Monsters

“Hurry!” Alex shouted. She was backing up, the Uzi in both hands, trying to cover all sides at once. One of Finn’s men—old, but with only a few streamers of white hair—swam at her in a panic, arms cranking in a herky-jerky crawl. Before she could get off a shot, the wolfdog surged. Screaming, the old man reeled as blood spurted from a rip above his elbow.

“Down, Buck!” As the wolfdog jumped back, Alex darted in with the Uzi, slamming the butt into the man’s jaw, one quick and vicious jab. There was a jet of crimson as the old man’s skin split, and he went down. In the next second, the Changed had him, and he disappeared, shrieking, one grasping bloody hand reaching straight up as if trying to claw his way from a grave.

“Lift him, Greg, easy, easy!” Tom said. Peter’s face was white as salt, the blood like bright spray paint. As Greg and Tom wrestled Peter onto his saddle, Chris saw the cramp of pain in Peter’s face and heard his moan.

“God, oh God, Peter, hang on, hang on!” Chris said as Peter fell into him, his back spooning against Chris’s chest. “I’ve got you, it’ll be okay.”

“C-c-cold.” Peter was gasping. There was so much blood, Chris could taste the iron in his mouth. Peter’s head lolled. “S-so c-c-cold . . . C-Chris, s-sorry, s-so sorry, I t-t-tried . . .”

“Shh, you did fine,” Chris said, tremulously, sobs welling in his throat. “You’re going to be okay. I’ve got you, Peter.” Peter was shuddering, struggling for breath. I’m going to save you; I’m going to save us both. Wrapping his arms around Peter, Chris took his friend’s weight and held him tight. “I won’t let you fall, Peter; I’ve got you, I’ve got you, you won’t fall.”

“All right, Greg, on your horse, let’s go!” Grabbing the roan’s reins from Chris, Tom turned to shout, “Alex, you ride with me—” He stopped, sudden panic blooming on his face. “Alex, where’s Alex?”

“What?” Confused, Chris threw a look down to where she’d been, then up, toward the hall. He spotted her, that red scream of hair, as she and the dog pushed past Changed and fighting men, and exploded for the steps—and a body. “There!” Chris shouted.

“Alex, no!” Aghast, Tom was already surging, whipping the pistol like a club, trying to beat a path. “Alex, there’s no time—less than ninety seconds! What are you doing, what are you doing?”

But she kept going, didn’t falter, and in that last second—before the shot—Chris understood why.

Laid out like a sacrifice, his grandfather was crumpled on the steps. The only reason Chris recognized him at all was because Yeager was bald. His face was ripped, but the head was still attached. The rest was a loose-limbed heap of gore and torn flesh.

Crouched alongside Yeager’s body was a boy, bloodied and bruised. A girl, very pregnant, hovered nearby, uncertain, clearly terrified. As Alex banged through, only the boy looked up.

My God. The jolt of surprise was like a crack of lightning splintering his brain. There was an instant where the engine of time hitched, jumped its tracks, and then simply ceased.

“Chris?” Greg said, the confusion clear. “Who—” “Wolf, please!” Above all that clamor, he still heard her shout. “You have to leave, you have to go, Wolf ! You have to run, you have to—”

And then they all saw, at the same terrible moment, what Alex did not: a monster, suddenly risen; a ruin of flesh and bone, virtually naked, clothed only in tatters and red rivers of blood streaming from rips and slashes and bites. A long flap of scalp hung in a limp flag of maroon flesh and gray hair. Pink skull showed from forehead to crown as if this monster was in the process of unzipping and shrugging from its skin to be born.

“YOU!”—and that was the only clue Chris had that this thing once had been a woman. Her arm, dripping blood and gleaming with bone, swung up, fist jabbing toward Alex, the chrome of a huge Magnum revolver winking in the day’s new light. “YOU!”

“MELLIE, NO!” Tom shrieked, his pistol drawing down, at the same instant that Chris screamed, “Alex, Alex, look out, look out, look—”

It was, she thought, the strangest feeling, like waking from the dark chaos of a long fever-dream with her mind burning bright and clear: coming back to herself not within her parents’ embrace but the shelter of Tom’s arms.

Now, here they were, fighting for every remaining second, in the middle of the end of the world, and no time left, in this growing garden of the dead. Yet there was nowhere on earth she should be other than with Tom and Chris and her people, waiting to welcome her back, take her away.

Although the monster still searched. She felt it reach because she did want Wolf gone and safe. So when she spotted Wolf with Yeager, all she could think was that he had to leave and take this one last leap away from Rule to whatever future waited. Maybe it was wrong to feel that way about a boy that was half monster, but so the hell what.

“Wolf !” Frantic, she grabbed his arm. She kept an eye on Penny, but the girl only seemed petrified, which was fine because they had problems enough. “You need to go, you need to get out!”

