#ashghosts

1.

A figure stumbled across the dusty waste, hot and arid, feet dragging across the pale reddish ground. Here and there were patches of mostly dry grass, of creosote bush, of cactus. Mostly, though, there was dirt. Miles and miles of endless dirt. There were stretches of time where he didn’t see anything but dirt, rocks, and the occasional lizard. The lizards didn’t like him much. Probably because he was good at catching them, and they were tasty. Well, tastier than trying to eat the leather of his jacket.

He’d been following the sun west for almost a week. Rumours of free people, communities who didn’t live in fear of warring Factions, and real, natural food, like before the Drop, had enticed him and a few others to run from their city, from the Orphanage they were raised in, where they were trained and indoctrinated. They’d almost believed it until he’d been brought in, and his stories of the outside world had disillusioned them.

Even with all the tales he’d told them to help him get out again, they knew nothing about him. Hell, he knew next to nothing about himself. Only flashes and bursts of remembered moments. Only his name.

He was the only one left now anyway. Jake had been shot down during the escape. Nina forgot to watch the ground and found a mineshaft. Ellis had almost made it, but he never knew about his allergy to bee stings. Then there were the DeSilva boys. He’d woken up the sixth day, and they were gone.

Just gone.

Things like that seemed to happen out here.

Mirages had made him swear there was a lake in front of him, only to find more dust. He’d nearly stepped off a damned cliff without even knowing it was there. And now, well, now he almost believed he could hear engines.

He shook his head and kept walking, taking in the horizon before him. The phantom sound kept getting louder. Then he spotted the black strip a few yards to his right. Not believing his eyes at first, he jogged over to it. It was a road. An honest-to-God road. He’d never been so glad to see asphalt in his life, he thought. Laughing in relief, he sunk down to his knees. The engine sounds, though, still hadn’t gone away. He wondered if maybe they weren’t a part of his imagina--

Tires screeched and the gray-clad figure scrambled backward as two motorcycles shot past the braking car, and time seemed to do one of those horribly cliched moments where it stood still long enough for him to know that he needed to move faster, but not long enough for him to actually succeed in moving.

The third motorcycle was going too fast to avoid the car, the car was starting to drift sideways, and the amnesiac in the road was still in the road. In short, at least three people were about to get really badly messed up.

And then, suddenly, they weren’t. The vehicles were still, perfectly still, and the kid in gray was scrambling out of the road.

There was a rather large explosion about a football field behind the remarkably alive desert wanderer. Then he collapsed to the ground.

 2.

“Brennan, please,” she begged, “let me do this for you. You know you can’t control it on your own. You need help. You need something to anchor yourself to.”

“No, Meg! I’m not gonna use you as a fucking conduit!” He ran his fingers through his hair, shaking his head. “I can learn to manage it. I can withstand it. You can’t.” Meghan flashed him a nigh-murderous glance.

“You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t handle, Lonewolf. I’ve had a goddamn vamp under my charge for the past four years, and this family handled that just fine. You think a detonator’s really gonna be that much of a change for us? We already deal in blood. Why not energy?”

“I could kill you, Meghan. I could take all your energy from you, or channel too much through you, and we could all go up in a blast like that. The whole damn planet could. I can’t risk that.” He took her face between his hands. “I’ve just found a home. I don’t want to lose it.”

“Bren...” Meghan’s face had fallen. “You’re the most powerful detonator we’ve ever even heard of. You may be our only chance to survive. We know they’re coming for us. For you. They’ll kill Liam, fuck knows what they’d do to Nadia. Les and Tony’d be conscripted, or enslaved, or maybe executed. And they’d take you, and they’d brainwash you like they did Malachi. I can’t let that happen. I have to do this.”

“What about you?”

“Me? They’d have to get through me to take any of you. So I’d be dead.”

 3.

  It was a shitty car. A horrible, nasty, probably moldy car. The paint was chipped and the fenders were just plain gone and the inside smelled weird. And then the Ashghosts had found it. And they’d rebuilt him, and refurbished him, and his engine had never run better. And they’d given the old ‘69 El Camino something he’d never had before: a name. Well, to be fair, he’d never had guns before either. His name, though, was Carter. Liam had named him. Liam was always the one to name things, whether it was the vehicles, the landscape, the creepy-crawlies that invaded their space, or the asswipes they fought. They’d even given Meghan her nickname.

Liam loved Carter. That car was their sanctuary, their escape from the burning daylight and the only friend they didn’t have the constant urge to bleed dry. They only drank enough to keep them alive, so as to prolong their sanity. Even so, they figured they maybe had ten years before the bloodsickness took over and they went full Reaper. They hoped--prayed--that they’d die before that.

If they went Reaper they’d kill everyone they loved. And they’d enjoy it. It was the one thing they couldn’t let themself become.

“Hey, Liam?” Their cousin’s voice snapped them out of their internal thoughts.

“Yeah Nad?”

“You okay out here? Been spendin’ an awful lot of time re-rebuilding Carter lately.” Liam stood up from where they sat next to the car going over its schematics for the seventy-sixth time, looking for any possible weakness or breaking point they’d missed, anything that might fail, anything that could be improved.

“I’m fine. Just like bein’ properly outside every once in a while, you know?” They let a tired grin light upon their lean, pale face. Nadia smiled back at them and looked up at the night sky, clouds obscuring everything the local lights didn’t block out. They were lucky to find this compound. It was abandoned, well-stocked with food, and on the grid of one of the factions.