We Are Ash

by Samara Stone

  Ash’s blazing eyes swung to Dolores and she said in a choked voice, “The Dolores thinks that we did this? It thinks we breathed into many squishies even though it is Not Allowed?”

  “Come on, Ash, what else am I supposed to think? It's the only possible explan—” but Dolores couldn't finish before Ash erupted into a keening noise that was neither human nor that of any animal she had ever heard in her life. It was an Ash noise. Ash gripped Dolores’s face between her palms and shoved her away so forcefully that the couch skidded across the floor with Dolores on it. Then she let out another Ash cry, swirled up into the fire’s light, and was gone.

  “Ash, no! Ash! Ash, please come back!” Dolores shouted, but try as she might to focus on Ash’s presence she felt nothing except a naked aloneness. There was no watchedness, only the bewildered stare of Brook as he caught his breath.

  Suddenly Dolores heard another terrible moaning cry. It took her a moment to realize that it came from her, and that it was accompanied by hot tears.

  32 The Finding Begins

  The alone from before is nothing compared to how we feel now that the Dolores has forsaken us. It believes that we betrayed it only because we grew some fur, but we knew that breathing into the squishies was a much different kind of Not Allowed. We wonder if the Dolores would have decided we were bad without the Brook. And why can't the Dolores make up its mind? It looks at the Brook like it looked at the Lane and then the Colt. We were under the impression that the bald bipeds mate for life, but perhaps not all the bipeds.

  But we thought it brought the Brook so that we would not be in the alone so much, but now we see that it was for the Dolores. If we hadn't gotten caught with our pelt, maybe it would not have sought out a different crazy bitch. Now the Brook will be the Dolores's crazy bitch and we pour out the sad eye juice when we think about it.

  We return to the place near where we became we. We look at the tattered bodily remains of the bear that the stupid squishies unmade. The sun is rising and it is terribly cold, but we keep our bare, pathetic hide as penance for our own mistakes with the Dolores. Then we are startled as something says, “Sweet Jesus, girl, you'll die out here like that. Are you okay?”

  We spin around to find ourselves face to face with the Danny. We are so shocked that it has found us that we almost unmake ourselves again. Then we remember it has never known us as we appear to the Dolores—as we appear now. It does not know us. It walks slowly toward us, taking its heavy jacket off.

  “Here, here. Take this at least. What are you doing out here?”

  It is clear that the Danny remembers our last encounter, even if it does not know what we are. It throws the drapes at our feet, but keeps itself far away. We say, “We are lost. We are in the alone.”

  “What? Who else is with you?” But we can see from its face that it is remembering what happened when we had just become we. Perhaps it recognizes our voice.

  “We just said, we are the alone. The Danny is afraid, isn't it?”

  “Oh fuck. You're—”

  It backs away from us, stumbling, but manages to stay on its bipedal feet.

  “Do not be afraid. We do not wish to make it cough up the blood-juice. We are only sad. We came to see if we could remake differently. We came to where we became we. But we can feel it in each of ourselves; we cannot go back to what we were. And we cannot change what we are.”

  It continues to put distance between us. “Look, I don't know what you want—”

  “No, squishies do not seem to know what the You wants or who the You is, yet they all talk about it all the time anyway. The bipeds are clever about most things, but not the You.”

  “Yeah… okay. I'm just… Keep the coat.”

  “Wait. Does it know about the other humans that got the blood-juice cough in the North Dakota? Does it know about that?”

  The Danny pauses and nods its head with its almost-Dolores eyes. “Yeah. Yeah. Did you do that?”

  “Possibly, we suspect the You is nefarious. But it was not us. We were with the Dolores the whole time, or at least in the Dolores's lair, which we thought was our lair once we were its crazy bitch housewife, but it has replaced us. It found a different crazy bitch housewife that doesn't grow pelts to save firewood.”

  We leak so much sad juice and now it is not just our eyes, but also our nose, and in a disgusting turn of squishy anatomy, somehow down the back of our throat. How much juice do these bodies have?

