Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  She shattered through, breaching the surface like a clumsy whale. She managed a single, wheezy, strangled aaahhhh, and that was all. No match for the pounding current, her elbows unhinged, and she instantly submerged, her head going completely under.

  Hang on, hang on, hang on! A drill bit of fear cored straight into her heart. As far as she could tell, the Uzi was locked tight. With every shudder of the earth, however, the gun bucked like a bronco, and it was so far below the surface, she had to work for every breath.

  Another kick, another gulping razor of air, and then down she went again. The burn in her chest was less, which was to say that her lungs weren’t on fire and her mind was clearing, slewing back into place. But she couldn’t do this forever. Although it felt like a century, she probably hadn’t been in the water more than two minutes. Her waterlogged clothes and boots were so heavy she might as well have been wearing chains. She was tiring, her muscles going as shivery as Jell-O, the icy water burning her skin, leaching heat and the last of her will. Another kick. A sobbing breath. There was an almost continual stream of stone: small rocks that bit her arms and nipped her scalp and drew blood, which the water washed away as soon as she submerged. Much larger chunks rained down, too, some so close she heard the whir and sploosh.

  Maybe try to rest somehow, wait this out until things calm down. Which was almost funny, in a bizarre way. Calm down? She’d be a Popsicle long before then. If she hadn’t needed the air, she might’ve laughed. Kicking for the surface, she opened her mouth for a breath—

  And that was when she realized, as she sucked in not air but water, that the tunnel was still filling, the water level rising—and fast.

  3

  No. Flailing, she fell back with a splash. Her left hand slipped from the gun, and she was nearly swept away. Kicking, she fought, got her left hand around the Uzi, and surged up for a breath. She only just made it. The water was now so high, she had to tip her head and still, water slopped over her chin to lick at her lower lip.

  Got to get out. But how? She dropped beneath the surface again. From far below came a strange heaving, as if the earth was a shell that a giant was trying to crack. An instant later, there was a dull boosh as another boulder bulleted into the water just off her right shoulder. God, what if this tunnel broke up, or a wall collapsed? That might happen, too, and then it would be like the Titanic. It was that damn physics again, water displacing air. The sudden rush of water out of this tunnel and into an adjacent, dry cavern would be too much. She’d never hang on then but be swept away to spin and drown in the dark.

  She held her breath as long as she could before struggling up for another precious sip of air. She tried to think of what she could do to save herself, and came up empty. Her only tools were the Uzi to which her hands were locked tight, the Glock 19 at the small of her back, and Leopard’s tanto strapped around her leg. While great for dirt or even chopping handholds in ice, the tanto was useless here. The Glock was an option, but only if she wanted to go out with a bullet. Could she risk butting the Uzi free, reseating it higher? Submerging again, she forced her eyes open. The cold was a blowtorch against her corneas. Couldn’t see a thing, not even her hands resting on the weapon. Working blind, going by feel alone with numb, icy fingers—that was a nonstarter.

  No tools, then. Just numb hands and clumsy feet. Resurfacing, she eked in a meager snuffle of air. High above, the tunnel seemed to have closed down, gone black. Moon must’ve set. But the space also felt dense and … crowded. Something jammed up there, probably rocks sealing the tunnel’s mouth to cork her in like a genie in a bottle. And that was it, wasn’t it? Up was a dead end. Probably just as well. She truly did suck at climbing.

  But life is precious and the body is stubborn, and so was she.

  Dad is right. You have to try. Surfacing again, the peak of her nose just barely clearing, she pulled in another panicky breath. Maybe two more and that was it. Her mind kept doing that swimmy slip, a mental sleight of hand that gave her brief, bird’s-eye views of herself, waaay the hell down there. Jump, Alex, jump. Climb, and do it now before you lose your nerve.

  Eyes shut tight, she let herself fall back. Water closed over her head. Then, gritting her teeth, she scissored her legs hard at the same moment that she pulled with her arms. Shifting her hands as fast as she could, the right first and then the left, she went from an underhand grip to overhand. Her elbows locked, and then she was swinging her left boot up so fast and hard and high, her hip joint shrieked. She jammed rock, felt the jolt in her knee and then metal under her foot, and thought, Push. She hung on, driving up, locking her left leg as she straightened. Her head broke the surface, followed by her chest and now her torso. Panting, she hugged stone, balanced a quick second, then bent her right knee and repeated the process. There was a white blink of pain in her ankle before the sturdy toe of her boot stubbed rock. She managed an awkward, sidelong shuffle, gradually easing onto her right foot, testing the joint, her knee. Easy, easy, go slow, don’t push your luck. She gradually relaxed, let her legs take her weight from her shrieking hands. Her ankle held, and her knee, too. And so did the Uzi.

  “Oh God.” For the first time since the ladder disintegrated, she let herself enjoy a tiny squeak of triumph. There was no relief, not yet; if she was right, there was a lot of distance to cover and, oh yes, all that rock jammed in the mouth of the tunnel besides. Pain sparkled in her ankle, and her temples throbbed, a rapid puhpum-puhpum-puhpum in time with her pulse. Water streamed from her hair and clothes. Air stroked her cheeks, her neck, and she was starting to really shiver. But she was standing, clutching razor-thin rock, precariously balanced on a thin ridge of metal as the tunnel shook and water bulled and sucked and eddied around her knees. The shuddering was much stronger than before, the rock sawing at her fingers. Between the water pounding and surging into minute crevices and cracks, and the continual shifting of the earth itself, the rock had to fatigue sooner or later. She didn’t think she had much longer.

  “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.

  4

  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.”

  5

  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.

  6

  “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. “Wee-wee-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 one-way 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 Re
verend 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.