Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “You can’t always cheat death, Chris.”

  Yeah, but there’s a time for everything, even death. Then he thought, Get out of my head, Jess. Aloud, he said, “Let’s exclude the kids who Changed, okay? What about the others, the ones who were just plain sick? Why not accept help? Hannah, do the math. At this rate, by the end of the year, there won’t be any of you left.”

  “Is that why you came, Chris?” Her voice was cold. “To convince us to go back with you?”

  “Maybe. In the beginning.”

  “What about now?”

  “Beats me.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know. I think there’s a better way than simply giving up and accepting, all right?”

  “You want to fight.”

  “Of course I want to fight. Life may not be great, but it beats dying. I just don’t know how to change things in Rule, or if I even can.”

  “Is that where you want to go? Back to Rule?”

  “I don’t know.” If his grandfather had anything to say about it, he’d be dead or in the prison house before he had a chance to do anything. “This whole thing about Isaac? It was a setup. I was supposed to find out about Jess and Simon and Yeager. I was supposed to figure out about the Zone.” And Peter. “I see it’s wrong. But I also understand.”

  “You understand?”

  “Yes, I really do see both sides,” he said, and thought, Chris on the right, Chris on the left. Eeny-meeny … “Not everything about Rule is bad. Like, take Ellie: You seriously believe an eight-year-old girl isn’t better off someplace where she can be protected? Or that she even has the ability to make that choice? What if she was seven? Or four? How young is too young to know better?”

  “You’ve got a point?”

  “Yes. You have a cutoff where it’s no longer a kid’s choice. But how did you get there, Hannah? What makes you think you’re right?”

  Hannah threw up her hands. “Fine. We’ll never agree. You are so like Peter, wanting to reduce all of life and death to cutoffs and percentages, when to step in, when not to.”

  Of all the things she could’ve said, this wasn’t it. “Wait a minute,” he said as she stood. “What do you mean? How well did you know Peter?”

  “Well enough.” She was already turning away. “I really don’t want to talk about this right now, Chris.”

  “But what if I do? What if I need to? Hannah.” He had to snatch back the impulse to grab her wrist. “Please. Please don’t go. Please … what are you talking about?”

  He saw the warring emotions chase over her face, and the moment she made her decision. “I’m talking about the accident,” she said.

  “Accident?” he said. “What accident?”

  “You’re not going to like it, Chris. You think you’ve found out all there is to discover about Peter? About Simon?” She showed a brittle smile. “Believe me, those waters run deep.”

  “What accident?” he said again.

  “The accident two years ago,” she said. “When Penny killed a girl.”

  59

  “Wait. Just … just hold on.” Gulping air, Alex eyed a splashy tangle of guts and one tiny paw with its broken nib of bone. Squashed bunny didn’t bother her. What ticked her off was that in the last two days since arriving at the lake house, this was the only rabbit she’d snared.

  As the trammeled and bloody snow wavered, Alex propped her hands on her thighs and hung her head, praying both that the dizziness would pass and Darth—the nickname she’d given to her guard—wouldn’t feel inspired to use the butt of his rifle, or a fist. A chronic mouth-breather, Darth was the kind of sinus-challenged kid with adenoids the size of baseballs that always had the seat behind yours for a major test. If anyone ever felt the need to make another Star Wars, though … When Wolf wasn’t around, Darth enjoyed the random punch, a swift swat. She even understood. She got grumpy, too, when she was starving. Except Darth had the Mossberg.

  “Just give me a minute, Darth,” she said. “Okay?”

  While this was only her second day at the lake house, she was fast coming to know Darth’s scents and moods. From his impatient fizz, she knew it wasn’t okay at all, but screw it. The kid was a brute and as noisy as a locomotive. She wouldn’t put it past Darth to let her faint and then either quietly slide back into the house until she froze or put a boot on her throat. By the time Wolf got back from his hunting expedition with Ernie and Marley, she’d be bones: Gee, Boss, I dunno; she was just here. After the fiasco in the cabin, she doubted Wolf would’ve left her alone if there hadn’t been enough in that bear bag to tide over the natives until his return. But she was finding it very tough to relax while Darth toyed with guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner.

