Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (33 page)

“What accident?” he said again.
“The accident two years ago,” she said. “When Penny killed a
girl.”

“Wait. Just . . . just hold on.” Gulping air, Alex eyed a splashy tangle of
guts and one tiny paw with its broken nib of bone. Squashed bunny
didn’t bother her. What ticked her off was that in the last two days
since arriving at the lake house, this was the only rabbit she’d snared.

As the trammeled and bloody snow wavered, Alex propped
her hands on her thighs and hung her head, praying both that the
dizziness would pass and Darth—the nickname she’d given to her
guard—wouldn’t feel inspired to use the butt of his rifle, or a fist. A
chronic mouth-breather, Darth was the kind of sinus-challenged kid
with adenoids the size of baseballs that always had the seat behind
yours for a major test. If anyone ever felt the need to make another
Star Wars
, though
. . .
When Wolf wasn’t around, Darth enjoyed the
random punch, a swift swat. She even understood. She got grumpy,
too, when she was starving. Except Darth had the Mossberg.

While this was only her second day at the lake house, she was
fast coming to know Darth’s scents and moods. From his impatient
fizz, she knew it wasn’t okay at all, but screw it. The kid was a brute
and as noisy as a locomotive. She wouldn’t put it past Darth to let
her faint and then either quietly slide back into the house until she
froze or put a boot on her throat. By the time Wolf got back from his
hunting expedition with Ernie and Marley, she’d be bones:
Gee, Boss,
I dunno; she was just here.
After the fiasco in the cabin, she doubted
Wolf would’ve left her alone if there hadn’t been enough in that bear
bag to tide over the natives until his return. But she was finding it very
tough to relax while Darth toyed with guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner.

Just when I thought things might finally break my way.
That coil of
wire she’d discovered in a cardboard box with other camping paraphernalia four days ago was the first piece of good luck she’d had.
With Darth tagging after, she’d tramped far back into the woods and
around the house, scoping out game trails. Plenty of tracks, lots of
juicy little bunnies running around. Lay out sixteen snares and pray
like hell.

Well—she studied the mess in the snow—she’d caught something,
all right, only to have the rabbit snatched by an animal just as hungry
as she.
Got to be whatever’s following us.
Probably a wolf, too. Those
tracks were right. So was the smell, although there was still that
queer something that was a little off and . . .

Oh, screw it. Wolf, not-wolf, who cares?
She smeared an angry tear
from the corner of her right eye. Crying wouldn’t help either. Only
thing to do was move the snare to a different game trail and start
over.

And look on the bright side, Alex. Here you were so worried about what
to use for fish bait
. Mounding the half-frozen guts into a rough snow
bowl, she gave the mess a grim stir with her forefinger and fished out
a small, roughly triangular squib of flesh.
Oooh, and what do we have
here?

“Darth, want to see another trick my dad taught me?” Popping
the rabbit’s heart into her mouth, she swallowed it back and licked
her lips. “Yum, yum,” Alex said. “
Dee
lish.”

Maybe an hour later, she eyed Ellie’s watch. (Habit. Mickey was still
dead. But wearing the watch made her feel better.) Whenever
now
was, it was as good a time as any to search the boathouse before all
those great bunny guts went to waste
.

The day was brilliant, the snow dazzle bright enough to scorch
purple afterimages, the sun a gold coin that made her shadow
puddle at her feet. She shut her eyes against the glare, tried to
imagine her cells wringing energy out of sunlight. She had to find
something more to eat than bark and twigs and the occasional
ant or bunny heart. The boathouse was the only place left where
she might find something useful. After scrounging around the
main lake house, basement, and garage, she’d come up with some
nice stuff: the snare wire, a camp stove, bottles of propane fuel, a
Coleman lantern, even a decent one-man tent. The stove seemed
like a taunt. The wire she was using for snares was too stiff for
fishing, though. Unless she decided to start pulling out her hair and
braiding it together for fishing line, that left the boathouse. Because
lakes had fish, right? Hack through the ice somehow, drop in a line.
Offer a sacrifice to the gods, or something.

