Ashes, Ashes (19 page)

Lucy felt her mouth twist. “It just wasn’t the same.”

“I know. You can try to imagine that it’s a tin can or whatever, but it never works. All I can say is try to do it fast and try to do it right.”

Del stalked back to them. The bunny swung from her gloved hand. Lucy looked away from the limp head, the eyes like foggy blackberries. A small red hole bloomed on its back. Del wiped her arrow against a patch of grass and stowed it with the rest in the quiver she wore slung from her shoulders. She hunched down next to Aidan. She danced her fingers up and down his arm.

“If we’re lucky,” she said, “the other rabbits won’t be alerted and we can get a few more. They come out in force just before sunset.”

Lucy squinted up at the sky. The sun was behind them now. She rolled over to look at the clouds drifting.

Sure enough, as the sun lowered in the sky, more and more rabbits poked out their quivering noses. They nibbled grass and chased one another, innocent and carefree, reminding Lucy of the camp kids playing kick-the-can.

They’re food
, she told herself, but it was no good.

She heard the soft whicker as Del notched an arrow.

Lucy watched as Del shot four rabbits in quick succession before finally missing one. Instantly the animal darted to the top of a hillock and drummed the ground with its back foot. The other rabbits vanished into their holes. There was a curious light in the girl’s eyes. It wasn’t pleasure, but a glint of
something
. Like she was paying the rabbits back for an insult. Lucy was happy that she had finally missed.

“I’ll get them,” she said, clambering to her feet. She was stiff. The rabbits were hard to find in the long grass. Their soft, brown bodies splayed in awkward positions. They were smaller than she expected. Lucy picked them up, holding them by their velvet ears, feeling the uncomfortable heavy, boneless quality about them. They were still warm, and they flopped like stuffed toys. One remained lost in the undergrowth despite careful searching.

When she walked back to the others with the dead animals, Del exploded. “I shot four. Where’s the other one? Do you think it’s easy?”

“Obviously not, seeing as how I couldn’t do it,” Lucy said. Her cheeks burned, but she met Del’s eyes. What was
with
this girl? “I looked for the fourth one. I couldn’t find it.”

Del snorted. She stripped off her glove and flexed her hand. The abrasions on her wrists looked raw. Again Lucy wondered how she’d escaped the plastic handcuffs by herself.

She unslung her bow and thrust it at Lucy. “Hold this.”

She strode off, swishing her quiver back and forth across the long grass, ducking below the branches of a tree that swept the ground.

Lucy held the bow between fingers that didn’t seem attached to her hand. The rabbits were cold now and their eyes had filmed over. She felt angry and a little sick.

“Give them to me,” Aidan said, standing up and stretching. She looked away from the lean length of him and handed them over. He opened the neck of the canvas bag they’d brought and shoved the bodies in.

“Listen,” he said. “She doesn’t mean anything by it. That’s just Del. She always says what she thinks. She’s been through a lot….” His voice trailed off. He looked uncomfortable.

The kind note in his voice set her eyes prickling. She focused on the scuffed toes of her boots.

“Hey,” he said softly. His hand reached out to her arm, fell short, and sort of brushed the air between them. She felt it against her skin, anyway. She took a step toward him.

Aidan pinched her chin and raised her face to his. She’d never seen his eyes so close. They were a deep green with specks of gold. She could smell the sun on his clothes. He smiled and leaned in farther. Lucy felt her head swim. She swore she felt a crackle of electricity. He was going to kiss her. They were going to kiss. His lips looked so soft.

“Crap!” Del yelled. Aidan froze, and Lucy stepped backward so quickly, she tripped over her own feet. Del was a few yards away. She swung a bunny from one hand. She was keeping the weight off of her left foot. “I think I turned my ankle in a rabbit hole.” She winced, but Lucy couldn’t help noting that the grimace was replaced by a smile as soon as Aidan hurried forward. She slung her arm across his shoulder, hobbled over, and handed Lucy the last rabbit and her quiver. Lucy followed behind, carrying the bag, the bows, and the arrows. She saw how Del clung to Aidan, her sleek head tucked against his chest. Her hand lay over his heart. Lucy quickened her pace until she was ahead of them, and then practically ran back to the camp.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MOVING MOUNTAINS

