by Mia Archer
“Motherfucker,” I growled. “Stop twitching!”
“They kind of do that when you’re pumping them full of electricity,” the cop said with a shrug.
The werewolf didn’t have long to clutch at its shoulder in pain. I brought the sword down again, and this time it landed right on the things waist. I halved the fucker, and it stopped snapping. Instead it tried to pull itself away, but it was already starting to transform back into its human form as it tried to get away from me.
Not that it was going to do it a damn bit of good to try and get away from me. The damage had already been done. The transformation back into humanity even as it refused to admit it was dead was proof enough of that.
I stood, my breath coming in long gasps as I sucked in air. My blood was pumping and adrenaline was shooting through me. I needed something else to kill, only the coast was clear.
A hand landed on my shoulder and I whirled around, my sword brought up to do some damage, but I saw the chief standing there with his bristling mustache staring at me with concern.
“You okay?”
“Do I fucking look okay?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “But you’re alive. That’s more than I can say for a lot of people since all of this started.”
I took in a breath and let it out to try and calm myself down. It was good to have a reminder that I was still alive, even if things were still fucked up.
Three nights of this shit. Three whole fucking nights, and it looked like it was never going to end. I looked off into the distance to see the full moon rising. I was pretty sure this was the last night for the full moon since there’d been one the night we went into the theater and I didn’t think they ever lasted more than three nights.
Granted I wasn’t the type to keep track of the moon’s phases most days. Usually I looked up to the skies and had the fleeting thought that a full moon in the sky meant somebody out there was getting fucked up by a monster that shouldn’t exist, and it was all going to be covered up by the cops.
“They’re doing this on the full moon on purpose,” I whispered.
“What was that?” the chief asked.
“All this craziness,” I said. “They’re doing it on purpose. They’re attacking the campus during a full moon on purpose.”
“You’re saying this is a coordinated attack?” the chief asked.
“From the very beginning,” I said. “They fucked up the first night with the movie theater, but still. Something is going on here, and we’re in serious trouble.”
“Okay, so what do we do to stop them?” he asked.
I tried not to think about how ridiculous it was that he was talking to me like I knew anything about what was going on here. It was a ridiculous thought. I didn’t feel like I knew all that much.
But I guess I did. I was my father’s daughter. I’d grown up with him teaching me everything he knew, and as much as I might’ve hate that at the time, I could use it now.
“I have a pretty good idea that something bad is about to happen at the arena,” I said.
“We’ll get cops in there to take care of it, then,” the chief said, his eyes narrowing.
“That might be a bad idea,” I said. “I think this proves your people aren’t quite ready to handle werewolves.”
We turned and looked at the carnage in front of the hospital entrance. It wasn’t pretty. Sure a couple of campus cops had survived, but about half of them hadn’t.
Fifty percent was actually pretty good for normals going up against monsters for the first time, and that didn’t speak well for their chances if they were forced to go up against werewolves again.
“Okay, so if we can’t take them out then what’s the plan?” he asked.
“I need to get out there and stop them,” I said. “If they’ve thrown this much at the hospital to keep me from getting out then that clearly means they don’t want me out there causing trouble.
“I don’t like it,” the chief said.
I started the chief. Held his gaze for a long moment.
“You know what I am, right?”
“I have a sneaking suspicion I know exactly who you are,” he said.
“Then you know that me going in there on my own is a better chance than sending a bunch of your rent-a-cops to get killed.”
“I’m going to go ahead and ignore that insult and concede the point,” he said, looking around and sighing. “The cops I have here represents about half of my force, and the rest are getting ready to take care of house parties and all the post game festivities. I guess I’m not equipped to handle werewolves attacking an arena even if I wanted to.”
“Still, you might want to call in the ones getting ready to go issue tickets to drunks,” I said. “I have a feeling things are about to get a little hairy.”
“Did you seriously just say that?” Cara asked.
“I did. Now come on,” I said. “We need to get to the arena.”
“You mean the place that has a bunch of scary werewolves congregating trying to take over campus?” Cara said. “Because I don’t know if I’m cool with this plan.”
“You don’t have a choice,” I said. “You signed up for this the moment you decided to roll with me.”
She sighed, but it looked like she was still willing to go along with the plan. Which relieved me for some reason. I’m not sure why I felt good having Cara with me, but the feeling was there.
“Good luck,” the chief said. “I have a feeling we’re all going to need it before this night is through.”
31
Cara
“Okay, so we might have a little bit of a problem here,” Kirsten said, staring at the arena.
“Really?” I asked, looking at the bored security guards standing in front of the entrance. “What kind of problem could that possibly be?”
She turned and hit me with a look that could kill. Like if she could figure out a way to weaponize that glare and use it on the werewolves then we’d be able to take out all of them in one night.
