Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (28 page)

“No help for it,” Kincaid said. “Just so long as we get—”
“Doc?” When the old doctor didn’t answer, Greg looked up from
ramming his right foot home and felt his heart flip.
“Weapons. On the floor,” Aidan said, from behind a shotgun and
smears of gore. Lucian pointed a pair of mismatched pistols, gunslinger-style. “Now.”

The sky had bled of color. The moon wouldn’t rise for hours yet,
and the stars were mica-bright. The snow sparkled, reflecting the
combined light of flashlights as well as Colemans and, Greg now saw,
dancing, dirty yellow flames from torches of oil-soaked rags. The air
was thick and bitter with the smell of soot and engine oil.

Greg thought most of the village’s remaining adults must be here,
in the square. Along the way, some had indulged in a little mayhem,
a bit of destruction. To his left, jagged teeth showed around gaping
holes in several storefront windows. More shattered glass winked
from the snowy sidewalk. The crowd yammered and milled in a restless, expectant clot at the base of a naked oak. Off to his right, Yeager
and the remaining Council members stood motionless in a circle of
armed men.

“What are they doing?” Greg asked, his voice as thin as piano wire.
Aidan and Lucian had marched them out through the vestibule and
past Tori’s body. While someone had the decency to cover her with
a coat, Greg might have fallen to his knees if Kincaid hadn’t clamped
a strong hand around his arm and practically carried him down the
church steps.

The village hall’s doors banged open, disgorging four men, who
staggered under bulging sacks. They were followed by Jarvis and
another man who scuttled out with coils of rope. Some people fell on
the sacks of food and began wildly tugging out cans and jars; other
hands grabbed the coils from Jarvis’s and his partner’s shoulders. One
man on horseback took charge of hurling rope over a stout, lowhanging oak limb that was still a good fifty feet from the snow. Eager
townsfolk crowded in to grab at the free ends. There were so many
that those who’d lost out grabbed hold of the waists of the people
before them in a human chain. Straightening, Jarvis made large
sweeping motions with one arm. An astringent odor spiked Greg’s
nose, and he thought,
Charcoal briquettes.
Stepping back, Jarvis said
something Greg couldn’t make out, and then there was another of
those enormous jungle bellows as the people manning the ropes and
forming those chains heaved.

Backlit by the combined glow of all those lights, Ben Stiemke and
his grandfather jerked limply from the snow, dangling from nooses
like ghastly, deflated parade floats. Because the old man was so much
lighter, he rose much faster, his feet clearing the ground in a matter
of seconds. Ben went more slowly, both because he was a heavier
boy—

And because Ben was still alive.
Not by much, perhaps. Greg hoped that what he saw was the lizard part of Ben’s brain sparking its last. But he didn’t think so. As the
noose tightened and Ben’s air cut out, his one good leg fluttered and
kicked; his bloody hands scratched at the rope. They were too far
away to see his face, but Greg could imagine it: Ben’s mouth agape,
his intact eye starting while that blasted socket stared in startled
amazement.
Jeering, the mob closed on the boy, swatting at his kicking leg and
body with rifle butts and clubs. Then one person darted forward with
a torch, and in its light, Greg recognized that gray fury. Screeching,
Travers thrust the flame into Ben’s gore-soaked middle.
With a sudden
whump,
Ben Stiemke erupted in a sheet of rippling
blue as the lighter fluid Jarvis had used to saturate his body ignited.
Sarah screamed, a sound lost in the mob’s clamoring cheers and hoots.
Ben’s body flailed, the one leg bicycling round and round but much
more feebly now, trailing a blue streamer that was rapidly yellowing
as the lighter fluid was exhausted and new fuel—Ben’s clothing—
ignited. His grandfather’s body, now also ablaze, flared like a candle.
The crowd fell utterly silent. Aidan and Lucian were rapt, their
faces dreamy. It was so quiet, so completely still, that Greg heard the
spit and crackle as the flames feasted and Ben’s flops became jitters
and then twitches and then nothing at all.
He would think about this for days; grow queasy at the lingering
taste of cooked blood and scorched hair on his tongue. And he would
dream about it: these old men and women, and the very few boys,
their expressions shifting and changing in this play of shadow and
light, reshaped by fire into something Greg no longer recognized as
human.
What came to him as well was Jess, in her unending sleep, walking
her dreams, and what she’d said the one and only time he saw her:
Leave them, boy. They are blind.
“Aw,
dude
.” Lucian breathed. “This so
rocks
.”

