"Used to be bears up here, maybe…" Case trailed off; like he hadn't even convinced himself.
"Stand back a little, Case. Thanks." Cherry slipped into some odd looking goggles. She examined the disgusting wound carefully and with a grunt of satisfaction produced a small strand of hair. She held it up to the light. "Yeah, that's him."
"Him?"
But Cherry had already whirled her stool around. While Case watched she put the hair onto a glass slide, covered and marked it and placed it in the lower tray of a large, black microscope. Case fidgeted while she focused in and made some notes. When she was done, she let him look.
"Isn't that just dog hair?"
"Not exactly," Cherry said. "Damned close. But each strand is longer and thicker than any breed of dog I know about."
"Back to a brown bear?"
"That's the right texture and size, but it doesn't come from a bear, either. I sent a sample to the lab in Reno, and they thought I was playing some kind of a joke on them."
Case blinked. "Why?"
"Indulge me for just another couple of minutes." Cherry found an eyedropper and another slide, turned out the lights. She did something to the goggles and then leaned down over the worst belly wound. She was whistling softly, but there was an odd tension to the sound. She was clearly not at ease in the way most medical personnel would be during a forensic examination. She stopped, collected a sample and then gently inserted it into the microscope.
"Have a look."
Case did. "Okay, but I haven't a clue what I'm seeing."
"That's our boy's saliva, Case."
"You can type the DNA then. That's terrific!"
Cherry marked the sample and put it in the drawer. "No, it's not. Like I said, the lab boys in Reno think I have a sick sense of humor."
"You're losing me." Case rolled his stool closer. "Doc, stop jacking around and tell me what's on your mind. It's almost dawn, I've been up all night and I'm beat."
"Case?" Kelly, from out on the porch. "Aren't you guys done yet?"
He called out, more harshly than he meant, "No. Hang in there, Kelly. Won't be much longer."
Cherry had already poured herself another drink. The bottle was now empty and she tossed it. "It's like this, Mr. Ex-detective. With the second animal I took some samples and sent them to the vet lab. They came back with a note saying I must have messed up the collection process, because everything was all squished together. Human, sheep, wolf soup. Okay, so I figure maybe I screwed up. It happens."
"And the next time?"
"The next time they said I needed to be talking to Reno, because the DNA wasn't from a feral beast. It was human. Well, sort of anyway." She looked up at him, and her reddened eyes were wide. "That was months ago, and it still freaks me out to say that."
Case leaned close enough to smell the bourbon on her breath. "Human? What the hell are you talking about?"
"That's the point. I don't know. The third time, Sheriff Whitley asked me to keep my mouth shut. He said we were already the laughing stock of the state in law enforcement circles. Said I should just keep my files tidy and drop it. No point in getting any more nasty letters."
"But you didn't sit on it. You lied to him."
"Yes," Cherry said. "In retrospect, I wish I'd just let it go." She opened a metal drawer and hunted around; produced several sheets of paper in a clear plastic folder. "Here is the lab report; you want to see it."
Case read the cover sheet. "Holy crap."
"Yeah. The DNA comes up flat-out impossible, Case. It's some weird combination of lupine and homo sapiens. A goddamned wolfman."
"How did you…"
"I kept some saliva from a wound. I used my own money and found a private lab in California that would do it for me on the side. They freaked. They actually accused me of running some kind of a scam and threatened to sue me if I went public. They figured I was going to go to the Tattler claiming to have discovered some kind of feral Man-Beast in the Rockies."
"Sue you? That's pretty extreme." Case closed the file. "Why didn't they just dismiss you as a quack?"
"Yeah, that bothers me, too."
"There must be some way somebody could fake a sample like this. Maybe it's all an extravagant joke that's gotten way out of hand."
"Here's the thing," Cherry said. "I figure there are two possibilities that make sense. The first is that they don't want this lab report to see the light of day, at least not with their name on it. After all, since this has to be some kind of hoax it could ruin their reputation to be associated with it."
"That makes sense."
