Bound to Ashes [The Altered Sequence: Book 1]

8 • Rain, Rain

[Dev]

If the humans never speak a word to us, that's fine with me. They walk in front of us and we trail behind. Alessandra occasionally looks back at us but is obligated to walk with her friends and says nothing to break the tension.

To Ashton, this pace is slow motion. His strides are so long and even, he can write in his journal without his steps interrupting his hands. He's always got his nose in the tattered black book. The sight of him and his journal coaxes the anxious edge away. Some things never change.

The road doesn't give us much to follow. Brown grass grows in clumps where the asphalt was worn away or blown up. A couple dirty signs stand in the overgrown field. The road curves in a wide semicircle. Alessandra cuts us right through the center, up the hill to the highway. Despite the height of the ramp and the intact retaining walls, prickly grass and shrubs still cling to any open soil between jagged cracks. The highway is much smoother than the road below us, though. The trees on the side cast a little shade.

Our world, the silo and the city, was so small. It never gave us a reason to go deeper into unknown territory. I never gave it any thought. Now that we're doing it... it feels like every step following the humans leads us farther and farther away from safety.

What are we going to see out there? Maybe a whole city burned to the ground. Like when our city caught fire. Grey buildings backlit with angry orange... All we could do was stand on a factory rooftop and watch it burn. Electric generators short out, lightning strikes. And no humans left to control the flames. I still dream about it.

Out there, maybe the virus hit harder. I was so worried about the humans we were stuck with, I hadn't even considered the possibility of meeting other survivors along the way. And by meeting, I probably mean 'being attacked by'. If Heydrich wanted to kill us for no reason, chances are other humans would, too.

We haven't even been walking for more than a few hours when Ashton stops in his tracks. "What?"

"Do you hear that?"

"Ash, you know that's kind of a stupid—"

"Shh!"

I shove my hands in my pockets and wait. Everyone else stops, too.

James rolls his shoulders and says, "What?"

Ashton turns and points behind us. "There! Back in a moment." And before I can blink he takes off, full speed back the way we came.

"Where the hell is he go—"

"Of course," Cain says, using his hand to block the sun.

Ashton jogs back to us, grinning, and occasionally glancing down at a mangy brown animal that looks an awful lot like a brown, overgrown possum.

"No way."

"He tracked us all the way here," Ashton says. Punk, that stupid dog, pants and wags its skinny tail frantically.

"This thing is still alive?" Jules says, walking over and kneeling to give Punk a few appreciative scratches on the head and neck. He leans into them and squints his eyes shut.

"Wait," Alessandra says, coming forward. "You guys have a dog?"

"And you haven't eaten it before now?" Peregrine says, laughing.

"He's not really ours. He just... stays," Jules says. Yeah, he lingers like a bad taste in your mouth. "I think he found the secret to immortality, actually," she adds. "I mean, look at him. Like death warmed over."

"We don't have a dog," Peregrine says, a little offended.

James looks ready to puke, hit something, or scream. Instead he says, "Look, can we just get going already? And I hope you don't expect us to feed that thing."