Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  He went to college, studied genetics and evolution, history. So maybe that was the point of the house. Peter had had a whole other life. From the looks of the house, he might have imagined eventually living here year-round.

  At her back, she heard Darth suddenly hitch as his reek went from fizzy rot to grouchy stink. Despite everything, a grin crept over her lips. She knew what was bugging him. Darth might be an ox, but he had a bladder the size of a walnut. This might explain why Darth got to babysit. A guy who needed a potty break every couple of miles could be a real drag. For her, Darth’s frequent need to go wee-wee wasn’t a problem, although he had this habit of doing his business, like, practically right on top of her, which not only was TMI but ticked her off. Want rabbits to stay far away? Pee on the snare. Jerk.

  She was tempted to hurry this up but then thought, Oh, screw it. Don’t rush this. There’s something here, something important.

  As she stepped up to the bureau, a second flashbulb of memory popped: of Tom, eyes bright with fever, thigh shiny and taut with infection. But why? Chemistry lab and Tom …

  Because I had to sterilize the knife before I cut him. That was it: that smell like burnt match heads, like flint against a striker. So, were there matches in the drawers? No, the odor was too strong for that. Gunpowder?

  Or a gun. Swallowing against the knot in her throat, she leaned in a little closer, opened her mouth, and tasted the air. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s probably not. But the smell was stronger here and coming from the bottom drawer of this bureau.

  So. If it was a gun, what then? She couldn’t sneak that past Darth. Unless I shoot him. But it would have to be loaded, and there’d be no way to check. Might even blow up in my hand if it’s old and dirty or the mechanism’s frozen.

  But Darth did need to take a whiz. She slid her eyes in a sidelong glance. The boy was doing the dying-to-pee two-step. Wear him down. When he goes potty, that’ll be your chance.

  As slowly as she could, she tugged the top drawer. The wood was swollen and yielded in grudging squalls. From the weight and hollow thock of wood against wood, she could tell it was empty. The second drawer held two pairs of boy’s underwear and three pairs of balled socks.

  As she pushed the second drawer shut, Darth broke, bolting from the boathouse. A moment later, she saw him hustling for the dock. Well, that’s one way to melt a fishing hole. Wasting not a second more, she dropped to a crouch and pried that bottom drawer free. The balky wood jammed on its metal runner. Come on, don’t blow this. Risking a fast peek around the bureau, she saw Darth stripping his gloves with his teeth. Minute and a half, max. Squelching her impatience, she wrestled the drawer shut then slowly pulled straight back.

  This time, the drawer cooperated. Hell. Two pairs of jeans, two cargo pants. While that burnt magnesium scent was still strong, she had no hope of going through each and every pocket before Darth made it back.

  “Come on.” She slipped a hand beneath the jeans. “Please, God, just cut me a—” She gasped as her fingers curled around smooth metal. “No way,” she said. “It can’t be.”

  But it was.

  A pistol.

  60

  “Penny killed someone?” Chris felt his jaw drop. “When? Who?”

  “Well, more like got her killed. About two and a half years ago.” With a weary sigh, Hannah dropped back into her chair. “It’s a long story.”

  Two and a half years ago, he was a sophomore in high school. Simon would’ve been sixteen. Isaac Hunter had said that Penny was a year younger than Simon. “Give me the short version. Did you grow up in Rule, or are you Amish or …”

  “Was. I left years back.” She shrugged. “I wanted more. School, an education beyond the eighth grade. Peter and I met in Houghton when I was a freshman at Michigan Tech. He was already a senior.”

  “Peter went to college?” He blinked in surprise. “I always assumed he’d been a deputy since high school or something.”

  “Hardly. He was the TA for my freshman seminar in comparative zoology, managed the lab. Nice guy.” Her mouth moved in an almost wistful grin. “Very forceful, a million opinions. There was this coffee place a block or two up from the river—Cyberia Cafe? Peter treated a couple times after lab. We’d grab coffee, hang outside the library along the Keweenaw Waterway.”

