Jo Treggiari - Ashes, Ashes

“Where do you live?” Lucy asked, shrugging the crawling feeling from between her shoulder blades.

He turned to look at her, one hand rumpling his shaggy hair until it stuck out in all directions. The smirk was gone. He pointed into the darkness. “See?”

She shook her head.

He grabbed her shoulder, turned her a few degrees to the east. Past the hollow where her camp was, a tall silhouette loomed. She recognized the Egyptian-style marble column which stood there, as out of place as a camel, and to the northeast of it a plateau and a series of gorges where a massive earthquake had caused the concrete slabs of a big road to slide and sink and bunch upward like a swathe of gray ribbon.

Aidan pointed with his finger, and she followed the invisible path with her eyes. “See the plateau? If you keep going across the escarpment about three or four miles as the crow flies, you’ll come to the canals. It’s pretty hard going.” She could just make out the slender silhouettes of rope bridges slung like webs above the cement-veined crevasses, and clusters of stilt houses sticking up along the slopes like bunches of strange flowers.

“There,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger, “the Hell Gate.” He sounded proud and embarrassed at the same time. “The camp was actually part of Wards Island before the floods.”

“What’s with the name?” she asked, thinking it sounded overly dramatic. “I thought the Hell Gate was a bridge or something?”

“We adopted it because it seemed appropriate.”

“Sounds homey,” she said sarcastically.

A dog howled suddenly from outside the thicket. Under their tree the pack lurched to its feet, barking raucously. The howl came again, a long, sustained cry like a signal of some kind, and the pack, jostling one another and snapping at the air, scrambled about in excitement, tearing up the mossy ground with their thick claws. Lucy tracked them as they milled and broke apart, never moving more than a few yards away from the tree. Something had gotten them riled up again. She sensed his eyes on her.

“You can’t just hide in your hollow like a mouse.”

She stared at him. “I’m not hiding,” she snapped. “I’m surviving. And I’ve been doing just fine on my own.”

His gaze flicked away. She felt him tense beside her.

“Those are not feral dogs,” he said. “They’re hunting dogs.”

“So what are they hunting?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not me. They didn’t appear until you did. They’re trackers. They’re looking for something.”

She felt her jaw drop open. “What do you mean?” Her voice was a croak. “What are they looking for?”

“I don’t know exactly.” He frowned. “But something makes them go crazy. I’ve watched them before,” he said. “They’re sent out from the Compound. I’ve seen them around, out on the Great Hill, on the Cliff, in the Hell Gate, down in the Village. They go out, they find people who are hiding, and then the Sweepers come.”

She blinked. Her brain felt fuzzy. Her knife was in her hand again. It felt clumsy in her hand, as if she couldn’t will her fingers to hold it properly.

“So they’re just keeping us here until…”

“Until the Sweepers arrive.”

“How did the dogs know?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I guess they smelled you.”

She shot a swift glance at him, but he wasn’t smirking. His eyebrows were drawn across his forehead and one hand raked through his hair.

She judged the jump to the ground. Maybe she could push off from a branch before dropping, get some distance from the dogs before running. She thought there were maybe a couple of dozen of them. And more beyond her sight, out there in the gloom with the dog that had howled the announcement of their location. She squinted into the gathering darkness, straining to see a sign that the Sweepers were coming. Could she kill a dog? If she had to. But would that stop the others? Or would the blood drive them into a killing frenzy?

“Give me that bandanna,” he said, pointing to her wounded hand.

“Why?”

“Come on!” He made an impatient gesture when she remained frozen. She held out her arm and he untied the knot from the bandage. Dark, fresh blood clotted the blue and white paisley design, and there were older, rusty stains where it had dried. He shoved it in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled two large, smooth rocks and a slingshot from the pouch of his sweatshirt. “Stay here until they’re gone, then run as fast as you can,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

He grinned, his teeth very white.

The dogs were huddled beneath the tree in a solid mass of resting bodies. Aidan fitted a rock into the rubber pocket of his sling and then drew it back between two fingers. The stone whistled through the air, hitting the trunk of a tree at the edge of the grove with a sharp thunk . Furry heads came up, and the dogs bolted toward the sound. He quickly aimed and shot the second rock at a tree farther on, and then, with one easy motion, swung out from the branch catching the limb below him. Quickly he made his way down before Lucy could even gasp out a word. He jumped the last ten feet, landing softly on his feet. The bandanna was out and in his hand, and he ran in the opposite direction from the pack, ducking every few feet to trail the material along the ground. Once he’d cleared the woods, he stopped and turned. He stood for a moment at the top of a small grassy hill, and then a wild, almost joyful cry burst from his lips. It rang through the trees and was answered by the dogs. Outlined against the sky, he raised the bandanna like a flag and waved it. He whooped and hollered. Lucy watched him disappear toward the lake. A chorus of barks rang out, and then the pack rushed back in a boiling frenzy. The small black-and-white terrier she had noticed before fought to get to the front. Its nose was down to the ground, a steady whine rising from its throat, its stump of a tail wagging furiously. It sent up an excited yapping, which was echoed almost immediately by another chorus of mad barks, and the small dog sped away. The other dogs hurtled after it, shoulder to shoulder in a melee of bristling fur, passing underneath her tree and onward in the direction the boy had taken.

Lucy half climbed, half fell out of the tree. Her knees were shaking and her muscles felt stiff and cold. Her hand was sore and so caked with congealed blood that she could barely close her fingers. She clambered backward until she reached the crotch of the tree, grabbed hold of a branch, and slipped, wrenching her shoulder. Her feet skidded against the wet bark. Her heart in her mouth, Lucy inched her way down, staring fixedly at her boots and letting the ground fuzz out at the edges of her vision. Any hope she had of natural coordination abandoned her, and the memory of Aidan’s confidence frayed her nerves even more. She dropped the last twelve feet gracelessly, slithering down against the trunk and scraping the side of her left arm and the length of her ribs against the bark. She came down hard on one foot, jarring her ankle.

By the time she had hobbled all the way to the clearing that surrounded her camp, she was panting and hunched over. Her ankle had swollen like a golf ball; her hair was glued to her face by a combination of sweat and moist air. Every shadow cast by the moon, every whisper in the grasses, sent a surge of panic through her body. So much adrenaline was coursing through her that she felt physically sick with it.

But there had been no sign of the Sweepers, no sign of the dogs beyond the occasional echoing howl carried over the mudflats from the lake. Lucy stopped in the middle of a barren patch of ground where she could see in all directions and listened hard, forcing her breathing to slow so she could pay attention. Would she hear if Aidan was being torn to pieces? Could she tell if the dogs had caught up to him? A lone insect stilled its buzz-saw melody as she slowly turned in a circle. There was no other sound.