Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (18 page)

“Look, unless you have a better idea, keeping him locked up ought to
be fine. I mean, he’s not a ghost or a zombie or Lazarus.” Jayden ran a
hand through his light brown mop. “The dogs gave him a pass, so we
know he isn’t turning. You need to take a breath, Hannah. This kid
being alive isn’t a miracle any more than Ellie’s a superhero.”

“She dragged a boy easily twice her body weight.” Hannah sipped
anise tea, rolling the steaming drink around her tongue, enjoying the
light aroma of sweet licorice. The fact that the drink was still
hot
,
almost a half hour after brewing, was nearly as wonderful. Equipped
with its own woodstove, this second-story bedroom was toasty
warm, and spacious, with its own sitting area. It was also the only
room that could be locked from the outside, unusual in an Amish
home. Sometimes Hannah wondered if the previous owners had
been forced to keep a lunatic relative under lock and key, like Mr.
Rochester squirreling away crazy Bertha.

Now, if we can keep Ellie from camping out in the hall.
Reluctant to let
Chris out of her sight, the little girl had argued for moving into the
sickroom. Thank goodness for Eli:
Ellie, he’s not a pet.

“You know that death house,” she said. “There’s no way she
could’ve gotten Chris to the ramp, much less hoisted him across the
saddle. She doesn’t have the strength.”

“Which doesn’t make it a miracle. In an emergency, more
adrenaline means increased blood flow to muscles and, therefore,
more strength. You know the science as well as I do.”

“Granted, but science doesn’t explain it all. And what about the
crows? Ravens and crows and sparrows are psychopomps.” She’d
lugged up books from her collection downstairs and now tapped
a text from a sophomore seminar:
Encyclopedia of Myth, Magic, and
Mysticism.
“Guides to help the soul reach the afterlife.”

“And bring a soul to a newborn.” Jayden shrugged. “I read the
same entry. Angels performed the same function. You saying that
crows
brought this kid’s soul back?”

Or were drawn there to take it away.
She stared into her mug. “I don’t
know what I mean. There are just too many questions for which I
have no answers.”

“Which, I repeat, does not make any of this a miracle.” Jayden
eyed her askance. “I know you and Isaac do the hexes and charms,
but you don’t still
believe
all that, do you? I mean, you went to
college
.”

Oh, she could tell him a couple stories. Amish pow-wow and folk
magic paled compared to the weird rituals she’d seen from some kids
at school who decided they were Wiccans. “But all sympathetic magic
has some basis in fact. The brain’s wired to seek the mystical, so . . .”

