Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (50 page)

Between Jed’s maps and a thumbnail of the village’s layout, Zone,
patrols, and approach routes Weller once drew, Tom would’ve found
what he was looking for easily enough. As with the lake, however,
the crows pointed the way, sketching lazy pinwheels above the woods
southwest of Rule. Now that they were into March and the daytime
temps were inching past freezing most days, the faintly gassy smell
helped, too. So did his horse, who finally balked a half mile shy and
refused to budge. That was all right. On foot, he had a better chance
of slipping in unnoticed. So he offloaded his gear, then unharnessed
and gave the horse a healthy slap to send it on its way.

If you didn’t know better, Tom thought you could almost imagine
that you’d dropped into some horror story where the village appeases
the local gods by sending out the occasional sacrifice. He knew better.
Rule’s story was written in the haphazard scatter of browning bones,
scored by teeth and knives; the remnants of clothes and discarded
backpacks; a hoary scraggle of wig so picked over there was nothing
left but ripped lace and a few strands of too-red hair.

What almost troubled him more, however, was a wrecked
pyramid of decaying human heads that lay at the end of a kind of
processional way. This was marked by the skeletonized remains of
animals heaped on thinning snow beneath gently swaying rib cages
still dangling from paraline. From the shapes of the skulls and teeth,
he thought these had been wolves. The whole setup was ritualistic,
with a weird Blair Witch vibe. He wondered if this spot had been
claimed by the Wolf Tribe, those Chuckies Cindi saw with Alex. If
true, then Tom was now standing close to or in the same spot Alex
once had. He didn’t know if that was an omen, good or bad.

Either way, no Chuckies have been here for a while.
Tom studied the
crows hopscotching over that jumble of human skulls and disarticulated lower jaws. Only the barest remnants of leathery skin and
desiccated muscle dangled from bone. Something had happened at
that pyramid, too. The skulls hadn’t simply fallen to the snow but
been knocked off, some by several feet. One lay far to the right. From
its position, he could almost imagine that someone had tried lobbing the skull like a stone. Nearby were two shredded, bloodstained
bits of cloth: part of a parka and a flannel shirt. Torn off in a fight,
maybe, but the edges weren’t as frayed as he would’ve expected from
a rip
.
Probably one honking sharp knife.

But where was the flood of Chuckies that was supposed to have
born down on Rule? In the last four days, Tom had seen only a few
and at a distance—and twice during the midafternoon, which was
also very bad news.

Tom held his breath and listened. So still. This close, he ought to
hear something: the
thock
of an ax, the distant clatter of wagons or
horses. Perhaps, even the occasional voice. In the dead silence of the
Hindu Kush, he’d once patrolled a mountainside and caught snatches
of evening prayers ten thousand feet above a Pashtun village he never
saw. But here? Nothing.

Where is everyone?
He was certain he wasn’t too late. With all those
men and their wagons, the horses—and now, the kids—he had to
have beaten Mellie and that old commander in black. Probably by no
more than half a day, but even a few hours was better than nothing.

Something really wrong here.
A slight movement to his right, and
his gaze dropped in time to see a small field mouse squirm from an
empty socket of that lone skull. The animal froze, only its whiskers
trembling before it wheeled and scurried away.
Something rotten in
Denmark, Yorick
.

It must’ve been an old mercury switch from a defunct thermostat
connected to a battery. Move the garbage, disturb the switch, the
leads spark, and
boom
. An easy bomb.

One second, he was shouting for Weller and dashing toward the
church. The next, he was very cold and crumpled on his side, a lucky
thing because there was old copper in his mouth, more blood drying
under his nose and along his neck. If he’d been on his back, he might
have choked to death on his own blood. His chest felt like someone
had dropped a boulder on him. His ears hurt, and they
whooshed
: a
good indicator that he still had eardrums to hear with. At first, he
thought the sound was only from the blast wave, but when he rolled
onto his back, gasping at jags of pain, he saw clots of black smoke
chuffing over blue sky and realized that what he heard was the muted
chugs of a fire that had yet to burn itself out.

