Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  I hear that. Greg pulled in a breath. Oh God, please make this work.

  Then he stopped thinking and moved. Dashing up the steps, Greg lobbed the boot in an awkward throw and then immediately dodged right. The shotgun roared at the same instant, following the trajectory of his boot. Through the ringing, he heard Pru squeeze off a shot as Greg hit the stone floor in a hard thump. The shotgun thundered to life again. This time, the pew just above his head exploded in a mushroom cloud of wood splinters. Ducking, Greg threw up a hand to protect his head and neck as he scuttled as fast as he could down the side aisle. Behind, he caught the sharp crack-crack-crack, the Ruger’s raps growing closer and louder as Pru stormed up the steps. Wheeling to his left, still hunched over, Greg dashed the cramped length of the pew, bare feet slapping stone, the center aisle dead ahead.

  At that moment, the bell cut out. The others are in. They’re safe. He felt a sting in his throat, gulped it back. Tori’s safe.

  From the altar to his left, he heard something shrill—a shout, a scream?—and then he was lifting onto the balls of his feet, pivoting, thighs tensing, his Bushmaster swinging clear of the pew, thinking, Aim up.

  But he never had a chance to take the shot.

  51

  In the sudden thrumming silence, Greg saw Pru looming over the writhing body of a boy. When he’d been shot—a belly wound from the way the Changed was curled in a comma—the boy had tried rolling away, because once Greg squirted past, the Changed needed to move, fast, or end up full of holes. But the kid couldn’t move fast or far enough to outrun Pru’s bullets, and Greg saw why.

  A forked splinter of bone jutted from a juicy rip in the boy’s thigh. Now that Greg was standing, he saw the trail of blood smeared over the sanctuary’s floor and up the altar platform’s steps. The altar carpet was purple and sodden. Dragged himself all the way. Turning, Greg followed the blood trail’s wavering path and realized that the boy must’ve broken his leg outside the sanctuary. Maybe in the vestibule, or even the breezeway. But how? That kid would’ve had to fall pretty far.

  Through the sanctuary’s thick double doors, he could hear a growing gabble and maybe … was that a scream? Couldn’t tell. Way back, he’d read that you lost some of your hearing if you shot at a range and didn’t wear gear. Keep this up, he’d be deaf by the time he was twenty. His ears still buzzed so badly he couldn’t tell or tease apart the muted sounds seeping through the doors. No gunshots, though, so that was good. As desperately as he wanted to burst through those doors and find Tori, he knew he ought to wait. No rush now. The girls were safe.

  We did it. So why didn’t he feel good about that? It was the Changed boy, the screw of his face, the way he writhed. Dying hard, Kincaid would say. Not right to feel good about that. He started back for Pru. “You okay?” He thought he said it too loudly.

  “Yeah. Can’t say the same for our buddy.” Pru toed a shotgun away from the boy’s spidering fingers. “Can’t decide whether to finish him or let him bleed to death.” He paused. “Dude’s pretty messed up. Carpet’s ruined. So’s the altar cloth.”

  Greg picked out splashes of blood on the wood, even the walls just below the cross. If you didn’t know better, you’d think Jesus’s ghost was up there, dripping. He stared down at the boy. Seventeen, eighteen, he guessed, greasy hair down past his shoulders and a ton of yellow pus balloons and zit scars to boot. Someone had rearranged his nose, too, and recently. The boy’s skin was the color of moldy cheese, and his eyes, already glazing, were sunk deep in sockets rimmed with fading yellowish bruises. This Changed was starving to death, just like them.

  Stooping, he reached for the shotgun—and froze. He must also have … what … gasped? Cried out? He didn’t know, but Pru said, sharply, “What? Greg?”

  No. Maybe his heart had stopped somewhere along the way. He thought that must be it, because he felt the muscle seize in his chest and his center go cold and still and black. For a crazy instant, he thought, This will be what it’s like when I’m dead. He watched his hand float toward the weapon; saw his fingers—small, so distant—wrap themselves around the shotgun’s walnut stock, then creep over the ridges and swirls of those intricate curlicues of carved flowers and vines as a blind boy reads Braille.

