Ashes, Ashes (2 page)

The turtle wasn’t getting any deader, and she had a lot to do before she lost the last of the daylight. She walked back over to the rough table she’d made out of a few pallets and peered down at the manual, held flat under a couple of rocks. The instructions had seemed simple enough. The capture had been easier than she had expected: sneaking up on the creature while it sunbathed on a mud bar on the shore of the Hudson Sea, grabbing it by the thin leather whip of a tail, and holding it well away from her body until she could shove a stick between the snapping jaws. And she hadn’t felt much sympathy, not after it tried to bite her; hadn’t felt so much as a twinge, even though before everything that had happened she’d been a strict vegetarian. No, she’d held it flat against the ground with the pressure of her knee, waggled another stick in front of the cruel, predatory-bird mouth until the neck was stretched taut, and then bopped it hard on its little old lady head with a handy rock.

She checked the book again. There was a page missing; there must be. She flipped backward and forward, looking for the sequence of actions that would yield four slabs of pink meat, as pristine and antiseptic as anything you could have bought off a refrigerated shelf in a grocery store. If there had still been any around. She stabbed at the creature in a sudden fury. The knife turned on the shell. She yelped and tossed it from her in disgust. She’d gouged her left palm—a long, wide gash that instantly welled blood. She sucked on her hand, not really enjoying the coppery taste. She pulled her bandanna from her neck and wrapped it around the wound, pulling the ends tight in a knot with her teeth. Then she kneeled down and picked up the knife, rubbing the dirt from it and checking the blade for damage. She heaved a sigh of relief. It seemed okay. She ran her thumb over the edge, feeling a burr of roughness, the smallest of nicks. It would need to be re-honed before she could continue.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she told herself.

At the bottom of her backpack was a narrow rectangle of gray stone. It felt like fine sandpaper. Five sweeps of the blade against it and the edge was sharp enough to draw a thin line of blood across the fleshy part of her thumb. She turned the knife over to sharpen the other side.

Lucy walked back over to the book and pushed her hair back behind her ears again with force. The gory remains of the turtle were laid out on some broad leaves. It looked nothing like the neat illustration. The vibrantly colored picture showed tidy quarters of pale rosy meat—not this mutilated lumpy mass leaking muddy water and blood. The shell was the problem. Bony, hard as granite, it just wouldn’t come off. She’d followed the instructions, tossing the corpse into a saucepan of water over the fire. She’d even left the turtle in the pot for longer than the ten minutes specified, but now she had to wonder if perhaps the water hadn’t been hot enough.

The words danced in front of her eyes. She stared so long that they stopped making any kind of sense. The sun was setting, and the light leaking through the willow screens was dim. Lucy inserted the knife between the shell and the carcass and jimmied it around. There was a snap and the tip of the blade broke off. She stared at the knife for a moment, disbelieving, and then with a cry of rage, she picked up and threw the book with all her strength, sending it skidding across the dirt floor.

“Crap!” she yelled, and instantly was aware of the frustration welling up in her throat and the hot tears coming. She bit down hard on her lower lip until the pain pushed back the angry sobs catching in her throat.
Deep breath
. You did not waste food. Not when it was so scarce. Not when the birds were poison and squirrels were skittish. Carefully she checked over the knife. The main part of the blade, about six inches, was still good. She could use it for most jobs. With a sigh, Lucy bent down and picked up the book, shuffling the pages back into the binding and smoothing the cover.

She leaned over the body, poked at it with her finger. The turtle’s legs flopped like a rag doll. She couldn’t imagine anything less appetizing, but there was no way she was going to give up now. She hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, and then it had only been a scoop of porridge and a handful of dried, shriveled raspberries, which had tasted moldy. She took a couple of pieces of wood from the scanty pile stacked beside her and added them to the fire. She held her hand over the mouth of the cooking pot. It was hardly steaming. The wood was too green, the fire still not hot enough; the cooking stones barely sizzled when she aimed a gobbet of spit at them, and the dented saucepan of water refused to boil.

