Ashes, Ashes (3 page)

As if to echo her thoughts, a howl rent the air. She stiffened. She knew the clear belling and crystal sharp barks of the foxes and coyotes as they called to one another. This was deeper, urgent—the sound of a hunting pack of dogs. Her head swiveled in the direction of the baying. She thought it was at some distance yet. But behind her. She shuddered, fighting the urge to break into a panicked run. Not just behind her, but between her and her camp. Most predators were still scared around humans; her smell was enough to keep them at a distance. But the packs of feral dogs were large and hungry, and they had no fear of people.

She considered. She’d work her way to the lake and circle around, giving them wide berth. The land rose slightly just beyond the water’s edge, and she’d be able to get a better look. And she could check the water levels at the same time. There was the tarnished bronze statue of a girl sitting on a large toadstool surrounded by an assortment of strange characters, and Lucy used this to keep track, scratching lines into the metal every second full moon. The last time she’d looked, the water had been barely lapping at the girl’s toes, but by the middle of the Long Wet it would be up to her shoulder level. Lucy couldn’t remember the girl’s name now, although when she was a child her mother used to bring her here to climb on the statue. She recalled jumping from toadstool to toadstool, feeling the smooth, sun-hot metal, playing king of the castle with other kids. The bravest of them leapt from the hare to the man in the top hat or perched on the girl’s head, gripping the long locks of her flowing hair. That wasn’t Lucy, though. She never made it higher than the girl’s lap—broad and solid and safe.

Now she moved quickly. There was no cover but scrubby grasses and spindly bushes. The ground underfoot had changed from loose, sandy earth to cracked, oozing mud. The lake was to her left. It had dwindled over the hot season to a series of small, murky pools surrounded by rings of soft, slippery sludge. A larger expanse of water lay far beyond her reach, as smooth as glass. Her fishing lines were marked by twists of bark. Lucy pulled them up, and, finding the hooks empty, tossed them back into the shallow water. All around her was the plopping sound of frogs, as they woke to her presence and alerted one another. The splashes they made sounded like a string of tiny firecrackers going off. She needed her spear to catch frogs. They were too quick, too alert.

The dogs had stopped barking. The night was silent again except for the small animal noises. Lucy crouched and submerged her water bottles to fill them. The flow of water gurgled gently. Her eyes darted around, her head lifted. She pushed her hood back so that she could see better. The quiet was unnerving after the cacophony of howls and barks. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She was being watched. Slowly, she got to her feet, capped the jugs, and hung them from her neck, easing the rope into position so it lay across her shoulders. Then she loosened the knife in its sheath. She strained her ears, listening hard. Suddenly there were small, ominous noises coming from all around. A rat snake rustled past, its heavy black body as thick around as her wrist. There was the squeal of something just caught.

Lucy pulled her hood back over her face, trying to blend into the inadequate shadows. She froze. Directly across from her, at the edge of a pool of fresh rainwater, belly flat to the ground, was a cougar. So close she could see the pink tongue lap. They locked eyes. Lucy barely breathed. She tried to remember if the manual said she should play dead or make a racket. The cougar didn’t move. Lucy’s fingers fumbled at the hilt of the knife, trying to prepare herself for an attack if it came; quietly telling herself to slash a volley of cuts; reminding herself that the blade was broken, that stabbing would have no effect. But behind that voice, the knowledge that she’d be helpless against two hundred pounds of lithe muscle and bone, a natural killer, and the hope that death would be quick and the pain numbed by fear and shock. Maybe she shouldn’t be making eye contact? Perhaps that was a threat? She closed her eyes and murmured a quick prayer. Her thigh muscles quivered. She ducked down, trying to move smoothly. Her feet slid awkwardly in the mud. She slipped and fell backward, the weight of the water bottles pulling her off balance. Quickly she was back up on her feet, knife in her hand. Her jeans were so coated in mud, they looked like a statue’s legs. The cougar was gone, soundlessly, no movement of grasses even to mark its passing. And now Lucy realized that the dogs were yelping again, an excited chorus of barks, much closer, and she heard the crash and thud of many paws trampling the earth.

