Free Ashes, Ashes by Jo Treggiari Page A

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