Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (24 page)

“No!” Gasping, she bolted like a spooked rabbit, springing for
the storage room door, keys tinkling to the Formica, but no time
to search for them, just enough to get away! The door crashed open
with an enormous bang. As Sarah bulleted through, she felt fingers
whisking through her hair. With a wild yelp, she spun on her heel and
lunged for the door to clap it shut. Her flashlight jittered crazily, ripping wide gashes, cutting shelves out of the dark before she lost her
grip. The light clattered to the floor, the orange spray winking out.
Blind now, she swam through the dark, made a wild grab, felt the bite
of wood, and then she was muscling the door home with a solid
clap.

Safe, she was safe. Chest heaving, she leaned back, bracing the
door with her body, expecting to feel the thud. But nothing happened. No bang. No battering of a fist. No kicks.

Barricade the door.
Without the keys, she couldn’t lock it, and this
might be her only chance. She knew the storage area well enough to
navigate in the dark: freestanding, largely barren metal shelves right
and left. The only shelves with any food at all were on her left. So
grab a shelf off to her right, haul it in front of the door. Unless she’d
imagined the whole thing. She pulled in a screaming breath, held it,
listened over the clamor of her heart. The air smelled, very faintly,
of peanut butter, but she heard nothing. So, nerves? No, she’d felt
something grab for her hair. Unless that had been a phantom terror,
too.

