by Red, Lynn
“Nothin’ is!” Jacques shouted. “Whole thing just went black!”
But then she heard a crunch, and another shout – this the mixture of pain and surprise that only happens when a person hits the ground and gets the wind knocked out of them unexpectedly. Just like a quarterback who didn’t see a linebacker coming straight at him from behind, Jacques grunted and writhed and moaned afterwards, hissing out pain between clenched teeth.
“Som’bitch!” he snarled, the swamp accent becoming bitter, angry. “Where are those damn bears?”
Swooping her head from side to side, Jill could hear nothing, could see nothing. That’s when she remembered the strange thing about lupines, and took her goggles off, laying them gently on the floor of the chopper as she stepped down, her boots crunching into the leaves. Silently, she opened the catch on the revolver and lifted the cylinder to her nose, drawing a whiff.
Steel, iron filings, gunpowder, the scents filled her nose. And silver. She smiled, clicking the cylinder back into place. “You’re good at insurance policies, Jacques.”
He laughed, but was still in pain. “I can’t tell how many there are,” he said as she drew to his side and lifted the thin, old pilot to his feet. “Two hit me though.”
“You bleeding?”
He shook his head, which she could only see because of the cabin lights in the chopper, streaming through the windows. The slow whop-whop-whop of the idling blades deadened most of the sounds around them. “Can we turn it off? Be easier to hear.”
“No way, no how,” he said, barely loud enough to be audible. “We need to get our bears and get the fuck outta ‘dis place. We ain’t here for huntin’, Miss Jilly.”
She nodded. “You said you lost them though?”
“No, I said the radar went dead. Something’s blotting it out. They’re close though, and I’m sure they heard the chopper. Can’t be more than a half mile away, maybe closer. Hard to tell though.”
Another whoosh of air. They’re close, Jill thought. A grim look crossed her face, but she squeezed her gun, feeling ever so slightly better.
The next one didn’t miss.
With the force of a medicine ball crashing straight into her sternum, Jill let out a breathless grunt, Jacques a shout of surprise. Her vision was flickering, black and gold and white and prickly, as the air in her lungs burned.
Jill opened her eyes just in time to see a pair of ghastly yellow ones staring at her, and a second later, she saw the monster’s teeth.
Instinct took over. She swung an elbow upward, into the side of the creature’s head. It yelped, she gained her feet and immediately fired.
A jet of spark blinded her momentarily, a spurt of flame burst from the end of the .38, and a second later the wolf’s hissing stopped, and the wound’s hissing continued as the body singed and fizzled. The familiar smell of burning fur, burning wolf, met her nose, but not before she heard Jacques fire, and then scream, “Suck silver, you son of a bitch!”
“Good one,” she said. “Rambo would be proud.”
Jacques chuckled under his breath. “I could really use a bunch of bears right about now. I’m a little tired of fighting these days..”
“Don’t see we have much choice.”
“Never do, when it comes to it,” Jacques added sagely, before the next round of action exploded all around the pair.
The forest came to life, all at once. From the east and west, teeth and claws and fangs descended with such ferocity and terrible fury that they managed to attack each other before they got to Jill and her pilot. The wolves tore into one another, yelping, screeching, and crying out in the night. Jill fired again, claiming another lupine, and Jacques blasted two of them, but there were so many that if they ever managed to get themselves organized, there would be absolutely no hope of escape.
“Help...”
The cry came to both Jacques and Jill and the same time. It was distant, weak.
“Help...”
“Tell me you heard that,” Jill snarled, kicking a hissing wolf just to make sure he was dead. “Please tell me you heard that.”
“Loud and clear. Well, not loud, but clear.” Jacques put his foot on a lupine and pulled his knife free with a sizzle. The corpse let out a popping sound as soon as the blade was free. “You think it was our girl?”
“But why would the bears leave her alone? Makes no sense.”
Both of them were breathing heavy, both covered in a thin film of sweat, despite the chill in the air. Neither wanted to face the reality that perhaps something had happened to the bears, something had captured, hurt, or...
