Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “Go on,” the small voice said. “Do what you have to.”

  “Okay,” Peter said again. The stump above the ankle was edged with clot, scanty shreds of raw muscle, and ratty gray tendon. Clamping his front teeth on a flap of loose skin, Peter gave a careful, experimental tug. There were an initial, slight resistance. He used his hands to help, stripping foot meat like barbecue from a rib. The skin gave with a soft riiippp, a sound that reminded him of his mother tearing his old cotton underpants into dust rags—and then Peter began to chew.

  The taste was indescribably vile, like rotting liver left to turn green. That taste was his life.

  “Now that,” said Jug Ears, “is so fucking gross, I cannot tell you.”

  21

  “I have something to tell you, honey. About that phone call?” Her dad slowly retracts his line, the reel going click-click-click as he jerks the rod up and down, up and down. Crappies love a jumping jig. “The one last night?”

  “Uh-huh?” Ellie’s not really listening. A light breeze, still chilly in early June, whispers through the down on her arms. The water’s so glassy there’s a whole other sky trapped underwater. She should be focused on her float, but her attention is on a male loon drifting along the far shore. When it tilts its head, she can see the red flash of its eyes. Lifting its neck, the loon wails, a spooky call—the sound of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and fishing with her dad—that always sends fingers creeping down Ellie’s spine.

  “Cold?” Her dad slips an arm around her shoulders. “Want my sweatshirt?”

  “No.” She snuggles. He smells of Dove soap and scorched sand, because Iraq never washes off. After his first deployment, he climbed into Grandpa Jack’s shower with all his clothes and gear on as she perched on the tub and Grandpa leaned, unsmiling, against the jamb. I washed everything before I left, her dad said, cranking the shower full blast. But watch this. The water gushed out clear and drained out muddy gray, which surprised her because Grandpa Jack did a newspaper story on the troops and her dad sent video of a sandstorm. The color of Iraq then was this really funky neon orange, not dead ash-gray. Two minutes after you take a shower, you’re dirty again, her daddy said, through spray. Stuff never comes out. (Grandpa Jack was pissed for days after, though: All that damn sand clogging my drains. But she caught him carefully scraping crusts of leftover sand into a small jar, like a souvenir.)

  “Just watching the loons,” she adds. She wishes her dad wouldn’t talk. This is the time she likes best: before a fish strikes. Once the bait’s taken, it’s as if something breaks, because what happens next is a matter of life and death. That fish’s life is over, just like that, and all because Ellie danced a jumping jig with a juicy waxworm on that particular morning when a crappie swam by and decided, Saaay, that looks pretty interesting.

  “Oh.” Her dad pauses. “Anyway, that phone call.”

  “Yeah?” From the brush on shore, the mom loon suddenly emerges, with two brown-black fluff balls. Ellie feels a jolt of excitement. The morning’s so still, the wind’s sigh so light, she can hear the chicks’ peeps and the mom’s soft hoots. “Look,” she whispers. “Babies!”

  “Uh-huh.” He squeezes her arm. “Honey, I need to tell you something important.”

  “Sure.” Her eyes are glued to the peeping chicks. The dad glides over as the mother slips into the water and the babies follow: plop-plop! “What?”

  “I have to leave again,” he says.

  For a second, the words just don’t sink in. Across the lake, the loon family is dodging around lily pads. Somewhere close she hears the plunk of a fish shattering the surface to snatch a bug. But inside everything has gone as dead and ashy as Iraqi sand.

  “What?” she says, sitting up fast, as if she’s the waxworm on the jig now. The adult loons jerk their heads, too, as if they’re just as startled by the news. “You just got back!”

  “Six months ago,” he says, his eyes on the water, jumping that jig as if his life depends on it. Her dad keeps his hair military-short, and a red flush creeps into the fish-belly skin behind his ears and at the base of his neck. “It was supposed to be a year, but they need me. One of the other handlers and his dog were … they’re out of commission.” The way he says it, she knows it means dead, but that’s a taboo subject, what her daddy calls bad juju. KIA is a jinx; say dead, it’s like stepping on a crack. Men and dogs don’t die; they’re out of commission. “Mina’s with another handler, but he’s rotating out, and I know her, so …”

  It’s not a she. I’m a she. That’s what Ellie wants to say. It’s a dumb dog. It is as if her dad and Grandpa Jack have decided she’s like this Mina: must be time to rotate Ellie to another handler.

  “When?” That’s not what she wants to say either, but fighting won’t help. She bounces her gaze from him to his water-twin. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Two weeks.” In the water, the twin dad turns her a look. “Got to square some things away, but we can …” His voice trails off. She can’t even imagine what he thought he could say to make things better.

  She doesn’t say okay. Or I hate you. Or every time you go, it’s like you die and I’m so scared I die, too. Besides, one is a fib. She has no interest in the loons now. Instead, she stares down at the little water-girl, trapped next to her water-dad, who says—

  “… much longer?”