Felt so real.
Maybe only her mind playing tricks?
Because I’m stressed,
starved, exhausted . . .
What to do now was the question. She could stay here, barricade the door. But the Coleman was on. Eventually the ice would
melt, boil off. Forget the waste of fuel; the flame would burn a hole
through that pot and then they’d have a fire.
She listened again, pressing her ear against the keyhole. Still nothing. If she decided to leave, go back out there, she would need light.
Which meant retrieving her flashlight from the floor and hoping to
God that it worked. Sarah dropped to her hands and knees. Grit bit
through her jeans.
Okay, which way?
She’d been spinning for the door
when she lost the flashlight. From the sound the metal tube made as
it struck the floor and then rolled, she thought it might be ahead, at
roughly ten o’clock. Moving carefully, she swept her trembling right
hand over the cold floor. She kept expecting something to skitter
across her skin. A spider, maybe, but no self-respecting spider would
set up shop here, and it was too cold besides. Her fingers skimmed
more dirt—a lot of it, and that was so strange because Tori was such
a stickler about neatness. But Cutter
had
interrupted Tori this afternoon. So she might not have swept here at all.
Sarah inched forward, her hand moving back and forth like a metal
detector, for what seemed like an hour but which was likely no more
than a minute before her fingers nudged a curve of cool metal that
tried rolling away. The flashlight. Snatching it up, she rocked back on
her knees, let out a long sigh of relief, and butted her thumb against
the metal switch.
A cone of yellow light leapt away, spraying itself against the
darkness to reveal bare metal, cinderblock, and—
“No!” The word jumped from Sarah’s throat as huge hands shot
from the dark. One battened on her jaw, clamping down on her
mouth. The other jumped into her hair, fisted, and yanked as if pulling a long cord. Her head whipped back, exposing her throat, and
then she was tottering, her balance gone. She crashed to the ice-cold
floor, legs kinked at an excruciating angle, the impact smacking the
breath from her lungs. Terrified, wild not only with fear but the
need to breathe, she flailed, the flashlight she still clutched whipping
around. She felt when it clubbed bone, the solid
thunk
shuddering
into her hand
.
From the hulking dark above her came a strangled
grunt, a deep and guttural
unh
. The hand in her hair jerked like a fish
trying to flip from a net, then groped for her thrashing wrist, found
it, ground down. An enormous bolt of pain shot up to her elbow and
she relaxed her grip. The flashlight tumbled to the floor again. This
time, however, the light did not wink out, which wasn’t necessarily
a mercy.
“Quiet!” Cutter snarled. Dropping onto her chest, he brought his
face so close his spit sprayed her cheeks. Sweeping up both her arms,
he grabbed her wrists in one hand and pinned them to the floor. “Be
quiet
, unless you want me to snap your little neck right now!”
She wasn’t screaming; she had no breath for that. Shaking her
head wildly from side to side, she strained, her tortured lungs singing,
the blood booming in her temples. Breathing was like trying to butt a
mountain out of the way with her chest. She managed another suck
of air, her nose wrinkling against a weird perfume souring Cutter’s
flesh: oily onions, greasy sweat—and peanut butter.
“Guh.” If she could’ve opened her mouth, she’d have bitten him.
“Guh-get
off
.”
“You gonna scream?” When she shook her head, he eased his hand
away. “We need to have ourselves a little talk.”
“There’s n-nothing to t-talk about,” she stammered. “You . . .
you’re st-stealing f-food from little
k-kids
.”
Cutter’s eyes flattened. “I’m taking my share. I’m taking what’s
mine.”
“You g-get rations.” By now, Tori must be wondering. She’d come
down to check, probably with one of the dogs, too. Even if she didn’t,
Tori had that shotgun. If she could keep Cutter talking . . . God,
where was their other guard, Benton? Unless he was in on this, too.
“We’re all on rations.”
“But you kids get more. They save the best for you.” Cutter sported
a full, gnarled gray wire of beard so dense there might be things living
very comfortably in there. “We take all the risks and we’re supposed
to be
grateful
for a cup of watered-down tomato soup?”
“Please. Just let me go. I won’t say anything.” For some reason,
her eyes zeroed in on a glop of peanut butter clinging to a tangle at
the left corner of his mouth. In the bad light, the smear looked like a
rat turd. “You can have
my
rations. You can just
have
them.”
“Yeah? Well, what if I want
more
?” He drew the word out, his voice
in her ear again, his reeking breath hot on her neck—and yet she
never had felt so cold in her life.
Her heart tried dying in her chest. “I . . . I don’t have anything else.
Please, just . . . I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
“Who you going to tell? The Council? Your boyfriend, that Pru?
What if
I
was to tell how some
kid
thinks he can buy me off with
a measly can of beans? You think people might be
interested
in why
those boys come to pass the time with such pretty girls? And here
that Peter only seven weeks in his grave, and you already finding
someone to warm you up.”
“No. I . . .” Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. “It’s not
what you think.”
“Oh, I got a good imagination. So . . . you
liiike
Pru?” He drawled
the word, his voice lazy even as she became aware of the increased
grind of his hips. “You
liiike
what he does?”
“No. He’s just . . .” She strained against Cutter’s weight. “Please,
let me go, let me—”
“Here’s what I want.” His mouth, the lips thick and cold and moist
as worms, dragged over her throat. “I want you to be as sweet to me
as you’ve been to that Pru.”
“No.” She was gasping again, trying to hold back tears. “Please.
I’ll scream.”
“You scream, and I’ll tell how those boys were here, and it won’t
matter what you’re up to, how
nice
Pru is. They’ll be watched. But
you don’t want them anyway. You want a man, and I can be
niiice.
”
His hips jerked in a sudden, hard thrust, his breath suddenly clogging
as he worked his knee between her legs. “I can be
sweet
to a sweet
thing.”
In the next moment, she felt his body lift, his free hand dropping
and then fumbling at her waist. She let out a short, sharp cry.
“No!
N—”
His mouth clamped on hers, and she gagged as he worked his
thick tongue between her lips and licked her teeth. Bucking, she tried
to bite, but he wrapped his free hand around her throat and rapped
her head so hard that all the circuitry shorted.
“You like it
rough
?” His voice was ragged, his face choked with
blood. “I’ll show you rough; I’ll show you what a
man
—”
She heard the loud bang, an explosion of wood against cinderblock. In her terror, she thought it was her mind snapping. Hadn’t
they talked about that in health; how the brain could let go, be elsewhere, hide? But then she felt Cutter rear in surprise, saw his eyes go
wide with shock, and thought,
Tori
.
“Jesus!”
Cutter started up. “N—”
Something—someone—hurtled over her head. Slamming the stillshrilling Cutter to his back, whatever this was darted its head, once,
like a snake striking at prey. There was a loud tearing sound, a ripping
of wet cloth—and then Cutter was only thrashing, gurgling, both
hands trying to staunch sudden, pulsing red jets from a throat that
was no longer there. His blood hit concrete in hard, frantic splashes.
The Changed—a boy—rode him, but only for a second.
What happened next nearly splintered her mind.
Planting a hand on Cutter’s forehead, the Changed plunged a
clawed hand straight down into Cutter’s throat. Sarah couldn’t see
Cutter’s face, but the old man’s legs stiffened, his boots jerking as
if he’d been electrocuted. The boy’s back tensed and there came
another of those loud, wet-cloth
rips
. Cutter was still juddering in
his death dance as the Changed sank his teeth into a limp red tube of
steaming flesh.
On the floor, Sarah began to scream.