“This way,” Jill called. “She’s over here. I think.”
For the moment, the wolves had stopped howling, they’d stopped swarming. For the moment there was peace. She knew that when a few of their numbers were culled, Lupines normally calmed for a time. There was something different about these though. She remembered that they hadn’t howled, they hadn’t swarmed. Something seemed to have driven them wild again. Like one of those strange, fungal parasites that makes ants climb up into the tops of a tree before a spire bursts out of their skull.
“Help... me...”
The voice was getting weaker. It was a woman’s voice, high pitched though exhausted and apparently in some kind of pain or terror. Probably both. Something about the voice ticked a box in the back of Jill’s head that wasn’t entirely alien.
She sounds like I did about six months ago.
“Jacques?” she called out. “You stay here, keep this thing going. Got it?”
“What? No! You’re fuckin’ nuts!”
The two of them were shouting over the helicopter blades. Jill dug in her feet, and the pilot was well aware of the uselessness of trying to argue with her when she dug in her feet and made up her mind.
“I’m telling you,” Jill hissed, trying to calm him down. “I know what’s happening. I’ve been here before, been through this not too long ago. Something’s happening with the bears, and there’s a terrified girl out there who probably got dropped on the ground because GlasCorp doesn’t want her. I know it sounds crazy, but—”
Jacques, despite the darkness, put his aviators back on, and smiled. “Don’t sound crazy to me, mon ami, sounds like you know what you’re doing. I’ll keep trying to jigger this radar, keep trying to fiddle the heat sensor until it’s back online. But you stay safe, and bring that girl back. And Jill?”
She turned back to him, eyes steely with resolve. “Yeah?”
“Get them bears,” he said. “I kinda miss goin’ out drinkin’ wit’ Rogue.”
Jill cocked a half smile. “I’m not gonna leave any of them out there alone. Toss me the radio, I assume it still works?”
Jacques tested the squelch a couple of times, tossed her a transceiver and spoke into his end. His words were chopped up by the helicopter’s whooshing, but he came through clearly enough.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Jacques said, but he couldn’t really hide his grin.
Jill took another step away from the chopper, boot crunching down on a small pile of leaves. “You wanna know the truth?” she froze, turning back to her friend. “I can’t believe it either. Something’s changed in me, something seriously changed. A year ago I’d be telling you to get me the hell out of here and back to civilization. I dunno what, but—”
“Love,” he cut her off. “Love is what happened. Go find ‘dat girl, Jilly. I’ll be here. And here,” he tossed his revolver down to her, which she caught by the handle as it fell. “Can’t hurt to have more insurance.”
With a smirk and a nod, she was off into the dark unknown, chasing a panicked voice and trying to make sense of her own head.
-11-
“This is not at all going the way I expected it to go.”
-Claire
“Help!” Claire called again, her voice weakening with every passing moment. “Help me! Help!”
She woke up in the dirt with a throbbing headache and the sense that sh
e was somewhere she really shouldn’t be. The bears – the men – whatever they were, were nowhere to be found. For the first time since she wandered away from Girl Scout camp and got herself lost for half a day in the Poconos, Claire was alone in the damn forest, and she had no idea where she was, or how she got there.
The small circle she’d been wandering around in for what seemed like eternity was getting worn down. It reminded her a bit of when she’d gone on a tour of Fort Sill as a little girl, and saw the room where Geronimo supposedly paced for so long that he wore a path in the stone floor.
Moments before, she’d heard popping sounds. Very distant ones, but they sounded a little like gunfire – or, like she imagined gunfire would sound, as she’d never actually been around a gun. Hunters, maybe, hopefully, were out... at night, shooting at something in the pitch black.
She took a puff on her inhaler, which was fast running out, and called for Cleo. Surely whoever had taken the bears wouldn’t have done anything to the dog – right? Surely that ridiculous pitbull had just run off into the woods. Right? That one had said to let the dog go. He’d said to let her go.
