Monsters (Ashes Trilogy #3)

“S’up to the boss,” the guard said, tipping coffee into a camp mug. Half a smoke was glued to the guard’s lower lip. Exhaling a gray jet, he sipped, sighed, pulled in another drag, and said, in a strangled voice, “Wouldn’t mind some decent sleep when this is done, though.”

“So we’re at Rule?” Luke waved away fumes. The way these guys smoked, they should chew burnt logs and get over it already. This particular old guard sported a ratty moustache so saturated with nicotine it was dirty orange. “Are we staying here? What about the kids in Rule?’

“You ask too many questions, you know that?” Turning away with a lazy shrug, the mustachioed guard hooked a thumb under the carry strap of his Uzi. “If I was you kids,” he said, sauntering toward a much larger fire and the other three guards, all of them sucking cancer sticks, “I’d get some sleep instead of freezing your asses. Gonna be light in about an hour.”

From his place opposite Luke, Chad muttered, “Yeah, well, it’s my ass to freeze, butt-face.” Sighing, he stirred a steaming MRE, listlessly chewed a mouthful of macaroni and cheese, then dropped the spoon into the pouch. “Stomach’s too jumpy.”

To Chad’s left, Jasper piped up. “You going to finish that?” “How can you eat?” Cindi asked.

“I’m hungry.” Jasper shoveled in a huge mouthful. “Too wired to

sleep,” he said, his voice clogged by cheesy noodles. “This has to be it. I mean, he took all the Chuckies.” He gestured with the spoon to a large stainless-steel animal cage, standing empty on a flatbed slotted in with the other wagons. “Even those guys.”

“So if this is Rule,” Cindi said, “and those kids are still there, what will they do with us now? Do you think they’ll . . . that they might . . .”

“No,” Luke said, and put both arms around her. He wanted to say something movie-tough, like Finn’s guys would have to get through him first, but the words just wouldn’t come.

“But we should make a move.” Chad tossed a look over his shoulder to check for the guards, then leaned closer. “We’re the three oldest. There’s four of them, three of us.”

“Hey,” Jasper said around a mouthful of macaroni. “I’m here.”

“You’re ten. Keep eating.” Chad rolled his eyes. “If we can get guns . . .”

“Yeah, well, if is a pretty big word right now,” Luke said.

“But we’re just sitting here.”

“I don’t see that we can do anything else.”

“I agree with Chad.” When Luke looked down at her, Cindi continued in a whisper, “Except for those guards, everyone else is gone. We’ll probably never have a better shot.”

“And go where, Cindi?” Luke asked.

“Anywhere. Luke, we could raid the supply wagons, grab some guns and food, and go.”

“Cindi, we have thirty kids. Us three and a couple other guys can handle a gun, and that’s it. How would we move everyone and all the stuff we need? We can’t outrun Finn.”

“But I don’t like waiting around for Finn to decide what happens next.” Chad jerked his head at the transport cage. “You want to end up in one of those?”

“No, I don’t,” Luke said to Chad. “But staying alive beats dying.”

“Not if we end up like Peter,” Jasper said.

After five days with Finn and his weird Chuckies, who were exactly like the girl Tom had fought weeks ago, Luke had a queasy sense of what was in store.

Peter was too old to be a Chucky, older than Tom for sure, by a couple years. But his eyes were raving red, and God, he ate what the Chuckies did: thawed slabs of frozen oldsters stacked like cordwood in a special Chucky chuck wagon. Which meant that Finn had probably given Peter the same crap Tom figured someone fed those Chuckies in white. Only it hadn’t worked on Peter, who spent half his time in his cage screaming—let me go, let me go, let me go go go—and the other half trying to get at Finn. Sometimes Finn hurt him pretty bad. Never laid a hand on Peter, but wow, a couple seconds with Finn and that creepy Davey, who followed Finn everywhere like a dog, and Peter was moaning, howling, clutching his head.

“It’s like he hears something.” When Luke turned his gaze away from the transport cage, Cindi said, “You know? When Peter starts up with the let me go stuff ? But how? He’s only . . . half a Chucky, you know?”

“But crazy,” Chad said. “Not all the time,” Luke said. “All this stuff, the go go go, that usually starts up whenever Finn moves out.”

“Telepathy?” Cindi asked.

“Can’t be straight telepathy.” Swallowing the last of the mac and cheese, Jasper licked the plastic spoon. “At least, not like the movies or what you’re thinking.”

