Jo Treggiari: Ashes, Ashes

“What 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.

Clasping his hands to his chest and adopting a high-pitched voice, he said, “Oh, thank you, Aidan, for saving me from that pack of vicious dogs! That was so great of you to hang out of the tree like that and risk your life or possibly a serious accident for a complete stranger!” She scowled, wondering if she could jump off the far side of the tree, avoid the dogs, and get the heck out of there. She looked down at the new hole torn in the knee of her jeans.

“Thanks,” she said, after a long moment. “I’m Lucy.” Her voice sounded raspy, and she was aware of how dry her throat was. “Do you have any water?”

He shook his head. “Didn’t plan on being here that long. Just came out to relax. See what I could see…” He stared at her and she wondered if her hair was bushing out.

“Are you scouting?” Lucy asked. She knew, of course, that there were others out there, loners like herself, but most people kept to their safe places and didn’t wander. She saw campfires sometimes, heard voices from a long way off, but Aidan was the first person she’d seen in a while. As far as she was concerned, the streets belonged to the S’ans—survivors of the plague who were horribly scarred and sick in the brain.

He shook his head. The sarcastic curl was back in the corner of his mouth, and she decided it was just something he couldn’t help, but it didn’t exactly make her warm to him.

She looked at him properly. As far as she could tell, he carried no collecting bags, no blade, not even a big stick.

“What do you mean?” she said. “You’re not scouting?” Lucy straightened up; her fingers felt for her knife again. “Are you a spy?” she blurted out. “Are you spying on me?” Her greatest fear was that someone would force her back to the shelter.