Ashes and Dust (2 page)

2

Frost watched them go. Part of her wanted to go with them, but right now, keeping the town safe meant getting organized while there was a chance to do so.

“Dodge, Loomis,” she said, making sure to use their last names. She wasn’t worried about the pastor, but she had a past with Jared Loomis. Using his last name would help him remember that their history was exactly that: history. If he hadn’t moved to Los Angeles when he had turned eighteen, things might have worked out differently. He had broad shoulders, gleaming teeth and a square jaw; he was as handsome as Julie Barnes was sexy. But when it came to love, Loomis loved himself first. Always had.

“Whadaya need, Sheriff?” Loomis asked with a wink.

Sheriff. That’ll take some getting used to.

“Get everyone with a weapon together. I want four groups of five.”

The two men split up without a word, wrangling the armed men and women into groups, keeping families and friends together. One of the groups formed on its own. She recognized the five men as all being on the Church softball team. For a moment, she thought the men were being silly, sticking together like this was a sport. But then she noticed their red-rimmed, tired eyes. They looked horrible. And she quickly realized why. For whatever reason, these five church-going family men had stayed home on the night of the fourth. They’d lost their families.

We’ve all lost someone
, she thought. Even Loomis. His parents were gone, though he seemed to be handling it better than most. If she recalled correctly, he hadn’t been on the best terms with his parents. They’d thought him a fool for going to Los Angeles and a lunatic for joining the military.

Frost turned to face the crowd. There were four groups of five, all with weapons. Perhaps another twenty stood to the sides, some armed, but mostly not. This is what remained of Refuge. Maybe forty people total, closer to sixty if she included those not present or the small cadre that had emerged as leaders—Griffin, Dodge, Cash, Winslow, Kyle and even Radar. Frost gave a nod of thanks to Dodge and Loomis, who stood off to the side, not among the five groups.

She turned to the gathered townspeople. Her people. She looked them in the eyes, seeing a mixture of fear, confusion and good ‘ol Yankee determination. She’d never had to address a group before, if you didn’t count kids at the middle school, so she pictured Sheriff Rule.
How would Becky handle this?
What advice might she give?

Get straight to the point
, she heard Rule say.
Don’t muck about. Tell people what you expect, and they’ll listen.

The advice had been given to her during her first year on the force, after dealing with a surly driver who wouldn’t cooperate. She’d fumbled for words. Shown weakness. The man had scoffed at her and driven away with a warning. It was just a traffic stop, but the lesson still applied.

She took a deep breath, stood a little straighter and asked, “How many of you know how to shoot?”

Thankfully, every hand in the four groups went up, along with half the hands from those not in a group. No surprise, there. In rural New Hampshire, hunting was almost a way of life. Almost every boy (and some of the girls) went out hunting for whitetail deer before their thirteenth birthdays.

“Look around,” she said. “Look at the person standing next to you. Look at the person standing next to them. Know what we are? We are
it
, folks. It’s pretty obvious that no one is coming to rescue us. We’re not anywhere close to home. If anyone is going to defend our town, it’s going to have to be us.”

A few of the gathered townsfolk smiled. One of them, a grizzled old-timer named Huck, saluted. “Live free or die!”

A cheer went up. This was why she loved New Hampshire. The state motto wasn’t just a motto, it was a belief. “Live free or die,” she said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

She motioned to the four armed squads.
“You all will patrol the town. Check houses for anyone still in hiding. Make note of anything unusual, but do not approach. And watch out for...invaders. Keep at least a half mile from the border.” She looked at the remaining townsfolk. “The rest of you are on clean up duty. That includes repairing damages and removing wasp carcasses. We are going to do this together, in shifts. From this point on, no one walks the streets of Refuge alone. At least not until we—”

“What’s the point?” a woman’s voice asked from the rear of the group. Frost leaned over and was surprised to see the woman Dodge had introduced as Sally Field staring back at her with a wild look on her face.

“The point, Sally,” she replied, “is defense. Protection. We don’t want anyone else to die.”

“No one else to die?” The woman barked a laugh. Her voice had a slight hysterical edge to it. “Isn’t it obvious? We’re all going to die, anyway. Every last one of us.”

“Hold on, Jillian,” Dodge said. “You don’t know—”

Jillian? So that’s her real name.

“Don’t be stupid, Pastor.” Jillian threw her rifle on the ground, and Frost wondered who had given her the weapon. She certainly didn’t seem fit to wield a butter knife, never mind a semi-automatic rifle.

“The next shift is just going to dump us somewhere worse. There could be dinosaurs! Zombies! Maybe fucking vampires!”