“What else could it be? You were at the barn.” What had happened when Finn’s Chuckies descended on their camp scared Luke silly: how they broke formation, half going left and the rest like a marching band at halftime, streaming to the right. Then, the Chuckies had done . . . nothing. Only waited, staring, their concentration utterly complete. It was so quiet that Luke could hear the crackle of the fire and the jangle of hardware as horses tossed their heads. It was the weirdest thing, but Luke sensed that the Chuckies were being . . . held back? Yes, they’d wanted him. They’d wanted Mellie. What they’d most hungered after was all those juicy kids huddled in the barn.

But they weren’t allowed. They were like . . . puppets? That wasn’t quite right. It was as if something or someone held them back on invisible leashes: this far and no farther.

“Yeah, but have you ever tried following your own thoughts? Real complicated.” Smoothing the empty MRE pouch on his thighs, Jasper began rolling the plastic into a tight tube. “Plus, you have the problem of signal strength and complexity.”

Luke and Cindi looked at each other. “What are you talking about?” Luke asked.

“Thoughts are, you know, jumbly,” Jasper said.

“Okay. So?”

Jasper gave him a duh-hello look. “What does Peter do? Does he talk about a gazillion things? No. He keeps saying the same thing over and over again: go, go, go, let me go.”

“Yeah, but he’s crazy,” Chad said.

“Not all the time.” Jasper peered through the tube he’d made like a pirate with a spyglass. “He’s worse when the Chuckies are on the move. Other times, he’s normal.”

“He eats people,” Cindi said. “His eyes are weird.”

“Okay, not normal-normal, but not all Chucky either. Whenever Finn does take him along, Peter’s either tied up or with a couple guards.”

“Probably because Finn can’t control him very well?” Luke said.

“Or all the way, yeah. And the times Finn’s left him here? Peter’s not as loud and crazy. He gets better the longer Finn’s gone. I think it’s a cumulative exposure and distance thing, like, you know, Wi-Fi.”

Wuh? “So?” Luke asked, and then as Jasper swiveled, still with the tube to his eye, added, “Would you quit that? It’s annoying.”

“Fine.” Jasper heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t think Peter’s saying let me go, like get me out of this cage so I can go home. He might mean, let me go go go after them. Go go go is the command. Maybe all Finn does are simple commands piggybacked on other signals.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Cindi said.

“Yeah, the Chuckies aren’t radios,” Chad said.

Radios. Luke turned that over. Wi-Fi. Something important there . . . something Jasper said about signal strength, not just distance but something else.

“Guys. What do you think a thought is?” Jasper said. “Electrical impulses, that’s all. The body’s full of electricity. You’ve got gradients across your skin and ion flow in cells.”

“What?” Cindi said. “So how does that work in this situation?”

“Well, thoughts are chemical and electrical . . . I don’t know.” Jasper’s shoulders rose and fell. “Look, I can’t tell you how Finn’s doing it, but he can’t be slinging real complicated stuff around, or if he is, only a couple Chuckies get the whole thing. Maybe even just one Chucky.”

“Whoa. Wait a sec.” Cindi sat up. “He’s right. Two groups of Chuckies, the ones in white . . .”

“And everybody else,” Chad said. “Like, maybe it doesn’t work with every Chucky?”

“Or he doesn’t need a ton to get the job done,” Luke said. “But he’s limited by distance, like when your Wi-Fi drops out when you’re too far from a network.” He kept thinking: signal strength; signal strength and a network . . .

“Okay, I buy that. But . . .” Chad threw up his hands. “So what? We’re still stuck.”

Luke didn’t see how this helped either, but his head felt like he’d spent all night cramming for a test he was sure to bomb. Sometimes when he walked away from a problem, the answer popped into his head. “I’m going for water.” As he stood, all four guards perked up. “Water,” he said, holding up his canteen and giving it a shake.

“Hold on.” Heaving to his feet, the mustachioed guard lumbered over. A lit cigarette jutted from his mouth. “All right, let’s go,” he said, handing over a flashlight.

“It’s not like I’m going to run anywhere,” Luke complained, but the guard only grunted and made a get going gesture with the Uzi.

The stream was beyond the kids’ tents and a short distance into the woods. Following his flashlight, Luke ducked into the trees, where the light was worse and the shadows thicker. Ahead, he heard the churn of water over stones. The final twenty feet to the stream took a sharp drop. “I ain’t going down there. Bad for my knees. Make it quick,” the guard said, as the orange coal of his smoke danced. “Freezing my ass.”