  Keweenaw. He had a vague notion that this was way north and east. “I’d never been much outside of Merton until I got to Rule.”

  “Oh, the Keweenaw’s really beautiful. There’s this bridge between Houghton and Hancock, which is a much smaller town on Copper Island right across the waterway. Once you get past Hancock, there’s virtually nothing on the island all the way out to Lake Superior except farms and golf courses, and then Copper Harbor at the very tip. I think about it sometimes, maybe settling up there?” Her expression turned dreamy. “Raid the university library, then go on past Hancock, find a nice, isolated farm just off Superior. Fish, grow crops, read books. That would be all right.”

  That sounded like something he would enjoy. “Maybe you should make it happen.”

  “Well, I couldn’t do it alone, for one thing, and you have to get there, for another. Oh, and hope all the people-eaters have moved out of town.” She gave another wry shrug. “Anyway, Peter really loved school. His big thing was Isle Royale. We’d go back and forth on what they should do about the wolves.”

  “Wolves? Isle Royale?” It was like listening to someone tell him a bedtime story in a foreign language. “Where’s that?”

  “In Lake Superior. It’s a national park, but hardly anyone goes. It’s tough to get there. It’s where they were doing this fifty-year study on the wolf and moose populations?”

  “They were?” He felt incredibly dense. “Why?”

  She gave him a look. “Isle Royale’s an island, but it’s got wolves and moose. So how’d they get there?”

  “Swim?”

  “Only the moose. Wolves can’t swim that far. The lead scientists were all in Houghton at Michigan Tech. They figured the wolves came across on ice bridges way back, but because of climate change, there hasn’t been a stable bridge since the mid-eighties. So the wolves are stuck. Their population’s been tanking for the last ten years. Before the world went dark, there were about nine wolves left. Only about half were females. So there was a lot of debate about how or whether to save them. Over the summers, Peter did fieldwork. Tranquilizing wolves, collecting samples, fitting them with collars, hunting down moose carcasses. He was very passionate, thought it was our fault for wrecking the environment. I think if he could’ve figured out a way to sneak wolves onto the island, he’d have done it. You have to admire that.”

  “I guess.” Chris felt a nasty ping of envy. If things hadn’t fallen apart, that might have been him going to classes and arguing ethics over coffee. “How does all that relate to Penny?”

  “Because of one really bad decision Peter made. The island’s all backcountry and very remote. You either go five to seven hours by ferry, fly in on floatplane, or pilot your own boat. Peter had this vintage thing he’d refitted with a fiberglass hull. It was like Quint’s boat in Jaws: pilothouse, engine room, galley. He turned the forepeak into sleepers. Over spring break of his senior year, he offered to take a bunch of us over to the island. The catch is, the park officially opens in mid-April, and this was mid-March. You can get into huge trouble if you’re caught, but Peter knew a cove to slip into on the north end, closer to Canada. I figured, a little winter camping, a little hiking, a nice boat ride, it’d be fun. Twelve of us crowded onto this old boat, including Penny”—she paused—“and Simon. He and Peter were close, even then. I think the grandparents hoped Simon and Penny would hook up.”

  That was exactly what Isaac described, too. “They weren’t like that?”

  “I never got that vibe. From what Simon said, he always thought he should look after her the way Peter did for him.”

  Interesting. Just how close had Hannah and Simon been? “How did Penny feel?”


  “Well, she and I never”—she inserted air-quotes—“bonded. She was nearly fifteen and still pretty young in a lot of ways. Peter had this real blind spot for her, just adored her. But she was already very troubled. You could see it, the way she hung on some of Peter’s college friends. And it was”—her gray eyes slid up in a sidelong glance—“spring break.”

  Meaning lots of alcohol. “What happened?”

