Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

52

“What?” At first, Greg wasn’t sure the voice, so dead and flat, was his. Still huddled in the circle of Kincaid’s arms on cold, blood-smeared stone, Greg felt eight years old again, a little boy waiting for the adults to make everything all right, and he had never missed his father quite so much. “Stiemke? Like on the Council?”

“Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Pru said, his rifle still trained on the dying boy. “I thought all the kids from Rule were dead.”

“Oh Lord,” Kincaid groaned in an undertone. His face was ashen. “You sons of bitches, you did it. You really did it.”

“Did what?” Greg asked as Sarah staggered toward them through the crowd. Her right pant leg was sodden, and tears had eaten tracks through the blood caked on her cheeks. “Doc, what are you talking about?”

Before Kincaid could respond, Henry said, in his clear bugle, “Yup, that’s Ben, all right. Known him since he was a little guy, oh . . . yay high.” Henry patted the air down around his knees. “Recognize him anywhere on account of that bad case of the acne.” Henry looked down the aisle toward the Council members, who’d worked their way through the swell of people crowding into the sanctuary. None of the Council wore their robes, and while Yeager was in the lead, only Ernst, broad-chested and very tall, with a still-substantial gut in spite of rationing, retained even a vestige of authority. Stiemke, a withered little man, blind in one eye, only cringed alongside Ernst. Greg couldn’t decide if Stiemke was in shock or trying to hide.

“Mr. Stiemke?” Henry called. “This is your grandson, isn’t it?”

Yeager spoke for the quailing Stiemke. “Yes, that’s Ben.” Yeager’s tone was even enough, but his skin was bleached so white his bald head looked like a cue ball. Without his robes, Yeager looked like a homeless person in mismatched socks, sagging trousers, and that red-checked flannel. Yeager’s eyes, usually so bird-bright with calculation, only looked furtive and a little frightened, like those of a mouse that can’t decide if running will only make the cat spring faster. “Obviously, Ben got away, a fact of which we were unaware.”

“Obviously? Got away? Unaware?” Rifle held high, Jarvis shouldered his way past the others to stand in the center aisle. Any resemblance to a turkey was gone. Jarvis looked more like a buzzard. “You run this place for decades, make all the decisions. You tell us, grown men, to follow orders from kids”—Jarvis jerked his head down at Greg—“but we do it because we are loyal and God-fearing, and now you say you didn’t know this boy had gotten away?”

Peter. The realization broke over Greg in a kind of icy wash. He said they rounded up all the Changed and shot them; that no one got away. Greg’s eyes drifted to the dying boy. So Peter would’ve known Ben wasn’t dead.

“Where I was from, before Rule? Those kids always came back,” someone in the crowd said. Murmurs of assent rippled through the rest of the men, and now Greg saw more than a few women had filtered in, too, armed with baseball bats, shotguns, like a village mob from an old black-and-white monster movie. He spotted one woman—Travers?—her hair a gray fury, clutching a Warren hoe, its blade tapering to a wicked point. “Lot of ’em hunted in packs. It was one of the reasons you said we’d be safer here, ’cause all your kids were dead.”

“So how that little monster’s alive in the first place is what I want to know.” It was Travers, the stormy woman with the hoe, which she now shook at Stiemke. “What’d you do, only kill kids like my Lee? Because we’re not important enough? Did you spare this monster because he’s yours?”

“Hell with that,” someone else rumbled. “How many others like that one are there? Because if one kid got away—”

“Or they let him get away!” another person shouted.

“There got to be others.” Travers brandished her hoe like a spear. “So where are they?”

“Where the hell do you think?” Jarvis aimed a look of black thunder at Stiemke. “They’ve been out there all this time, maybe even close by. But why? You said you were doing God’s work, taking our grandkids, ending their torment. What did you do, you and that son of a bitch, Peter, and Chris . . .”

“My grandson knew nothing about this,” Yeager said, and Greg thought from his tone that this was the truth. Yet Ernst remained silent, not a flicker of emotion on his bullish features.

But Peter knew. Greg saw Sarah study Ernst’s face, then drop her eyes as the first fingers of scarlet crept up her neck. A tear splashed onto a cheek, which she knuckled away. Greg gave her free hand a small squeeze, but she didn’t look up or acknowledge him in any way. Sarah knows it now, too. Peter was in on it all along. Letting some of the Changed get away might even have been his idea. Peter was the one who’d told each patrol where to go, and when. Because he knew where the Changed were most likely to be at any given time?

And Jarvis had said maybe even close by . . . Changed, in the Zone? Of course. Now that someone had finally said it, this made perfect sense.

“So did Chris find out?” Travers, the woman with the hoe, shouted. “Is that why you got rid of him, said he organized an ambush when he didn’t?”

“Chris ran.” Yeager said the words like a curse. “He betrayed us.”

“Like you betrayed us?” Until the words hung in the air, Greg hadn’t known they were on his tongue. He tottered to his feet. “You didn’t give Chris a choice. He denied it, but you’d already decided. No matter what he said, you’d have sent him to the prison house.”

“Because he defied me.” Yeager seemed to be getting some of his old fire back. His coal-black eyes shifted to Jarvis. “You owe Rule your life. Don’t dare to judge—”

“Shut up. Let’s judge you for a change.” Jarvis jabbed a finger into Yeager’s chest, hard enough to rock the old man back a stumbling step. “You lied. I don’t know how many of our grandkids you let go, but that abomination on the altar is a councilman’s grandson. You had to know. Does that mean our grandchildren are still alive? Why would you do that?”

“So what are we going to do about it now?” Travers’s wrinkled face was the color of a prune. She jabbed the point of her hoe at Ben. “What are we going to do with that?”

Uh-oh. Greg rifled a warning look to Pru. The other boy gave a small nod and took a step back from Ben Stiemke, who had gone still and watchful, his lips frothy with blood bubbles.