H
enry was a whistler. Jaunty little tunes, like that one about working on the railroad, and the other about the hole in the bucket, which totally got on Lucy’s nerves after the first hour. If she’d known, she probably wouldn’t have requested to be on his team, but the alternatives were even worse: work with Connor and Scout, who were welded together so closely, you couldn’t get a thin dime between them, or with Del and Aidan. Aidan had been in a strange, quiet mood ever since yesterday afternoon. He wouldn’t even look at her. And Del had been radiating anger, although Lucy noticed that her sprained ankle was miraculously better. They were working at the other end of the field, over where Sammy and the other two S’ans were raking over the soil. Lucy had discovered that their names were Beth and Ralph, and she was finally able to talk to them without shuddering. Visibly, at least. Inside, she still felt a clench of fear, wondering if some day she would wake up with her skin cracked and oozing and the disease rampaging through her body. She had noticed that they always kept themselves apart from the rest of the scavengers, and that made her feel slightly ashamed of herself.

Henry was all right. He reminded her of her brother, Rob—sort of cute and funny, like a cartoon character—but she’d also found out that he had basically one thing on his mind, with a relentlessness that was almost scary. He was so busy flirting that he had slowed his work to a snail’s pace. She looked at the huge pile of stones and chunks of blacktop Henry had yet to load into the wheelbarrow and decided to take a break. They’d already filled the barrow four times and wheeled it out to where the big road entered the camp. Each load seemed pathetically small when they dumped it out. Aidan had been right that it would take time to block it completely, she admitted, but at least they were doing
something
. She wiped sweat from her forehead. Her back was aching, and she was pretty sure she had some major blisters under her leather gloves.

“The S’ans,” Lucy said, leaning on her pickax. “I mean, Sammy, Beth, and Ralph …”

Henry looked up and threw down his spade. He stretched with both arms over his head and froze for a minute so she could admire his wiry torso as his T-shirt rode up. She suppressed a laugh. He’d taken every opportunity to show off his biceps. She pointed to the heap and then to the wheelbarrow, and, with a huge dramatic sigh, he began shoveling in the rocks.

Before he could start whistling about the chain gang, Lucy continued. “Are they totally healthy now?”

“Yeah. I mean, their bodies fought off the disease. Normally hemorrhagic smallpox kills in about seventy-two hours.”

“And will their skin and their eyes go back to normal?”

He paused. “Hmm. Since there are no documented cases of survivors, I don’t know. I mean, the burnt look and the bloody eyeballs are due to bleeding under the skin. I guess it makes sense that eventually the wasted cells will be washed away in the bloodstream, cleansed by the kidneys, and then flushed.” Henry frowned and rubbed his nose with his glove, leaving a smudge of dirt. Finally, he said, “Seems likely. Who knows what’s going on under those masks? The skin has an amazing ability to rebuild cells.” His serious expression was replaced by his usual grin. “You know, I can tell that Beth might be really pretty. I think she’s got those melting brown eyes like dark chocolate and a tight—”

Lucy aimed a punch at him, but he jumped backward and held up his hands in surrender. She lowered her fists, but neglected to tell him about the muddy smear across his face.

“So how’d you get on Lady Del’s bad side so fast?” Henry said, pushing the heavy wheelbarrow up a few feet. Lucy glanced over to where Del was working next to Aidan at the other end of the field, and threw a chunk of masonry into the barrow. She pulled her sweatshirt hood forward. It was drizzling, and by the look of the black clouds massing overhead, they were in for a real downpour. The Indian summer was over. The weather matched her mood.

“How do you know it’s not you she’s throwing those mental daggers at? Maybe she knows you ate the last of those wild strawberries we found.”

Henry grinned. “Not me. I’m her go-to man.” He stomped on the edge of his shovel, pushing the blade into the iron-hard ground and breaking it into manageable chunks.

“Go-to for what?”

“For whatever she needs. She’s Lady Del. Questions, answers, other more urgent needs. You know.” His expression was smug. “She seems mightily interested in you, as a matter of fact.”

Lucy wrinkled her forehead. “Me? I’m no one.”

“That could be argued,” he said with a wide grin. “Sometimes it’s special favors she’s looking for.”

“Oh.”

“I could be your go-to guy, too, if you like.” He waggled his eyebrows.