“Lang said he’s playing possum,” Jug Ears said. “I only been working
here a couple days, and he’s only ever been off his rocker. Screaming,
talking to thin air, sometimes beating up on himself pretty bad. See
around his face there? But I’ve never seen him like this before.”

“Yeah, he does look pretty out of it. My God, he stinks, too. Like
an animal, worse than these Chuckies.” (
Old coot.
Peter didn’t recall
his name. The next thing Peter heard was the scrape of a boot over
concrete, a pop of grit. But no
bong-bong-bongs
or Simon. No visions
of holes in stone or orange water. No Chris either. Was that bad?
Bwahahaha.
Who knew?) “How long he been like this?” Old Coot
said.

Jug Ears: “You mean the shakes or the not breathing real good?”
Old Coot: “Both.”
“Uh . . .” Mutters as Jug Ears counted under his breath. “Couple

hours? He was like this when I come on shift. Lang gave him a whack
with his baton. Right there in the side . . . see where the bruise is
coming up? Kid didn’t even flinch. Ask me . . . I don’t know. The way
he’s breathing, he’s either
real
crazy or dying.”

Both. Neither. Bwahahaha.
Naked, eyes screwed shut, sprawled on
the floor of his cell, Peter let go of another gargling, guttural groan
and shuddered, his hands fluttering like dying moths. His skin was
so caked in filth, huge dried chunks cracked from his flanks.
And it’s
showtime, folks.
Dragging in another grudging inhale, he began to
jitter and flop like a dying fish, spluttering and choking, the foam
bubbling to froth over his lips. From the taste, there was some blood,
too. The back of his head bounced against concrete and he felt a
spray of pain, but it was muted and very distant.

“Oh, shit,
shit.
” He heard the tinkling chatter of metal, then a
clack
as Old Coot slotted in a key. “Son of a bitch is having a fit. Come on,
before he swallows his tongue.”

