Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (14 page)

To her astonishment, the mare didn’t toss or even move. Ellie
could actually see the tension rippling and then running out of the
horse’s powerful shoulders. Still talking nonsense, she tied the scarf,
lightly knotting it behind the horse’s jaw.

“All right, let’s go,” she said, cautiously gathering up the reins,
bracing herself for the bolt Bella would surely try. The horse
did
tug
but only once.

In five minutes, the mechanical rasp and clack of the crows swelled
through the trees. Bella’s ears pricked, angling toward the sound like
radar dishes homing in on an alien signal.

Don’t bolt, please don’t shy.
Ellie held her breath but then thought
that if
she
didn’t get spooked, the horse probably wouldn’t either. The
milling crows parted as they had before, like waves retreating from a
beach. Ellie led the horse all the way to the point where the ramp met
the slider and felt a burst of elation. Her saddle was just even with the
ramp at its highest point.

This is gonna work.
Throwing the reins over the horse’s head so
they draped over the horn, she scurried up the ramp. The slider
complained, and that made Bella turn her head, but Ellie was already
wheeling inside to where Mina, tail thumping, patiently waited.
This
has to.

She spared a few seconds to press her ear to Chris’s chest. His
heart balled with a dull
thump
. . . pause . . .
thump
. . . pause . . .
thump
. . . Boy, that was
really
slow. She wished she knew if that was good or
bad, then decided anything was better than zip. His eyes still roamed,
but his breathing was better, no gasps now, and his skin was pinker.

Drag him
. That was what she’d decided. Grabbing up pillows from
the other bodies, she eyed Chris, the distance he would fall, then
arranged the pillows into a landing zone. Shaking out two of the
burlap sacks, she spread these over the pillows, then clambered back
up to Chris, braced herself on her knees, hooked her hands under his
arms, and levered him into a slouch against her lap. His arms were
heavy but floppy, his limp hands dangling, the fingers like the legs of
dead spiders. Chris’s head slewed then lolled, and she could see the
steady but slow throb of his pulse in his neck. The smudges under his
eyes were bluer now, not as gray.

“Okay,” she said. She hitched toward the edge in fits and starts,
scooting him what seemed an inch at a time, feeling with her feet
for the moment when her boot tipped over the pallet’s lip and into
air. Chris was much heavier than she’d expected, and she was sweating, her breath coming in harsh pants. Tail swishing encouragement,
Mina watched as Ellie worked her butt toward the edge with another
gigantic heave—

Her right foot shot into thin air. Gasping, she felt herself tilt as
Chris’s weight shifted against her chest; her left knee, still bent to support him, fired with a sudden tearing pain as she tumbled sideways
off the pallet. She came down hard on the pillows, on her back, and in
an awkward splay, like a ballerina doing a really bad split. The impact
slapped the air from her lungs, and pain roared all the way into her
groin. Chris was so much dead weight on her chest, and he’d jackknifed, although he was now mostly off the pallet, his legs loosely
flexed at the knees. Squirming out from under, she got her boots
planted and pushed to a stand. Her left knee yelled, but she could gimp
on it just fine and that was all that mattered.

All right, hurry up, hurry up.
Pulling his legs off the rest of the way,
she got Chris arranged on the burlap sled, tucked all the remaining
sacks and her coat around his body. Then she went to his head, fisted
up tongues of burlap, and
pulled
, really put her weight into it. He
moved—not by a lot, but the burlap let out a
shush
as it skidded over
stone, and suddenly, his head was six inches closer to the slider than it
had been only a second before. Huffing, grunting, her boots clapping
stone and Mina keeping pace, she hauled him all the way to the slider,
which she’d left open this time around. The crows were bunched up
at the edge but backed away in that black eddy as she slid the burlap
onto the snow. Here, the going got even easier. As she dragged Chris
to the left and toward Bella, she eyed the saddle.
Okay, slide him as
close as you can, then roll him onto his tummy, and you’ll have to push, get
his chest over the saddle—

As if someone somewhere flicked a switch, the crows went completely still and silent. Just a dead stop, like a soundtrack suddenly
cutting out.
What?
For a second, Ellie actually thought there was
something wrong with her ears. But then she heard Mina’s pants and
her own harsh breaths, and the hard drum of her heart.
Uh-oh.
All
the fine hairs bristled on her neck. She was still in her crouch, but
now she let go of the burlap and straightened. Beneath her boots,
the snow spoke in tiny, alarmed squeals. In his burlap cocoon, Chris
sighed a low moan.

