Monsters (Ashes Trilogy #3)

Greg couldn’t have answered if he wanted to. Dazed, he saw Travers and that fury of gray hair lead the charge to the altar as Pru darted left and out of the way. Mouth dropping wide in alarm, Henry crossed his hands in a warding-off gesture. “Wait, wait! I didn’t do nothing, I’m on your side,” he piped. “I’m—”

The charging mob simply plowed the little man under. On the carpet, in front of the blasted altar, Ben Stiemke managed to raise an arm so awash with blood that it seemed to be drizzling red paint. With a screech that was also a growl, a rising note feral and terrible in its rage, Travers heaved the hoe in a huge, sweeping arc. The blade whickered.

Ben wailed a single piercing shriek as the blade cut three of his fingers away, cleaving them from his hand like sausages. The hoe’s point buried itself in his chest with a loud and hollow sound like an ax biting wood. Somehow, Ben managed to grab the handle before Travers could yank it free, and hung on, grimly, acne-pitted face contorted in fresh pain and new fear. Blood sheeted from his ruined hand.

“Son of a—” Unable to retrieve her hoe, Travers let out another of her monstrous ululating howls. Darting forward, Jarvis raised his rifle and pistoned his arms. The butt slammed into Ben’s abdomen and then Jarvis put his weight into it, grinding down. A fountain of blood gurgled from the boy’s mouth in a soundless scream. His hands went slack while Travers planted her boot and pulled the hoe free with a brisk snap of bone.

The crowd closed ranks. Gargling, choking to death on his own blood, Ben Stiemke was lost under a heaving, thrashing sea of backs and legs, rifles and fists, those bats, a rake, that hoe. In the cavernous stone church, the clamor built and fed on itself, mushrooming into an explosion of inarticulate shouts and grunts and snarls. It was like watching ants boil out of a mound to swarm a tiny, wounded animal. Somehow it did not surprise Greg at all to see Aidan and Lucian and Sam in the thick of it. Fresh ruby tears mingled with those of blue ink spilling down Aidan’s cheeks. Not to be outdone, Lucian dragged that long and obscenely pink tongue over Aidan’s face, licking away the blood. Laughing, the two high-fived.

At that moment, Greg understood that this was like the morning his world broke apart: when his parents sat him down to say they were divorcing, and he’d spat something awful before bolting away from his father, who called after him, Son, son, wait, please. You know I’ll always love you. And what he’d said in return, something so hateful it hurt to even think it: Fuck you, fuck love! After, still fuming, he’d glanced through his bedroom window—just in time to see his dad suddenly slump and their ancient riding mower mutter on, narrowly missing his mother. Not that this mattered, because she was already stone-dead. The old mower kept on, eating its way over the lawn and plowing under a bed of late mums before cratering their shed.

This was like that: a disaster in progress, unstoppable, perhaps inevitable.

There was a wild triumphant roar. On the altar platform, a tidal surge of hands and arms hoisted Ben Stiemke into the air. The boy’s blood rained onto the stone steps. Ben’s right socket was a blast crater of crimson eye jelly. Greg and the others cringed back as the mob rampaged down the center aisle, pausing only to scoop up Stiemke’s body, too.

When the crowd was gone, the sudden silence was a sound all its own. On the altar, a huge crimson lake was overflowing down the stone steps, spreading in a blood tongue down the center aisle. Bits and pieces of Ben were scattered here and there, too; Greg spotted a thumb and a chunk of something raw and liverish.

“What are they going to do?” Sarah asked in a small voice.

“We’re not sticking around to find out,” Kincaid said. “Let’s get you three to the hospice. Safer there. Got to work on that leg anyway, Sarah. Come on, I’ll carry you.”

“No,” Sarah said, grimacing as she hobbled a step. “I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, just shut up.” Pru scooped her into his arms so easily, Sarah nearly went flying over his shoulder. The big boy nodded toward the side aisle. “Greg, your boots. One of them’s pretty messed up from . . . you know.”

“Blood washes off,” Greg said. The left boot was soupy and flecked with spongy pink flesh. Lung, maybe, or brain. No use ruining his socks. Wriggling his left foot home, he felt his face screw into a pucker as his toes squelched. “Horses are tethered by the village hall. Unless we want to go on foot, we’ll have to cross the square.”

“No help for it,” Kincaid said. “Just so long as we get—”

“Doc?” When the old doctor didn’t answer, Greg looked up from ramming his right foot home and felt his heart flip.

“Weapons. On the floor,” Aidan said, from behind a shotgun and smears of gore. Lucian pointed a pair of mismatched pistols, gunslinger-style. “Now.”