“I don’t know.” Jug Ears. “Lang said we shouldn’t—”
“Screw Lang. He’s not here. The boss is back, too, from that training exercise. Now,
you
want to explain how this kid choked to death
on his own damn tongue while we watched it go down with our
thumbs up our butts? Get something to stick between his teeth and
come on!”
There was a harsh bawl of metal hinges, and then boots on concrete. A hand on his forehead now and another on his jaw. Jug Ears,
on his left, shouting: “Okay, I got a ruler, I got a ruler. Come on, open
his mouth, open his
mouth
!”
“Hang on,” Old Coot grunted, trying to hook his fingers in the soft
notches at the corners of Peter’s mouth and away from his clashing
teeth. Peter obliged, letting his lower jaw sag, throwing in a choking
guh guh guh
for good measure.
“Jesus, he’s goddamn dying.” Old Coot wrenched Peter’s jaws
open so far Peter heard the tendons creak. “Damn it to hell! Come
on, get that thing in there, get it over his tongue, get it—”
“I got it.” A rigid edge of wood sliced Peter’s lower lip, and then
there was a
tick-tick-tick-tick
as Jug Ears tried butting the ruler between
the shelves of Peter’s teeth. Jug Ears wormed his fingers over Peter’s
tongue. “I got it,” Jug Ears sang, “I got—”
Peter snapped, hard and fast. There was an audible
crunch,
a burst
of blood in his mouth, and then he was grinding his jaws from side to
side, his teeth sawing through skin and stringy tendons down to the
joints. The bones snapped as Jug Ears screeched and beat at Peter’s
face with his free fist:
“Get him off, get him off, get him—”
Spitting out the ruin of what had been two fingers, Peter surged
from the floor. His left hand was already driving for the man’s throat,
his right sweeping up the dropped ruler. Jug Ears got out a pained
gah
as Peter cocked his right elbow and then pistoned fast, driving
the ruler into the old man’s mouth. Jug Ears gave a tremendous
jerk. A huge gush of blood jetted, hot and wet, splashing Peter’s
face and hand. Through the wood, Peter could feel the harder plate
of bone at the back of the man’s throat. The guard’s eyes bugged;
his hands flew to Peter’s wrist and tried clawing the ruler free, his
nails and jagged splinters of bone from his missing digits frantically
scoring Peter’s wrist. Rearing up, Peter flipped Jug Ears onto his
back, stabbed the ruler down like a pike, and bellowed: “Eat it, eat
it,
eat it
!”
There was another bony
crunch
, this one duller, muted by the boil
of blood. Jug Ears flailed in a brief but violent spasm as if he’d stuck
a wet finger in a live socket, the connections between brain and body
suddenly severed as the ruler slammed through to skewer vertebrae
and the delicate spinal cord.
All this took less than five seconds. Without pause, Peter rounded
on Old Coot, who’d scuttled back only a few feet and was now
fetched up against the iron bars of Peter’s cage. His knobbed fingers
scrabbled for his pistol, but when Peter’s shadow swam over his body,
the guard screamed:
“N-nuh-nuh-noooo!”
Horror bleached all the
color from the guard’s face, and Peter had a moment’s clarity where
he understood what he must look like to this old man: naked, painted
with gore, a Medusa’s crown of jungle hair, as inexorable as fate. He
was something born from a nightmare, or hell.
“D-don’t look at m-me with th-those
eyes
!” Old Coot shrieked. “I
n-never . . . I never
h-hurt
you!”
“True,” Peter said. “But you never helped me either.”
* * *
Two minutes later, flipping the globe of Old Coot’s left eyeball onto
his tongue, he was at the door. He’d strapped the guard’s knife to his
right calf but taken nothing else. No clothes, no coat, no boots, not
even gloves. He didn’t need any of that.
But it’s cold, Peter.
It was that still-sane, dime-sized portion of his
mind.
You’re outnumbered. Don’t you think you might want a rifle and
some clothes?
“Clothes are for the rest of you.” Swallowing back eye jelly, he
worried the lens between his teeth, then crunched. About the consistency of a slightly stale Tic-Tac, minus the peppermint. From the
milky color, Old Coot had been on his way to a major cataract.
He felt the press of the Changed staring but didn’t look back.
Although, yes, he
had
considered releasing them—
Fly, my pretties, fly,
fly!
—and taking the doe-eyed Kate right there on the filthy concrete
in the bargain. But while he was nuts, he wasn’t crazy. As strong as
he was now, he doubted even he would survive a fight with so many
Changed
.
Instead, cocking his head, he listened with his oh-so-acute hearing
