“Just a sec, just a sec!” Fumbling, Alex stripped the lace from her boot and then crowded in beside Sharon. She lashed the lace around Ruby’s forearm a few inches down from the old woman’s bloodstained elbow—once, twice. For a moment, she worried the polypropylene would saw right through Ruby’s skin, which was frail and paper-thin. Well, screw that. She put some muscle into it, cinched down hard. “Okay, ease up.”

The big woman’s fingers cautiously relaxed. The steady crimson pump dribbled to an ooze.

“Christ.” Sharon was panting. Her sweat-drenched face was matted with hanks of her bullet-gray hair. Drying blood fanned her chest and neck. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. Hang on.” When they’d staggered back to the guesthouse with Ruby, Acne and Slash had followed, dumping six of the camo packs in after them. Now, Alex snatched up one and pawed through the contents: food, clothes. She tried not to pay attention to the smells of trail mix and MREs, the spike of a packet of peppermint gum. Or the clothes either: floral soap, talcum warmed by a child’s skin. No ammunition, and the Changed’s muscle had pulled anything remotely resembling a weapon. So, no knives or scissors either.

Come on, come on, these kids were prepared; there’s got to be something. She tumbled out another pack, gave the contents a quick going-over, her eyes brushing over a pair of boy’s pajamas: SpiderMan. She grabbed up a third pack.

“What are you looking for?” Sharon asked. Her voice was limp as a spent balloon. Ruby’s blood shellacked both arms to her elbows.

“Medical supplies.” Alex upended the pack in a shower of pink and purple that smelled of vanilla and little girl. “These kids were ready to be on the road for a while.”

Fourth try: pay dirt. She sifted through tubes of antibiotic ointment, bandages, antiseptic wipes, alcohol, gauze, tape, Kerlix. And pills, lots of pills: over-the-counter packets of cold tablets, Tylenol, ibuprofen, cough drops. But there was a clutch of more potent stuff: prescription painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin, a handful of tiny green Valiums, and—the mother lode—antibiotics: big pink horse-pills of long-acting erythromycin and chalky-white amoxicillin.

Okay, almost in business, but there was still one hell of a problem. The second she took off that tourniquet, the bleeding would start right up. During the few amputations she’d done with Kincaid, he’d talked about isolating nerve from muscle to minimize phantom limb pain and how to clamp off blood vessels; what suture to use now that were was no power for electrocautery . . .

Cautery. She gasped. That’s it.

“What?” Sharon asked as Alex pushed to her feet.

Tom. She raced to the kitchen, started yanking open cupboards and pulling drawers. Tom had told her what to do; he’d talked her through it. She’d done this once before. Come on, come on, I smelled it before, I know I did, I know it’s here.

“What are you doing?” Sharon asked.

“Metal holds heat.” She ripped open another cupboard. Dust mice and crumbs. The Changed had been smart enough to remove the obvious: knives, forks, anything that jumped out as a potential weapon. But not everything. There was something. All she had to do was follow her nose . . .

“So?”

“So, if I can find something metal and get it hot enough, I can use that to stop the bleeding.” As soon as she levered open the oven door, she smelled cooked sulfur, ancient grease. Gotcha. The skillet was upside down on the rack: cast-iron, very small, speckled with rust, a little sticky from stale Crisco. Good enough. Grabbing a cooking mitt and the pan, she scuttled back. When they’d first arrived, she’d built up the fire to burn hot and fast through that first load of wood, mainly to warm the chimney and create the airflow to keep the fire going. The fire had dwindled to red-hot embers. Slipping on the mitt, she reached in with a long split of oak.

“Get me more logs,” she said. She used an oak split to shove aside spent wood. “There, in the firebox.”

Laying the wood in a grid, she knelt, blew on the embers, and was rewarded with a flower of flame. She jockeyed the skillet into a nest of red-orange coals.

“You sure this will work?” Sharon said.

“No, but it’s better than nothing.” She waited until the smell of scorched iron filled the guesthouse and then levered the skillet from the fire. The heat rolled off the iron, leaked through the mitt where the gray, fire-resistant covering had flaked away.

“Hold her down,” she said to Sharon. Ruby was still out, but Alex didn’t think that would last more than a nanosecond. “No matter what, don’t let up until I tell you to.”

“I’m on it.” Sharon straddled Ruby, pushing her knees into the little woman’s shoulders. She grabbed Ruby’s left arm in both hands. “Go.”

Has to work. Gritting her teeth, she jammed the hot skillet onto Ruby’s raw stump.

There was a pop and then a sizzle. Ruby flopped. Her legs pistoned straight out. Her head jerked and then her eyes were wide and so was her mouth and she was bucking and thrashing and screaming, screaming, screaming . . .

