Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

No. NO. Tom felt the earth suddenly split beneath his feet, and then he was falling and falling and he would never stop, never, and Alex . . . and Alex . . . and Alex and—

“NO!” he screamed. His finger convulsed. The night broke apart with a roar. A tongue of orange flame shot through the dark like a comet. Behind, he heard the horse bray in alarm. The girl’s head vanished in an instant, but the explosion lingered in purple afterimages burned onto his retina: her skull bursting in a chunky halo.

Pivoting, already adjusting, he shot the Bravo’s bolt and fired again. Another roar. In the bright muzzle flash, he saw the boy, caught as if in a strobe, half-turned, his mouth open in a look of stupid shock—and then the bullet drilled into his chest and he went down.

As the roar died, he heard the dog barking. Dixie was still rearing, screaming, trying to tear from her tether, her front legs jackhammering the snow.

Alex! In the next second, he was lurching as snow grabbed his feet and whippy twigs slapped his face. Air tore in and out of his lungs. The dog churned alongside, working so hard to keep up it had no breath to bark. Perhaps ten yards away, his feet registered the sudden change in the snow. He stumbled out on a path already broken and tamped down with repeated use. Ahead, he saw all three: the body, the Chucky with no head, and the boy. He spotted the half-eaten arm, too.

“Alex,” he said, brokenly. “Alex.” He fell to his knees by the dead girl with only one arm. She was facedown, her long hair dragging over black, bloodied snow. Reaching out with one palsied hand, he eased her over.

“Ah, God.” Not a girl. Not even close. In the bad light, he couldn’t tell how old she’d been, but the woman’s cheeks were weathered. Her hair was the color of gravel and dragged from a large flap of scalp peeled from forehead to crown, revealing skull that was smooth as a cue ball. Her nose had been gnawed away to bone. The eyes, too.

Oh Christ, oh God, oh shit. He was gasping. Sweat poured down his neck; he could feel his clothes sticking to the skin of his back and chest. And he was weeping, too: huge, ripping sobs of relief. Stop, stop, stop! He tore off a glove, jammed a fist into his mouth, bit down until his teeth sawed through and his mouth went coppery with blood. Stop, you’ve got to stop. It’s not her; it’s all right to be happy that it’s not her, but you’ve got to—

Then. The boy. Coughed.

More gurgled, actually. Tom heard the boil and splash of blood and a hissing rush of air with every breath the boy drew.

That sound sobered him in a way nothing else could. Live through enough firefights, see enough buddies go down, and any soldier recognized a sucking chest wound when he heard one. With every breath, the boy pulled air into his chest. Eventually, the pressure would stop his heart unless the boy bled out first, which he just might.

He could end this. Tom stared down at the boy. A bullet to the brain; a quick slice across the carotids. Either would be the merciful thing, the right thing. Or, hell, he could try to save him. Well, in theory. He knew what to do. Every soldier did. Any soldier could.

There is no right. His mind was burned white, hot as a neutron star. There are no laws and there is no god. There is only here and now, and what I do next . . . what I do next . . .

The boy’s eyes were dark pits, and his face was gray. A black viscous pool was spreading beneath his body, leaking over the snow. The boy coughed again. Blood boiled onto his lips and ran over his chin to dribble down his neck.

I can’t save you. He slid his knife from its sheath. Not even I can justify that.

Tom tugged open the boy’s parka. The Chucky didn’t resist but only stared with eyes as dark and shiny as polished obsidian. The boy’s blood smelled of sweet iron. The bullet had cored midway down the right side of the boy’s chest. Straddling the boy, Tom slid his knife just beneath the sternum, then up and left. The muscles parted easily, and he went as fast as he could. Still, the boy flinched and Tom hesitated.

He could do this. The pommel ticked against his palm in time with the boy’s heart. He had to do this.

The boy’s gaze locked on his. His lips moved.

“No, don’t,” Tom said, and then he rammed the knife home, pierced the heart through, and gave the blade a savage twist.

A tick.

Another tick.

Tick.

Nothing.

The boy stared. And stared.

The dog growled, and that brought him back. “No, Raleigh,” Tom said. Taking back his knife, he plunged it into the snow until the blade was clean.

Then he got the hell out of there as fast as he could.

Two days later, he was in Michigan.

52

Venus was a hard diamond in the east. The air was dry as dust and going crackly with cold as the light drained from the sky. It would be dark pretty soon. But Tom had to think this one through. Once done, he couldn’t undo it.

Through the Bravo’s scope, he studied the farm from a screen of new birch and thick hemlock at the very edge of a wide, sloping, snow-covered field. The two-story farmhouse was solid, native stone with gable dormers, but looked to be in need of some serious work. The limp tongue of an American flag hung from a very tall flagpole mounted on a rise to the right. Thin, haggard smoke dribbled from a single, moth-eaten chimney that had lost its cap and teetered like a stack of kids’ blocks ready to fall with the touch of a finger. A low woodpile butted against a fenced-in rectangle that must be a vegetable garden. The ax-half of a sturdy splitting maul leaned against a pile of uncut rounds. To the left of the garden, a dead truck showed as a glint of windshield peering from humped snow, and at the end of a sinuous path stood three garbage-can-green Porta-Johns.

A cluster of outbuildings hunched beyond a wide, unbroken expanse—a road leading to the farm, probably, but one that hadn’t seen traffic in months. Of the two barns, a peaked gray prairie barn had seen better days, too; the southwest corner of the roof had caved in. In a paddock of trampled snow, a lone horse and solitary cow drooped over an old cast-iron, white-enameled bathtub while a trio of goats and six chickens drifted and scratched around a stone trough. Left of the prairie barn was a much smaller stable with sliders, and a longer, low concrete building running north-south with some kind of metal feeder silo. Adjacent to that, five enormous hogs huddled in an outdoor pen. Three more pens were empty, the snow undisturbed.

Balanced on his snowshoes, he gnawed his lower lip and thought about it. The Kings were the last people on Jed’s list. So far, he’d avoided people . . . well, the Chuckies didn’t count. So he could bypass these people, backtrack into the woods, and spend the night there.