Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

“Because there are pills.” He knew exactly where this was going now. The standard Vietnam myth was that every American soldier was some kind of crazed junkie. Total bull. Oh, he’d known his share of potheads, dopers, boys into junk or fat A-bombs, which were blunts mixed with heroin. But it wasn’t as if the military didn’t help things along. Weller’s dad, a pilot, served during World War II, when the Army Air Force was only too tickled to dole out their little gopills: good old-fashioned speed, which Weller used plenty of in his day, too. Ate it like candy sometimes. No other way to stay awake and alert. It could also screw you, big-time, the crash afterward so bad you thought you’d never dig yourself out of that hole.

There had been other pills, too, ones that did a whole lot more: not only kept you up but turned off sleep altogether. Weller knew plenty of guys who’d volunteered as guinea pigs, because, hell, he’d worked on them. For those soldiers, anything was better than playing the odds, when the life expectancy of a machine gunner in a hot LZ was about eight seconds.

“Or you find pills. I never . . . too scared they’d mess me up the way the Army—” Tom ground to a halt.

There we go. That’s what this is about. “What about the Army, Tom? What did they do?” When Tom was silent, Weller pressed: “In ’Nam, they got volunteers. Ran experiments. Not just the LSD or sarin or BZ. I’m talking drugs to make you crazy-good at killing—”

“I think they might have tried that,” Tom whispered. It came fast, as if he knew he was sinking and needed to get this out. “Because you got to stay alert. Can’t let yourself sleep. You live on speed and fear, or just plain fear.”

“Or you’re dead.”

“Or dreaming,” Tom said. “Just as bad. The dreams . . . they take over, like the flashbacks, until it’s like you’re in this bottle, no way out, and dreams and what’s real . . . they all mix together. So the shrinks . . . they have lots of pills.” He let out a cawing laugh, but it was wheezy and weak. “Call it ‘damage control.’ Keep the guys worst off close to the front lines, let them rest and get some decent chow, but also feed them all kinds of pills. So you take what the Army shrinks dole out, and other stuff, too.”

“Black market?”

“Some. Yeah. But if you take too much, or the wrong type . . .”

“You go crazy.”

“Worse.” The smudges under Tom’s haunted eyes were livid as bruises. “You can’t be stopped. You keep going in this . . . this frenzy. And that girl . . . her eyes. Blood eyes . . .”

“What?” Weller said sharply. “You mean, bloodshot, right? Like a bad hangover.”

“No.” Tom’s head wobbled, and his voice was dwindling like water spiraling down a drain. “No no no . . . no whites. Just red and black.”

Oh, you crazy bastard, you really did it this time around. “I’ve seen that,” Weller said. “In ’Nam, we called them berserkers.”

“Yeah?” Tom’s lips thinned in a faint grimace. His eyes drifted shut. “We didn’t.”

“No?” Weller waited, noting how Tom’s breathing had settled. “Tom?”

Tom didn’t reply. The deep lines of weariness and grief were still there, but his muscles had relaxed into sleep. That was all right. Weller now knew more than enough and understood that they all might be in real trouble. If the Chuckies could be manipulated, if that was possible, he knew precisely who was insane enough, smart enough, to do it. The world had gone to hell in a handbasket almost five months ago. Plenty of time, especially if you were well supplied, a planner and an experimenter, someone with a prepared mind. Lord knew, he’d nurtured his hunger for revenge long enough.

So what in hell am I going to do now? Weller skimmed a hand over his forehead and was not at all surprised that the palm came away oiled with sour sweat. This whole ugly business was out of control. It had changed to something he didn’t recognize. He should have gotten clear as soon as the mine went. Just picked up and left. For God’s sake, hadn’t he already avenged Mandy? Peter was dead, and Rule couldn’t be far behind, what with their precious little Chuckies well on their way home by now. Shouldn’t that be enough for him? Because there was revenge, and then there was . . . End Times. Revelations. And I don’t even believe in that crap.

Should he fight this? Try to do something? Did he even have to? Sure, he could take a chance, soldier to soldier, and tell Tom what he knew. But Mellie was right. Tom was on the brink, had been for a while, and there was no way to predict what the boy’s reaction might be. Getting himself killed trying to come clean wouldn’t help anyone, and he wasn’t even sure, exactly, of the bigger picture here or what was going on. All he had were bits and pieces, suppositions and suspicions. So, would it be better to get out now, while he still had the chance? Build himself a new life someplace where he wasn’t known, with what time he had left?

But there are these kids, just starting out in life. There’s Tom, carrying grief he shouldn’t have had to bear. We got them into this. No doubt Mellie saw the kids as expendable, too. But Weller just didn’t know what he should do, what was safest and which the lesser evil . . .

Tom sucked in a sudden breath as if he’d just found something in the dark of his mind and dragged it up to the light. When Weller looked back, Tom’s eyes were open again but so clear that it was like looking into the clean, deep, chilling blue of Superior.

“What?” Weller asked.

“Zombies,” Tom said, very clearly. “We called them zombies.”

PART THREE:

BREAKING POINT

39

Ten days after the avalanche, in the first week of March, Alex staggered from the wreckage of a tumbledown cabin just off a nondescript fire road somewhere west of the mine and southwest of Rule. At least, she thought it was west-southwest. After days on the trail, she had a lot on her mind. Like finding food before she became it.

There was new blood in her mouth and a huge knot on the back of her head. She didn’t need a mirror to see the swelling under her left cheek where Acne had clobbered her not so long ago. God, the kid’s fist had felt like the business end of a pile driver.

She was headed toward the shed—and that weird mound she’d seen earlier—but halfway there, she either fell or tripped, she wasn’t sure. Blundering through snow, her boots probably tangled. When she hit, she let herself sink, really dig in so the cold could start its work of burning her skin, scorching its way through her brain. Maybe reduce the monster to a cinder.