I remembered. I remembered being surprised at how awkward Ash had been with the dissection. His face had been so green, and I was scared that he was going to vomit all over the lab table. I had never seen that kind of vulnerability in Ash before, and definitely not at school where he was the badass on campus. It made me want to help him, to make him feel better.
“I don’t know. It was just a great moment, you know? It was just one of those moments where I was reminded of how great a person you are. You could have let me throw up or pass out and be completely humiliated, but you didn’t. It’s something I’ll always remember.” He sat back, his hands covered in blood. “I think you’re done.”
I raised my hand to my face and felt the jagged stitches. Sitting up, I took in inventory of the rest of my body. There were cuts, some of them shallow and some of them deeper, all over my arms and on my legs showing through my ripped jeans. I lifted my shirt a little and saw four deep scratches in my stomach. They had been bleeding but not anymore. There was dry, crusty blood on my belly button.
Ash stood up and held out his hand to me, pulling me up. The world spun for a moment. I leaned over, breathing deeply to right myself. He reached for me, but I held out a hand to stop him. “I’m fine. Where is he?”
“I don’t think you should…” Ash started to say, but it was too late. I spotted him, dragged off of the car and laying to the side of the wreckage, away from the other bodies. Ash had tossed a coat over him, hiding his face and torso.
I fell to my knees beside him, my hands reaching for the jacket.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ash said, coming to kneel next to me. “You don’t want to see him like that. You don’t want your memory of him to be of this.”
My hand stopped, my fingers falling on the soft fabric of the jacket. “I just…I can’t believe that he could be gone.” A sob was stuck in the back of my throat, and I felt the tears stinging the slash on my face. “I feel like if I see it, it makes it real.”
“I know,” he said, his voice soft. “But not like this. This…Zoey, it’s not pretty. You don’t want to see it.” I looked up at him and saw that there were tears in his eyes. He had seen, and he could barely look at the covered body now. This was not his father, but he had cared for my dad.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “You’re right.” I stood up and stared down at the body that was once my father, the only good man I had ever really known and the only person I had always known I could count on. Now the only person I had left in the world, to keep me safe and get me to my mother’s was Ash Matthews, and I hadn’t quite figured out how I felt about that yet. “I want to bury the body. I want to bury my father.”
Ash hesitated, looking around. There were bodies of Awakened all around us and they were starting to smell. “We need to do something about these bodies too. And I don’t want to linger too long. But Zoey, we can’t bury your father. The ground is frozen, we have nothing to dig with and I don’t want to be here longer than we need to.”
I looked back down at the body and back up at Ash. “You’re right…”
“We could burn him?” Ash offered up tentatively, studying my face for my reaction.
I nodded, looking around me in a daze. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Okay.”
We made a pile of the bodies of the Awakened and set them ablaze first. I covered my face with my hand, trying hard to ignore the horrible stench from the bodies. I turned to my dad. Ash looked at me as if asking for permission, and I nodded. I watched as my dad’s body went up in flames, consumed by the fire.
“Do you want to say anything?” Ash whispered.
“I…I don’t know what to say,” I said, wrapping my arms tightly around myself. I was shivering like mad despite the incredible heat that was surrounding us. “I love you, Dad. You died protecting me, and I’ll never…” I choked on the words. “I’ll never forget that.” I felt the tears again, and I held them back. I refused to let them fall. “Let’s go. I just want to go.” I turned away and walked back over to the mess that was the broken car.
We spent a good twenty minutes getting what we could out of the car. We grabbed packs and stuffed them with as many necessities as we could: clothes, water, the first aid kit, food and the map from the glove compartment. We started walking alongside the highway, walking for at least an hour before we stopped. I could still see the smoke in the distance, the lump in my throat growing larger and larger.
“What’s the plan now?” Ash asked, after taking a gulp of water.
“We keep up with the plan that my dad had,” I said, pouring some water onto the edge of my t-shirt and using it to wipe the remaining blood off my face. “We head to Nebraska.”
He looked exhausted. “And how far away is that?”
I sighed. “We’re probably about six hours of driving from Constance, which means, I don’t know. Four or five days of walking?”