Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (9 page)

From the sky came more hard, mournful cries as a trio of crows
arrowed left to right, west to east, followed by six more. Even higher,
she spotted the telltale glide of several seagulls. Frowning now, she
craned a look behind her, toward shore. That gull was still there, but
the crows had vanished. Even deeper in the trees, something flickered—a flash of light green—and then a cedar swayed with a sudden
shake and shiver, spilling a fine curtain of snow.

“Well, that’s weird,” Ellie said. Crows
loved
fish guts or just about
anything
dead or dying. (Well, except the people-eaters.) This was
something Jayden said, too: if you want to know where that deer you
clipped had got to, don’t follow the blood. Look for the crows.

But they’re all gone now.
She jumped her eyes over low-hanging
branches and snow-laden evergreens. That still-billowing cloud of
fine snow. Where there’d been plenty of birds before, now there was
only that one gull. Which was a little strange.

Shouldering the auger over her left and a .22 on the right, she
grabbed up her primer bucket again and resumed her slow trudge
toward shore. The gun, a Savage, was what Jayden called a
plinker
,
meaning it didn’t do squat and only added weight, but it made her feel
better. While her hand auger wasn’t a thirty-pounder like Grandpa
Jack’s, it was long and unwieldy—essentially a spear tipped with two
incredibly sharp, stainless-steel blades.

Ahead, she could see Mina squirting after that one gull. With an
alarmed cry, the gull lifted from its perch, circled, and let go of a long,
drippy streamer. Mina skidded at the last second but not fast enough.
A stringer of green-white goo splashed her muzzle, and then the gull
was winging higher, shrieking gull-laughs:
Ah-hah-hah-hah!

“Serves you right,” she said, while Mina only snorted and groveled
in the snow. As they passed into the woods, she saw the gull, back on
its rock, and could swear it was still laughing.

This particular farm was huge, once probably two farms or even
three, with a gazillion acres and lots of outbuildings. Eli had gone
left, following a wooded path back to the farmhouse. She peeled off
right on her horse, a poky, muddy brown mare named Bella, down a
meandering trail through oaks and tall tamaracks. Ahead, in a crescent-shaped clearing, the trail elbowed right and left. One look at that
fork and Bella spooked, prancing and shaking her head in a clatter of
metal and leather.

“Okay, okay, you big baby.” Dismounting, she looped the reins
around a stout oak. None of the horses liked this part of the woods.
Nothing good lay down that right-hand trail.

“So totally
lame
,” she muttered, darkly. Trotting by her side, Mina
turned her a look, and Ellie said to the dog, “Bet if it’d been you
and me, they wouldn’t have given up so fast.” Yeah, but when Jayden
and Hannah found her and Mina, they hadn’t been hurt like Chris.
Mortally wounded
was what Hannah said about Chris, which was a
fancy way of saying
hurt so bad I can’t fix it
. But there
might
have been
a chance. Chris could be really strong, or Hannah might be wrong.
Not
trying
wasn’t fair. Tom and Alex always tried.
They
would’ve
fought . . .

“You know, Ellie, it really doesn’t do you any good to think about
this. You’ll just get to feeling sorry for yourself and all.” She let out
an exasperated sigh. Why
was
she remembering Tom and Alex and
her dad and Grandpa Jack so much today? It couldn’t be the fishing.
She fished all the time. “Yeah, but I miss them all the time,” she said,
mad that her nose was starting to itch again. Soon she’d be bawling
like a little kid. Focus on the positive: that’s what Grandpa Jack always
said—and Hannah and Jayden and Isaac
were
nice.

