Hey, stupid human, look down here.
Sorry, I thought.
The cardinal nodded up at me. Then it opened its wings and fluttered them, chirruping as it pointed its head toward the trail ahead of us.
“Oh,” I said. “I think it’s trying to warn us that someone’s watching.”
Phweeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The new whistling sound ended with a thunk as a striped arrow whizzed past Aunt Mary’s face and buried itself in the trunk of a pine.
CHAPTER FOUR
I stared stupidly at the arrow, thinking I should get down or duck or something like that. Instead I just stood there. Perhaps I was waiting for Aunt Mary to tell me what to do. But, to my surprise, she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t even looking at the arrow. Instead, with an exasperated look on her face, she just took a deep breath.
“Le-nard!” she said, emphasizing every syllable. “You — get — out — here! Before I shoot your ass.”
A chuckle came from the brush to my left. Whoever it was, if it was the person who shot that arrow, he’d moved more swiftly to reposition himself than almost any normal human could move.
It took me by surprise, but not Aunt Mary. She had already shifted to aim in that very direction.
“Crazy Dog,” she said. “I am not going to warn you again. Get — out — here.”
Crazy Dog, I thought. Then he wasn’t just a myth. That would explain it.
“Cool it, Mary,” a calm, deep voice said. “Here I come, hands up.”
And with that, a big, broad-shouldered man stepped out from the brush, the leaves not even rustling as he did so. In addition to the large compound bow he held over his head in his right hand, he had an AK-47 over his shoulder and a very large knife strapped to his right leg. He was dressed in camouflage, a green headband circling his brow and holding back his very long black hair.
His hooked nose bent noticeably to the left, as if it had been broken a time or two. The scars on his face seemed to bear that out. His hands were almost as big as mine, but I was disappointed to see he wasn’t actually ten feet tall as the legend had it, just standard height for a big man. Namely, five inches shorter than me.
As he grinned, his dark eyes sparkling with mischief, I could see that he was missing a canine on his left side. He had the beat-up good looks of an action star in the old viddys.
Lenard Crazy Dog was the one man who had fought the system that put our whole adult working population into those killing mines. Even without the helpful injections and implants that had made our rulers’ soldiers nearly superhuman, he’d been able to evade capture for months. He sabotaged shipments of the ore, even blew up one of the power towers.
But he’d been caught, sentenced to life in Distant Detention, from which they sent broadcasts every now and then of what they were doing to him — painfully — to our handhelds and stick-on screens — an object lesson to anyone foolish enough to think they could win when they fought power.
“How’d you know it was me, sweetie?” Lenard Crazy Dog asked.
Sweetie?
I’d never heard anyone call Aunt Mary that before, like she was someone’s girlfriend! That was clearly a weird thought. After all, she was almost forty years old. I assumed that had to be way past the point where anyone would be interested in that sort of thing. Not that I knew anything at all about “that sort of thing.” Nor, butt ugly as I was, would I ever be likely to.
Aunt Mary pointed with her chin at the arrow.
“Oh,” Lenard said. “Right.”
I got it. A black arrow circled with four red stripes had been his calling card, left behind whenever he pulled off one of his exploits.
“Do I need to ask how you got out?” Aunt Mary said.
Lenard grinned again. He’d lowered the bow from over his head and moved closer to us, perhaps taking the fact that Aunt Mary had not yet shot him as permission to approach.
“Just walked out,” he said. “Doors opened right up when the power quit. Just had to hop over the occasional overseer whose implants had shorted out and turned him into barbecue beef.”
Aunt Mary raised an eyebrow.
“Well,” Lenard continued, “there was a few whose implants didn’t finish them off. But not that many. Then I picked up their weapons, which they had no more earthly need of, and I headed for home.”
“What took you so long?” Aunt Mary had actually moved a little closer to Lenard herself. Her gun was held off to her side, pointing at the ground. And her voice was sort of friendly and husky, in a way I’d never heard before.
“Five hundred miles is a ways to walk,” Lenard said. “Especially when there was no shortage of gemods tending to see yours truly as an easy snack. But I was not going to let them keep me from seeing you again, sweetie.”
It was all getting to be too much for me. I cleared my throat.
Both Aunt Mary and Lenard Crazy Dog turned to me, a similar sort of guilty look on both their faces. Like they were teenagers or something.
“Ah, Lenard,” Aunt Mary said, her face a little redder than usual, “this is my niece, Rose.”
I’ll say this for Lenard Crazy Dog, he recovered fast. That winning smile back on his face, he reached for my hand and shook it gently.
“Pleased to meet you, Rose.”
I did not smile back at him.
“How did you find us?” I said.
“Weelll,” Lenard said. “Not that long a story. Reached the Ridge yesterday. After I was done with the pleasantries, saying hello to friends and relatives, telling how I’d gotten back home and all, I asked about your Aunt Mary here, who was always . . . a special friend of mine. And they told me quite a tale. How she’d dreamed the power was going to go out even before that Silver Cloud got here. How she had been persuasive enough to warn everyone to get up out of the Deeps before that happened, which I gather took some doing. How the Overlords had been amused enough by it to let everyone just take the day off, seeing as how everyone was all so hot and bothered, and the bosses figured they could punish the ringleaders later.”
