ASHES SYNOPSIS:

On the beach, where the three survivors meet, very little sand is seen, just ashes, and, as with everywhere else, no plant life is seen, especially along the walls of the houses lining the beach. And on the beach itself, although a swipe of toes through the ashes does reveal sand, the fact remains that not everything on the planet is dead, that it will eventually come back to life. However, presently there is no plant life, no trees and no human life … anywhere. Just these three people devastated that the world they had known and loved was gone.

These survivors: Kit, a beautiful, exotic-looking woman with a teaspoonful of American Indian blood, appears in ASHES in Chapter One. She spends one hundred grueling days alone in a shelter with just her dog Rusty. She is in her late thirties and very racist, very selfish, very conceited; It was probably this flaw in her tenacious character that  assisted her through her one hundred-day nightmare.

 Alan is a veterinarian in his early forties, appearing in Chapter Two. He is kind and thoughtful and does what he can to make his new friends, Kit and Della, comfortable in their bewildering, desolate  surroundings. Della is a ten-year-old survivor stunned that she will never see her parents and siblings again.  With everything in the world up for grabs, the three pool their lives and find an exquisite beach house to live in.  Alan does everything in his power to improve their lot, but Kit remains sullen, complaining about the slightest irritation.

Despite this, Alan finds himself  falling in love with her, but Kit, constantly missing her family and cursing God for taking them away from her, treats him with contempt. Kit despises Della, an African American child, and avoids her whenever possible. She questions why her  husband and son had to die in the holocaust while Alan and Della were saved. She makes life miserable for the two with whom she is forced to spend her days.  

Upon Kit’s insistence, a trip to the mountains by car to look for her dead husband and son turns out to be hideous. Although the bodies are recognizable by their clothes and the husband’s wedding ring, … it’s clear that humans – and everything else that trembled with atoms to the naked eye  -- crumbled to ashes when the planet started to die.

At the mountain resort – called Idylewild  -- they find an elderly woman sitting on the side of the road. She is in shock, has lost her will to live and her ability to speak.  Kit names her “Mom” and takes her under her wing, trying to make up for her indifference to the mother she lost during the devastation in what they now call the “Old World,” but she only tends to the woman to boost her self-esteem.

 Indeed, it is her selfishness that ends Mom’s life when the car she’s driving erratically crashes into a pole while she  connives to cheat Mom out of taking her to church. Kit characteristically blames Alan for the woman’s death and locks herself in her room. She cuts herself off from Alan and Della and continues to grieve about the loss of her handsome husband and young son. While brooding, and knowing how Alan feels toward her, she is struck with the notion that she can give birth to another son if she tells Alan to get her pregnant. He agrees readily, thinking Kit is perhaps falling for him, but is too proud to admit it.  The result of the eventual pregnancy is a baby girl, whom Alan names Eve, but Kit turns her back on the baby and Alan is no longer welcome in her bed.

Two years pass at the beach house, Alan getting more attached to the yacht he has  found in a slip in Newport Beach. He lovingly cleans out the ashes from the decks and cabins and makes the yacht sea-worthy. The name on her stern is Comptesse.  Alan now realizes he can visit other places in the world to look for survivors. His first thought is Hawaii, figuring that the islands, sitting out there in the Pacific in its lonely splendor, could have escaped the poison that choked the atmosphere on Planet earth, and he and his friends could therefore find live human beings.

Alan and Della take care of the baby between them while Kit still broods about the family she lost.  To counter his boredom, Alan cruises up and down the coast  between Newport Beach and San Diego to look for survivors and becomes quite adept at sailing.  Spotting a speed boat on the horizon, he finds it’s going too fast for him to catch up with, and he is now convinced his theory is correct: Other people have been saved out there. He decides to sail to Hawaii with Kit and Della to look for more survivors.

Refusing to leave at first, as she is unable to swim, and is afraid of the water, Kit finally agrees to go when it appears she will be left alone in the beach house after Alan and Della leave, thus, the threesome set sail for Hawaii with the baby. However, a storm tosses Kit overboard  in mid-channel and Alan saves her. They are then forced to alter their course for Catalina Island, just twenty-six miles off the U.S. Mainland because Alan realizes he should know more about navigation before crossing three thousand miles of the Pacific. Kit, realizing that if not for Alan’s bravery in saving her, she would have drowned,  she slowly begins to realize how much she needs him to be there in an emergency.  As a result, she becomes slightly kinder to him, but still refuses to have sex when he tries to get close to her.

But to Della, now twelve years old, having started to menstruate and becoming quite a young lady, Kit behaves abominably, hating the fact that she is black, and always letting her know it, calling her an “inferior African American.” On Catalina Island, they make a comfortable home for themselves in a second story hotel opposite the pier with flashing lights on the roof to alert any vessel out to sea that there’s life on the island.

The only drawback in their newly-found existence is the ashes, which they are constantly cleaning up to make life more bearable. However, there is at least one
Glimmer of hope when they discover life in the sea and realize Planet Earth is not  dead.