  Just when I thought things might finally break my way. That coil of wire she’d discovered in a cardboard box with other camping paraphernalia four days ago was the first piece of good luck she’d had. With Darth tagging after, she’d tramped far back into the woods and around the house, scoping out game trails. Plenty of tracks, lots of juicy little bunnies running around. Lay out sixteen snares and pray like hell.

  Well—she studied the mess in the snow—she’d caught something, all right, only to have the rabbit snatched by an animal just as hungry as she. Got to be whatever’s following us. Probably a wolf, too. Those tracks were right. So was the smell, although there was still that queer something that was a little off and …

  Oh, screw it. Wolf, not-wolf, who cares? She smeared an angry tear from the corner of her right eye. Crying wouldn’t help either. Only thing to do was move the snare to a different game trail and start over.

  And look on the bright side, Alex. Here you were so worried about what to use for fish bait. Mounding the half-frozen guts into a rough snow bowl, she gave the mess a grim stir with her forefinger and fished out a small, roughly triangular squib of flesh. Oooh, and what do we have here?

  “Darth, want to see another trick my dad taught me?” Popping the rabbit’s heart into her mouth, she swallowed it back and licked her lips. “Yum, yum,” Alex said. “Deelish.”

  Maybe an hour later, she eyed Ellie’s watch. (Habit. Mickey was still dead. But wearing the watch made her feel better.) Whenever now was, it was as good a time as any to search the boathouse before all those great bunny guts went to waste.

  The day was brilliant, the snow dazzle bright enough to scorch purple afterimages, the sun a gold coin that made her shadow puddle at her feet. She shut her eyes against the glare, tried to imagine her cells wringing energy out of sunlight. She had to find something more to eat than bark and twigs and the occasional ant or bunny heart. The boathouse was the only place left where she might find something useful. After scrounging around the main lake house, basement, and garage, she’d come up with some nice stuff: the snare wire, a camp stove, bottles of propane fuel, a Coleman lantern, even a decent one-man tent. The stove seemed like a taunt. The wire she was using for snares was too stiff for fishing, though. Unless she decided to start pulling out her hair and braiding it together for fishing line, that left the boathouse. Because lakes had fish, right? Hack through the ice somehow, drop in a line. Offer a sacrifice to the gods, or something.

  Earlier, when Alex was stewing up her oh-so-wonderful pot of white pine, she’d happened to glance over at Penny, stretched on a frayed leather couch squared before the great room’s picture window. Plenty of light to see by—and damn if Alex hadn’t spotted this brief but very distinct little ripple. Not a punch or a kick. More like something rolling over in its sleep.

  She knew more about quantum physics than she did about pregnancy, and since Alex knew as much about quantum physics as she did Outer Mongolia … she was virtually clueless. None of the very few kids she’d hung with in high school got pregnant or knew anyone who had. All she remembered from those informational drool-fests from high school health was that how much you showed and when depended on how tiny you were. And you could feel the baby move on the inside … at four months? And from the outside at five to six months? Something
like that.

  So Penny’s at least five months, and maybe more like six or seven. Alex had folded a drippy strip of boiled pine into her mouth. The stuff smelled like Christmas and tasted like stale Dentyne peeled from the underside of a school desk, right next door to a booger. Meaning she was pregnant before the Zap.

  Which was something to think about.

  So had Peter brought Penny here before or after things fell apart? Peter had to be involved, somehow. Peter and the Council set up the Zone, Peter was head of security, Peter made sure the Changed were fed. Unless Penny was already here before the Zap, Alex couldn’t see how Peter managed to move her without Penny ripping off his face. Knocked her out somehow?

  Or what if she knows Peter the way Wolf knows me?

  Neither scenario accounted for Wolf, who’d been with Spider and the rest of his high school buddies when Alex had bumbled into the Zone. Unless she had it the wrong way around. From the lake house photograph at the Yeager place, she’d seen that Simon and Peter were tight. So maybe Simon knew about this place, and Wolf had wanted to take Penny someplace he thought was safe, a place he could visit every now and then to resupply and check up on her?

  This begged an obvious question, too. Alex had assumed Wolf was the father. Now, she wasn’t sure. Oh, Wolf cared about Penny plenty. He was always watching out for her, carrying things that were too heavy, making sure she—and then his guys—ate before he took a single morsel for himself.