"But the second idea is the one makes me the really nervous." Cherry cracked her knuckles. "I hate to get all "X-Files" on your ass, but there are a lot of government projects that work out of this state. Nevada is mostly open desert and it's easy to see folks coming from miles away."
"Cherry, what are you driving at?"
"That it might not be a hoax. Maybe some project or another went wrong, Case. Maybe they messed around with our DNA one too many times and made…a mistake. Like created a genetic freak; a feral human of some kind, something that hunts, but not just for food—for fun. And the lab got orders from the Feds to shut me down."
Cherry let the air out of her chest with a long sigh, like someone sad but pleased to be relieved of a burden. "Okay, now you can tell me it sounds paranoid and I've been out in the boonies for too long."
"It sounds paranoid and you've been out in the boonies too long."
"Thanks. I knew I could count on you."
Case stretched and checked his watch. "Hell, the sun will be coming up soon. We all need some sleep. Cherry, you realize how this looks, right?"
"Of course I do," she said. "Look, I even went online and typed everything I could come up with into the search engine, okay? I researched werewolves, shape-shifters, loup-garou, wendigo, shamans, on and on. I came up with a ton of websites and information, but it was all a bunch of entertaining bullcrap."
"What did you expect?"
"I don't know. I guess I thought I'd find a clue leading to some kind of rational explanation for all of this. But what I learned is how extensively perverse the human animal can be, and hell, I already knew that."
"We both know that."
"Yeah. We humans kind of suck, Case. And in our history we've had cannibal killers, delusional paranoiacs who dress up in fur, psychotics who think they are made of fur on the inside, and every other kind of mental and emotional aberration. But there has never been one shred of hard, scientific evidence that such a thing as a werewolf has ever existed. Not outside of folklore, fairy tales and the movies. Until now."
18
Wendover, on the Nevada/Utah border
February 18th, 1954
A man sits cross-legged on a blanket, chewing Red Man tobacco. He has been waiting motionless in these rocks for most of the night, hour after hour, and his clothing is now brittle and dusted with frost. Something moves, deep in the shadows. He blinks. A faint sound occurs, repeats. Hope causes a slight twitch under his right eye. He resists the urge to spit, drools instead. His fingers tighten. This gaunt young man's name is Wilbur Anders. Wilbur is just back from his service as a sniper with the Corps up in the Frozen Chosin. Now he hunts predators for a living. Combat taught him patience.
Another rustle in the brush. A badger pokes its striped head out, sniffs the air; chuffs and retreats into a hole. The full moon is rising and the bright desert floor seems like her evil twin sister, a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
It takes little effort for Wilbur to transmogrify the scene; transpose white sand for ice and frost for driving snow. He closes his eyes and tries to relax, but the mind keeps wandering. His fingers and toes go cold. He remembers the previous year; that gasoline stink, the rocking ride up the hill to the command post and the way the jeep nearly threw him ass over teakettle into the mud when it braked. His surprise at the half-assed saluting and unshaven misery of the combat troops stuck at the front.
/> Wilbur Anders had gone to Korea at seventeen, hoping the Corps would make a man out of him. Instead, it almost made him a mindless savage.
He'd been a beardless wonder the day he'd boarded LST 565 in Kobe, on his way to Inchon. Their craft, a former Japanese fishing vessel, was dented and orange with powdering rust. The boat lurched forward and listed in a jarring, though predictable way. Most of the boys spent their time throwing up over the side, but the food was awful so Wilbur couldn't eat much in the first place. He hadn't been sick. Anders was a long-limbed, lanky boy from a small town in the high desert; a crack shot who barely spoke and clung fiercely to the Bible his poor dead momma had left him in her will. Hardly anyone knew why they were there. It had something to do with Communism, and President Truman and the UN had decided them Koreans needed help, so that was that. Off they went.
Time had no meaning on the fog-shrouded ocean. Wilbur didn't care for being out of sight of the land. It made his heart race way too fast to even much think on it.
