Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (36 page)

First chance he got, he should leave. There was nothing more he
could do here, or discover. No army of willing children either. If that
was Jess’s plan, then she was insane. These were only kids, trying to
survive. He couldn’t force them to come back, wouldn’t even ask.

As for the rest—all those secrets—okay, now he knew. Yay. And
so what? The only unanswered question was whether the people in
Rule suspected what Peter and the Council were up to and just kept
their mouths shut. Did he really
care
enough to risk going back to
dismantle the Zone, take on the Council?

“Maybe so.” But not for them.
The kids Peter and I brought back;
they didn’t have a say. You can’t let them grow up in the shadow of that.
What kind of people will they be in the end?
Of all people, he should
understand what it was like to grow up with ghosts and blood that
never washed away
.

His stomach picked that moment to grumble, an incongruous
sound that made him laugh. He ought to eat up. This might be his
last good meal for a long time. Just as he turned from the window, his
eyes hooked on a very slight shift in the light, some dark slink out of
the corner of his eye. He shot a quick but off hand glance, more from
habit than anything else.

Two boys—Jayden and Connor, he thought—hurried over the
snow toward the barn.
Oh
was all the thought he gave them, because
he was preoccupied, focused on food and how to break the news
about Lena and Alex before heading back to Rule. South was best,
a straight shot that wouldn’t take him but four days on foot. Three,
if he hustled. Hunter said they had Nathan’s gear. A lucky break. He
could listen in with the radio, figure the best way to slip into the village without getting his head blown off.

The stew was stone-cold, the glutinous sauce clinging to chunks
of potato and carrot and venison. He shoveled in a mouthful. The
meat tasted a bit musty, gamy, and it was tough. Probably an older
buck, or Jayden might not have dropped it right away. Peter once
said that the longer a deer ran after it was shot, the gamier it tasted
because of the acid buildup in—

“Muscle,” he said out loud, around stew.
Wait a minute. What did
I just see?
Leaning back, he carefully replaced his spoon in the bowl,
replayed the view from his window. Two boys, heading for the barn.
And this was a problem because?

“Because”—he swallowed—“they were hunting.”
So if Jayden and
Connor were hunting and checking traplines . . .
“Where’s the game?” he
said to his room. “Well, they might not have bagged anything, right?
Everyone has bad days.”

But hadn’t Hannah said that Jayden
never
came back until he’d gotten something; that he always pushed the envelope and this scared
the hell out of her?

“Oh shit.” His chair toppled as he darted back for the window. “It’s
not only that they don’t have game. They don’t have
guns.
”
The boys were much closer to that far barn now. No guns. No
horses. No game—but that was because they were still
on
the hunt.
And instead of only two Changed, now . . . there were ten.

“Go, go, go.” Alex could hear herself now, but the sound was tiny in
her mouth, the red storm still huge in her mind. “Push, push,” she
said, unseeing, the words falling off her tongue. “Push push push.
Go, go after them, go faster, go—”

A jolt of pain raced up her right thigh. Grunting, she hissed out
a breath as she felt whatever had grabbed the monster in her head
suddenly let go. She looked up to see Darth, who was just winding
up for another kick.

“Stop, Darth, stop,” she said, laboring to her feet. “I’m getting up,
okay?” Yet, for once, she was almost glad to see him.
God, what the
hell
was
all that?
She put an absent hand to an itch on her upper lip,
then felt her thoughts stutter as her eyes fell first to her glove and
then jumped to the step. Red spiders spattered the snow.
Oh no.
A clot
of fear wedged in her chest. The last time she’d had nosebleeds, the
monster had chewed up enough real estate to double in size. Maybe
the red storm, that
pushpushpush
, was nothing other than the monster, now stronger and bigger, ripping up her brain.

So maybe that’s what happened just now. The monster’s developed to the
point where it can do this . . . this . . .
Well, whatever had just happened.
She didn’t even know what she could call it.

