Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (47 page)

“So what’d you think?” Already a total spaz, Jasper was practically
vibrating. Jiggling free an aluminum bowl from clamps suspended
above a bucket of sand, he put the bowl to his eye. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Mmm.” Luke spared a glance at the blue button of Jasper’s eye
peering through the bottom. Never having seen thermite in action,
he was startled at how high that shower of sparks leapt, a good five
feet. The pillar of fire was even higher and so bright he’d shielded his
eyes.

But where was Tom? Earlier, there’d been no mistaking Tom’s
dark look, or his anger. What surprised Luke was when, instead of
staying and
stopping
this craziness, Tom wheeled away, really fast,
then streaked off on his horse in the general direction of the church,
with Weller a few minutes behind. Now, an hour later, still no Tom,
no Weller.

Not good.
“Yeah, it was all right,” he said to Jasper, who was dancing from foot
to foot like he had to pee. “But unless you can slow it way down”—he
wanted to add,
without blowing your head off
, but thought that would be
lost on a nut like Jasper—“what do we need it for?”
“This is already fifteen seconds slower than the last batch.” Jasper
sounded offended. “I ground the aluminum coarser and that slows
the reaction. But I saw a TV show where this arsonist used stuff from
fire extinguishers to slow down the reaction, and so I was thinking,
you know, why not? Tom kind of said something about that, and I
know
he was working on it, only he did it in secret and he won’t show
me what he did. But I think he figured out how to use . . . uhm . . .”
Jasper screwed his lips to a rosebud in thought. “Ammonium phosphate. I think.”
“Great,” Luke said, with no enthusiasm at all. He pulled the bucket
of sand from the concrete cistern cap. In the center was a large, gray,
cow patty-like splotch of molten iron and aluminum slag still shimmering with heat. “Gas us all with ammonia. That’ll be just swell.”
“No, just phosphoric acid when the phosphorus combines with
water. It won’t
kill
you, not right away. Anyway, it
could
work,” Jasper
said. “It did on the show.”
What had his parents let this kid watch? “This is reality, Jasper,”
Luke said, and turned to trudge toward the equipment shed. The going
was much easier these days, what with the snowpack diminished, no
more than six inches now, and a good foot less than it had been when
they blew the mine. Now that they were into the middle of March, the
first hints of spring sometimes came in sudden whiffs of sun-warmed
air. The roofs of the buildings were showing. Breaking the ice over the
horse troughs took only a hard kick.
After the demonstration, Mellie had stayed to enthuse before
shooing the other kids back to their various chores: taking care of
the horses, gathering wood for fires, slopping MREs into a pot for
a communal supper. He looked for her now, sweeping his gaze left
from the equipment shed, which sat at the base of the north slope
and was the furthest of the outbuildings, to the cow barn where
Mellie and Weller had set up their command post. They stockpiled
their weapons there, too, Mellie or Weller doling out rifles from a
locker to those kids on lookout or guard duty. Beyond the red rectangle of the barn was a hog shed where half the kids bunked. A little
further on was a horse barn with a staved-in roof, though half the
space was still serviceable. He could see people moving around, the
fire flaring up in the center of the cow corral as kids fed it. A handful
of yapping dogs raced and rolled on a near fan of land rising east to a
knoll and then to pasture. As far as he could tell, Mellie wasn’t down
with the kids.
Probably at the house. Up to me to talk to her, I guess.
After Tom, he
was the oldest. Just work up the nerve, that was all. Tell Mellie what
a crummy idea this all was and how they ought to be thinking about
spring coming, finding a home. What was the worst she could say?
At the shed, he set the bucket of sand down next to the roller door,
then ducked in via the side door, with Jasper on his heels. Emptied of
farm equipment, the shed instead was divided into workstations, long
planks supported by sawhorses. Tom’s area was completely clear, all
his equipment squirreled away somewhere only he knew. Jasper’s work
area was littered with rolls of magnesium ribbon, bottles of aluminum
powder, sulfur, potassium nitrate, glycerin, a large plastic tub of plaster
of Paris. Nearby, another of Jasper’s buddies was experimenting with
chunks of Styrofoam, gasoline, various soaps, sugar, and lighter fluid,
trying to figure a way to make a suitably sticky version of napalm.
Still another team was scoring old soda bottles with glass cutters for
Molotov cocktails. The air smelled of chemical welds, gasoline, and
old eggs.
What are we doing?
They were developing weapons just to do it,
Mellie setting them to various tasks like a guidance counselor slotting them into career paths. In a couple months, it would be spring.
Would they still be living out of tents? Broken-down barns? How
long did disasters go on?
“We need to find a home,” he said.
“Huh?” Jasper glanced up from his perusal of a slender red fire
extinguisher. “What?”
“Nothing.” Tasting
home
hurt his mouth. His vision wavered, and
he stood up suddenly, barking a knee against a sawhorse.
“You okay?” Jasper asked.
“Yeah.” Knee throbbing, he gimped to the door. “Don’t crack any
of those fire extinguishers until I get back, okay?”
“I
wouldn’t
,” Jasper said, with the injured dignity of a kid eyeing
a cookie jar. “What about potassium chloride? You know, Super-K
extinguishers?”
“Wouldn’t the chloride turn into chlorine gas? Won’t that kill you
pretty fast?”
He watched Jasper think about it. “Oh. Maybe.” Jasper made a
face. “Shoot.”
“Yeah,” Luke said, turning to go. “Reality blows.”

