Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (4 page)

Unless it doesn’t.
The water had dropped to just below her knees
but no further.
Must be filling almost as fast from somewhere else.
The
rope had swayed left, and there it stayed, drawn to the doomed course
that the water charted, their weight fixed to the end of a gigantic
pendulum. If the rope snapped, or Wolf couldn’t hang on—

I should let go.
An insane thought, but one that, under the circumstances, had all the bald certainty of an irrefutable logic.
I’m too much
for him. I’ll get us both killed.

A jolt. She felt the quiver down her arm and into her teeth. Above,
she saw Wolf ’s head jerk and then his left foot slide up the rock wall.
Another jolt, and now she could see, quite distinctly, that crude harness tighten as he managed another half step, jamming his right boot
against a lip of protruding rock that she could’ve
sworn
had been a
good four inches above him only a second before. She looked down at
her legs. Was it her imagination, or had the water fallen, just a little?
They’re trying to pull him up.
But if this was the best they could do, it
wouldn’t be nearly enough. Could she move her legs, drag one out?
Anything would help.
Come on, come on.
Her thighs tensed, battling
the clutch of all that water. As if sensing what she meant to do, Wolf
tightened his grip around her wrist and
pulled
, working to lift her just
a little higher—

The earth suddenly
heaved.
She could feel the pressure of it. In
the next moment, there was a crack and then a
BOOM
, like thunder.
Debris skittered over the rocks; to her right, jagged seams suddenly
splayed. Someone screamed, and then a boy, arms and legs spread
in a star, hurtled past in a sudden hail of stone. He hit the water not
twenty feet away, although she couldn’t hear the splash over the roar.
The boy bobbed to the surface, and then one hand appeared to claw
at air. His jaw unhinged, maybe to scream, but whatever sound might
have emerged was lost as a gush of water flooded down the boy’s
throat. The claw-hand tightened to an agonized fist. His bulging eyes
rolled back to the whites. A moment later, the boy was jerked under
and away.

There was a sudden lurch. The tension in her screaming shoulder
eased a smidge, and she thought,
Oh hell.
She looked back up, then
gasped. Wolf ’s face was a mask of blood.
Must’ve been hit by a rock.
She saw him give his head a groggy shake. His arms were shuddering
now, uncontrollably, his muscles nearing their breaking point.

He’s going to lose it.
Instead of the panic she expected, the realization brought a certain calm. Monster or not, he was risking his neck
to save her. So the math was simple, the equation neat. If she wanted
to live, there really was only one way.

Yes.
“Come on, come on,” she chanted. Her teeth clamped
together; she felt her belly tighten, her neck muscles cord with the
effort. You really didn’t appreciate how
thick
, how
powerful
water was
until you had to fight it. To Alex, it felt like gigantic hands were cupping each heavy heel, but either she was winning or the water level
was
dropping. Same diff. “Come on, come—”

Both boots popped free so quickly her burning thighs tried to
relax, send her legs pistoning down. Gasping, aware that she was
truly swaying now and free of the water, she caught herself just in
time. For a moment, she simply dangled, her shoulder coming apart
in Wolf ’s grasp, the water surging only inches away and ready to grab
her again, take her down for good.

Then Wolf tensed, his fingers so tight it felt as if her wristbones
were being ground to dust. She began to move by minute degrees,
see-sawing back and forth: first a few inches and then a few more
as he tried swinging her closer to the rock wall so she could make a
grab. The arc of her travel lengthened, her body nothing more than
a sodden little yo-yo depending from a very short string. Toward the
juddering wall, then back, then closer—those crags first ten and then
only five feet away, but still too far for even a very determined, very
desperate person to have a hope in hell—then back, and now one
more time . . .

