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  We Are Ash

  Chronicles of Ash Series Book 1

  Samara Stone

  Hidden Key Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Hidden Key Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  WE ARE ASH is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the creator’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. We

  2. The Mother-Thing

  3. The Dolores

  4. The Learning

  5. Just Dolores

  6. The Dolores's Lair

  7. Fixing The Danny

  8. An Empty Pile

  9. The Sky Ice Bits

  10. The Red Death

  11. The Lane

  12. The Mouth-Smashing

  13. The Return Home

  14. The Doppëldanny

  15. The Colt

  16. The Alone

  17. The Healing Place

  18. The Layers

  19. The Not-Nice Feeling

  20. Unmaking The Mother-Thing

  21. The Dolores’s Return

  22. The Not-Nice Yelling

  23. A Housewife

  24. Fixing The Marisol

  25. Searching, Waiting

  26. The Pelt and The Den

  27. More Things That Are Not Allowed

  28. The Dolores Gets Another Friend

  29. The Broom

  30. The Brook

  31. The Going Away

  32. The Finding Begins

  33. Leaving The Bozeman

  34. The Danny Joins The Gang

  35. The Other

  36. The Quest Begins

  37. Trusting Ash

  Thank you

  About the Author

  1 We

  Immediately we know we have made our first mistake since taking our new form. Before, we could have run ourselves through the shaggy pelt of this beast, but now we are vulnerable. It lashes out with its immense paw and we are alive with the pain of the ragged tears it rips across our bipedal body. We gasp for breath and are shocked by the new sensations every time the taupe and red gashes rise and fall over our soft, fleshy frame.

  The beast makes a loud noise, and we repeat the same noise back at the beast. This startles it, making it step away from our broken body. We hear the cries of the other bipeds approaching nearby in the dim pre-dawn light. It swings its giant, tooth-filled head back and forth between our noise and their noise. Then it drops to all fours and sprints, fur and fat wobbling so much that it looks ridiculous for something that can cause such damage. It runs back toward the copse of dead trees where we had first seen the beast—before we became the we that we are now.

  The animal feared this herd of bipeds, although we can’t see why. They approach us, and after several ear-splitting sounds from the sticks they point at the woods. We hear a groan from the beast. We feel something new—a sinking sorrow that our actions led to the beast’s suffering.

  They surround us, covered in some kind of fur substitute. They are making mouth-noises at our new face. They say “bear” and “grizzly” over and over again and we put those mouth-noises away. We know many of the mouth-noises, but these are new ones, in new tones. One biped is coming close and looking into our eyes, so we make its mouth-noises back to it. It screams. We smell its fear, so we try switching to other mouth noises we learned in the woods, including the beast. The bipeds shriek like they have been torn to shreds, not us.

  We focus on the biped we mimicked and concentrate. We feel our face shift and slip until we resemble this one quite closely. Perhaps this will put them at ease.

  It does not put them at ease.

  They now positively stink of fear. The unfortunate bear-beast lets out horrible, wet, rasping roars until one of the bipeds’ unmaking sticks makes another unbearably loud report. The bear-beast’s smell changes and we no longer hear its sounds or feel its heat. We are alone with the bipeds. We hate them. The bear-beast did nothing to them and yet they unmade it.

  Now the bipeds are pointing their unmaking sticks at us. We are filled with another new thing—rage. We make a bear-mouth-noise and the smallest of the bipeds points the unmaking stick at us. Our torso explodes in a spray of pink froth and we fall down.

  We lie there for a moment before lurching back to our feet. The bipeds are stunned. One makes a set of slow, deliberate mouth-noises: “Who are You? What are You doing out here?”

  We do not know what this You is, but we repeat the noises, feeling them roll in our mouth like its mouth-noises rolled in our ears. It grabs our arm and we look into its wide, vivid blue eyes; they have so much white around the edges. Our arm disintegrates into the air and it shouts, “Fuck! Fuck! Her arm turned to ash! She's turning to ash!”

  We push our face closer and breathe tendrils of our gray multitudes into its mouth. It grabs its throat, its blue eyes bulging. The Danny, it calls itself. The Daniel, its mother-thing calls it. We pull ourselves out of the lungs of the Danny and it falls to the ground, coughing its red-life-juice onto the barren ground.

  We turn to breathe into the one who shot us. We can learn so many things so quickly this way! We are sorry the bear was unmade in order for us to discover this. This one is the Cody and it is the same as but different from the Danny. The Cody is screeching like a thing being unmade and fires into us again. We hate being shot. The Danny has a memory of touching a burned-out tree. One of the branches looked firm and hard, but when it touched it, it fell into a trillion tiny gray particles and floated on the air like smoke. Our middle crumples and falls like the finest ash.

  We draw our breath back into the shattered remains of our brief form before unmaking ourselves completely. We swirl up into a spiral of smoke and the bipeds’ screams follow us. The Cody erupts into a frenzy of red-life-juice-laced coughs. The others flee as the Danny also covers its feet in a fine red spray. We disappear, concentrating hard on the Danny's mother-thing amongst a forest of structures these bipeds construct. Humans. Both the Cody and the Danny wondered is she human? The question was so loud it was hard to learn other things.

