Refuge Book 4 - Ashes and Dust

by Jeremy Bishop

  With that, she strutted down the steps and away from the house.

  He let the screen down slam shut behind her. Back in the living room, the cold can of Coors called to him. He walked to the TV tray and plucked up the perspiring brew. Walking back into the kitchen, he expertly popped the top. His insides quivered at the smell. He’d been sober too long. The headache would set in soon.

  “Fuck it, and fuck her, too,” Charley said, and he poured the beer into the kitchen sink.

  5

  Griffin’s eyes darted back and forth as he drove, scouring the woods around the car for danger. While he didn’t expect those ash creatures to make a return appearance any time soon, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that they’d picked up a hitchhiker from another world along the way. And while their current surroundings appeared as dead as the moon, he wasn’t about to let his guard down. So he drove carefully and slowly.

  “Just because we’re going to see an old geezer,” Avalon said from the back of the cruiser, “doesn’t mean you need to drive like one.”

  “You used to hate how fast I drove,” he pointed out.

  “That was before monsters were trying to eat people.”

  “If we could talk less about monsters and more about anything else, that would be fantastic,” Winslow said.

  “Sorry,” Avalon said. “I’m sure Carol will be... I’ll just shut up now.”

  Griffin glanced at Winslow. The man’s legs continued to bounce nervously, but he seemed focused. And present. Despite his age, and his wife’s precarious condition, Winslow was doing what he could to help. Hell, most people in town were. New Englanders didn’t socialize much with their neighbors, but when disasters struck—typically blizzards or ice storms—communities came together and strangers were treated like family. And now, Refuge was coming together in a big way, thanks to people like Winslow, Cash and even Dodge, who were stepping up to take care of others.

  Winslow’s legs stopped bouncing. He tensed.

  “What is it?” Griffin asked.

  “Don’t you hear it?” Winslow asked.

  Griffin slowed the cruiser to a stop and put it in park. They were just a half mile from Ellison’s driveway, but he couldn’t ignore impending danger. He couldn’t hear anything, so he rolled down the window. A faint buzzing filled the car.

  “It’s the wasps,” Winslow said. “They’re back. I need to get back to the house!”

  “Carol’s inside,” Griffin said, reaching for the M-16 between the seats. “Besides, I think it’s coming this way.” He took the rifle, opened the door and got out. He stood behind the open door and aimed his weapon back down the road. The buzzing was getting louder, approaching fast, following the road.

  Winslow got out on his side, rifle in hand. Following Griffin’s lead, he aimed over the window. “These have much of a kick?”

  “Just don’t hold the trigger down,” Griffin said. “Might want to take the safety off, too.”

  Avalon rattled the back door’s handle from inside. “I can’t get out.”

  “Better if you stay put,” Griffin said.

  She grunted with annoyance. “Why, because I might get shot?”

  Griffin glanced at Winslow, who was searching for the safety. “Actually, yes.”

  Avalon’s complaints were cut short by the buzzing, which grew suddenly louder. The road behind them curved away after fifty feet. Whatever was coming would be on top of them fairly quickly. Griffin looked down the sights, let out a breath and slipped his finger over the trigger.

  Just a quick three round burst, he thought. That’s all it will take.

  When the thing sped around the corner, Griffin’s finger squeezed instinctively, but his conscious mind stopped the twitchy digit before a single round was fired.

  “Holy shit!” Griffin shouted, pointing the gun toward the sky and engaging the safety. “Radar. I almost shot you!”

  “S-sorry,” Radar said, slowing the moped to a stop. Lisa peeked out from around him, looking very guilty.

  Griffin took a breath, controlling his frustration. For a moment, he considered the possibility that the pair was here because something had gone wrong in town, but that couldn’t be right. Frost would have called him on the radio.

  “Why are you here?” Winslow asked. “Did something happen?”

  “I just wanted to see this through,” Radar said. “I found Ellison’s name.” He pointed to Griffin. “And you’re here because you found the envelope.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Griffin said.