“Help!” she called out again, into the pitch black, not entirely sure who she expected to find her, or even if being found was a good thing. After all, whatever had snatched the bears was still out there. “Help!” she called again, as a chill coursed through her body, sending her teeth chattering and goosebumps crawling up her chest. “Someone! Anyone! Help me!”
Whatever got them left me, though. Or didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.
That last thing – that whatever took them didn’t care – was something she’d been hanging on ever since those weird soldiers said it. “Leave the girl, she doesn’t matter,” one of them had intoned in its weird, static-laden voice. “Only the bears. Only the bears. One-eight-eight-nine.”
Those numbers stuck in her head too, the strange, haunting repetition. The foreign, bizarre, unsettling order to them.
Well, that, and the fact that those weird number stations had creeped her out for as long as she could remember.
“Help!”
Her feet ached, her head throbbed. With a sigh of resignation, Claire finally took a seat and leaned back against a tree trunk. One of a million in the forest. This one seemed a little smoother than the rest.
“And thus,” she said with a great amount of drama, “the heavy sound of silence descends upon the land.” Claire was quoting a poem she read at some point, in some English literature class. She’d taken a lot of them, couldn’t quite remember which class it was, or which poem because she never cared much for either. But in this case, the words resonated deep in her angsty, college student heart. “With nary a thought,” she paused as something whispered through the darkness.
Not a voice, no, not a sound exactly, more like air simply moving around something else. “Nary a breath, silence holds, it grips, it strangles, it... Howls? And along with the howls, jingling? Cleo?”
Her heart jumped as the dog loped out of the woods, apparently having been sensible enough to go hide. With a snuffle, a snort, and a few hundred licks, she’d gotten Claire feeling better.
Just as the warm hum of semi-contentment settled in, Claire let out a pained scream before the awful sounds even reached her. Cleo, however, seemed completely unaffected. Ear-splitting, horrible, pained and agonizing all at once, the sound of a massive howl, and a whimper, and then another chorus of howls filled Claire’s ears. The deafening screams and cries filled the night, and these were... significantly worse than silence.
“Help!” she started to pointlessly cry out again, but fear constricted her throat.
Where am I? Where are they? What are those goddamn howls? Why can’t anyone hear me?
For about the seven thousandth time in three days, she asked herself if this was really real, if it was really happening. Another cry pierced the night and suddenly she realized what was happening around her. It wasn’t air moving – it was them moving the air.
A horrible smell – similar to the copper she’d smelled in the air before, with Eckert – wafted to Claire’s nose as she stood. Her eyes had adjusted enough to the absolute darkness of the forest that when the moon rose, she could see well enough to make out shapes. Nothing specific, usually, but movement and shapes caught her attention.
And right then? There were a whole lot of things moving. Something was coming toward her, and before she knew what it was, she felt a cold burst of wind, and then the rough brush of coarse fur against her leg, through a place her jeans were ripped open, baring her skin.
“The fuck?” she yelped, jumping backward almost enough to lose her balance. “The fuck was that?”
Her voice had grown tight, more tense in her throat. The wheezes were more ragged, the tightness more unbearable.
She puffed again, and the pain subsided momentarily, but not fully.
“Great,” she hissed to herself, willing her breath to come slowly and evenly. “Just great. Calm down, Claire,” she coached. She’d done this a thousand times over the years. Being an asthmatic kid had a perk or two – for one, she never had to bother with PE classes in high school. For another thing, she was always able to calm her nerves more readily than anyone else she knew. After all, if she couldn’t she’d have spent a lot more time in a hospital bed, or hooked up to one of those giant, steaming nebulizers that made her feel like her skin was coming off.
“Calm down. Everything’s fine. It’s... raccoons or something.”
Claire had to laugh at herself for that one, mostly because raccoons aren’t exactly the sort of thing you want to encounter when you’re alone in the woods either. But they were certainly more appealing than whatever it probably actually was.