He took his time slogging to the farmhouse, rehearsing what to say.
Giving out grief had been his older sister’s specialty. By the time his
parents got around to him, either she’d worn them out, or they didn’t
much care. His mom once said that getting all worked up about kids
was like worrying about dropped pacifiers: the first kid, you sterilized
that sucker; the second kid, you wiped the Binky on your jeans.
And
by the third, you let the dog lick it.

That brought a grin. His mom always cracked him up. He should
tell Cindi. She’d appreciate it. One thing Cindi was good at was telling stories, most of them about her mom. He liked listening, too,
because she made it sound like a once-upon-a-time.

That’s what we should be doing
.
We should be swapping stories and
toasting marshmallows. Like home.
The thought pushed a lump into his
throat. At the farmhouse steps, he tipped a look back. Three of the
dogs were still roughhousing, although a fourth was pointed east,
nosing the knoll, and
yark-yark-yarking
. Now that he was up higher,
Luke could easily eyeball the fields beyond the horse barn and the
lookouts, black specks on a distant knoll.

* * *
The farmhouse, a two-story with dormers, was quiet. The kitchen
was empty, although a mug with the black and red tag of a teabag
draped over the lip sat on the table, and a chair was pushed back. The
air smelled of warm oranges. Maybe Mellie was sleeping? Uncertain
now, he stood a moment, eyes on the ceiling, listening for footsteps.
Nothing moved overhead. He knew that Weller slept on the ground
level, but he had no idea if Mellie used the other back bedrooms.

He opened his mouth to call, then hesitated. Listened. The dog’s
yark-yark-yark
was muffled, though he thought there might be two
barking now. This seriously creepy vibe suddenly tickled his neck,
like the day he snuck into his parents’ bedroom and started opening
drawers to discover, well . . .
things
. Like,
my dad reads these? They
do
things like that?
He kept expecting his dad to pop out of a closet. For
weeks, whenever his dad put an arm around his mom, Luke broke
into a sweat.

This was like that. He was someplace he didn’t belong, about to
see something he had no business seeing, not if he knew what was
good—

From down the hall came a muted mechanical
click
. And then two
more.
He went rigid. After a moment, the sounds came again:
click.
Pause.
Click-click-click.
Pause.
Click-click-click.
Luke’s heart skipped. He might not know the meaning, but he
understood what this was.
Code.

When he spotted the blood, Tom made them peel off the road, get
under cover, and wait. This went against every impulse that screamed
he needed to get to Cindi and Chad,
right now
. But it was the same as
it had been in Jed’s shed when the bounty hunters came: panic, and
everyone died. So, instead, he and Weller crept in gradually, ducking
behind and under what scant cover they had.

The church’s front doors were ajar, an open invitation they took,
Weller sweeping low as he angled high because everyone forgot to
look up. The church’s interior was deeply shadowed, with dark corners from which anything might spring. Tom’s eyes scoured the stone
floor and along the pews for trip wires, a curl of det cord. But there
was nothing.

The tower had seven landings accessible by wrought iron ladders
fixed to limestone walls. Weller covered as he led the way, scrutinizing each rung and rail for wires, pressure switches. More nothing, and
no one blasted down from above. A defunct carillon console was still
just as thick with dust and cobwebs as it had been when Tom climbed
down two weeks ago.

Which left only the trap at the top of the seventh ladder. Tom
stood there a good minute, listening for the tread of a boot, a squeal
of wood. He felt cold air seeping from the open belfry, and thin slivers
of daylight glimmered through gaps in the wood. But there were no
dead spaces, nothing blacked out. He used the tip of his Uzi to ease
open the trap. Nothing went
ka-boom
, and there was no muzzle flash.