She sighed. Her fists were clenched and she could feel the pinch of her nails against her palms. It was already too late in the day to build up a good fire. The turtle’s mottled skin, the ragged ruin of its neck, were taking on an unhealthy gray appearance. And she could smell something swampy and briny, like stagnant water. It was already cooler than it had been for the last six months, but still warm enough to turn meat bad fast. If the last four hours weren’t going to be a complete waste of time, she’d have to do something. Lucy hefted one of the heavy, river-smoothed rocks she kept nearby and smashed it into the shell, which broke into irregular pieces, some large enough to dig out with her fingers, some small bits, like yellow pottery shards, embedded into the leathery skin of the turtle’s underside. She went to work picking out the pieces until she could make a long incision in the belly. She shoved her hand in under the tough hide and scooped out the stomach and intestines, careful to breathe through her mouth. She’d gutted plenty of fish in the last year, and the looping entrails didn’t bother her too much anymore. They were neat little parcels as long as she was careful not to puncture them. She piled them on a few broad dock leaves and covered them up against the flies. Later she’d bait her fishing lines with them and see if the catfish and eels liked innards better than the night crawlers she normally used. She flipped the turtle over, smashed the upper plate with the rock, and picked out as much of the shell as she could. After consulting the book again, she made four slits down the inside of each leg and cut away the skin. It slipped back easily, sort of like peeling a banana, and with only a little bit more cutting she was able to pull it free from the turtle’s feet.

Lucy ran her finger over the hide, wondering if it was tough enough to patch the many holes in her boots.
Nothing wasted
, she thought, putting it aside to deal with later. She’d cured a rabbit pelt and a couple of squirrel skins before and ended up with serviceable but stinky leather, too stiff to work with easily but good enough to mend holes. She looked down at the oozing carcass, casting her mind back to tenth-grade biology, trying to remember anything useful. That had been frogs, in any case. Rubbery, fake-looking, and smelling overwhelmingly of formaldehyde. If she had a frog in front of her now, she’d have been able to skin and fillet it in two minutes flat, like one of those Japanese chefs.

She had a wild impulse to just dump the turtle and eat acorn porridge and dried berries for the fourth day in a row, but her acorn flour store was getting low, fresh meat was rare, and she needed the protein. She suspected, too, that there was more squirming weevil than powdered acorn at the bottom of the old coffee can. Perhaps if she just shoved the meat back into the saucepan, put the lid on, and left it to sit for a while over the bedded embers, the flesh would fall from the bones and she’d have turtle soup or turtle tea. There were a couple of shriveled wild onions left, some woody mushrooms she could toss in. She’d eaten far worse.

Lucy stuck the turtle in the pot and covered it, piling the smoking wood around it. She rinsed her right hand in the bucket of water, getting most of the blood off, though not the dark matter stuck deep under her nails, and wiped it dry on her jeans. Her left hand throbbed, and she wondered if the bandage was on too tight. Her skin felt greasy with sweat. She stripped off her thick sweatshirt. Underneath she wore a tank top. Lucy sniffed at her armpits, wrinkling her nose, and then quickly sluiced her upper body. Now that the waters were rising, she’d be able to bathe again. It had been far too long. Weird how she hadn’t noticed the odor of stale sweat and grime that permeated the shelter. Time to change the bedding grasses and air out the rush mats she had pieced together during the long nights. Lucy had ended up with cuts striping her palms and fingers and looking as if she’d lost a fight with a bramble bush. She would light some sage bundles later to clear out the musty stink and the smell of dead turtle.

She pulled her sweatshirt back on. Her neck felt tight, her hands shaky, and the wound beat in time with her heart. She wrapped a shawl and then her sleeping bag around her shoulders and sat as close as she could to her small fire. The smoke burned her eyes. She was procrastinating. There were things to do before nightfall, but she had checked the calendar notches she had cut into the bark of one of the four support trees and knew the moon would be full, which would give her more light than usual. She could get a later start, and a few minutes’ rest would do her good.

Beyond the cracks in the interlaced willow screens she had made to disguise the small clearing where she lived, she could see the huge, red sun setting above waters that looked as thick and black as molasses.

Lucy dreaded this time of day, when there was a pause and her thoughts rose up and threatened to submerge her. As long as she was busy doing, she could keep the loneliness at bay. She drew the edge of the sleeping bag up around her ears, the shawl over her head, and nuzzled into them, smelling the nose-tickling mustiness of leaf mold, ground-in dirt, and the dried grasses she slept on. Her mind buzzed at her like an annoying mosquito.

