Page 23 of Ash Fall

Luna worries me most of all. She works as hard as anyone to clean up the mess, but I catch her eyes going to the basement door every few minutes, quick little glances she thinks nobody sees. Each one finds me, because I know exactly what's at the bottom of those stairs. There's a dead man in a uniform down there, with a caved-in skull and burned-out eyes, lying in the dark under our feet while we sweep up this mess. I silently curse myself for not dealing with it the second we got home.

I'm crossing the kitchen to start dealing with it when Mars gets to her first.

"Luna, hold on." He says to her in a low, pitched for just the two of them tone, and every muscle in my back goes tight. "Can we talk somewhere private for a minute?"

Yeah, that's not happening, not today, not with her hands still shaking and a body in the basement and the sky getting ready to do God knows what. I close the distance in three steps and clamp a hand down on his shoulder, friendly to anyone watching, iron grip underneath.

"Perfect timing, man. I need your hands downstairs." I steer him toward the basement door before he can argue, throwing Luna what I hope is a reassuring look. "We'll be up in a bit, sweetheart. Don't let Gigi start the meeting without us."

Mars shoots a frustrated glance back at her over his shoulder, but I don't give a single shit. She has enough to deal with right now without whatever drama he's carrying around in that head of his getting dumped on top of it.

Down the stairs, the air is cooler and wrong, tinged with copper under the dust that shook loose from the all the rattling. The quake finished what the bullet started. The window I shot through is nothing but a toothy frame now, glass scattered across the carpet. A bullet is still buried in the drywall across from it, waiting for me to deal with the fact that I pulled a trigger to kill a man. The body is right where we left it against the wall, and Mars has gone very still as he stands over it.

"Grab the end of this sheet." I pull the folded drop cloth off the shelf by the dryer and shake it out. "He probably deserves better than being dumped outside covered in a sheet, he didn’t have a choice in what he was doing, but it’s all we can do for now. We have to get him out of here, for Luna."

Working together without talking is the one thing that still comes easy with Mars. We wrap the man carefully and as tight as we can, and I try not to look at his face while we do it. He can't be more than a few yeas older than me, and that is too young for every single thing that happened to him this week. When we're done, Mars straightens and rolls his shoulders, and the shadows come when he calls them. Dark ropes slide up out of the corners of the room to gather under the wrapped shape and lift it off the floor without a sound.

The window frame takes some clearing before anything can pass through it but then the body floats out into the backyard ahead of us, steady and level, and I boost myself through after it with Mars behind me.

Penny comes trotting across the grass before we've gone five steps, nose down, tail low, zeroing in on the wrapped shape with that terrible dog thoroughness.

"Penny, deck, now." I point, and she gives me a wounded look and slinks back up the steps to lie down with her chin on her paws, watching us with pure betrayal on her face. Better she sulks over there than sniffs over here.

The back gate creaks the same way it has for two years. Then it's just us and the ravine falling away below, scrub and dry dirt and the earth stairs I created to get up it We don't take the stairs. Mars walks the shadows out over the slope, the body drifting between us. At the edge he looks at me once for the go-ahead. With a sigh, I nod, and the shadows unwind.

The wrapped shape slides and rolls down the steep face, dirt hissing along with it. It comes to rest in the brush at the bottom, small and pale against the grass and brush.

Guilt is a heavy weight on my shoulders. That soldier flew across an ocean far from his home and family to learn and train to be a better helper to the world. He spent a week doing things that were probably not his choice and died in a stranger's basement for it. Now he doesn't even get a hole in the ground or a marker with his name one it. My grandfather would have words about what we just did. Hell, I have words about it, and none of them change the situation we’re in. There are eight living people in that house behind me and a sky about to turn against all of them. The living have to come first. It was never in my control, any of it, and knowing that doesn't make it one ounce lighter to bare.

"I’m sorry this happened to you," I tell the bottom of the ravine, because somebody should say something, and then I turn back for the gate.

Mars falls in beside me, and I let the quiet hold until we're halfway across the yard, because what I have to say needs saying before we're back inside.

"I don't know why you're back, and I honestly don't care." I keep my voice level and my eyes on the house. "But you're going to leave Luna alone."

His steps slow. "What are you going to do, Gage? Hit me again?"

"If I need to." I stop and face him, and I let him see that I mean it all the way down. "Whatever you think you need to say to her waits until we get our shit figured out. We don't have time for more fucking drama right now. And it's not just her, man. You owe the rest of us an explanation too. Two years, you asshole, and you don't get to skip the line by cornering her in a hallway first. So, until then, make yourself fucking useful and keep your mouth shut."

I can practically hear his teeth grind from clenching them so hard as his hands curl and release at his sides. For a second, he's a teenager again about to swing at me over a bad call at third base. Then he locks it all down behind that flat look he's gotten so good at and stalks past me toward the house, fury coming off him in waves. That part is fine with me. He can be as pissed off as he wants, as long as he's pissed off quietly.

Inside, the family is already gathered and waiting for us.

They're all around the big cherry wood table with Elenor at the head of it with an unlit cigarette rolling back and forth between her fingers. Luna and Kara flank her, Torrin is awake again and propped up carefully in his chair, and Jules and Reid sit across from them. Two chairs sit empty, and I take mine, the same one I've had since Luna's mom first pointed me into it. Then I watch Mars stop behind the last four empty chairs where his chair sits. They’ve all been sitting empty at every Sunday dinner for two years while the rest of us learned to eat around the hole that was left.

He hesitates with his hand on the backrest, and then he pulls it out and sits. Across the table Luna's face pulls into a frown with so much sadness folded into it that my chest aches. She's looking at him in that chair and seeing every dinner he missed. I know, because I'm seeing them too.

"Alright, my loves." Gigi sets the cigarette down and flattens her hands on the table, and every eye in the room goes to her. "I'll give it to you straight, because you're all grown and the situation doesn't leave room for softening it. I can confirm that was the Yellowstone super caldera erupting. I went out to the garage and turned on the Escalade’s radio. Reception is faint but I caught enough to confirm it. The eruption itself is the least of our problems. The biggest concern is what comes after, and what comes after is ash."

"Ash like a campfire?" Jules asks with a frown.

"Ash like powdered glass." She lets that sit for a breath. "It's pulverized rock, sharp as anything, and it's going to come down for weeks. Months or years, more likely. It'll bury fields, choke rivers, and blot the sun out enough to drop the temperature and kill growing seasons, and that's just it lying there being ash. The real trouble starts when it gets wet. There'll be acid rain coming down with it and through it, and ash plus rain doesn't make mud, my darlings, it makes something closer to wet concrete. It sets up heavy and hard, and every flat roof holding a load of it will come down. If you breathe enough of it dry it will mix with the fluid in your lungs and turn into a type of mud. It will be like drowning on dry land."

Stunned quiet rolls around the table. Kara has gone pale under her smudged makeup. Reid reaches over without looking and takes her hand, and Luna's arms wrap around her own middle.

"Are you saying that once it starts falling, we can't go outside at all?" I ask her in disbelief.

"Not without masks and some form of glasses to protect your eyes, and probably not for long even then. When Luna and I did our shopping spree, I grabbed as many heavy-duty masks as I could." Gigi ticks her answers off with the ease of a woman who has been living with this fear longer than the rest of us have known it existed. "It'll murder vehicle engines too. The filters clog and the grit chews everything inside them. Any driving we do after it starts falling means rigging extra filtration, and even that buys hours, not days before it all needs to be swapped out."