Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  He ached to skim her hair from her face and drink her in. Instead, the world slammed back in with a vengeance, time restarting itself, and he became aware of shots and screams and the riot of Changed and men, of the violence seething all around.

  “Alex, we have to get out of here, right now. This place is going to blow in five minutes, maybe less.” Rolling, he helped her set her feet, grabbed her arm. In the square, there were horses, and all they needed was one. “Come on, come on!”

  “Wait!” Tossing a wild look around, she let out a gasping cry: “No, no, Peter, Peter!”

  When the screams and the guns started, it never occurred to Chris, for a second, to turn back. If anything, he urged Night on even faster. This was a collision he would not avoid, a fight from which he wouldn’t back down. If there ever was a right time to pick up the hammer, that time was now.

  They were coming in fast from the northeast corner, a hundred yards from the far end of the church. He could see the chaos now, the tide of Changed sweeping over Finn’s men. Off-leash, the Changed were tearing people apart in chunks, plunging their hands into bloody craters to reel out double handfuls of guts. The square was awash in bodies and pieces of bodies and gore—and old people, still standing, as the past embraced its blighted future. He saw a woman, her gray hair a storm cloud, dart for a brute of a boy: “Lee, Lee, Lee!” Lee’s huge arms whipped the old woman—Travers, Chris thought, her name’s Travers; she likes to garden—from her feet. The boy spun his grandmother around in what might almost be joy. When Lee sunk his teeth into that woman’s throat, the look on her face was a species of an awful, final ecstasy.

  “Look!” Greg was pointing toward the village hall. “On the landing!”

  Chris looked—and felt his heart fail. The steps were heaving with Changed scrambling and fighting and tearing at bodies. From its bulk, one of the dead was Ernst. And his own grandfather? He didn’t see Yeager. But what he did spot on the landing, surging like some behemoth breaking the surface of the sea, was Tom.

  Tom was saturated with blood, so much that he looked as if he’d plunged into a deep pool of red paint. He was staggering, too; there was a body draped over his neck and shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Tom had a pistol in his free hand, and he was banging out shots, trying to clear a path. Black shotgun in hand, Alex was by his side; Chris recognized her at once and there was … my God, was that a dog? Where had it come from? Huge, its white coat flecked with gore, the animal was snarling and spinning at any Changed that tried getting close. Tom’s rifle scabbard dangled from Alex’s right shoulder. Grabbing up an enormous green canvas pack, she slung it over her left shoulder and then she was shouting something to Tom, wheeling toward the Changed boy swooping in, coming for Tom’s blind spot. The shotgun bucked in her hand with an enormous boom. The Changed toppled back in a loose-limbed splay. Alex turned a brief look to her right, and Chris saw her lips move, understood what she was screaming: Come on! But he couldn’t see to whom she was speaking and, suddenly, didn’t care, because it caught up to him then that the body over Tom’s shoulders wore white going crimson. Where that fall of hair wasn’t gold, it was a deep rust-red.

  Peter. “No! Alex! Tom!” Spurring Night, Chris plunged into the crowd, beating a path. He snatched the reins of a stamping, riderless roan, thinking, furiously, Get him on a horse, get Peter to Kincaid, get out get out get out! Trying to cover the distance between them was like battling a stormy sea in a rowboat with a soupspoon. The roan was shying and squealing, and he could feel Night tensing, struggling to find a safe place to set his hooves. Hands tore at his legs. The square was a sea of teeth and snarling faces. This was the nightmare of the plateau again, only this time he was trying to control two horses. Greg had pulled beside him, and Chris heard the crack of shots as they battled their way the last fifty feet.

  “Chris, no! Stay on your horse!” Tom’s face was tense, pinched with pain, wet with sweat and gore. There was an enormous bloody slash across his chest, and he was breathing hard. Alex’s back was pressed to his, the Mossberg in her hands, that big dog still whirling and snapping. “Greg, help me! Chris,” he said, as Greg hurried around, “pass down the Uzi!”

  “Here!” Chris stripped the weapon from his shoulders, turned it butt-first. “How bad is he, how bad?”

  “Bad. Alex!” Tom shouted over his shoulder. “Take the Uzi!”