He paused and looked over at Aunt Mary. “Right so far?”
“More or less,” Aunt Mary said.
“So when the power went off, cutting off the light and the air and letting the tunnels flood with sludge when the pumps died, it was none of ours died down there,” Lenard said.
It was a pretty good summary, I had to admit. It brought that memorable day back to me. The crackle and sizzle in the air before the lights went out, the booming sounds from the shafts as the lev-lifts plummeted to crash at the bottom, the screams from the offices and homes of the nearby Overlords, the crash and explosion a mile to the west of the Ridge as the formerly mile-high air platform that had held the mansion of the head regional administrator struck the earth and started a forest fire.
I shook my head. Enough reliving the past. “Us,” I said. “How did you find us?”
Lenard chuckled. “They said you was up in the hills, seeing as how my girl, er, my old friend your aunt had another dream. About how you had to be made ready to go out and find something that would help the people. And seeing as how I know these hills as well as I know the lines in my own hand, I figgered it wouldn’t be all that hard to find you. Thought I might help some.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t need to say that, but for some reason I did. I was not sure I wanted Lenard to be here with us, even if he was famous and a sort of hero. I’d liked the idea of Aunt Mary and me doing it on our own — even if it was scary to me. After all, we had just defeated two madbears all on our own. We didn’t need a man helping us, did we?
I waited for Aunt Mary to tell him that. But she didn’t.
So I did. “I don’t think I need your help,” I said.
“Hmmm,” Lenard said, a different sort of smile on his face now, one that was kind of speculative. “Really.”
Instead, she looked at Lenard Crazy Dog, who just stood there, his left hand cupping his chin.
“What about,” Lenard finally said in a slow voice, “them five firewolves waiting down the trail?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Firewolves?” I asked.
“Yup,” Lenard Crazy Dog replied, scuffing the toe of his left boot against the dirt of the trail. “Five of ’em.”
Firewolves? Jeez. As if madbears were not bad enough. Though not as big as a grizzly on steroids, the firewolves were still twice the size of a normal wolf, maybe even three times as big. Like the other creatures in the District of the Plains, which is what our part of the continent was called, they had been modified with a mix of animal and human genetic material. For some reason, our regional Overlords got a kick out of making terrible creatures that were part Homo sapiens and thus self-aware and capable of speech, as well as voracious and vicious.
The electronic ion barriers and vaporstream locks had kept them safely enclosed — at least safely for anyone or anything outside the enclosures. In the case of the pack of firewolves — which had numbered about two dozen creatures — that enclosure had been no less than twenty square miles. Lots of room for the favorite sport of the Overlords — televised, of course, using drone cameras — of releasing some hapless animal or human inside that enclosure and then taking bets on how long they would last.
It wasn’t an easy bet. The firewolves seemed to have had an especially human streak of sadism in them. Torturing their prey, terrorizing, catching, maiming, and then releasing had all been part of their pattern of behavior. So it might take hours, even days.
As soon as their barriers disappeared, that same cat-and-mouse behavior pattern was quickly inflicted on any human they could locate, including surviving members of the upper classes. Firewolves were among the main reasons everyone at the Ridge stayed inside the gates of Main Cave at night.
Firewolves got their name from two things that characterized them. One was their red fur. The other was that they actually could make fire and had no fear of it like normal animals.
“Firewolves.” I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
“We’ll take all the help we can get,” Aunt Mary said.
“Sure thing,” Lenard Crazy Dog said.
“Firewolves,” I said again.
“Yes, Rose, honey,” Aunt Mary said. Her voice was normal, all business now. That made me feel better, if not less scared. “Now just drop those blankets. Leave ’em here. The less you have to carry, the better. In fact . . . ”
She grabbed the heavier pack from my shoulder and pulled out a leather-wrapped object about three feet long. She unrolled it and lifted the gun that had been wrapped inside.
“This belonged to your Grampa Spotted Horse,” she said, handing it to me. “Though I was the one who cut down the stock and sawed a foot off the barrel.”
I hefted the 12-gauge Remington shotgun in my hand. I’d never used a gun much and I’m only an average shot, but when you’re using a 12 gauge, you don’t need pinpoint accuracy to hit your target. Just point and pull the trigger. I knew enough about guns to see that it was pump action, which meant I could shoot it several times before reloading. Being shortened as it was made it a good weapon for close-range action.
“Your Grampa Spotted Horse was a big man,” Lenard said.
Aunt Mary handed me a box of shells. They were double-aught buckshot, with enough stopping power to knock down most big game. I slipped shells into the gun, jacking one into the breach so I would have a full six shots. Then I stuck a dozen more shells into the pockets of my down vest. I wasn’t happy about the thought of having to shoot at anything, even a firewolf, but I guessed I was ready.
“Plan?” Aunt Mary asked.
“Wind is blowing down the trail,” Lenard said. “So they’ll know you’re coming. Me, I circle around, come at them from upwind.”
