“Okay, come on, Alex,” she whispered. “Get going, honey. You
can’t stay here.” But, oh God, she was so scared. A fit of trembling
grabbed her. Her eyes pooled, the first tear swelling, then trickling
down her right cheek.
Don’t cry, come on, stop—
A sudden swoon swept her brain. In her skull, the monster shimmied and twisted and stretched. Beneath her hands, the rock seemed
to evaporate as a black void opened in her mind.
No, not now.
Her knees were unhinging with the faint.
Not when
I’ve made it this far . . .
And then a hand spidered onto her shoulder.
That touch snapped her back as crisp and sharp as a slap. Shrieking,
Alex flinched. Her left leg shot off slick metal, like a cartoon character skating on a banana. Her full weight dropped onto her battered
right ankle. She screamed again, this time with pain. Her vision
purpled. Off-balance, she scrambled for purchase, fingernails frantically scratching stone. Just as she was about to peel away, the hand on
her shoulder grabbed a fistful of her parka and yanked her back. She
righted, blundering onto the precarious ledge of that Uzi.
“
No
,” she gasped, horrified, her heart a hard knot in her chest—
because now the pieces fell into place. Everything fit: the slip-slides
of her mind; the monster, so suddenly awakened; that sensation of a
crowd and swarming shadows above her head.
And there’s the smell.
She hadn’t noticed before; been a little busy
trying to save her ass, thanks. But now, it was close: rot and roadkill.
And shadows. Cool mist. A darkness more profound than a starless sky.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Wolf.”
A bolt of bright yellow light sprang from the dark. Nearly blinded by
the glare, Alex squinted and would have put a hand up if she hadn’t
needed both to hang on. Belatedly, she realized that the light must be
for her. The Changed saw very well in the dark. She saw Wolf, his legs
braced against rock, dangling from some kind of crude rope harness
looped around both thighs.
Sniffed me out, just like I caught his scent earlier this morning. Came
to get me.
Had he tracked them all along? Possibly. The Changed followed a route, kept to a pattern. So maybe Wolf had bided his time,
waiting to see if she was still alive, then planned a way to get her out.
Before the Zap, when Wolf was Simon Yeager and not a monster,
maybe he and his friends had done a
lot
of rock climbing, exploring
all the ins and outs of the Rule mine.
Then she remembered:
Tom
. Her heart stuttered. Tom had been
up there. He’d called to her, and then she’d heard shots. “Did you kill
him?” She was so afraid for Tom she thought her chest would break.
Was Tom lying dead in the snow because of her? “If you killed him,
if you hurt him . . .”
Wolf said nothing. He couldn’t. But now that he was so close, she
smelled something else in all that mist and shadow: a scent sweet and .
. .
gentle
, a light perfume of lilacs and honeysuckle. Her dad’s face suddenly flickered in a quick flashbulb of memory:
Jump to me, sweetheart
.
“Safe.” The word slipped off her tongue. For an instant, where she
was, what was happening, ceased to matter. It was as if she and Wolf
had slipped into a private, silent, well-lit room built only for them.
And not only safe . . .
“Home,” she whispered. “Family?”
The scent deepened. His face smoothed, and for a second, there
was the ghost of Chris—the lips she had kissed, the angles and planes
of a face her fingers knew—and she felt her monster suddenly reach;
was aware of an ache and a fiery burn that was need and desire flowing like lava through her veins.
The monster knows Wolf.
This was new, as was the hard throb in her
neck and the claw of something so close to raw, red yearning that she
felt the rake of it across her chest. What the hell was going on? The
times her mind had sidestepped from her to end up behind the eyes
of the Changed—Spider, Leopard, Wolf—had been few, and mainly
in response to
their
intense emotion, not hers. Long ago, Kincaid
wondered if her tumor was reorganizing, the monster becoming
something separate and distinct from her.
God, and now it has
.
The
monster
wants
Wolf.
“No,
I’m
in control,” she ground out, no longer sure whether she
spoke to the monster or Wolf. She clung to the rock. “I’m Alex. I’m
not a mon—”
CRACK!
