Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

“Yeah? And?” Pru sounded angry. “How the hell are we supposed to . . . wait, Greg, why are you taking off your boots?”

Giving him something else to look at. Quickly yanking off his other boot, Greg stripped the sock, then crammed both socks into a parka pocket. Hefting the boot in his left hand, Greg glanced back at Pru. “He’s got a shotgun.”

“So?” Pru gave him a strange look and then Greg saw the second his friend got his meaning. A shotgun had a max effective distance of about forty yards. Plenty of stopping power, but if he could get far enough away, his rifle, or Pru’s Mini-14, would be much more effective. Pru jerked a nod. “Okay,” Pru said. “Just . . . run fast.”

I hear that. Greg pulled in a breath. Oh God, please make this work.

Then he stopped thinking and moved. Dashing up the steps, Greg lobbed the boot in an awkward throw and then immediately dodged right. The shotgun roared at the same instant, following the trajectory of his boot. Through the ringing, he heard Pru squeeze off a shot as Greg hit the stone floor in a hard thump. The shotgun thundered to life again. This time, the pew just above his head exploded in a mushroom cloud of wood splinters. Ducking, Greg threw up a hand to protect his head and neck as he scuttled as fast as he could down the side aisle. Behind, he caught the sharp crack-crack-crack, the Ruger’s raps growing closer and louder as Pru stormed up the steps. Wheeling to his left, still hunched over, Greg dashed the cramped length of the pew, bare feet slapping stone, the center aisle dead ahead.

At that moment, the bell cut out. The others are in. They’re safe. He felt a sting in his throat, gulped it back. Tori’s safe.

From the altar to his left, he heard something shrill—a shout, a scream?—and then he was lifting onto the balls of his feet, pivoting, thighs tensing, his Bushmaster swinging clear of the pew, thinking, Aim up.

But he never had a chance to take the shot.

51

In the sudden thrumming silence, Greg saw Pru looming over the writhing body of a boy. When he’d been shot—a belly wound from the way the Changed was curled in a comma—the boy had tried rolling away, because once Greg squirted past, the Changed needed to move, fast, or end up full of holes. But the kid couldn’t move fast or far enough to outrun Pru’s bullets, and Greg saw why.

A forked splinter of bone jutted from a juicy rip in the boy’s thigh. Now that Greg was standing, he saw the trail of blood smeared over the sanctuary’s floor and up the altar platform’s steps. The altar carpet was purple and sodden. Dragged himself all the way. Turning, Greg followed the blood trail’s wavering path and realized that the boy must’ve broken his leg outside the sanctuary. Maybe in the vestibule, or even the breezeway. But how? That kid would’ve had to fall pretty far.

Through the sanctuary’s thick double doors, he could hear a growing gabble and maybe . . . was that a scream? Couldn’t tell. Way back, he’d read that you lost some of your hearing if you shot at a range and didn’t wear gear. Keep this up, he’d be deaf by the time he was twenty. His ears still buzzed so badly he couldn’t tell or tease apart the muted sounds seeping through the doors. No gunshots, though, so that was good. As desperately as he wanted to burst through those doors and find Tori, he knew he ought to wait. No rush now. The girls were safe.

We did it. So why didn’t he feel good about that? It was the Changed boy, the screw of his face, the way he writhed. Dying hard, Kincaid would say. Not right to feel good about that. He started back for Pru. “You okay?” He thought he said it too loudly.

“Yeah. Can’t say the same for our buddy.” Pru toed a shotgun away from the boy’s spidering fingers. “Can’t decide whether to finish him or let him bleed to death.” He paused. “Dude’s pretty messed up. Carpet’s ruined. So’s the altar cloth.”

Greg picked out splashes of blood on the wood, even the walls just below the cross. If you didn’t know better, you’d think Jesus’s ghost was up there, dripping. He stared down at the boy. Seventeen, eighteen, he guessed, greasy hair down past his shoulders and a ton of yellow pus balloons and zit scars to boot. Someone had rearranged his nose, too, and recently. The boy’s skin was the color of moldy cheese, and his eyes, already glazing, were sunk deep in sockets rimmed with fading yellowish bruises. This Changed was starving to death, just like them.

Stooping, he reached for the shotgun—and froze. He must also have . . . what . . . gasped? Cried out? He didn’t know, but Pru said, sharply, “What? Greg?”

No. Maybe his heart had stopped somewhere along the way. He thought that must be it, because he felt the muscle seize in his chest and his center go cold and still and black. For a crazy instant, he thought, This will be what it’s like when I’m dead. He watched his hand float toward the weapon; saw his fingers—small, so distant—wrap themselves around the shotgun’s walnut stock, then creep over the ridges and swirls of those intricate curlicues of carved flowers and vines as a blind boy reads Braille.

“Oh Jesus,” Pru said. Then: “Greg, look at me, man. This doesn’t mean anything—”

But he was on his feet, backtracking a stumbling step and then another, and now he’d gotten himself turned around and had begun to run, the Changed’s blood sticky against his bare feet, and then the sanctuary’s double doors were suddenly swinging wide, as if in a bellow, because now the voices all crashed through in a huge wave that the men rode, spilling into the sanctuary. The faces blurred—all black mouths, black eyes—and now hands were floating to meet him like exotic sea life on an incoming tide.

Of them all, he recognized only three people in those first few seconds: Sarah, hair wild, face smeared with blood; Yeager, somehow pathetic in a red-checked flannel he hadn’t managed to button correctly; and Kincaid, who crowded through, with his arms out to grab him, hold him back, spare him for one more second: “No, son. Don’t look, don’t look, son, don’t . . .”

“Nooo! Tori? Tori?” Greg wailed as Kincaid wrapped him up, and then there were more hands and other men bearing him to the cold stone as Greg thrashed. “No no no!”

And in all of that, there was one thing more: the moment doddering old Henry stumped up the altar to stare down at the Changed boy, who was, miraculously, still alive.

“Jesus Lord,” Henry piped, his high voice cutting above the gabble. “It’s Ben Stiemke.”