by R. Lee Moore
“Oh god,” Tamina said with faux panic in her voice. “I've never been this close to one of them before.”
One of the men said something she couldn't understand, and the wolf froze in its tracks and began carefully backing up without taking its eyes and the suspicious predatory stare within them off her.
“First time huh,” the man said to her. When Tamina nodded her head, he laughed and waved the wolf away with a sharp command. He turned slightly and motioned over to the line of cars near the planes at the end of the runway. “We don't want to scare you. Not yet. You can park over there to wait for Ms. King. I'll let Vanya know you're here though. He'll want to meet you.”
The wolf gave Tamina a low warning growl as it eyed her suspiciously. She was going to have to deal with that wolf before anything else, she thought to herself. The other two might have lowered their guard, but the big beast between them didn't.
With a command from the man who'd been speaking, the three of them turned and started nonchalantly ambling their way back down the runway leaving Tamina behind. She watched and waited for them to get a good distance away before she slid back into the driver's seat shutting the door behind her. So far so good, she thought. Now all she had to do was get in close, and drop the hammer.
“I'm moving in,” she whispered under her breath hoping the ear-piece would pick it up. “Wait for me to get into position, then come in hard.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Pulling to a slow rolling stop, Tamina parked as close as she dared next to the cluster of cars beside the airstrip. Keeping her distance, at least for the time being, was critical if things were going to go smoothly. There were too many werewolves roaming around to take any risks. Any closer and their heightened supernatural senses would blow whatever cover she had. It wasn't hard to imagine what would happen then.
Tamina switched off the engine, and sat silently watching the men and women, human and werewolf alike busying themselves loading up and preparing the string of aircraft for departure. She took note of everything she saw, memorizing the position and activities of each one of them. From the armed men standing around the aircraft scanning the surrounding area with casual glances, to the werewolves prowling the edges of the darkness. These people carried themselves like trained professionals. People who knew how to kill and were probably good at it. Knowing where everyone was, was a matter of life and death. Her life, her death. She couldn't afford to miss anything.
The wolf that had first confronted her kept its distance, but it never stopped watching her with such keen and intent eyes. She'd tried several times to reach down beneath the passenger seat to ready her weapons, but each movement she made perked the wolf up and drew its attention far too much for her to be comfortable. That wolf was going to be a problem, she decided. It was far too suspicious and wary.
All the rest of the crew seemed to be caught up in their preparations, so her presence didn't seem to merit much attention outside a few cold disinterested looks in her direction. All on her own, Tamina wasn't enough of a threat for most of them to even bother noticing. At least she wasn't until she spied one of the men who'd confronted her speaking and motioning in her direction to a tall dark haired man in the distance.
Tamina felt her body tensing in anticipation, and she forced herself to relax as much as she was able. She had to be calm and in control of herself. Less chance of making mistakes that way. The tall dark haired man broke off from the pack and started ambling towards her with an almost arrogant confidence. He didn't look like was going to keep his distance like the others had.
“Go,” Tamina said under her breath hoping the ear-piece picked up the transmission. Everything was moving faster than she'd anticipated. She had to act.
Silently counting down to herself as she opened the car door, she stepped out to intercept the man coming towards her. She took the opportunity to slip the holdout pistol from its place in the door, and jamming it into her jacket pocket. It wasn't going to do much to any of the werewolves, but it was better than nothing.
Tamina recognized the man as he drew closer. He had the same dark hair, same build, same dark eyes as the man she'd seen in most of the videos. This was the man, the werewolf that shifted right on top of all of those women, and then killed them. He had that same look in his eyes, the same confident disarming smile turning up the corners of his mouth that she'd seen in nearly every one of those videos. It was him, and now she had a name to put to the face of the monster.
“You're Vanya right?” she said stepping out from behind the door just enough to give the weapon in her pocket a clear line of sight. It wouldn't be terribly accurate, but it would hit and that was what counted. “Yeah, I know who you are. Been looking forward to meeting you.”