Wolf was weeping. Big tears burned in ruby trails through blood. For a second, she knew what he felt. For this, she needed no monster. This was a boy who’d just lost everything, not only Yeager but Peter, too. For him, there was no home left, no place to go. It was like looking down at herself at her parents’ funeral. Or on the day of her diagnosis: huddling in a chair in a too-cold office and seeing for the first time what a monster, living in the dark and eating you alive, really looked like.

“Wolf, please.” She could feel her lips trembling, the tears burning her eyes. “It’ll get better, I promise it will, but you have to try, you have to go, Wolf, you have to run, you have to—”

There was no transition at all. Despite how much had happened, less than three minutes had passed since the moment she let her monster go. So there was a lot of gunfire and people were still shrieking. The crack of one gun was nothing new, although . . . was that Tom, scream—

Something clubbed her, very hard, in the back. She saw Wolf flinch. Fire licked her chest. For that dead space between heartbeats, she and Wolf only stared at each other. She still heard gunfire, but it was so different. No cracks or heavy bangs. Only a muted, distant crackle like tired cellophane.

Then her legs folded. There was the dark, waiting below, but only that. It was Blackrocks again.

Except this time, it was the water—cold and deep—that jumped for her.

Alex probably never heard. There was so much noise. The Magnum’s boom was lost in the twin roar of Tom’s pistol and Greg’s rifle. What was left of Mellie tumbled back, and then Tom and Greg were stumbling forward as Chris forced Night to follow.

Awkwardly cradling Alex in his arms, the boy—Simon, his brother—was staggering to a stand as that huge dog snarled but dared not strike. Alex was tall, a handful for anyone, and limp now: dead weight, eyes closed, the long white swan of her neck dropping back. From Night’s saddle, Chris could see where the shot plowed into her back because of the red starburst halfway down her right chest where the bullet cored through. When her chest struggled up, Chris heard a horrible, sudden cawing sound, like the croak of a dying crow.

Penny was already trying to back away. When Simon saw them coming, he took a half step back as if to turn and try to run. But then his eyes ticked up to Chris, and Simon’s face—my face, Chris thought—bleached white.

“Please,” Tom said, his voice breaking. He held out his arms. “Wolf . . . Simon, please give her to me. Let us help her.”

“Tom. Chris, what the hell . . .” Greg had dismounted and already come up with Chris’s Uzi, which he trained on Simon. “Guys,” Greg said, shakily, “we have to go, we have to go.”

“I know.” For that second, Chris saw, in Simon’s anguish and the tears streaming over his cheeks, not a Changed but a boy struggling with what he wished for versus what he could have. “Simon . . . please,” he said, tightening his arms around Peter, who was now unconscious. Although his friend was very heavy, his was a weight Chris could bear. “She belongs with us.”

At that, Simon took a clumsy, hesitant step. Tom met him halfway, scooping Alex into his arms and then turning for his roan, limping fast as the dog broke from Simon and bounded after. “Give him the gun,” Tom tossed over his shoulder to Greg. “Give it to him, get on your horse, and let’s go, now, now.”

“What?” Greg’s head jerked to Chris. “Chris, I know he’s got to be your brother, but this is like Lena. He’s still—”

“Do it.” Chris looked down at Simon as Greg held out the Uzi the way you’d offer a python a snack. As soon as Simon got a hand on the barrel, Greg dropped the weapon and sprinted back to his horse. “Run, Simon,” Chris said to his brother. “Do you understand? Go, get out, take Penny, and run—”

“Come on!” Tom bellowed. He held Alex to his saddle as Chris did Peter: against his chest, in his arms. She was still as death, and Chris couldn’t tell if she was breathing anymore. Wheeling his roan, Tom kicked the animal to a gallop. “Forty seconds, go, go!”

“Run, Simon!” Chris shouted, and then he was pulling the blood bay around, spurring Night to a dead run, giving the horse his head. “Go, Night, go, Night, go!”

Forty seconds. They blasted past a knot of feeding Changed, the newly dead, and those who would join them soon enough. Rushing from the square, counting in his head: thirty-nine-one-thousand, thirty-eight-one-thousand, thirty-seven—

He made it to thirty.

The end came when he was five blocks away. It was how he’d always thought the end of the world should have been: not the silence of the EMPs and the scream of birds but a huge blistering roar, like the detonation of a neutron bomb; a clap and then a blaring, pillowing, swelling BAH-BAH-BAH-ROOOM. Captured by buildings and reflected off stone, the sound was enormous. Chris felt the air blow past in an enormous, gushing whoosh. The windows of the houses on this block suddenly shattered as the pressure wave barreled past and tried scooping him from his saddle. The ground shuddered so violently he felt the shiver in his spine, saw it in the cascading showers of residual snow shaken loose from roofs. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">