  “I know,” Radar said. “You’re here because Ellison might have something to do with the shifts. Because finding the answers to what is happening might help you protect the people you love. Avalon. Sheriff Frost.”

  Three taps on the cruiser’s rear window. “Dad,” Avalon said through the cage separating the front and back seats. “Just let them come. I kinda missed the little brats, anyway.” She said that last part loud enough for Radar and Lisa to hear. They both smiled, in part because of the compliment, but they also had Griffin outnumbered.

  “We’ll do everything you ask us to,” Radar said.

  “Except go home,” Griffin said.

  Radar nodded. “Except that.”

  Griffin tried to stifle his smile. Radar had gone and grown himself a pair of balls. While he wasn’t the kid’s father, the new strength and resolve Radar was showing made him proud.

  “You’re not getting a gun,” Griffin said. “And the moped stays here. You can get it on the way back.”

  With a big smile, Radar parked the moped on the side of the road. He and Lisa hurried to the squad car as Winslow and Griffin got back in. The teens hopped into the back seat with Avalon.

  At least, Griffin thought, I can leave them locked in the car if I have to.

  6

  When Frost had started after the frantic Jillian, whose true last name was still a mystery, she thought it might take five minutes to catch the woman. Jillian didn’t appear to be an athlete. She’d get tired. She’d have to stop. Reaching the town’s border and the potential danger beyond would take her half the day if she stuck to the road, longer if she didn’t. But as they’d moved down Main Street and discovered broken glass on the sidewalk, it became clear that the crazed woman had no intention of simply walking to the border.

  She’d stolen a car.

  “Anything you want to tell me about this woman?” Frost had asked Dodge.

  “She’s had a rough life,” was his reply.

  And now, they were at the town’s southern border—again—parked on the side of the road in Jimmy’s tank-like Phantom pickup truck, next to Jillian’s discarded vehicle, and the spot where Rebecca Rule had died. The memory of Rule’s demise made Frost pause at the clean-cut town line. She might share Rule’s fate. Worse, she could be left behind. All of them could. But Becky would have taken that risk. Would have sacrificed herself again, if she could.

  She opened the driver’s door and dropped down to the pavement, while four of her passengers exited via the other doors and three jumped out of the flatbed. The truck could easily hold all eight of them, plus Jillian. While the others gathered around, she looked out at the bleak landscape, beyond the edge of town, which reminded her they were about to step foot into another world.

  “Anyone hears that bell,” Frost said, knowing she didn’t need to specify the church bell, “give a shout and high-tail it back here. Do not wait for anything. If we haven’t found Jillian, and that bell starts ringing, she’s on her own.” She set her eyes squarely on Dodge.

  He nodded and said, “I think she went this way.” He pointed to a rough outcropping of rocks just beyond the town border.

  “What makes you think that?” Loomis asked.

  Frost was wondering the same thing. Inside the town, the grass and trees were green and alive, with soft leaves shifting gently in the warm, dry breeze. But all signs of life ended at the town line. The green living world just…stopped, repla
ced by dry, dusty rocks and gravel strewn about a dry, dead landscape. The only aberrations in their view were the occasional spires of long dead trees and dark crisscrossing crevices in the rocks.

  If that wasn’t strange enough, about fifty yards beyond the edge of town, the earth angled up as though they’d shifted into a giant rocky bowl, like a sinkhole, but large enough to hold the entire town, if only just barely.

  How Dodge could be certain Jillian had come this way was a mystery, since there was no foliage to use for tracking and the dry ground gave no hint of her passage.

  “Because it’s the way I would go if I were leaving town,” Dodge said, pointing up at the rise. “It’s the only place not covered in jagged rocks.” He pointed toward a rocky ledge about ten feet off the ground. Two large boulders sat atop it, but beyond that they could see blue sky. “That looks like a good place to climb out.”