  Now the Danny comes back closer to us. It not-nice yells, “What about Dolores? What happened to Dolores? Is Dolores coughing up blood? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “No, no, no! We would never hurt the Dolores. The Dolores is fine. It is with the Brook, probably pelvic-smashing and tearing the Not Allowed list off the fridge because it doesn't need to tell the Brook not to have a house-pelt.”

  We leak and leak and ooze and ooze and we feel like our whole chest cavity is under something very heavy and we choke on our own air. The Danny foolishly but kindly wraps us in its discarded jacket.

  “Okay. Okay. Look, I'm pretty fucking confused right now. Come with me to my truck, but don't do your crazy ash-smoke-breath shit, okay? None of that.”

  “We know! It is Not Allowed!”

  So we follow the Danny to its exoskeleton and it turns the twisty thing toward the red and then the small, mobile den fills with cozy, warm air, even though there is no visible fire. So clever, even if they are maddening, these bipeds. It asks us many questions about the Dolores and it seems to finally understand that we have been living with the Dolores, that we are what it calls the Dolores's roommate. It asks if we wish to call the Dolores, but we shake our head in the 'no' way, so that we do not have to sound so goopy and sloppy from all the leaking we are doing.

  “Why are you here? Why did you come here? I can't believe I ran into you again. I've been sneaking out here to… I don't know… be alone, to try to process that maybe I killed my mom. If I hadn't been out here helping my friend to poach a damn bear, none of this would have happened.”

  “We are sad the Cody and the other squishies shot the bear. And us. But the You didn't kill the mother-thing, we did, though we didn't mean to. We do not wish to make the Dolores sad, and we now know that the Danny's sadness makes the Dolores sad. We are sorry. We love the Dolores.”

  “I don't even know what that means, or what the fuck is happening, but thanks. I thought I'd lost my mind, and then when those guys got sick, I just had to come out here and see, you know? I had to know if it was back—or you, I guess.”

  “Yes, perhaps it was the You that caused this. But we did not. We too came back to see what caused the other humans to have the blood juice cough. We must find what out what caused it so that maybe the Dolores will let us be its crazy bitch again.”

  The Danny watches us and says, “Are there more… like… this?” It gestures to us and our squishy form.

  We think about the darkness, the fear, that has been in every single one of us lately and we sigh, finally having ceased leaking. Then we tell the Danny what the Dolores would not stop making noise long enough to hear.

  “We have been scared that there is. We were the only Ash—the only we—before. But now we are not so sure. We have felt it. We have felt something coming, some darkness. What if it is another we that does not become Ash? What if it doesn't have the Dolores to help it know what is Allowed? And it can't have the Dolores. It is ours! Even if the Brook thinks it has the Dolores, it does not! Not yet.”

  We see the baffled look on the Danny's face and we know that even though the writhing mass of squishies as a whole are clever, most of the individual squishies are not. This is the not-clever face that many of these defenseless, destructive bipeds make when they cannot follow our logic. It does not matter to us. We are glad we met the Danny, that it knows us. We are glad that despite knowing what we did, it did not shoot us. We also hope that maybe it will tell the Dolores on the small hand-face device. We hope that it will tell the Dolores that we
will come back, that we will stop the blood-juice-cough thing, but that first we must find it. We will leave the Dolores, but we will always come back.

  “Has the Danny seen anything strange out here?” we say to the Danny. “This is not exactly where we became we. Not where we were born. We were made north of here. Does it know how to go north in its elaborate, noisy exoskeleton? Does it know the place where the earth is ruptured? Does the Danny know? Can it take us there?”

  “Shouldn't you get some clothes?”

  “No,” we say, and we grow a nice thick pelt like the mountain lion we saw once in the hills surrounding the Bozeman. The Danny squawks and for a moment looks as if it will run again. Then it curls its battered fingers into a fist and withdraws its arm. Then the giant exoskeleton begins to rumble over the land.

  “Dolores is okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “What's north of here?”

  “It will know it when it arrives.”

  We come to the blasted, sick wound on the earth that smells like the fabric of reality has begun to rot. The Danny stops its exoskeleton and whispers, “Sweet mother of Christ… so this is what they were hiding.”