A yelp bulleted from her mouth. The sound, somewhere to her
left, had been enormous. At first, Alex thought she saw more water,
a wide stream running a jagged dark course over stone. But then
there were more snaps and cracks, the crisp sounds like thick ice over
a deep lake in the dead of winter, because ice is restless, never still,
always in flux, the stress building and building to the breaking point.
Before her eyes, that jagged seam became a black lightning bolt,
growing wider and darker and
longer. . .
Water still swirled around
her waist, but now she also detected an insidious tug, much stronger
than before.
From above came a hard
bang
and a
thunk
as rocks ricocheted and
rebounded before slamming down in a stony fusillade.
Crack!
The
rock wall squealed, singing with the strain. Crack
CRACK!
And that was when the Uzi actually
moved.
Terror blazed through her veins. Almost without thinking, she
sprang, her right hand splayed in a grab. If her ankle shrieked, she
didn’t feel it. All she saw were Wolf ’s hands, the one knotted in her
parka and the other, gloved, clinging to the taut snake of rope that
would have to be strong enough to hold them both. She felt his wrist
sock into her palm, and then she was swinging a half-assed trapeze
move as Wolf whipped her, hard and fast, like a stone in a bolo, trying
to fold her against his chest. He might have done it, too. He had the
strength she lacked, and he was solidly anchored besides. But then
the Uzi shifted again, a sharp jolt down that knocked the breath from
her chest.
She missed, dropping as the rock crumbled beneath her feet.
Skating away, the Uzi was swept in a sudden tidal surge into this
new and ever-expanding fissure, one that had grown so wide it was
a sideways grin and then a toothless leer and then a black
scream
that
matched her own.
In the next instant, the wall shattered and split and opened with
a roar.
“Wee-wee-wee
.
”
Aidan’s right arm blurred. There was a whickering
sound and then a mucky
whop
as a whippy car antennae connected
with bloody mush that had once been the sole of a right foot. “
Weewee-wee
, little piggy!”
“Don’t hit me anymore, please,
don’t
. . . AAAHHH!” The guy,
Dale Privet, let go of another shriek as Aidan whapped his left foot
while Mick Jagger shouted about how pleased he was to meet you.
God, Greg
so
wished that wheezy old cassette recorder would just
die already. He had another monster of a migraine that was keeping
time with Charlie Watts. But Aidan loved the Stones:
The pros, like,
blast it 24/7.
How this little rat-creep even knew
anything
about guys
who were professionals at torturing other guys scared him shitless.
This whole nightmare was like the time Greg was six and his older
brother—really, an asshole, so Aidan would’ve
loved
him—took Greg
to the old Mexican place, a rotting husk hunkered at the end of a oneway country lane. What Greg remembered most was when a couple
of giggly guys in these glow-in-the-dark
Scream
masks plunged his
hand into squelchy cold goo they called monster guts. It was only
spaghetti, but Greg was so freaked he peed himself.
Another quicksilver flash, a whicker—and
whop!
Dale gave a violent lurch. Aidan’s soul mates, Lucian and Sam, bore down to keep
the whole mess—a barn door to which they’d fixed seat belts and
ropes—from skittering off its sawhorses and crashing to the floor.
Aidan liked the sawhorses. If or when he got around to waterboarding, all they had to do was slide a couple two-by-fours under the
sawhorse at Dale’s feet. (Aidan said it was all about the angle; you had
to get it just so or the water wouldn’t flood the guy’s nose and throat.)
Each time Dale jumped, the barn door jumped with him.
“AAAHHH,
stop
!” Dale babbled. “
Stopstopstop
, please,
stop
!”
“Then tell us, little piggy.” Aidan’s tongue eeled over his lower lip
and a glistening splotch of Dale’s blood. Aidan was just that type: a
psychopath in training, lean and rat-faced, with slanted gray eyes and
draggled hair so grungy and soot-slimed he probably sucked out the
lice for a midmorning snack. A double trail of jailhouse tears trickled over his narrow cheeks. When a prisoner broke, Lucian—a whiz
with needles, nails, hammers—added a tat. Give it another month
and Aidan would weep nothing but ink. “How many in your camp?”
“I
told
you!” Dale wheezed. From the wattles of loose flesh hanging from the old guy’s arms, Greg thought Dale once had been pretty
big and probably strong. Now, he was just one more old geezer in
grimy boxers, reeking of urine, oily sweat, fresh blood. Greg didn’t
like looking at the sparse gray hairs corkscrewing from Dale’s chest.