  Frost stared at the ledge and had to admit that Dodge had a point. It would be pretty easy to climb up there and squeeze between the two rocks. From their spot on the floor of the depression, it definitely looked like the easiest path. Even hysterical people probably follow the path of least resistance, Frost thought.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Frost stepped across the town line, going from blacktop to barren dirt, and took a few more steps before she realized no one, aside from Dodge, was following her. She turned to face the group, who were staring at the town border as though it could bite them at any moment.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, even though she knew. They hadn’t seen Becky, but they had all heard about it. They had all been warned about the dangers beyond town. She’d done the warning herself.

  “Look, guys,” she said. “Becky gave her life to save one of our own. She’d do it again, and...so would I. For Jillian. For any of you. So either grow a pair or go home.”

  “But Sheriff Rule—” Meeks, the short one, began.

  “Is dead,” she finished. “And she was closer to me than any of you. I watched her die, right there!” She pointed to the pavement beneath Grimm’s feet. The red-headed man shuffled to the side, looking down.

  “How many of you lost family in the first shift?” she asked.

  Every hand went up.

  “Well, this whole town is your family now, and if your wife or son, daughter or sister went running off into this world, would you just let them go?”

  No one spoke. No one moved. “Fucking pussies.” She turned and started toward the rise. Dodge stayed by her side. “Sorry ‘bout the language, Pastor.”

  “It wasn’t uncalled for,” Dodge said.

  “Sheriff,” Loomis said from behind. She turned back and found him a few feet behind her. The other men followed his lead, stepping over the town line. “We’re with you.”

  Frost gave a nod. “Stay within a couple hundred yards of the town line. If the bells start ringing—”

  “We’ll haul ass,” Loomis said.

  “Good,” she said. “Now let’s go find Jillian.”

  As they set out from the edge of town, she sent Loomis and the two blonde, bearded men, Brent and Silver, to scout ahead, while she and the rest took the rear. As they walked, Grimm, Meeks and Marshall, who weighed in at close to 300 pounds, moved ahead of them, while she and Dodge lagged behind.

  Once they were out of earshot, Dodge tapped her arm. “A few hundred yards? That’s it?”

  Frost nodded. “When was the last time you sprinted the length of a football field, Pastor? How about three? Think you’d make it without stopping? Winslow timed the last shift. One minute twenty seconds. Would take a running back about thirty seconds, but you and me? Three hundred yards is probably our limit, and if you hadn’t noticed, we’re not exactly walking over a flat, green playing field here.”

  “What if Jillian runs farther than that?” Dodge asked.

  “Then she’s on her own,” Frost stated flatly. “I doubt she’ll get that far, honestly. In this terrain, she’ll be lucky to go a hundred yards without falling and breaking…a leg.” She’d been about to say ‘breaking her neck,’ but thought better of it, when she saw the look on Dodge’s face.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find her.” I hope.

  She heard shouting up ahead, and she and Dodge picked up the pace. They jogged up to find the other guys gathered around in a circle, staring at something on the ground.

  Have they found her already?

  “What is it?” Dodge asked, sounding as nervous as she felt.

  “Bones,” Silver noted. He wasn’t related to Brent, but they looked similar enough they could have been brothers.

  The group parted, revealing a swath of bleached white bones.

  “Was it a dog?” Dodge asked.

  It sure looked like a dog, or something similar. Whatever it was, when it was alive, it had walked on four legs and had a tail, along with a snout full of sharp teeth. Then again, maybe it was something else entirely, with a canine-like skeletal structure. But a dog would be a nice change to what they’d already seen.

  The bones had an odd look to them. In most places, they’d been bleached by the sun, but here and there were long, dark marks that looked remarkably like burns.

  Why would there be charred dog bones out here?

  “What’s that?” Loomis asked, and he reached down. Just beneath the skull was a small, round piece of metal. Loomis picked it up. It looked like a dog tag. He used his index finger to wipe away a layer of ash. “Dexter,” he said.

  It was a dog tag!

  “Isn’t Dexter the name of ‘ol Tom Mungovan’s shepherd?” Grimm asked.

