Ashes (22 page)

At dusk, she caught their scent: faded and musty. Most old people smelled like used underwear, and she could tell from the rich clog of odors that there were a lot of them, all bunched together. She was downwind, and she thought they were still fairly distant, but she sensed their exhaustion and the sharp sting of their panic. That made sense. These old people must know that the brain-zapped kids woke up just as it got dark, and they'd want to be off the road and somewhere safe. She could envision the road ahead: a solid whip of humanity stretching from Rule for miles.

She felt a prick of anxiety. It was one thing to find Rule; it was another to try battling her way through a crush of fellow refugees to get help for one person, even if he was young. And how would these old people react to her?

Judging from the frowsy reek, there were also dogs and—she closed her eyes, concentrated, caught the aroma of sunshine and warm hay—
horses.

Something more, too. She inhaled again and then her nose twitched with the bite of gun oil and singed metal.

Guns. A lot of those, too.

When she first picked up the puppy, she'd taken the Glock from its holster and slipped it into the right-hand pocket of her jacket. She debated simply taking out the weapon, more as a deterrent than because she wanted to pick a fight, then thought better of it. If someone started shooting, it would be over fast, and there was only one of her. So she left the gun where it was.

On her right, a small green sign flashed out of the darkness:

RULE 6

Beyond, there was another billboard for the hospice and a sign urging visitors to stop in at Harvest Church:
TRUST IN THE HEALING HAND OF GOD
.

A few more hours, Tom
, she thought
. Hang on. Just a few more.

Two hours later, she heard them: a muted, confused gabble. Then she spotted the yellow bob of flashlights and silver-edged silhouettes. Not a throng, but easily several hundred bathed in the sickly green light of that surreal moon. She smelled them much better now: a great stinking ball of old men and women at the end of their tethers, and not a few dogs. People and animals were streaming and bunching around her, but either they hadn't noticed her in the dark, or didn't care. The puppy was awake, too, and she could feel it begin to shiver with fear.

“It's okay,” she murmured, hugging it close, praying that it wouldn't start to bark. The last thing she needed was attention. She'd already done up her hair in a long braid and shoved it beneath her watch cap, but she still felt exposed. One good look at her face, and these oldsters would know she was a teenager. She jammed on a John Deere ball cap she'd found on the road, pulling the bill as far down as she could. She turned up the collar on her coat, too, hoping that would mask her silhouette.

No one was moving forward; that was the thing. Instead, the crowd milled uncertainly before a huge eighteen-wheeler, lying on its side like a beached orca. The forest hugged the road on either side, but no one made a move toward the woods to go around the roadblock and then she saw why. Among the trees, ranging on either side of the overturned semi, and perched on top of the truck, were other people and many, many dogs. She heard a hollow clop coming from behind the trailer, the jingle of traces, and knew she'd been right about horses.

Far ahead, one of the men at the roadblock was shouting into an old-fashioned bullhorn: “We will get to everyone. We know you're tired, but you'll just have to wait your turn. You'll be safe here. The Changed don't come this way, so everyone just calm down.”

The Changed
. So that's what people were calling them now? How could they be sure those brain-zapped kids wouldn't come? She slowed, hanging back, teetering on the very edge of the crowd, trying to decide what she should do. She was afraid to slip into the woods, and those guys on the truck had rifles. Duck and weave through the crowd? Man, that was a big risk. If she bumped anyone, if someone got a good look …

Just ahead, a trio—one man and two women—bunched with a Labrador tagging behind. Its tail drooped, and it smelled of dog and salt—and another smell that made her flash to a bowl of slimy cold oatmeal her aunt tried to make her eat the day after the helicopter exploded.
Sad
, she thought.
The dog's sad
.

But then the lab's ears pricked. She scented its sudden surprise as the pop of an electrical outlet, a burnt fizz sizzling in the air, and then it was pivoting, straining at the end of its leash, its tail whisking back and forth. And it started to bark.

At her.

Shut up
, she thought. Her knees began to shake, and she felt her legs go rubbery as the dog continued to bark.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.

“Watson.” A gangly elderly man in a fur-trimmed parka sounded both exasperated and exhausted. “Come on, what are you—” He turned, his flashlight scything through the dark, cutting across her body before continuing on. As soon as the light passed, she ducked, tried turning away, but then the torch swept back like the beam of a lighthouse and caught her. She heard him gasp: “Oh, Jesus.”