There was an ominous rumble overhead. Immediately, as if the sky had ripped open, the rain began, a torrent drenching her to the skin and plastering her hood to her skull. The ground was instantly hammered into sogginess. Lucy looked to her right. She saw hillocks of flattened grass too low to conceal a ground squirrel, and the tossing sea beyond. To her left was a series of muddy pools fast expanding and the shifting sludge that would slow her down, sucking at her boots, and beyond it the rain-shattered lake. She could make out the silhouette of the statue. The rainwater had already pushed the level up above the top of the toadstool, much higher already, she thought, than at this time last year. Directly in front of her, past a patch of soggy scrubland and up a slight rise, was a thick stand of trees, shadowed and dark. Behind her, she saw the first dog loping in her direction. Its muzzle grazed the ground, plumed tail up, fur raised in a spiky ridge over its back. Through the sheets of rain it looked like an illustration from a children’s fairy tale cut out of black construction paper. Wolflike.

Without hesitation she sprang forward toward the grove, dodging around the hummocks of slick, sharp grasses, running, like a panicked rabbit, in a crooked line, until she was pushing through dense and prickly bushes, ignoring the barbs that caught and tore her skin and snagged her clothes. She secreted herself behind the nearest tree—a pine, wind-battered and salt-poisoned, with rough, shaggy bark, and no branches low enough or strong enough to hoist herself up on. The rain drove into her eyes. She wiped a streaming hand across her face. Her water bottles tugged at her neck. She lifted the rope over her head and hurriedly stowed the bottles under a nearby shrub. Her grip on her knife was slippery, and she rubbed her hand uselessly on her wet pants to dry the moisture from it. She tightened her grasp and leaned her forehead against the tree, trying to catch her breath. She had a cramp in her side and she kneaded it with one bunched fist. Pressing her body against the coarse bark, she squinted her eyes against the drizzle to make out the shapes of the dogs.

The throng broke apart, dozens of dogs fanning out and then coming back together as they caught a trace of her along the lakeshore. The moonlight made shadows everywhere. They had definitely found her trail. The rain might slow them down a little, the puddles she had sloshed through would mask her scent, but they were serious about tracking her and unlikely to give up. She could hear the heavy panting and excited bursts of barking as they called to one another, like the high-pitched yelps of puppies scuffling over a bone. They were so close.

Lucy forced herself to leave the comforting solidity of the tree and move backward, as quietly as she could, sliding her feet through the mush of wet leaves. She took shallow breaths, darting quick glances over her shoulder, making for the place where the trees grew thickest. Black shapes wove back and forth, just beyond the pines in front of her, as the dogs tried to pick up her scent on the wet ground. She crept toward a cluster of pine, elm, willow, and leggy maples. The tall trees stood trembling; water cascaded down from their branches. She backed against the smooth trunk of an elm, the biggest tree in the glade. Too high overhead, wide branches spread out against the dark, fractured sky. The moon was directly above her. She hunkered down, listening to the sounds of the dogs coming ever closer. She held her knife in both hands, the blade pointing straight out in front of her. She’d kill at least one or two before they savaged her. The cramp was back again, jabbing into her side with a ferocity that made her wince; her lungs felt starved of oxygen; her heartbeat echoed in her ears. Then the crack of a branch snapping, loud as a gunshot, made her look up.

CHAPTER TWO
THE DOGS

W
hat are you waiting for? Come on, grab it!” hissed a low voice. A hand dangled a few feet above Lucy’s head. She blinked against the rain streaming into her eyes. Long fingers waggled. The rest of the person was shrouded in shadow. She stumbled backward, brandishing the knife. Behind her, at the perimeter of the small wood, the barks coalesced into a uniform baying and delighted howls, and she heard the sound of many bodies plowing through the undergrowth. They had found her.

The person made an annoyed explosive sound halfway between a curse and a grunt. “Well?”

She could tell it was a male voice. The hand gestured impatiently. “I can’t hold on much longer. Are you coming or what? Do you want to be dog food?” She took one last look over her shoulder and jumped for the hand. Her fingers grabbed and slipped. The branch bucked under their weight. For a brief moment before she dropped to the ground, she saw his eyes—light-colored, not the bloody red eyes of the S’ans.