She knew the howls, knew what they meant and from what they were coming. She just didn’t want to admit the truth.
When another chorus broke out, and another furry gust blew past her, she said out loud what had been haunting her for the past few minutes.
“Wolves,” she said flatly.
As Cleo jangled around, judging her and licking her dangling fingers, Claire’s leg’s wobbled. Her knees alternated between locking down and trembling.
“Get down!” she heard, over from her left.
“Huh? Who are—?”
A hand on her shoulder shoved Claire, forcefully, forward. She pitched over, sprawling face first into the forest floor. She drew her hand into a fist, picking up a bundle of sticks, wet leaves, and humus. The taste of earth and moisture permeated Claire’s entire being, starting from the dirt that she somehow managed to get all in between her teeth.
Two explosions shattered her ears, two muzzle flashes blinded her sensitive eyes. Claire screamed, accidentally, and covered her head with her hands.
Seconds later, she found herself pulled off the ground, and something hard was pressing into her palm. A feminine voice – which was approximately one-hundred percent not what she expected – hit her ears.
“Are you okay?”
“Uh,” Claire stammered. “What’s this? I—”
“A gun, hold it. Are you okay?”
Suddenly there was a pen light in her face, bouncing back and forth between her eyes. “Did any of them bite you? Scratch you?”
Claire couldn’t speak. Something about this new person made her think that possibly Superman had fallen out of a tree and was checking her for a concussion. “You’re not a hot doctor, are you?” she asked, groping for something to say to make herself stop panicking.
“Depends what you mean. I’m Jill. I came to find you, and a few, uh, others.”
“Bears? Or whatever?” Claire was so dumbfounded that this superwoman just stuck a gun in her hand she didn’t even have time to filter the possibility that maybe this was someone arresting her, or that it was whoever had done... whatever they had done, with Fury and Stone.
“Bears,” Jill repeated. “Yeah. Where’d they go?”
Claire was shaking her head. “I woke up here, with the popp
ing noises or – well I guessed they were gunshots. Guess I was right.”
“Always a good feeling, huh?” Jill momentarily stuffed her pistol into the back of her jeans, as she checked Claire for any outward signs of damage. “So no injuries? Nothing wrong?”
“Asthma,” Claire croaked. “I... think I’m having an attack, but I can usually... stop them.”
“Take a minute. When you kill a couple Lupines they usually get skittish for a little while. And I doubt running off in the dark to find the bears is going to do much good. There were two of them, right?”
As soon as the younger woman said that there had been four, Jill felt a new sense of resolve harden in her chest, but she knew that they both needed a second to calm down, and for the moment at least, the wolves were at bay.
For the majority of their short respite, Claire laid out the short version of their escape from GlasCorp’s headquarters and the running around the woods, hiding in bushes. She talked about the strange, static-voiced gasmask men, and how Rogue and King had summarily dispatched a whole host of them. The whole story was unbelievable and slightly incredible, but then again, Jill had gone from being a detached, emotionless scientist to mate to a pair of werebears in the space of three weeks, so she had a feel for the absurd.
“You ready?” she asked, offering Claire a hand up. “We need—”
“Miss Jilly?” Jacques’s voice squelched over the radio transceiver. “Ol’ Jacques got the machines up and running again. Or maybe it really was that somethin’ was jammin’ up the works. Either way, you got the girl, I’m guessing?”
“Yeah,” Jill said. “Got her. She’s safe and mostly healthy. Said she woke up from being unconscious. Wolves were attacking her, but—”
From out of nowhere a snarling wad of iron-gray leapt from through the air. It must’ve been waiting beside where they were seated, but as soon as Jill turned her back to a bundle of underbrush, it leapt. She turned, open mouthed, in shock, as the wolf’s paws contacted her shoulders, hard and heavy and rough.
Claire raised her gun closed her eyes, and emptied all six bullets in a direction that was, she hoped, vaguely pointed at the wolf. Four of them missed completely, but the last two hit home. They thumped eerily into the creature’s flesh.