Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

She could hear him now: a low, muffled groaning that went on and

mo ns ters on. Through the slit she’d made, Ellie could see black hair and now the broad plain of his forehead. Slipping in her fingers, she jerked the cotton sheet hard, grunting as the fabric first resisted then gave. His face appeared. His skin was very white, almost like a grub’s. Bluishgray smudges brushed the hollow beneath his eyes, which were still closed. His lips were dusky blue, like dead worms after a bad rain. His mouth was open, and he was gasping, his chest heaving against the sheet, the wiry cords standing in his neck.

“Chris! Chris!” She was crying again, ripping the sheet apart and crying, screaming his name. He was naked—as in no clothes at all, a fact her mind only dimly registered, like the flicker of something you passed on the road in a really fast car. His chest strained to suck in air. She could see the way the skin actually bowed between his ribs.

But what really riveted her to the spot, made her actually start back with a little shriek, was the blood: scarlet roses unfurling where Hannah had placed the wound wood after blessing it.

That can’t work. She saw that the wounds weren’t raw or ragged anymore either but dimpled with half-formed scar tissue. It’s just a charm, it’s only wood.

Chris was shuddering, all over, as if he’d stuck his finger into an electrical socket. She battled the sheet away from his hips and then his jittering legs. Chris had many injuries: nicks and smaller rips, a gash on each palm, punctures in his thighs. The killing blow, the real monster rip that sealed the deal, drove straight down, a through-andthrough that had shredded first his diaphragm, which Hannah said helped you breathe, and then his liver, which was nothing more than a big bloody sac, easily torn by a broken rib. Or, in Chris’s case, obliterated by the weight of the door and that iron spike. No way to stop the bleeding either, not from something this bad. Chris had lasted as long as he had only because he was young and strong.

But now there’s blood . That terrible wound glistened like the red eye of a loon in high summer—and yet there was also a rim of very pink flesh, like the new skin of a baby. It’s all just voodoo; there’s no such thing as magic, there’s no such thing.

“Chris!” Ellie grabbed his face and realized with a shock that as he got more air, his skin was growing even warmer, his cheeks going hectic with fresh color. “Chris, can you hear me? Are you—”

All at once, his eyes flew open. At the same instant, Chris’s hands shot out, fanning a thin spray of new blood, and hooked her shoulders. It happened so fast her shriek was only halfway to her mouth when he spoke.

“Help.” The word rode on a ferocious gasp. Chris’s eyes, the centers black and huge, bored into hers—and for Ellie, it was like staring into the mouth of nothing and everything at once.

“P-please,” he gasped again. “H-help me.”

28

Tom might have been a couple cans shy of a six-pack right about then, but he knew the gun wasn’t hers. No cross-trigger safety, for one thing, and Alex’s had been a Glock 22, standard police issue with a fifteen-round mag. Besides, Alex had been a prisoner. No way the Chuckies would let her keep her father’s weapon.

This gun was smaller, a Glock 19, but with an extended magazine. He eyeballed it as nineteen rounds altogether. Yet he had no way of checking for sure, or even jacking back the slide to shuck a chambered round. A thin scrim of ice coated the weapon, like the petrified sugar glaze over a stale doughnut.

It got wet. His own battered hands were stiff with cold, and he was starting to shiver all over. Wincing, he clamped his right hand under his left arm to warm it as he lurched back to the dead Chucky. Bracing his butt against boulders, he shrugged back into his parka, but his torn hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t work the zipper and finally gave up. Had to warm his hands first. Fumbling up his gloves, he studied the rise directly east. No question about it: that Glock was in the fall line, either carried here all by itself or stripped from its owner as the avalanche roared downslope. So . . . this Glock had belonged to a Chucky? That stood to reason. There had been seven plowing up the rise, and he’d already found one. The Chuckies had only just breached the hillside when Luke and Weller forced him to leave. So, prepared or not, unless you were a real monkey or a trained Army Ranger like Weller and knew your way around ropes and rocks, reaching Alex would have taken precious time the Chuckies might not have had to spare. So wasn’t it much more likely that none had survived, and other dead waited, entombed under his feet? Of course. He’d found a ski pole. That dead kid had an Eagle and now here was a Glock. Probably rifles under the snow and skis and all sorts of goodies. Only time and the spring melt would tell, unless he came back with a shovel and excavated the entire flat. A futile effort. He knew that. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it, but . . .

The ice. He slid a thumb over the Glock’s grip, felt the smooth glide of his glove. Spied a tiny frozen teardrop hanging from the trigger’s tip. The ice is wrong.

Squatting over the Chucky, he laboriously worked the Eagle from its hip holster. To his utter lack of surprise, the massive gun was locked up tight; he couldn’t budge even the safety. “But there’s no ice on it,” he muttered, hefting the Eagle, a heavy sucker, in his left hand. So the gun probably hadn’t gotten sopping wet. “What the hell does that mean?”

Before the avalanche, the water had been belowground, in the mine, and rising. There was plenty of ice now, not only a skin of it over the new lake itself but also frozen into beards over the rocks along the shore. But the only ice down here was a brittle surface crust, and what you’d expect from snow exposed to sun and wind.

Laying the Eagle on the dead boy’s stomach but still clutching the Glock, he pushed up on his thighs. No ice on the Eagle meant no water, nothing to explain how the Glock got wet. Unless Alex got her hands on a weapon. The thought was a golden blaze, and crazy, too, just another loony-tunes item in a long afternoon of insanity, but he couldn’t help it. That would explain it, because that would mean . . .

“Oh Jesus.” He felt a knot loosening in his chest. His eyes sprang hot. Hold it together. Don’t get ahead of yourself. But it might have been hers, right? Alex had been in that tunnel, working her way to the surface. If anyone could’ve found a way to get a weapon, it would be Alex, and what if, what if . . .

“Alex.” Closing his eyes, he folded his hands, pressing the weapon to the hard thrum of his heart. “Alex, oh God, did you make it? Did you get out?” Or did they take you? Is that how you lost the gun? He hated that thought because then, more likely than not, she really was here, now, beneath the snow, waiting for him to find her.