A Light From the Ashes

  A LIGHT FROM THE ASHES

  RACHEL ANNE COX

  The people, places, and events described in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to anyone, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright ©2019 Rachel Cox

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by Glass Spider Publishing

  www.glassspiderpublishing.com

  Cover design by Judith S. Design & Creativity

  www.judithsdesign.com

  For Gibs, who showed me the light

  when all I saw were the ashes.

  And for Jen and Steven, who helped

  me keep the fire going.

  PART I

  1

  BEFORE

  Somewhere in Virginia

  The Year of 42

  T he scarred land and verdant forest looked brighter to Sam through the lens of freedom, even in the pre-storm gray light. Silver-backed leaves flipped their personalities with the waves of the wind. Now green, now silver. And his eyes danced to follow them. The monotony of the last seven years had blended his days into beige sawdust. Still, seven years wasn’t too long to work for the woman he loved and earn the right to put his mother’s ring on her finger. That kind of joy demanded a sacrifice.

  Patches of sun were torn out of the shade. From the tangled jumble of trees and vines as he made his way home, Sam saw a flash of white out of the corner of his eye. Two skeletons lay out in the open, entwined and held in strange poses by creeping blackberry vines thick with thorns. They lay across the edge of the forest, partially in the adjacent meadow as if they were trying to run away from something but had fallen just short of escape. He approached them slowly, blanched bones of broken lives and interrupted dreams. He wondered, as he always did when he came across similar remains, what their story had been. He could not rest until he’d taken care of them. This was as good a place as any for a burial.

  He pulled the small shovel from his pack to dig the two graves. The clean hiss of the spade in the dirt sounded and felt as if the earth would swallow the shovel up, and him along with it. Hiss. Lift. A clump of earth and roots thudded and thwapped on the ground. Sam felt and heard the rhythm, willing himself not to break it. The rhythm, the pattern, they held him in check, but the sounds didn’t quite drown out the echoes of war still ringing in Sam’s ears, sounds he was never quite free of.

  Rifle fire in the trees beyond the meadow splits the air. Sam no longer jumps at the sound. It peppers his consciousness just as the crickets used to. He listens closely as the cracking sounds fall away, farther and farther from his hidden spot in the alders. Sweet vernal grass tickles his legs, the dew sticking the leaves to his torn shins. He loses track of how long he is crouched over the body of his friend. The blood and muck where he’d fallen now pasting his clothes in stiff swaths of torn fabric. As the air becomes thick and quiet around them, Sam pulls out his knife to begin digging a grave. He grips the leather handle, blackened with sweat, until his knuckles are white. In the trackless forest, he searches to find a spot clear of trees and roots. The sky becomes gray with rain, and he tries to quell the sickness rising in his throat. He can’t look at the lifeless body of his friend taken down by a bullet. He keeps thinking the boy will rise as if he’d been sleeping and take off running into the trees as he used to. Sam hunkers over the hole he’s forming, tearing the carpet of leaves and grasses from the earth with one hand, fiercely wiping the tears from his cheeks with the other.

  Sam couldn’t remember the name of his young friend, another child soldier—he was only the first of many Sam would see fall around him. And he didn’t know the names of the bodies he was now burying. The task struck him as strangely intimate for strangers. Touching the bones of bodies that had been actual people, determining their final resting place. What made him worthy of such a task? Maybe it wasn’t about worthiness. Maybe it was about availability. Within a half hour, the job was done, a shallow grave being sufficient for the bones left behind. He reached in his small pack for Great Expectations, where he’d scribbled some words in the front cover in his own hand.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, the True Judge. This is also for the good. May all be free from sorrow and the causes of sorrow; may all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrowless. From untruth lead us to Truth. From darkness lead us to Light. From death lead us to Immortality. Amen.

  Sam didn’t understand fully what the words meant. They were abstractions to him, unrelated to anything he could see or touch, but still they gave him comfort. He knew that the people of Before had found great comfort in these words. He’d read their religious texts and knew their deeply held beliefs had even led to wars. Somehow for him, pulling the words together from their different religions made him feel he was helping them find peace, and in doing so, he found his own. Maybe this was what they called God—this peace and space between.

  Kneeling by the grave, he kissed his hand and touched the stone he’d found to mark the grave. “Rest well, my friends. I thank you for your sacrifice.” He’d lost count of how many he had buried through his travels. But he’d promised himself long ago that every lost soul he encountered would receive a proper burial and his thanks.

  As his final day at the lumber work camp had ended that afternoon, he was left with a strange sense of emptiness and anticipation. His days had been filled with other people’s needs and orders for too long. He knew within a day he’d be seeing Gemma again—he had worked and waited for nothing else every day for seven years. So why then was he now almost frightened of the reunion? True, he hadn’t actually received any response to his letters throughout the seven years, but with the haphazard carrier system being what it was, there could be a thousand reasons for that.