Earlier, when Alex was stewing up her oh-so-wonderful pot of white
pine, she’d happened to glance over at Penny, stretched on a frayed
leather couch squared before the great room’s picture window. Plenty
of light to see by—and damn if Alex hadn’t spotted this brief but very
distinct little ripple. Not a punch or a kick. More like something
rolling over
in its sleep.

She knew more about quantum physics than she did about pregnancy, and since Alex knew as much about quantum physics as she
did Outer Mongolia . . . she was virtually clueless. None of the very
few kids she’d hung with in high school got pregnant or knew anyone
who had. All she remembered from those informational drool-fests
from high school health was that how much you showed and when
depended on how tiny you were. And you could feel the baby move
on the inside . . . at four months? And from the outside at five to six
months? Something like that.

So Penny’s at least five months, and maybe more like six or seven.
Alex
had folded a drippy strip of boiled pine into her mouth. The stuff
smelled like Christmas and tasted like stale Dentyne peeled from the
underside of a school desk, right next door to a booger.
Meaning she
was pregnant before the Zap
.

Which was something to think about.
So had Peter brought Penny here before or after things fell apart?
Peter had to be involved, somehow. Peter and the Council set up the
Zone, Peter was head of security, Peter made sure the Changed were
fed. Unless Penny was already here before the Zap, Alex couldn’t see
how Peter managed to move her without Penny ripping off his face.
Knocked her out somehow?
Or what if she knows Peter the way Wolf knows me?
Neither scenario accounted for Wolf, who’d been with Spider and
the rest of his high school buddies when Alex had bumbled into the
Zone. Unless she had it the wrong way around. From the lake house
photograph at the Yeager place, she’d seen that Simon and Peter were
tight. So maybe Simon knew about this place, and
Wolf
had wanted
to take Penny someplace he thought was safe, a place he could visit
every now and then to resupply and check up on her?
This begged an obvious question, too. Alex had assumed Wolf
was the father. Now, she wasn’t sure. Oh, Wolf cared about Penny
plenty. He was always watching out for her, carrying things that were
too heavy, making sure she—and then his guys—ate before he took a
single morsel for himself.
But Wolf
never
touched Penny. They didn’t snuggle. He didn’t hug
her. Never put a hand on her stomach. (Although maybe guys only
did that in chick flicks;
she
didn’t know.) There was nothing
intense
between Penny and Wolf, no
spark.
In high school, you always knew
who the couples were, no matter how übercool and below-the-radar
they were about it. Their heat was in their eyes, the glances they
shared, the way the air thickened. Like how the very first time
she
got
close to Tom, inhaled his smoky musk, the tug of her attraction had
been immediate. When they had kissed, that one moment deepened
to something vital, as elemental as air.
The only time anything like that happened with Wolf, when his
scent shifted and became an aroma that was
safety
and
family
and
desire
, was around her
.
The only person to whom Wolf seemed truly
attached and
attracted
, and for whom he would risk his life, was . . .
her
.
Which was just so frigging great.

The boathouse was an A-framed one-room cabin on stilts, but with
no boats or canoes or even kayaks slotted underneath. As soon as she
forced the door, she realized she was looking at a man cave: a place
where a guy and his buds crashed to get away from the main house.
The décor screamed
boy
, too. Two single beds, one still rumpled; a tiny
four-drawer bureau; two straight-backed chairs; a bookcase crammed
with puzzles, a cribbage board, two decks of cards, board games, and
stacks of smeary magazines she knew better than to leaf through. A
curling
Star Wars
poster, Luke battling Vader, thumbtacked over the
bookshelf. A ring of keys and an old windup alarm clock rested on a
plank shelf on the left wall beside the bed, along with road atlases of
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan. Several jackets hung from nails just
inside the door. Even through the deep cold and Darth’s baseline sunscorched opossum stink plugging her nose, the boathouse had just
the right boy-smell, too: sharp deodorant, foot powder, Irish Spring.