“What?” said one of the women. Alex thought her scent was very sour, the combination of days without washing and annoyance rolling off in a cloying fug. Turning, the woman got a good look at Alex, pinned in the light like a bug to cardboard. “Holy shit,” she said, and then Alex heard the metallic
ga-thunk-chunk
of a shotgun pump.

“Wait,” Alex said. The puppy was whimpering now. Hugging the dog with one hand, she held up the other, palm out. “I'm not one of them.”

“Not yet you aren't,” said the woman. To her left, another, much older woman with a beaky nose had drawn an ancient-looking Luger. “Or maybe you're just moving up the fucking evolutionary ladder.”

“Please.” Alex sidled back a step. “I'm just trying to make it to—”

“Not with us, girlie, no way.” The older, hawkish woman with the Luger tugged the toggle joint and then let it snap forward.

“Hold up, Em,” the elderly man said. “She seems okay. Look, she's got a dog. Let's just take a second here.”

“Look at your dog,” Alex said. The lab was still barking, but its tail whisked the air in a frantic semaphore and now she could hear more dogs beginning to bark. Beyond, heads were turning, flashlights stabbing through the dark. The pool of light around her body widened and got brighter as more and more people shone their torches her way. “Your dog's not afraid.”

“Because you haven't turned yet,” said the woman with the shotgun.

“I say we shoot her now.” The beaky woman squinted down the Luger's barrel. Her bony hands had tightened to claws. “Get it over with. Better yet, hang the little bitch.”

“Wait a minute,” the man said. “We
need
her. We have her, they'll let us in.”

“I got no use for one of them,” the Luger Lady spat. “Remember the last one we run across? Went to sleep a little angel, woke up an animal.”

“But the dogs know, don't they?” Alex said. The lab, Watson, was straining at its leash, and beyond, Alex could hear other dogs whining and a general murmur rippling down the line as more and more people became aware of her presence. There was the sound of handguns being drawn and the rack of rifle bolts and shotgun pumps. “Isn't that why you have them?”

“She's right,” the man said. “We didn't have Watson then.”

“It's just a damn dog,” Luger Lady said. “What the hell does it know? Did it know that little bitch that got my Cody? I
told
him to kill her, but she was just a kid, just a sweet little innocent monster
killer
.”

“Hell, you don't want her, I'll take her.” This from another man dressed in hunter's camouflage. He held what looked like a stubby machine gun, maybe an Uzi, in one hand, and two ammunition belts crisscrossed his chest. He had very white, very square teeth that were too perfect and probably false, but his grin was wide and maniacal and menacing. “I'd like to see one of them try to come after me; I'd just dare them to try.”

“No one's taking me,” Alex said, working to keep her voice steady, but her heart was trying to punch its way from her chest. The puppy had gone silent and was trying to melt into her body. She saw Uzi pushing past the others, and she took a step back, then another. “Please, I just want to—”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Another voice, very angry, coming from the crowd. “Who says she's yours?”

“I said she's
mine
!” Uzi clamped a beefy hand around her left wrist just as someone else—she couldn't see who—grabbed at her from the right. She felt the puppy clawing at her shirt, and then the dogs began to bark, not snarling or foaming, but in a prancing, jabbering frenzy, and then it seemed that these were not people anymore but plucking, grasping hands and angry mouths and shattered, ancient faces full of desperation and hatred and despair. They weren't really seeing her at all, only what she represented: the cause of the disaster—a symptom and the disease itself.

The puppy was crying, trying to squirm its way out of her jacket. “Careful!” she pleaded. “Please. Stop, you're going to hurt him, st—”

“Calm down!” From the front of the crowd and far away, the man with the bullhorn was shouting. “What's the trouble here? Everyone, calm down, just stay calm!”

The ripping roar of bullets, a stuttering flash of light, split the night. “I'm telling you, back
off
!” Uzi brandished his weapon. “Just back the fu—”

Another shot, this time from behind, and Uzi jerked, a look of stupid surprise on his face, and then he was falling in a rattling heap.

“Get her!” someone shouted.

And then they were running, the crowd boiling around, pushing her back and forth in a tug-of-war. Hands tore at her clothes, tangled in her hair. Her jacket burst open, and the puppy was suddenly gone in the crush, although she heard it yelping. The man with the bullhorn was shouting, and there were more shots, and then she screamed as fingers stripped off her coat.

Someone sang, “She's got a gun, she's got a gun!”

