Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (31 page)

“What?” When he tried to start up from the bed, knots dug into his
wrists and ankles. “What are you talking about? What are you
saying
?”

“Easy, Christopher,” the old man said. “Calm down.”
“Calm
down
?” He thought he was screaming, but he could only
muster a tortured squawk. He strained against the sheets, his neck so
stiff he heard the creak of bone. “You’re telling me I was
dead
? That
Hannah
really
poisoned me?”
“Yes. She wished to ease your suffering, to help you let go. She
stayed with you until you slipped away. It didn’t take long. You were
quite weak already. If Ellie hadn’t found you when she did and sent
Eli for help, you might’ve been stone-dead long before Hannah and
Jayden got to you.”
“Ellie and her dog k-kept me alive. Th-they . . .” His throat suddenly clogged as he collapsed back onto the bed. “They kept me
w-warm.” Chris’s eyes burned, and when he closed them, he felt a
tear leak onto a temple.
Why am I crying?
Embarrassed, he rolled his
face away.
“Yes, our little fisherwoman’s quite resourceful,” the old man
said, and then Chris felt the slight pressure of a thumb wiping away
the wet on his face. “It is not weakness to become emotional after a
shock. You’re clearly a very strong boy, Christopher.”
“But how can I still be alive?” Chris whispered. He opened his
eyes. “You said I was dead. I
f-felt
myself die.”
“I know what I said. You were given poison that should’ve killed
you but didn’t. You should be dead, but you’re not.” The old man laid
a gentle hand on Chris’s cheek, a touch for which Chris was almost
absurdly grateful. “I can’t explain it.”
“Maybe it wasn’t as bad as Hannah thought.” He could feel the
tears dribbling into his hair. “She shouldn’t have done that. I’m not a
horse with a broken leg.”
“Fair enough, but would you have drunk poison willingly? Would
you have had faith in a girl you’d never met, that she was right: you
were going to die and this was more merciful?”
“Well, she was
wrong
, wasn’t she?”
“She may have been . . . mistaken about the extent of your injuries. Hannah’s quite skillful. She’ll be a fine healer someday. But no,
she’s not a doctor.”
“Are you?”
“No. But I’ve been a healer for a very long time, and I know that
tiger-trap.”
“How did they . . .” He heard himself hyperventilating but couldn’t
stop it. “They couldn’t get the trap off. It hurt too much. I heard them
argue. Hannah was worried I would bleed even more.”
“That’s right.” The old man’s tone was dry, factual. “After you
slipped away, they turned you over and pulled you off. I believe they
cut a spike or two to do it.”
Cut me off.
The image of them flipping the door and his limp body,
tacked on iron spikes like a frog pinned to a dissecting pad, stroked
the small hairs along his neck. They would’ve bundled him up, too,
before throwing his wrapped corpse onto a horse.
Or had the horse drag
me if it got spooked.
He supposed he was lucky they hadn’t decided to
bury him under rocks.
“Nathan was hit with a mace,” he said. “That big log? I heard his
neck break. Did he come back from the dead, too?”
“No. His body’s still in the death house.”
Still.
He could feel the scream trying to squeeze past his teeth.
That’s where I was. They thought I was dead. They put me with Nathan.
Then how—
“We’ll bury him come spring, if you like. We don’t cremate
remains, although we did butcher his horse for our dogs. We also have
Nathan’s belongings—clothing, rifle, a radio? I suppose they’re yours
now.” The old man paused. “I know you don’t agree, Christopher,
but I’ve had ample time to examine you. From the extent of your
injuries and visible wounds—well, what’s left of them—Hannah did
the right thing.”
“Left of them?” Every time this old man opened his mouth, Chris
felt his mind scrambling to keep up. “What do you mean, what’s left
of them?”
In reply, the old man reached and peeled the sheet from Chris’s
chest down to his waist. “You have half a dozen wounds, three of
which are quite serious. This one”—the old man laid a dry palm over
Chris’s right side, just below his ribs—“was the worst: a through-andthrough that collapsed your lung. Your difficulty breathing? Hannah
said you had tracheal deviation.” He touched a finger to his own
knobby Adam’s apple. “Your windpipe had shifted to one side. That
happens when air collects inside your rib cage instead of the lung.
And do you remember the pain in your belly? That was probably
from blood pooling in your abdomen. But look now.”
Chris craned to peer down at his stomach. A pink eye of taut,
raw-looking scar tissue, about as big around as a half-dollar, stared up
from his abdomen, just below the shelf of his ribs.
My God.
He heard
his sudden intake of breath. The first time around, when he came to
. . . he remembered the old man’s hand on his stomach.
How can this
be?

“You have a matching exit wound to the right of your spine. From
its location, I suspect you sustained a laceration of your kidney as
well. Yet that, too, is almost healed. Here.” Chris felt a tug at his left
wrist as the old man worked the knot. “As long as you promise not to
choke me again, let me . . . There. Look at your hand, Christopher.”

At first, he thought there was nothing, but then his eyes picked
out the half-moon of the mostly healed slash running from the web
between his thumb and first finger down to his wrist. He stared,
dumbfounded.