He grunted again. “And put that pig-sticker away before you cut off my nose. You’re going to have to help yourself get up here, you know. I’m barely hanging on.” Lucy hesitated; she didn’t think the branch would hold them both. He leaned farther forward. His arms were bare and his skin was tanned, unblemished save for the silvery puckered scar of the vaccination on his biceps. She thrust the knife into her sweatshirt pocket, unsheathed. Dangerous, but she wanted it close at hand. Heavy bodies thudded through the underbrush. She turned and saw two dogs angling in, mouths open, black lips peeled back from their long, spittle-flecked fangs. They covered the ground with terrifying speed. She could see the lean muscles bunching as they prepared to leap.

She turned back to the tree and the hand that was still held out toward her and jumped for it. His grasp caught, slipped again, and then his fingers tightened around her wrist. She scrabbled at the trunk with the blunt toes of her heavy boots, reaching out for a branch or something to hold on to. The gash across her palm stung. She felt the wound split open again under the bandage. For one horrible moment she hung suspended just a few feet from the ground, and she imagined a dog’s sharp teeth grinding into her ankle. There was a volley of awful noise: crashing, panting, and a chorus of snarls.

He heaved, she kicked desperately, her left foot hit something with a solid
thwack
and a yelp, and all of a sudden her momentum carried her up to the high branch he straddled, so quickly that she almost went over it and back down to the ground, but he kept hold, jerking her back. Lucy threw out her free arm and clasped it around the branch, then swung her leg across. Looked down. Ten or twelve dogs were clustered around the bottom of the tree. One blew a froth of bloody bubbles from its shattered nose. More dogs were coming, the pack, rearing up on their hind legs, jostling for position, black claws digging into the bark.

The earth tilted, pulled at her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, feeling her tenuous hold loosen and her equilibrium leave her with a stomach-twisting suddenness. Lucy fell against the stranger, a boy. Her head spun, and for a moment she thought she might vomit. Her stomach cramped. She bit down on her tongue until the nausea passed.

“I lost my balance,” she muttered, even though he hadn’t said anything. Her voice was gruff, and she was conscious of his hand still clasping hers, the warm solidity of his chest. Lucy scuttled back against the trunk, pulling her hand away and clutching the bark tightly. She had never liked heights, not even the swings or slides in the playground growing up. There was no room on the branch to move very far away. She carefully avoided looking down again. She could hear the dogs milling around, snapping and growling at one another. She tried to pretend she was not fifteen feet up. The boy stared at her with an amused expression that she longed to slap from his face. She cleared her throat. Her hand went to the knife inside her pocket.

“What?” she blurted out. She was painfully aware of the grime on her face and hands, the dry sweat that stiffened her hair, the stale, dirty stink coming off her mud-soaked jeans. He smelled clean. Soap—a memory so sharp, it hurt. His clothes were worn and patched, but not as filthy as hers. They were brightly colored, too—not the best choices for blending into the dull, beige landscape and shadows—as if he didn’t care who could spot him from a mile away, and he’d cut the sleeves from his red sweatshirt as though he didn’t feel the damp chill. She shot a look at him from under her eyelashes. He was about her age, with green eyes, dirty blond hair, and a generous mouth that was smirking at her. The grin slipped a little as her tone of voice registered.

“I’m waiting for you to thank me,” he said. Her cheeks flamed.

It had been months since Lucy had been around another human being. She went out of her way to avoid them, to hide. She felt acutely uncomfortable; sort of like the feeling she used to get on the first day of school after the freedom of the summer holidays. She looked away from the intensity of his gaze. The dogs were sniffing around the tree. A couple of them had plopped down and begun licking themselves. They looked almost friendly, except that whenever she or the boy shifted just a little bit on the branch, they leapt to their feet and started growling and snarling again. Farther out in the brush she could see more shadowy sentinels waiting for her to make a break for it. How long would they wait for a meal? How soon before they’d give up and try for a mouse in a burrow or a rat on the garbage heaps? How long before she could climb down and go home? The boy was still looking at her, almost as if he could tell what she was thinking. The smirk was back. She dropped her eyes, busied herself with tightening the bandanna around her left hand. It was wet with new blood. She’d left a bright smear on the bark on her way up.