  Instantly, she broke her elbows so the Mossberg aimed at the sky, and wheeled, one hand stretching for the new weapon. As soon as her fingers wrapped around the butt of the Uzi and he felt her connect, Chris let go. But she did look up. Their eyes met, and he said, “Alex …”

  “I know, Chris. Me, too. Help Peter.” Limbering the Mossberg, she turned back to cover and buy them time.

  “Chris!” Tom called. “You’ll have to hang on to him until we can get clear!”

  “How much time left?” he cried, steadying Night with his knees.

  “Not enough! All right, let’s go, let’s go!” Tom shifted his weight, came down on a knee, and then Peter was swooning into Greg’s arms as Tom hefted Peter’s legs.

  “Hurry!” Alex shouted. She was backing up, the Uzi in both hands, trying to cover all sides at once. One of Finn’s men—old, but with only a few streamers of white hair—swam at her in a panic, arms cranking in a herky-jerky crawl. Before she could get off a shot, the wolfdog surged. Screaming, the old man reeled as blood spurted from a rip above his elbow.

  “Down, Buck!” As the wolfdog jumped back, Alex darted in with the Uzi, slamming the butt into the man’s jaw, one quick and vicious jab. There was a jet of crimson as the old man’s skin split, and he went down. In the next second, the Changed had him, and he disappeared, shrieking, one grasping bloody hand reaching straight up as if trying to claw his way from a grave.

  “Lift him, Greg, easy, easy!” Tom said. Peter’s face was white as salt, the blood like bright spray paint. As Greg and Tom wrestled Peter onto his saddle, Chris saw the cramp of pain in Peter’s face and heard his moan.

  “God, oh God, Peter, hang on, hang on!” Chris said as Peter fell into him, his back spooning against Chris’s chest. “I’ve got you, it’ll be okay.”

  “C-c-cold.” Peter was gasping. There was so much blood, Chris could taste the iron in his mouth. Peter’s head lolled. “S-so c-c-cold … C-Chris, s-sorry, s-so sorry, I t-t-tried …”

  “Shh, you did fine,” Chris said, tremulously, sobs welling in his throat. “You’re going to be okay. I’ve got you, Peter.” Peter was shuddering, struggling for breath. I’m going to save you; I’m going to save us both. Wrapping his arms around Peter, Chris took his friend’s weight and held him tight. “I won’t let you fall, Peter; I’ve got you, I’ve got you, you won’t fall.”

  “All right, Greg, on your horse, let’s go!” Grabbing the roan’s reins from Chris, Tom turned to shout, “Alex, you ride with me—” He stopped, sudden panic blooming on his face. “Alex, where’s Alex?”

  “What?” Confused, Chris threw a look down to where she’d been, then up, toward the hall. He spotted her, that red scream of hair, as she and the dog pushed past Changed and fighting men, and exploded for the steps—and a body. “There!” Chris shouted.

  “Alex, no!” Aghast, Tom was already surging, whipping the pistol like a club, trying to beat a path. “Alex, there’s no time—less than ninety seconds! What are you doing, what are you doing?”

  But she kept going, didn’t falter, and in that last second—before the shot—Chris understood why.

  Laid out like a sacrifice, his grandfather was crumpled on the steps. The only reason Chris recognized him at all was because Yeager was bald. His face was ripped, but the head was still attached. The rest was a loose-limbed heap of gore and torn flesh.

  Crouched alongside Yeager’s body was a boy, bloodied and bruised. A girl, very pregnant, hovered nearby, uncertain, clearly terrified. As Alex banged through, only the boy looked up.

  My God. The jolt of surprise was like a crack of lightning splint
ering his brain. There was an instant where the engine of time hitched, jumped its tracks, and then simply ceased.

  “Chris?” Greg said, the confusion clear. “Who—”

  “Wolf, please!” Above all that clamor, he still heard her shout. “You have to leave, you have to go, Wolf! You have to run, you have to—”

  And then they all saw, at the same terrible moment, what Alex did not: a monster, suddenly risen; a ruin of flesh and bone, virtually naked, clothed only in tatters and red rivers of blood streaming from rips and slashes and bites. A long flap of scalp hung in a limp flag of maroon flesh and gray hair. Pink skull showed from forehead to crown as if this monster was in the process of unzipping and shrugging from its skin to be born.

  “YOU!”—and that was the only clue Chris had that this thing once had been a woman. Her arm, dripping blood and gleaming with bone, swung up, fist jabbing toward Alex, the chrome of a huge Magnum revolver winking in the day’s new light. “YOU!”

