Jo Treggiari - Ashes, Ashes

She bent and tied her laces, fumbling for a moment and finally settling for two tight knots which would be impossible to undo later. She stowed her yearbook in the bag and shrugged it back over her shoulders. The beach was still empty, the fish a thin layer of throbbing silver at this distance, with the deep blues of water and sky above. Choosing which way to go was a nonissue. West was the sea. East and south ended in water as well. North would take her up a slope and eventually to the Great Hill, and from there she could make a decision. A small voice in her head piped up and reminded her that the Hell Gate, Aidan’s camp, also lay in that direction, but she pushed it down. From the Great Hill she could journey on for a few days and cross the Geo Wash Bridge if she wanted or loop back around. Maybe come home in a day or two and try to salvage something, rebuild. She told herself she could completely avoid the Hell Gate if she wanted to.

Lucy hurried along the narrow track—a muddy animal trail worn into the grass by sharp deer hooves when they came down from the heights to drink from the lake. Beyond the scrublands the ground rose sharply. She went straight up, taking it at a run, her backpack bouncing with every step, reaching forward with her hands, low to the ground, ready to catch herself if she fell. The terrain became loose, crumbling earth and pebbles, spiked with rocky outcrops and straggling trees. Stones rolled under her feet, threatening to bring her down. She pulled herself up, grabbing at slender branches and roots to keep her balance. A few hundred yards up, she paused for breath. Her sprained ankle was a hot ball of pain. Her throat was raw. Her ribs hurt. Her fingers were scratched and bleeding. The wound on her palm had opened again. She’d left a trail of blood on the stones. The thought crossed her mind that the dogs would have no trouble tracking her this time. Lucy felt a jolt of fear and suppressed it. Drowning in a monstrous wave would fix that problem. Just ahead was a thicket of wind-twisted fir and pine clinging tenaciously to the slope, and beyond, she knew, was a bare cap of gray rock at the summit of the hill. And surely that would be high enough. She ran on, limping now, her leg muscles trembling with exhaustion. There were pine needles underfoot; it smelled mossy, pleasant. Dappled light filtered down. She paused, her breath hitching in her throat, and drank the water in her bottle in a few, panicked gulps. She felt safe under the canopy of trees, but her fear pushed her onward. She had just reached the far edge of the wood when she heard a roar like a subway train hurtling through a tunnel. It seemed frighteningly close.

Lucy broke through the line of trees, clawed her way up to a rocky ledge, and looked down from the height. She had a panoramic view of the drained beach, so peaceful at this distance. The thin slice of land where she’d lived for more than a year fell away beneath her only a mile or two from where she stood. She could see the green dome of her camp, the line of grass hummock sentinels, the black trunks of salt-burned trees by the shore, the wide swathe of sand. And then the wave came. Suddenly there was water everywhere, rushing in as fast as a jet plane. The waves jostled to fill every available space. The bowl where her home nestled was an upended snow globe shaken with a ferocity that robbed the breath from her lungs. Trees were uprooted and flung into the air; bushes and slabs of earth were ripped loose, rolled and tossed into the seething mass of water. The stone needle was completely submerged. The wave grew higher as it came, a cataclysmic wall of water dwarfing everything before it, taller than her father’s office building. It smashed against the hill like a massive fist, and she felt the tremor vibrate through her body. It broke less than a quarter mile from where she stood. A quarter mile was only 1,320 feet, she remembered from some math class long ago, and yet it seemed closer. If she hadn’t forced herself to take more than 1,320 steps, it would have caught up to her. She looked into the wave, a dizzying swirl of stormy blue and emerald green, darkening to purple at the depths and exploding with foam at the crest. It was near enough that Lucy felt the soaring spray hit her face and her nose filled with the smell of salt. Her eye was caught by a splash of bright orange within the brown swampy swirl of pulverized tree and bush and earth, and she recognized the tarp from her camp. When the wave rolled back out with a sucking sound that she felt as a pressure around her throat, it left nothing behind but a thick sludge. The ground steamed in the morning sun. It was quiet and nothing moved.

Lucy realized that she had bitten her lip. Blood trickled down her chin. She rubbed it away, staring at the bright red smear on her fingers before wiping them on her jeans. She looked down at the devastation, trying to will her brain to comprehend it. The splintered trees, the slick layer of mud and pools of water. Nothing remained of her shelter. Even the tarp had been dragged back to sea. There were shapes left sprawled in the mud. Rabbits, groundhogs, other small animals, drowned in their burrows. Bile flooded her mouth and she vomited. Turtle soup. And that brought on more heaving until her stomach was empty.

After some minutes she got up, moved away from the steaming pile of puke, and sat down with her back to the wreckage. She peeled her sock back from her ankle. It was soft and puffy to the touch, but she could rotate her foot and flex her toes. She stripped the sock off and tied it around her ankle and then put her boot back on. The sole and heel of her foot were covered in calluses about a centimeter thick—she could walk without a sock for a while. Next, the wound on her palm, split open again and weeping a little blood. She wrapped it with the only bandanna she now owned, pulling the ends tight and securing them with a knot. Lucy’s fingers were shredded from the rocks and the tips throbbed, but at least it was a distraction from the pain in her ankle. She leaned back against her backpack, listening to the thud of her heart. The slope ahead was a gentler rise topped with cracked and weathered gray stone. Tiny pink-flowered plants anchored themselves in the crannies. In the sky, so brilliant a blue that it seemed unreal, a hawk climbed in ever-tightening circles. It must be wonderful to be so free , she thought, to be able to travel away from everything .

It was the yucky taste in her mouth more than anything else that propelled her to her feet eventually. She walked up to the crest of the hill, favoring her ankle and working the stiffness out of her legs, and scanned the area in front of her, wondering if she could find a spring or a small stream where she could refill her bottle, maybe soak her ankle. The hill dropped off into a gorge, but it was not so deep that she couldn’t scramble down into it and up the other side. It was what lay beyond it that made her pause and begin chewing on her thumbnail: a long expanse of buckled highway, driven up into a series of concrete ridges by the powerful earthquake that had collapsed the Empire State Building three years ago and pulverized most of Midtown. Strewn with rubble, the road dropped twelve feet in places and climbed twenty feet in others. The concrete was crumbling and pierced with weeds. Dandelions bobbed their yellow heads from every crack. She’d always liked dandelions. They seemed like free spirits, growing wherever they wanted, and springing back no matter how often her mother dug them up. Lucy started walking toward the first crevasse.

Lucy wiped her mouth. After three hours of steady hiking, climbing, and risking severe bodily injury crawling in and out of crevasses, she’d found a puddle of rainwater that tasted of tarmac but wasn’t too gritty. The water made her stomach cramp and she realized how hungry she was. The sun climbed in the sky. It looked huge and more orange than yellow. She guessed the time must be close to noon. She wanted to be off the ridge before night fell. She felt exposed and vulnerable with no foliage above her, and although the sky was cloudless, Lucy knew that a vicious storm could move in with unnatural speed. The day had become humid, still, as if the tsunami had driven out most of the oxygen when it took the trees. Her bangs hung in limp ringlets over her eyes, and she could tell by touch that her hair had frizzed up. She wished for an elastic band or a piece of string to tie it back with, but she had nothing. She touched the hilt of her knife, rubbing her thumb over the smooth bone. She could hack off the mass of hair, cutting it close to the nape of her neck, but then she’d have the same problem in another month or two, and in the meantime she would look like a freak, or a boy. She wasn’t sure which was worse, but she did know that she didn’t want Aidan to see her looking like a head-injury victim.