The mortar fire started the second the commies saw them coming. They heard kind of a whistling sound overhead, like someone pretending to be a bomb; the actual sound of firing, by some odd trick of the cliffs, came a split-second later. BOOM! Then a huge column of water rose up on their right side and a couple of the guys screamed in terror. The boat went all sideways and then slammed back down again. The gunny held on to the wall with an air of studied insouciance. He was older, nearly thirty, and took a lot of crap for that.
Wilbur tried to peek over the side one time, but couldn't see a goddamned thing, what for all the smoke and fog and the way the waves kept them rolling. He hoped the brass knew what they were doing, prayed they did but feared they didn't. In that Wilbur guessed that he was just like soldiers all over the world. He hugged his rifle close and waited to be told what to do.
Wilbur wouldn't know all this until after he mustered out, but Easy was part of the 2nd Battalion and they were supposed to come ashore at a place designated Red Beach Five, following a long string of armored vehicles. The Amtracs were amphibian gun-carriers designed to roll over and around the sea wall; their function was to pave the way for Dog and Fox, who were to take the beach. Easy was supposed to waltz on in after the hard work was done and make the place secure. Smooth as goose poop.
But everything got screwed up in the fog.
Probably because it was his first time in combat, Wilbur didn't remember much. There were rope ladders and one guy fell and broke his arm. They were directed to another, smaller craft. It moved in toward Inchon. They hunkered down and listened to themselves getting shot at; a constant, horrifying wave of noise of metal slapping into metal and flesh all around. Then the guy yelling GO GO GO and the door fell open and dumped them out into the surf like toy soldiers. An LVT-41 tractor rolled right in front of Wilbur, accidentally screening him off from the shore. He and a few others got behind the guy and followed him in. Now and again they'd sneak a peek around their guardian and see the other boys trying to scale the seawall. A couple of tractors crashed up and over, and the enemy started to retreat.
Wilbur Anders passed out on the beach, soaking wet and dog tired. When he woke up they were already on the move.
Weeks turned into months. Because Anders was a sharpshooter he was often sent on ahead of the unit. He got pretty good at being a sniper and picking off the North Korean scouts; even bagged himself a Chinese officer and his aide once—he could tell by the extra red stars on their hats. Before too long, his duties were almost taken for granted. He'd just go out nearly every day and see what he could find.
They moved higher, meeting only sporadic resistance, and other than the miserable weather began to think this wouldn't be such a nasty fight after all. But then came the Frozen Chosin… The Chosin Reservoir itself became a time-warp; a black hole in reality, a place where everything but torment vanished and the universe was empty except for ice and snow and the rusty red of frozen blood.
And the Chinese.
Wilbur still awoke in the middle of the night, his heart thick in his throat, hearing the sound of distant bugles… That mournful keening, followed by the guttural roar of a thousand throats preparing for another charge. They came on and on and on, those Chinks. This life seemed meaningless to them. The Marines fought them to a standstill, but lost fingers and toes and facial features to the relentless cold. Wilbur and a boy from Kansas name of Whitman fired their machine gun until their hands were burned and blistered; they were surrounded by smoking brass cartridges and empty ammo belts and still the Chinese charged.
Whitman, he died of a bayonet wound to the throat. Wilbur got himself a million-dollar wound and a ticket back to the States.
Wilbur Anders tried a lot of jobs before landing on one that suited him. He broke horses for a bit, but the physical demands played hell with his back and he still had some shrapnel in one leg that acted up every time he got thrown. He drove a hay bailer for the H. H. Cazier family down to Wells for a few months. The work was okay and the food was great, but at the end of his time he still didn't have a pot to piss in. He thought about getting some schooling, but in truth he could barely read. Then one of the other hands tipped him to a rancher named Logan who was agitated about losing too many sheep to the coyotes. This Logan, he wanted somebody to start picking them off.
Like a sniper.
Wilbur had bagged him a shitload the very first week, and made more money doing it than he had all summer. So that was his job now. He covered a couple hundred miles of familiar territory—hell, he'd been born around here for cryin' out loud—taking down any predators that were causing trouble. The ranchers loved him; he always had a place to sleep and good food and walking around money for booze and the whorehouse outside of Wells. Life was good.