  “MELLIE, NO!” Tom shrieked, his pistol drawing down, at the same instant that Chris screamed, “Alex, Alex, look out, look out, look—”

  It was, she thought, the strangest feeling, like waking from the dark chaos of a long fever-dream with her mind burning bright and clear: coming back to herself not within her parents’ embrace but the shelter of Tom’s arms.

  Now, here they were, fighting for every remaining second, in the middle of the end of the world, and no time left, in this growing garden of the dead. Yet there was nowhere on earth she should be other than with Tom and Chris and her people, waiting to welcome her back, take her away.

  Although the monster still searched. She felt it reach because she did want Wolf gone and safe. So when she spotted Wolf with Yeager, all she could think was that he had to leave and take this one last leap away from Rule to whatever future waited. Maybe it was wrong to feel that way about a boy that was half monster, but so the hell what.

  “Wolf!” Frantic, she grabbed his arm. She kept an eye on Penny, but the girl only seemed petrified, which was fine because they had problems enough. “You need to go, you need to get out!”

  Wolf was weeping. Big tears burned in ruby trails through blood. For a second, she knew what he felt. For this, she needed no monster. This was a boy who’d just lost everything, not only Yeager but Peter, too. For him, there was no home left, no place to go. It was like looking down at herself at her parents’ funeral. Or on the day of her diagnosis: huddling in a chair in a too-cold office and seeing for the first time what a monster, living in the dark and eating you alive, really looked like.

  “Wolf, please.” She could feel her lips trembling, the tears burning her eyes. “It’ll get better, I promise it will, but you have to try, you have to go, Wolf, you have to run, you have to—”

  There was no transition at all. Despite how much had happened, less than three minutes had passed since the moment she let her monster go. So there was a lot of gunfire and people were still shrieking. The crack of one gun was nothing new, although … was that Tom, scream—

  Something clubbed her, very hard, in the back. She saw Wolf flinch. Fire licked her chest. For that dead space between heartbeats, she and Wolf only stared at each other. She still heard gunfire, but it was so different. No cracks or heavy bangs. Only a muted, distant crackle like tired cellophane.

  Then her legs folded. There was the dark, waiting below, but only that. It was Blackrocks again.

  Except this time, it was the water—cold and deep—that jumped for her.

  Alex probably never heard. There was so much noise. The Magnum’s boom was lost in the twin roar of Tom’s pistol and Greg’s rifle. What was left of Mellie tumbled back, and then Tom and Greg were stumbling forward as Chris forced Night to follow.

  Awkwardly cradling Alex in his arms, the boy—Simon, his brother—was staggering to a stand as that huge dog snarled but dared not strike. Alex was tall, a handful for anyone, and limp now: dead weight, eyes closed, the long white swan of her neck dropping back. From Night’s saddle, Chris could see where the shot plowed into her back because of the red starburst halfway down her right chest where the bullet cored through. When her chest struggled up, Chris heard a horrible, sudden cawing sound, like the croak of a dying crow.

  Penny was already trying to back away. When Simon saw them coming, he took a half step back as if to turn and try to run. But then his eyes ticked up to Chris, and Simon’s face—my face, Chris thought—bleached white.

  “Please,” Tom said, his voice breaking. He held out his arms. “Wolf … Simon, please give her to me. Let us help her.”

  “Tom. Chris, what the hell …” Greg had dismounted and already come up with Chris’s Uzi, which he trained on Simon. “Guys,” Greg said, shakily, “we have to go, we have to go.”

  “I know.” For that second, Chris saw, in Simon’s anguish and the tears streaming over his cheeks, not a Changed but a boy struggling with what he wished for versus what he could have. “Simon … please,” he said, tightening his arms around Peter, who was now unconscious. Although his friend was very heavy, his was a weight Chris could bear. “She belongs with us.”

  At that, Simon took a clumsy, hesitant step. Tom met him halfway, scooping Alex into his arms and then turning for his roan, limping fast as the dog broke from Simon and bounded after. “Give him the gun,” Tom tossed over his shoulder to Greg. “Give it to him, get on your horse, and let’s go, now, now.”