Darth nudged her again, this time with the business end of the
rifle. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, snuffling back blood. As she began trudging across the cut to the driveway, however, Darth moved on ahead
again and she was able to flick a quick look toward the clutch of low
cedar. At first, she thought the wolfdog was gone, but then spotted it
well back, mostly hidden in the dense shadows beneath a blue spruce.
And how weird is that?
Darth didn’t seem to notice or care about this
animal. With those carcasses standing as ritual sentinels here and
Wolf ’s cowl, Darth must have known the animal was there. Unless
this was only Wolf ’s peculiar little fetish, his spirit guide or whatever,
that Darth and the others put up with.

She turned her thoughts back over what she’d just experienced.
What would she call that? A mind-jump? Or someone else dropping
in? Both?
Think, Alex, how did it start?
She’d been with the wolfdog . .
. but no, that wasn’t
quite
right. The mind-jump had happened when
she
relaxed
to coax the animal closer. She’d let down her guard, and
then either her monster got out, or something—someone—grabbed
it. Which meant what, exactly?

Her monster always woke up when Wolf was around. So Wolf
could be on his way back, and she’d gotten a kind of subliminal whiff
of him, one she hadn’t really noticed or paid attention to because
she was so used to the Changed. That was possible. She had no idea
what the range of her spidey-sense might be, and it was probably
dependent on the wind, which was relatively still at the moment.
But
Wolf might be nearby.
One eye on Darth, she slowed and sampled the
air, letting it whisk over her tongue. All she got, however, was the
copper of her blood, pine, snow, the evanescent coil of the wolfdog.
No Wolf.

Okay, scratch that idea.
Unless Wolf ’s on his way back and the monster
knows this somehow.
Yeah, but how would that work?
Maybe the same
way you got a premonition about someone and then your cell would ring.
Which would mean that her monster was syncing up in some funky
way with Wolf ?

“Well, honey, I hope that’s not it.” Her breath rose in a tangle of
mist that the breeze picked apart.
But what did I see? What
was
that?
Turning away from the house, she stared back down the hill at the
lake. Just couldn’t put her finger on—

“Wait a minute.” She squinted against the yellow glare bouncing
up from unbroken snow over icy water.
I saw this.
A feeling of unreality swept through her.
It’s not the
same
perspective, but if that
was
the
lake . . .
“During the mind-jump, I saw the lake on my left. So that
means I was coming from the west.” Her eyes widened.
And I saw
three kids, way ahead, running away . . .

“No, that’s not quite right. Push-push-push,” she whispered, her
eyes watering against the light. “Go-go-go.” What did that mean?
“Think it through, Alex, come on.”

First, she and the monster had jumped—no, no, been
pulled
—
into someone, a boy. A Changed, brimming with the single-minded
urgency and intensity of a pursuit. He’d been with that red storm,
the
push-push go-go
. There’d been someone else, too, screaming:
Let
me go-go-go
.

But then her perspective had shifted.
I jumped
ahead
and into someone else, another boy.
The feeling she’d gotten
then
was also different:
not only the
push-push go-go
but a sense of being
driven
and
pushed
after two . . . no, three other Changed the way old-style cowboys
might herd cattle. Two she’d seen pretty clearly: that lanky kid with
the wild hair and a shorter, smaller . . .

“Oh my God,” she breathed.
Alex, you idiot. That was
Marley
,
which means the smaller kid has to be Ernie.
“And that means those other
Changed are
all
chasing—”

“Hannah!” Chris beat the window with his fist. Below, on the snow
and now much closer to the barn, the Changed were splitting up, five
right, five left.
Coming at them from both sides.
He slammed the thick,
double-paned glass again. “Hannah,
Hannah
!”

Stupid, useless, what are you doing?
He had to get out of the room.
His fingers fumbled with the window latch, but it wouldn’t budge,
and a second later, when he saw the slot for a key, he understood why.
“A lock?” Whoever had built this room
really
didn’t want anyone getting out. So, either break the window and clamber down that trellis,
or kick open his door. Neither was great, but the window would be
faster.