“But they’re not Alex.” She veered for the left fork. “They’re not
T—”
By her side, Mina suddenly alerted with a soft but distinct
huff.
Uh-oh.
Caught in mid-stride, one boot above the snow, Ellie went
absolutely still. In her chest, her heart slapped a fast fish-flop of alarm.
Mina was looking not left but down the
right
fork. Not growling—a
good sign—but her dog’s ears were up, her body stiff. So that was
not good. Not
bad
. Growling was bad because growling meant either
unfamiliar adults, for whom she had no use, or people-eaters, for
whom she had even less.
Wrong time of day for them anyway.
But something was spooking the dog. What?
From the sky came another harsh bray, and that was when she
finally heard what it was that Mina had picked up. Heck, for all she
knew, her horse had probably spooked early because Bella could hear
what she hadn’t. But now Ellie did: a sound like . . .
voices
? Lots of
them, too, like a crowded school yard at recess, coming from somewhere down that right fork. She watched Mina listening. The dog was
still alert but not growling. So . . . not dangerous? Probably no adults,
anyway; no people. Not alive, anyway.
Then it dawned on her. “Oh boy,” she said, and almost—
doh!
—
smacked her forehead like Homer Simpson. The birds. The
crows.
That was why there were so many. Crows were scavengers, drawn
to death. It was just like Jayden said: if you wanted to know where
that poor wounded deer was, look for the crows. Made perfect
sense.
Yeah, but do I want to go down there?
Because now it was a choice,
wasn’t it? Someone would have to check this out. It would take her a
good hour to dump her gear, slog back to her horse, then hoof it back
to the farmhouse. She was here now. Someone had to put that poor
deer out of its misery, and she should grow up already. Tom would
do it. So would Alex.
Carefully squaring the auger across the mouth of her pail, she
unlimbered her rifle and threw the bolt. At the sound, Mina’s tail
whisked in approval.
“Yeah, better safe than sorry. So, come on.” Ellie gave her dog a
pat. “Let’s make it quick.”

The walk wasn’t terrible, although this wasn’t Ellie’s favorite trail or
place in the universe. Within ten minutes, the chattering swelled and
consolidated into caws and squawks. The racket was enormous, like
on the mountain in the Waucamaw when Grandpa Jack died and her
head seemed to explode. This time, though, instead of blackening the
sky, glossy crows seethed and roiled in the trees.

Wow, something’s got their attention.
A cold finger ticked down the
knobs of her spine. Something told her that this had to be more than
birds waiting for something to die. But what could it be? She dropped
her eyes to the snow. The last time she, Jayden, Hannah, and Eli had
been down this trail was a week ago. In between, there’d been snow,
and she saw where their tracks had filled.

Oh boy.
One set was small. Not much bigger than hers, actually.
A
kid?
Her hands tightened around her rifle.
A kid, a hurt kid?
Or this might be the kind of kid she really didn’t want to meet.
No, it can’t be a people-eater. Mina would know; she always knows.
She
checked the dog, who was still on alert but keeping pace. Again, not
alarmed
but definitely telling her that something wasn’t quite right.
The dog’s attention was fixed straight ahead, and now Ellie looked
that way, too—and heard herself pull in a hard gasp.

The clearing was small and dominated by a gray limestone building
with a slate roof. Two windows were set on other side of a wood
slider. A ramp ran down from the slider in a broad tongue.

The hex signs painted on the stone were kind of weird. Just below
the eaves were five-pointed, bone-white stars that ran around the
entire building, and that Hannah said were supposed to represent
heaven. Above the double slider was a single high arch, outlined in
black paint and filled in with purple. Within the arch were three
evenly spaced blue triangles. The arch was supposed to be a false
door—a
Devil’s door
, Hannah said—designed to trick Satan into
bumping his head.

There were other hexes, too: painted half-arches, done in the same
design, above and below each window so if a witch tried to climb in,
it would trip over what Isaac called a
witch’s foot
.

With all those hex signs, at first glance you’d think
barn
. But that
made no sense, because this building was
all
stone and really far out,
way off by its lonesome in the woods and well away from fields and
pasture. Neither Jayden nor Hannah had a clue as to the building’s
original purpose. When they first came across it, the structure had
been totally empty.

To Ellie, though, those windows always looked like empty sockets
with funky purple and blue eyelids. If she let her own eyes defocus a
little, she could see the skull.

Which was kind of apt, considering what was inside.
Something, it seemed, had reached out and grabbed those crows,
too, because there were hundreds. Birds lined the slate roof, clung to
shingles, clutched the eaves. More crows swarmed over the snow or
strutted up the ramp like soldiers. They oiled over the building in a
heaving mass of bright eyes, gleaming feathers, and black beaks.
Crows knew where death lived, all right.
Because that gray skull building was where the bodies were.

Eight days after the mine went, at the very beginning of March, the
crows came in big black thunderclouds. Tom knew what they meant.
Hang around a war zone and you learned. Want to figure out where
the bodies are? Look up.

A fact: the colder it is, the slower things decompose. But it’s also
true that a mine’s deepest levels are very warm, even so hot that
they’re impossible to work without fans and ventilation. Evidently,
the old Rule mine was just warm enough for people to start rotting,
fill with gas, and bob to the surface of that new lake like so many
human-skinned balloons.