The first thing he saw in the belfry was that the stool, on which
he’d perched for hours, lay on its side. Beside it, on the floor, was
the rumpled mound of a sleeping bag. A book splayed, facedown,
next to the stool and Cindi’s binos, a pair of Nikon 8X42s that she
liked for when the light started to go. Wrappers were scattered over
the floor. A small litter of crumpled lunch bags and balled waxed
paper half-covered Cindi’s Nikons. A water bottle and thermos were
overturned. The air smelled of cold chicken broth and wet noodles.

From the looks of it, the kids put up a fight. Yet as they headed
down from the belfry and out of the church, Tom worried the tableau. Something was off, but damned if he knew precisely what.

“I don’t know about this.” Weller crouched over the mutilated body
of Chad’s dog. The animal had been decapitated, its severed head
lying at the bottom of the steps like a discarded basketball. “That’s
a clean cut, and I’ll bet it was the first one, too. Look at the blood
spray. But”—he reached to turn the dog over—“if you look at these
cuts here . . .”

“Don’t!”
Tom snatched Weller’s wrist. “It could be booby-trapped;
they plant
bombs
in dead dogs.”
“Ease down, Tom. We’re not in Afghanistan.” Weller gave his
hand a pointed glance. “Mind?”
“No. Just . . . be careful.” Exhaling, Tom forced his hand to relax.
He did not like this at all. The back of his neck was jumping. Being
out in the open, on this bald knob, made him nervous. He and Weller
were static targets, just
begging
to be picked off. “First time for everything.”
“No arguments from me there.” Weller rolled the dog’s stiffening
body, then grunted. “Look at the blood.”
The vermillion pool was small, a few tablespoons. “Not enough.”
Tom turned back and eyed the spray-painted stone of the church’s

front. “So those had to come first, when the heart was still pumping.
You’re saying they cut the head off first and then mutilated the body
after the dog was dead?”

“Be my guess.” Weller held a hand over a slop of the dog’s colon.
“Cold. Blood’s real thick. Whatever happened here happened a while
back. Hours, probably. Same thing with Chad’s horse.” Like the dog,
the mare’s belly was ripped. Pulverized organs splattered the snow.
The stink was terrible, a rancid, fecal odor that made a pulse of bile
boil to the back of Tom’s throat. The horse’s skull had been hacked
straight down through the poll, leaving an ax-shaped divot that neatly
split the skull in two. “Hatchet or a big machete for the killing blow,
and then they could take their time tearing up the animal once it was
down. But Tom . . .” Weller aimed a forefinger at the stump of the
dog’s neck. “That is a
clean
cut.”

Tom stared at Weller for a full ten seconds before he got it. “The
dog was standing still. It recognized whoever did this.”
“Or responded to commands, yeah.
Or
it could’ve been helped
along.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look at the head. What’s missing, something Chad’s dog always
wore?”
Tom’s gaze raked over the dog’s glazed eyes, the sagging halfshuttered lids, that lolling blue tongue. “The muzzle. Chad always
muzzled his dog when he went on lookout.”
“Right. I think someone removed the muzzle and fed the dog
something. Put it to sleep and then you can chop off the head pretty
easy. So, one thing’s for sure, it couldn’t have been a Chucky. That dog
would
never
stand still or let it get close,
and
they only killed the one
horse. Why do that unless you need the other? Chuckies don’t ride.”
“Unless, now, some do or can.” Tom thought about that. “You
know what else is wrong? There’s nothing covert about this. It’s like
they’re trying to spook or impress us. This all feels ”—he waved a
hand—“
arranged
.” That jogged something else loose. “You remember upstairs? It looks like there was a struggle, right? But what
wasn’t
there, Weller?”
“I don’t follow.”
“No brass. No smell of gunpowder.”
“Maybe Chad never got off a shot.”
“Come on, the place was a mess. Cindi dropped her book, the
binos, kicked over her stool and the thermos, but Chad never fired
a shot?” There was
still
something else wrong with that scene, too,
a nag in his mind like a loose tooth begging to be nudged from its
socket.
“You’re saying it’s the same as the dog? That they knew him?”
“Or had no reason to be scared until too late, yeah. But how many
people, who could do something like this, do the kids know? There
are only three: you, me—and Mellie.”
“I hear you, but . . .” Weller shook his head. “I don’t see it. Besides,
she’s been at camp all day. Couldn’t have been Mellie, and I know it
wasn’t me.”
Had
he seen Weller earlier in the day? “She could’ve arranged for
it to happen.”
“What? She’d never do that. What are you saying?”
“You heard me,” Tom said. “I think there’s another player.”