Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (45 page)

Fading back from wherever she’d been, with her mind dark and
eyes closed and body as motionless as a pillar of salt, and into the
silence of those woods and bluing shadows was like reentering the
world after a long, dreamless sleep. The wolfdog was still by her side.
The only smells drifting through the woods were charred timber,
scorched stone, crisped bone. Broiled wolf, and melted nylon. But no
Changed, no Finn. No Wolf or Penny. No men.

Her bare feet were white and so cold tears sprang when she tried
worming her toes into socks and then her boots before tottering to a
stand. Using the hunter’s .30-06 Springfield as a crutch, she’d picked
her way from the screen of brambles, hobbling like an old woman.

The hunter’s body lay where it had fallen. Only his radio was gone.
Interesting. The body could be Finn’s way of saying just how deeply
he didn’t care. Perhaps Finn would return to see if other Changed
took the bait, but that felt wrong.

Which left a third possibility. The man in black had set out the
equivalent of kibbles for a hungry stray:
Here, kitty, kitty. Don’t be
afraid.
If true, that would suggest he thought she
was
Changed. So,
had Finn been bluffing with all his talk, just tossing out lines? Maybe.

* * *
Picking over the hunter’s body wasn’t her favorite activity, but this
guy was loaded for bear. Besides the ammo in his fancy camo, the
hunter had a brick of 165-grain super shock tip bullets in his cargo
pants and a small headlamp, as well as a flint and striker, an Altoids tin
of char, an emergency blanket, a small wad of jute, and a plastic bag
of Vaseline-smeared cotton balls. A seven-inch sheathed Buck knife
was looped through his belt. She crammed everything into her medic’s pack. Feeling more like a grave robber than ever, she unwound his
scarf and peeled his watch cap. They smelled like old dead guy, but
she needed the clothes.

The house was a smoldering ruin in a crater of rubble and melted
snow already on its way to refreezing. Of the wolf totems, only the
one hanging beside the stuff sack remained. The fire had burned hot
and long enough to barbecue the corpse and partially melt the stuff
sack. The body parts it once contained—a rack of ribs, an entire pelvis
from waist to just above the thighs, one leg—were now in a heap on
the snow. The charred wolf smelled like old cooked tires. The people
parts smelled of overdone pork tenderloin. All the bodies, Changed
and not, were crumbling, crisped stick figures with impossibly white
teeth bared in the lipless grins of blackened skulls.

Skirting the crater, she went around to the porch side. No Wolf or
Penny, but plenty of prints. No blood.
They didn’t hurt Wolf; they took
him alive.
The blast of relief made her knees wobble. That she
was
relieved . . . she didn’t want to look at that just yet.

“But Finn must’ve come because of the baby,” she said to the wolfdog. “He’s experimented on the Changed already. I think he’s tried the
same thing with poor Peter.” So, should she
do
anything about that?

She’d first thought the whole wolf shtick was some weird religion, and it still might be. But Wolf
was
an exception. It was a leap,
but she thought she was right. Somehow, Wolf figured it out, too.

The Changed couldn’t smell wolves.
What she’d taken to be mystical mumbo jumbo, a way of marking
territory, was wrong. Wolf had used wolf skins and carcasses to hide
the feeding grounds outside Rule and his kills from other Changed.
This was probably the same reason why Wolf had hung totems here,
to shield the house
and
protect their food supply. She remembered
that brief leap behind the eyes of the Changed who’d been chasing
Wolf, Marley, and Ernie. The Changed had no trouble tracking the
last two boys.
But they couldn’t quite get a fix on Wolf.
He’d been a blank,
camouflaged and invisible.
“That’s why Darth didn’t see you,” she said to the wolfdog. “He
couldn’t smell you, so he never knew you were there.” How would
that work? Dogs were related to wolves. They always smelled each
other’s bums, and she bet wolves did, too. Come to think of it, whenever her aunt’s cat got spooked, that little stinker let go of some really
nasty-smelling goo from its butt. So maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to
imagine that the same secretions that might
lure
one species would
either repel or not register with another.
The wolfdog was the key. So long as it stayed close, the Changed
couldn’t smell her. Sure, if they
spotted
her, she was cooked. But otherwise?
She was invisible.