  “Oh Jesus,” Pru said. Then: “Greg, look at me, man. This doesn’t mean anything—”

  But he was on his feet, backtracking a stumbling step and then another, and now he’d gotten himself turned around and had begun to run, the Changed’s blood sticky against his bare feet, and then the sanctuary’s double doors were suddenly swinging wide, as if in a bellow, because now the voices all crashed through in a huge wave that the men rode, spilling into the sanctuary. The faces blurred—all black mouths, black eyes—and now hands were floating to meet him like exotic sea life on an incoming tide.

  Of them all, he recognized only three people in those first few seconds: Sarah, hair wild, face smeared with blood; Yeager, somehow pathetic in a red-checked flannel he hadn’t managed to button correctly; and Kincaid, who crowded through, with his arms out to grab him, hold him back, spare him for one more second: “No, son. Don’t look, don’t look, son, don’t …”

  “Nooo! Tori? Tori?” Greg wailed as Kincaid wrapped him up, and then there were more hands and other men bearing him to the cold stone as Greg thrashed. “No no no!”

  And in all of that, there was one thing more: the moment doddering old Henry stumped up the altar to stare down at the Changed boy, who was, miraculously, still alive.

  “Jesus Lord,” Henry piped, his high voice cutting above the gabble. “It’s Ben Stiemke.”

  52

  “What?” At first, Greg wasn’t sure the voice, so dead and flat, was his. Still huddled in the circle of Kincaid’s arms on cold, blood-smeared stone, Greg felt eight years old again, a little boy waiting for the adults to make everything all right, and he had never missed his father quite so much. “Stiemke? Like on the Council?”

  “Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Pru said, his rifle still trained on the dying boy. “I thought all the kids from Rule were dead.”

  “Oh Lord,” Kincaid groaned in an undertone. His face was ashen. “You sons of bitches, you did it. You really did it.”

  “Did what?” Greg asked as Sarah staggered toward them through the crowd. Her right pant leg was sodden, and tears had eaten tracks through the blood caked on her cheeks. “Doc, what are you talking about?”

  Before Kincaid could respond, Henry said, in his clear bugle, “Yup, that’s Ben, all right. Known him since he was a little guy, oh … yay high.” Henry patted the air down around his knees. “Recognize him anywhere on account of that bad case of the acne.” Henry looked down the aisle toward the Council members, who’d worked their way through the swell of people crowding into the sanctuary. Greg saw that none of the Council wore their robes, and while Yeager was in the lead, only Ernst, broad-chested and very tall, with a still-substantial gut in spite of rationing, retained even a vestige of authority. Stiemke, a withered little man, blind in one eye, only cringed alongside Ernst. Greg couldn’t decide if Stiemke was in shock or trying to hide.

  “Mr. Stiemke?” Henry called. “This is your grandson, isn’t it?”

  Yeager spoke for the quailing Stiemke. “Yes, that’s Ben.” Yeager’s tone was even enough, but his skin was bleached so white his bald head looked like a cue ball. Without his robes, Yeager looked like a homeless person in mismatched socks, sagging trousers, and that red-checked flannel. Yeager’s eyes, usually so bird-bright with calculation, only looked furtive and a little frightened, like those of a mouse that can’t decide if running will only make the cat spring faster. “Obviously, Ben got away, a fact of which we were unaware.”

  “Obviously? Got away? Unaware?” Rifle held high, Jarvis shouldered his way past the others to stand in the center aisle. Any resemblance to a turkey was gone. Jarvis looked more like a buzzard. “You run this place for decades, make all the decisions. You tell us, grown men, to follow orders f
rom kids”—Jarvis jerked his head down at Greg—“but we do it because we are loyal and God-fearing, and now you say you didn’t know this boy had gotten away?”

  Peter. The realization broke over Greg in a kind of icy wash. He said they rounded up all the Changed and shot them; that no one got away. Greg’s eyes drifted to the dying boy. So Peter would’ve known Ben wasn’t dead.

  “Where I was from, before Rule? Those kids always came back,” someone in the crowd said. Murmurs of assent rippled through the rest of the men, and now Greg saw more than a few women had filtered in, too, armed with baseball bats, shotguns, like a village mob from an old black-and-white monster movie. He spotted one woman—Travers?—her hair a gray fury, clutching a Warren hoe, its blade tapering to a wicked point. “Lot of ’em hunted in packs. It was one of the reasons you said we’d be safer here, ’cause all your kids were dead.”

  “So how that little monster’s alive in the first place is what I want to know.” It was Travers, the stormy woman with the hoe, which she now shook at Stiemke. “What’d you do, only kill kids like my Lee? Because we’re not important enough? Did you spare this monster because he’s yours?”