Sitting up was an exercise in slow torture. Everything hurt. He
wasn’t coughing up any more of the red stuff, so his lungs might
be okay. A blast could kill you a lot of different ways. Some—being
vaporized or skewered by shrapnel or bleeding out because your leg
was gone—were a lot faster than others. Have the bad luck of being
too close to a blast wave, and the hollow organs—lungs, heart, guts—
could burst, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. When he was finally
up, he propped himself on his elbows, concentrated on moving air in
and out of his aching lungs, studied what was left of the church—and
realized just how lucky he’d been.

The church looked like something out of a travel brochure advertising tours of castle ruins. The tower had ruptured in a halo of stone
and splintered wood. Mangled brass bells and sprays of shattered
stained glass glittered on the snow. The blast had been powerful
enough to fling the smallest bells toward the forest edging what had
been the church’s parking lot. The crowns of several nearby trees,
principally heavier evergreens, had snapped while other, thinner
hardwoods were bowled over by the blast wind. Three walls still
stood, but the rest of the church was a gutted shell surrounded by
blasted pews and the fluttering remnants of tattered hymnals.

He ought to be dead. They’d tethered the animals about an eighth
of a mile away. He thought he’d covered half the distance back
before he’d dropped the reins and sprinted for the church. So, tack on
another fifty yards before the explosion? Either way, give or take, he
was still too darned close. The fact that he’d been blown back so far,
knocked unconscious, and bled from his nose and ears proved that. If
the explosion had happened, say, in a town or a narrow alley, the blast
overpressure would’ve ruptured his heart and blown his lungs apart.
What saved his ass was that the church stood alone, with no nearby
structures or even trees to capture and amplify the blast wave.

By some miracle, he still had his weapons: the Uzi on its retention
strap, Jed’s Bravo snugged in that back scabbard, and the Glock—
Alex’s Glock, as he thought of it—in its cross-draw. He had extra
ammo stashed in his over-vest, too, also lucky because the horses had
scattered. From their tracks, he knew at least one had not headed
back to camp. That, he hoped, would be his ride, but hunting it down
now would be a mistake. Instead, he kicked snow to hide his blood,
then shucked his vest and used that to scour away the Tom-sized
divot where he’d lain and the stumbling tracks he made as he headed
into the trees.

They came a few hours later. By then, he’d moved downwind and
well into the woods, hauling himself by painful degrees high into
the deep recesses of a thick, sturdy cedar. There were three, and he
recognized them all. Mellie’s square, compact frame was easy. With
his white hair cut high and tight and that black uniform, the way he
carried himself, Tom thought the old guy was used to command.

But my God, I know you.
His mind flashed to his battle with that
blood-eyed girl on the snow.
You’re one of the guys I saw watching from
the woods.

The third person was a kid, a boy in over-whites. The boy’s head
was up, sampling the air. Looking for
him.
Tom was too far away
to see the boy’s eyes, but he knew they were the same maddened
red of that Chucky he’d fought to the death. Given the guy in black,
Tom thought this must be the same boy he’d spotted in the trees two
weeks ago.

He watched as the three made a slow perambulation around the
church in an ever-widening spiral.
Looking for tracks, trying to figure out
if anyone got away.
The oldsters bent their heads to the snow, but the
kid kept his head up like a bloodhound. The Uzi was silenced, chambered and ready to go, and now he inched a finger over the selector
switch.
Kill them now? No way anyone will hear the shots.
But he wasn’t
a sniper, and he might miss. Worse, he was only one person, and he
was willing to bet the old commander had a fair number of men. Try
to rescue the kids on his own, he’d probably end up dead.
Wait for a
better time. Think of a plan.

Heart pounding, he watched as they continued their search pattern until the debris field petered out. Mellie and the commander
conferred about something; the Chucky only scanned, turning his
horse in a slow three-sixty. And then they left, returning to camp the
way they’d come.

