Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (64 page)

Tom. She had to save him. She had to let the monster out and do
something
, and she had to do it now, right now, before it was too late
.
And if she couldn’t get back to herself ?

It won’t matter. Can’t let Tom die. Stop being such a scared bunny and
do this; this is for Tom, for Chris, for Wolf and Peter, for everybody
. No one
she cared about would be safe if she didn’t try. She had to trust herself, stop fighting who she was, let the monster go, let it touch Wolf.
It wanted to anyway, and Wolf would be easiest to reach, because the
monster’s interest was selective.

Steeling herself, she gave the monster substance: built it a gargoyle of a body; went the whole hog, the way the doctors always
wanted. Sketch that boogeyman some slit eyes, needle-teeth, scales
and wings, claws long as scimitars, a forked tail. Then she imagined
the monster reaching out with one scaly arm; felt it unspool from
her mind to
tap-tap
with a single talon. Wolf reacted and turned
a look, actually
knew
she was there—and for a second, she saw
Tom with much more clarity through eyes that were not hers. No
exchange
of thoughts, no insights, but she was
in
Wolf ’s head for a
split second.

She kept the message very simple, stupid:
Look.
And Wolf did.
Davey was harder, different, worse—like jumping from Blackrocks,
only at night into black goo. His was a dark language that she only
caught when it was very strong in the sweep of the
gogo pushpush
. She
went fast, too. A quick dart, in and out, no message. Finn would be
there, holding the boy back; otherwise, Davey and all the Changed
would have been tearing these people apart. She didn’t want Finn to
feel her, not yet.
Again, that dizzying sidestep, doubling, dropping behind the
windows of Davey’s eyes—
And there was Tom, again, but through Davey this time. Davey’s
focus
, though—so taut and mica-bright it was like riding a laser—was
Finn: Finn’s smell, his eyes, even the voice.
The old man—his signal?—
was
there, too, in the background: a
thin red river coursing through an intricate landscape. Not the roaring fury of the
push-push go-go
, though, because there was no killing
to be done at the moment.
She let the monster drift on the current, very briefly; flow from
Davey’s perspective to the others, all the altered Changed: Tom and
Finn and the square seen from different perspectives and varying
points on the same river, like a glimpse of the world through the
myriad facets of the eye of a giant fly.
Because Davey and the altered Changed were Finn’s network,
his cell towers, and the unaltered Changed were networked to one
another. She knew
that
because none of the Changed, not even Davey,
reacted when Finn hurt Peter. Finn didn’t need to use Davey or the
altered Changed to get to Peter in that way. But when Finn wanted to
reach those Changed he hadn’t altered, he
had
to go through Davey.
Finn was limited the same way
she
was: the Changed were all on a
different circuit, speaking to one another on a frequency that neither
Finn nor she could directly access without a kind of gateway.
Simple commands piggybacking on a more generalized signal.
That had
to be how Finn was doing it. For Finn, Davey was the way into the
conversation. When Finn urged on the Changed, all Peter got was the
bleed, the leakage, same as she. The further away Finn was, the less
she and Peter were affected by the
push-push go-go.
One signal, repeated and boosted through one conduit and then
into many, just as Jasper said.

Now, as Finn amped it up; as he
showed
himself in a surge of the
red storm; as she felt the hammer and the thrum and the sweeping
power
of the
push-push go-go
, Alex let herself go. Let everything fall,
all those barriers and walls, no holding back, because this
was
the leap
her father tried to prepare her for all those years ago at Blackrocks,
whether he had known it or not:
Jump to me, sweetheart. Take a chance
and jump.
This was the end and it was for keeps, it was forever, and
do it, Alex, do it, do it for love, do it for Tom,
save
him
, because it was the
very last and only play left.

She could feel it, that same ballooning in her mind, the sidestep
and shimmy, the shift.
Gathering herself, marshaling as much of the monster’s frenzied
energy as she could, she dropped all the barriers, each and every
mental firewall. Alex leapt; felt herself and the monster falling and
then crashing into the roaring red tide of the
go-go-go-go
, swamping
Davey, swamping the Changed, as the monster—all yellow eyes and
needle-teeth and scaled arms—exploded from its deep dark well and
unfurled in a sudden bloody flower to seep into Davey, into the altered
Changed, and all the others, even into Peter:
gogogogoGOGOGO
—

“N-no, Finn,” Alex said, working to get the words out, and through
it, Tom heard the deep venom in her voice, almost a growl. “L-let
me
. . . sh-show
you
!”

Her back arched; her eyes gleamed; her features twisted into a
naked kind of raw fury he knew from battle, when the enemy was
swarming over the rocks and you had no ammo and all that was left,
everything that separated life and death, was the razor-thin margin
of what the body knew and what it would do to cling to every last
moment. Alex seemed to
grow
in front of his eyes into something
new, breaking from a cocoon and revealing something not quite
human living behind the eyes of a girl whose face was etched with
a diamond on his memory and yet never truly known or seen until
now. Until the moment she let herself break, let the mask slip, dared
to make herself known, dared it all.