As one, the crows lifted in a huge, silent storm, exploding from
the snow and the death house to rocket away in a swirling cloud. It
was so much like the day everything died that Ellie threw her arms
over her head and screamed, “No, no, not again!” She couldn’t help it.
But there was no detonation of pain in her head.
So it’s not that.
Eyes
wide, she threw her head back, watching the crows silently spin away.
Then what? What could—

By her side, Mina began to growl, deep in her chest, a sound that
swelled to a snarl.
Oh . . .
Her mind couldn’t squeak out the
no
. Heart slamming her
ribs, Ellie swept her eyes from the sky and those silent birds and down
to the snow and the woods.
Oh boy, I’m in so much trouble
.
Because there, in the clearing and at the mouth of the trail that
would take her and Chris from the death house to safety, was a girl.

Those knives were real trouble. The Glock in his hand wouldn’t fire.
Neither would the Eagle. His Bravo was out of easy reach. Tom
thought about that silver glint in the trees and wondered just how
many other Chuckies were out there, knives at the ready, and what
they were waiting for, unless this was simply the way they did things.
Send in an attacker, one right after the other, to tire him out before
swarming in for the kill, like wolves.

For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder just how long this
girl had waited, watched. He’d been on the snow, exposed, for . . .
what? A half hour? At least that—and a good portion of that time,
he’d been out of it, so consumed with visions and flashbacks and
the manic jitter of something close to insanity that it would’ve been
smarter and easier to take him then.

But she wants to fight.
The Chucky was on her feet now, and God,
she recovered fast. Fear iced his throat. She didn’t want to just
kill
him.
She had knives and she’d plowed right into him. He should already be
dead. Come to think of it, she could probably handle a rifle or pistol
just fine. But this girl wanted the rush, the fun of the kill. The blood.

And there’s something wrong with her, different.
Given she was a
Chucky, this was an understatement.
It’s her eyes, something about
them; the color . . . too dark.
But she was so far away he wasn’t certain,
and that was just fine, thanks.

Forget her face. Concentrate: don’t lose track of the knives.
Tom watched
as she began to circle, very low, moving carefully left to right—and
Jesus, she wasn’t sinking much. Shuffling, he turned, keeping her in
sight, feeling the shift of uneven stone beneath his boots, dismally
aware that she was compensating for his longer reach by forcing his
knife hand further away and off-target. He didn’t know what kind of
knives she had, but they were wicked: silvered steel, long and thin,
single-edged, with only the suggestion of a curve. Hers were real
fighting knives, made for cutting and slicing. Her blades were already
in motion, scything back and forth, sparking in the setting sun, and
he had trouble keeping track of both. As the light got worse, that
would also get harder, assuming he lasted that long. He thought this
might be over pretty quick. She didn’t need to get in a killing thrust.
All she had to do was cut him a couple of times and then stand back
and wait for him to weaken, or bleed to death.

Any soldier knew hand-to-hand combatives, how to grapple and
kill, and part of basic training was the rifle-bayonet course. The reality was a lot simpler: the guy who survived was the one who held off
an attacker until his buddies arrived with guns. Unlike Special Forces
and Black Ops guys, all of whom were big into close-quarters combat, Tom knew only the basics of what to do with a knife:
cover the
middle, defend the face and neck, deflect with the left hand and forearm, stab
hard and fast, put your weight into it.
If he could get close and behind
her knives, he might slash her face. Better yet, cut her forehead, let
all that blood spill into her eyes and blind her. But he knew he wasn’t
good enough for anything fancy. Rush her, and he’d probably end up
impaling himself on her knives and doing the job for her.