She needed to walk the circumference of her camp, check the snares she’d set, the trip wires, the bundles of grass she had laid down on the ground that would show her if anyone heavy-footed had come near. Lucy groaned. She was so tired. Her days were always long, but sometimes it seemed as if it didn’t matter how early a start she got.

She thrust the sleeping bag aside, bundled up the shawl, and got to her feet, popping her neck and shrugging her shoulders up and down a few times to work out the tightness. She checked a few more things off her mental list: She needed drinking water, so she’d have to make a wide arc and pass by the lake, and she needed as much wood as she could carry, now that the rains were gathering force. There’d been two torrential downpours lasting ten or twelve hours already, and it was only the beginning of June by her rough monthly calendar. She’d been less than careful about keeping track of the days and nights. The Long Wet brought monsoons, riptides, flash floods, and sudden lightning fires—the worst of them falling roughly in the middle of the cycle, but if anything was true these days, it was that the weather was erratic.

She’d check her snares, of course, hoping for a ground squirrel or rat, and her fishing lines, although during the Long Dry the lake waters had receded, leaving about twenty feet of dry, cracking mud before the first dribbles accumulated in shallow pools. A mudskipper maybe, a newt, or a salamander, though she didn’t like the gluey taste much. It was too dark to go digging for shellfish by the sea. She’d plan on doing that tomorrow.

First she listened. But there were no noises except for the rhythmic hum of insects. Next she peered through a hole in the mesh of supple willow limbs that screened the front entrance to her camp. Lucy knew every tree, every bush, every grassy hump silhouetted in the gathering dusk. It was a landscape she had peered at and studied night after night. She had counted the weird hummocks carved out of the earth after the last quake—there were twenty-three of them standing guard like silent sentinels.

Nothing seemed different, but lately she’d had the unsettling feeling of eyes on her. She checked for movement. The air was so still, the grasses didn’t stir. She pulled up the black sweatshirt hood. Then she picked up a couple of plastic gallon jugs for the water, looping a length of rope through the handles, slung a woven grass bag over her shoulder, checked that her knife was snug against her hip, and lifted the front door screen out of the way.

A long puddle of water lapped against the piled sticks and brush she’d stacked against the outer walls to keep the rainwater from seeping in. She splashed through, feeling the cold wetness through the thick leather of her boots and a double layer of socks, ducked her head slightly, and replaced the screen. She backed up about five feet, making sure her small fire pit was invisible from the outside. It was.
Good
. She’d spent a lot of time stuffing most of the larger chinks with moss and dried grass recently. Plus, now that the rains were coming, the willow sticks she’d shoved into the ground to make thicker walls would begin to grow and leaf-out. Willow was amazing! A cut stick would take root easily. The four slender, flexible trees she had bent down and bound together at the top to make the sloping roof were already bushy with new growth.

If you didn’t know the camp was there, it was almost invisible against the surrounding foliage and shrubs, like the snug, domed nests the field mice made themselves out of grass stalks. She glanced at the sky. The moon was beginning its rise, full as she had hoped. Purple clouds boiled; the wind had suddenly picked up and the scent of rain was heavy. It would mask the smells of smoke and cooking turtle, she thought. Taking one last look around, she set off toward the lake, her nerves stretched tight and jumping.

The terrain was already changing. There were splashes of green leaves within the dusty gold. And the ground was spongy underfoot, treacherous with puddles and sinkholes. There were pretty much only two seasons now—drought and flood.

Her boots squelched a bit, but so far they were not leaking too badly. It was so quiet—save for the scritch of small claws scrabbling up tree trunks and the angry, explosive noises of disturbed squirrels. She always thought they sounded as if they were cussing her out. On the way, she inspected various snares she’d concealed under bushes and by likely holes, crossing back and forth along the narrow spit of land, her senses in hyperdrive. They were all empty. One showed signs that a predator had gotten there first. Tufts of silver fur snagged in the branches, a few driblets of blood. She kneeled down, touched the soft, downy clumps. Rabbit, she thought, rather than squirrel. Too bad. Rabbit was a delicacy these days, but she couldn’t help but be glad that there were still foxes and coyotes around. So many animal species had been wiped out in the plague.