Yet there were two other nose-crinkling odors. One was a campfire odor, or like chemistry class, when they’d ignited magnesium.
The other was . . . Her mind flashed to chemo, and an oncology nurse
feeling for a vein before hooking Alex up to a brown IV bag of cisplatin.
Hospital smell
, that was it. Alex hauled in more air, worrying
the smells—and then forgot all about sulfur and flammable metals.
Because
this
time . . .

Oh God.
Her stomach tightened against a whiff of sweet summer.
She got a memory-pop, a flashbulb moment of her dad:
Relax, honey,
she’s wash and wear
.

“Oh please.” Her voice came out squeaky. Her eyes snapped back
to the bed, and then she was dropping onto her stomach and batting
blankets out of her way, reaching beneath the bed. “Oh please, please,
please,” she chanted, sweeping her glove over bare floorboards, catching wooly dust kittens, a pencil, an old sock—before slapping metal.
Scrambling to a cross-legged sit, she dragged out a dented red toolbox. She was shaking so badly she had to use her teeth to tug off
her gloves before fumbling open the toolbox’s icy chrome latch and
throwing back the double lid.

Instead of tools, there was a small landfill of discarded candy
wrappers and—no mistake—the dizzying aroma of chocolate and
petrified coconut.

“Oh.” She said it in that breathless, astonished way she did at a gorgeous sunset or a gift too beautiful to believed. Plunging her hands
into the wrappers, she came up with a humongous,
giant
candy bar
that she would’ve recognized even without the helpful blue and white
wrapper and big black letters: ALMOND JOY KING SIZE.

“Sometimes you feel like a nut,” she sang. Her grip kept slipping
on the slick paper, and she finally ripped the wrapper with her teeth.
A luscious perfume of sugar and butter and chocolate ballooned. The
butter solids had separated, giving the milky chocolate a dusty, sickly
cast. “And ask me if I care,” she said. Teasing out a bar, she stuck the
candy into her mouth and bit. There was a hollow
chuck
, a jab of pain
in her jaw. The candy was frozen solid and, literally, rock hard. All she
managed was to scrape off a few chocolate shards.