The flashing lights on the roof of the hotel are credited to Alan’s research and installation of generators to produce electricity, another reason why Kit tries to be reasonably nice to him because they make life more comfortable for her. They find one survivor on the island, a young twenty-five year old girl, Shari, whom Kit starts to despise once she learns the girl is Jewish. After much flirting, and always parading in sexy bikinis, Shari is finally successful in attracting Alan as her lover.  However, Alan knows his true love will always be Kit.

Realizing he was a veterinarian  in the Old World, and had perhaps performed surgery on animals with cancer, Kit asks him to save her when she discovers a lump in her breast.  He is shocked when she tells him about her discovery, but tells her he’d employed  veterinary surgeons to put animals under the knife at his clinic when the procedure was called upon. He adds that he himself had never performed surgery in his life.  Desperately fearful the cancer will kill her, she clings to what Alan can do for her, begging him to research the medical books he has accessed from Catalina’s library. He assures Kit he will do everything he can to save her. 

His consoling words calm her and she starts to feel safe. She begins to look upon her survival in the shelter as a gift, egotistically thinking she was meant to live as one of God’s Chosen Ones, although she herself is no believer.  She goes back to her despicable ways, disliking Della and Shari, but looking up to Alan as her own personal Savior.

Their lives on Catalina are just beginning to become reasonably pleasant when they spot a small sailboat  being tied up at the end of the pier. Kit suddenly comes alive  when she meets the boat’s skipper, Griff, a handsome Australian. She dresses up, uses makeup and paints her nails to attract  the good-looking stranger. She flirts with him, little knowing he is an ex-con, a woman-beater and a rapist.

 The result of Kit’s first encounter with Griff when she coyly visits him all dressed up on his boat ends with a brutal rape, bruises on her face and neck, a broken shoulder, a loose front tooth, and the dawning realization that she has been in love with Alan all along. But, becoming more human now, she sadly concludes that Alan is too decent to drop Shari for another woman, and that he and Shari are lovers for life.

Alan, however, is bent on protecting Kit from Griff. Making sure Griff can’t get to her by blocking access to the hotel from the first floor, he also protects Shari from Griff, making the newcomer frustrated knowing there are women on the island he can’t force sexually. From the deck of his boat at the end of the pier through his binoculars, he watches the activity  on the verandah of the hotel and on the beach and sees Della going in and out of the drug store below to sneak chocolate from the deserted building. Della has been warned by Alan and Shari not to sneak into the drug store for candy as she will cause dental problems for herself.  

Griff knows she creeps into the store barefooted and wearing  only a  flimsy nightgown after everyone is asleep, and he is waiting his chance when she sneaks in there one fateful night and rapes her. He threatens her with his gun, saying he will kill all her friends if she tells them what he’s doing to her every night. Della, now almost fourteen years old, suspects she is pregnant.  Too ashamed to tell Alan, she informs Kit about the rapes and her fear of being pregnant, with the result that Kit plans to seek revenge  by murdering the Australian with the knife she will plunge into his abdomen.  Alan, not knowing Griff has raped Della, and thinking Kit has gone mad, sews up the rip in Griff’s stomach and saves his life.  Through all this, Kit and Della become true friends.  The same friendship follows with Shari.

Kit, meanwhile, discovers  the lump in her breast is growing.  Having studied surgical procedures from the Catalina library, Alan realizes that a mastectomy would be an impossible task for him to tackle.  He also realizes, having studied navigation extensively from maritime journals, that the voyage to Hawaii is a must if they are to find more survivors, one of whom could perhaps have knowledge of surgery of the human anatomy. Kit is now weak and short of breath and describes her darkest nightmares.

Alan gives her morphine, and stores a load of it on Comptesse for the voyage to the Islands after Griff viciously kills Kit’s dog Rusty.  Too late to prevent Griff’s hurried exodus to Hawaii with Della and the baby, whom he has kidnapped, Della being the only female left to him, and Griff having lost two small sons in the holocaust, Alan frantically sets sail for the Islands with the people he’s protected for almost five years. And on this voyage, he handles Comptesse magnificently, although the voyagers do experience some frightening moments they miraculously manage to overcome.

They eventually end up on Kauai, a beautiful Hawiian island  (called the wettest place on Earth) ,with no sign of destruction and no ashes, completely unaffected by the holocaust. alive with plants, and shrubs and tree, bees, birds, animals  ... and human life… the entire island … teeming with life, accomodating more than 300 humans, from countries all over the world.

Nothing, no one, not  even the most evil person ever to exist, in their wildest imagination, could have comprehended that the brutality of a despot disguised as a saint, so drunk with the desire for complete control, power, and idolatry, would be insane enough to cause the Old World to end so horrifically.

What our voyagers ultimately discover on Kauai shakes them into realizing there is such a thing as justice, and, as horrifying and unimagineable as it is, to learn that the kind of mind that never has enough, that is never sated, never completely full of what it thinks it wants, could be so rabid as to not only desire the annihilation of an entire country, but would cause almost six billion people to die in order to gain total control of a sapphire-blue, lush-green planet….

Such a mind is possible, has existed before, without success, exists today, and will exist in the future if it is not percieved in time.

But that was when the beautiful New World  began, and justice took over …