The man paused mid-step and canted his head to the side with a thoughtful, wary look. The ears of the werewolf behind him twitched and its muzzle lifted into the air scenting the wind. Tamina couldn't see, hear, or smell anything, but then again she didn't have the creatures advantages. It knew something was coming, it just didn't know what yet. Neither of them did.
Vanya's eyes darkened and narrowed into a fixated predatory glare as the human color in them began to melt away revealing the beast within. Whatever it was the wolf was sensing, he was sensing too.
“Something's wrong. Who are you?” Vanya demanded with a rumbling and threatening growl.
Tamina offered him a cold, unfriendly smile as she slid herself into combat mode. Her hand wrapped around the weapon in her pocket, her fingers gliding gently over the trigger. Watching. Waiting for the right moment to strike.
“I'm the angel of fucking death,” Tamina replied. No sense play-acting anymore, she figured.
She squeezed her trigger in rapid succession causing a hole to rip through the front of her jacket pocket. A staccato of sharp cracks filled the air spitting fire and lead from the snub barrel of the weapon concealed in her jacket. The shots rippled across Vanya's chest sending out spurts of blood and torn flesh and flinging him back off his feet, dropping him hard to the tarmac below.
With the rush of adrenaline into her system, time slowed to a crawl, and everyone froze all around her. Every eye on the airfield suddenly focused directly on her. She was already moving when the realization of what had just happened, what was happening began to dawn on them. It only held for a split second at most, but that was all the time she needed.
Tamina dove behind the relative cover of the door and launched herself back into the interior of the car just as a ferocious hail of gunfire snapped and cracked through the air all around her. The unmarked car began to twitch and dance under the peppering assault. The metallic thunk of lead impacting steel and aluminum echoed and pulsed through an interior showered with sparkling shards of glass raining down like a mist.
The bullets weren't what she was worried about, though. She doubted she'd taken Vanya out, and even if she had, there was still a fully shifted werewolf that was likely rapidly closing the distance between them. The beast would kill her long before any of the wild shots ripping the car apart would.
Thrusting her hand blindly beneath the passenger seat, she wrapped her fingers around the handle of the heavy pistol hidden there, and jerked it free. She thumbed the safety off, spun to her side, and swung her weapon to aim out the drivers side door in a single fluid motion.
She stroked the trigger in rapid succession the second the head of the massive snarling beast came into view. Her aim was slightly off in the rush, but she still hit. The rounds slapped heavily into the wolf's lower jaw and shoulders staggering and forcing it back with agonized yelps and shrieks of pain.
Tamina didn't let up. She kept firing and pushing the thing back with round after round drilling mercilessly into it. The Wolfsbane rounds would hurt, and maybe even slow the thing down, but a fully shifted werewolf was almost never an easy kill. Even in human form they could shrug off damage that would have left anyone else bleeding and dying on the ground. She'd have to steady her aim and
take the thing's head off. No easy task when those massive jaws were coming right at you.
The beast dove away from her fire and out of her line of sight, and Tamina swung her weapon wildly all around her trying to predict where the beast would reappear. She had to get it before it got her. The car lurched beneath her, and she could see the roof above her begin to buckle from the massive weight of the werewolf bearing down on it.
Without even thinking, Tamina jerked her weapon up sent a rapid-fire hail of bullets rippling through the roof above her. The car bounced and shuddered as the beast above vaulted from the roof to the hood to avoid the fiery lead streaking up underneath it.
She swung her weapon to the shattered windshield and fired just as the wolf lunged forward. A single shot cracked out and grazed across the muzzle of the beast shattering through the glass. It was a wild shot that did little more than leave a thin line of blood where the round had creased and scraped over the flesh. Nothing more.
