Free Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick Page A

out there. Just thinking about it stroked gooseflesh from her skin and set her teeth. Had those kids killed that woman? They must have. She looked pretty old, like fifty or sixty, so between the two of them, taking her down might have been easy. Alex could almost see the movie in her mind, like one of those Animal Planet videos: the kids attacking, pouncing, swarming over the woman, tearing open her belly, ripping out her throat with their teeth.
    God, just like animals. She shuddered at the thought. And what was with that stink ? It smelled like … she didn’t know … roadkill, yeah, but it was a really old smell, too. No, old wasn’t the right word either.
    The kids smelled … wild . They were wild. They were like zombies—only alive instead of coming back to life. Or maybe they had died and then …? No, no, that couldn’t be right. Could it? God, she didn’t know. All she knew was their electronics had fried and so had their brains. The brain-zap hit them all: the animals and these kids and her and Ellie. Until now, she’d thought that she was the only one who’d changed—a stupid assumption, but she just hadn’t had anything to go on. Hell, she’d never stopped to consider that the zap might cover a big area: not just the mountain but the valley, too. The mountain was, what, five miles back? So, if the zap was a circle, say, with a radius of five miles, square that and times pi and …
    Oh my God . Her breath caught. Eighty square miles ? The Waucamaw was huge, almost four hundred square miles. If she was right, that zap hit a fifth of the wilderness—a lot of land. And how many people? This far north, the fall colors were past peak by a good week, which meant that tons of tourists already had come and gone.
    And what was with those kids? They’d changed in a way that was different from her.
    Or maybe not. She remembered how Ponytail Blonde had tested the air. What if their sense of smell sharpened, too? What if that’s the first step?
    Her restless mind strayed back to those gunshots. For the first time, she considered that maybe the question wasn’t what those guys had been shooting at, but who.
    Was that going to happen to her? God, she’d put a bullet in her head first. But what if she didn’t notice until it was too late? Worse, what if she didn’t want to stop the change? What if she didn’t care?
    â€œAlex?” Ellie’s voice floated out of the dark. “Is what happened to those kids going to happen to us?”
    Hearing her thoughts come out of Ellie’s mouth thoroughly creeped her out. “No,” Alex said automatically. “It’s been too long. It would’ve happened already.”
    Liar. The voice was small, only an inner whisper misting through her mind. You don’t know anything for sure. You’ve changed, and you’re still changing. You’re smelling things—and you’re smelling meanings . That zap was only this morning, and look how far you’ve come since then. Look how fast those kids changed. Maybe what happened to them hasn’t caught up to you yet.
    Go away, you. She couldn’t worry about this now. She didn’t want to worry about it ever. All she wanted was to close her eyes and not dream at all; to wake up in her own bed and see that this was all a really bad nightmare or something.
    â€œCome on,” she said, “go to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
    â€œBut I’m scared to go to sleep,” Ellie said. “What if I don’t wake up like me ?”
    â€œWe’ll be okay.”
    â€œHow do you know? Maybe we’re going to die.”
    â€œNo, we’re not. Not today.” It was another automatic response, a little bit of the gallows humor—or reality—she’d adopted over the past two years. “And not tomorrow either.”
    A pause. “I’m sorry about Mina. She