Ashes (Page 54)

“I’m leaving,” she said. Maybe she should say something else? She couldn’t think of anything else. What did you say to a wolf? She eased back a single step and waited. The alpha male was a sphinx. She took another small sliding step back, felt the heel of her boot butt against the dead woman’s leg, and realized she would have to turn around.

She didn’t want to do that. But she had no choice. All the tiny hairs on her arms and neck spiked with fear, and her skin was so jumpy she thought it might just tear itself from her bones and go screaming down the road.

Heart pounding, she turned on her heel and began to walk, not too fast, not too slow. Every jangling nerve told her to bolt like a bunny rabbit, but she thought that would make the wolves chase her, maybe change her smell from no-threat to dinner.

After thirty feet, she was still alive. The wolves’ scent remained unchanged; no one was storming after her, and she decided to chance it. She craned her head over her shoulder for a look back.

The wolves were standing now, watching her go, their breaths wreathing them in smoke. After a moment, the smallest wolf turned and glided back into the woods. A second later, the third followed, leaving the alpha alone on the rise.

For reasons she didn’t understand, she stopped and turned to face him. She was too far away to make out its face, but she felt its eyes. Nothing wordless passed between them, no deeper understanding; no telepathic, paranormal stuff. But when the alpha male reared onto its back legs like a playful shepherd before pivoting and melting back into the forest … when that happened, she thought maybe there’d been yet another change.

In her.

39

By mid-afternoon, when a sign told her she was twenty miles from

Rule, she’d noticed three things.

The closer she got to the village, the fewer dead bodies she saw.

She had yet to run into anyone who wasn’t dead.

And she smelled smoke.

The smoke was very strange and very familiar, and it made her heart thump a little harder. She’d smelled this kind of smoke before, only then it had been a phantom, the first sign of the monster in her head.

God, no, not now. Don’t let me die here. Please, just a little longer. Get me through to Rule so they can save Tom, and then if I’ve got to die—

The puppy sneezed, pawed at its nose, then sneezed again.

Her relief was like splashing into a pool on a very hot day. If the puppy could smell the smoke, she wasn’t hallucinating. This wasn’t a symptom. It was real.

She got a good snootful, trying to sort out the components: wood char mixed with a chemical sting, like the fluid her father used to spritz over charcoal briquettes, and something almost sweet and juicy like the pork roast her mother made on Sundays. But there was something sooty and unsettling about the odor, nothing that made her mouth water.

Shielding her eyes against the sun’s glare, she aimed a squint at the sky. At first, she saw nothing—just an impression of white from the sun burning her retinas—but then she spotted just the faintest wispy tail, a thin dreadlock of very dark smoke. Not leaves, she knew, which burned white or gray—and not wood. A chemical fire?

Dropping her gaze to the snow, she eyed the by-now familiar scuff of boots and shoes and flip-flops and bare feet—and then spotted deep, straight cuts and the stamp of horses’ hooves: wagons.

Interesting. North, up by Oren, was Amish country. With its proximity to the mine, she didn’t think Rule was, but maybe even the Amish had decided to come south. Or …

Of course. They’d come out with wagons to gather up all those bodies. The people in Rule must’ve decided to establish some kind of perimeter. That made perfect sense. No one would want heaps of rotting corpses piled outside town.

But why no people on the road? Where was everyone? Hiding? Waiting until dark, hoping to avoid those brain-zapped kids? No, that didn’t make sense. All her run-ins with those kids had been either in the early morning or at dusk. Come to think of it, she had never seen one in broad daylight. Something Larry said popped into her head: In some ways, she’s still kind of a typical teenager. Like always waking up just when I’m ready to sleep.

Well, that was interesting. Before the monster, when her parents were still alive, she’d been the same way. Staying awake in morning classes was an act of will. Everyone her age was chronically sleep-deprived, downing Red Bulls and Mountain Dews and coffee to stay alert.

The monster had taken that away. When she really stopped to think, smelling that phantom smoke hadn’t been the first monster-sign but the second. The first sign had been the change in her sleeping patterns: frequent awakenings in the middle of the night, bizarre and fractured dreams, a feeling of restlessness as if she’d drunk two pots of coffee. The monster in her head had made her very different from her friends. Maybe very different from other kids her age. Before stealing her sense of smell and eating her memories, it had taken her sleep. And of course, there’d been her parents and that recurring nightmare, a trauma she relived over and over that blasted her sleep.

And Tom hadn’t slept much either. When he did, he always seemed to pop awake just a few hours later, and he kept that up all night. From bio, she knew most people slipped into REM sleep—dream sleep—a couple hours after falling asleep, and normal people went through three or four REM cycles every night. Other than that one night—before he’d come close to telling her what weighed on him so much—Tom never slept for long stretches, maybe because he couldn’t help it. Maybe Afghanistan had changed Tom and altered his brain somehow. She thought again of post-traumatic stress and nightmares that stormed in Technicolor across the black screen of Tom’s mind: horrors from the past Tom could not outrun.

Horrors—nightmares—that might have saved him.

Messed-up hormones might not be the only things that had saved her from changing so far. Maybe, as with Tom, altered sleep and nightmares were important, too. More to the point, maybe it was her whole screwed-up brain.

Maybe the monster had saved her life.

40

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.