She stormed to the front of the group and stood directly in front of Frost, her eyes wide, her skin sweaty and pale. Frost thought the woman looked like she might pass out at any moment.

“Calm down, Sal—Jillian,” Frost said. “That’s why we’re arming the town. Sticking together. No one will be left without protection.”

“Protection?
Protection?
You saw those wasps!” Jillian shouted. “They were bigger than my dog! You saw those trees! What happens when we shift to a world with wolves the size of buildings? Or spiders the size of the Sears Tower?”

Frost was glad she and Griffin had kept the carnivorous nature of those trees from the general population. No one they knew had been killed by them. Ignorance was bliss, though in this case, it might be the only thing keeping the insanity at bay. But that didn’t seem to be the case with Jillian.

“How are you going to
protect
us against that?” Jillian shouted. “We can’t fight those with rifles. We aren’t even people anymore, we’re just meat! Meat!”

“Jillian,” Dodge began.

“Meat! We’re just meat.” Jillian was laughing now.

Definitely hysterical,
Frost thought. But the woman’s words were already having a demoralizing effect on the rest of the group. Several other residents were staring at her with expressions that suggested similar thoughts. She had to stop this. Now.

“Pastor,” she said to Dodge, “Why don’t you take Jillian to the library. See if you can help her rest.” It felt strange suggesting Dodge take someone to the library, but no one wanted to be in the church anymore. It also felt odd to suggest Dodge be alone with the strange woman, after most had assumed he was having an affair with her. But Frost no longer thought that was the case. Despite his fearful response to the first shift, Dodge had shown himself to be trustworthy, brave and aptly enough, righteous. She didn’t think Dodge would sleep with a married woman, though he had yet to reveal why the woman had been with him at all.

Dodge shouldered his rifle and moved toward Jillian, trying to speak in soothing tones. He held out his hand to her. “Come on, Jillian,” he said. “You just need to lie down for a bit. Things will look better after you’ve had some rest. The Lord knows, we all could use some rest.”

Jillian looked at Dodge’s outstretched hand and bolted.

“Meat!” she screamed as she ran. “We’re all just meat!”

Loomis tried to tackle her, but she sidestepped him and took off, heading down Main Street, screaming the word ‘meat’ over and over again. She was surprisingly fast, fueled by mania, and she disappeared over the crest of the hill a moment later.
If she keeps going...

“Loomis,” she snapped. “Pick a team and come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

Frost pointed in the direction Jillian had run. “After her.”

Loomis hesitated. “But...”

“Everyone in this town is my responsibility now. If you don’t want to help us—”

Loomis held up his hands. “I’m on it. I’m on it.”

“Dodge, take the rest of the people and—”

“No,” Dodge said.

Did he just say no?

“Pastor,” she said, “I thought you and Rule had an agree—”

“Jillian was my responsibility, before she became yours,” he said. “Lucifer himself couldn’t stop me from coming.”

Frost looked at the distant, barren landscape and said, just loud enough for Dodge to hear, “If we run into him out there, he’s all yours.”

She looked at the man, reassessing him for what had to the be the tenth time since things had gone haywire. Like most in town, he was a dedicated hunter. During deer season, he led a men’s group out into the woods to pray and shoot. The season ended with a potluck of venison dishes. He was probably good at tracking, too.

“Fine,” she said. “But you do what I say.”

Dodge nodded. “You’re the sheriff.”

“The rest of you,” she said, “get started cleaning up the wasps. Set up a fire in the lot behind Jimmy’s.” She winced after saying it. Jimmy was well known and well liked. And while his death meant she could turn the lot into a bonfire, it might not sit well with some.

She was about to address the elephant she’d just allowed into the room, when old ‘live free or die’ Huck spoke up, saying, “Jimmy’d want it that way. Being helpful from beyond the grave.”

“Thanks,” she said, and then asked. “Mind keeping watch while I’m gone?”

“It’d be my pleasure,” Huck said, with a half-toothed grin.

With that settled, she turned to Dodge and Loomis, and their five-man group. She knew them all: Jarvis Brent, Matthew Silver, Bill Meeks, Anthony Grimm, and Tucker Marshall. All good men. “Okay, guys. Let’s get her back, quick.”

3

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Lisa said, looking over her shoulder. The driveway and the street beyond looked clear, but she always felt nervous being inside Radar’s house. Not that the garage was really inside the house, but it wasn’t unusual for Mr. Wilson to tinker in the garage, and she didn’t think he’d take too kindly to them messing around with his things. Not only that, Griffin had asked them to help out around town, but they’d just snuck away instead, which kind of meant they were doubly not supposed to be here.

“It’s my moped,” Radar said, pouring gasoline into the open tank.