For a split second, time gathered itself, swelled like a trembling
teardrop ready to fall—and then the time splintered and broke apart.
And Alex
wailed
. The sound was a keening, as clear and piercing
as the note of her father’s whistle that called to him from the endless
night of a dark and desperate place where the monsters lived. But this
was also a roar, a call to battle: a swooping crescendo that went on
and on and on, one that raised the hair on his head and sent Tom’s
heart crowding into his mouth.
“Alex!” He had to do something; he had to break this, get her out,
get them both
out
! The guards had fallen back; everyone seemed frozen. Without realizing,
he’d
actually recoiled a step, but Tom now
started forward, no clear idea of what he meant to do, only knowing
that he
must
take her away from here—
But then, to his left and just beyond Finn, Davey’s head whipped,
those mad vermillion eyes going wide as he shrieked, his cry twining around Alex’s, becoming one. To his right, Peter was howling
a ululating note, and Simon and Penny were screeching, and then
all the Changed, altered and not, wailed. It was a cry that rose to an
insane bellow and in voices that were many and voices that were one,
resolving to a single note, and that voice was Alex, it was Alex, and
it said—

Minutes out of Rule, still in forest but running up the hospice road,
Chris abruptly reined in Night. Ahead, a shuddering
roar
billowed
from the trees. It was like something from television, on Saturdays in
fall when his father mainlined beer and cursed the Wolverines: that
peculiar kind of whooping bellow a college crowd made in a packed
football stadium. Yet
this
cry was also unearthly, a shriek that was one
voice made of many, and Chris couldn’t tell if he was listening to pain
or ecstasy—or a little bit of both.