Tamina stroked the trigger a second time, but the slide of her Hardballer had locked back with the chamber empty. The beast was too close, and she wasn't going to have the time to reload. She scrambled for the holdout in her pocket when the back of the car lurched again throwing her off balance.
As she fumbled for the weapon in her pocket, her eyes locked on the slavering jaws of the wolf surging forward through the windshield. She could see her end in those jaws and those wicked teeth bearing down on her. The roof buckled over her a second time, and the wolf's jaws snapped shut close enough to her face that she could feel the heat of its fetid breath washing over her skin.
Then out of nowhere, the beast flew suddenly backwards as if an explosion had hurled it away. Through the decimated remains of the windshield she could see a mass of red fur streaking forward across the hood of the car and driving full force directly into the wounded werewolf.
Tamina wasn't going to waste the opportunity she'd been given. She reached beneath the seat and drug out the tactical vest holding the spare magazines, and reloaded her sidearm and quickly as possible. She could hear the thundering of gunfire, the roar of engines, and the screeching of tires off in the distance racing across the open fields.
There were panicked shouts as Tamina snatched up the AR12 from behind the seat and scrambled across the glass covered interior to escape the vehicle. She dove to the ground, rolled up to a crouch with the stock of the shotgun pressed tight against her shoulder, and began scanning for targets in front of her.
As she came up over the hood of the car, she saw what happened to the werewolf. It lay twitching and kicking on the pavement. It's terrified and agonized whines and yelps garbled by the wet sound of blood filling its throat. A throat locked tightly in the jaws of a sleek and heavily armored red-furred wolf standing over it furiously slashing at it with blood-soaked paws.
Tamina thought about ending the thing's life with a close range shot to the head, but she wasn't sure if the first round she'd loaded was a Wolfsbane slug, or an incendiary round. Siobhan probably wouldn't appreciate either one. One would steal her kill, the other was likely to tear her apart and set her on fire when she got caught in the blast. Neither were good options.
The better option was to ignore the pair of wolves and concentrate on everyone else. She could see the Strike Teams pouring fire into the cluster of hostiles surrounding the row of planes as they broke through the chain link fence surrounding the airfield. Fire was coming in from all sides, squeezing their targets and forcing them back into a tightly compacted kill-box.
The targets were fighting back, though, and they weren't making it easy for the Strike Teams to advance. Tamina's assessment of the professionalism of the men and women she was fighting was proving correct. One or two had panicked and run, but the rest had reacted with the discipline and focus of combat veterans.
They'd spread out and taken up tactical positions behind what cover they could, and began raking the oncoming vehicles with gunfire intense enough that the Strykers veered off and took up defensive positions. They were still close enough to engage the enemy, but far enough away that they could dismount their ground units at a safe enough distance to keep from being cut to pieces.
A bright light and the roar of an engine from behind spun Tamina around. She instinctively brought her weapon to bear on the vehicle skidding to a screeching stop beside her. Her finger hovered over her trigger, ready to burn down the vehicles occupants until she saw the familiar rail-thin form of her partner flinging open the car door.
Carson slid from the interior, weapon in hand, and began firing into the thick knot of the enemy surrounding the planes. Tamina felt herself smiling slightly. Neither of them had time for words, just action.
She swung back around searching for targets when a loud echoing chorus of howls pierced through the air. Suddenly Tamina could see waves of armored werewolves streaking out of the darkness from all sides. Some of them stumbled and fell to the ground in front of them as bullets ripped through their massive bodies, but most shrugged off whatever fire they took and kept charging forward. None of them made it close to the line of planes before enemy werewolves roared out to intercept them.
The fighting was brutal on both ends. Tracers ripped across the sky in both directions. The chatter of automatic fire echoed like a continuous barrage of thunder. Bright sustained flashes of light lit up the whole of the airfield like it was the 4th of July.