for Lang or another guard. All that came was the sough of the wind.
The icy air smelled of razors and cut through the sour reek steaming
from his flesh.
I want to be clean.
Sprinting across the threshold, he plunged facefirst into a pillow of snow. His heart gave a startled jump at the shock
of it, a baptism first of ice and then fire as his skin shrieked. After
so long in the prison house, it was the most wonderful thing he’d
ever felt in his life. Gasping, he rolled once, twice, came to rest on
his back. Clots of snow clung to his hair; he could feel lumps of ice
on his lashes. He let out a laugh that was another of those breathy,
ecstatic moans. Snow cupped his back; he was melting into it but
felt no cold. For him, cold was only a concept, nothing more than a
faraway twinkle of a distant star.
I am new.
He felt the winged presence, the one that had been
growing for days now, pulse and swell. Its low muttering surged.
Yes.
He pounded his chest with a fist.
Yes, yes!
He was butt-naked and
maybe out of his mind, but this was
his
time, it was his.
No one’s ever
seen anything like me before. I’m a fucking warrior, I’m—
A very distant, very dull thud
.
And another. His ears tingled as
his brain translated: boots, on snow, coming this way.
Lang. Or Finn.
Either would do. Rising, he bulleted down the wooded path toward a
bend where, if he remembered right, the hemlocks were thick—the
perfect cover because no one remembered to look up. His feet slapped
snow, a dull
puh-puh-puh-puh.
His soles should be shredded, cut by ice,
but he felt no pain at all, no fingers of cold kneading his flesh. Wind
tugged his blond hair. His heart thumped, strong and steady, fueled
by the manic exhilaration of the winged thing and freedom.
Ahead, hemlocks pulled together out of the gloom. Then he spied
a knotty red pine to the right. This was better still because its lowest
limbs were even higher, a good six feet off the ground and big around
as his thigh. Backing up, he dug in with his toes, and took off in a
diving run. He didn’t even think about whether he might slip. As a
boy, he’d climbed higher, taken greater risks. The thought did flash
through his mind that, really, he wasn’t a featherweight kid clambering up to his tree house to read or dream or sneak his first smoke;
that this was an awful risk; and where was he finding the strength,
the stamina?
Then he stopped thinking, and leapt. His palms slapped wood, his
fingers hooked, and then he was heaving, boosting himself from the
snow, swinging up like a gymnast. Hitching a leg up and around, he
seated himself, got a foot under and then the other, and stood. To his
right, another branch jutted at a thirty-degree angle, an easy straddle.
The path was directly between the V of his legs.
Reaching into his long blond hair, he fished out a slender spike
of bone. The bone, which he’d hidden between his butt cheeks, had
come from that left foot. Over the last week, he’d laboriously ground
the bone to a needle: perfect for popping an eye or jamming through a
throat. Of course, if all else failed, he still had the knife. His hands. His
teeth. But he really wanted to try out the bone.
His ears prickled with the sound of a man’s breaths, the squeal of
snow.
Wait for it, wait . . .
In the well of his mind, the winged thing
waited, too: taut, breathless. Then Lang was there, passing immediately below: a hunched, plodding old man in olive-drab.
Now.
Peter dropped. There was a millisecond’s free fall, the rush
of air past his ears. At the last instant, Lang must’ve sensed something, because Peter saw a startled, silver oval flicker up and then the
black holes of Lang’s eyes.
Eyes, eyes in the dark, eyes in stone
. Peter’s
feet hammered Lang’s forehead, an impact that jarred Peter’s heels
and shivered into his shins. A wild
ah
leapt from Lang’s mouth. Peter
hit the snow, rolled, set his feet, then swarmed over Lang, still turtled
on his back, who was gagging and choking against blood. Lang saw
him coming, tried getting his hands up, but Peter batted them away
and dropped on Lang’s chest. As Lang began to buck, Peter slammed
Lang with a stunning blow. There was a crackle as Lang’s nose caved,
and more blood, a river of it.
“Ha
-
how?” Lang gargled. The old man was far down in the snow,
with no leverage at all. He tried a weak punch that Peter blocked with
his forearm. “How d-did you . . .”
“Does it matter?” Planting his knees in the knobs of the man’s
shoulders, Peter ground down until Lang moaned. Jamming the bone
needle between the second and ring fingers of his right hand, Peter