Now!
her brain screamed.
Do it now, do it now, do it now now now!
Her left hand made a grab. Rock chewed her fingers. She clawed,
wildly, but then physics—that
bitch
—took over. Her swing’s momentum reversed, carrying her away.
“
Shit! Shit
, god—” A lurch and the words dried up on her tongue
as Wolf ’s fingers slipped, his muscles shivered, and that greedy water
drew closer—so close.
No, no, don’t lose it, Wolf ! Don’t lose it now, just a
few more seconds
. . . And then she was sailing back, and she could tell
from the frantic twist of Wolf ’s fingers—slick with blood and water
and sweat—that he wouldn’t be able to hold on for another go. This
was it. She felt the air whisking through her hair, whiffling past her
ears. The rock wall suddenly loomed, but she’d picked her spot: at
her ten o’clock, a slight curve of shadow, an inverted grin of stone.
At the last second, just before she butted the wall, her hand shot out,
fingers hooked. She grabbed that stone lip, felt a ridge of rock slot
beneath her knuckles—
Wolf must’ve felt the moment she connected, because his elbow
suddenly kinked and then he was leaning in, shifting his weight, trying not to let go or pull her off. Anyone looking would’ve sworn she
and Wolf were engaged in a weird variation of arm wrestling. Yet, at
that moment, on the rock, they were a single unit, a team bent to one
purpose. Jamming her knees against sharp stone, Alex clung to the
rock with both legs and her left hand like a three-legged fly.
“Get them to pull us up, Wolf,” she croaked, not knowing if he
would understand speech, and beyond caring. The earth was groaning, fatiguing fast in a swoon that might still take them all down, and
she knew: they weren’t close to being safe yet.
“Hurry
.
”
What?
Startled, Greg aimed a look at the rough brick floor. He
could’ve sworn the bricks moved.
Unless I’m going crazy.
The stable
was so cold their breaths plumed, but Greg still felt sudden anxious
sweat on his upper lip. Another flashing stab of light skewered his
eyes as his sledgehammer of a headache pounded.
Please, God, please.
I can’t be losing it. Not now.
What convinced him that he was still semi-sane was when he saw
Daisy, his golden retriever, scramble to her feet and give a sharp yap
of alarm. So, he knew she’d felt it. There was also something else—
a sound, something that was not Mick Jagger or a bluesy guitar or
Dale’s dribbling sobs: a faint, faraway, hollow
whump.
That was real. I heard that. What the—
Greg tossed a glance up to
Pru, who stood at his right elbow, a wrinkle of worry between his
eyebrows. At seventeen, Pru was two years older and one of the biggest kids Greg had ever seen: six foot six, square-jawed, and broad, the
kind of bullnecked hulk a high school football coach would sell his
grandmother’s soul for. Pru was also the only boy Greg considered
close to a friend these days, now that Peter and Chris were gone.
Pru
heard that, too. Could it be thunder?
Greg shot a quick glance out the
stable windows. No lightning; only the diffuse, muddy green glow
of the setting moon. Unless it was snowing near Lake Superior; that
might explain it. Thundersnow happened around the Great Lakes
all the time.
But the lake’s more than a hundred miles away. Even if it’s
thundering up there, we shouldn’t be able to hear it.
The floor shivered again in a bizarre undulation, the grimy, bloodspattered brick heaving as if a gigantic underground monster had
rolled over in its sleep. The vibration, much stronger than before,
went straight up Greg’s calves and into his thighs.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Did you guys feel that?”
They were ten feet from the edge, then five. At the lip, still clutching
Wolf ’s left wrist, she managed a last stumbling lurch, felt the rock
beneath her boots skate and shift. A red rocket of pain raced into her
right ankle. Pushing through it, she planted her boots and heaved
herself away from the ledge—
And into a nightmare.
The world was coming apart at the seams. The roar of the earth
was huge, a grating bellow counterpointed with the sharp pops and
squeals of overstressed rock. Jagged fissures scored the snow; a clutch
of trees to her left weren’t swaying but
jolting
back and forth. The
crowns of several trees had snapped, leaving trunks that were little
more than ruined splinters. There’d been fresh snow the night before,
but the brutal cold had solidified the layers beneath. With every shudder of the earth, this more rigid, hard-packed ice layer was cracking
and shifting into unstable slabs.
God, isn’t this how avalanches start?
She watched a jagged chunk,
this one as large as a kiddie sled, jitter down the rise.
Got to get off the
hill before it collapses.
A brief, sweeping glance. The moon was going down, the light
no longer neon green but murky and so bad that the others—six
Changed in all, including Wolf—were only slate-gray, boy-shaped silhouettes: parka hoods cinched down tight, their faces ghostly ovals.
The five who’d pulled them up were jittering like cold butter hissing
on a hot skillet. Their fear was a red fizz in her nose. Wolf was having
as hard a time keeping to his feet as she, and he’d dropped her wrist
to fumble with the rope harness. The other boys were staggering,
working at the hopeless task of gathering up rope, trying to corral
their gear. One Changed, though, snagged her attention because he
smelled . . . familiar. Who
was
that? She lifted her nose, pulled in air.
There, floundering toward them from the end of the conga line that
had hauled her and Wolf to safety: a tall, slope-shouldered kid, his
features now pulling together out of the gloom.
And she thought,
No, no, it can’t be
.

She’d waffled over this all the way up the tunnel: whether to make a
break for it if she managed to reach the top, or stay. Her ankle was
messed up, but she was managing. From Kincaid and all her hiking
experience, she knew how to splint it, if needed. But the fact that she
was soaking wet was a much bigger problem. Her sodden pants were
already stiffening, and she was trembling, getting hypothermic. What
she needed was to get warm, which meant a fire, a change of clothes,
something hot to drink. Wet, with no supplies and nothing to keep
her alive except Leopard’s knife and the Glock 19, she might as well
have let go of that rope and saved Wolf the trouble of rescuing her
from the tunnel. She would probably die if she ran now.