“A week ago, I chowed down on ants, and now I catch two rabbits in
one day. Wouldn’t you know I’d hit the jackpot now? Here.” Peeling
skin from front paws and head, Alex tossed the carcass to the waiting
wolfdog. “Make it last,” she said, as the animal began bolting rabbit.

Wherever you came from and for whatever reason you picked me, I’m
sure glad you showed up when you did.
Picking up the second rabbit,
she grabbed a back leg, punched through the thin skin with a thumb,
and then began peeling the rabbit out of its skin, working fascia away
from red muscle and finishing off by tugging the skin over the carcass’s head like an inside-out bodysuit. This one, she’d gut and roast.
No need for raw heart this time around.

She and the wolfdog spent the night in Peter’s boathouse. The
weird thing: she couldn’t get comfortable. It had been months since
she’d slept on a mattress and with a pillow, and she was uncomfortable, anxious. After a few hours of tossing, she gave up, wrapped
herself in a blanket, strapped on the headlamp, and spread the atlases
from Peter’s bookshelf on the floor.

Once she hiked out to a main road and got her bearings, she could
go anywhere. Her earlier ideas about warning Chris seemed naïve
now, so much wasted energy. If Peter was with Finn, Rule was in
much bigger trouble than she’d realized. She also had no way of tracking Tom. So, if she stayed in Michigan, only two destinations made
sense: Rule or Oren. The dead boy from Oren had her whistle, which
meant Ellie had been there. While she still might be, the chances of
stumbling on one little girl were ten trillion to one.

Which left Rule, a place that felt radioactive.
But Finn has Wolf. He has Penny and Peter. I can’t just let that go.
“Oh, don’t be crazy, Alex. You’re not Batman.” On the floor,

snugged against her left leg, the wolfdog’s ears pricked. “Seriously?”
she asked the animal. “Rescue them so they starve, or I have to shoot
them to protect myself or, say, Ellie? Tom? Chris? If it came down to a
choice between Wolf and Tom, I’d pick Tom. I’m not saying it would
be easy, and it feels wrong because Wolf is . . . in-between, just like
me,” she finished in a whisper, definitely
not
understanding why her
eyes stung.

Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself.
She rested a cheek on her knees.
Yet Wolf
was
different now. In the beginning, she’d been only food;
he’d chowed down on a slice of her shoulder, for God’s sake. But then
Wolf saved her from Spider, kept her off-menu; rescued her from the
mine and then Acne. They’d worked together to fight Finn’s men
before he’d made her leave him behind and save herself. Wolf
cared
about her. It was in what he did, and his scent.

“And I care what happens to him,” she said, feeling the ooze of a
tear and a weird hollowness in her chest. So, fine, all right, she was
evil and maybe brainwashed, and this definitely wasn’t
love
. . . was it?
No, of course not, but she
cared
, okay? Shoot her.

But Wolf still has to eat.
It wasn’t as if Wolf was suddenly going
to go vegan. Yes, he cared for her and she was pretty sure he would
never hurt her now. That kind of amnesty might also extend to the
people she cared about. For Wolf to live, though, he had to eat.

“I don’t know what’s right,” she said to the wolfdog. “Maybe it’s
smarter to kill Wolf, but it would be like putting a gun to Tom’s head,
or Chris’s.” Wasn’t that exactly what Tom
wanted
her to do if he
Changed? Tom had killed Jim, his friend, to save her and Ellie. Could
she
do something like that? At the last second, if there was no other
choice, she probably would. “But maybe we’re not there yet. And
what if Wolf
can
come back? Then I have to do something
.
I can’t just
leave
him with Finn. It wouldn’t be right.” Penny . . . she wasn’t sure
what to do with her. But there was Peter, too, caught in between like
her and Wolf. Whatever Finn had done to him might also be undone,
eventually.

So, go to Rule? See if she picked up Wolf ’s scent? It was insane, but
with the wolfdog, she might pull it off. As long as she didn’t succumb
to the
push-push go-go
. . .

“You know what I can’t figure out?” she asked the wolfdog. “What
that whole thing was. Like the monster either grabbed on
to
or got
grabbed
by
Finn, then jerked me along for the ride. I hopped. First I
land behind one set of eyes and then a whole bunch of other eyes,
and then I jump to someone else, further ahead.” She thought about
that. “Know what it reminds me of ?” At the wolfdog’s look—
no,
really, tell me
—she said, “High school bio.”