“Just because we’re hardwired to
want
to believe doesn’t make it
true.”
She could easily point out that there must be some evolutionary
advantage to belief or out-of-body experiences. Hard science was
a language Jayden would understand. He demurred to Isaac and
Hannah about the hex signs, the Brauche bags, and charms because
he saw no harm. Besides, she was the botanist and Isaac’s apprentice,
with just enough physiology and biology under her belt to understand which folk remedies might actually be helpful.
“Okay. Fine. It’s not magic,” she said. “You got a theory?”
“I’ve got ideas. I think
he
”—Jayden tipped his head toward the bed
and the boy under a heap of comforters—“is a combination of serendipity and really good luck. There’s a logical explanation for why
he survived. We just don’t know what. But that doesn’t mean there
isn’t science behind it. That’s like saying thunder’s Thor’s hammer. A
much bigger problem is what to do when he wakes up.”
“If he does.” While Chris’s color had improved in the last hour,
the blush coming back to his nails and gums, he showed no signs
of waking. If he really was asleep. She honestly didn’t know. In the
hush, his raw, jagged breaths were very loud but normal, if you were
dreaming. The rough gasps Ellie heard might not have been proper
breathing at all, not in the technical sense of drawing in air. It was
normal for people on the verge of death—and those teetering on the
edge of a deep coma—to gasp.
Except I saw that already; I listened to this boy die, and now he’s come
back to life?
“If ?” Jayden frowned. “But I thought you said he’s dreaming.”
“I think so, but he’s been like this for hours. Ellie said he was in
REM back at the death house.” From her exam, it was clear that Chris
wasn’t in any coma or other state of unconsciousness described in the
books at her disposal. For all intents and purposes, Chris was deep
in the sleep of the dreaming dead, a state from which he couldn’t or
wouldn’t be roused. Lord knows, she’d tried: shone her tiny penlight
in his eyes, pricked him with a needle, shouted, squirted icy water
into his ears. Zip. “REM sleep shouldn’t last this long.”
“But you said there are people who have breakthrough episodes
of REM all the time.”
“Those who have narcolepsy, yes. It’s the closest match.” She
placed a hand on the topmost book in her stack,
Standard Textbook
of Clinical Neurology, Tenth Edition.
The solidity of those embossed
letters against her palm was reassuring. “It’s not an illness or true
sleeping sickness. It’s a disorder, like diabetes, where people are overcome with an urge to sleep.”
“But you said narcoleptics have these really vivid hallucinations.”
“Hypnagogic, yeah. They’re not true dreams.” She bracketed a
sliver of air between two fingers. “They happen in this very narrow
window
between
dreams and wakefulness.”
“So how do you know he’s not on a really wild trip? Isn’t that what
the mushroom was for?” Jayden flicked a finger at a hand-stitched
leather diary. “Not to kill but help you dream?”
“According to the original recipe. The encyclopedia says the
Ojibwe drank the decoction in order to help the soul find its way to
the Land of the Ghosts.”
“By way of visions, right? Weird dreams? Like, they took a helluva
trip?”
“Yes, in low doses. And in higher doses, it kills you,” Hannah said,
a little impatient now. What a formula using hallucinogenic mushrooms was doing in an old handwritten journal of Amish Brauche
spells and pow-wow charms, she had no clue. Neither did Isaac. They
both supposed the original Amish settlers had incorporated local
customs. But why this decoction from this particular mushroom?
While the old ways involved a fair amount of folk magic and white
witchcraft—and most practitioners were Pennsylvania Dutch—as a
rule, the Amish weren’t into ecstatic experiences. If she were back
in Houghton, she could consult the university library, the science
department’s database, maybe figure it out, but . . . She gave the idea
an irritable mental shove. Wishing would get her nowhere. “I know
all that, Jayden, but isn’t the more pressing question, why isn’t Chris
dead?”
And what brought him back?
“That’s easy. The dose is weight-dependent and you had to guess.
He was so weak already, he slipped away fast and you figured you’d
given him enough.”
She’d already thought of the same thing. “I accept that. But think,
Jayden. It’s really
cold
. Why haven’t his tissues frozen? Or let’s say that,
by some miracle, his core temperature didn’t drop far enough. That
still leaves hands, fingers, toes, his ears. But he doesn’t have frostbite.
His wounds are half healed. How did that happen?” She didn’t bother
pointing out that a badly lacerated liver ought to be a death sentence
all by itself. That and his collapsed lung were why she’d poisoned
Chris in the first place. Letting him slip away into sleep was a final
kindness.
Looks like you were wrong about that, too.