“A spike did that,” the old man said, although his words were faint,
nearly lost in the sudden buzz that filled Chris’s ears. “As you can see,
the thumb was nearly severed. But here you are, almost healed. All
your wounds are in much the same condition.”

“But how?” He turned his hand over, then made a fist. It didn’t
hurt at all. “That’s not possible. How can this be happening? Why am
I still alive?”

“Can’t say.” The old man threw up his hands. “Is it the tonic? Or a
mistake, as you say? A combination of both the tonic and your physiology? Or is this only a miracle or magic?”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Chris managed through numb
lips. He recalled the dark guttural mutters, the strange incense that
filled his nose.
And his hands, on my chest; I remember how I felt something
. . . leaving.
A bolt of fresh fear burned a path through his chest. “I
don’t believe in miracles.”

“I don’t either. Although you could argue that an eight-year-old
slip of a girl finding the strength to hoist a seventeen-year-old boy
onto a horse to be a touch miraculous. That is, until you consider
that the human body reacts to emergencies by flooding the tissues
with adrenaline. This increases blood flow, gives more energy, greater
strength. So Ellie was frightened; it was an emergency, and her body
reacted. She even gave up her coat for you and should have been
really
cold. But she never felt it because the same physiological mechanism
also kept her warm. So, see?” The old man spread his hands in a notricks-up-my-sleeve gesture. “No miracles. Just science.”