  “Everyone got drunk,” she said, simply. “That is, everyone but Simon. Even then, he was a very careful, very private kid. Being a freshman, I didn’t know Peter’s friends very well, so Simon and I hung. Talked about college, his interests, what I was doing. Anyway, there we are, in the middle of Lake Superior. No one’s wearing a life jacket. It’s March, and freezing. The water’s forty degrees. Peter’s completely wrecked, a beer in one hand or a shot, and knocking them back. People are goofing around. A bunch are below, some making out in the bunks and …” She punctuated the sentence with the arch of one eyebrow—“Penny, too, with a guy. I think Simon lost track of her. If he’d known, he’d have gotten her out, but I guess he was a little distracted, talking to me and keeping an eye on Peter.”

  He still didn’t see where this was leading or how Penny got a girl killed. “So what happened?”

  “Penny set the boat on fire,” she said.

  61

  This wasn’t just any pistol. Alex knew it as soon as she saw that hinged steel barrel, and a plastic baggy with a cartridge the size of a twelve-gauge shell.

  A flare gun. She’d seen only one in her life, the time she and her parents had taken a coal-fired ferry boat that chugged between Ludington, Michigan, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The captain had shown her his flare pistol when he gave them a tour of the pilothouse. His flare gun had been orange plastic. This pistol was metal and looked old and worn.

  She thumbed the release and broke the weapon open the way she would a single-shot shotgun. The barrel housed a removable metal insert. Opening the baggy, she shook out the shell. The cap was brass; the cartridge red, with BAM-PM 1-060-062 stamped in black. Below that was the word KALIBER and then numbers: 12/70. On the back was the word SIGNALPATRONEN, also in black.

  No way she was leaving this behind. “And where are you, Darth?” Her heart gave an unpleasant lurch as she did a peek around the bureau just in time to see her guard zipping his fly. Hell. Her pants weren’t exactly skinnies, but someone might notice a pocket bulge. Slipping the shell into the barrel, she quickly shoved the flare pistol beneath her sweatshirt and flannel into the small of her back, then fluffed out her parka.

  You’re crazy; you’re nuts. One good whiff of that pistol and you’re dead. She was about to push up from the still-open drawer, but hesitated, her attention still pinned by that bizarre hospital smell. Something still there. Peering into the very back of the drawer, her eye ticked to a fluffy, feathery red splotch. She made a swiping grab and her hand closed around a very slim plastic tube that she instantly knew was both too narrow and too long to be a spare cartridge for the flare gun.

  In the eight seconds before Darth clumped to the door, she had enough time to think how strange it was to find a flare pistol beneath a stack of jeans. Although she could wrap her head around it. This was a boathouse. When you were out on a boat and needed help, you got off a flare. The fact that there was no boat was a little strange. Didn’t the gun belong where you might conceivably need and use it? Why hide it?

  And now here was another puzzle squirreled away and under wraps, just like the signal gun: a common hospital item in an uncommon place.

  All she could think as she stared was, Peter. What the hell?

  Because what she held in her hand was a fluid-filled syringe.

  62

  The way Hannah told the story, it was a wonder anyone made it off that boat alive. The watertight fiberglass hull meant the wood beneath was dry as kindling, a fire waiting to happen.

  Hannah was on deck at the time, propped against the pilothouse, her eyes closed against the wooziness in her head and the heave of her stomach: “It was so cold, I was turning blue.” She lay there, shivering, until Simon peeled out of his jacket and draped that around her shoulders. Wouldn’t want you to catch your death was what she remembered him saying. She’d just opened her mouth to thank him when there was a huge bang and something hot and white suddenly blasted through the hull not five feet from her face.

  After that, Hannah’s memories were a chaotic blur: screaming kids stampeding from below; flames shooting first out of the forepeak and then the hatch; the boat taking on water; the electrical failing a second after Peter, sobering fast, got off a Mayday. There was a life raft, but it was designed for eight, not twelve. Once Simon and Peter got the raft into the water, keeping people calm enough not to swamp it was another nightmare, especially when Peter’s boat began to sink.

  “It wasn’t dark yet, but the water was so black Peter used a flashlight. That boat filled and rolled pretty fast. Once you were in the water, you really couldn’t see, had no idea which way was up. I don’t think he or Simon realized Penny and another kid weren’t there until they did a head count,” Hannah said. By then, the fire was out, but the boat had disappeared.

