Monsters (Ashes Trilogy #3)

To which Tom said about four syllables, all of them chipped from ice: Leave me alone.

Twenty minutes later, Mellie clumped back down the way she’d come. But when Tom turned Cindi a look, she could tell: for the first time in days, the veil was gone, and he was seeing her, recognizing who she was.

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “She invited herself.”

“I know that.” Tom paused. “You don’t have to go, Cindi. I’d like it if you didn’t.”

“Sure.” A lump pushed into her throat. Tom hadn’t smiled. There wasn’t this choir of angels or anything. There was only Tom and his monster, the black fist around his heart that, sometimes, she worried might squeeze so hard it would crush him altogether. But hearing him say that he’d like her to stay, that was a beginning. It was a place to start.

But now . . . this.

“And you’re absolutely sure he never mentioned going to the mine?” Mellie gave her and then Luke, seated beside Cindi at a rough-hewn kitchen table, the stink-eye. They’d made their camp in a long-abandoned farmstead: a motley collection that included an old two-story farmhouse, hog barn, cow barn, silo, and a clutch of tumbledown outbuildings hemmed on all sides by wide pastures and distant knolls where they mounted a few lookouts. Only Weller and Mellie slept in the house, along with anyone who was ill or hurt. At the moment—bad news, bad, bad, bad—that was Tom, tucked in Weller’s first-floor back bedroom. “No warning at all?”

“No,” Cindi fibbed, her right leg jumping and jiggling and making the table rock, a really bad habit that used to drive her mom crazy: Cindi, you make coffee nervous. Considering that her mom had been a child psychiatrist, that was saying something. “Is he going to be all right?”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine and . . . please.” Mellie laid a hand on Cindi’s wrist. The other was wrapped around a steaming mug. “Coffee’s not so easy to come by these days that I want to waste a drop.”

“Sorry.” Cindi clamped her hands between her thighs. “There was a whole lot of blood. He was pretty cut up.”

“Not all the blood’s Tom’s. It probably looks worse than it is.”

“Well, I hope so.” Luke was so pale his eyes looked smudged on with blue finger paint. “Because any worse and he should be dead. Did Tom say how many he saw? Are we going after them? Or maybe we ought to, you know, move?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, all right?” Mellie was very good at sliding around questions. “I think the most important thing we can do now to help Tom is—” She looked around at the sound of heavy footsteps. “Well?”

“We’re doing okay,” Weller said, but his tone was brusque, preoccupied. Always a little grumpy, the thick grizzle of gray stubble over Weller’s cheeks and chin only made him look meaner, like an old bear with a toothache. Cindi thought Weller would be a lot nicer once the mine was gone, but the longer Tom hung out in the tower, the blacker Weller looked. On the other hand, considering the rustylooking bandage plastered over the right side of Weller’s neck and that shoulder . . . well, she’d be an übergrouch, too, if some Chucky snacked on her.

“Okay, as in . . . ?” Mellie prompted.

“As in we’ll see.” Heading for a counter where a Coleman hissed, Weller rooted through a cardboard box. “You kids, go back to your racks. Best thing for Tom is we let him rest.”

From the look on his face, Cindi thought Luke would argue, but he only nodded and scraped back his chair. “Just tell him we were here, okay?” he said to Weller.

“Can we come tomorrow morning?” Cindi asked.

“Let’s see what tomorrow looks like,” Mellie said, and gave Cindi’s arm a little pat-pat the way you’d pet a puppy to encourage it to make wee-wee. “All right?”

“Does that feel all right to you?” Cindi glanced at Luke, but his expression was lost in the dark. She turned her attention back to following the yellow cone of their flashlight as they crunched over snow. The moon wouldn’t rise for hours yet, which suited her just fine. Every time she looked, she couldn’t help but think of some bug-eyed green cyclops and the night sky as an eyelid taking a whole month to slowly open and close.

“No,” Luke said. “But I can’t figure what freaks me out more— that there are Chuckies close by and they haven’t found us yet, or Tom almost got killed.”

“And why we aren’t doing something about them.” “Beyond posting a couple more kids who can’t hold rifles as guards? Yeah. It’s almost like . . .”

Cindi waited, then said, “Like Mellie’s not worried enough.”

“Uh-huh.” Pause. “Maybe she doesn’t want us to panic. My dad was like that. He always worried we couldn’t hack it, so he’d say things were fine, or think of something to distract us stupid little kids.”