On the other hand, Wolf had come back. He wanted her. Or
maybe . . .
needed
her? So, go with him? Bide her time? God, it would
be Rule all over again, and probably just as stupid, but she’d nearly
talked herself into it.

Until now, this moment, because heading toward them was a boy
she recognized by sight and scent: Ben Stiemke.
Acne.
He’d been part of Wolf ’s original gang, before Spider and
Leopard took over. The fact that Acne was here, on the surface, actually frightened her just as much as this nightmare. But there was no
mistake. Acne had made it out of the mine. Had he left before the
attack, the explosions? Maybe slipped out when everyone else was in
the chow line because he’d smelled Wolf earlier in the day, just as she
and Spider and Leopard had? She would never know. The important
thing was that Acne was with Wolf now. That meant some of the
others—Spider, Slash—might have gotten out, too.
That decided her. She was not going through this again.
Her eyes clicked to the quivering snow. To her left, maybe fifty
feet away, she spotted a scatter of cross-country skis and poles—and
rifles. One, lying near a pair of skis staked in the snow, caught her eye:
scoped, a bolt-action with a carry strap. She darted left, digging in
with her aching right ankle and launching herself toward the weapon.
She saw Wolf start; saw the others trying to get at her; spotted a kid
with very long dreads, the tallest of the six, suddenly reaching for her;
felt his fingers whisk her hair. . . .
“No!” she gasped, twisting, dancing out of the way. The sudden
twist sent a spike of red pain from her ankle to her kneecap, bad
enough that tears started. She clamped back on the shriek that tried
bubbling past her teeth.
Keep going, come on, it’s not that far.
Snowy
slabs slipped and rocked beneath her boots like dinner plates on ice;
a sudden skid to the right and she nearly lost her footing, her right
boot kicking free. Her left jammed down hard, driving into snow
that grabbed at her calf, but then she was hopping free, nearly there,
thirty feet, twenty-five . . .
shuck a round into the chamber
. . . no more
than fifteen feet now . . .
throw the bolt, swing up on an arc, because
they’re moving, they’re behind you.
This was something she’d practiced
with her dad, hitting a moving target with the Glock:
Lead, honey,
and mount the gun. Don’t duck down.
The earth shivered. She could see the skis waggling back and
forth. The rifle began to scoot and skip. But she was close now; it
was almost over; she could do this. The rifle was to her left, two
feet away. And if Wolf got to a weapon or pulled a pistol? Could
she shoot him? After all this? It would be like sticking a gun into
Chris’s face. She didn’t want to have to make that decision.
She slid the last foot—and then felt the snow tremble. There was
a monstrous jolt, a stunning
whack
as something very big—another
cave, maybe—collapsed underground. The sensation was nearly
indescribable, but it was as if she were a glass on a white tablecloth
that a magician had tried to snatch away, only he’d muffed the trick.
The impact cut her legs out from under; she felt her knees buckle and
her feet leave the snow. With a yelp, she came down hard on her butt.
A white sunburst of pain lit up her spine. For a second, her consciousness dropped out in a stunned blank. She couldn’t move. Her chest
wouldn’t work. Electric shocks danced over her skin, tingled down to
her toes and fingers. Gagging, she finally managed a gulp of air and
then another. Rolling to her stomach, she dragged in air, shook the
spots from her vision.
All the boys were down. Most were crabbed on their stomachs,
digging in, hanging on, riding the earth like rodeo cowboys on bucking broncos. That kid with the dreads was lower than the rest, his fall
taking him closer to the edge of the rise and far away from her. A
lucky break. She watched him trying to clamber his way straight up.
For her? That was stupid, a mistake. He should move out of the fall
line and
then
up before the snow collapsed.
But that was when it dawned on her: the kid with the dreads
wasn’t coming for
her
. Wrong angle. Her eyes swept up again—and
then she saw where he was going.
Wolf was maybe fifty feet away, close to where they’d popped out
of the mine, and to her right. He was still flat on his back—but not
moving. God, was he unconscious? He’d lost a lot of blood. Maybe
it wasn’t the fall. Maybe he’d fainted. She almost shouted to him but
snatched that back before it could spring off her tongue.
Doesn’t matter. Let old Bob Marley there worry.
And, grimly:
At least this way, I don’t
have to decide whether to shoot him.
But she couldn’t set her feet. The earth was heaving, trying to
shake her off its skin. Panting, she pulled her left knee to her stomach,
got her hands planted, pushed up. The skis had toppled to the snow,
and the rifle—where was it? Her gaze snagged on a gray-green glint
of moonlight, just beyond a ski pole, reflected from the rifle’s scope.
Yes.
On hands and knees, she spidered for the weapon, fighting the
