Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

“What?” Abruptly, she sat up. “What the hell are you thinking, Alex?” Her voice came out angry, and that was something Wolf understood, because she saw him flinch, felt his hand fall away from her face.

“I’m going outside.” She wasn’t going to run—she wasn’t stupid— but she had to get out of this miserable little room with its smells of death and Changed. Walking the wall with her hands, she made her feet. For a moment, she thought Wolf would try to help. “Don’t,” she said, flattening herself against cold wood. “Leave me alone. I don’t want—”

She stopped talking then, the words turning to dust in her mouth as she saw Bert, just beyond, coming toward her. . . .

With dinner.

The arm was spindly. It was the right. Not tons of meat. Tattered remnants of skin and ropy veins dragged over the pinkish knob of the birdy woman’s funny bone; and—oh God—the slim steel band of a watch was still tight around that twig of a wrist.

Something seemed to snap in her head. She stared at the arm, horrified—and yet she was so hungry that this thought actually bubbled to the surface: If there’s no other choice; if it’s life or death . . . “No!” Grabbing back a scream, she bullied her way past Wolf and Bert. Clawing open the cabin door, she stumbled into the bronze dazzle of a sunset. The cold was stunning, like blundering through glass, but she couldn’t stay in that cabin another second. Of course, the Changed would feed; they had to eat. But I do have a choice. After a half dozen yards, her knees unlimbered—just plain gave out—and she toppled to the snow. She dug in until her face and neck and bare hands flinched with the cold. Eventually, she would feel the burn, which was fine.

Burn my eyes out, take a blowtorch to my brain, anything. She dragged her head from side to side like a dog trying to get a bad smell out of its snout. I can’t go down that road. I do that, then I might as well have eaten Jack and snacked on those kids—or let the monster out all the way.

No matter what Wolf was thinking, what he wanted, she had to fight. Can’t give in, can’t go there. Behind, she heard the cabin’s door open; felt his eyes, knew his scent. He only watched, though, and didn’t follow.

I’m me. Ahead, by the shed, she saw that strange mound. I’m me, I’m Alex. She battled her way there, slithering through snow until the mound loomed. She knelt before it, sweeping her eyes over patchy snow—and spied a dark pinprick scurry over a patch of ice. And another pinprick, and another. And another.

Fight.

She thrust both fists into the mound, right up to her wrists. Almost at once and despite the cold, a black tide boiled to the surface and over her forearms. Withdrawing a hand, she inspected her fingers, smeary with dirt and so many ants her skin was a black, writhing mat. Many carried eggs and tiny, milky larvae clamped in their mandibles.

Do it, Alex. Just do it. Hang on to who you are. Don’t let them break you.

Before her brain could really kick in and stop her, she stuck two fingers into her mouth and sucked. Ants foamed over her tongue. She tasted dirt, the coarse pop of grit and the yeasty tang of fermenting earth; felt the spidery scampering of many legs, the minute pricking of mandibles nipping at her flesh—but she bit down and killed them all and swallowed them back and went back for seconds. And thirds.

Because, yes: things were that bad.

40

“Sarah, I know things are bad. That weird earthquake spooked everyone—” Greg broke off as Tori, with Ghost in tow, bustled into the church’s main office. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, what took you so long?” Pru had parked his butt on a desk still heaped with stacks of Xeroxed announcements for October 2. Given that they were at the end of the first week of March of the following year, an Amish Friendship Bread and Whoopie Pie church bake sale scheduled for October 8 last year was probably moot. “Cutter and Benton’ll be back in less than twenty minutes, and Greg and me have to be gone. A couple cans of refried beans only buy you so much time.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Caleb’s pretty sick.” Tori backhanded honeyblond frizz from her forehead as Alex’s gangly Weimaraner made a beeline for a muscular black German shepherd curled at Sarah’s feet. “Honestly,” Tori said, “if one more kid decides to chow down on play-dough, I’m going to throw it all out.”

Greg made a face. “Play-Doh? That stuff stinks.”

“Not the homemade stuff. The little kids made it back when we actually had flour. Looks and smells like bread dough. Really salty, though.” Propping her shotgun, a Remington 870 with a carved floral design on the walnut stock, in a corner, Tori said, “Then I had to shake Becky. She wanted to know if I was going to see you.”

“What? How’d she find out?” Greg blurted. At the dart of dismay in Tori’s eyes, he wanted to kick himself. When the girls lived with Jess, he’d drunk so much tea just to be near Tori, he could’ve floated his own battleship. After Alex’s escape and the ambush, the Council moved Tori and Sarah into the church’s rectory. That should’ve made things a little easier, especially since the girls’ housemother, a lumbering hag named Hammerbach, keeled over from a stroke. But he always seemed to say the wrong thing.

“Becky saw me unlock the choir door while I was sweeping the basement. She was under the altar, playing hide-and-seek, she said. But I think she was scoping out the pantry. A couple kids tried to break in yesterday.”

“Because they’re starving.” A tiny girl to begin with, Sarah had shriveled. At her right hip, a holstered Sig P225 jutted like a black knucklebone. Greg wondered if she even knew how to fire the thing. She turned Greg a hollow stare. “You can only live on watered-down oatmeal, corn syrup, peanut butter, and the occasional acorn for so long. We’ve already lost seven kids. Another few weeks, they’re going to start really dropping like the old people.”

“Without their pills, those old guys were going to kick anyway,” Pru said. “Nothing Kincaid can do about that either. Get pneumonia, kiss it good-bye. Going to be big trouble.”

“We’re already in deep trouble.” Sarah spooled a listless curl around a finger. “Why do you think they moved all of us Spared to the center of town? We get a little more to eat than everyone else. But they might as well paint a bull’s-eye on our backs.”

“Sarah’s right,” Tori said. “Wasn’t it just yesterday that old man took a shot?”