It was like they were beating up on his grandpa. Which, in a way, he
guessed they were.
Not that any of this was doing them a damn bit of good.
It was the third week in February of the worst winter of his life.
Having overreached, Rule was nearly out of food, ammo, medicine.
The village was collapsing in on itself like the fevered firestorm of a
disease that had coursed through its host, burning too hot, too bright,
until there was nothing in its wake but bones. Without enough manpower to protect them, the farms had been ravaged, their remaining
herds either stolen or dead of starvation. Having butchered most for
the meat, they were down to twenty horses, and about two dozen
dogs. People old and young were dropping from illness, starvation.
For all his skill and his weird potions filched from arcane books on
herbal medicines, mushrooms, and folk magic, there wasn’t a damn
thing Kincaid could do.
The talk was that the ambush had been the start of it all, the
beginning of the end: the day almost six weeks ago, when Peter was
murdered in an ambush the Council said Chris set up. Greg’s first
thought when he heard that? Those people didn’t know shit. Chris
was Greg’s friend, and a good person, and
brave
. A stunt like that
would never cross Chris’s radar. Chris and Peter were a team; they
were tight, like brothers.
But look, people argued, Chris ran when the going got tough. So
that was proof, right? Mark 13:12:
Brother will betray brother to death,
and a father his child,
was what Reverend Yeager said. Hell, Matthew
liked that so much, he slotted in the same shit, chapter ten, verse
twenty-one. Now, the very
next
verse also mentioned that kids would
rebel against their parents and put them to death and the good guys
had to stand firm to the very end and blah, blah. Greg just didn’t
know what
that
was supposed to mean. These days, he was having
a hard time telling who the good guys were, or what that boy in the
mirror was thinking.
On the other hand, Greg had no better ideas. He was exhausted,
half-starved, appalled by what the situation was compelling him to
do—to
consider
—and so afraid of the blackness welling in his chest
that he was six all over again and only just realizing that he’d blundered into a house of horrors. Most of the time, he felt like bursting
into tears. But he had to be strong. They were in big trouble here, life
or death, and no Peter or Chris to tell him what was right.
Considering how things were going, there were moments when
Greg truly believed:
Show your face in Rule, Chris, and I’ll put a bullet
through your eye.
Which only proved how far gone
he
was, too.
“There
is
no one else.” Dale’s mouth pulled into a desperate, fearful
rictus. “It’s the
truth
!”
“Oh, bullshit.” Sam’s voice was lazy, almost bored. But Greg
knew better. If Dale didn’t cough up the information, those boxers were going to go next. Then Sam, armed with his collection of
hardware—pliers and wire cutters and handsaws—would go to work.
Greg’s stomach somersaulted. Because Aidan’s crew really
were
sick
little freaks. Having sussed out Lucian and Sam as like-minded brothers, Aidan now provided Rule with its version of gangbangers: punks
heavy on the blood and torture, light on the graffiti. Greg imagined it
was the reason Peter tagged Aidan for the job in the first place. It was
also why Greg didn’t have the guts to stop them, even though
he
was
the one who was supposed to be calling the shots now.
In charge, my ass.
For about the billionth time, he wondered what
the hell Yeager was smoking. Greg wasn’t Peter or Chris. He’d only
just turned fifteen. He was having a hard enough time being
him
—
whoever that was.
“No, no, I’m telling the truth! It was me, it was just me—
Aaahhhh
!”
Dale shrieked as Aidan’s antenna razored meat right down to bone.
“Jesus Jesus Je—”
As one wall of the tunnel cracked apart and the rock gave way, Alex
screamed. Her right shoulder was a fireball of red, liquid pain, the
tendons and muscles stretching until she thought her skin would rip,
the arm simply pop from its socket. Clutching Wolf ’s forearm in a
death grip, she could feel his muscles quivering from the effort. She
had visions of the rope to which Wolf clung, fraying, unraveling,
breaking, and the two of them being swept away. She had no idea
if the Changed above were trying to pull them up. They probably
couldn’t, because of the current. She was barely holding on, and the
pain was building, her shoulder trying to come apart. If only the drag
would let up!