Reining in his horse at the village hall, a hulking two-story brownstone capped with a clock tower, Greg dismounted. Tethering his
mare to a wrought-iron railing, he untied a bulging navy blue pillowcase from his saddle. The contents ticked, glass against glass, as
he hefted the makeshift sack over his left shoulder. It had taken them
a long time to both search the rest of the house and then pack up
the stash, which the stuffy-nosed, still-bleeding Verna assured them
was the very last of what they’d squirreled away. Chester still hadn’t
shown by the time they left. Neither had the cat.

By then, Greg didn’t care. His only concern was getting the jars
out of his hands, out of his sight, then finding someplace quiet to
lie down, and screw food. He passed a hand over his suddenly watering eyes, wincing at a needle of pain jabbing his temples. Another
whopper of a migraine muttering in there, building itself up to a real
roar, the kind of monster headache that made him queasy and fractured his sight with wavering lines and jagged shards of light. Kincaid
said that was normal—called it
scintillating
something or other—and
doled out some advice, too:
Reduce your stress, son, and you might feel
better.

Oh yeah, right. What had happened back at the Landrys was just
too damned close for comfort. No matter what Tori said—and, yes,
kissing her was the best thing that had happened to him in
months
—he
knew it was all bullshit, too.
Maybe she believes in me
,
but I sure don’t.
That fiasco back there only proved he wasn’t Chris or Peter. No good
pretending he could be either anymore, no matter what the Council
said or wanted. If Aidan had rebelled, or Pru had sided with Jarvis,
or Jarvis had taken a shot, what then? Kill Jarvis? Shoot anyone else
who disobeyed? Or make the exception and look the other way as the
guys cracked open those jars and ate the evidence? Hell, he might
have joined in.

Can’t even trust myself. Got to go to the Council in the morning and just
quit. Tell them Pru’s a better choice. He’s older, and he thinks things through
better than me.

And really, what could the Council do? Send him to the principal’s office?
Ban
him? His lips curled in a sour smile. Not likely.
He wasn’t refusing to help. There were patrols to mount, places to
guard, the occasional foraging expedition. He’d settle for chopping
wood. Plenty to do. Besides, he was Spared, woo-hoo, and way too
valuable to toss.

I’ll trade valuable for normal any day.
He skimmed a look toward the
church. His mind drifted back to the shock of Tori’s mouth, how
nice
that felt, and
warm
. For those few seconds, he’d actually felt human
again.
So maybe, after we’re done here, sneak back to the church? It’ll be
dark soon. Lob a snowball at her window and then . . .

“What you grinning about?” It was Pru, two steps below.
“Nothing.” God, he couldn’t even daydream in peace. Another
scintillating splinter of light skewered his left eye. He ought to see
Kincaid, maybe beg some aspirin or Tylenol, if there was any left. Or
maybe in all Kincaid’s reading up on plants and mushrooms, tinkering with decoctions and infusions, he’d come up with something that
could deal with this monster headache that just wouldn’t quit.
“Come on,” he said, turning, his gaze sweeping past the church,
“let’s—” Suddenly, he froze.
Pru let a beat slide by. “Greg?”
He didn’t reply. He could feel his eyebrows bunching together in a
sudden frown. Out of the corner of his eye, he could’ve sworn there’d
been a light?
No, a flash.
But that was probably the headache . . .
“Greg?”
“I don’t know,” he said to Pru. “But I thought I heard something.”