  “Who is this Mother of Christ and why would it do this and try to hide it?”

  The Danny shakes its head and says nothing more. We walk even farther north with the Danny and it covers its mouth and nose with its gloved paw. We too cover our respiratory orifices, even though this is likely the womb that birthed us. After picking our way across ground covered in skeletal plants that crumble at our touch, the Danny stops short, looking at something on the bottom of its foot cover.

  We clamber over a ridge that makes our paws, all four of them, burn and ache and smell like sickness. Then we see it. An even more blasted crater—not even plant remnants are here. Only sulfurous, acidic vapor rising over the corpses of hundreds of animals.

  We walk slowly, painfully, over to the enormous, dead carcass of a moose. We circle it and see that it has nearly all of its blood-juice and lungs on the ground in front of its mouth and giant nostrils. We spin and begin to leak as we see that every poor creature in this wasteland has a mouth and nose garishly smeared with bright red blood-juice and innards. Hundreds of dead animals, all innocent, all more than willing to give up their learning, their places, with no breathing into them needed. That is what makes the squishies so maddening yet so appealing—they keep their secrets. We must take them, extract them. But all the other animals, all these unmade beasts radiate learning in life—all they know we can discover by looking into their eyes, sometimes stroking their fur. But never so much that they need fixing.

  We squat down next to the head of the huge moose, marveling that something so large, so powerful, could still be so dependent on the ridiculousness of the blood-juice. We place our hands deep into its warm winter pelt on the crown of its head between magnificent antlers, large enough to serve as chairs for the squishies. We do not understand being sad for a generic squishy dying this way, because there are so many. But many of these creatures, dead in this forsaken place, are few in number and tread lightly on the land, leaving hardly a trace of their existence. Certainly nothing like this destruction. Many of them are rare enough that we have not seen even one alive.

  We clasp the moose's dead skull through its dead skin through its dead pelt and we reach inward, into the last memories in its dead brain. We see it. We see the Other. It was born as we were, and it could've become like we are, but it didn't—it obliterated even its own multitudes.

  Suddenly, as though the Other were still alive inside this dead moose, we feel its malevolent gaze on ourselves. Its eyes—pale and gray and flat like stone— glow through the tissue left behind, and each of us cringe away and scream, falling away from the moose.

  We stumble back into the Danny, who had crept up behind us while we sought the cause of so much unnecessary obliteration. So much darkness and death. We spin around, seeing that our fur was not quite thick enough, and we felt the Danny's fingers plunge through and touch us enough that the Danny is now leaking. Despite feeling overwhelmed and hunted by the horrible eyes of the Other, we quickly run our fingers down the Danny's snout and pull out the hurt.

  It not-nice yells as its eyes rove wildly over the many carcasses. “What the hell did you do? Why would you do this? Why?”

  We can feel the Danny being sickened by this place, by the oozing angry sores of the earth. “Run,” we say. “The Danny must run away from here, back to its wheeled thing. It must flee. It must not come back here. This place will eat its body, but even if it survives that, the Other might come back. The Other might be coming here now and we do not know if it can travel as we travel. We do not know if it can remake itself since it destroyed its multitudes. The Danny must go away. The Danny must tell the Dolores we are okay. Tell the Dolores we will find the Other.”

  The Danny stands there, dumbfounded and looking around at the many, many dead creatures. And then it says, “You are a monster. You stay the fuck away from my sister.” It has its hand on its gun thing, its gloved paw fumbling with the snap that attaches a strap over the end of it.

  “We cannot even blame the You for this. It was the Other. Please, go. The Danny must save itself or the Dolores will be sad.”

  “Why can't you just fucking stop? Why do you have to keep killing? Why do you have to make everyone, and now everything, sick? Huh? Stay the fuck away from Dolores and if you come near her ever again, so help me God, I will kill you. Do you hear me? Stay away from her!”

  We glare at the Danny and we make ourselves larger. We let our voice turn into its more natural state, where each of us speaks at once. We say, “We love the Dolores, and we will always come back to it, but not until we have found the Other. Not until we have a plan for the Other. The Danny must go now.”