  Sam had left the lumber camp near the Border to go on one last scavenging trip before heading home. He needed another book and thought he might find something for Gemma as well. He was lucky to still have his treasured copy of Great Expectations. When the Corsair sergeant had found him the night before retrieving his books from the hidden box under the third tree from his tent, Sam had been sure he would lose everything.

  He’d been so careful. Everyone was in the mess tent, eating dinner. He’d looked over his shoulder a hundred times to make sure he wasn’t followed. The small wooden box was in a shallow hole nestled among the tangled roots of an alder. He’d covered the hole with a large patch of soft green mold so no one would see the earth disturbed. The hinges had creaked and protested as he opened the box to reveal his few linen-packed books. He had tucked Great Expectations between his jacket and tunic. He breathed a little easier, feeling the worn cover and heft of it close to him.

  He tenuously fingered the pages of the other two volumes—a book of Irish poetry from the 1900s and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The familiar smell of musty paper and ancient binding overcame his senses as he sat breathing them in. Moon-cast shadows danced over the words as the wind rustled the pages.

  “Samuel Erikson!” The grating of the Corsair’s voice had shot through his spine like a steel rod, and the two books in his hands fell to the ground.

  “What’s this?” The soldier strained his tight blue uniform as he bent to retrieve what Sam had dropped. “The day before you are to leave, and we find this contraband.” />
  “Sir, I can explain . . .”

  “Silence!”

  Sam felt the bulge of Great Expectations under his coat and hoped the soldier didn’t see it. He knew this sergeant as one of the more fair Corsairs, as Corsairs went. Perhaps his punishment wouldn’t be so bad.

  “It seems we have a choice to make, Erikson. If I bring you to the commandant, you’ll likely serve another six months here.”

  Sam’s jaw tightened, and he felt beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  “You were in this camp before I arrived. Remind me how long your service has been.”

  “Seven years, sir. It started out as two.”

  “Bad behavior?”

  “I wasn’t given a reason, sir.”

  The sergeant looked around as if he wished someone else were there to tell him what to do. He was used to following orders.

  “Right, then, Erikson. Either we take you to the commandant, or you throw these books on the fire. Which is it to be?”

  Sam’s shoulders relaxed without him thinking about it. “You’re giving me a choice?”

  “Only if you make it in the next five seconds. One . . .”

  The sergeant stood before him, pistol in one hand, books in the other. Sam couldn’t see his face clearly in the dark but sensed he wasn’t enjoying his task.

  “Two . . .”

  Trying to strain to see the books in the soldier’s hands, Sam wished he could have read them one last time before being faced with this choice. But he knew what his answer had to be.

  “Three . . .”

  “I’ll throw them on the fire.”

  “Follow me, then.”

  They’d walked in single file to the fire just outside Sam’s tent. It was beginning to smolder into coals. The sergeant took a large stick and stoked the fire into life. Tiny bits of burning ash rising up into the blackened night.

  “Here you go, Erikson. Now, throw them in.”

  Sam held them in his hands for a brief second. Relishing the feel of the hard covers beneath his fingers. Any longer than a second, and he would have started to question his decision. In one swift movement, the books were out of his hands, being swallowed up in the burning embers.

  As he thought back to the night before, he felt a hole in the pit of his stomach, an ache for the words and ideas lost in the flames. His skin itched with a layer of the fine sawdust. He ran his hand through his thick mop of sandy curls, then along his rough cheek. He tried to think of Gemma, his reason for every decision he’d made for as long as he could remember.

  He thought of the creek which he would pass on his way home. Though he’d had some leaves of absence from the lumber camp—most of them spent on scavenging trips in the Forbidden Grounds—he had not been allowed in his own village until his seven years were up. He wondered if the creek still followed the same path.

  Vines of memories as thick as the underbrush at his feet followed him through the forest. He thought of Gemma’s long brown hair falling around her shoulders, her skin darkened by the sunlight as they played in the creek together, hiding from the kind but watchful eyes of Zacharias. She was the only bright spot in his life then and now. They had clung to each other in those first few years after Zacharias took them in after finding them stealing food in the town square. Gemma was the only beauty he’d ever seen in this world.

  She would be changed some, he was sure, as he was changed, his thin arms now bulky with muscle hard-earned in the Virginia forest cutting an average of two cords of wood per day, hands calloused and worn. But she would be lovely still, and more importantly, she would be his. They would hold each other in a warmth protecting them from the descending winter. He would love her in the breathing in and the breathing out, sharing the same air and all else. He would smile at her over breakfast in the mornings, the coffee steam from their two cups blending between them.

  And now he was on his way back to her. It used to be easy enough to slip past the Border guards. Although their stations weren’t far apart, Sam remembered how often he had found the guards napping. The days of revolutionary armies and border raiders were long gone. He’d found a few of the guards easy to feign friendship with and bribe with alcohol he found in demolished bars in the Forbidden Grounds.