  But Wolf never touched Penny. They didn’t snuggle. He didn’t hug her. Never put a hand on her stomach. (Although maybe guys only did that in chick flicks; she didn’t know.) There was nothing intense between Penny and Wolf, no spark. In high school, you always knew who the couples were, no matter how übercool and below-the-radar they were about it. Their heat was in their eyes, the glances they shared, the way the air thickened. Like how the very first time she got close to Tom, inhaled his smoky musk, the tug of her attraction had been immediate. When they had kissed, that one moment deepened to something vital, as elemental as air.

  The only time anything like that happened with Wolf, when his scent shifted and became an aroma that was safety and family and desire, was around her. The only person to whom Wolf seemed truly attached and attracted, and for whom he would risk his life, was … her.

  Which was just so frigging great.

  The boathouse was an A-framed one-room cabin on stilts, but with no boats or canoes or even kayaks slotted underneath. As soon as she forced the door, she realized she was looking at a man cave: a place where a guy and his buds crashed to get away from the main house. The décor screamed boy, too. Two single beds, one still rumpled; a tiny four-drawer bureau; two straight-backed chairs; a bookcase crammed with puzzles, a cribbage board, two decks of cards, board games, and stacks of smeary magazines she knew better than to leaf through. A curling Star Wars poster, Luke battling Vader, thumbtacked over the bookshelf. A ring of keys and an old windup alarm clock rested on a plank shelf on the left wall beside the bed, along with road atlases of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan. Several jackets hung from nails just inside the door. Even through the deep cold and Darth’s baseline sun-scorched opossum stink plugging her nose, the boathouse had just the right boy-smell, too: sharp deodorant, foot powder, Irish Spring.

  Yet there were two other nose-crinkling odors. One was a campfire odor, or like chemistry class, when they’d ignited magnesium. The other was … Her mind flashed to chemo, and an oncology nurse feeling for a vein before hooking Alex up to a brown IV bag of cisplatin. Hospital smell, that was it. Alex hauled in more air, worrying the smells—and then forgot all about sulfur and flammable metals. Because this time …

  Oh God. Her stomach tightened against a whiff of sweet summer. She got a memory-pop, a flashbulb moment of her dad: Relax, honey, she’s wash and wear.

  “Oh please.” Her voice came out squeaky. Her eyes snapped back to the bed, and then she was dropping onto her stomach and batting blankets out of her way, reaching beneath the bed. “Oh please, please, please,” she chanted, sweeping her glove over bare floorboards, catching wooly dust kittens, a pencil, an old sock—before slapping metal. Scrambling to a cross-legged sit, she dragged out a dented red toolbox. She was shaking so badly she had to use her teeth to tug off her gloves before fumbling open the toolbox’s icy chrome latch and throwing back the double lid.

  Instead of tools, there was a small landfill of discarded candy wrappers and—no mistake—the dizzying aroma of chocolate and petrified coconut.

  “Oh.” She said it in that breathless, astonished way she did at a gorgeous sunset or a gift too beautiful to believed. Plunging her hands into the wrappers, she came up with a humongous, giant candy bar that she would’ve recognized even without the helpful blue and white wrapper and big black letters: ALMOND JOY KING SIZE.

  “Sometimes you feel like a nut,” she sang. Her grip kept slipping on the slick paper, and she finally ripped the wrapper with her teeth. A luscious perfume of sugar and butter and chocolate ballooned. The butter solids had separated, giving the milky chocolate a dusty, sickly cast. “And ask me if I care,” she said. Teasing out a bar, she stuck the candy into her mouth and bit. There was a hollow chuck, a jab of pain in her jaw. The candy was frozen solid and, literally, rock hard. All she managed was to scrape off a few chocolate shards.

  Probably best. Closing her eyes, she luxuriated in sweet chocolate melting over her tongue. Might bring it up if I eat too—

  A fizz-fizz, pop-pop boiled into her nose, and she knew, a second before he gave her shoulder a warning nudge: Darth was getting impatient.

  “Sit on it and spin, Darth.” Yet when she reached for her knife, she did it slowly. No reason to give Darth an excuse. Placing the bar on the wood floor, she jockeyed the blade’s tip into the chocolate, right behind that first almond, then rocked the knife back and forth, applying steady pressure until the bar broke in a small shower of chocolate-covered coconut.