Scraping up his chair, Chris grabbed the legs, wound up, and
swung. He felt the impact in his wrists as the high split-rail back
banged glass before bouncing back. The panes were seamed with a
sudden silver tracery of cracks, like a psychotic spider’s web. Roaring
in frustration, he swung again. This time the panes shattered with
a tremendous
crash
, the chair’s ears and top rail smashing through.
Whipping up cloth napkins Hannah had used to cover his food, he
wrapped his fists, knocked hanging daggers out of the way, and bellowed: “
Hannah!
Hannah, look out, look out! Isaac,
Isaac!
”

Across the snow, he saw that steady, deadly stream of Changed
suddenly come to a dead stop. They were too far away for him to
make out faces, but he could see when they twisted to look back at
the house. Good,
good
! He’d slowed them down, at least for a second.
Cupping his hands, he screamed: “Hannah,
Hann
—”

The barn’s west door suddenly swung open. A head appeared,
a froth of white above broad shoulders.
“Isaac!”
Chris bawled.
“Barricade the doors! There are ten, there are
ten
!”

The old man’s head jerked back as the barn door snapped shut
hard enough for Chris to hear the faint clap and then its echo.
Okay.
He’d warned them. Now to help them. Crossing to the door, he hesitated, studying the jamb, that lock.
God, a dead bolt?
Whatever.
Just
do it.
Backing up, he aimed his right shoulder, grabbed his right arm
with his left, then charged. He hit the door hard enough to feel the
impact in his teeth. His shoulder let out a bark of pain. The door,
solid oak and stout, shivered, but there was no splinter or scream of
wood. He hammered the door again, and a third time, a grunt jumping past his teeth. By the fourth time, the bark in his shoulder was a
roar, and still the door held tight.

“
Damn
it.” Cold air gushed through the shattered window. His
puffing breaths plumed as he planted his fists on his hips and tried
thinking past the ache in his shoulder.
Maybe have to climb out the window after all
. That was when he noticed what he should have seen at
the very beginning. This door locked from the outside but swung
in.

“Hinges.” He spun back to the table. Hannah hadn’t given him a
knife or fork, but . . . “There is no spoon,” he said, giddily, sweeping
that up along with one of Hannah’s books. The spoon was heavy
stainless steel and would break before it would bend. Wedging the
handle under the hinge pin’s flattop, he beat it with the book’s spine.
To his surprise, the pin let out a metallic
screak
after only a few blows
and jumped a half inch from the knuckle. “Come on,” he grunted,
beating the spoon. The pin hitched another half inch. “Come on,
come—”

Shit.
“Got to get out,” he said, using his fingers to pry the pin
the rest of the way. The hinge uncoupled, and now he could see a
gap between the top rail and frame.
One more, then I can just tear it
down.
Dropping to a crouch, he braced his shoulder against the jamb,
rocked the now nicked handle beneath the head of the middle pin.
This time, there was more resistance from the weight of the door.
His left hand ached from his death grip around the spoon; his right
wrist was throbbing. The spoon had punched and then cut a crescent
moon through the book’s clothbound cover and a quarter inch of
pages.
Thank God it wasn’t a paperback
−and then he wondered if he
wasn’t getting just a little hysterical. More spackles and muted pops
of gunfire, and now he was talking to the pin: “Let go, let go, let—”

Shooting straight up from the middle hinge, the pin popped free
to clatter to the floor. Shoving the spoon into a back pocket, Chris
flung the book aside, then wrapped his hands around the edge of the
door and put his weight into it. The butt hinge cried in a long, high
squall before giving way all at once. Raking the door aside, he bulled
into the hall.

His room was at one end. Two doors on his right, one on his left,
and, a little beyond that, a short banister marking the head of the
stairs. Wheeling around the newel post, he pounded downstairs.
Through pebbled glass sidelights on either side of the front door, he
could see a huge porch he hadn’t known was there because his room
was at the back of the house. To his left was an enormous front room
with several long benches that looked like some kind of meeting
room. He spotted a swinging door at the far end. Jess’s house had a
door just like that, between the kitchen and parlor.