  “Huh?” Ellie blinked away from the memory of that June morning and into the here and now of March. Stuffed with high clouds, the afternoon sky was the color of boiled egg white. As she looked up from the blue-black eye of her ice-fishing hole, she had to raise a hand against the glare. “What did you say?”

  “I said, how much longer?” Eli’s long eyelashes were feathered with frost. Flecks of ice clung to his scarf and dangled from a fraying watch cap, like Christmas ornaments. His cheeks were cranberry red. Cradling his rifle, he stamped his feet with an exaggerated shudder. “I’m freezing. How can you do that?” He chinned the rod in her naked right hand. “My fingers would fall off.”

  “That’s because you’re not moving around,” she said, returning her attention to the rod and gently playing it, up and down, up and down, jumping that jig. To be honest, her hand was turning icy, the nails bluing with cold. The few times she and Grandpa Jack ice-fished, he’d always started a fire on shore so she could warm up with hot cocoa and charred brats and blackened hot dogs. Her mouth watered at the memory. She would kill for a hot dog. With mustard and relish. Grilled onions.

  “You okay?” Eli’s eyebrows, honey-colored and delicate, pinched together.

  “Yeah.” She worked to stopper the sigh. Something her grandpa said drifted through: If wishes were fishes.… No good wishing for anything these days. You just ended up depressed or in tears, or both, and she’d be darned if she bawled in front of Eli. He was cute, and despite the fact that he was twelve, they hung together. (Jayden called them the Killer Es, which Ellie just didn’t get.) But Eli could also be kind of a goof. Like, sometimes she thought she ought to be guarding him. She tilted her head at two nearby holes where she’d lowered stringers. “Could you take those back? I have to break down the tip-ups, and since I’ve got, like, fifteen of those …”

  “Me?” Eli wasn’t fond of fish slime, and Ellie had had a very good afternoon: fourteen black crappies, all ten-inchers. “Well,” Eli said, twisting to look toward shore and their patient horses waiting beneath drooping boughs of tall hemlock. Nearby, a clutch of crows hopped over the snow, probably hoping for a nice steaming mound of fish guts, while a stern-looking, solitary gull perched on a thumb of icy rock. “I guess I can wait. You’ll need help with the auger.”

  Right, so then I carry all the fish and the tackle. On the other hand, she knew what Eli really wanted to avoid was storing the tackle. Well, avoiding the place that was near where they stored tackle. Even the horses hated that part of the woods. She wasn’t wild about it either, but at least she wasn’t such a girl.

  “Well,” she said, withdrawing her rod and
reaching, with studied casualness, to an inside parka pocket. Pulling out a plastic container, she popped the lid. In a bed of sawdust, warmed by her body heat, were thick white maggots, each about as long as the tip of her pinky. She delicately tweezed one fat boy from the wriggling mass. “Oh-kaaay,” she said, stabbing the maggot with the jig’s hook. It was really a waste; she’d already hooked one. But Eli needed a fire lit under his butt. “If you want to waaait and help me with the taaackle …”

  “God!” Eli’s lips, bright as cherries and almost too delicate for a boy, corkscrewed. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “Nom, nom.” Plucking out another waxworm, Ellie smacked her lips. “Taastee—”

  “Gah.” Eli did a mock heave, but he was also grinning. Sunny was what Grandpa Jack would’ve said. “Fine, you win. Just stop.” Eli reeled up a steel chain stringer and eight dripping black-spotted crappies, attached via snap hooks through their gills, from an ice hole. “Gah,” he said again, holding the flapping fish at arm’s length as Roc, a gray bullet of a mutt, bounded up with Mina on his heels. “My gloves always smell like fish,” Eli complained as the dogs pranced excited circles. “Roc always smells like fish. My saddle smells like sardines.”

  She bit back a snark about killer farts, although even she was tired of smoked crappie and bluegill. But a hot dog … “At least everyone’s eating.”

  “And you always smell like fish, too.” Eli dragged up the second stringer. “How much longer are you going to be, so I know when it’s time to get worried that you’ve been eaten?”

  “Oh, ha-ha. Maybe another hour, hour and a half.” It was just something to say. Since Alex had Mickey Mouse, Ellie hadn’t the foggiest what time it was. “Not too long. It’s still plenty light.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay with the tackle?”

  “Of course I’m okay. I’m always okay,” she muttered under her breath, but she called Mina to heel and tipped a cheery wave. The crows perked up as Eli neared shore, but when he passed to his horse without stopping, they lifted in a black cloud to scold him on his way.

  Only two tip-ups had anything: seven-inchers that she released. With Mina trotting alongside, she hooked a handle of an old plastic primer bucket she used for her tackle and headed over the ice to holes she’d drilled this morning waaay out there.

