Ashes, Ashes (8 page)

Lucy hurried along the narrow track—a muddy animal trail worn into the grass by sharp deer hooves when they came down from the heights to drink from the lake. Beyond the scrublands the ground rose sharply. She went straight up, taking it at a run, her backpack bouncing with every step, reaching forward with her hands, low to the ground, ready to catch herself if she fell. The terrain became loose, crumbling earth and pebbles, spiked with rocky outcrops and straggling trees. Stones rolled under her feet, threatening to bring her down. She pulled herself up, grabbing at slender branches and roots to keep her balance. A few hundred yards up, she paused for breath. Her sprained ankle was a hot ball of pain. Her throat was raw. Her ribs hurt. Her fingers were scratched and bleeding. The wound on her palm had opened again. She’d left a trail of blood on the stones. The thought crossed her mind that the dogs would have no trouble tracking her this time. Lucy felt a jolt of fear and suppressed it. Drowning in a monstrous wave would fix that problem. Just ahead was a thicket of wind-twisted fir and pine clinging tenaciously to the slope, and beyond, she knew, was a bare cap of gray rock at the summit of the hill. And surely that would be high enough. She ran on, limping now, her leg muscles trembling with exhaustion. There were pine needles underfoot; it smelled mossy, pleasant. Dappled light filtered down. She paused, her breath hitching in her throat, and drank the water in her bottle in a few, panicked gulps. She felt safe under the canopy of trees, but her fear pushed her onward. She had just reached the far edge of the wood when she heard a roar like a subway train hurtling through a tunnel. It seemed frighteningly close.

Lucy broke through the line of trees, clawed her way up to a rocky ledge, and looked down from the height. She had a panoramic view of the drained beach, so peaceful at this distance. The thin slice of land where she’d lived for more than a year fell away beneath her only a mile or two from where she stood. She could see the green dome of her camp, the line of grass hummock sentinels, the black trunks of salt-burned trees by the shore, the wide swathe of sand. And then the wave came. Suddenly there was water everywhere, rushing in as fast as a jet plane. The waves jostled to fill every available space. The bowl where her home nestled was an upended snow globe shaken with a ferocity that robbed the breath from her lungs. Trees were uprooted and flung into the air; bushes and slabs of earth were 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 always liked dandelions. They seemed like free spirits, growing wherever they wanted, and springing back no matter how often her mother dug them up. Lucy started walking toward the first crevasse.

CHAPTER FIVE
THE HELL GATE

L
ucy wiped her mouth. After three hours of steady hiking, climbing, and risking severe bodily injury crawling in and out of crevasses, she’d found a puddle of rainwater that tasted of tarmac but wasn’t too gritty. The water made her stomach cramp and she realized how hungry she was. The sun climbed in the sky. It looked huge and more orange than yellow. She guessed the time must be close to noon. She wanted to be off the ridge before night fell. She felt exposed and vulnerable with no foliage above her, and although the sky was cloudless, Lucy knew that a vicious storm could move in with unnatural speed. The day had become humid, still, as if the tsunami had driven out most of the oxygen when it took the trees. Her bangs hung in limp ringlets over her eyes, and she could tell by touch that her hair had frizzed up. She wished for an elastic band or a piece of string to tie it back with, but she had nothing. She touched the hilt of her knife, rubbing her thumb over the smooth bone. She could hack off the mass of hair, cutting it close to the nape of her neck, but then she’d have the same problem in another month or two, and in the meantime she would look like a freak, or a boy. She wasn’t sure which was worse, but she did know that she didn’t want Aidan to see her looking like a head-injury victim.

Aidan was an uncomfortable thought. Lucy pushed it away. She wasn’t going to see Aidan. She was going to stock up, rest, and figure out where she would live now. Aidan was where people were, and where food was, that was all. She cupped her hands, scooped up more lukewarm water, and dribbled it over her head and neck, then smoothed her hair down as best she could. The road was flat for a few hundred yards. Beyond that it dropped off again, but she couldn’t tell how far. She walked, watching out for loose rubble. In places the mangled tarmac was marked with a broken white line, but it was no longer straight. It deviated from the middle and twisted suddenly and disappeared. She estimated that she was around Second Avenue and 92nd Street, although acres of road and earth had been shifted in the big quake, the landscape completely reconfigured. Sometimes she thought it looked as if a toddler had built a city out of blocks and then knocked them all down in a rage.