“Is that the only thing bothering you?”

“No,” Luke said, and sighed. “They’re not saying it, but Tom just got lucky. He really should be dead.”

A screw of fear. “But he’s not. He made it back.”

“Believe me, Cindi, I’m just as happy about that. I don’t think I could stand it if . . . But if Tom got killed, then what? It’d be just you and me and Chad, with thirty other kids, all of them younger.”

“Weller would still be here. So would Mellie.” She wasn’t thrilled with either, but they were better than nothing.

“Come on. Weller joined up with us when Tom did. Before the mine went, Mellie would disappear.”

“To get other kids. She was never gone for long.”

“But long enough.” He stopped walking and looked down at her. “You may not have wondered what would happen if she didn’t show up again, but I did. I worried the whole time. Like, what would we eat? Where would we go? And this whole Rule thing? It’s crazy to think that we’re going to go marching anywhere. I mean, think about it. There’s me and Tom, Weller and Mellie, about two, three other guys I can think of who are decent enough shots, but that’s all we got. Tom never came right out with it, but I could tell he thought us going against Rule was a bad idea. The only reason he helped us at all was because of her. Because of Alex.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.” Her teeth made a grab for her lower lip in time to stifle the sob. She gave her stinging eyes an impatient scrub with a fist. Only babies cried. “Are you saying he won’t help us now?”

“No. If he comes back to stay, he will. He’ll put the brakes on kids like Jasper. Like, what Jasper did to that bucket the other day? I mean, yeah, there are manuals and that old chemistry book we dug up— which, you know, I only sort of understand—but there really wasn’t anything in what we read that said thermite might make plastic catch on fire.”

“Thermite?” Jasper was a spazzy, twitchy-smart ten-year-old, and a complete pyro with a fixation on pipe bombs, water impulse charges, and anything that made a bang.

“Take a while to explain.” Luke blew out in a white plume. “The thing is, Mellie’s encouraging Jasper to just go on ahead. She’s got other kids experimenting with napalm and Molotov cocktails.”

“But won’t we need to learn how to do that anyway? To protect ourselves?”

“Do we? Don’t you think there’s something just a little crazy about us maybe blowing our heads off ? That stuff Mellie’s so hot for . . . it’s dangerous. That’s why Tom never let us watch him work, much less taught us what to do. Mellie doesn’t seem to care.”

“But . . .” Cindi slicked her lips. “She’s a grown-up.”

“So? Remember what Tom said, about the monster inside and killing because it feels good? I watched Weller do that, kill this one Chucky really slow. Suffocated him in the snow and smiled. It was spooky. It wasn’t only killing. What Weller did was murder. And now Mellie wants thermite, flamethrowers, claymores. But how does that help us? We blow up a bunch of people, rescue those other kids—and then what?”

“Well,” she began, and stopped. “I don’t know. I never stopped to think.”

“Right. The adults do all the thinking. But what if we want something different?”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m wondering,” Luke said, “if the Chuckies and Rule are our only enemies.”

36

“So?” Mellie glowered. “ Is he as bad as he looks?”

“Worse.” Reaching for two enameled mugs, Weller winced against

the sudden grab in his right shoulder. Damn thing got stiff if he didn’t

remember to keep moving the joint.

“I thought you said you could handle the cuts.”

“Oh yeah.” Weller wasn’t anywhere close to a medic, but any

soldier, even an old, broken-down wreck like him, knew battlefield

medicine. “Tom’s strong, he’s young. He ought to heal. Damn lucky

they weren’t bites.”

“He’s lucky he’s alive.” Mellie wasn’t a tall woman or even especially beefy, but solid as a brick and pugnacious, with a fondness for

big guns like that chromed .44 Mag cannon riding high in a crossdraw on her left hip. “What the hell was he thinking? Was he trying to

get himself killed?”

“I don’t think he understands what he was after, Mellie.” One look

at Tom in those blood-soaked camo over-whites—one good long gander at those wicked slashes—and his first impulse had been to knock

some sense into the boy’s skull. “We just need to give Tom time and

some space to get through this.”

“Space? He’s been in that tower for over a week.”

“Cut the boy a little slack, Mellie, all right?” Weller shook a packet

down before ripping it open and dumping the contents into a mug. “I