“Hold her, hold her!” Alex shouted. The smell was coming on, thick and heavy: the unmistakable aroma of fried meat and molten fat. Alex heard the fizz of boiling blood. Saliva suddenly flooded her mouth, spilled over her tongue, as her brain registered that this was meat, it was meat, this was the aroma of food. Hamburgers on the grill. Juicy steaks.

Come on, don’t lose it; it doesn’t mean anything.

Her body didn’t care. A huge hunger-rat clawed at her belly. To her horror, her stomach let out a long, very loud growl.

But then, for once, it happened the way things are supposed to in make-believe: Ruby passed out.

“Thank Christ,” Sharon breathed.

Alex had one precious second when she really thought everything would be all right; that she could chalk up her hunger for Ruby’s meat to some ghost of an ancient past when cavemen hunkered over roast saber-toothed tiger.

But then her mind shifted. Again. The sensation was almost like a sound: a dry rustle as the monster flexed its muscles. Out of nowhere, that swimmy feeling washed over and through her mind, spiking the hairs on her neck. A whir bloomed in her brain—black sound—and then her mouth filled with the wet, mushy funk of warm iron and something so slick it tasted like boiled snot.

“No!” she gasped. Her gorge, sour and hot, pushed up through her chest, and then she was spinning up and away. The skillet thudded to the hardwood with a dull clang, and Sharon was shouting: What, what, what? She didn’t care. Alex bolted for the door at a dead run, and then she was out in the storm, the snow swirling in a white rush, the wind clawing her hair. No guard at the door. None was needed because of the storm.

Through the snow, across the clearing, the Changed were feasting. The party was just getting started. She had no idea where they’d taken Daniel, but she saw what they’d done to Jack.

Against the jump of orange flames, the spit turned like something out of a grade-B movie: the carcass threaded onto forked wood lashed together with, of all things, extension cords. The stench of scorched rubber competed with the aroma of broiled meat and crisped fat.

Spider was right there, in the thick of it, cheeks bulging, her skin ruddy with firelight and excitement. She was pressing a fistful of something to Leopard’s mouth—

And Alex felt the edge of his teeth ghosting over her own fingers.

God. An icy knife of horror cut her chest. No. She watched as Leopard pulled Spider closer—

And it was her skin that crawled as Leopard’s tongue dragged over Spider’s neck.

Oh my God. It was happening again, her mind slewing sideways, stepping away—and into Spider.

No! A surge of bile roared from her mouth to splatter to the snow. She isn’t me; I’m not her. I’m not one of them, I’m not!

“Hey!” Sharon called. “Get your ass back here!”

God, what’s happening to me? Alex’s muscles were shuddery and weak. Sagging against the door, she pressed her sweaty face to icy wood. I’m not Spider. I’m Alex and I’m here, I’m here, I’m right here.

But then she thought she heard just the faintest whisper sighing up from a deep, dark crevice of her mind. Or maybe she didn’t really hear anything, and it was a hallucination conjured from her addled, sick brain. Whatever. It was there, sardonic and small.

Maybe, it—the monster—said. But so am I. So am I.

43

“You did good.” Sharon vacuumed in a mouthful of trail mix and chomped. With the other hand, she plucked at a red and black flannel shirt they’d draped over Ruby. The little woman had swum to a kind of twilight awareness long enough for Alex to feed her an erythromycin and Percocet before sinking back. Alex had worried about the dose because Ruby was so small, but knocking her out seemed both prudent and humane. Time enough to deal with the night’s horrors tomorrow.

“I would never have thought to use the frying pan.” Sharon smoothed the shirt under Ruby’s chin. “That was real smart, Alex.”

“Yeah. Well.” Alex palmed a pink tablet of erythromycin. After bandaging Ruby up and then taking care of her shoulder, she’d sifted through the pill bottles, debating which was best, and decided upon erythromycin, a drug she was familiar with from her work with Kincaid. The pills had belonged to a Bev Ulrich, who had been a very bad patient, only taking four tablets when her doctor specifically prescribed two a day for fourteen days, or else. Or maybe Bev had been a very good patient, only the Zap happened and then bronchitis was the least of her problems.

The label said to drink plenty of water and take the medicine on a full stomach. Yeah, right. She could hear Aunt Hannah: Not bloody likely.

What am I going to do? The thought of her aunt made the tiny black letters on the prescription label squiggle and shimmer. Erythromycin sure wouldn’t cure what ailed her, but she dryswallowed the antibiotic, which caught and hung in her throat. It’s winning, Aunt Hannah. After all this, the monster’s finally going to win.