A chaos of dogs thrashed and twisted on their leashes, the clamor of their barking and yawping redoubling in the general roar, and now the people were shouting:
Kill her! Get her! Get—

Quite suddenly, she was airborne, her feet swept away from under her. She screamed again as the night sky—and that sinister moon—spun in a drunken whorl. They were passing her from hand to hand like a crowd in a gigantic mosh pit. She couldn't see where they were taking her, what they meant to do, but then she was pinned to the ground, staring up as if from the bottom of a very deep well.

“Little
bitch
!” The old woman with the Luger darted one gnarly claw-fist at her face. Shrieking, Alex wrenched her right foot free and kicked; feeling the solid thump all the way to her knee and the moment the woman's beaky nose crumpled. Flailing, the old woman staggered back as a great spume of blood gushed down her face.

Alex kicked again, but more hands caught her, and then she felt her head being pulled back and the skin of her neck exposed, and she thought,
Oh, God, they're going to
cut
—

Instead of a knife, she felt the rough bite of rope. Her scream choked off, and then they were dragging her by the neck over the cold, hard earth. This was like the nightmare at the gas station all over again, but there were so many of them, and she had no chance. Still, she fought, twisting, digging in with her heels. She clawed at the rope, felt her fingernails tear as she scrabbled for a handhold, but then they were hoisting her up, hands catching at her to keep her from falling, and her air choked off as the rope tightened.

The woman whose nose she'd broken—Luger Lady—was back. Her mouth hung wide open in a bloody, ravenous snarl, and this time, she clutched a knife. “Gonna cut your little head off!” Luger Lady shrilled. She exhaled a cloud that reeked of iron and rage. “Gonna cut your little—”

The sudden crackle of gunfire was crisp and sharp and glassy. Then a voice, very clear, cut through the din and the thundering roar of blood in her ears: “Go, Jet,
go
!”

Someone screamed as a German shepherd bulleted out of the crowd. The shepherd was black as coal and very large, and as Luger Lady half-turned, the dog sprang. Luger Lady had time to get her hands up, but then the dog barreled into the old woman. She tumbled to the ground, her knife flashing away, and then the old woman was shrieking, “Get it off me, get it off me!”

“Jesus Christ,” someone said.

“Don't shoot it!” a man shouted. “It's one of theirs, don't shoot it!”

Around her neck, the bite of the rope suddenly eased, and then Alex was on her knees. Her chest was on fire, and her throat felt as if someone had taken a razor blade to it and slashed. Gasping, she hung on all fours, trying not to be sick.

Luger Lady was still screaming, but no one moved to help her and, incredibly, no one tried to shoot the dog. Alex couldn't really see what was happening, but she heard the voice again, closer now: “Jet! Off, boy, off!”

And she had a single, stunned thought:
That voice … he's not
old.

The shepherd instantly obeyed, dancing away from the old woman, but it did not leave. Instead, the dog turned toward Alex, its black lips curling back, and Alex waited, helpless, for the jaws to snap at her flesh, tear her skin.

Instead, the dog nosed her: a single playful nudge. The scent that came from the animal was like a splash of cool water on a hot day. She thought of the morning Mina had broken out of the underbrush to save them from the wild dogs, the intense relief that had melted the icy sludge of fear in her veins. She remembered how, all of a sudden, Mina had been reluctant to leave her to follow after Ellie.

She thought of the wolf:
no threat
.

All around, dogs bristled and snarled—but not at her.

They were growling at their owners.

The voices in the crowd fell instantly, deathly silent, and people let go of the dogs. Surging forward, the animals ranged around Alex in a tight, protective circle. Some licked her face. Others nosed at her as she dragged the rope from her neck. The big black shepherd pressed against her, as if daring someone to cross it, and then something very small spurted from the crowd and into her lap. It was the puppy, wriggling all over, so frantic with relief that it tried to climb on top of her head.

“Good boy,” Alex said, still stupid with amazement, and then looked up as the crowd wavered and broke. She saw old men with rifles and shotguns parting the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea, wading into the dogs.

Looking up, Jet let out a soft whine, his black tail whisking the air in greeting. Following the dog's gaze, Alex pulled in a sudden, startled gasp.

“Are you all right?” He knelt on one knee and reached a hand to steady her. His eyes were as jet-black as his dog, his cheekbones were high and sharp as ax heads, and his scent was a complex mix of the darkness itself: cold mist and black shadows.

With a little yelp, the puppy jumped to lick at his hand, and the boy smiled.

“Hey, you,” he said, ruffling the dog's ears. “That's a good pup.”