Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

“It’s like he hears something.” When Luke turned his gaze away from the transport cage, Cindi said, “You know? When Peter starts up with the let me go stuff ? But how? He’s only . . . half a Chucky, you know?”

“But crazy,” Chad said. “Not all the time,” Luke said. “All this stuff, the go go go, that usually starts up whenever Finn moves out.”

“Telepathy?” Cindi asked.

“Can’t be straight telepathy.” Swallowing the last of the mac and cheese, Jasper licked the plastic spoon. “At least, not like the movies or what you’re thinking.”

“What else could it be? You were at the barn.” What had happened when Finn’s Chuckies descended on their camp scared Luke silly: how they broke formation, half going left and the rest like a marching band at halftime, streaming to the right. Then, the Chuckies had done . . . nothing. Only waited, staring, their concentration utterly complete. It was so quiet that Luke could hear the crackle of the fire and the jangle of hardware as horses tossed their heads. It was the weirdest thing, but Luke sensed that the Chuckies were being . . . held back? Yes, they’d wanted him. They’d wanted Mellie. What they’d most hungered after was all those juicy kids huddled in the barn.

But they weren’t allowed. They were like . . . puppets? That wasn’t quite right. It was as if something or someone held them back on invisible leashes: this far and no farther.

“Yeah, but have you ever tried following your own thoughts? Real complicated.” Smoothing the empty MRE pouch on his thighs, Jasper began rolling the plastic into a tight tube. “Plus, you have the problem of signal strength and complexity.”

Luke and Cindi looked at each other. “What are you talking about?” Luke asked.

“Thoughts are, you know, jumbly,” Jasper said.

“Okay. So?”

Jasper gave him a duh-hello look. “What does Peter do? Does he talk about a gazillion things? No. He keeps saying the same thing over and over again: go, go, go, let me go.”

“Yeah, but he’s crazy,” Chad said.

“Not all the time.” Jasper peered through the tube he’d made like a pirate with a spyglass. “He’s worse when the Chuckies are on the move. Other times, he’s normal.”

“He eats people,” Cindi said. “His eyes are weird.”

“Okay, not normal-normal, but not all Chucky either. Whenever Finn does take him along, Peter’s either tied up or with a couple guards.”

“Probably because Finn can’t control him very well?” Luke said.

“Or all the way, yeah. And the times Finn’s left him here? Peter’s not as loud and crazy. He gets better the longer Finn’s gone. I think it’s a cumulative exposure and distance thing, like, you know, Wi-Fi.”

Wuh? “So?” Luke asked, and then as Jasper swiveled, still with the tube to his eye, added, “Would you quit that? It’s annoying.”

“Fine.” Jasper heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t think Peter’s saying let me go, like get me out of this cage so I can go home. He might mean, let me go go go after them. Go go go is the command. Maybe all Finn does are simple commands piggybacked on other signals.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Cindi said.

“Yeah, the Chuckies aren’t radios,” Chad said.

Radios. Luke turned that over. Wi-Fi. Something important there . . . something Jasper said about signal strength, not just distance but something else.

“Guys. What do you think a thought is?” Jasper said. “Electrical impulses, that’s all. The body’s full of electricity. You’ve got gradients across your skin and ion flow in cells.”

“What?” Cindi said. “So how does that work in this situation?”

“Well, thoughts are chemical and electrical . . . I don’t know.” Jasper’s shoulders rose and fell. “Look, I can’t tell you how Finn’s doing it, but he can’t be slinging real complicated stuff around, or if he is, only a couple Chuckies get the whole thing. Maybe even just one Chucky.”

“Whoa. Wait a sec.” Cindi sat up. “He’s right. Two groups of Chuckies, the ones in white . . .”

“And everybody else,” Chad said. “Like, maybe it doesn’t work with every Chucky?”

“Or he doesn’t need a ton to get the job done,” Luke said. “But he’s limited by distance, like when your Wi-Fi drops out when you’re too far from a network.” He kept thinking: signal strength; signal strength and a network . . .

“Okay, I buy that. But . . .” Chad threw up his hands. “So what? We’re still stuck.”

Luke didn’t see how this helped either, but his head felt like he’d spent all night cramming for a test he was sure to bomb. Sometimes when he walked away from a problem, the answer popped into his head. “I’m going for water.” As he stood, all four guards perked up. “Water,” he said, holding up his canteen and giving it a shake.

“Hold on.” Heaving to his feet, the mustachioed guard lumbered over. A lit cigarette jutted from his mouth. “All right, let’s go,” he said, handing over a flashlight.

“It’s not like I’m going to run anywhere,” Luke complained, but the guard only grunted and made a get going gesture with the Uzi.

The stream was beyond the kids’ tents and a short distance into the woods. Following his flashlight, Luke ducked into the trees, where the light was worse and the shadows thicker. Ahead, he heard the churn of water over stones. The final twenty feet to the stream took a sharp drop. “I ain’t going down there. Bad for my knees. Make it quick,” the guard said, as the orange coal of his smoke danced. “Freezing my ass.”

Oh, bite me. Carefully picking his way over stones and scrims of ice, Luke fanned the light over the sparse snow along the stream’s edge, looking for a safe spot where he wouldn’t wind up wet. As the beam flickered past a splotch of slush, he spotted something that only registered when his light had already skimmed past. Puzzled, he turned the beam back and saw two things: snow heaped around a rock where all the rest nearby were still covered, and a trio of animal prints. Probably an animal had disturbed the snow as it stepped past. From the prints, at first glance, he thought: wolf. Huge, too. That print was bigger than his hand, and fresh. As in, not long ago.

Considering that, all of a sudden, he was glad for the guard and his gun. Make this quick is right. The last thing he needed to run into was a hungry wolf. He had enough problems. Heart pounding, he swiveled right, dragging his light over a curving meander—and froze when two green coins flared alongside the silver oval of a face.