  “Hell with that,” someone else rumbled. “How many others like that one are there? Because if one kid got away—”

  “Or they let him get away!” another person shouted.

  “There got to be others.” Travers brandished her hoe like a spear. “So where are they?”

  “Where the hell do you think?” Jarvis aimed a look of black thunder at Stiemke. “They’ve been out there all this time, maybe even close by. But why? You said you were doing God’s work, taking our grandkids, ending their torment. What did you do, you and that son of a bitch, Peter, and Chris …”

  “My grandson knew nothing about this,” Yeager said, and Greg thought from his tone that this was the truth. Yet Ernst remained silent, not a flicker of emotion on his bullish features.

  But Peter knew. Greg saw Sarah study Ernst’s face, then drop her eyes as the first fingers of scarlet crept up her neck. A tear splashed onto a cheek, which she knuckled away. Greg gave her free hand a small squeeze, but she didn’t look up or acknowledge him in any way. Sarah knows it now, too. Peter was in on it all along. Letting some of the Changed get away might even have been his idea. Peter was the one who’d told each patrol where to go, and when. Because he knew where the Changed were most likely to be at any given time?

  And Jarvis had said maybe even close by … Changed, in the Zone? Of course. Now that someone had finally said it, this made perfect sense.

  “So did Chris find out?” Travers, the woman with the hoe, shouted. “Is that why you got rid of him, said he organized an ambush when he didn’t?”

  “Chris ran.” Yeager said the words like a curse. “He betrayed us.”

  “Like you betrayed us?” Until the words hung in the air, Greg hadn’t known they were on his tongue. He tottered to his feet. “You didn’t give Chris a choice. He denied it, but you’d already decided. No matter what he said, you’d have sent him to the prison house.”

  “Because he defied me.” Yeager seemed to be getting some of his old fire back. His coal-black eyes shifted to Jarvis. “You owe Rule your life. Don’t dare to judge—”

  “Shut up. Let’s judge you for a change.” Jarvis jabbed a finger into Yeager’s chest, hard enough to rock the old man back a stumbling step. “You lied. I don’t know how many of our grandkids you let go, but that abomination on the altar is a councilman’s grandson. You had to know. Does that mean our grandchildren are still alive? Why would you do that?”

  “So what are we going to do about it now?” Travers’s wrinkled face was the color of a prune. She jabbed the point of her hoe at Ben. “What are we going to do with that?”

  Uh-oh. Greg rifled a warning look to Pru. The other boy gave a small nod and took a step back from Ben Stiemke, who had gone still and watchful, his lips frothy with blood bubbles.

  “Leave him be,” Stiemke wheezed. His face was contorted, his blind left eye as milky as a white marble. His remaining eye, with its faded gray iris, was runny, the lower lid sagging like melted candle wax to reveal pale pink flesh. “Let the poor boy die in peace.”

  “Peace?” The way Travers’s hands were wrapped around the hoe’s wooden handle reminded Greg of the fighting sticks Naruto used in Ultimate Ninja Storm. “Boy? It’s an abomination!” she shrieked, and darted at Stiemke. With a sudden, violent thrust, she whipped around the blunt handle of the hoe like a bat. There was a muted thuck. Stiemke’s head snapped back so quickly it was a wonder his neck didn’t break. A fan of blood unfurled as Stiemke let out a gargled ugh and dropped to the stone floor.

  “No!” Yeager squawked, at the same moment that Kincaid bawled, “My God, what are you doing?”

  “Doc, no!” Greg grabbed Kincaid’s arm as the doctor started forward. “Don’t.”

  “Listen to the kid. Stay out of this, Kincaid,” Jarvis warned.

  “Peace? I’ll showing you fucking peace!” Travers aimed a kick at Stiemke, who was on his belly, moaning, trying to eel away. This time, the crunch and crack as Stiemke’s nose shattered and his neck kinked too far to the right weren’t muted. Blood burst over Stiemke’s mouth and chin, but his neck did not roll back. It stayed exactly where it was, the ear neatly cupped over the hump of Stiemke’s left shoulder. Stiemke’s body went as limp and flaccid as a drowned worm.

  For a moment, there was that kind of stunned, surprised, soundless hiccup Greg knew well from years of school lunches and dropped cafeteria trays, when everyone was craning a look, getting ready to burst into laughter and shouts of duuude!