  But the Danny does not go, and when it pulls the gun thing from its hip strap we throw our head back and roar our best bear roar and swipe the gun away. We roar again and walk toward it, becoming larger still, until it makes a series of no-point noises and begins to run. It runs and we chase it until it is safely in its exoskeleton.

  Without a pause, we focus on the terrible sense of the Other that we felt inside that innocent moose and we throw our head back and unmake, not even caring that the Danny sees. The Danny has seen all of us, even if it doesn't know or understand. We only hope that the Dolores can forgive us for terrifying the Danny.

  33 Leaving The Bozeman

  Brook rushed over to Dolores as she collapsed on the couch, sobbing. What if Ash really hadn't hurt the men in North Dakota and Dolores had just driven her away? And did she deserve it after treating Ash like some kind of dime sideshow at the circus?

  Brook's nose had stopped bleeding thanks to Ash, but he still had blood smeared on his face and the back of one hand and the shoulder of his shirt. Dolores stared at all the blood for a long moment before realizing that he was talking to her. She had a brief flash of fury, wanting to blame Brook and pretend that this was somehow his fault.

  “Where would she go, Dolores? Where does she go when she does this? Is she still here, like in the room?”

  Dolores shook her head and snorked back some snot, not caring what he thought of her now. “No, she's gone, gone. I think she can go anywhere, literally anywhere! I'm not entirely sure, she's hard to comprehend sometimes. But she can travel great distances. I don't know exactly how fast or how far, or what, but those attacks on the east coast, and even the one in Mexico City, she's always been home in the evening by the time I got home from work, so she can't have traveled by any normal means, you know? And she can run too, like, run forever, and inhumanly fast from what I understand. So I don't know! I don't fucking know! She could be anywhere.”

  “Do you think she'd go back to North Dakota? To the place where she got those men?”

  Dolores clasped her head tightly in-between her hands, gripping her hair by the roots. “Given her reaction, I'm beginning to doubt whether that was her at all. She was
so upset that I suggested it. That's not like her. When I've caught her at other things, she doesn't try to hide it. I don't even think she knows that lying is a thing. She can be sneaky, but not when confronted directly. And she can be surly, but she's not… I don't know… there's no malice in her. Except maybe… maybe a little when it comes to me. She gets jealous and then sometimes she can be… petulant. But it's not mean-spirited. It's just jealousy.”

  “She got any reason to be jealous of a group of guys in a mining town in North Dakota?”

  “No! I mean, I don't know. Maybe in Ash logic? Fuck, I'm just going to go to bed and think on this until tomorrow.”

  “You want me to stay over in case she comes back?”

  “No, but thanks. Ash would never hurt me, but she might decide to hurt you. That or mouth-smash you until you bleed to death.”

  “That doesn't seem all bad. I bet it’s never boring with Ash around.” Dolores hated the dreamy, distant look in his eyes.

  “No, you’ve got that right at least. I'll see you next week in class, okay?”

  “Really, you're just going to drop the whole Scooby Doo mystery? You aren't going to get in my mystery van and help me solve it?”

  “Scooby Doo? How old are you, fifty?”

  “Come on, let's get together tomorrow at least and talk once you've had time to ponder where she might've gone. Or maybe she'll come back and you two can kiss and make up.”

  “Get out of my house.”

  Brook put on his coat and as he ducked out into the still cutting cold. “I mean it, Dolores. Call me tomorrow? Please? You and I are the only ones who can figure this thing out and if you don't want me to call in the CDC cavalry, you have to help me out, okay?”

  Dolores nodded as he disappeared into the darkness. She closed the door quickly and stoked up the fire, hoping that Ash would come home and curl up in front of it like some beloved pet, returning after escaping outside. But maybe that was Dolores's whole problem. She treated Ash like a quirky pet that could speak, and as a result didn't much think about what Ash wanted or needed. Dolores walked into the kitchen and looked at the Not Allowed list with its rebellious Allowed addendums at the bottom. What if she had just broken her only friend's heart with her accusations? Even if it were true, Dolores shouldn't have brought Brook here for the confrontation.