Shards and Ashes

No luck.

She tested her footing. Nothing sprained or broken. She stepped back into the house, listening hard, feeling along the floor with the soles of her sneakers for the gun. She still couldn’t find it. She could come back for it later, but there was no way she was going to leave the batteries. They were just too precious.

Ear cocked, she groped around for the carton, found it, and picked it up again. She was trembling. She didn’t feel any pain. No bites, then. Hopefully.

A creak.

She turned back around to leave. Her knees gave way and she almost slid to the floor.

Silhouetted by moonlight, a man stood in the doorway. Spiky hair, long coat, boots. Her heartbeat went into overdrive.

His dog, she thought, cold and terrified. He set it on me.

They faced each other without speaking. She kept it together. You didn’t live as long as she had—she was seventeen—by losing your cool. But she was very scared.

“I have a gun,” she said.

He raised his hand. “This one?” he said in some kind of accent.

Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God, she thought. This was what she got. Jordan had told her not to scavenge alone. But she had just known they had to get the batteries tonight. Jordan was down with a bug, and no one else had felt like going.

She licked her lips and raised her chin. “I have another gun.”

“You can have this one back,” he said. The accent was German. He sounded like a movie villain. He looked like one in his long coat. She felt naked in her sweatshirt, sneakers, and board shorts.

“Stay away from me. I’ll call my guard dog on you,” she said, but her voice cracked and she realized she was losing her grip on the carton. Icy sweat was streaming down her body.

“I mean you no harm, Delaney.”

She jerked, even more afraid. That was her given name, and no one at the house knew it.

He raised his hands above his head, and she saw the outline of her gun. She didn’t know what to do. Rush him? Run back into the darkness? Where there might be another dog?

Then suddenly, there was no carton in her arms. It was in his. And they were on the sidewalk outside the house.

“What the heck?” she said.

“Schon gut, keine angst.”

He was very tall, not as old as she had thought—maybe five years older than her—and in the moonlight, she saw that his hair was blond. His eyes were light and he had a superhero face—flared cheekbones, square chin. Pierced eyebrow. Maybe that was a tat on his thumb. He was muscular, his long black wool coat stretching across big broad shoulders. These days, most people were a little too thin. Like her. She was all crazy black hair, brown eyes, and bones. “I got your name from your aunt. Well, from her things. I haven’t actually met her.”

“What aunt?” she asked him cautiously. She and her mom had kept to themselves until her mother’s death three years ago. She didn’t know any of her relatives.

“Aunt Meg.” He waited for her reaction. The name meant nothing to her.

“She’s white,” he added.

Her stomach did a flip. Maybe this Aunt Meg was from her father’s side. Dana didn’t even know his name. Dana’s mom had never told her white ex-boyfriend that she had gotten pregnant.

“What things?” she asked, catching her sneaker toe on a crack in the sidewalk. Their neighborhood looked like a bomb had gone off. Things fell apart all the time. She caught her toe again. Despite the heaviness of the box against his chest, he reached out a hand to steady her. His fingers were very warm and pale against her dark skin.

“Where is she?” she asked. “Aunt Meg?”

“She used to work for my family. In a manner of speaking.” He took his hand away. “My distant relatives.”

She stopped walking. “It was nice of you to Taser that dog and all, but just, you know, get to the point.”

He stopped, too, and faced her. “It’s a sad world when someone who knows a family member of yours is greeted with such hostility.”

“This world is more than sad. I don’t know that you know her,” she countered. “You’re just a name-dropper in a coat.” When he kept looking at her as if that didn’t compute, she said, “I need more proof.”

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

She looked to the right, at a boarded-up building, and had a funny feeling. His face came into her mind, and then there was something black and rectangular. She squinted as she walked, trying to make sense of it.

“Hey,” said a voice, and she jerked her head up. She and the guy were standing in front of her house, which she shared with Jordan, Lucy, Mike, and Anny. The strays that had become family. Wrapped in his bathrobe and plaid pajama bottoms, Jordan was standing on the porch, shotgun pointed in their direction. “What’s up?”

“We have a rule,” she told the guy. “No strangers in the house. Ever.”

He looked from her to Jordan and back again. “My name is Alex Ritter. There. I’m not a stranger. It’s okay to let me in.”

Jordan hesitated. “What?” he said fuzzily.

“It’s okay,” the guy—Alex—said again.

“Cool.” Jordan nodded calmly and lowered the shotgun.

Dana was stunned. “Jordan?”

“It’s really all right, Delaney,” the man—Alex—said. “I swear it to you.”

“It’s not,” she insisted. Too late, she remembered that he still had her gun. She bounded onto the porch beside Jordan and reached for the shotgun. “We don’t know this guy. And he is weird.”

Jordan kept hold of the shotgun and opened the front door. “Come on in.”

“Lucy!” Dana shouted. “Anny! Mike!”

Then they were in the house, and her four roommates were oohing and aahing over the carton of batteries, which Alex was doling out to them like Santa Claus with his bag of presents. Dana looked around wildly. She had lost more time. And this creepy man in black was inside her house.

“These things are over fifteen years old,” Jordan marveled as he popped a couple of batteries into her flashlight, twisted the head back on, and gave it a flick. Light poured forth. She didn’t remember giving it to him. “Awesome.”

“They’re warm,” Lucy said, holding one between her hands. She leaned over and kissed Dana on the cheek. “You’re made of fabulous.”

“She chased away some dogs, too,” Alex offered. Dana glared at him. Everyone else was taking his sudden appearance in stride. Or maybe she had simply fast-forwarded through the introductions.

She held out a shaking hand. “Give me back my gun.”

He did so, willingly, and she stuffed it into her pocket again. Then she turned her back and walked into the kitchen. Out of his line of sight, she slipped through the back door and flew down all the wooden stairs to the cool sand of the beach.

He followed, as she had expected him to, and she pulled out the gun. He looked from it to her face and sighed.

“If you shoot, you shoot,” he said.

Then he walked to the water’s edge and lifted his chin. “No seaweed,” he said. “No seagulls.”

But there was something on the beach, next to his boot. She spotted it at the same time that he looked down. He picked it up—tats all over that hand—and his palm blossomed with a pale bluish glow. Her eyes widened as he put the object in his pocket.

“Sea glass,” he said, as if that should satisfy her.

He turned his face back to the black water. “I was out here earlier. One good thing about the end of the world: the sunsets are fantastic.”