quaking earth, working her way around the skis. Stretching for the
rifle, she felt her fingertips brush the cold black steel of the barrel . . .
From somewhere behind her came a loud, lowing moan.
Her first thought:
Wolf ?
No, this wasn’t a natural sound at all. It
was too
deep
, as if something that lived only in the center of the earth
were coming awake. The sound was
big.
That was the ground. That was rock, breaking open.
She was afraid to
look back. The rifle was right in front of her. Another inch, she’d have
it and make a run for it, just keep going: traverse the hill, get out of
the fall line and out of danger, but get
away
.
But Wolf ’s unconscious. The whole rise is collapsing.
And so what?
It was her here-and-now brain, a voice firmly planted
in a world where there were blacks and whites, rights and wrongs.
Are
you
insane
? Forget him. He’s a monster, for God’s sake. Grab the rifle and
get out, get out
now
!
“Oh, shut up,” she said. As far as she was concerned, the world
to which that voice belonged had vanished after the Zap. Nothing
was black-and-white anymore. So she risked a look back—and felt a
scream gather in her throat.
Whatever it had been, the opening through which they’d popped
only minutes before wasn’t simply a hole anymore. The gap was widening by the second as the guts of the rise—and the entire mine—fell
away. What lay behind her was a sore, a black and insidious blight. It
was the mouth of a monster eating the earth, chewing its way to Wolf.
“Wake up! Wolf !” Twisting back toward the rifle, her hand shot
out—and grabbed a ski instead. Turning, she lunged back toward the
crater. “Wolf, wake up,
wake up
!”
She swam for him, eeling over the snow, panic giving her strength
as she fought the trembling earth. Beyond Wolf, maybe thirty feet
away, the hill was dissolving, the snow buckling and folding. The air
was misty with pulverized rock and ice that pecked her cheeks.
Meanwhile, that voice, the one that lived in the black-and-white
world, was babbling:
What are you doing, are you crazy, are you nuts?
Let his guys worry about him. Get off the rise, grab the gun, get off, get off,
get off !
“Wolf !” This time, she thought she saw his head move. She was
ten feet away now, no more.
Far enough.
Still on her stomach, she
jammed the toes of her boots into the snow and thrust the ski toward
him, stretching as far as she could. If she could get Wolf up, get him
to grab the ski, the principle ought to be the same as pulling someone
off thin ice. All she had to do was back up, pull him away from the
hole, give him a fighting chance.
And then I’m done; we’re even.
“Wolf, come on!” she shouted over
the clatter of rock and the boom of the earth. “Get up, wake
up
!”
What she got was a rumble—not in front of her but behind, where
she’d been.
What?
She shot a quick glance over her shoulder just in
time to see the snow beneath the rifle shudder. In the next instant,
the weapon skated away, riding the swell before sailing over the lip of
the rise to disappear. If she’d been there, she’d have gone with it. She
still might anyway.
She felt the ski jerk and looked back. Wolf was awake, on his belly,
and clinging to the ski. So strange, but she didn’t know how she truly
felt about the fact that she was trying to save his life—only that this
was what she
had
to do. It was illogical, but it was also right. “Come
on, Wolf, damn it! Move your ass!”
He began crabbing away from the hole, scuttling toward her, using
the ski as a guide and an anchor as she slithered back five feet, then
ten.
Just a few more feet, enough to give you a chance.
The entire rise was
quaking now; she felt the snow slipping and sliding in front of her, the
earth bucking against her stomach.
Then I let go, and I’m done, I’m—
In the next instant, the skin of the earth rose in an enormous
inhale. She felt it happen and thought,
Oh shit
. Against all reason, she
looked down the length of the ski, toward Wolf, this boy with Chris’s
face who had brought her to one hell, saved her from another. Their
gazes locked, and she saw her terror mirrored in his eyes, reflected in
his blood-caked face. “Wolf—” she began.
The earth suddenly collapsed. The giant exhaled, and she hurtled
down. The force, so hard and fast, was a fist that punched a gasping
scream from her chest. The snow just broke apart, shattering into
shards like thick, white glass. A second later, she felt herself beginning to slide sideways as the icy slab on which she sprawled followed
the lie of the land.
She began to move and pick up speed, the layer of snow to which
she clung shearing away. She lost the ski and then she was whirling,
the slab spinning like a top. A scream ripped from her mouth as the
slab hurtled for the edge of the rise. The snowfield was now only a
dim blur; behind, above, the hill was breaking up. She had no idea
where the others were, what had happened to Wolf; she just had time
to think,
No!
The side of the rise fell away with a thunderous roar, in a shuddering avalanche of snow and ice and rock.
And she went with it.