Ashes

PENANCE

It caught Gran next.

Small red sores appeared in the wrinkles of her neck and face. In the candlelight of the kitchen, the sores sparkled like jewels. Father wouldn't look at her anymore. I'm sure he would have locked her in the spare bedroom, except the beds were already occupied by the corpses of Bobby and Mother. The house smelled of corruption and ointment.

Father had started wearing his mask again. He sat in the living room, watching the Web screen, hoping the misery of others would ease his own. At least they hadn't cut our electricity, though our water service had been terminated. I guess they figured that the Penance wasn't transmitted by electrons. But Father made us use the candles anyway. He said the fire was God's purifying light, now that we had been robbed of the sun.

Gran sat at the kitchen table, her eyes glassy, the candle's flame reflecting off her pupils. I dipped a towel in the bowl of gray water, wrung it out, and patted Gran's face.

'Don't waste it, Ruth,' she said.

'Shh,' I said. 'It's no time to be brave.'

'The saints may not bring any more.'

'Have faith,' I said.

The saints hadn't brought food or water in three weeks. Maybe the army had finally wiped them out. Maybe the Penance had caught them. Or perhaps God had called them home.

Gran's eyes welled with tears that she couldn't blink away. I wiped at the fluid that leaked down her face.

'You should be wearing your gloves,' she said, her voice raspy.

I kept wiping. I hung the towel over the back of a chair and squeezed some ointment from a rolled-up tube. The gel was cold on my finger. I touched it to Gran's sores, at least the ones that hadn't burst open.

'You're warm,' I said.

'The fever.' She shivered under her dusty blanket.

'Tell me about the mountains,' I said, both of us needing her stories. Gran had grown up in the Appalachians of Virginia. Now the mountains had become a mecca as hundreds, maybe even thousands if that many were left, escaped the city. Some of them were already infected, carrying in their hearts the thing they were fleeing. From the Web news, back before the army had taken control of transmissions, we had learned that people were killing each other there, too. But when Gran lived in the mountains, it was a place of peace.

Gran drew the blanket more tightly across her chest. 'We had a little cabin,' she said. 'In the morning, you could see for miles, the high ridges like islands above the ocean of fog. The air was so clean you could taste it, maple and oak and pine, with just a touch of woodsmoke from the chimney. Your father, he looked so much like Bobby-'

Her voice broke. The tears welled up again at the mention of my brother. I fought back the water that threatened to pool in my own eyes. I reached for the towel, but Gran shook her head and smiled. 'The tears don't sting anymore.'

The curtain over the doorway parted and Father came into the kitchen. The mask made him look like an insect. His eyes were large and frightening, distorted by the goggles. He went past us without speaking and opened the refrigerator. The buzz and murmur of the Web screen protected us from the awful silence of the room and the world outside.

We watched as he thumbed through the stack of cheeses. He pushed aside the packages that had been opened. He found one he liked, put it in the pocket of his coveralls, and pulled a bottle of wine from the lower shelf. Then he rummaged through the cabinets.

He pulled out a can of tuna. He looked past Gran to me. 'Have you touched this?' he said, his voice muffled by the filters of his mask.

I shook my head. Father dropped it in his pocket. He had his own can opener, fork, and knife. No one could touch his utensils. He even slept with them.

'What's on the screen?' I asked, hoping to get him to stay for a moment.

'The army says the war with the saints and scientists is nearly over,' he said. 'I should have joined the army while I had the chance.'

My heart spasmed and then sank in my chest. The extermination of the saints meant there would be no more midnight deliveries. 'What will we do for food?' I asked him.

'We shouldn't expect others to spare us God's punishment,' he said. I waited for him to deliver another sermon, parroting the Commander-In-Chief's press conferences. About how we had brought the plague among us by our sinning ways, how the world had to be cleansed, how the scientists conspired with Satan to deliver us unto these dark ages.

Instead, Father went back through the curtain, the wine bottle tucked under his arm. He couldn't even spare us a sermon.

'Your father used to go into the woods with his hatchet,' Gran continued, as if recalling fond memories at a funeral. Like Father was already dead. 'He'd cut me a little pile of twigs and say, 'Here, Mommie, these are for the fire.' I made a big deal of putting them in the fireplace and rubbing my hands together, then blowing into the flames.'

She shivered again, either from nostalgia or fever. 'I'd say, 'It's a magic fire.' And the next day, frost would be thick on the trees and grass and creek stones. We would put on our mittens and go walk in the woods, the leaves like a crisp carpet under our feet. Our breath made clouds in front of our faces.' She glanced at the curtain that hung over the entry. 'He believed in magic, back then.'

'Blue heaven,' I said, trying to make her forget her pain. Gran used to say, 'When I die, Lord, take me back to blue heaven.'

'Looks like He'll be taking me there soon.'

'Do you want to go?' I asked.

Her eyes narrowed and her mouth collapsed into creases. 'Only the Lord knows the proper hour.'

I felt for her hand. Her skin was like damp tree bark. 'No. I mean, do you want to go now?'

'Don't tease an old woman,' she said.

I leaned over the table and lowered my voice, even though Father was in the warm cocoon spun by the Web screen and alcohol. 'I found a way out.'

She looked at me, her eyes cold, dead of hope. 'No. I heard the hammers and nails. The soldiers buried us. In here with the Penance.'

The Penance had started in the cities, New York, Los Angeles, Miami. We watched on the news, the videos of hospitals and people in ambulances and doctors trying to explain the Penance away. Father would shake his head and say that the sinners had brought God's wrath. When the army closed off the roads leading from Charlotte, my parents shared a prayer of thanks that we had been spared.

But the Penance didn't stop among the highrise buildings, and barbed wire and barricades couldn't hold it back. It reached the foothills where we lived, just as surely as it stormed the beaches and jetted across the oceans. And the army chased it, growing in might along with the Penance, two great careening forces. They both came to Barkersville and hemmed us in.

In the beginning, it was only one house. Megan, from my eleventh grade class, came to school one day with the sores on her face. The school officials sent her home. After school, as I walked down her street on the way to our house, the trucks pulled up. Soldiers in gas masks got out, carrying guns, boards, ladders, and tool belts. They nailed the doors and windows shut, then added a layer of plywood over the boards. Megan's father tried to fight them off, but they hit him with the butts of their rifles and pushed him back inside. Megan screamed as they boarded her window.

I heard her screams every day, even when I crossed to the other side of the street. On the fourth morning, I tried a new route to school, one that took me well out of my way. On those other streets, more than half the houses were boarded up, an 'X' spray-painted in red on each barred door. A thin dog rooted in the garbage that covered the sidewalk. The few people that were out looked at me warily, and moved away as I passed their yards.