“But that’s not what you were doing when I woke up. That wasn’t
science.”
“No, that was faith, like the
grudafoos
.” The old man stroked a finger over a wooden charm hung around Chris’s chest on a leather cord.
“Ellie believed it would protect you. Whether it did is immaterial. It
was something she could give, and in return, that gave her courage.
It gave her faith. But all emotions are chemically mediated and may
be manipulated. Every drunk, every lover, any ecstatic mystic knows
that. There is no heart”—the old man palmed his own chest, then
touched a temple—“without the head.”
“So what were you doing then?”
“I was calling on God to heal you,” the old man said simply. “I
was also suggesting to
you
that it might be time to wake up—and you
did, rather spectacularly. And don’t bother objecting. I’m sure it was
coincidence and no miracle. There is only what we don’t understand.
Of course, this”—he touched Chris’s stomach—“I don’t understand
at all.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Chris said.
“Do you
remember
it at all? Because we think you were dreaming,
and for quite a while, too. Days. Your . . .” The old man traced a circle
in the air before his own eyes. “They were moving as they might in
intense REM sleep.”
“I—” His tongue tangled.
Dreams, all those dreams, they felt so real.
“I
only remember a little, right before . . .”
“Yes?” the old man prompted. “Did you see something,
Christopher?”
The nightmares were in pieces, daggers of glass from badly
smashed mirrors—and, he thought now, just as a dangerous.
I saw
Lena and Peter—and my father. . . .
He felt his heart suddenly sprinting
in his chest.
Lena.
God, in all that had happened, he’d forgotten about
her. She’d been with him. Where could she have gone? And didn’t she
know Jayden?
Yes, she said she was in a group of ten kids,
with
Jayden. So
that means I’ve found a group,
her
group.
“Christopher?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Chris said, hoping he didn’t sound
as frightened as he suddenly was. If Lena
wasn’t
dead, where was she?
Could she have headed back to Rule?
But Lena’s no good in the woods,
not alone, and she was sick, pregnant.
She’d said that Peter was the father,
so that must be why
he’d
linked the two of them together in his nightmares. Her going back to Rule made no sense either, especially since
Jayden
was
here. So what had happened? Had she simply freaked out
and run into the woods—and become lost? She’d never survive that.
Could the Changed have gotten to her?
But then why didn’t they kill
me?
Maybe it was as simple as they couldn’t get at him. Lena was easy
pickings. Yet that made no sense. The Changed wouldn’t have cared
if he was alive, barely alive, or dead. Meat was meat. By rights, he
ought to be in pieces, or bare bones.
Regardless, saying anything about Lena now would be a mistake.
His mind went through the same mental calculus as it had with Ellie
and Alex. Telling about Alex wouldn’t have helped the little girl, and
might make things ten times worse for him. He was at a disadvantage
here, and effectively a prisoner. These people were not his friends.
Hannah had only proved he couldn’t trust them.
So keep your mouth shut. They’ve already tried to kill you once. Say
nothing.
“It was a pretty bad dream,” he said. “That’s all I remember.”
“I see.” That dark gaze was clear and very direct, and Chris had
the uncomfortable feeling that this old man read exactly what was
behind his eyes. “Was it the only one?”
“I don’t know,” he said, resisting the urge to sneak his gaze elsewhere.
“You sounded very frightened.”
“I was scared.” This was true. “I couldn’t move. The dream felt
very . . .
real
.”
“Ah.” The old man nodded. “Probably a hypnagogic hallucination.
They can be quite frightening because your body’s still in the grip of
a sleep paralysis. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you from yourself.
Otherwise, we’d all act out our worst nightmares. Given how long
you’ve been in REM sleep, how active your brain’s obviously been,
I’m not surprised.”
“Could it be a side effect of the poison? I mean, another one, other
than not ending up dead?”
“Perhaps.” The old man showed a thin smile. “Intense dreams
were commonly reported. That was the
point
of ingesting the mushroom to begin with. This particular genus is loaded with psychedelics,
toxins, and other interesting compounds.”
“Mushroom?”
“
Amanita pseudomori.
The False Death mushroom. Apt. It and a
cousin, the Fly Agaric, have a very long and colorful history. You can
read about it, if you wish. In any event, Jayden—quite a bright boy, a
real scientist—he thinks the decoction induced a bizarre sleep-coma.
That, combined with the cold, put you into a hibernative state. Slowed
down your metabolic processes, somehow protected your brain. It’s a
decent theory. We know that coma is sometimes protective for braininjured patients, children who’ve drowned in cold water.”
“My brain wasn’t injured. I didn’t drown.”
I bled out. I couldn’t
breathe. And what explains the scars?
“No, you didn’t. You’re quite unique, Christopher, beyond the fact
that you’re still
you
.”
“You mean that I haven’t Changed. That’s our name for it. Your
brother’s. He’s my . . .” His throat moved in another dry swallow.
“My grandfather. Reverend Yeager?”
“Ah. Yes. I’ve been told that my brother and I have the same eyes.”
Isaac Hunter’s were, however, still kind. “I suppose this makes you
my great-nephew.”
“I guess.” He didn’t have a clue. “I was sent to find you.”
“I assumed as much. Was it Jessica?”
“In a way.”
Jess, with black mirrors for eyes, in the Land of the Dead.
And Peter was there, too, and Lena.
He was suddenly exhausted, the
events of everything that had happened finally catching up. “It’s kind
of a long story . . .” And so pointless now. Nathan was dead. Given his
dream, he bet Lena was, too.
What am I thinking? I don’t believe in magic or dreams.
And yet he’d
pulled . . . what? A Lazarus? That was crazy. He’d accept a weird coma
before coming back from the Land of the Dead.
“I don’t understand what there is for me to find here, or why
you’re so important,” he said. “Yeager’s my grandfather. That’s not
news. So, fine, you’re his brother, and you’re either Amish or lead
some breakaway sect. But so what?”
“Well, I agree,” Hunter said. “If that were the only story or all
there was to discover.”
“What more is there?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much you know about Simon Yeager,” Hunter said,
“and Penny Ernst.”
Somewhere west of Rule and four days after the ants—two weeks after
the avalanche—Wolf led them down a single, unmarked, dead-end
rut along an isolated and very large lake nestled in the cup of broad,
rolling, forested moraines. From the lack of houses ringing the shore
and that rut, Alex thought the lake might be privately owned, a secret
getaway. About two miles in, she spotted a boathouse and lone stake
dock, with a single slip, perched on the water’s edge down a steep hill
to her right. On a high hill to her left and directly across from the lake
was a rough-hewn, two-story house, with a large, chalet-style picture
window on the left and a partially completed wraparound porch, still
on bricks and cinderblock, running off the front door and curling
around to the right. The house was surrounded on three sides by tall
stands of densely packed evergreens and hardwood—
And the dusky, flayed, and gutted carcasses of four wolves, dangling like totems.
All the blood drained from her head. The last time she’d seen anything like this was just outside the Zone, guarding the way to Wolf ’s
feeding grounds and that arena with its grisly pyramids of decaying
human skulls. Purple tongue jutting in a stiff apostrophe, one wolf
dangled from a thick iron hook punched through its chest. The body
hung to the right of the front door, where you might put up a cheery
flowered banner:
Welcome, Friends!
To the extreme left, a second
wolf, its eyeless sockets wide with eternal wonder, was suspended
thirty feet up a weathered spruce. Alongside, a very large, navy blue
Cordura stuff sack hung from a carabiner clipped to red paraline tied
off around the trunk of a smaller adjacent tree.
A bear bag.
She watched as the fingers of a light westerly breeze
snatched the naked wolf and gave it a playful twirl. The paraline
let out a soft
squee
. Her lips were numbing, as was her brain. From
the aroma of chilled people-steak, she understood that the sack was
where the Changed stored their kills
.
The idea that she’d come all
this way only to be hacked up for storage in the equivalent of a deep
freeze . . . Her throat began to clench, and she’d clapped both hands
to her mouth, unsure if she would vomit or scream or both.
The front door opened then. A second later, a bull-necked boy
lumbered out, trailed by another Changed: honey-blonde, blue-eyed.
The shock of recognition was physical, a splash of icy water. The
hair wreathing the girl’s haggard features was what Alex recalled
from a picture in yet another lake house. The square jaw, the nose
were right. Willowy before, the girl was much thinner now. Well,
mostly thin. Alex wasn’t really certain until the girl turned and Alex
saw her in profile.
Then everything clicked into place: that green medic’s pack, the
lengths to which Wolf had gone to save and protect her, his scent of
lilacs and honeysuckle:
safe
and
family
. Regardless of
how
he might
feel about her, she now understood
why
Wolf needed her, too. She
finally
got
what was going on.
Penny Ernst—Peter’s sister—was pregnant.