Another noise.
Wilbur held still and listened intently; tried to get a sense of the size of the creature down below. His instincts told him it was larger than the badger. He glanced to his right. The lamb he'd staked out was still there, but no longer sleeping. She raised her head and even from this distance Wilbur could see that she was breathing rapidly. She gave a small bleat of terror and the rustling came again. Wilbur moved his fingers just a bit, to keep the blood flowing. Other than that, he stayed completely still and willed the predator to come out into the moonlight…
The lamb bleated again, a bit more urgently.
…The rustling as something large crept forward, dislodging a small stream of pebbles down the slope.
He saw its shadow first. It seemed long and low, even slinky; perhaps it was a good-sized mountain lion? Wilbur shifted the rifle just a bit. His cold fingers nearly stuck to the barrel.
The predator paused as if sensing him. He held himself in check. The tobacco in his mouth was burning and he longed to spit some drool but didn't want to make the slightest sound until it was safe.
Movement again as if the creature was satisfied. It edged out into the cleared area. It was a mountain lion, an old one, scarred and missing most of one ear. His mouth was open and he was panting, perhaps from hunger. Caution lost to appetite. His large tail twitched and he set himself to spring.
Wilbur Anders leaned slightly forward and allowed some spit to drop out of his mouth, followed by the plug of tobacco. He licked his lips and slowly dropped the rifle into the crook of his arm. He watched the cat carefully; it was alert to the slightest disturbance and he didn't want to lose the shot. Some clouds obscured the moon and his vision became blurred.
The cat growled…
…the lamb cried out in terror…
And something fell upon the mountain lion. Wilbur could not believe his eyes. A shadow emerged from the rocks, crossed several yards of open sand faster than an arrow and grabbed the battered cat by the back of the neck. By now the lamb was thrashing about in fright, yanking and jerking at the tether; about to break its own neck. The mountain lion hissed but there was something oddly pathetic about this attempt to appear defiant. It was far outmatched. A split-second late
r the giant predator shook massive jaws and SNAP the lion's neck broke.
Wilbur heard the sound though he was nearly fifty yards downwind.
The beast began to rend and rip at the mountain lion's flesh. There was something disorganized, even frenzied about the act, as if the point were to inflict as much damage as possible, rather than to feed. Wilbur squinted in the moonlight. He raised the rifle and slipped his arm through the sling, then sited carefully on the rolling mass of fur.
And it happened. There came a thing that pierced his heart. The thing raised its enormous, bloodied muzzle to the bloated moon, showed stained teeth and released a sound that seemed to come from another dimension. OOoooooOOOoooo… It was an evil noise that echoed off the hills and into the shivering pines. AroooOOOooooo.
In fact, it was so much like the ghastly blast of enemy bugles across a frozen expanse of snow and frozen bodies that Wilbur Anders began to cry. The sudden tears surprised him, torched his soul, shook his resolve. He tried to steady the rifle but his hands began to shake. Wilbur sobbed quietly. Finally.
The creature heard him.
Looked up.
And seemed to grin…
Wilbur took the shot, knowing even as he pulled the trigger that he'd missed, but he shot anyway. And then he fired again, not so much to hit anything as to try and drive the beast away; because Wilbur Anders was scared—in fact, more terrified than he'd ever been in combat. He had peered into the very eyes of the devil.
The eerie night closed in again until there were just those two sounds—the sobbing of the former solider and the bleating of the helpless, sacrificial lamb.
It became difficult to tell them apart.
19
Joe Case was drunk. He was seated at a long, empty wooden bar with a brass railing. There were mirrors all around. The bartender was mixing something tropical in a blender that shredded nerves like a surgeon's bone saw. Case had been downing 'depth charges,' shot glasses of Jack Daniels dropped into mugs of fresh draught beer. He could tell by the dead soldiers lined up on the bar. His wallet was empty and his mouth tasted like the bottom of a litter box.
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