“Security isn’t going to like that we’re armed,” Kirsten muttered.
“Oh, you mean how we’re loaded down with the kind of weapons you usually only see in the armory of some crazy sovereign citizen type who’s waiting for the end of the world or something?”
I still had trouble believing Kirsten had a weapons cache like that in her house. She’d pulled back a bit of cement in her basement revealing a small room that had astonished me. A small room that didn’t seem like it should’ve existed.
She’d explained that her house was in a part of town that was old enough that it’d been a part of the underground railroad once upon a time. So a room that’d been used to help people reach freedom once upon a time was now being used by a crazy monster hunter to hide all her monster hunting toys.
“What can I say?” she said. “I like to be prepared. Something my dad taught me.”
She frowned as she said it. I got the feeling there were some issues between her and her father. She always got that far off look and frowned when she mentioned him.
“So how do we get into the arena while we’re armed for World War III?” I asked.
“I should’ve had a conversation with the chief about that,” she said.
“You think?” I asked.
“I could try to blink my eyes at them and flash a little skin,” she said, looking down at the tank top and shorts she’d picked up at her place.
“We could both do that,” I said. “But the fact remains that they’re not going to let us through with these weapons.”
I looked down at myself. I had a pistol strapped to either side of me. They were the same pistol Kirsten had. They weren’t anything that I recognized, but I was also willing to admit that most of my experience with weaponry came from looking at weapons I could use it to frag my brothers when they were running LAN first-person shooter nights.
So it was entirely possible this was simply something I wasn’t aware of because it’d never bee
n digitized into one of my brothers’ favorite first person shooters, and not that it was something that didn’t exist.
Kirsten also had a duffel bag over her shoulder. A duffel bag that was so loaded down with weapons that it’d been difficult for me to lift the damn thing, and yet she was able to hold it up like it weighed nothing.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked, looking up into the sky.
We were well into night, which wasn’t good. Night meant werewolves. I guess these wolves didn’t necessarily need the full moon to transform, Kirsten had explained that to me, but they did need it to be dark outside to do the transformation for some reason.
Why? Who the fuck knows. They were supernatural creatures and they had supernatural restrictions to their powers. I wasn’t the one who made it up, and Kirsten didn’t seem to know any more about why the rules worked the way they did for werewolves than I did.
“Follow me,” she said. “I have an idea.”
“Are you going to call your coach or something and get us inside?”
“I don’t think Coach Anderson would let me in with all these weapons,” Kirsten said. “But she is going to help us get in, even if she doesn’t realize it.”
“What are you even talking about?” I asked.
But it didn’t seem like Kirsten was in a talking mood. She moved around the arena and off towards the athletic complex attached to the place. I’d walked past the place plenty of times, but I’d never been inside.
I preferred to rely on my metabolism and genetics to keep me looking good, for all that I knew that would catch up with me eventually. Point being I didn’t spend any more time in a gym that I absolutely had to for course requirements.
“Do you want to tell me where we’re going?” I asked.
She led me to a small hole dug in the ground next to one of the practice gyms.
“I just found out about this yesterday,” Kirsten said. Then she frowned. “Though it feels like it was an eternity ago.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
I wished I could go back to the days when I had no idea werewolves were real. Only I also got the feeling that with everything that was going on lately I probably would’ve found out werewolves were real one way or another by the time this was all said and done, so I suppose it was a good thing circumstances led me to Kirsten who could handle herself in a crisis.
If I was going to be stuck in a crisis that involved werewolves roaming the world then I might as well be stuck in that crisis with a girl who was more than capable of killing the motherfuckers.
“So we’re going down there?” I asked.
“We are,” Kirsten said. “I just hope they didn’t lock the door.”
“Why would that matter?”
“We can’t get through a locked door, right?” Kirsten asked.
“You mean you don’t have plastic explosives or something like that in that duffel bag?” I asked.
Kirsten cocked her head to the side, and I knew from that weird smile that there were definitely explosives in there. She hit me with a thumbs up.
“Good idea!”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as Kirsten went down and pulled on the door. Sure enough, it was locked. There was going to be no getting in there unless we forced entry somehow. Kirsten looked down at her duffel bag as though she was seriously considered blowing the door up, and then she reached out and grabbed the handle one final time.
She gave it a yank, and the handle came off in her hands, pulling completely through the door. Then she reached through the whole she’d just created and pulled the door open.
“No explosives?” I asked.
“I mean that would’ve been fun,” Kirsten said. “But this seemed easier.”
“Remind me to never get in an arm wrestling competition with you,” I said.
“I can think of some far more interesting wrestling I’d like to do with you,” Kirsten said with a wink.
Which had me blushing. I reminded myself we’d have to survive first, and then we could think about alternate methods of wrestling.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Right,” Kirsten said, leading me down a hall.