  We made our first mistake, but we learned. We even found our name: Ash. We are Ash.

  2 The Mother-Thing

  We don’t remake until the air around the Danny’s mother-thing's fake cave is dark. We do not want to startle another biped with our remaking, even if they don't pose much of a threat without their unmaking tools. Here in the forest of human-boxes we see no unmaking sticks, but we know these humans have other ways of unmaking. Before we chose our new form, we saw a whole pack of sharp-toothed quadrupeds unmade by a chemical placed by the humans on a piece of meat. The animals suffered, seizing on the ground and foaming at the mouth. Eventually they didn’t breathe anymore. We saw several animals unmade this way. The humans laughed. The bipeds seem to enjoy pain—other creatures' pain, other humans’ pain, maybe even their own.

  This incident informed our decision to take the shape of a human. The quadrupeds were intriguing creatures, and we liked their social structure, but they were susceptible to the trickery of the bipeds. We did not wish to be tricked. So we formed ourselves into a biped body instead. Then we attempted to communicate with the bear-beast. We have much to learn, but are relieved that breathing into the bipeds can be so informative. Hopefully taking on this squishy bipedal form was not a mistake.

  Once the sun has dropped below the horizon, we remake ourselves. It is impractical that t
he bipeds are hairless—it is cold for a hairless creature. We suppose that humans must not be native to this climate; an invasive species. We picture the Danny and remake our own face and body into the Danny’s. Hopefully this will put the Danny’s mother-thing at ease. They seem to like similar looking humans and fear strangers.

  We are ready to interact with the mother-thing. But how to get inside its lair? We see many apertures, but they are all either covered with a transparent, hard material or wood. So clever to allow light in, but not cold air and creatures: even now, many small, flapping dust-wing-things smack against the opening with light pouring out of it. One opening blocked by a slab of wood is biped-sized and has a shiny metal ball protruding from one side. We assume this is the ingress point.

  We put our new Danny-hand on the shiny thing and feel around it for some sort of trick, but as our hand slides, we feel that it twists. Although something clicks, something else does not give way. These clever bipeds! It's hard for us to stay mad even though the Cody shot us with its unmaking stick.

  We press our Danny-face to the nearest clear-hard panel and look past the fake suns that the bipeds put everywhere. We are glad we are not truly human—they must have very bad night vision. We continue to twist the ball, hoping that maybe with enough twisting, it will give way. We see the Danny’s mother-thing inside. From the Danny's memories we assumed the mother-thing would be happy, but it looks alarmed as it throws open the cave protector.

  “Danny! What are you doing—oh my god—what? Why? Why on earth do you have—ugh—those? Why are you naked? What in God's good name have you done to yourself? What have you done?”

  It gestures at our udders as it pulls us inside. It's leaking, but not the red-juice, something salt-smelling from its eyeballs. Its nose leaks as well. We glance down at our body and remember that most bipeds drape themselves in artificial fur. The mother-thing wears a purple, fluffy drape with a loop around its digestive section. It covers most of the mother-thing’s plump flesh.

  We make some of the Danny-mouth-noises that we heard when we breathed into the Danny in an attempt to communicate. “We love the mother-thing,” we mimic, using the Danny's voice.

  This makes it pause its less specific mouth-noises. “Who is 'we'? Did you bring someone with you?”

  “We are we. Who is the You?” we say in a most perfect replication of the Danny mouth-noises. It is starting to look at us with the look that the Cody gave before it shot us. Then the mother-thing slaps us! We are tired of bipedal violence. Quadrupeds seem much better mannered in our experience.

  “Are you high, Danny? Did someone do this to you? Are you in trouble? Oh, sweet Jesus, Danny, what’s wrong with you?”

  We are tired of the You. If all the humans are obsessed with the You, we will start acting like the bear.

  We make a bear noise, a nice loud bear noise. The mother-thing scampers away from us and falls over a soft-looking nest of some sort. Then the mother-thing is on the floor screaming and wailing a mix of make-sense noises and no-point noises. We bend over it to deliver one last bear noise before we breathe into the mother-thing, gray tendrils swirling into its mouth and nose.

  Exploring its mind we find another intriguing specimen. Unlike the Danny and the mother-thing, this one has long, dark hair. It is called the Dolores and the mother-thing doesn't care for the Dolores as much as the Danny, although they have the same eyes. The Dolores is in a place far from here, where there are big, beautiful mountains and a huge cluster of human-lairs. The mother-thing is kicking at us while our breath learns more about the Dolores.

  We concentrate hard on the Dolores and its Danny-blue eyes, unsettling in the mind of the mother-thing but exhilarating for us. We pull our multitudes back out of the mother-thing. It coughs chunks of blood over the front of its lavender not-fur. It spews a new screed of mouth-noises before wailing, “Not Dolores, anything but my Dolores! Dear God, not Dolores!”

