Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (12 page)

He blinked.
Maybe it was the angle and the fact that he was low on the snow
and facing a different direction. Or maybe he’d been so focused on
that ski pole and then the boot, and seen only what he wanted instead
of what had been in front of his nose all along.
Another gun.
No.
He didn’t believe it.
Can’t be. It’s a trick. I’m seeing things
. He
armed his streaming eyes. That portion of the snowfield was incredibly chewed up, pocked with stones and potholes. When he really
stopped to consider, the snow was also piled very strangely in a few
places, as if someone had dug down into the snow. As if someone had
been searching for something.
But the shape remained, crisp and unmistakable. What his vision
sharpened on was a gun, jammed bore-first into the snow.
That was surprise enough. But he got the shock of his life after
staggering over, his boots stubbing on hidden rocks and debris that
kept trying to trip him up. Enough of the weapon was visible for him
to know the make well before he dropped to his knees and parsed out
the words
Austria
and
19
stenciled on the barrel.
It was a Glock.

Ellie didn’t stop to think. When she looked back at it later, she didn’t
remember how the knife even got into her hand. But in the next second there was a wink of steel, the
snick
as the Leek’s blade socked
home, and then she’d grabbed burlap and begun working the point
of the knife through the tight weave, sawing as fast as she could.
Careful, careful
. She made a hole just big enough for her hands, then
put aside the knife, hooked her fingers on either side, and pulled.
There was a loud
riiip
as the burlap tore in two.

Spiced air spilled out. Seated over the chest, the red spell bag, no
bigger than her fist, quivered like a heart trying to remember how
to beat. The body was completely cocooned in that white sheet . .
. except the material wasn’t strictly white anymore. Tiny ruby spiders were spreading their legs over the fabric swathing the thighs and
chest, that right side.

Fresh blood. Bleeding . . .
She stared, spellbound, her horror slipping
into a kind of awe.
How can there be bleeding?
And then the chest . . .
rose
.
“Ah!” She let out a mousy squeak. The body was starting to rock
and shiver as it fought against the sheet like a butterfly too weak to
battle its way out of its cocoon.
I have to help, I have to
do
something!
But wait, did she? It . . .
he
was alive or coming back to life . . . and
that was
nuts
. She’d never seen any of the
Mummy
movies, but isn’t
this how bad things went down? Stupid person stumbles into a cave
or tomb or something, and finds a stone coffin and thinks,
Whoa, I
think we’ll just open this puppy and see what’s what.
“And then the stupid person gets killed,” she whispered. Or the
mummy ate his tongue and ripped out his eyes or something. For
a split second, she thought,
Run, run fast, just go!
Leave and roll the
slider back into place and shut up the death house and stick her fingers in her ears—
la-la-la-la, I can’t hear you
—and pretend she hadn’t
seen a darned thing. No one would ever know. Of course, when they
came back at the spring thaw to bury the bodies, they’d notice that
the burlap was all torn up. They’d see the blood. But
she
didn’t have to
fess up. Because here was the thing: how did
she
know that
this
wasn’t
what happened to some kids when they became people-eaters? Not
everyone was done turning, or turned in the same way. So what if ?
What if the
second
she ripped open that sheet, that person—who
might not be a person anymore—
grabbed
her and . . .
By her side, Mina pawed at her shoulder and let out an anxious
whimper.
Listen to Mina,
the little voice from deep in the closet of her mind
said
. She would know if this is trouble. Come on, you’ve got to do something, Ellie, and you’ve got to do it quick, or he’ll die.
“But he’s already dead,” she said, only meekly, the way you
offered an answer in class you weren’t quite sure of.
Unless he really
isn’t. It could’ve been a mistake. Hannah doesn’t know everything.
And that
calmed her down, enough to stop her thoughts from skittering out
of control like boots on slick ice.
Mina knows it’s okay. She wants me to
help. Mina always knows.
The heck with it. Swallowing back her heart, she patted her hands
over the dome of his head. Of all the places she could cut, this was
probably the best way not to hurt him.
Not
hurt
him
? She tented up
a handful of sheet, stabbed with her knife, worked a horizontal slit.
He’s dead, or he
was
dead . . .
She could hear him now: a low, muffled groaning that went on and