  Both frantic, Peter and Simon jumped out of the raft and swam back to the spot where the boat had gone down. What happened next was … a little hazy was how Hannah put it. As Peter later told it to the Coast Guard, he and Simon dove a good fifteen or twenty feet, grappled their way through what was left of the hatch, and surfaced in the skeletal remains of the engine room. The remaining air pocket was tiny, no more than a ten-inch gap. Numb with cold and nearly exhausted, Penny was treading water that was up to her chin. The other girl, a townie no one really knew except for the boy who’d brought her aboard, was already dead.

  “Peter told them the other girl must’ve gotten snagged on something that held her underwater,” Hannah said. “Simon said the same.”

  “Who was she? The girl who died?”

  “Amanda … Peterson? No, Pederson.” She paused. “You know, I remember that at the time, there was one thing I thought was … weird. As soon as the boys got Penny to the surface? Peter screamed at Simon to take care of her and not follow, and then Peter dove back under, on his own, and he was gone a long time. I thought he’d drowned.”

  “Why would that be weird?” he asked. “He probably tried to get that girl’s body out.”

  “I guess.” Smoothing back her hair with one hand, Hannah rose to go. “Maybe you had to be there, but I know something happened down there, in that boat. I just don’t know what.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because Peter never came back to school,” she said. “And about six months later, Simon tried to kill himself.”

  63

  Plopping down on the last step up from the boathouse, Alex decided to steal a few minutes to spaz in private. Chugga-chugging ahead like the little asthmatic engine that could, Darth was already halfway to the house. Or maybe he was daring her to run so he could shoot first, eat second, and ask questions later.

  You have lost your mind, honey. She propped her back against a knotty red pine. The pistol knuckled her spine. She’d slipped the capped syringe into a right cargo pant pocket. What was she thinking? Wolf always slept close. If he sniffed or felt that pistol? She was sunk.

  So far, all her grand schemes had been pipe dreams of an oh-so-daring getaway. But now, she had a real weapon. Two, if she counted the tanto. (That funky syringe she wasn’t sure about. The more she mulled over that feathery thing, the more she thought: fletchings. Was this some kind of dart?) But no kidding around this time. Execute this just right—blind someone, set a few Changed on fire—she could swipe a couple rifles, have herself some real gun-guns. For that matter, she could’ve shot Darth right then and there. Of course, a twelve-gauge shell in a tiny little gun had to be loud. Still, she could’ve grabbed his rifle and skedaddled before anyone knew what was going on. If she really wanted to throw a monkey wrench into t
hings? Set the house on fire. Those propane canisters she’d found, combined with popcorn-dry, resin-rich pine certain to throw off a ton of sparks—what’s not to like?

  So what’s wrong with me? Wolf’s not here. So it wasn’t a question that she might hurt or kill him. But whoever was left standing might take it out on Wolf. That would be on her. And so what?

  Tired of this endless, mental rat race, she reached into her parka, withdrew the candy bar, inhaled memories. Jump, sweetheart. “I agree, Dad.” She slid another nibble of candy onto her tongue. “Live a little.”

  Why care about Wolf? How long was she supposed to be grateful? Wolf was not Chris. She was starting to think like those kidnap victims … what was it? Stockholm syndrome? Sympathy with the devil’s more like it. She worried coconut between her teeth. What is this, I kissed a zombie and liked it? He ate part of your shoulder, for God’s sake. So what if he protects you now? He put you in this position—

  She suddenly stiffened. Hello. That familiar and yet very weird scent—wolf and not-wolf—was very close, much more so than ever before. Dead ahead, in fact, and practically in her lap. Oh shit. Did it sense easy prey? Here she was, alone, in the open. What help she might count on—hah!—was too distant to do her any good, if Darth even bothered.

  Just be calm. The scent hadn’t deepened to And, oh, what big teeth you have, but she felt her heart giddyap in a spastic gallop. She inched her eyes, sweeping up from untrammeled snow to the denser green of the woods and a screen of low cedar—and it was right there, so perfectly still that were it not for its scent, she’d never have known where to look.