  The roads outside the Border still showed remnants of the past before the Disaster and lay as crumbled and broken reminders of things that no longer existed. Within Virginia, the Triumvirate had ordered that roads be cleared and reverted back to dirt paths, easier on the feet of men and horses. But outside the Border, the asphalt roads looked like black icebergs among the encroaching trees. Sam usually found it easier to walk beside the decrepit roads than on them.

  On this particular day, he had walked toward the ocean. Ancient rusted-out cars littered the roadway, tires and all useful pieces of them long since removed. He’d taken this road enough times to know he’d find nothing of value until he reached the place he called New Beach. Sam had breathed in the freedom in the crisp autumn air. No more schedules, no more assigned days off. Day after day of freedom stretched out before him, and he reveled in the luxury of it. Feet crunching in the fallen leaves the only sound, no other person for miles.

  The road had turned southeast through the forest, which for years had been left unchecked. There he’d found the bodies as he took in the sights around him, the trees tall and untouched by man, the underbrush encircling his feet like a pool of green dappled with orange and red. The edge of the woods had receded. Others had been here and cut some of the trees down. Saws, not axes. He was used to seeing trees with axe-cut notches from other scavengers in need of wood for their fires or shelter. A tree here or there, hewn down awkwardly and dragged through the brush. But a group had done this, not an individual.

  Sam took another look at the shallow grave he was leaving behind, then made his way down the hill to the waves lapping around the buildings in New Beach. The signs were long since destroyed, so he could only guess what the city used to be called whose streets now flowed with seawater. He scanned the horizon, finding the city library just above the waves, only the top floor untouched by water. Sam picked his way over fallen walls, bricks, and chunks of cement in piles. He saw the waves flowing in and out around the buildings. Were they farther inland since his last visit?

  Sam thought of a line he’d read from Emerson and played over in his thoughts every time he saw the Forbidden Grounds, like a song that ran in his mind unbidden. . . . universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present.

  He wondered if that was true, and wondered again about the nature of the world, the nature of creativity. He couldn’t quite grasp it. What creativity rested beneath the waves around his feet? What glories and forgotten dreams of those gone before him? Sam wondered just how many lives had passed in the streets beneath him en masse, how many had intersected, combined, created, grown, and multiplied before the final rush of water washed them from the earth and all became still, silent, separated again.

  He was able to reach the library via a high wall which reached from the dry land, then through the seawater like a tightrope. From the wall, he climbed into an open window on the fourth floor of the withered library. Rows of books in the dusty rays of what was left of the sunlight stretched before him. He wouldn’t have time to really search as he would like to. He passed the shelves he’d already been through. Here and there a gull perched on a copy of Keats or commiserated with Lee’s mockingbird. These were books he’d read often in his travels, but he only brought back his absolute favorites, as hiding places had been scarce at the lumber camp. Now perhaps he could bring home a few more. He passed by King’s Salem’s Lot and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Although he had read them, he couldn’t count himself as fond of them. Gemma would like To Kill a Mockingbird, he was sure. He’d written to her about it the first time
he read it. She reminded him of the young, precocious Scout, though with a protective armor which the naive Scout never needed.

  He scanned the shelves, trying to find volumes with the least amount of damage. Whole sections were pasted with white salt deposits. The choking stench of mold almost overwhelmed his senses. Books stood swathed in the black, creeping growths. Some without mold simply fell apart in his hands. As he reached for what appeared to be the last copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, several shiny black beetles and silverfish scurried from beneath it. On the shelf in its space, insects and two brown salamanders writhed in liberation. He held his breath, hoping they had not devoured the inside of the book. As it began to come apart in his hands, Sam sighed with disappointment. He would have to find another. Lists of books Zacharias had told him about scrolled through his head. He tried to think of one Gemma would like. Was Little Women one Z had mentioned? Yes, he was sure that it was, so he quickly went to find it.

  Sam ached to stay longer, to be able to linger over the books he loved. But he kept looking over his shoulder to make sure he wouldn’t be caught by a Corsair patrol or other scavengers. Something in Sam always wanted to believe the best of people, but he never trusted anyone he met in the Forbidden Grounds, and there were more patrols in the Forbidden Grounds in the past months than there had ever been before. He quickly placed the book in his knapsack, first wiping the pages free of salt and dust. He paused longingly in front of the shelf of Steinbeck before forcing himself back to the window and his wall of escape.

  Standing just at the water’s edge, Sam turned the ring on his little finger absentmindedly, a gold ring which seemed to hold the fire of the noonday sun. The ring his father had given his mother, and before that his grandfather to his grandmother. It was the only small connection he felt to any happiness in the past, and soon it would be a connection to Gemma and the happiness of the future. His heart was starting to beat faster every time he thought about returning home and seeing Gemma’s face, her blue eyes filled with tears. He wondered if it was anticipation or fear of finding her gone. Shadows of clouds crawled slowly up the mountainside while cold came down to wash over him like his fear. He tried to squelch the nervousness that was growing like a weed in his stomach. By tomorrow at sunset, he’d be there. Tomorrow.