on. Through the slit she’d made, Ellie could see black hair and now
the broad plain of his forehead. Slipping in her fingers, she jerked the
cotton sheet hard, grunting as the fabric first resisted then gave. His
face appeared. His skin was very white, almost like a grub’s. Bluishgray smudges brushed the hollow beneath his eyes, which were still
closed. His lips were dusky blue, like dead worms after a bad rain. His
mouth was open, and he was gasping, his chest heaving against the
sheet, the wiry cords standing in his neck.

“Chris! Chris!” She was crying again, ripping the sheet apart and
crying, screaming his name. He was naked—as in no clothes at all, a
fact her mind only dimly registered, like the flicker of something you
passed on the road in a really fast car. His chest strained to suck in air.
She could see the way the skin actually bowed between his ribs.

But what really riveted her to the spot, made her actually start
back with a little shriek, was the blood: scarlet roses unfurling where
Hannah had placed the wound wood after blessing it.

That can’t work.
She saw that the wounds weren’t raw or ragged
anymore either but dimpled with half-formed scar tissue.
It’s just a
charm, it’s only wood.

Chris was shuddering, all over, as if he’d stuck his finger into an
electrical socket. She battled the sheet away from his hips and then
his jittering legs. Chris had many injuries: nicks and smaller rips, a
gash on each palm, punctures in his thighs. The killing blow, the real
monster rip that sealed the deal, drove straight down, a through-andthrough that had shredded first his diaphragm, which Hannah said
helped you breathe, and then his liver, which was nothing more than
a big bloody sac, easily torn by a broken rib. Or, in Chris’s case, obliterated by the weight of the door and that iron spike. No way to stop
the bleeding either, not from something this bad. Chris had lasted as
long as he had only because he was young and strong.

But now there’s blood
. That terrible wound glistened like the red eye
of a loon in high summer—and yet there was also a rim of very pink
flesh, like the new skin of a baby.
It’s all just voodoo; there’s no such thing
as magic, there’s no such thing.

“Chris!” Ellie grabbed his face and realized with a shock that as
he got more air, his skin was growing even warmer, his cheeks going
hectic with fresh color. “Chris, can you hear me? Are you—”

All at once, his eyes flew open. At the same instant, Chris’s hands
shot out, fanning a thin spray of new blood, and hooked her shoulders. It happened so fast her shriek was only halfway to her mouth
when he spoke.

“Help.”
The word rode on a ferocious gasp. Chris’s eyes, the centers black and huge, bored into hers—and for Ellie, it was like staring
into the mouth of nothing and everything at once.

Tom might have been a couple cans shy of a six-pack right about
then, but he knew the gun wasn’t hers. No cross-trigger safety, for
one thing, and Alex’s had been a Glock 22, standard police issue with
a fifteen-round mag. Besides, Alex had been a prisoner. No way the
Chuckies would let her keep her father’s weapon.

This gun was smaller, a Glock 19, but with an extended magazine.
He eyeballed it as nineteen rounds altogether. Yet he had no way of
checking for sure, or even jacking back the slide to shuck a chambered round. A thin scrim of ice coated the weapon, like the petrified
sugar glaze over a stale doughnut.

It got wet.
His own battered hands were stiff with cold, and he
was starting to shiver all over. Wincing, he clamped his right hand
under his left arm to warm it as he lurched back to the dead Chucky.
Bracing his butt against boulders, he shrugged back into his parka,
but his torn hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t work the zipper
and finally gave up. Had to warm his hands first. Fumbling up his
gloves, he studied the rise directly east. No question about it: that
Glock was in the fall line, either carried here all by itself or stripped
from its owner as the avalanche roared downslope. So . . . this Glock
had belonged to a Chucky? That stood to reason. There had been
seven plowing up the rise, and he’d already found one. The Chuckies
had only just breached the hillside when Luke and Weller forced
him to leave. So, prepared or not, unless you were a real monkey
or a trained Army Ranger like Weller and knew your way around
ropes and rocks, reaching Alex would have taken precious time the
Chuckies might not have had to spare. So wasn’t it much more likely
that
none
had survived, and other dead waited, entombed under his
feet? Of course. He’d found a ski pole. That dead kid had an Eagle
and now here was a Glock. Probably rifles under the snow and skis
and all sorts of goodies. Only time and the spring melt would tell,
unless he came back with a shovel and excavated the entire flat. A
futile effort. He knew that. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it, but . . .

