Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (61 page)

And then there is the jump she knows, a shimmy and shift, and then she’s
there in another body, a girl’s. She can feel the difference. She’s in the middle
of a jostle of bodies, a tangle of arms and legs, and GOGOGO—

Dead ahead, there is a boy, not like her at all. He is a scream of meat.
He is food, and she smells his desperation and panic as he tries to get onto
his horse. But he won’t be able to manage it, because this boy’s fear is
strong and she is close now; his full, rich, raw scent fills her mouth, and—
PUSHPUSH—she will have him. She rushes for the boy, pushing her way
through the others—GOGO—she lunges, feels the rake of her nails on his
leg, and he turns a terrified look, and she sees—

“No”—but she could barely hear herself. “Chris, run, get away,
run—”
There was a sudden
snap
, either the monster letting go, or her
finally recalling it, she couldn’t be sure. Her vision cleared and fixed
on Buck, hovering over her, a paw on her chest. Her gaze shifted to
jagged chinks of sky showing through branches.
Fell off my horse.
Struggling to a sit, she wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of
her mouth and listened to her pulse thunder.
That was Chris.
She was almost positive. The horse, a blood bay,
was right, and she’d gotten a fleeting look at his face . . . Right hair,
the face was the same, but bruised, and there was something wrong
with his eyes. “Red,” she breathed. Buck nudged her neck, and she
let herself sag against the wolfdog. Chris’s eyes were red. The same
as Peter’s? No, the more she thought about it, the surer she was that
Chris was hurt. From that girl’s perspective, Chris was food: blood
and salt, fear and sweat. Meat.
Strong, too, that red storm. Every time that
push-push go-go
amped
up, her monster leaked through. Throttling it back when there were
only Finn and a few altered Changed around wasn’t as hard. But an
increase in numbers meant more intensity, a wider spread. She wasn’t
sure she could maintain control.
Scraping up the Uzi from where she’d dropped it, she clawed to
her feet. For a moment, she thought about leaving the green canvas
medic pack, now stuffed to capacity not only with medical supplies
but several books and odds and ends she’d picked up along the way.
The pack would only add weight, slow her down.
But Chris looked hurt.
Hefting the pack onto her shoulders, she
broke into a staggering, wobbly run, with Buck trotting alongside.
Chris is here, and he’s in trouble
.
I’ve got to do
something
to help, somehow
.
If she only could figure out what.

Passing through Rule—its deserted streets, those wrecked houses—
was like wandering through the defunct set of a disaster movie. The
windows of many houses were shattered. Some had no doors. She
paused only once: at Jess’s house, its door hanging askew like a rotten
tooth ready to fall from its socket. Part of her wanted to go inside.
She’d left her parents behind, squared on the desk in her room. But
the chances of their ashes still being there were about as good as her
stopping Finn.

Need to keep going
. She eyed a red, spray-painted
X
that wept from
the lintel over the ruined door.
It’s like that old Bible story, the one about
the Angel of Death.
Except all these houses hadn’t been passed over.
There were still bodies inside a few, and dead Changed, too.

But Chris was among the living, and the living needed help.
And
Peter, Wolf, Penny . . . what do I do, what
should
I do?
She was still turning that over as she neared the square, dodging from house to house,
slinking through backyards. As she remembered the square’s layout,
the church was on the northwest corner. Jess’s house was west of
the square, which meant she was coming up behind the village hall.
What she’d do once she got there, she didn’t know. Was there a back
entrance, a way into the building? If so . . . what then? Make her way
to the roof ? Could she even do that? How would that help?

You’d better figure this out, honey.
The fug of all those Changed,
altered and otherwise, bled through the air, growing stronger the
closer she got. Finn’s people must be nearly to the square. Their stink
made the hackles rise in a Mohawk along Buck’s spine. She felt her
monster suddenly perk right up, too—and, a split second later, understood why as she teased out an odor of shadows and cool mist and
rot.

Wolf.
She parsed more smells, got denim and wintergreen, hard
steel and desperation mingling with the stench of chemo:
Peter’s
there, too.

