Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

lurch, felt the rock
beneath her boots skate and shift. A red rocket of pain raced into her
right ankle. Pushing through it, she planted her boots and heaved
herself away from the ledge—
And into a nightmare.
The world was coming apart at the seams. The roar of the earth
was huge, a grating bellow counterpointed with the sharp pops and
squeals of overstressed rock. Jagged fissures scored the snow; a clutch
of trees to her left weren’t swaying but jolting back and forth. The
crowns of several trees had snapped, leaving trunks that were little
more than ruined splinters. There’d been fresh snow the night before,
but the brutal cold had solidified the layers beneath. With every shudder of the earth, this more rigid, hard-packed ice layer was cracking
and shifting into unstable slabs.
God, isn’t this how avalanches start? She watched a jagged chunk,
this one as large as a kiddie sled, jitter down the rise. Got to get off the
hill before it collapses.
A brief, sweeping glance. The moon was going down, the light
no longer neon green but murky and so bad that the others—six
Changed in all, including Wolf—were only slate-gray, boy-shaped silhouettes: parka hoods cinched down tight, their faces ghostly ovals.
The five who’d pulled them up were jittering like cold butter hissing
on a hot skillet. Their fear was a red fizz in her nose. Wolf was having
as hard a time keeping to his feet as she, and he’d dropped her wrist
to fumble with the rope harness. The other boys were staggering,
working at the hopeless task of gathering up rope, trying to corral
their gear. One Changed, though, snagged her attention because he
smelled . . . familiar. Who was that? She lifted her nose, pulled in air.
There, floundering toward them from the end of the conga line that
had hauled her and Wolf to safety: a tall, slope-shouldered kid, his
features now pulling together out of the gloom.
And she thought, No, no, it can’t be .
    She’d waffled over this all the way up the tunnel: whether to make a
break for it if she managed to reach the top, or stay. Her ankle was
messed up, but she was managing. From Kincaid and all her hiking
experience, she knew how to splint it, if needed. But the fact that she
was soaking wet was a much bigger problem. Her sodden pants were
already stiffening, and she was trembling, getting hypothermic. What
she needed was to get warm, which meant a fire, a change of clothes,
something hot to drink. Wet, with no supplies and nothing to keep
her alive except Leopard’s knife and the Glock 19, she might as well
have let go of that rope and saved Wolf the trouble of rescuing her
from the tunnel. She would probably die if she ran now.
    On the other hand, Wolf had come back. He wanted her. Or
maybe . . . needed her? So, go with him? Bide her time? God, it would
be Rule all over again, and probably just as stupid, but she’d nearly
talked herself into it.
    Until now, this moment, because heading toward them was a boy
she recognized by sight and scent: Ben Stiemke.
Acne. He’d been part of Wolf ’s original gang, before Spider and
Leopard took over. The fact that Acne was here, on the surface, actually frightened her just as much as this nightmare. But there was no
mistake. Acne had made it out of the mine. Had he left before the
attack, the explosions? Maybe slipped out when everyone else was in
the chow line because he’d smelled Wolf earlier in the day, just as she
and Spider and Leopard had? She would never know. The important
thing was that Acne was with Wolf now. That meant some of the
others—Spider, Slash—might have gotten out, too.
That decided her. She was not going through this again.
Her eyes clicked to the quivering snow. To her left, maybe fifty
feet away, she spotted a scatter of cross-country skis and poles—and
rifles. One, lying near a pair of skis staked in the snow, caught her eye:
scoped, a bolt-action with a carry strap. She darted left, digging