No one said anything for a long moment. Then Luke stepped closer. “What if we wait for you? Tom would want us to.We pack up and move, say, a mile or so west, into the woods.”
This was the mountain again, the day of the Zap, when she was saddled with Ellie and terrified out of her mind. She didn’t want all this on her. Yet if Ellie hadn’t been there, would she have tried so hard? Ever left the Waucamaw? Every step she’d taken since the Zap had been because of someone else. She might still be lost if not for Ellie and Tom and Chris. Even Wolf. All those connections led her out of those woods, from a very black place, and pulled her from the brink of a leap where there was nothing and no one waiting but death.
Tom said we saved each other. She ran her eyes over the upturned faces. Maybe he was saving me for this.
“If I can,” she said to Luke, “I’ll be back. We’ll figure this out. But don’t wait too—”
A quick kick of pain, a fireball behind her eyes. Deep in her mind, the monster flexed, teased awake, and she could feel it stretching, trying to muscle open that box. She blinked, and it was as if the shutter of a camera suddenly opened, a third eye—
—and she is behind those eyes again, in that body she is beginning to think might be a boy’s and in the heart of the pushpush gogo. High on a horse, dressed in white, the red storm on the left, and the other screaming: GOGOGO LET ME GO. Silently streaming over patchy snow, flowing with the pushpush gogo of the red storm, breathing in the ripe meat smell it wants, he wants, she craves. In the distance is a high hill and the stark outlines of a tower—
—then a shift—
—into and through many eyes—
—a shimmer—
—and now, closer still— pushpush gogogogo—she is looking through a tangled curtain of matted hair. This body is another boy, and he is wild at the aroma of salt and meat, of prey dead ahead and just up that hill, in the tower—gogo pushpush—I want I want I want I need—pushpush gogo—
Two rumbling booms suddenly cannoned like distant thunder. Some of the kids let out startled cries. Snapping back behind her own eyes, Alex saw two faint yellow-orange candles shoot into a pewter sky due north. The flares faded fast, swallowed by distance, the coming day to her left, and the gleam of the moon, low on the western horizon.
That tower. That’s where the Changed boy was focused: the tower, and men. Meat.
“Go, Alex. Good luck,” Luke said. “We’ll watch for you. Come back.”
She wanted to say she would, but all those words hung in her throat. “Stay safe.”
Then she spurred her horse as Buck sprang after, and galloped for Rule.
Tom wasted ten minutes piecing it together. By then, Jarvis was on the ground and Chris was trotting down the last flight. On the final landing twenty feet above the ground, Tom turned a troubled look back. Those men should’ve been on them, or very close. A fast horse can cover a lot of ground in no time flat. And yet . . . Glassing the plain through breaks in the trees, he saw they’d dismounted. Maybe—he chewed his lower lip—a half mile? Working on . . .
“Tom?” Chris, just below. “What is it? You see something?”
“Yeah, but their backs are to me. Can’t tell what . . .” As a cloud finally drifted aside to bathe the plain with moonlight, he raised his binoculars. “Why send only four—”
“Tom?” Chris’s voice was sharp. “What . . .”
“Oh Jesus.” Alarm ripped through Tom’s gut as he finally understood. Two men were kneeling, and now he could see what they balanced on their shoulders.
“RPGs!” Whirling, Tom planted his hands on the metal guardrail. “RPGs, RP—”
“Jesus Christ, kid,” the bald boy snarled. With dawn filtering through low-slung evergreens, Ellie saw the creep’s hair was growing back around spidery scabs. “Give me the damn gun.”
“No.” Ellie hugged the Savage to her chest. This was so embarrassing. All around, kids, most older and a few younger, were all big eyes and sniggery mouths. To her right, a tiny girl with a froth of fine, nearly white hair was cringing, like Ellie had sneezed and gotten her all boogery. “It’s my gun. Jayden lets me.”
“This isn’t Jayden’s wagon, and I don’t care.” Creep totally freaked her out. All those eyebrow hoops, and that safety pin, crusted with old blood, through his right earlobe, not to mention the tongue stud . . . it was just plain sick, like the kid got off on deciding what part to stab next. As if life wasn’t bad enough already. “Now hand it over,” the boy said.
“Lucian, leave her alone.” It was the thin, tired-looking girl, Sarah, who was driving the swaying wagon as they jounced over humped ice and sparse snow. “She’s not hurting anybody.”“Yet,” Lucian said. “You want that gun to go off ?”