Probably best.
Closing her eyes, she luxuriated in sweet chocolate
melting over her tongue.
Might bring it up if I eat too—
A fizz-fizz, pop-pop boiled into her nose, and she knew, a second
before he gave her shoulder a warning nudge: Darth was getting
impatient.
“Sit on it and spin, Darth.” Yet when she reached for her knife,
she did it slowly. No reason to give Darth an excuse. Placing the bar
on the wood floor, she jockeyed the blade’s tip into the chocolate,
right behind that first almond, then rocked the knife back and forth,
applying steady pressure until the bar broke in a small shower of
chocolate-covered coconut.
“Oooh, you don’t know what you are missing, Darth. On the
other hand, more for me.” Wetting a finger, she dabbed up all the
shards, then popped the finger into her mouth. “Oh, thank you,
God,” she moaned. She was
definitely
taking all the wrappers for later.
Give ’em a nice, long lick. Popping the bit of broken bar into her
mouth, she tucked it into her cheek like a chipmunk. The rest she
carefully wrapped and then slipped into an inside pocket, where her
body warmth would thaw out the treat. She was still starving, but
even that little bit of chocolate made her blood surge.
Yeah, well, don’t get giddy, honey.
The candy might be the extent of
her luck. She didn’t see any fishing gear, and her nose hadn’t sussed
out anything else other than that strange campfire odor and that
hospital smell. Where were they coming from? There didn’t seem to
be much else here but the bureau and another bookshelf, made of
sagging two-by-fours propped on cinderblocks, filled with hardcovers
and paperbacks. A lot of novels, all stuff she’d either read or been
meaning to but never got the chance: Tolkien, Asimov, Bradbury,
Matheson. A broken-spined, scotch-taped copy of
Childhood’s End.
Lord of the Flies. Dune
, a book she’d read while getting chemo, that
mantra about fear as the mind-killer ringing true as she watched the
drip-drip of yellow poison flow into her veins
.
A good collection of
Stephen King, too:
The Dead Zone. Desperation
and
The Stand
.
Duma
Key. A Wrinkle in Time
was falling apart, and the spine of
Watership
Down
was so creased she could barely make out the title.
But there were also a ton of newer textbooks:
Lupine Biology.
Mammalian Speciation. The Ecology of Genetic Rescue. A Head of the
Pack: The Wolves of Michigan’s Isle Royale.
A larger clutch on population genetics and evolution. A third of one shelf was devoted only to
history:
Where the Buffalo Roam: Roosevelt and the Embattled Wilderness.
When Darkness Reigned: Civilizational Collapse in the Middles Ages.
“Whoa,” she muttered. A voracious reader who also had been
a history buff and hard-core mammologist was the last thing she’d
expected. On the other hand, Peter was a problem-solver, a guy
who’d obviously thought about allocation of resources. Someone
who would’ve recognized that feeding the Changed garnered additional benefits, like a tidy buffer between Rule and the rest of the
world. Fitting, somehow, that he’d read up on the Dark Ages.
She wouldn’t mind crashing here awhile.
Childhood’s End
looked
awfully tempting. So did all that Stephen King. Rereading
Wrinkle
would be like picking up where you and your best friend left off.
Chris would love this, too
.
A boy who’d dismantle and move an entire
bookmobile’s collection would want a crack at these. If she got out
of this, she ought to bring him here.
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
She had to be practical.
You can dream,
but food comes first.
Searching each jacket, turning out pockets got her nothing but a
crumpled handful of dollar bills liberated from a denim jacket, which
she crammed into a parka pocket. Tinder was tinder. She was putting
the jacket back when she paused. The garment was big, just as the
boathouse had an older-boy feel to it. Its aroma was stark wintergreen
and icy iron. While in Rule, she’d never paid that much attention, but
now she inhaled deeply, wondering how scents
this
bold could hide
so much.
So, was the house a gift?
The chocolate of that Almond Joy chunk
was gone, her tongue pebbly with coconut. Flipping the almond from
the pouch of her cheek, she chewed, mulling this over. Her curiosity
was stoked, which was somehow better than focusing only on that
beaky gnaw in her stomach.
Or was this just a really old family vacation
house where Peter went when he needed to think things over?
That felt right.
Yesterday, when she swept the woods to set her snares, she’d also discovered an ancient, weathered tree house about thirty feet up a towering
oak around back. Judging from the lake house’s unfinished porch,
Peter had been busy. The house had also been recently winterized,
with double-paned windows redolent with the reek of putty and caulk.
She scented relatively fresh insulation behind the drywall downstairs,
the lingering tang of paint. A woodstove, so new the house smelled of
scorched cast-iron, gave off heat in spades. (A lucky thing, too. There
were two fireplaces, one upstairs and one down, but both were very
old, the hearths blackened and cracked. The sting of creosote on her
tongue was so strong, she bet you could take a chisel to the coal-black
residue caking that flue and still not chip it all away. A wonder no one
had started a chimney fire and burned the house down.)
He went to college, studied genetics and evolution, history.
So maybe
that was the point of the house. Peter had had a whole other life.
From the looks of the house, he might have imagined eventually living here year-round.
At her back, she heard Darth suddenly hitch as his reek went from
fizzy rot to grouchy stink. Despite everything, a grin crept over her
lips. She knew what was bugging him. Darth might be an ox, but he
had a bladder the size of a walnut. This might explain why Darth got
to babysit. A guy who needed a potty break every couple of miles
could be a real drag. For her, Darth’s frequent need to go wee-wee
wasn’t a problem, although he had this habit of doing his business,
like, practically
right
on top of her, which not only was TMI but ticked
her off. Want rabbits to stay far away? Pee on the snare. Jerk.
She was tempted to hurry this up but then thought,
Oh, screw it.
Don’t rush this. There’s something here, something important.
As she stepped up to the bureau, a second flashbulb of memory
popped: of Tom, eyes bright with fever, thigh shiny and taut with
infection. But why? Chemistry lab and Tom . . .