The ice.
He slid a thumb over the Glock’s grip, felt the smooth glide
of his glove. Spied a tiny frozen teardrop hanging from the trigger’s
tip.
The ice is wrong.

Squatting over the Chucky, he laboriously worked the Eagle from
its hip holster. To his utter lack of surprise, the massive gun was
locked up tight; he couldn’t budge even the safety. “But there’s no ice
on
it,” he muttered, hefting the Eagle, a heavy sucker, in his left hand.
So the gun probably hadn’t gotten sopping wet. “What the hell does
that mean?”

Before the avalanche, the water had been belowground,
in
the
mine, and rising. There was plenty of ice now, not only a skin of it
over the new lake itself but also frozen into beards over the rocks
along the shore. But the only ice down
here
was a brittle surface
crust, and what you’d expect from snow exposed to sun and wind.

Laying the Eagle on the dead boy’s stomach but still clutching the
Glock, he pushed up on his thighs. No ice on the Eagle meant no
water, nothing to explain how the Glock got wet.
Unless Alex got her
hands on a weapon.
The thought was a golden blaze, and crazy, too,
just another loony-tunes item in a long afternoon of insanity, but he
couldn’t help it.
That would explain it, because that would mean . . .

“Oh Jesus.” He felt a knot loosening in his chest. His eyes sprang
hot.
Hold it together. Don’t get ahead of yourself.
But it
might
have been
hers, right? Alex had been in that tunnel, working her way to the
surface. If anyone could’ve found a way to get a weapon, it would be
Alex, and what if, what if . . .

“Alex.” Closing his eyes, he folded his hands, pressing the weapon
to the hard thrum of his heart. “Alex, oh God, did you make it? Did
you get out?”
Or did they take you? Is that how you lost the gun?
He hated
that thought because then, more likely than not, she really
was
here,
now, beneath the snow, waiting for him to find her.

The only answers he got were virtually none at all: only that wind,
laced with decay, sighing down from the lake.
And then, a minute grate of stone at his back. Just a
tick
, to his
left
.
Say . . . eight o’clock. A tiny
tock
as rock butted rock, a sound that
did not belong but that he heard even past the pulse and pound of his
rampaging blood because, after all this time, he was still a soldier. So
he knew.
Something was storming over the snow, and coming fast.

She had to get him out of here, and fast. But how? Thrusting her bare
hands under her armpits, Ellie winced against the sting. Now that her
initial burst of shock had dribbled away, She was starting to feel the
cold. Shucking out of her coat, she’d draped that over his chest, then
stripped burlap from all the other bodies and piled the shrouds over
Chris to keep him as warm as she could. On the pallet and under his
burlap blankets, Chris was quiet now, eyes closed again, but he was
panting, his breath chuffing in wavering gray clouds.

There were really only two things she could do: leave Chris and
ride for help, or take him back herself. The first was easiest. Leave
Mina to guard him, race back to Bella, and gallop all the way to the
farmhouse. Maybe an hour, and maybe a lot less if she got poky old
Bella to really book.

But there was also the issue of time, and her reluctance to let him
out of her sight. She cast an anxious eye at the windows. She could
tell from the gray cast of the sky that what had been early afternoon
was now slipping well into late. They might be lucky enough to make
it here before dark, but they’d be working their way back at night. It
was also true that they’d spotted no people-eaters in weeks this far
north. Chris and that old guy he’d been with, the one clobbered by
the mace, had tripped booby traps that hadn’t seen action in a good
two months.