“Umm, that’s okay. I’m good.” Lucy peeled her leather gloves from her hands and inspected the blisters across her palms. She looked at the small patch of ground they’d managed to clear. Even the youngest kids were helping—sort of: picking up one pebble every ten minutes and chasing one another around the rest of the time. Grammalie Rose was running lines of rope along what would be the furrows. Connor and Scout were wrestling with a clumsy wooden contraption shaped like a giant V, with two long handles and a thick plate of steel bolted to the underside. It was a plow, Lucy had been told, and it looked as if it would take ten of them to drag it through the ground once they’d gotten rid of as many of the stones as they could.

She eased the gloves back on, wincing as the rough material touched her tender skin. She squinted her eyes against the slanting rain.

“We all have roles. Sammy is her shoulder,” Henry said as he piled a scant shovelful of rock into the wheelbarrow.

Lucy stopped in mid-swing. “What does that mean?” she asked. “What’s with the high school nicknames?”

“When she needs someone to lean on, or to cry on. He’s the shoulder. I’m pretty sure he’d like to be more,” he said speculatively. “But for now, that’s it.”

Lucy turned to look at the small group across the field.

Aidan was talking to Sammy and Del now. Del shook her head at something Aidan was saying. Sammy put his hand on his brother’s arm. Aidan shrugged it off and walked away. Lucy wondered what had happened. She saw Aidan hop a low wall and disappear into the jagged terrain left by the orchestrated bombing of what looked like at least three apartment blocks.

Del watched him, too, until Grammalie Rose barked at her. Then she turned around and looked right in Lucy’s direction. It was like being targeted by a laser beam. Even from this distance—at least twenty yards—she could sense the anger in Del’s deep blue eyes. Henry followed Lucy’s gaze. He whistled. One low note.

“Ouch,” he said. “You been trespassing on her property?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She laid claim to Aidan a long time ago.”

“Oh come on!”

“He’s her O-O-H-A,” he said.

“Enough already!” Lucy said.

“Object of her affection,” Henry said hurriedly.

Lucy snorted. “That’s so dumb.”

Henry raised his eyebrows. “I’ve seen the way you look at him. And he’s always staring at you in a sly, undercover way. I bet Del has been scoping out the situation. You guys figured it out yet?”

Her cheeks burned.

“Do you really like him?” He watched her curiously, his voice serious all of a sudden.

She thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I do. But most of the time I’m so mad at him, I could spit.”

“The path of love never runs smooth,” Henry said, throwing out an arm as if he were declaiming poetry.

“No. I mean, we’re friends but … nothing has happened…. No.” Lucy stopped as the rest of what he’d said sunk in. She couldn’t help the small smile that spread across her face. She bit the inside of her cheek and tried to look unconcerned. “You’ve seen him look at me?”

“Yeah. He pretends he’s all cool and stuff, but …”

She turned her back and savored this information for a moment, and then spun on her heel to face him. “Wait a minute. What business is this of Del’s? Doesn’t he get any say in this? He’s not a trophy, and he’s not some pet she can put on a leash.”

“I never said he was,” Henry said with a roguish grin. “He plays it really well.”

“Excuse me?”

Henry put down his shovel. “All I’m saying is,
I
wouldn’t mind being caught in the middle of you two.”

She whacked him on the arm hard enough that she felt the sting in her fingers. He stood there rubbing the spot, but the grin never wavered. She gritted her teeth.

“Don’t be stupid!”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’m just kidding….”

“Well, don’t.” Lucy grabbed the pickax and hefted it, ignoring the worried look on his face. She worked off some of her annoyance by attacking the ground. After a while, she said, “So are they together?”

“Listen. I shouldn’t have shot my mouth off. It’s none of my business.”

His tone was no longer teasing. She met his gaze. No smirk, no mocking light in his eyes. He looked chastened.

“There aren’t too many secrets in camp. I mean, everyone knew Connor was gaga for Scout months before he made his move. But I can tell you honestly, I think it’s all on Del’s side. Why Aidan would pass up a gorgeous girl like that, I don’t know, but that’s the truth.” He stopped talking all of a sudden. Lucy turned. Grammalie Rose stood behind her. Her clothes were covered in dust. The black leather of her clogs was barely discernible under a thick coating of dirt. Lucy wondered again at the strength of the old woman.