“So do you come here often?” I asked, smiling at the typical pickup line.
“I’m in here almost every day of my life,” Kirsten said.
“Every day?” I said, letting out a low whistle. “That’s some dedication to staying in shape!”
“I didn’t see you complaining about me staying in shape last night,” Kirsten said, hitting me with a wink.
“Definitely no complaints from me,” I said.
“Being on the cheerleading squad is a lot of work,” Kirsten said. “It takes dedication and constant training. A lot of people don’t appreciate what goes into doing something like that, or they think it’s easy.”
“I never thought it looked easy,” I said. “I did think the girls on the squad back at my high school were total bitches who thought they ruled the place because they got to dress up in their short skirts on game days.”
Kirsten cocked her head to the side, and I worried I might’ve insulted her. I didn’t want to insult her. Both because I was getting a serious case of the feels for this girl, and because I didn’t want to piss off a girl who could single handedly fistfight werewolves and rip through a reinforced security door.
“You get that with some people,” she said. “But a lot of the mean girls mentality goes away by the time you’re doing it at the college level. The people doing it there are serious about their craft.”
“You say so,” I said. “So how do we get to the arena proper from here?”
“I’m working on it,” she said.
“I thought you said you came here all the time?” I said.
“I am in here all the time,” she said with a sniff. “It’s just that I’ve never gone to the arena from the underground tunnels in the practice gym.”
“Gotcha,” I said.
“This way,” Kirsten said after looking around for a minute.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked.
“No, but if I take us to the wrong place then we’re going away from the werewolves, right? I figured you’d be happy about that.”
“I suppose,” I said. “Though it’d be nicer if we could stop this whole werewolf invasion thing before it really gets going.”
“You and me both,” Kirsten said. “All the more reason for us to get our asses in gear and get to the right place, right?”
So we made our way through the tunnels. I took the opportunity to feel the guns at my side. Was it a little ridiculous to have a gun on either side? Maybe, but it made me feel a hell of a lot better knowing I had some backup in case things started to go pear-shaped.
Given the sheer volume of werewolves we’d been running into over the past couple of days I was pretty sure things were going to go pear-shaped before this was all said and done.
That pesky little fact didn’t make me feel better about our chances. If we ran into a situation like the house party then these guns would mean killing a few werewolves before they got to me.
I was well aware that the only thing that’d saved us last night was Kirsten’s ingenuity. I wasn’t sure what we’d do if we were faced with an arena full of werewolves.
I wasn’t sure what Kirsten had planned, but I hoped it was something good. I had to put my faith in her and hope she knew what she was doing, because faith in her was all I had.
“Here we are,” Kirsten said, looking at a sign with an arrow pointing towards the arena. “Ready to crash a basketball game?”
“Honestly I was never a big fan of basketball to begin with,” I said.
“Oh come on,” Kirsten said. “There’s nothing like the night of a big game!”
“I thought our basketball team wasn’t even all that good?”
“The team doesn’t have to be good,” Kirsten said, getting a far off look in her eyes. “It’s all about the experience. Hanging out with y
our friends. Hearing the roar of the crowd. Seeing all the fans there to have a good time. It’s an experience like no other!”
“Right,” I said, figuring I’d let her have her moment. That didn’t sound like my idea of a good time, but clearly it did something for her.
“It’s the most down to earth and normal thing I’ve ever had in my life,” Kirsten said, double checking her weapons and then looking down the hall with a grim expression. “And if these werewolf motherfuckers are going to try and take that away from me then they have another thing coming.”
I wouldn’t want to be one of those werewolf motherfuckers, as she’d so eloquently put it, if they were taking this away from her.
“Let’s go,” she said. “If they’re going to pull an old-school Buffy on me then I’m going to make sure I’m there to kill their asses.”
“It’s really too bad Rutger Hauer is dead,” I muttered. “It’d be cool to meet him.”
Kirsten rolled her eyes. “Come on.”
32
Kirsten
“Excuse me!”
I ignored the sound as I brushed past the table where a very bored looking security guard was sitting watching a TV broadcast of the game that was going on not ten feet away from the table.
“I said excuse me! You can’t go in there with that stuff!”
I glanced down to his side. Which was difficult to see past his considerable gut. He didn’t have a weapon. Just pepper spray, and I doubted the guy even knew how to use that.
“Help!” the security guard finally yelled when it was clear we were armed to the teeth and weren’t stopping.
Normally there would’ve been a campus cop hanging out at the security table making sure nobody who wasn’t authorized got in. The campus cop would’ve been armed with something more substantial.
Only the campus cops were already stretched thin tonight, as I’d established with the chief earlier at the hospital. Which meant there was no one here to keep me from walking right into the arena.
It would’ve been a terrible security situation, were it not for the fact that there were already werewolves taking advantage of the security situation to launch an attack.