  “Oooh, you don’t know what you are missing, Darth. On the other hand, more for me.” Wetting a finger, she dabbed up all the shards, then popped the finger into her mouth. “Oh, thank you, God,” she moaned. She was definitely taking all the wrappers for later. Give ’em a nice, long lick. Popping the bit of broken bar into her mouth, she tucked it into her cheek like a chipmunk. The rest she carefully wrapped and then slipped into an inside pocket, where her body warmth would thaw out the treat. She was still starving, but even that little bit of chocolate made her blood surge.

  Yeah, well, don’t get giddy, honey. The candy might be the extent of her luck. She didn’t see any fishing gear, and her nose hadn’t sussed out anything else other than that strange campfire odor and that hospital smell. Where were they coming from? There didn’t seem to be much else here but the bureau and another bookshelf, made of sagging two-by-fours propped on cinderblocks, filled with hardcovers and paperbacks. A lot of novels, all stuff she’d either read or been meaning to but never got the chance: Tolkien, Asimov, Bradbury, Matheson. A broken-spined, scotch-taped copy of Childhood’s End. Lord of the Flies. Dune, a book she’d read while getting chemo, that mantra about fear as the mind-killer ringing true as she watched the drip-drip of yellow poison flow into her veins. A good collection of Stephen King, too: The Dead Zone. Desperation and The Stand. Duma Key. A Wrinkle in Time was falling apart, and the spine of Watership Down was so creased she could barely make out the title.

  But there were also a ton of newer textbooks: Lupine Biology. Mammalian Speciation. The Ecology of Genetic Rescue. A Head of the Pack: The Wolves of Michigan’s Isle Royale. A larger clutch on population genetics and evolution. A third of one shelf was devoted only to history: Where the Buffalo Roam: Roosevelt and the Embattled Wilderness. When Darkness Reigned: Civilizational Collapse in the Middle Ages.

  “Whoa,” she muttered. A voracious reader who also had been a history buff and hard-core mammologist was the last thing she’d expected. On the other hand, Peter was a problem-solver, a guy who’d obviously thought abo
ut allocation of resources. Someone who would’ve recognized that feeding the Changed garnered additional benefits, like a tidy buffer between Rule and the rest of the world. Fitting, somehow, that he’d read up on the Dark Ages.

  She wouldn’t mind crashing here awhile. Childhood’s End looked awfully tempting. So did all that Stephen King. Rereading Wrinkle would be like picking up where you and your best friend left off. Chris would love this, too. A boy who’d dismantle and move an entire bookmobile’s collection would want a crack at these. If she got out of this, she ought to bring him here.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself. She had to be practical. You can dream, but food comes first.

  Searching each jacket, turning out pockets got her nothing but a crumpled handful of dollar bills liberated from a denim jacket, which she crammed into a parka pocket. Tinder was tinder. She was putting the jacket back when she paused. The garment was big, just as the boathouse had an older-boy feel to it. Its aroma was stark wintergreen and icy iron. While in Rule, she’d never paid that much attention, but now she inhaled deeply, wondering how scents this bold could hide so much.

  So, was the house a gift? The chocolate of that Almond Joy chunk was gone, her tongue pebbly with coconut. Flipping the almond from the pouch of her cheek, she chewed, mulling this over. Her curiosity was stoked, which was somehow better than focusing only on that beaky gnaw in her stomach. Or was this just a really old family vacation house where Peter went when he needed to think things over? That felt right. Yesterday, when she swept the woods to set her snares, she’d also discovered an ancient, weathered tree house about thirty feet up a towering oak around back. Judging from the lake house’s unfinished porch, Peter had been busy. The house had also been recently winterized, with double-paned windows redolent with the reek of putty and caulk. She scented relatively fresh insulation behind the drywall downstairs, the lingering tang of paint. A woodstove, so new the house smelled of scorched cast-iron, gave off heat in spades. (A lucky thing, too. There were two fireplaces, one upstairs and one down, but both were very old, the hearths blackened and cracked. The sting of creosote on her tongue was so strong, she bet you could take a chisel to the coal-black residue caking that flue and still not chip it all away. A wonder no one had started a chimney fire and burned the house down.)