  This lake, which was very deep, was fed by a spring located somewhere off the western shore. That meant the water nearest the spring was much warmer and the lake never entirely froze. Instead, the ice sheet petered out in a ragged scallop of slushy ice from which she always kept a healthy distance. As she neared the far tip-up, she saw the orange flag standing upright and felt a burst of elation.

  “All right,” she said to the dog. “We got something.” Jogging the last little way, she dropped to her knees and worked at unhooking her line. As soon as she felt it—how light the line was—her excitement died. “Well, shoot.” Something had grabbed the bait and split. But then she saw how the monofilament line curled and realized there was no sinker at the end, no weight at all. The dripping line had snapped in two. She’d used monofilament on purpose; it had a lot more give and cushioned the set of the hook so the fish’s mouth wouldn’t tear.

  “Wow, that was one strong fish.” And big. Walleye liked deep water. So did pike. Lots of meat on those fish. “So maybe I should use braided line,” she said to Mina, who only licked water from her fingers. “And auger the holes a little wider if we’re going for the big boys.”

  Unclipping her knife, a stainless steel Leek, from a pants pocket, she deployed the blade with a practiced flick of her thumb. In a very small, dark closet of her mind, she wished she could show Tom and Alex what she knew how to do now. But she always wished that.

  You have to stop this. She used the Leek’s sharp point to pick out the knot of ruined line, then dumped the tip-up into her primer pail. For the past week, ever since Chris, she’d been thinking way too often about Tom and Alex, much more than was good for her.

  This is your home now, so just deal. She should think about things she could actually do something about, like how to catch more and bigger fish dreaming their slow winter dreams in deeper water under the thinner, weaker ice of the shelf. More holes meant more time keeping them clear with her axe, though. Crunching back toward shore, she worried the problem. Grandpa Jack used rubber mats from his old pickup for fish-hole covers. But finding a car might be tough. Isaac and Hannah and a bunch of other kids were once Amish and still kind of big into God. All the places they stayed were Amish, and Amish didn’t use cars. But maybe regular carpet or cut-up rug?

  “I should ask Jayden,” she said to Mina. “He’s like Tom. You know … a fixer-upperer? Like, remember that old truck Tom and I …”

  Stop. Clamping down on that memory, she thumbed away a fast, stinging tear. She had to cut it out, this dumb looping back to Tom and Alex, or her dad and Grandpa Jack. Her hand snuck to her neck and found a length of leather cord from which dangled a small wooden pendant. Hannah said the charm, some weird Amish or German magic thing, would protect her from evil or sad thoughts. Ha. It was just an upside-down peace sign. Dumb. Like it did any good for all the memories that kept slipping out of that dark closet. The ones of Tom always led to Alex and vice versa. Each came to the same end: with Tom, his face twisted in agony as the snow bloomed a violent rose-red under his leg; and Alex, her hands painted with his blood, screaming, You bastards, you bastards!

  Good-luck charms? Ha. Her fingers fell from the leather cord. She was total bad-luck juju. It was her fault Tom got shot. Tom said he was only trying to take care of his people and Alex saved me from the mountain and now look, because of me, probably they’re both—

  “Nooo.” She caught the moan with a cupped hand. Another fast tear chased down her cheek. Now she wished she’d kept Alex’s whistle. Dumb to give that away. A whistle was actually something you could use, not a stupid piece of wood with a dumb German doohickey. The whistle was Alex, too. Just like the letter from her mom. Placing a palm over her heart, Ellie felt the envelope crinkle in its Ziploc, folded in an inner pocket. She hadn’t been able to stop Harlan from stealing Alex’s parents. But I got your mom’s letter, Alex. I saved her for you.

  As, perhaps, Alex and Tom might save her? Not that Hannah or Jayden or Eli were so horrible, but Ellie just couldn’t shake the idea that things would never be right again until they were all back together. Which had led to the whistle. Giving Alex’s whistle to Tobe had been partly impulse, partly design. Tobe was so sick and scared about being left behind. She’d hoped the whistle—that Alex, she guessed—would cheer him up, make him strong the same way it made her feel both better and really sad at the same time. You’ll give it back when you get well, she’d said.

  But in the back of her mind, a place she didn’t visit often because it hurt too much, she’d also nursed another idea. The night before Harlan and Marjorie and Brett, Tom and Alex had talked about Rule. She remembered the rustle of maps and Tom’s voice. She’d tried going there after Harlan, only she’d gotten so lost. It was just luck that Jayden found her. So, maybe, when the boy from Rule came and took Tobe to get better, someone would find the whistle and then show Alex. (Why anyone would, she didn’t know. It was stupid. But it was something, like a message in a bottle.) Then Alex would know where to find her, and she’d tell Tom—because, of course, Alex would’ve saved him—and they would come for her … just like that.

  If Tom was really okay, too. If he was still alive. If he wasn’t like poor Chris, the boy from Rule who had only tried to help.

  Until Hannah had gone and done what she’d done and couldn’t take it back.

  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 t
hen 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.