For the rest of that day and through the night, Tom stayed put,
using his retention straps to anchor himself in case he dozed. The
orange of the fire eventually diminished. What light there was
splashed gray and dim from the waxing moon. The hissing in his ears
diminished enough that he heard the flame’s dying crackles and, at
some point, a jangle of hardware. That made his pulse ratchet up
a notch until he reconsidered that a solitary rider, at night, made
no sense. Probably his horse, or Weller’s. He thought about it for a
few seconds, then decided he was much better off with a ride than
without one. So he called to it as softly as he could, coaxing the animal into the woods, wincing at every crackle and snap of brush and
brambles. In the moonlight, he saw the horse slip close to the tree in
which he hid, and then stop.

That was the only good in an otherwise very long and terrible
night. He still ached, his gimpy right leg complained, and now he was
both hungry and thirsty. Scooping snow from nearby limbs, he let it
melt down his throat to take the edge off. He even managed a fitful
doze.

Mostly, he worried about the kids, and his next move. The one
thing he didn’t believe Mellie would do was kill the children outright.
It just didn’t fit. True, that commander had Chuckies. They would
need food. But why waste kids? More than enough oldsters around
to keep the Chuckies happy for a while.

What he kept coming back to was that boy. The old commander
was messing around with the Chuckies. But how?
And why does he
need my kids?
There had to be a reason why Mellie had gathered children for her buddy in black. Tom suspected she and the commander
wanted the Rule children for the same reason.

Except for two dead dogs, a bigger blood splotch that looked as if it
might have been a person, and a riderless horse nervously wandering
around the horse barn, the farmstead was deserted. The horse trough
had been moved, and the stockpile of explosives gear was gone. That,
he’d counted on. First principles: all warfare is based on deception.

Every tent had been broken down and taken away—except his,
set apart, close to the trees. He stared for a very long time, first from
across the corral and on his horse, and then on foot as he worked a
careful perimeter, thinking,
Fool me once . . .
He bet Finn read Sun
Tzu, too.

It took him a while. The snow was all broken up, deeply incised
with horse hooves, boots, and—this was a surprise—the cut of at least
seven or eight wagons. But he finally spotted what did not belong: a
thin curl of det cord coiled around a corner guy and grommet of his
tent. Following that took him to a trip-release hooked to the front
zipper. Peering through a seam, he saw a half block of plastique, with
a Vietnam-era M28 detonator stuck in one end, molded to the tent’s
center pole. The trip-release meant that he’d use more force on the
zipper. One quick tug would arm the fuse and then
boom.

Not good.
He cut the cord with his KA-BAR, then broke down the
rest of the bomb.
Either they think one or both of us got out, or they’re
being cautious.
Each scenario was bad news and meant he would have
to be doubly careful when he searched the rest of the farmstead.

None of the barns were booby-trapped. He took his time with
the equipment shed, studying the roof and where the walls met concrete and then snow. Nothing. Now that he had his gear and binos, he
peered in through the one window. Bare sawhorses, empty shelves.
Using paracord, he carefully tied one end to the doorknob and strung
it out behind. Then he wound the other end around the saddle horn,
boosted himself onto the saddle, and spurred the horse into a sudden gallop. Startled, the horse bolted, and the door caromed off its
hinges. But nothing blew up.

Save for a single half-roll of magnesium tape and a bottle of aluminum powder that had rolled under a sawhorse, the equipment shed
was a metal and concrete shell. Pocketing the magnesium and ground
aluminum, he walked out to the cistern. The cap was still in place,
but once bitten, twice shy. When he was satisfied it wasn’t rigged,
he shoved the heavy concrete to one side and peered in. His breath
huffed out in relief. Still attached to an iron bolt on the cap’s underbelly, the black paracord was taut, exactly as he’d left it. Reaching in,
he hauled up the heavy pack in which he’d stowed the lion’s share of
his bomb-making materials.

Clearing a house of potential booby-traps takes time. All the rooms
were clear and empty, except Weller’s.
Interesting
. Both hands on
his Uzi, Tom turned a slow look. With its tight hospital corners,
Weller’s rack could’ve passed any drill instructor’s muster. From
his few changes of clothing in a duffel to his cracked leather dopp
kit, everything was squared and ordered.
Why not empty the room, or
booby-trap it?
Two reasons: either the contents held no value . . .
or, on
the off-chance Weller survived, they’re telling him to kiss off.