So tempting to give the monster a little leash, see if it might slip
behind Wolf ’s eyes.
What if I
could
control it?
Send it out to very specific targets? That was . . . a little creepy, and crazy, too. Let the red
storm set its hook, and she’d be as helpless as a swimmer in a rip current. Yet the idea of actually letting the monster go, making it work
for
her . . .
Can I
do
that?
Her hand snuck to caress the wolfdog’s neck.
God, this would be like naming her monster, which her cancer docs
encouraged: fighting back by thinking of the monster as something
separate and apart. One guy even gave his cancer a Twitter account.
She had wanted no part of her tumor: not to name it, draw it, visualize it. She’d only fought until she couldn’t fight anymore, and left for
the Waucamaw, where her tumor became a monster with slitty eyes
and needle-teeth—and had saved her life, a couple of times over now.

“So what are you saying, you nut?” she murmured. “You want to
jump off Blackrocks? Gonna send out the monster with a message?”
It was crazy sci
fry
.
But Finn does it, somehow.
Look at those weird
Changed and poor Peter. But what if she got snagged by the red
storm and couldn’t get free? What if who
she
was drowned in it?
Somehow, she thought that could happen.

People, all old, gathering in the square. Her schnoz was full of
fusty stained underwear and doughy skin. She heard them, too, a low
buzz.
But no kids.
Where could they be? She didn’t smell Chris either,
and her stomach tightened with dread.
Take it easy. He was on a horse.
If he was smart, he was already long gone. With enough warning,
all
the kids might be, too. Could be why she smelled none.
Except Finn
made his move while it was still dark.
So how would Rule have known
Finn was on his way?

A distant crackle, like a string of firecrackers. She glanced north.
Someone shooting out there, but far away, easily several miles. The
kids? Maybe, and probably not fighting Finn’s people. She’d followed
him long enough to know that no one had split off from the main
group.

Oh God.
What if those were Rule’s kids, and there were
Changed
out there? Would Finn’s, well . . .
signal
bleed that far? That wide?
How much range did this guy have?

Range, there’s something about that; that kid, Jasper, mentioned Peter,
and how Peter got better whenever Finn was further away. He said if Finn
died, the network would fall apart.

She’d thought of the same thing when trying to figure out how
Finn managed all those Changed.
I know the signal hops because the
monster does, and I go along for the ride.
And look what had happened
to her when Finn’s Changed attacked that plateau: big surge, huge
signal, and she woke up on the snow.
But what does that mean? How can
I use this? What does it
mean
?

Dead ahead, she spied a short alley, lined with detached garages,
that trickled into the village hall’s parking lot. Nosed to the back
wall alongside a large green Dumpster were three sheriffs’ cruisers,
minus their tires and doors, resting on their rims. To the right was a
single driveway that led to the square. The long, stained-glass breezeway connecting the school to the church was on her left. Tall trees
marched up to the rectory and school, and, as she recalled, a side
door into the church off a courtyard.

Pulling Buck close, she crouched in a drift of old snow behind
the last detached garage on the left and at the very edge of the alley.
Two choices: the village hall or the church. Keep to the woods, and
she and the wolfdog had a much better chance of slipping inside the
church.
They were ringing the bell, too.
Which meant the tower was
open.
Get up high, scope things out, see where Peter and Wolf and Penny
are in relationship to Finn.
She might even spot Chris. The Uzi had a
scope. Wait, could she shoot Finn?
Oh, get real, honey.
She wasn’t a
sniper. She didn’t know if the Uzi even had the range. Besides—she
felt her chest squeeze down—what would happen if Finn died? With
all those Changed, she bet: nothing very good.

“They’ll be off the leash. They’ll go out of control.” When the
wolfdog let out a soft whimper, she stroked his ears. “I know. I smell
them, too.” The Changed’s rank fog was getting stronger by the second. “I hear you, boy, we’re going.”