cupped his left over Lang’s throat and squeezed—not a crushing grip
but enough that Lang’s face suddenly darkened. Peter held the quivering spike of bone just above Lang’s left eye, so close that Lang’s eyes
crossed. “You’re a traitor and I’m going to kill you. But first I’m going
to blind you. You’ll hear it, that little
pop
.” Leering, Peter dragged his
tongue over his lower lip, cleaning it of Lang’s blood. “Then I’ll
eat
it. I’ll rip out your tongue so you can’t scream. I’ll take you apart a
piece at a time.”
“Peter.” Lang’s voice was nasal, stuffy, and the word came out,
Peeyuhh.
He was breathing fast, his chest heaving against Peter’s
thighs. “It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t just me. It was Weller, too, it was—
uhh
!” Lang’s voice choked off as Peter squeezed.
“I don’t
care.
” Teeth bared, Peter rode Lang’s bucking hips. Lang’s
face went from beet-red to purple; his bluing tongue bulged through
pink foam. “All I want is for you to die, Lang. Die and know that I beat
you, I beat you, I got you, I—”
Peter felt the hit, registered the impact as a solid body blow that
slammed him left and off Lang. Caroming to the snow, he fell heavily on his left wrist. A rocket of pain shot into his elbow. The wrist
buckled and then he was wallowing, thrashing, his face half buried
in snow. Spitting, he rolled, already aware that the needle was gone.
Still have the knife.
Righting, he planted and then rose on the balls of
his feet, calves bunched, ready to spring . . . and felt his heart clutch
with fury.
Squared in his fighting stance, Davey—a Changed boy Peter hadn’t
seen in more than two weeks—only waited. He wore camo-whites.
His leather control collar was a black cut across his throat, and there
was something terribly wrong with his eyes. At first, Peter thought
that Davey had been blinded, the eyeballs scooped out, leaving only
scarlet sockets. Then he realized that the whites of Davey’s eyes were
a deep, dark bloodred.
Jug Ears:
What happens to them? Their eyes?
“
No
.” The word foamed in a snarl from Peter’s lips. “No, he’s
mine
.
Lang’s—” Uncoiling, Peter sprang. At the same instant, Davey leapt,
matching Peter move for move in an eerie, silent pas de deux. They
crashed together in midair, then tumbled to the snow in a thrashing
tangle. Peter’s fists bunched in the boy’s camo-whites as Davey’s hands
slipped and slid over Peter’s skin. Planting both feet in the boy’s chest,
Peter bucked him up and over in a somersault. Floundering in the
deep snow, Peter got over onto his left side just in time to see Davey
somehow tuck, hit, tumble—and set his feet with the nimbleness of
an acrobat. In a split second, the boy was steaming over the snow.
Turning, Peter swam to his hands and knees, but not fast enough to
avoid Davey, who vaulted onto his back. A second later, Peter’s right
shoulder exploded with pain.
“Aahh!”
Now
this
hurt. Rearing, Peter flailed, spinning a mad circle
around and around. Clinging like a wolf latched onto prey, Davey
readjusted his jaws and sawed his teeth deeper into muscle. Peter felt
the spurt of blood down his back. Reaching around, he clawed wildly
for the boy’s face, then thought,
I’m heavier
. Throwing himself straight
back, Peter dropped to the snow. He felt the boy’s grip loosen; that
maddening grind of teeth and jaws suddenly ceased. Bellowing with
both pain and rage, Peter kicked up, twisted, got a fist in Davey’s hair,
cocked the other for a punch—
A orange-red blaze of heat detonated in his head, an immense
thunderclap like a pillowing wave of napalm. Peter wailed in agony
as another shock wave blasted him back. Still screaming, he toppled.
The pain was molten and all-consuming. Through the clamor, he just
made out a voice he knew too well: “All right, boy-o. Let’s everybody
cool down.”
As suddenly as the pain swept through, it evaporated, as if someone had flicked a hidden switch. Wallowing in snow, Peter turned
a look to where Finn stood, massive and compact, a monolith in a
uniform as black as a crow’s wing. A long, curved parang hung in a
scabbard from his left hip. At his right rested his pearl-handled Colt.
Flanking him were two Changed girls, also in camo-whites, and their
eyes were like Davey’s: blood-red pools.
“Ease down, boy-o,” Finn said.
“No,
no
!” Peter rolled to all fours, like a seething animal. “Let me
finish
!”
“And you will, but not today or with Davey. Unless you
want
a
repeat?”
It was a question that required no response. Peter spat a bullet of
blood. “How did you do that?”