  Frost nodded, but she knew this wasn’t the same dog. Cash had relayed Sam and Jimmy’s encounter at the Mungovan house. Dexter was dead, that much was true, but not here, and not long enough to look like this.

  “What the heck is it doing out here?” Brent asked.

  No one had an answer, so Loomis handed the tag to Frost. She pocketed it, deciding to keep her knowledge to herself.

  After a moment, Dodge cleared his throat loudly. “It’s just an old dog tag,” he said. “But there’s a woman out here who could be in danger.”

  He was right. “All right,” Frost said. “It’s just a dog skeleton. Let’s keep looking.”

  “You got it, Sheriff,” Loomis said.

  Frost really wished he would just call her by her name. Wished they all would. But that would require going back in time. Of course, it seemed that moving between worlds was now possible. Why not time? But she somehow knew that was impossible. At least for them. So she pushed forward before time ran out.

  Loomis angled himself to the left, moving away from the group and up a ridge, but knowing a wider search area was going to get the job done sooner. He glanced at Frost, remembering a different time, when they’d been close. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but since the first shift took his parents away—or rather him away from his parents—he’d felt very alone. As a result, he felt himself drawn back toward the one person in town with whom he’d ever felt a deep connection: Frost.

  While she wasn’t being as cold as her namesake, she wasn’t really responding to his flirtations. Partly because they weren’t entirely appropriate, given the situation, but he wasn’t a fool. He saw how she glanced at Griffin Butler after she had laughed at Loomis’s joke in the park. She was worried about what Griffin would think.

  At least Griffin was a good man. A fellow soldier. A tougher soldier. And while Loomis knew how to fight and fire a gun, acting was what he did best, at least by New Hampshire standards. And for that, he was glad, because no one would notice his melancholy, meaning he wouldn’t have to talk about it with anyone. And that suited him just fine. Just because he was an emotional kind of guy didn’t mean he had to wear that shit on his sleeve.

  Lost in thought, he didn’t hear the first crack beneath his feet.

  But he heard the second. He stopped, now at the top of the ridge. Looked down.

  Shit.
/>   “I—I found something,” he said, eyes on the ground.

  “What is it?” Frost asked. She was twenty feet away, her view blocked by several boulders. “Is it her?”

  “It’s not her,” Loomis said, “but it’s someone.”

  “Several someones,” Silver added as he stepped up next to Loomis.

  Frost hurried over and looked down. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw all the bones. Then she looked up and saw the rest. She brought her hand to her face. “Oh my God.”

  There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bones, all laid out in a dozen or so seemingly random piles, scattered among the rocks and gravel. Atop each pile sat a single human skull, grinning back at them.

  While the macabre site was unnerving, it was the knowledge that someone had placed the skulls on top of the piles that was worse. Someone had survived whatever must have happened to this world.

  7

  Griffin continued at a leisurely pace, which was now a requirement, as the paved road had given way to a deeply pocked and washboarded dirt road. The car jostled back and forth through each unavoidable pothole. He thought it strange that a man with Ellison’s money and influence wouldn’t just have the road paved, but then again, the man liked his privacy. So did the few other homeowners in this part of town.

  They passed Quentin Miller’s house. Quentin’s big, green monster truck sat in the driveway, sulking like an ogre in the wan light of this strange world. While it wasn’t a performing monster truck—the tires weren’t that big—it towered over every other vehicle in town, even Jimmy’s Ford Phantom, and its deep treads could sling mud like nothing else. The Millers were out of town when the shift had occurred, enjoying the fireworks in Ashland, most likely. But the truck remained behind, standing nearly as tall as the house.

  And it probably cost twice as much to build, Griffin thought.

  “Jeez, that thing is ugly,” Avalon said.

  “I think it’s awesome,” Radar replied.

  Griffin was inclined to agree with his daughter. Quentin’s truck stood on huge, knobby forty-four inch tires. It was lime green with orange and yellow flames on the hood and front fenders. From under the hood, a huge chrome breather poked up like a shiny tank. Quentin said it fed air to the supercharger mounted on the engine, resulting in a massive gain in horsepower.