As she scurried past the village hall, she caught a strange odor:
just the slightest curl, like a finger of spiced smoke dissipating on a
strong breeze. The
spice
made her falter.
No.
She battened down on
the association before the grief could wind itself up and undo her.
Enough, Alex
. She centered herself, focused on the beat of her heart.
You’re upset; it’s your imagination. You
want
it to be Tom.
“Get through
this, and you can cry later,” she muttered.

She took another, deliberate inhale. This time, there was no spice,
no phantom of Tom. What she got was diesel fuel and scorched . .
. metal? Like a blackened can of beans set to heat in a campfire. Yet
the smell was also oddly chemical: gunpowder and . . . She flashed to
a summer’s afternoon: her dad, cursing, aiming a fire extinguisher.
The chalky chemical gush, and her mother fretting about how they’d
have to wear masks to clean up the mess:
There’s the phosphoric acid
to worry about
.

Then the village hall was behind her, and she and the wolfdog
were darting into the woods around the rectory. After slipping in the
side door, she and Buck cowered on the landing, sniffing and listening.
Something awful had gone down in the sanctuary and the basement,
too. Her mouth puckered at the tang of cold blood and spent gunpowder. The black maw of the basement door exhaled mangled flesh
and sweat and fear and a Changed, for sure, an eye-watering reek of
stewed, smooshed raccoon.

Dusty bolts of colored light streamed through the stained rosette
window at the east end of the church. The pews were empty, although
the smell of people and a few spent candles lingered. . . .
Wait a minute.
Gathering more air into her mouth, she tongued the aroma, then
gasped. “Oh God. Acne . . .
Ben
?” He’d come back to Rule after all.
And died here, in the church.
The aroma was . . . violent. Wreathed
in a mélange of bleach and pine tar, Ben’s smell was
everywhere
, as
if they’d scrubbed and scrubbed, knowing that nothing could erase
the stink of this horrific death
.
The altar cloth was gone, as was the
platform’s carpet. Someone had tried scrubbing Ben’s blood from
the wall where the cross still hung, but too late. The sight of those
ghostly, purple splashes drew a cold finger down her neck. How anyone could still
worship
here, she couldn’t imagine.

More blood in the vestibule, worked into stony crevices. She
couldn’t tell whose, and she had no time to worry the smells. The bell
tower door was open. No one up there she could suss out, although
the reek of Finn’s Changed cascaded in a waterfall of cold air. The
church doors were also slightly ajar, and through the crack, she saw
them, as well as Finn’s men and horses, streaming into the square.

Sprinting up the tower’s circular steps with Buck on her heels, his
nails clicking on stone, Alex vaulted into a short, stone passageway.
Light streamed in through rectangular slots in the wall that reminded
her of a castle’s arrow loops, only much wider. From the square,
she caught the clop of horses, a low muttering from people, but no
screams. Which was strange: with all those Changed, she’d expected
hysteria and a fight. Yet there was no gunfire at all, here or north now
either. Ahead, she spotted ropes and a wood console, the kind bell
chimers used to play melodies. One rope dangled, probably attached
to that working bell.

She was so intent on getting a look at the square that she’d already
turned aside before her brain processed what she’d seen: a bulky
rectangle, in shadow, fixed to the lower left corner of that carillon
console.

“What?”
Greg heard Chris snap into his walkie-talkie. His voice was
very loud in the hush; most kids had stopped crying. Sarah had gathered the youngest into a solemn knot to wait until they were ready to
move out. On the bed of Jayden’s wagon, a blood-spattered Kincaid
was tending to a boy whose arm had been broken by a bat. They’d
been lucky, though. The survivors mostly had bumps, scrapes,
cuts, bruises. Except for Ghost, whose right ear was ripped off by a
Changed, the dogs had made out just fine.

Well.
Greg tossed a look toward the back of the wagon train.
Almost all the dogs.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Ellie looked
like a kid whose parents were just killed in a hit-and-run. Not far
from the truth, what with Tom staying behind. Forefinger corking
her mouth, the little girl—Dee?—leaned against Ellie while Ghost, a
blotchy bandage wound around his ruined ear in a lopsided turban,
sprawled by Ellie’s side. Jet and Daisy sat nearby.