“My God,” he said as the horse pranced and snorted, “do you
hear
that?”
“Yeah. And screams, too, not just that . . . that
sound
.” Greg’s eyes
were bright with urgency and early morning light. “Are we too late?
Do you think the bombs . . .”
“No. If we can hear that, we’d have heard the explosion.”
Or explosions.
The idea was that there would be no one left
to
scream, or at
least not for very long. “I think . . . God, I think those are the
Changed
.”
“Chris.” Greg was staring. “The Changed don’t speak.”
They do now. Something’s given them a voice
. The sound was so eerie
he was shivering. “I think they’re
saying
something. You hear it?
Actual words?”
“Yeah. I do,” Greg said. “It sounds like—”
* * *
“GO GO GO!”
Eyes blazing, crackling with sudden energy, Alex
wailed:
“KILL FINN KILL FINN KILL HIS MEN KILL FINN KILL—”
“What’s happening?” Mellie shrieked. Turning a wild circle, she
clapped her hands to her ears as the Changed bellowed. “Elias, Elias,
what are they
doing
, what’s—”
“No!” Finn shouted, but his was a voice in the wilderness, a tiny
speck, like listening to a scream lost to the thunder of a whirlpool.
And then, for Tom, everything snapped, the world cracking wide
in a furious maelstrom of sound and movement just as it had the day
the world died, and the night they blew the mine and the ground had
shuddered under his feet. Only now, instead of a black tornado of
birds and a rampaging of deer and bewildered animals and his brain
trying to tear itself apart and the mouth of the earth yawning wide to
swallow him for good—this time, the end belonged to the Changed.
As one, all the Changed began to move, storming and rampaging through the square. The Rule people were screaming, slipping,
tangling with one another in their rush to escape, but there was
nowhere to go. They were hemmed in by the Changed and Finn’s
men and a chaos of horses wheeling and rearing, their hooves clashing down on ice and earth to break bodies, crush heads. The Changed
wheeled on Finn’s men, most of whom were still trying to raise their
weapons two seconds too late. The Changed charged, the weird,
altered Changed leaping from braying horses, the others like puppets
suddenly cut free of their strings to fall on Finn’s men, swirling and
seething and boiling in a mad, chaotic frenzy. The square erupted as
Finn’s men fired wild, bullets buzzing in high hornet-like whines. It
was like watching a scene from a movie where an army overruns a
village; where, soon, there will be no one left.
On the landing, Alex
keened
: hands by her head, fingers spread
wide, eyes bulging, blood on her mouth from the red river leaking from her nose, as if the something that had burst
from
her was
blowing her apart. To Tom’s left, Mellie screamed again as a girl
raced up the steps to throw herself on the woman in a fast, flat dive.
Crashing back against a balustrade, Mellie rebounded from the stone,
rolled, and tried scuttling away. Swarming over Mellie’s back, the girl
latched onto the old woman’s neck with her teeth. Howling, Mellie
reared like a horse trying to throw its rider, hands wildly scrabbling
for purchase.
To Tom’s right, Peter suddenly launched himself, a fury of golden
hair and mad eyes, with Simon—that boy who might have been Chris
in a different life—only a step behind:
“Kill him kill him kill him—”
But Davey, Finn’s pet, his very special boy, was closer and already
turning, lips skinning from his teeth, manic red eyes wild with rage.
“No, Davey!”
Finn shrieked, one arm upraised, a hand going for his
Colt as Davey uncoiled like a caged panther finally breaking from its
prison. “NO NO N—”
Finn, as fast as he was, never had a chance. Davey barreled into the
old man, bearing them both, thrashing, to the stone. Finn’s pistol spun
away. Pistoning his legs in the frantic way of a man desperate to keep a
rabid dog from ripping out of his throat, Finn hammered Davey’s chin
with his right boot. A spume of blood splashed Davey’s white uniform;
Davey’s eyes rolled in their sockets, and the boy began to slide. Finn
wound up for another kick that never connected as Peter and Simon,
still roaring, converged. Peter was screaming: “He’s mine, he’s
mine
!”
Grabbing the old man by the throat, he hammered Finn’s head into
the brownstone landing, a hard percussive blow. Blood spurted from
Finn’s burst scalp, but the old man was still fighting, screeching now
like his sister. Planting a boot in Peter’s chest, he pounded Peter back.
Tom saw a flash of metal as Finn whipped the parang from its sheath,
heard the whicker of a vicious backhanded slice that sizzled like a
snake. Peter shrieked and there was a wash of bright red blood, and
then Peter was clutching his middle, blundering back as the Changed
boiled through the square, heading right for them, coming for Finn.
All this happened in less than ten seconds, and it finally got him
moving.
Five minutes, less than five minutes, got to get to a horse, get us the
hell out of here!
And break Alex, break her free of this! As Tom turned
for her, he caught a blur from the corner of his eye. Maddened to
a killing fury, Penny was spinning for her guard. Breaking from his
paralysis, the guard swung his weapon, a Mossberg 500 shotgun. As
that big black bore started coming around in a wide sweeping arc,
Tom knew that not only would this man die trying—he would miss.
“Alex!” Pivoting, Tom lunged first one awkward step on his hurt
leg, then two. Incredibly, he saw
her
whirl in a fan of bloodred hair. For
a moment, he thought she was running for him. But she wasn’t. She
charged Finn, and the change he saw in her face—that same killing
fury he read in Peter and Davey and Simon and all the Changed—
stilled his heart. Tom understood, at once, that if he did not break
this now, before she reached Finn, she was lost and he might as well
let the Mossberg’s slug find its mark. Hell, he would stand and hold
her fast and make sure it killed them both.
He threw himself in a desperate dive, smashing into her a nanosecond before the shotgun
boomed
. The slug
brrred
a hot trail over his
head. There was a splash of imploding glass as a window exploded
somewhere beyond. He wrapped her up, getting up one arm to protect her head and neck, throwing the other around her waist. They
fell in a heap. Tom tried rolling onto his back at the last second so he
could take the brunt of it, but he was awkward, in pain, off-balance,
and only managed half a turn. They smacked stone that was going
wet and red now with all this blood from the Changed and men alike.
When they hit, Alex’s shriek cut out. Tom felt his breath blast from
his lungs, but he hung on and then he was hugging her close as she
thrashed and kicked and snarled to get away. He felt the bite of glass
and stone on his back and the wild beat of her heart against his, and
he was screaming, too,
screaming
into her raving, bloody face: “Alex,
Alex, it’s me, it’s me, it’s
Tom
!”
For an instant—and just an instant—that feral glint in her green
eyes sharpened on
him
. He really did think that if she went for his
throat
,
he would let it happen. In another five minutes and change,
Alex wouldn’t be there anyway. For him, letting her go, again, was
not an option. If he
had
to die, better this way, with and by her. But
then her head rocked; he had the sense of something snapping either
away or back into place, or maybe both. Her eyes, still so green and
bright, firmed to a different reality. Firmed to
him.
“Tom.” There was wonder there, a searching, and a whisper that
he heard as a shout because he really did have her now, no-holdsbarred; this moment was the beginning of forever. “Tom?”
He ached to skim her hair from her face and drink her in. Instead,
the world slammed back in with a vengeance, time restarting itself,
and he became aware of shots and screams and the riot of Changed
and men, of the violence seething all around.
“Alex, we have to get out of here,
right now
. This place is going
to blow in five minutes, maybe less.” Rolling, he helped her set her
feet, grabbed her arm. In the square, there were horses, and all they
needed was one. “Come on, come on!”
“Wait!” Tossing a wild look around, she let out a gasping cry: “No,
no, Peter,
Peter
!”