  She killed him. Greg couldn’t tear his gaze from the buggy white marble of Stiemke’s dead eye. He felt his legs try to turn to water. She broke his neck, she—

  Pulling away from Greg’s suddenly boneless fingers, Kincaid squatted alongside Stiemke. He put a finger under Stiemke’s ear, then raised his stricken face to the woman. “Do you realize what you’ve done? What you’re doing? You think this will make things right? Killing each other isn’t the way to solve this!”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s a goddamned good start.” Travers hawked out a rope of spit. Half splashed Kincaid’s hand; the rest splatted Stiemke’s glassy cheek to slither in a snot-trail onto the old man’s lips.

  That seemed to trigger something, as if the crowd was a coiled spring under more pressure than it could bear. In the next instant, what seemed like a solid shock wave of screaming people surged forward, some stampeding for the altar, others moving to surround Yeager and the rest of the Council. Greg felt hands plant themselves on his chest as Jarvis gave a mighty shove. “Out of my way, boy, outta my way!” Jarvis bellowed as Greg staggered back. “I’m done! You hear me? From now on, you’re taking orders from me, boy, from me!”

  Greg couldn’t have answered if he wanted to. Dazed, he saw Travers and that fury of gray hair lead the charge to the altar as Pru darted left and out of the way. Mouth dropping wide in alarm, Henry crossed his hands in a warding-off gesture. “Wait, wait! I didn’t do nothing, I’m on your side,” he piped. “I’m—”

  The charging mob simply plowed the little man under. On the carpet, in front of the blasted altar, Ben Stiemke managed to raise an arm so awash with blood that it seemed to be drizzling red paint. With a screech that was also a growl, a rising note feral and terrible in its rage, Travers heaved the hoe in a huge, sweeping arc. The blade whickered.

  Ben wailed a single piercing shriek as the blade cut three of his fingers away, cleaving them from his hand like sausages. The hoe’s point buried itself in his chest with a loud and hollow sound like an ax biting wood. Somehow, Ben managed to grab the handle before Travers could yank it free, and hung on, grimly, acne-pitted face contorted in fresh pain and new fear. Blood sheeted from his ruined hand.

  “Son of a—” Unable to retrieve her hoe, Travers let out another of her monstrous ululating howls. Darting forward, Jarvis raised his rifle and pistoned his arm
s. The butt slammed into Ben’s abdomen and then Jarvis put his weight into it, grinding down. A fountain of blood gurgled from the boy’s mouth in a soundless scream. His hands went slack while Travers planted her boot and pulled the hoe free with a brisk snap of bone.

  The crowd closed ranks. Gargling, choking to death on his own blood, Ben Stiemke was lost under a heaving, thrashing sea of backs and legs, rifles and fists, those bats, a rake, that hoe. In the cavernous stone church, the clamor built and fed on itself, mushrooming into an explosion of inarticulate shouts and grunts and snarls. It was like watching ants boil out of a mound to swarm a tiny, wounded animal. Somehow it did not surprise Greg at all to see Aidan and Lucian and Sam in the thick of it. Fresh ruby tears mingled with those of blue ink spilling down Aidan’s cheeks. Not to be outdone, Lucian dragged that long and obscenely pink tongue over Aidan’s face, licking away the blood. Laughing, the two high-fived.

  At that moment, Greg understood that this was like the morning his world broke apart: when his parents sat him down to say they were divorcing, and he’d spat something awful before bolting away from his father, who called after him, Son, son, wait, please. You know I’ll always love you. And what he’d said in return, something so hateful it hurt to even think it: Fuck you, fuck love! After, still fuming, he’d glanced through his bedroom window—just in time to see his dad suddenly slump and their ancient riding mower mutter on, narrowly missing his mother. Not that this mattered, because she was already stone-dead. The old mower kept on, eating its way over the lawn and plowing under a bed of late mums before cratering their shed.

  This was like that: a disaster in progress, unstoppable, perhaps inevitable.

  There was a wild triumphant roar. On the altar platform, a tidal surge of hands and arms hoisted Ben Stiemke into the air. The boy’s blood rained onto the stone steps. Ben’s right socket was a blast crater of crimson eye jelly. Greg and the others cringed back as the mob rampaged down the center aisle, pausing only to scoop up Stiemke’s body, too.