Which brought up unsettling questions about the other children to whom she’d given the
poison.
But you had no choice. They were turning. The dogs told you so. Once
that happens, there’s no coming back.
As far as they knew. Considering
the people-eater’s limited menu, just how would you keep someone
like that alive long enough to find out?
“Doesn’t it say in the encyclopedia that the old Vedic recipe used
honey and that it was supposed to make you immortal?” When
she only gave him a look, Jayden shrugged. “Look, you have to get
past this.
I
accept there’s science underneath all this. But we’ll never
explain it without a detailed chemical analysis and a couple dozen
experiments.”
“So, take this resurrection on faith?” She couldn’t resist. Clinging
to science was, when you got right down to it, just a god of a different
flavor.
“Ha-ha. Let’s hypothesize, all right? For whatever reason, his metabolic rate slowed down. There are precedents in nature. Many species
of fish and insects and flies can live perfectly well in intense cold.
They manufacture glycerol from fat, which lowers the freezing point
of their blood. And before you tell me that he’s not a fly or fish, I’ll
remind you that the human body also makes glycerol as a by-product
of fat metabolism. So what if this particular mushroom also stimulates the production of glycerol? Then he’d be protected. His body
would cool down, but his core and brain wouldn’t croak.” He pointed
at the neurology text. “It says in there that they put coma patients on
cooling blankets and used drugs to lower body temperature.”
“To protect the brain,” she said. “I know. But that’s still a lot of
ifs
.”
“A heck of a lot easier to accept than a miracle. There’s also something else we’re not considering. Maybe he’s just, you know,
different.
”
Jayden tapped his temple. “Something about his brain protected him
from the poison and turned it into something else. I mean, think
about
us
. We ought to be people-eaters and we’re not. You can say it’s
a miracle, but I’ll bet if there were scientists, they’d eventually figure
out why we’re still okay.”
“If we stay that way. Some of the younger kids, like Eli and Ellie
and Connor—they still might turn. We all might.”
“Okay, yeah, I’m not wild about the idea of waking up one morning with a hankering for a people-burger, but I can’t live every day
waiting for the other shoe to drop. Know what I think is
really
bugging you?” Jayden stretched across the table and gave the back of her
left hand a tentative touch. “You’re freaked because you think you
made a mistake.”
“Because I was obviously
wrong
, and I don’t like mistakes. Make
a mistake, people die.” She screwed her gaze to his fingers, long but
rougher now and calloused from long hours of swinging an ax and
reining horses. “And I didn’t give Chris a choice.”
“He wouldn’t have taken the drug. You know that,” he said, gently. “Besides, how do you know that we didn’t
save
him? What if the
decoction was
exactly
what he needed? Think about that. This could
be something really big.” His hand closed over hers. “It might
help
us
in the future.”
She had to be careful. They made a good team. Just because Jayden
wanted more didn’t mean she should encourage him—especially
now, with the appearance of this strange boy whose face revived a
host of other memories, most of them very bad. “If we understood
it. It’s not an experiment I can run again until . . .”
Until one of us is
injured so badly we’ll die anyway.
After another moment, she eased her
hand away, covering the move by picking up her mug. “What about
the girl? The one Ellie saw?”
“I don’t know,” Jayden said, his tone as suddenly stony as his face.
“Tomorrow, I’ll take Connor and we’ll fetch Isaac to take a look at
this kid. While I’m there, I can check with the others, see if anyone
turned and got away before they could be . . . you know . . . dealt
with. Just be glad that girl was alone. I’m not sure Ellie would’ve
made it past more than one.”
“But what was that girl doing there? We’ve been so careful. We’re
in the middle of nowhere. The winter won’t break for another month
or two. There’s no reason for any kid to be wandering
back
where
there were no kids in the first place.
And
she was out during the day.
Jayden, what if they’re adapting, or changing again?” Lord knew, they
already had enough problems without having to worry about peopleeaters taking over their days, too.
“I don’t know, Hannah. If they are, there’s not much we can do
about that. Let’s just chalk it up as one more big booga-booga supernatural mystery, all right?” Pushing back from the table, he gave her a
tight smile. “Or a God-miracle, how about
that
?”
“Don’t.” Her eyes dodged to her books. “Don’t be angry with
me.”
“Angry? Oh, Hannah.” There was a short silence and then the
heavy tread of his boots as he headed for the door. “I wish I could be,
because that would be so much easier.”

