Page 104 of Ash Fall

All I want is a shower hot enough to hurt and a full hot meal and then Luna in my arms. We stopped at place after place today only to find a lot of them were already stripped to the walls. Shelves down, doors hanging open, and everything of value already looted. Other people got there first. Anything we need from here on is going to cost us more time and further driving to find. We still came home with four cases of filters and a bunch of other things on the list, so the day counts as a win.

Mars has been fairly quiet on the ride back, but Jules has been narrating the ash cloud in a nature documentary voice for ten minutes and Torrin keeps encouraging him. This is how the five of us used to be before everything, and it took eleven days in a wrecked world to get it back.

The elephant in the room was brought up at lunch in an abandoned furniture store off the main drag with all of us sitting on display couches eating the lunch Gigi packed for us.

Mars was the one who said it, which surprised everybody.

"So, you're really doing this?" He looked around the circle with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. "All of you. On board with being with her together?"

Nobody jumped in, so I did.

"Yup. We're all going to be official boyfriend in laws."

Gage barked out a laugh. He smothered it a second later behind the blandest face he owns, but it got out first, and everyone heard it. First time I’ve heard him laugh in days.

"Cool. Um, Luna and I had a moment so I might be a part of all that…if that’s what she wants." Mars tells us and none of us are really surprised given their history.

I glance over my shoulder through the back window at the tarp bungeed down over the patio set we took out of that store. It’s a long table with eight chairs. We're going back tomorrow with one of the covered trailers to get more so that everybody down our row has somewhere decent to sit in the evenings. It's the first plan any of us has made that isn't about staying alive.

I start humming without deciding to. It's been circling my head all afternoon, four or five notes that keep turning over, and it takes me most of a minute to understand what's actually happening. My music has come back. It hasn't been there since I woke up in that flooded hotel room. My fingers start moving on my knee, and I want a pen and my journal to write lyrics to go with it so badly it's almost a physical thing.

Gage drives us in through the bay door and everybody piles out to unload. That's when I first hear it. It's faint and it's somewhere underneath everything, a voice with no words I can pick out. Animals get through to me all day long now with them just outside the door in the pen, but I’m getting better at letting it flow past me instead of hearing each and every thing, so it doesn’t overload my brain. I take my end of the patio table and let the noise go. By the time the truck bed is empty, the voice has gotten higher and realize it’s not coming from outside.

I rub at my ear with my head turned, trying to shake it loose, like when you’re trying to get water out of your ear after a swim.

"Reid?" Torrin closes the tailgate. "You alright, mate?"

I don't answer him, because now I'm straining to listen. It's coming from the far end of the bay where everything we aren’t using now gets parked, and there’s something frantic about the sound. I start walking, and the closer I get the more of it comes through. About halfway down that row the sound stops being noise and turns into words.

"MY GIRL. My girl my girl MY GIRL, somebody, the curly one, the big one, ANYONE, my girl is GONE and I could not stop it, I BIT him, I bit at the sour man's hand and it did not work, LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT."

I'm running before I tell my feet to.

Boots come after me, all of them as somebody shouts my name but I keep going. The Jeep is nose in against the wall with all four windows fogged from the inside. Penny is up against the driver's glass with her paws scrabbling and her whole body shaking.

"How the hell did she get in there?" Jules reaches for the handle a half step behind me. The door comes open and she launches out of it straight into my chest and knocks me back into Mars before she hits the floor and scrambles around us with bulging eyes filled with fear.

"The truck the TRUCK, the smoke man put his hand on my girl and she was AFRAID, I have never smelled her that afraid, and the sour man grabbed my neck and the ground went away and then the DOOR, and the sad boy just STOOD there, he smells like the shed and old sandwiches and he did NOTHING, why did he do NOTHING, and the ice girl and the little one went in the truck too and my girl put her hand on the window and then it went OUT THE DOOR."

She's going too fast, tumbling over herself. It comes through in pieces and smells and terror. I get down on both knees on the concrete and take her face in my hands and hold her still.

"Slow down. Pen, slow down for me."

"The smoke man and the sour man and the sad boy took my girl in the truck out the big door and NOBODY CAME."

Cold quickly followed by fear goes straight through me. I'm on my feet and turning in a circle before I've worked out what I'm looking for, and there are four men standing around me with their faces filled with confusion.

"What?" Gage has hold of my arm. "Reid. What did she say?"

"Luna." I say in a strangled, choked voice. "She's telling me about Luna. Men took her and Kara and Briar were with her. They put them in a truck and drove out the bay door." I'm already moving. "Penny tried to stop them and bit one of them, but they locked her in the jeep, and she's been stuck in there since."

Nobody asks a single question. We scatter across the bay. Gage goes up the motorhome steps and comes straight back down out of them shaking his head. Mars cuts toward the garden racks while Torrin and I take the fifth wheel. Jules comes back from Kara and Briar’s camper shaking his head with his face gone white.

I stop a woman carrying a laundry basket and ask her. Two men walking to the visitor stairs get the same question. Milton takes his hat off when I ask him and his face fills with concern, but nobody has seen them.

We meet in the middle of the floor with nothing, and then all five of us go for the visitor centre stairs at once. The cafeteria is full and loud with the smell of something delicious. Somebody strung lights along the window wall and there are pizzas coming out on trays with people around the tables with paper plates, kids running between chairs and two of Clayton's men pushing tables together.

I scan every face in that room, looking for her. Anders is at a table near the back with his neighbors and when he sees the five of us come through that door in a rush, he's up out of his chair before anyone says anything. He gets to us fast for a man his age.