The werewolves on both sides howled out their rage-filled challenges as they charged forward into battle. When the two sides met, the air around them erupted into pain-filled shrieks and the violent spilling of blood. Gaping maws filled with fangs snapped around throats, and claws tore through exposed flesh the kind of savagery only the feral supernatural could ever show. There was no mercy on either side. It was kill, or be killed. There was no in between.
Through it all, Tamina and Carson poured fire into any target within range as the vehicles they hid behind rocked and sparked under the intensity of the fire directed at them. Neither vehicle was reliable cover, and it was a miracle neither of them had been cut down by the heavy rounds rippling across one side of the vehicles, and bursting clean through the other side. They weren't going to last long at this rate.
“Air inbound,” a voice shouted through Tamina's ear-piece. “Ground units, fire is danger close. I repeat, danger close.”
She swore and immediately bolted towards Carson and vaulted over what remained of the hood of his car to put as much distance between her and what was coming as possible. Both of them flattened themselves down on the ground as close to the protection of the engine block as they could get.
When the Blackhawks roared over top of them, if felt as if an earthquake had rippled through the airfield rumbling the ground up beneath them. They watched as the helicopters flew in a tight and fast orbit around the parked planes. The distinct whirring snarl of miniguns immediately drowned out all other sound around them. From where she lay, it looked as if fiery beams of light were reaching out from the sides of the aircraft to rain hellish judgment down upon those beneath them.
The whole area shook and withered under the assault. The parked planes and the vehicles surrounding them began bouncing back and forth under the relentless torrent of gunfire pouring into them. Men and women mouthed wordless screams as they were scythed apart alongside their vehicles. One by one the vehicles started to smoke and catch fire, then all at once an explosion rippled up and down the line sending flame and molten shrapnel bursting out into the air all around them.
Tamina rose back up to a crouch the moment the helicopters veered off in a steep ascent to avoid the torrent of fire streaking up at them from what remained of the enemy force.
An entire section of the runway was a nightmarish hellscape of wreckage and burning bodies strewn about the tarmac. The Blackhawks had massacred a good portion of those on the ground and taken out the planes and most of the other vehicles clustered around the center, but there were still enough of the enemy left to cause problem
s.
She began creeping forward firing off well aimed shots at whatever she could see until they fell. Everyone who'd survived the air strike had begun to break and scatter in all directions across the airfield. With their means of escape destroyed, those that were left were simply fighting for survival now. That made them all the more dangerous.
Tamina hoped none of the Strike Teams had been caught in the blast and had made it unscathed from both the air strike and the explosions that had near flattened everything around them. She looked around to make sure Siobhan had survived, only to find that the red wolf had gone. She'd left the mutilated carcass of her first victim behind, but the red wolf herself was nowhere to be found. Tamina hoped she was alright.
She pressed herself against her destroyed vehicle and swept the area in front of her. She could see the remains of Siobhan's kill, but that was it., When she looked where Vanya had fallen after she'd dumped half her magazine into him, the werewolf was nowhere to be seen.
“'Ak'eed,” she swore to herself. She turned and shouted over her shoulder at her partner. “Carson! The bastard's gone.”
Carson rushed up to her side, weapon held out in front of him, and crouched beside her looking in the direction she was indicating.
“Who?” he asked breathlessly.
“Vanya,” Tamina snapped. “The-the guy from the videos. The fucking wolf that was eating people. He was right there.”
“You shoot him?” Carson asked.
Tamina swore again.
“Regular 9mm from my backup,” she growled angry at herself. “Damn it, I knew it wouldn't kill him.”
“Maybe he was in that?” Carson said nodding over to the burning wreckage of the planes and vehicles in front of them.
Tamina shook her head and started scanning out into the darkness. There was still fighting going on. Still fully shapeshifted werewolves and gunmen going at it all around her while others were scattering off in every direction trying to escape. It was possible that Vanya was one of the mutilated and smoldering corpses littering the ground, but she couldn't take that chance. That was one wolf she wasn't going to let get away no matter what it took.