Two hours into this, and he was still doing all the talking, telling
stories from after ’Nam: “. . . laid open my leg with a saw, and I’m
thinking, no way I’m going to the emergency room. So I wander over
to my neighbor, this lady doc, and show her—”

Story forgotten, Weller pulled from his slouch.
Now we’re cooking.
He’d settled Tom onto his cot, and Weller now saw that the boy’s
eyes were glazed, a little unfocused. Setting his own mug on the
floor, Weller slid a finger to one of Tom’s wrists, felt that slow, steady
pulse. Tom was a tough nut, but not even
he
could fight two Xanax,
their aluminum bite covered with strong coffee and sugar.
Better living
through chemistry.
A grim thought but entirely appropriate.

“Made them.” When there was no response, Weller gave the boy
a little shake. “Tom?”
“Uhm.” Rousing himself, Tom swallowed. “Well. More like . . .”
Tom had squared his mug on his chest, but when he tried to drink,
the mug nearly slipped from his slack fingers.
“Here, let me take that.” Weller gently extricated the mug and set
it down beside his. “Tell me what you saw.”
“They’re different.”
They.
“More than one?”
“Uh-huh.” Tom gave a lethargic nod. “Boy, in the . . . the trees.”
“A boy. Waiting?”
“No.” Tom’s head rolled left then right. “Watching.” He licked his
lips. “He should’ve come . . . come after me. I was beat up. Hurt. Had
the Bravo by then, probably could’ve taken him down, but if there’d
been more . . . don’t know if I would’ve made it. Only the kid . . .
didn’t. He was . . . learning? No, s’not right.
Studying
. Maybe even . .
.
connected
somehow.”
“Connected?” That got his attention.
Jesus Christ, don’t tell me he
actually figured out how.
“How do you know that, Tom? What do you
mean,
connected
? To the girl?”
“Yeah. Jusss . . . a feeling. I think there were others, too.”
“More Chuckies? Back in the trees?”
Tom nodded again. His skin was paler than his bandages. “But I
thought . . . I also saw
men
.”
Weller felt the spit wick off his tongue. “What?”
“Men. Old. At least two, maybe three. They were—”
“Watching,” Weller finished for him. His stomach went icy.
“Maybe evaluating?”
“Or working together. I think so.” Withdrawing his right arm from
beneath a thick blanket, Tom held it, unsteadily, in front of his face
before turning it to show Weller the crisscross of cuts and scrapes. “It
makes no sense. That girl could’ve come for me earlier. I was . . .” His
eyes rolled, drifted away, then gradually tacked to true. His words got
mushier. “I wassen . . . wasn’t paying attention. Sh-she only showed
herself after . . .”
“After you cut your hands. When the wind changed and she got
your scent.” Which meant something Tom was
not
saying: that the
girl, the boy, those other Chuckies and
men
probably came from
somewhere relatively close—and
goddamn
it.
“Her . . . her
eyes
. J-jacked u-up.” Tom rubbed a slow hand over his
mouth. “D-drugged.”
Even though he’d steeled himself for this, the word knocked him
back. “Drugged. You think she was fed something?”
Tom moved his head in a slow, deliberate nod. “When you’re outside the w-wire . . . d-don’t sleep. Can’t.”
“Because there are pills.” He knew exactly where this was going
now. The standard Vietnam myth was that every American soldier
was some kind of crazed junkie. Total bull. Oh, he’d known his share
of potheads, dopers, boys into junk or fat A-bombs, which were
blunts mixed with heroin. But it wasn’t as if the military didn’t help
things along. Weller’s dad, a pilot, served during World War II, when
the Army Air Force was only too tickled to dole out their little gopills: good old-fashioned speed, which Weller used plenty of in his
day, too. Ate it like candy sometimes. No other way to stay awake and
alert. It could also screw you, big-time, the crash afterward so bad
you thought you’d never dig yourself out of that hole.
There had been
other
pills, too, ones that did a whole lot more:
not only kept you up but turned off sleep altogether. Weller knew
plenty of guys who’d volunteered as guinea pigs, because, hell, he’d
worked
on them. For those soldiers, anything was better than playing
the odds, when the life expectancy of a machine gunner in a hot LZ
was about eight seconds.
“Or you find pills. I never . . . too scared they’d mess me up the
way the Army—” Tom ground to a halt.