Lenard jerked his chin toward me. “Rose, you keep time.” He knelt, picked up one of the hundreds of pebbles scattered along the trail, and then carefully placed it on the bare earth in the middle of the path. “You do this, same speed as I just did. When you got two hundred stones in the pile, that is when you and your Aunt Mary start down the trail. Just walking normal. Okay?”
Then, before I could nod, he slid back into the brush without a sound and was gone.
“Start counting,” Aunt Mary said.
CHAPTER SIX
Two hundred,” I said, dropping a stone that glittered with quartz on top of the little hill I’d built in the center of the path.
“Add fifty more,” Aunt Mary said. “You were counting a little fast.”
I was glad she said that. Fifty more stones meant I had fifty more seconds to live. One firewolf would have been bad enough, but the thought of five of them waiting for us made it seem hopeless, even with Crazy Dog helping us.
Firewolves were just about — though not quite — the worst of the creatures around the Ridge that hunted human beings. I’d seen viddys — back before all our screens went blank — of other things in other districts that looked awful, like hundred-foot-long snakes and giant predatory birds as big as the airbuses that used to cross the skies. But around here, the firewolves were pretty much the top of the food chain. Us people were much lower links on that chain.
The stories people told about firewolves, people who’d survived them, about their thick skins and superfast reflexes and razor-sharp teeth and claws, those stories flashed through my head so fast I almost lost count of the pebbles.
“Rose, honey,” Aunt Mary’s voice cut into my increasingly panicked thoughts. “That’s fifty. Fifty-five, in fact. Time to go.”
I stood up, hefting the sawed-off shotgun and wondering if it was going to be any more effective than those little pebbles I’d been piling.
“Ready?” Aunt Mary said.
“Ready,” I replied, a little surprised at how steady my voice sounded. But not that surprised. Even though just about everything we had to deal with these days tended to make me terrified, when I finally had to face up to it, a kind of calm would come over me. When it came time to do what had to be done, I would just do my best to do it. I may have been afraid of trouble, but I’d never run away from it. At least not when I had had no other choice. When I knew I couldn’t outrun it.
“Lead,” Aunt Mary said.
I nodded. She followed close behind, watching out for anything that might try to hit us from the back.
I walked at a regular pace. One step at a time. That’s all it takes to climb a mountain. Or walk into an ambush. My feet thudded against the ground. I was not trying to walk quietly. That might have given away the fact that we knew we were about to be attacked. If the firewolves didn’t know that we knew, it could give us an edge. A very narrow edge. Narrower than the edge of a straight razor.
A meadowlark called from off to my left. To my surprise, I understood its message.
I looked back at Aunt Mary. “Bird said two on either side of the path just past those big rocks,” I whispered.
She made a small gesture with her left hand. Keep going.
And as she did that, the wind changed. It turned from blowing down the trail to blowing in our faces. And it brought to me the smell of smoke. I swallowed hard, my mouth so dry I almost had to cough. Then I pressed off the safety on the shotgun that I was holding across my chest.
Maybe twenty steps more and we’d be past the big rocks, each of which was three times the height of a man and flat on top.
Nineteen.
Eighteen.
Seventeen.
Sixteen.
Fifteen.
Fourteen . . .
“HAI-HAI-HAI-HAIIII!”
Crazy Dog’s battle cry split the air. I
t came from somewhere past the place where the firewolves were hiding behind those two big stones. A heartbeat later one of the monsters lurched on two legs out from behind the stone to the left. It dropped the piñon pine torch it had been holding and clawed at the center of its throat, where a black arrow with red stripes was buried deep.
BLAM!
The sound of Aunt Mary’s carbine came at the exact moment the firewolf’s head was jerked back by the impact of her .44 slug. The firewolf fell on top of its dropped torch.
Another firewolf appeared from behind the rock on the other side, an arrow protruding from its side. Aunt Mary fired again and the man-beast lurched backward and was lost from my sight behind the huge stone.
We’d stopped moving and were waiting now. I had the sawed-off shotgun lifted up. From somewhere below us on the trail, I heard a burst of rapid gunshots that had to be Crazy Dog’s AK-47. Aunt Mary’s back was against mine, and she was shooting up the trail.
BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!
My ears ringing from those shots, I turned to see what she’d been firing at as the pressure of her back against mine disappeared. She’d stepped away from me, toward —
“Above you, Rose!” Aunt Mary screamed at the same time I heard a deep growl from above me.
And I looked up to my left just in time to see a big red-furred demon, its claws spread wide, dropping toward me from the top of the stone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Maybe it’s because fear has been such a familiar thing to me, especially when I am uncertain or afraid that I might be doing the wrong thing. Maybe that is why the sight of that firewolf leaping down at me did not freeze me in my tracks like a frightened rabbit. I knew what the right thing to do was if I wanted to survive, and so it had the opposite effect. It made me move that much faster.
I was so fast that when I dived forward, the creature landed not on me, but where I’d been. And when it turned, its fanged jaws gaped wide to rend my flesh, I was just close enough to jerk up my right arm and shove the barrel of the shotgun into its mouth. Saliva dripped down my arm, and its claws were reaching for me as I pulled the trigger.
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