“It’s safetied,” Ellie said. Sensing her distress, Mina clambered to her feet and pushed her snout into Ellie’s stomach while Jet and Ghost also struggled up to see what was the matter. That started a general heaving and jostling of the other dogs, which staggered and bumped kids, who started up with the complaints, and blah, blah, blah. . . . Maybe they’d let her walk. That would certainly solve the whole gun thing. Exasperated, she pushed Mina to a sit. “My finger’s not even in the guard. What do you think, it’s going to go off on its own?”
“All right, listen,” Sarah said, hoing the horse to a halt. Sarah’s expression reminded Ellie of teachers she’d like to forget: sympathetic about her dad but always saying stuff like we can’t have that kind of behavior in class. “Give Lucian the gun, please? I can’t drive with you guys arguing and a loaded gun pointed at my back.”
“It’s aimed at the sky,” Ellie said. Well, trees: dense forest hemmed this snaky curlicue of a road. Limbs jutted like fingers trying to lace. They were making lousy time; she bet they weren’t more than three, four miles out. If they needed to turn around or move fast? They were sunk. Jayden was having a heart attack; Ellie saw him in the driver’s box of that first wagon, his head going every which way, trying to watch everywhere at once. “Even if it went off, which it won’t,” she said, “it wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Don’t make me come back there, kid,” Lucian warned.
The other kids’ eyes were saucers; a bunch of boys started in with the elbow-jabs: Whoa, F-bomb. Oh, why had Tom put her in this wagon? She should’ve hopped right out and run over to Jayden’s. “But I know what I’m doing,” she said as one of the boys on horseback eased to their wagon, ducking beneath branches as he did so.
“Problem here?” The boy, about Jayden’s age, had dark curly hair, kind of like Tom’s, which was wavy and thick. Ellie thought he even looked a bit like Tom, and then saw why in this boy’s eyes, which were smudged with purple and . . . sad. Like Tom’s, even when he said he was happy to see her. Ellie knew why, too: Tom hurt, all the time, because of Alex. Ellie only wished she knew how to make that better. Maybe if I love him enough, hug him enough . . .
“We’re fine, Greg,” Lucian said, his tone like a boy with one eye on the playground monitor and the other on the kid whose butt he wanted to kick.
“Yeah, I guess that’s why the wagon’s stopped,” Greg said in an unimpressed uh-huh way that made Ellie bite her cheek to keep back the snicker. He cut the girl a look. “Sarah?”
“I said we got this.” Heaving to his feet, Lucian stepped onto the flatbed, brushing past feathery branches to wade through dogs and kids. Towering over Ellie like a giant-killer, Lucian jabbed a finger into Greg’s chest. “This is my wagon. This kid’s got a gun, I want it, and you’re not in charge here, Greg-guh.”
“Calm down, Lucian.” Sarah looked like a whipped puppy. “Guys, look, let’s just settle this and get going, okay?”
“But it’s safetied, right? So what’s the harm?” Greg said.
“Yeah,” Ellie said. This Greg kid was okay. “If we get into trouble, we’ll need every gun we’ve got.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Lucian snorted. “We get into trouble, ain’t no little girl .22 gonna save our butts.”
“Fine,” Ellie shot back. “So if I’m not going to save your butt, you mind if I save mine?” That got everyone nudging elbows and whispering again. I don’t care; you’re not my friends. She glowered up at Lucian. “What’s your problem?”
“A very good question,” Greg said.
“Greg,” Lucian growled. “Don’t push me, man.”
“Or what? You going to kill me now? You had your shot,” Greg said.
“She should give it,” the white-haired girl suddenly piped in that lisping singsong every kid knew: Okay, but don’t blame me. She had to be, what, six? The girl clutched a Lalaloopsy doll with a spray of fuchsia curls. “My mommy said guns kill people.”
About half the kids gave solemn nods, but a trio of boys shrugged and one elfish, older kid with big ears said, “I don’t see what’s the big deal. I wish I had a gun.”
“Greg,” Sarah said, still with that nervous, whipped-puppy look. “This isn’t going to change what’s happened.”
“You weren’t locked in a cell, Sarah,” Greg said, but he was looking at Lucian. “You weren’t spit on and punched. You didn’t clean chunks of dead kid from a church floor, or shovel horse shit with your bare hands.”
Whoa. No wonder Chris left Rule. The way Greg and Lucian were eyeing each other, she had a terrible feeling that neither needed much of an excuse.
Her closet-voice: Don’t make trouble, Ellie.
“Fine. Look, I’m giving it.” Fuming, she watched Lucian shuck the round in the chamber, then work the bolt and empty the Savage’s magazine.
“There you go.” Lucian had this big nasty smirk all over his stupid face. Slipping her bullets into a pocket, he handed back the rifle. “We get where we’re going, you can have the bullets back. And Greg?” Lucian stomped for the driver’s box. “Thanks for your concern, man. Now fuck off.”