One thing was certain, though. He had absolutely no reason to
hang on to the Glock now. He needed his hands free. But instead
of dropping the weapon to the snow—the smart move—Tom did
something incredibly dumb. Angling his body, keeping the tip of his
knife pointed at her head, he swept his left hand around and under his
open parka to shove the weapon into the small of his back—

And that was all it took, that little move. He wasn’t centered and
she knew it. He saw her dart forward, low, a white blur, stepping in.
His reaction was clumsy, an awkward stumble as he tried backpedaling fast. Her right hand, which was closest, swept in a high cut.
Gasping, he struggled to whip his left arm back into line to fend off
the strike. Too late, he read the cock of her elbow, registered the feint.

Suddenly, she was there, twisting beneath his right arm, ducking
under his knife. Her blade flickered, its silver tongue licking side to
side—one-two-three,
zip-zip-zip.
He couldn’t follow it, didn’t really
see the knife at all, but on the third pass, he felt a lick of cold as his
clothing ripped and then a snaky burn, a line of fire across his exposed
belly. Biting back a shout, he arched, pulling himself out of reach, but
she was already withdrawing, backing up. The setting sun bathed her
skin as richly red as the blood welling from the gash across his stomach. He could feel the oozy drizzle, warm and thick.

She could’ve killed me right then.
Cold sweat oiled his face as she
began to circle again, a balletic move, her knives sketching their slow,
mesmeric back-and-forth.
She had me, dead to rights.
A single thrust, a
twist, and she could have watched him bleed out.
Playing. She wants
this to go slow.
Grunting, he clamped his left forearm across his middle.
A slow slither of blood was beginning to worm over his thighs and
drip to the snow. This wasn’t going to kill him, but if he got cut too
many more times or she decided to slash just a little deeper, unzip him
so his guts spilled out, he’d never keep his feet.
Got to do something . . .

Moving again, lightly despite the snow, she came in fast, jabbing
with her right. Acting purely on instinct, he tried countering with his
own knife, which meant that he had to twist to his left. As she pulled
the thrust in a perfectly timed feint, he realized much too late that
not only was his right side exposed, but he’d taken his eyes from the
knife in her
left
hand.
Shit!
He tried to correct, to turn, but she was so
damn fast! The knife ripped in a backhanded slice from his right hip
all the way up to his chest.

This time, a shout of pain leapt from his mouth. Doubling over,
he tried to protect his torso—stupid, stupid,
stupid
; that brought his
face into her strike zone—and she was right there, the knife whickering for his face.

What happened next was all reflex. Uncoiling, he whipped up
with his left arm to defend himself . . . and damn if he didn’t still have
that Glock.

She saw it coming, tried going with the blow, but she was a fraction of a second too late. The hard butt clipped her nose. It was so
fast, he didn’t know he’d connected until her neck snapped back. A
bright red bib spumed down her chin and over her chest, and then she
was blowing, off-balance, shaking her head like a wounded dog, her
blood flying in ropy spatters.

Come on, come on, move, move!
She was less than twenty feet away
when he charged because, he figured, what the hell. He was outmatched, and she was going to kill him if he kept letting her dictate
the fight. So he had to move; he had to step into this; he had to muscle
past his fear and own this one.

Bellowing, he closed the distance in three big strides. Snarling, her
face cramped with fury, she thrust to deflect with her left and jab with
her right, but his reach was longer and for once he did exactly the
right move at exactly the right moment.

Dropping to his left knee, he swept his left arm up, knocking her
blade out of line, and then he thrust his KA-BAR into her middle with
all his might. He felt the blade jam through thick down and clothing. For one terrible second, he thought that either she had on too
many layers or maybe even a Kevlar vest. But then he felt her jump,
heard her scream, felt the give of flesh and muscle. Dropping his
right elbow, he twisted the knife, tearing both cloth and something
much denser and wetter. Still screeching, she arched back, trying to
get away. His knife jumped in his palm as the serrated edge snagged
on cloth and, more likely, guts. So, two choices now, and only two:
Go with her, press the advantage; get her on her back in the snow.
Suffocate her, choke her to death, beat in her skull with the Glock,
maybe even get his hands on one of her knives.