53

The sky had bled of color. The moon wouldn’t rise for hours yet, and the stars were mica-bright. The snow sparkled, reflecting the combined light of flashlights as well as Colemans and, Greg now saw, dancing, dirty yellow flames from torches of oil-soaked rags. The air was thick and bitter with the smell of soot and engine oil.

Greg thought most of the village’s remaining adults must be here, in the square. Along the way, some had indulged in a little mayhem, a bit of destruction. To his left, jagged teeth showed around gaping holes in several storefront windows. More shattered glass winked from the snowy sidewalk. The crowd yammered and milled in a restless, expectant clot at the base of a naked oak. Off to his right, Yeager and the remaining Council members stood motionless in a circle of armed men.

“What are they doing?” Greg asked, his voice as thin as piano wire. Aidan and Lucian had marched them out through the vestibule and past Tori’s body. While someone had the decency to cover her with a coat, Greg might have fallen to his knees if Kincaid hadn’t clamped a strong hand around his arm and practically carried him down the church steps.

“Nothing good,” Kincaid muttered. The village hall’s doors banged open, disgorging four men, who staggered under bulging sacks. They were followed by Jarvis and another man who scuttled out with coils of rope. Some people fell on the sacks of food and began wildly tugging out cans and jars; other hands grabbed the coils from Jarvis’s and his partner’s shoulders. One man on horseback took charge of hurling rope over a stout, lowhanging oak limb that was still a good fifty feet from the snow. Eager townsfolk crowded in to grab at the free ends. There were so many that those who’d lost out grabbed hold of the waists of the people before them in a human chain. Straightening, Jarvis made large sweeping motions with one arm. An astringent odor spiked Greg’s nose, and he thought, Charcoal briquettes. Stepping back, Jarvis said something Greg couldn’t make out, and then there was another of those enormous jungle bellows as the people manning the ropes and forming those chains heaved.

Backlit by the combined glow of all those lights, Ben Stiemke and his grandfather jerked limply from the snow, dangling from nooses like ghastly, deflated parade floats. Because the old man was so much lighter, he rose much faster, his feet clearing the ground in a matter of seconds. Ben went more slowly, both because he was a heavier boy—

And because Ben was still alive.

Not by much, perhaps. Greg hoped that what he saw was the lizard part of Ben’s brain sparking its last. But he didn’t think so. As the noose tightened and Ben’s air cut out, his one good leg fluttered and kicked; his bloody hands scratched at the rope. They were too far away to see his face, but Greg could imagine it: Ben’s mouth agape, his intact eye starting while that blasted socket stared in startled amazement.

Jeering, the mob closed on the boy, swatting at his kicking leg and body with rifle butts and clubs. Then one person darted forward with a torch, and in its light, Greg recognized that gray fury. Screeching, Travers thrust the flame into Ben’s gore-soaked middle.

With a sudden whump, Ben Stiemke erupted in a sheet of rippling blue as the lighter fluid Jarvis had used to saturate his body ignited. Sarah screamed, a sound lost in the mob’s clamoring cheers and hoots. Ben’s body flailed, the one leg bicycling round and round but much more feebly now, trailing a blue streamer that was rapidly yellowing as the lighter fluid was exhausted and new fuel—Ben’s clothing— ignited. His grandfather’s body, now also ablaze, flared like a candle.

The crowd fell utterly silent. Aidan and Lucian were rapt, their faces dreamy. It was so quiet, so completely still, that Greg heard the spit and crackle as the flames feasted and Ben’s flops became jitters and then twitches and then nothing at all.

He would think about this for days; grow queasy at the lingering taste of cooked blood and scorched hair on his tongue. And he would dream about it: these old men and women, and the very few boys, their expressions shifting and changing in this play of shadow and light, reshaped by fire into something Greg no longer recognized as human.

What came to him as well was Jess, in her unending sleep, walking her dreams, and what she’d said the one and only time he saw her: Leave them, boy. They are blind.

“Aw, dude.” Lucian breathed. “This so rocks.”

54

“Lang said he’s playing possum,” Jug Ears said. “I only been working here a couple days, and he’s only ever been off his rocker. Screaming, talking to thin air, sometimes beating up on himself pretty bad. See around his face there? But I’ve never seen him like this before.”

“Yeah, he does look pretty out of it. My God, he stinks, too. Like an animal, worse than these Chuckies.” (Old coot. Peter didn’t recall his name. The next thing Peter heard was the scrape of a boot over concrete, a pop of grit. But no bong-bong-bongs or Simon. No visions of holes in stone or orange water. No Chris either. Was that bad? Bwahahaha. Who knew?) “How long he been like this?” Old Coot said.

Jug Ears: “You mean the shakes or the not breathing real good?” Old Coot: “Both.”

“Uh . . .” Mutters as Jug Ears counted under his breath. “Couple