Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

Only then, somehow, the movie shifted in his mind. Instead of a crow, now Tom had a boy by the neck and the boy was bucking and fighting, but Tom was riding him, strangling him, watching the boy’s face turn purple, killing Chris Prentiss for what he’d done. This vision was so real, Tom could feel the frantic scratch and cut of Chris’s nails over his hands.

You can’t get away, Chris; I won’t let you go. I’m strong and I will kill you, I will crush you, I will make you pay for what you did to her . . .

A deep moan worked its way from Tom’s chest. God, killing Chris would feel good, it would feel so good, and, Jesus, he wanted that. This need to kill something was the claw of something new, scraping the cage of Tom’s ribs, raging to be born.

But I can’t let you out. Untangling his mind from the vision made the sweat pop on his upper lip. Got to hang on. Pressing a trembling hand to his chest, Tom felt for the two tags hanging from a beaded chain around his neck. One tag was Jed’s from Vietnam; the other had belonged to his son, Michael, who’d died in Iraq. Tom gripped the dog tags the way his grandmother used to clutch a rosary. Got to stop this. Can’t let myself get lost in this thing.

His tongue ached from where his teeth had sawed through flesh. He spat a coin of blood, watched it melt into snow stenciled in irregular stars from the birds. A lot of animals up this way, actually. His eyes drifted to some elongated, five-fingered splays that had to be raccoons, and then to a single deep trough scalloped from snow. Wolves, probably. They’d be heavy enough, and most packs went single file.

Crows, wolves, raccoons scavenging a meal. He swallowed against the rusty tang of his blood, then spat again. A lot of animals. His gaze skated over a smaller set of prints that looked almost like a dog’s. Foxes have been busy, too. No wonder. All these bodies, the lake was practically a . . .

“A buffet,” he whispered, and at that, his thoughts stuttered to a halt because he’d suddenly realized what kind of prints weren’t there.

Wait a minute. Blowing the mine was like kicking over an anthill. While a whole lot of Chuckies had died, the rest had dispersed, presumably heading north toward Rule. There’d been no activity at the mine since. But he’d been in a war zone. Survivors always came back to salvage what they could. Yet his were the only human prints around the lake—which made no sense. All this free food and nothing to stop new Chuckies from moving in, or the old ones from drifting back. Except no one had.

So where the hell are they?

Hoisting himself onto a flat-topped boulder, he glassed the shore right and left. No human prints at all, that he could see. He turned his gaze directly west. The sun was already midway to the horizon, its thin light beginning to curdle to the color of a fresh blood clot. His eyes touched first the debris-littered flat before shifting to the ruined trees. The night the mine blew, Chuckies had come from that direction. In his mind, he replayed what he’d seen as the mine deteriorated beneath their feet: those boys, black as ants, lurching across the snowpack. Five came on foot, but two had been on skis. Eventually, the Chuckies had opened fire and driven him, Luke, and Weller from the rise. But what Tom hadn’t given a lot of thought to was why those boys were headed this way in the first place. Why run toward a disaster? More to the point, what was up here that was nowhere else?

“Alex?” This was right; he could taste the tingle, feel the thrill work through his veins. “Jesus. You weren’t interested in us. You came for Alex.” That had to be it. Hundreds of tasty meals to choose from, but they came for Alex and only her. But how did they know? The whistle was his first clue, but he’d heard it after spotting the Chuckies, so it could only be . . .

“Smell?” The word came on a breath cloud. “You smelled her? Oh my God.” Glassing the flat, he jumped his gaze over the snow, sweeping left to right, following the natural lie of the land and that flood of rubble. “You were on skis. You came up the rise. You came right for her; you didn’t deviate, you didn’t hesitate. So if you made it, if you were in time, if you were prepared because you knew where she was . . .” He was shaking, his thoughts tumbling like those numbered balls they used for a Powerball jackpot. “You go down, you get her, and then you book, fast as you can. Just point your skis, get yourself in the fall line, and bomb down—”

The words evaporated on his tongue as his gaze snagged on something spindly jutting from a small mountain of debris. A branch? No. Too straight. What was that?

“Oh God, oh God, oh please, please,” he sang as he slowly feathered the focus. “Please, please, puh . . .” Something inarticulate, breathless, not quite a shout, jumped from his mouth. His heart gave a sudden hard knock he felt in his teeth. “Jesus,” he gasped. “Oh Jesus.”

Because there, fixed in the binocular’s sights, was the black handle and wrist strap of a ski pole.

23

In winter, when someone died, there were three choices. You could bury the body, burn it, or store it. Burial was preferred; it was some religious thing for Hannah and Isaac. For Ellie, it was like, okay, whatever. But without backhoes, there was no way to dig deep enough for a proper grave until spring. A shallow grave was like an invitation to scavengers and—no one would say it, but they all thought it—maybe even the people-eaters, if they got desperate. Or if the people-eaters were like crows and would eat anything.

Cremation was a no-go. Isaac just wouldn’t allow it. That religion thing again, or maybe it was his and Hannah’s hex-y magic stuff . . . Ellie didn’t know. The only bodies they ever burned were the peopleeaters. But they hadn’t crisped a single one since before Christmas because it was just too cold and Jayden thought the people-eaters had all gone south where the pickings were better.

Which left storage: a place where, in the deep freeze of the Upper Peninsula, bodies couldn’t, wouldn’t rot. No decay, no smell, no scavengers.

Yet now, at the death house, there were crows. But I don’t understand. Stunned, Ellie turned a cautious circle, sweeping her gaze from the ranks of crows on the death house’s roof to the canopy overhead. The majority of trees here were hardwoods and barren of leaves, their bare branches lacing together in skeletal fingers. Some branches now were so weighed down with birds they bowed. Where did they all come from? Why? The sound those crows made was almost mechanical, like thousands of scissors snapping open and shut. Yet the birds didn’t seem dangerous. Mina would’ve growled or barked or something. But Mina wasn’t worried. She was only . . . interested.