“But it’s his gas, right?”

“It takes like a gallon,” Radar said, slowing the pour. “He’ll never kn—”

The scuff of a foot on pavement turned their heads back to the torn up driveway.

“Charley,” Radar said, standing up quickly and spilling some gas.

Charley Wilson stood silently in the driveway, eyeing them both. Lisa could tell that Charley was sober, in part because he hadn’t shouted yet, but she’d never really seen him lucid. She had no idea how this would go.

Charley nodded. “Boy.”

Relief swept through Lisa, as Charley took a step toward the side door.

“I have a name,” Radar said.

Lisa spun toward Radar, her eyes wide. What was he thinking?

Charley stopped short of the door. “‘Scuse me?”

Radar looked down at the rusty old green moped. Lisa recognized the face. He was going to back down. Apologize. And thank God for that. She didn’t think she could handle a Charley Wilson meltdown. Not after what they’d seen and survived. Not after losing her family. As much as Radar helped her feel safe, his father scared her more than any of the worlds they had visited.

But then Radar’s expression changed. He looked...angry. Straight at his father. Angry!

“I said, ‘I have a name.’”

Charley’s hand fell away from the door. He tried making fists with both hands, but when the fingers of his bandaged hand flexed, he winced, which only made him angry.

Radar approached him. “Do you even remember my name?”

Charley didn’t move, but his face twitched with raw fury. Radar had never spoken to him like this before.

“Radar,” Charley said. “I—”

“That’s
not
my name,” Radar said. “You ought to remember it. You gave it to me. It was
your
father’s name.”

The anger in Charley’s eyes softened. “Josh... I’m...I’m sorry.”

Lisa’s hand went to her mouth. She felt like she was witnessing some kind of a miracle.

“That’s the best you’re going to get out of me today,” Charley said, opening the screen door. He looked past Radar, into the garage. Eyed Lisa, and then the moped. “Wear helmets.”

He stepped inside the house and closed the door behind him.

When Radar turned around, he had tears in his eyes. His hands shook. Lisa hurried to him, eyes on the door, half expecting it to burst open at any moment. She took Radar’s hands and squeezed them. He sniffed and placed his head on her shoulder. The brief connection seemed to calm him. He lifted his head again and looked her in the eyes. “Maybe there’s hope for him?”

“Maybe,” she said, but she thought,
I doubt it
.

Radar screwed the cap back on the moped’s gas tank. He pointed to a large, white helmet that looked like half an egg. “You can use that.”

“What about you?”

“We only have one.” He shrugged. “I’ll drive carefully.”

He pushed the moped down the driveway and into the sloped street. Motion over at Griffin’s house caught his attention. It was Cash, putting his tools in the back of a car. After closing the trunk, he approached Radar and said, “Handled that well, kid. Not many people in town would stand up to your dad like that.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen worse now.”

“Ayup, ‘spose we all have.”

Lisa still disagreed. The monsters they’d seen, even the wasps that had stung Carol, seemed unreal and distant compared to Charley Wilson. He was the monster that wouldn’t go away each time the church bell rang.
He’s the monster we’re stuck with.

“If you see Griff,” Cash said, “Let him know he’s on the new grid.”

“I’m not sure where he is,” Radar said, “but I’ll let him know, if I see him.”

Cash gave a nod and headed back toward his car. “Good luck with the moped, kid.”

“You shouldn’t have lied to him,” Lisa whispered. “It might be a good idea if someone knows where we’re going, in case...”

Radar swung his leg over the moped and sat down. Its old, spring shocks creaked under his weight. “We’ll be fine. I’m not the wimpy kid I used to be.” He turned the moped on, took his feet off the pavement and began furiously peddling. “Don’t I look tough?”

Lisa laughed. He looked ridiculous. But then the engine coughed a black cloud and buzzed to life. Radar drove down the street, turned around and came back. He stopped next to her, a cocky smile on his face.

“I’m totally badass, right?”

Still laughing, Lisa put on her helmet and climbed on the moped’s seat behind Radar. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed, probably tighter than she needed to. “What if they catch us?”

“What are they going to do?” he asked. “Ground us? Besides, I’m the one who figured out the name. And we have a right to know what’s going on. They can’t exclude us, just because we’re kids.”

Lisa wasn’t sure if that was true, but if Radar wanted to find out what was going on, she’d support him. That’s what good couples did, right? Carol would do the same for Winslow. Probably for a stranger, the woman was so sweet. And Frost would support Griffin. They weren’t really a couple, but they had a better relationship than most of the married folks in town. And if Lisa followed their lead, she would follow Radar, wherever he went. No matter what.