The question was when to go. Cindi came every morning, so that
was out. Afternoons were safest, but there were the lookouts to consider. He didn’t want anyone, especially Cindi or Luke, to figure out
what he was doing. They would try to stop him or insist on coming
along, and he needed to be alone for this. So that left late afternoons.
Time it just right, and he could ski it pretty fast, skirting the path that
would put him in the lookouts’ sights, and still have daylight to spare,
although it would be well past dark when he got back.

When.
Really, wasn’t it more a question of
if
he came back? Ever?
Or
never
? Because, in some ways, Tom was already gone, finished, used
up. He had never been like this before either—not after Afghanistan,
not after Jim. Not after he’d been shot and Harlan had taken Ellie.
Not after Jed and Grace, when he’d thought,
Yes, kill all the enemy; no
sweat
. Despite what he’d said to Luke, choosing life with no hope of
seeing Alex again was only going through the motions. Putting one
foot in front of the other until you couldn’t walk anymore.

Regardless, one thing was crystal-clear. It stood to reason that she
was up there, at that lake, with all the other dead.
And there was absolutely no way in hell Tom would let the crows
have her.

He had taken the Long Walk before. In Afghanistan, the bomb suit
was always a last resort, when robots wouldn’t work or, as in his case,
there were choices to be made in no-win scenarios. So he had walked,
alone, toward death many times. Yet, somehow, this was even worse,
the longest and loneliest walk of his life.

The lake was surreal: a logjam of partially decomposed bodies
mired in ice and black with crows. From the looks of it, the Chuckies
had believed in stocking up on rations for a rainy day. Or maybe it
was just that there had been a lot of hungry little Chuckies in that
chow line, and it was easier to take a quick trip down to the corral
whenever you needed to rustle up a little grub. There were plenty of
dead Chuckies, too, which were easy to distinguish from the other
dead. Not only were the Chuckies all young, nothing—not even a
crow—touched them.

Through binoculars, he glassed the lake, skipping his careful gaze
from face to face. Paying him no mind, the birds jabbed at empty
sockets, jackhammered bone, jumped from one hideously distended
body to the next, as if playing a complicated game of hopscotch. One
crow skidded to a landing on the icy bloat of a man’s belly before
working its way to a safer perch on the nub of the old guy’s nose. The
bird stabbed down and pried loose a flap of cheek with its beak. The
frozen, greenish flesh came away with a tinkle that reminded Tom of
crinkly cellophane.

Tom watched the crow work the meat into its mouth and down
its gullet. If that had been Alex, he’d have drawn down so fast with
Jed’s Bravo, that crow would’ve been a cloud of blasted feathers and
red mist and in hell before it knew it was dead.
Or maybe I only wound
the thing. Then grab it, rip it apart.
He could see that, too. As detailed as
any flashback, the movie spun out in his mind: the bird struggling as
Tom squeezed harder and harder until he felt the thready kick of its
heart against his palms and now the crunch of bone. . . .

Only then, somehow, the movie shifted in his mind. Instead of a
crow, now Tom had a boy by the neck and the boy was bucking and
fighting, but Tom was riding him, strangling him, watching the boy’s
face turn purple,
killing
Chris Prentiss for what he’d done. This vision
was so real, Tom could feel the frantic scratch and cut of Chris’s nails
over his hands.

You can’t get away, Chris; I won’t let you go. I’m strong and I will kill
you, I will crush you, I will make you pay for what you did to her
. . .
A deep moan worked its way from Tom’s chest. God, killing Chris
would feel
good
, it would feel
so good
, and, Jesus, he
wanted
that. This
need
to kill something was the claw of something new, scraping the
cage of Tom’s ribs, raging to be born.
But I can’t let you out.
Untangling his mind from the vision made
the sweat pop on his upper lip
. Got to hang on.
Pressing a trembling
hand to his chest, Tom felt for the two tags hanging from a beaded
chain around his neck. One tag was Jed’s from Vietnam; the other had
belonged to his son, Michael, who’d died in Iraq. Tom gripped the
dog tags the way his grandmother used to clutch a rosary.
Got to stop
this. Can’t let myself get
lost
in this thing.
His tongue ached from where his teeth had sawed through flesh.
He spat a coin of blood, watched it melt into snow stenciled in irregular stars from the birds. A lot of animals up this way, actually. His
eyes drifted to some elongated, five-fingered splays that had to be raccoons, and then to a single deep trough scalloped from snow. Wolves,
probably. They’d be heavy enough, and most packs went single file.