Really?
The wolfdog cocked its head.
Which part?
“How the brain works and cells talk to each other.” By that point
in bio, the monster had shown itself, too, and she became somewhat
of an expert. “The brain’s an electrical system mediated by chemicals. But here’s the thing,” she said to the wolfdog. She was starting
to get a little excited now; felt she was onto something. “The brain
has
tons
of synapses, like more than the stars in the Milky Way. Even
an electrical impulse would be too slow on its own for everything to
work together the way it should. So the impulse has to
hop
. It jumps
like a bunny from node to node along an axon, and that speeds everything up.”
So what
if
Finn was doing that? “Like an out-of-body thing. A
signal leapfrogging from mind to mind. Only it can’t be a straight
line. Too inefficient.” And wouldn’t the signal decay? She thought
that was right; depending on the frequency, a radio signal could peter
out fast, and hadn’t cell towers worked the same way?
Unless you boost
the signals somehow.
So how did Finn work around that? She thought
about how the
push-push go-go
got stronger when Finn was closer.
Like roaming, or Wi-Fi. The monster got part of it, like a cell phone getting
only a bar or two instead of four or five.
And then what had happened?
The monster tried looping her in, on its own?
“Or maybe the monster couldn’t help it.” She said this slowly,
testing each word. “Unless you disabled a computer’s Wi-Fi, it
would automatically search for a connection, a network, something to grab.” With the exception of Wolf, for whom the monster
seemed to have a special affinity, every time she’d leapfrogged into a
Changed’s mind was on the basis of both proximity and the strength
of an emotion: lust, hunger. Rage. “But the monster can’t
always
be
receptive, because it doesn’t happen all the time. I never
really
know
what’s going on; it’s like being in a French class when all you speak
is Russian. You
hear
sounds, but that’s not the same as
knowing
what
they mean—and I don’t
hear
anything anyway. Whatever I figure out
is from the scent.”
Because it’s not the right
kind
of signal, nothing to snag the monster’s
interest? Like lunch in the cafeteria . . . there’s always the buzz of conversation, but unless you make an effort you don’t pay attention, because you’re
either not interested or you’re focused on something else: finding your friends,
for example, or someone’s called your name from across the room. The rest of
the time, you don’t hear anything, really, even though you register the noise.
So, a regular conversation between Changed wasn’t
strong
or
interesting
enough to goose the monster? Even when she
did
hop—
that time she’d dropped behind Spider’s eyes, for example, way back
at the lake house after Spider had killed poor little Jack—it wasn’t
like eavesdropping. She was never pulled into a wider conversation.
Because I really don’t understand the language? Or maybe
. . .
“There’s some other piece I’m not seeing.” She also had this really
crummy feeling that she had to experience the mind-jump a couple
more times before she figured it out. If she followed Finn, she’d be
asking for trouble, because if she
was
right about proximity and the
monster
was
receptive, getting closer to Finn and his weird, altered
Changed would increase the chances of her being detected or pulled
in, or losing herself in the red storm.
“And Finn sensed the monster. He felt my edges.” Which was
also different. Wolf and Spider, Leopard, Acne . . . none showed any
awareness of her or the monster at all. But Finn had. How could he
do that?
“Hell if I know, and I’m not going to figure it out tonight.” Her
head ached, and she needed sleep. Clicking off the headlamp, she
settled down next to the wolfdog, which groaned and put its chin on
her belly. “I like you, too. If we ever see my dog again, you can’t eat
him, okay?” She stroked the animal’s ears. “Should give you a name.”

A name.
She thought about that.
Finn wanted my name. He asked
twice. Why?
“Something important about a name . . .” She scrubbed the wolfdog’s chin. “So how do you feel about Buck? Great book, and you fit.
Me, too. We’re both halfwild now, aren’t we, boy?” That made her
think of Peter’s paperbacks. She should take a few. Long walk ahead,
but that was all right. She needed time to think about what to do.
Still fidgety, she rolled onto her side and heard the crinkle of that
Almond Joy wrapper in the pocket where she’d stowed the candy. So
tempting to eat the other half. But she should hold off, maybe wait
for a real celebration.
She let go of a very long sigh. “Because, sometimes,” she said to
Buck, “you just feel like a nut.”