  “We are not the You, and not the God, either,” we say. Then we dissipate into smoke and are gone, wondering if there is a Not-Dolores as well.

  3 The Dolores

  Dolores was used to feeling watched. People watch a six-foot girl like a hippopotamus wandering through a Walmart—with fascination, but also complete distrust. After all, why would there be a hippo in a Walmart in the first place? It would be easier if she were willowy like supermodel, but no, she had the arms and shoulders of a silverback gorilla and none of the coordination, so the WNBA was out of the question too.

  Not that Dolores ever did anything more athletic than carry large piles of books. She would’ve been valedictorian of her podunk nowhere high school if she hadn’t refused to do an assignment in biology on intelligent design. It was her first and only F and quickly bumped her to second place. Stephanie, the valedictorian ascendant, was just as bookish but hit the genetic lottery of being athletic, likeable, and petite to boot. Dolores hated her.

  But never before had Dolores felt watched in her own home. This new paranoia had settled on her like a fine layer of ash the night before. She tossed and turned, feeling modest for the first time since she’d left home. She’d been sleeping nude ever since she moved out, relishing the newfound sensation of living alone.

  Dolores had moved out of her mother’s house the minute she graduated high-school. They handed her her diploma and as soon as she finished walking across the stage, she headed out the gymnasium doors into the parking lot where her car was already packed and waiting. She drove thirteen hours straight in her graduation gown, arriving at her destination with the adult equivalent of diaper rash around her neck. But it was worth it. It had been one of the happiest days of her life.

  That was how she'd greeted Bozeman, Montana—no big city to be sure, but better than the dusty North Dakota town of two thousand she’d come from. Her plan was to save enough to enroll at MSU and study biochemistry before going to a bigger city and a bigger job. She liked Bozeman, and had hoped she'd find her people in a slightly more populated area.

  If they were here, though, she had not found them yet. Instead Dolores spent all her time working long, unpredictable hours at a goddamn Starbucks and practically setting every dollar on fire paying rent. She didn't get out much, her version of socializing limited to the occasional flirt with one of the cute college boys who sometimes came in. Although usually their tiny girlfriends accompanied them.

  Unable to shake the watched feeling, Dolores eventually gave in to her insomnia. She opened her Kindle, a gift from Danny. Her early morning shift started in four hours anyway. Today was the dreaded break shift: she'd worked until ten the night before and had to be back by five to open. It should be illegal, and maybe it was, but she could hardly complain to her boss—a short bastard who clearly hated her for being a Viking warrior—if she wanted to keep her job. And then she'd be a bum, just like her mother thought. Until she was a Montana resident and could be declared financially independent, the social security and military benefits that her mom received after her dad had been exploded in Iraq were standing firmly in the way of Dolores getting financial aid. Once she was free of her mother’s finances, she could apply for financial aid and get started with a real life. Until then, Starbucks.

  At four in the morning, she gave up on In Search of Lost Time. She wanted to read it, she really did, but she'd also found it a particularly potent sleep-aid. Not the right fit for a creepy-crawly, paranoid early morning. Instead she got up and showered. She sneezed on her way and a brief, unsettling image of her mother coughing blood all over her purple, super-plush robe flashed through her mind. It must've been some kind of psychosomatic memory or something.

  After the sneeze, a few drops of blood dripped out of her nose onto her upper lip. She brushed at it, thinking it was snot and before the vivid red in the greenish fluorescent light of her small, all white bathroom gave her a start. She stepped into her square shower stall and watched the blood swirl around the drain as she mentally prepared to face another day of caffeine-addicted yuppies.
/>   The feeling of being watched followed her onto her bike—gas was too expensive when you already spent every penny on rent—but the sensation stopped once she was inside Starbucks. She didn't know why, but it felt like she could finally breathe again. The entire twenty feet from the bike rack to the door, she had been looking back and forth like a criminal, positive she was being observed. But she was alone in the autumnal mountain air. T-minus two months till ski bums. Maybe someday she'd have enough money to try skiing, but she doubted it.

  She greeted Lane, her fellow opener, and set about brewing coffee. She knew the other three early shift workers would roll in one minute before six when they'd have three hours of chaos. Then some of them would leave, but not her—she worked until two-thirty. Dolores sighed and at five minutes to six, stepped outside with a cup of tea only to immediately feel watched again. A drop of blood fell from her nose into her tea. “Oh come on, fucking seriously?” She headed back in to escape the imagined eyes and pour a new cup.

  She mostly forgot about her paranoia as the day wore on, but it accompanied her home and all through the next night. She got ahead of it though by drinking several shots of vodka at nine to put herself down for her next opening. Hopefully drinking to unconsciousness wasn’t the sort of thing some creepy stalker was waiting for before he finally pounced. Still, she was warm and snoozy from the exhaustion plus vodka so she curled into her bed and let sleep take her, certain that the feeling would still be there when she awoke.