Lucy had reached a gorge that was as big as a canyon. It went down about forty feet and then climbed back up nearly the same distance in a series of trenches like giant steps. There was no way around it—it crossed the entire width of the ridge. When she finally pulled herself up the last craggy slope, bruising her knees in the process, she found herself on top of a plateau. Straight ahead of her was a deep, wide ravine, and stretched across it, ridiculously fragile, a suspension bridge. It swung in a gentle rhythm, although there was no breeze. This must be the Grand Canal. For a minute or two Lucy looked across the chasm. She chewed on her lip. Sweat trickled down her back and her heart thumped painfully against her breast bone. It was so high. The bridge was anchored on her side by several loops of rough-looking braided rope attached to an outcrop of rock. Lucy tugged on it and then stepped onto the bridge, which dipped with her weight. Each step created vibrations that traveled the length of the bridge and then bounced back, throwing her off balance. She crept forward, holding on to the rope supports with both hands, her arms outstretched to their full length. She tried to keep her eyes on the far side, but she couldn’t control her gaze. It was drawn to the ground far below. The channel bed was almost completely dry. The two downpours they’d had at the beginning of the Long Wet were not enough to flood it yet. Sharp rocks and rubble were strewn on the bottom, along with mounds of garbage. She saw a baby stroller, a dented refrigerator with its door hanging loose, wads of rain-soaked paper, tattered clothes and blankets, the twisted wreck of an old metal bed—the kind they used to have in hospitals, with wheels and coiled springs.

The rung she shuffled onto snapped with a sharp crack, half of the wood breaking off jaggedly and spinning out into the air. Her already weakened ankle twisted. Her foot went through the hole; the weight of her body threw her forward onto her knees, and the bridge swung crazily from side to side, tilting so that she was no longer on a level surface. Now one edge was vertical. She was being tipped off. She grabbed at the ropes, burning red stripes across her hands, and halted the fall. For several minutes she didn’t move. She lay there sideways with her head hanging over the edge, waiting for the bridge to stop swaying and right itself again. Lucy squeezed her eyes shut, trying to erase the image of the rocks sticking up like spearheads at the bottom of the canal. Slowly she shifted her weight toward the middle. The bridge leveled out. Once her heart had stopped pounding, she pulled her foot from the hole. Like a bear trap, splinters of wood had pierced her jeans and the sock she’d tied as a bandage over the bone. Her ankle was ringed with scrapes like tooth marks. She moved from her knees to her feet and began to inch her way forward again. Her teeth chattered so hard, her skull hurt and her jaw ached. By the time she got halfway across there was a sheen of sweat across her face, which she dared not wipe off, and her legs were trembling. She forced herself to keep moving. When she stepped off the bridge onto firm ground, her legs gave way beneath her.

After a few long moments with her head down around her knees, Lucy got up again. Her hair was plastered to the back of her neck with sweat and her damp arms clung to the lining of her leather jacket. Her throat was parched and her stomach growled with hunger. In the forefront of her brain was the fervent hope that wherever Aidan was, it would be straight ahead and not across any more suspension bridges. She looked around at the dilapidated buildings, the mountains of pulverized concrete and twisted girders. This may have been a neighborhood before, but now it was just the shell of one. A path, barely discernible, snaked through the rubble, disappearing a dozen yards ahead between the remnants of two brownstones, their roofs missing, their foundations sagging so that they almost touched at the top. The Hell Gate. The question was, were you entering hell going in or coming out? As far as she was concerned, the jury was still out on that one.

The terrain was unpredictable, and in most places sharply inclined on crumbling slopes made up of equal parts soil and man-made materials. Cinder blocks, sandbags, and planks of wood shored up the various levels like a humongous ladder. She followed the track—so narrow a goat would have had a problem with it. She went slowly, testing the ground, which was loose and studded with rocks. She kept her eyes open for people. Scavengers. Bands of roaming thieves who scoured the streets for anything that could be reused or resold. Rumor was they stole the fillings out of the mouths of corpses.

Suddenly Lucy was conscious of a hum not far ahead, down the next hill. She unclasped her knife, making sure it slid freely in the sheath, and pulled her leather jacket tighter around her body. It was too hot for leather, but it gave her confidence. She hoped it made her look tough. She walked slowly toward the noise, unable to tell if it was machinery, music, or the buzz of human voices. A guide rope was fastened to stakes where the edge of the hill dropped precipitously, with white flags of cloth tied onto wires to make the way clear. Wooden pallets were laid over deep puddles. She stopped. A curve in the trail along the edge of a crag revealed a view of the settlement below: tents clustered like mushrooms, lean-tos made of rough pieces of plywood. She was barely fifty feet above the source of the jumble of noise. She ducked down, feeling nervous all of a sudden. Lying on her belly in the loose dirt, Lucy peered over the edge. A few pebbles rattled down the slope. Just ahead, the path dropped down and opened onto a crowded square.