There we go. That’s what this is about.
“What about the Army, Tom?
What did they do?” When Tom was silent, Weller pressed: “In ’Nam,
they got volunteers. Ran experiments. Not just the LSD or sarin or BZ.
I’m talking drugs to make you crazy-good at killing—”
“I think they might have tried that,” Tom whispered. It came fast,
as if he knew he was sinking and needed to get this out. “Because you
got to stay alert. Can’t let yourself sleep. You live on speed and fear,
or just plain fear.”
“Or you’re dead.”
“Or dreaming,” Tom said. “Just as bad. The dreams . . . they take
over, like the flashbacks, until it’s like you’re in this bottle, no way out,
and dreams and what’s real . . . they all mix together. So the shrinks . .
. they have lots of pills.” He let out a cawing laugh, but it was wheezy
and weak. “Call it ‘damage control.’ Keep the guys worst off close to
the front lines, let them rest and get some decent chow, but also feed
them all kinds of pills. So you take what the Army shrinks dole out,
and other stuff, too.”
“Black market?”
“Some. Yeah. But if you take too much, or the wrong type . . .”
“You go crazy.”
“Worse.” The smudges under Tom’s haunted eyes were livid as
bruises. “You can’t be stopped. You keep going in this . . . this
frenzy
.
And that girl . . . her eyes. Blood eyes . . .”
“What?” Weller said sharply. “You mean, blood
shot
, right? Like a
bad hangover.”
“No.” Tom’s head wobbled, and his voice was dwindling like water
spiraling down a drain. “No no no . . . no whites. Just red and black.”
Oh, you crazy bastard, you really did it this time around.
“I’ve seen
that,” Weller said. “In ’Nam, we called them berserkers.”
“Yeah?” Tom’s lips thinned in a faint grimace. His eyes drifted
shut. “We didn’t.”
“No?” Weller waited, noting how Tom’s breathing had settled.
“Tom?”
Tom didn’t reply. The deep lines of weariness and grief were
still there, but his muscles had relaxed into sleep. That was all right.
Weller now knew more than enough and understood that they all
might be in real trouble. If the Chuckies
could
be manipulated, if
that was possible, he knew precisely who was insane enough,
smart
enough, to do it. The world had gone to hell in a handbasket almost
five months ago. Plenty of time, especially if you were well supplied,
a planner and an experimenter, someone with a prepared mind. Lord
knew, he’d nurtured
his
hunger for revenge long enough.
So what in hell am I going to do now?
Weller skimmed a hand over his
forehead and was not at all surprised that the palm came away oiled
with sour sweat. This whole ugly business was out of control. It had
changed to something he didn’t recognize. He should have gotten
clear as soon as the mine went. Just picked up and left. For God’s sake,
hadn’t he already avenged Mandy? Peter was dead, and Rule couldn’t
be far behind, what with their precious little Chuckies well on their
way home by now. Shouldn’t that be enough for him? Because there
was revenge, and then there was . . . End Times. Revelations.
And I
don’t even believe in that crap.
Should he fight this? Try to do something? Did he even have to?
Sure, he
could
take a chance, soldier to soldier, and tell Tom what he
knew. But Mellie
was
right. Tom was on the brink, had been for a
while, and there was no way to predict what the boy’s reaction might
be. Getting
himself
killed trying to come clean wouldn’t help anyone,
and he wasn’t even sure, exactly, of the bigger picture here or what
was going on. All he had were bits and pieces, suppositions and suspicions. So, would it be better to get out now, while he still had the
chance? Build himself a new life someplace where he wasn’t known,
with what time he had left?
But there are these kids, just starting out in life. There’s Tom, carrying
grief he shouldn’t have had to bear. We got them into this.
No doubt Mellie
saw the kids as expendable, too. But Weller just didn’t know what he
should do, what was safest and which the lesser evil . . .
Tom sucked in a sudden breath as if he’d just found something
in the dark of his mind and dragged it up to the light. When Weller
looked back, Tom’s eyes were open again but so clear that it was like
looking into the clean, deep, chilling blue of Superior.
“What?” Weller asked.
“Zombies,” Tom said, very clearly. “We called them zombies.”