  “What?” Greg’s head jerked to Chris. “Chris, I know he’s got to be your brother, but this is like Lena. He’s still—”

  “Do it.” Chris looked down at Simon as Greg held out the Uzi the way you’d offer a python a snack. As soon as Simon got a hand on the barrel, Greg dropped the weapon and sprinted back to his horse. “Run, Simon,” Chris said to his brother. “Do you understand? Go, get out, take Penny, and run—”

  “Come on!” Tom bellowed. He held Alex to his saddle as Chris did Peter: against his chest, in his arms. She was still as death, and Chris couldn’t tell if she was breathing anymore. Wheeling his roan, Tom kicked the animal to a gallop. “Forty seconds, go, go!”

  “Run, Simon!” Chris shouted, and then he was pulling the blood bay around, spurring Night to a dead run, giving the horse his head. “Go, Night, go, Night, go!”

  Forty seconds. They blasted past a knot of feeding Changed, the newly dead, and those who would join them soon enough. Rushing from the square, counting in his head: thirty-nine-one-thousand, thirty-eight-one-thousand, thirty-seven—

  He made it to thirty.

  The end came when he was five blocks away. It was how he’d always thought the end of the world should have been: not the silence of the EMPs and the scream of birds but a huge blistering roar, like the detonation of a neutron bomb; a clap and then a blaring, pillowing, swelling BAH-BAH-BAH-ROOOM. Captured by buildings and reflected off stone, the sound was enormous. Chris felt the air blow past in an enormous, gushing whoosh. The windows of the houses on this block suddenly shattered as the pressure wave barreled past and tried scooping him from his saddle. The ground shuddered so violently he felt the shiver in his spine, saw it in the cascading showers of residual snow shaken loose from roofs.

  Gasping, he turned a look back. Intensely bright, insanely brilliant gouts of bloody light burst from the hall’s ruptured windows, like the fiery breaths exhaled from the many mouths of monsters rising from the deep. He could feel the gush of heat, and more surging after. The entire village hall didn’t just fall away; it blew apart in a rocketing hail of stone and steel and surging fireballs that rolled in orange-red waves to crash over the Changed and braying horses and every living soul still in that square. That light was so bright it cut him a long, fleeing shadow. His eyes shouted with pain as if he’d tried staring into the heart of the sun. If there were shrieks and screams, he couldn’t hear them.

  But closer, in his arms, he felt Peter stir, and heard him moan.

  Things were now falling, in a shower, from the sky: a rain of stone and fl
aming wood. Limbs blown from trees stabbed down in jagged, flaming spears. And there were bodies, in pieces: legs and arms, the scorched blackened balls of skulls. The haunches of horses and stumps of bone and more flesh too blasted even to guess at. A block and a half away, a horse’s head, mane ablaze, blistered a burning arc to slam the roof of a house before tumbling off.

  “Chris!” It was Tom. Still dazed, he turned and saw Tom and Greg and that enormous wolfdog waiting at the mouth of the road that would take them to the hospice and away from Rule.

  When he reached them, Chris said, stupidly, “It was so . . so big.”

  “I know,” Tom said. In his arms, Alex cawed a breath. Gathering her, Tom swung his horse and pointed them north.

  “Let it go, Chris,” Tom said. “Don’t look back.”

  THE LONG WALK

  IT FELT LIKE EARLY SUMMER, ALTHOUGH HE COULDN’T BE EXACTLY sure. Chris sat cross-legged on a flat table of greenstone-speckled basalt in a drench of sun. The day was cloudless, the sky a hazy white where it edged the indigo of the lake but a deeper, stonewashed denim directly overhead. Smelling of cool iron and tangy spruce, a northerly breeze feathered his hair. Drifting up from the valley some thousand feet below came the solitary grunt of a wood frog. Directly north, off the far coast, he counted at least five thin and rocky tree-studded slivers and a larger green splash spread over the water like an outstretched hand.

  Teasing out the blade of a pocketknife, he sliced a wedge of cheese, tore off a hunk of flaky baguette, and laid the cheese on top. Holding the food under his nose, he inhaled a buttery aroma of warm cheddar and fresh-baked bread, then took a bite. He moaned.

  From just off his right shoulder came a low laugh. “Good, isn’t it?” Peter said.

  “Oh my God,” he mumbled around bread and cheese. “I’ve got to learn how to make this.”

  Peter’s laugh was light as a breath of air. “Well, first you got to have a couple cows. And, oh, some flour. Yeast. Sugar. Rennin and—”