Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

She could feel it, that same ballooning in her mind, the sidestep and shimmy, the shift.

Gathering herself, marshaling as much of the monster’s frenzied energy as she could, she dropped all the barriers, each and every mental firewall. Alex leapt; felt herself and the monster falling and then crashing into the roaring red tide of the go-go-go-go, swamping Davey, swamping the Changed, as the monster—all yellow eyes and needle-teeth and scaled arms—exploded from its deep dark well and unfurled in a sudden bloody flower to seep into Davey, into the altered Changed, and all the others, even into Peter: gogogogoGOGOGO—

“N-no, Finn,” Alex said, working to get the words out, and through it, Tom heard the deep venom in her voice, almost a growl. “L-let me . . . sh-show you!”

Her back arched; her eyes gleamed; her features twisted into a naked kind of raw fury he knew from battle, when the enemy was swarming over the rocks and you had no ammo and all that was left, everything that separated life and death, was the razor-thin margin of what the body knew and what it would do to cling to every last moment. Alex seemed to grow in front of his eyes into something new, breaking from a cocoon and revealing something not quite human living behind the eyes of a girl whose face was etched with a diamond on his memory and yet never truly known or seen until now. Until the moment she let herself break, let the mask slip, dared to make herself known, dared it all.

For a split second, time gathered itself, swelled like a trembling teardrop ready to fall—and then the time splintered and broke apart.

And Alex wailed. The sound was a keening, as clear and piercing as the note of her father’s whistle that called to him from the endless night of a dark and desperate place where the monsters lived. But this was also a roar, a call to battle: a swooping crescendo that went on and on and on, one that raised the hair on his head and sent Tom’s heart crowding into his mouth.

“Alex!” He had to do something; he had to break this, get her out, get them both out! The guards had fallen back; everyone seemed frozen. Without realizing, he’d actually recoiled a step, but Tom now started forward, no clear idea of what he meant to do, only knowing that he must take her away from here—

But then, to his left and just beyond Finn, Davey’s head whipped, those mad vermillion eyes going wide as he shrieked, his cry twining around Alex’s, becoming one. To his right, Peter was howling a ululating note, and Simon and Penny were screeching, and then all the Changed, altered and not, wailed. It was a cry that rose to an insane bellow and in voices that were many and voices that were one, resolving to a single note, and that voice was Alex, it was Alex, and it said—

Minutes out of Rule, still in forest but running up the hospice road, Chris abruptly reined in Night. Ahead, a shuddering roar billowed from the trees. It was like something from television, on Saturdays in fall when his father mainlined beer and cursed the Wolverines: that peculiar kind of whooping bellow a college crowd made in a packed football stadium. Yet this cry was also unearthly, a shriek that was one voice made of many, and Chris couldn’t tell if he was listening to pain or ecstasy—or a little bit of both.

“My God,” he said as the horse pranced and snorted, “do you hear that?”

“Yeah. And screams, too, not just that . . . that sound.” Greg’s eyes were bright with urgency and early morning light. “Are we too late? Do you think the bombs . . .”

“No. If we can hear that, we’d have heard the explosion.” Or explosions. The idea was that there would be no one left to scream, or at least not for very long. “I think . . . God, I think those are the Changed.”

“Chris.” Greg was staring. “The Changed don’t speak.”

They do now. Something’s given them a voice. The sound was so eerie he was shivering. “I think they’re saying something. You hear it? Actual words?”

“Yeah. I do,” Greg said. “It sounds like—”

* * *

“GO GO GO!” Eyes blazing, crackling with sudden energy, Alex wailed: “KILL FINN KILL FINN KILL HIS MEN KILL FINN KILL—”

“What’s happening?” Mellie shrieked. Turning a wild circle, she clapped her hands to her ears as the Changed bellowed. “Elias, Elias, what are they doing, what’s—”

“No!” Finn shouted, but his was a voice in the wilderness, a tiny speck, like listening to a scream lost to the thunder of a whirlpool.

And then, for Tom, everything snapped, the world cracking wide in a furious maelstrom of sound and movement just as it had the day the world died, and the night they blew the mine and the ground had shuddered under his feet. Only now, instead of a black tornado of birds and a rampaging of deer and bewildered animals and his brain trying to tear itself apart and the mouth of the earth yawning wide to swallow him for good—this time, the end belonged to the Changed.

As one, all the Changed began to move, storming and rampaging through the square. The Rule people were screaming, slipping, tangling with one another in their rush to escape, but there was nowhere to go. They were hemmed in by the Changed and Finn’s men and a chaos of horses wheeling and rearing, their hooves clashing down on ice and earth to break bodies, crush heads. The Changed wheeled on Finn’s men, most of whom were still trying to raise their weapons two seconds too late. The Changed charged, the weird, altered Changed leaping from braying horses, the others like puppets suddenly cut free of their strings to fall on Finn’s men, swirling and seething and boiling in a mad, chaotic frenzy. The square erupted as Finn’s men fired wild, bullets buzzing in high hornet-like whines. It was like watching a scene from a movie where an army overruns a village; where, soon, there will be no one left.

On the landing, Alex keened: hands by her head, fingers spread wide, eyes bulging, blood on her mouth from the red river leaking from her nose, as if the something that had burst from her was blowing her apart. To Tom’s left, Mellie screamed again as a girl raced up the steps to throw herself on the woman in a fast, flat dive. Crashing back against a balustrade, Mellie rebounded from the stone, rolled, and tried scuttling away. Swarming over Mellie’s back, the girl latched onto the old woman’s neck with her teeth. Howling, Mellie reared like a horse trying to throw its rider, hands wildly scrabbling for purchase.

To Tom’s right, Peter suddenly launched himself, a fury of golden hair and mad eyes, with Simon—that boy who might have been Chris in a different life—only a step behind: “Kill him kill him kill him—”