Wolfen

by Alianne Donnelly

  The human screams, and I smell blood. “You bitch!”

  That’s my girl. Despite the animosity which rises more with each little bit of control I regain, I smile.

  Then the human pulls back and slaps her as hard as he can manage.

  I fade out completely.

  ~

  A soft, flying projectile slammed into Bryce, tethers looping around his neck. His claws furled out to tear it off, when its scent registered. He shook his head, and sucked in a deep breath to make sure. His mind cleared in slow degrees, senses reconnecting to his brain one by one. It was Sinna. Trembling against him. The ringing in his ears quieted enough for him to make out her ranting babbles, and he moved to embrace her.

  But the sight of blood coating his hands and arms stopped him. Bryce blinked at them, looked around, then shuddered. Body parts and gore littered the ground. Half of a man’s head was propped against a tree, and from its warped shape, he could tell the other half had been smashed inward. A leg hung by its knee joint from a nearby branch, entrails tied around the trunk. A ribcage torn open like a hunting trap lay several feet away, emptied of all organs.

  Bryce squeezed his eyes shut.

  What have I done?

  “…they’ll come looking for him. We have to go…”

  Bryce’s hands curled into fists. “Sinna.”

  She quieted. After a moment, she pulled back a bit. Her cheek and eye were bruising, and she couldn’t meet his gaze. “I’m fine,” she said firmly. “Nothing happened.”

  Nothing?

  She huffed, then shook her head as if annoyed with herself. Wiped her face, and cupped his cheek, searching his gaze. “Are you okay?” Hazel eyes glowed with concern. For him? “Are you with me?”

  Bryce nodded. He didn’t know what to say. Sinna was smeared with blood, but none of it was hers. She’d come away unscathed. How?

  Sinna took his hand and stood, pulling him to his feet. “We need to go. It’s getting late, and the silence is freaking me out.”

  Bryce gauged the time from the sun’s position. They had about two hours of light left. Evening creatures should have been coming out by now. Birds returning to their nests, squirrels and woodpeckers in the trees, insects flying around. There was nothing. Just dead silence.

  “Is the mule fixable?”

  Still somewhat out of it, Bryce focused on the mule and tried to make his brain work faster. The paint job was shot to hell; they’d need every second of sunlight to power up the batteries. Dents and scratches on the truck bed were minor damages. What worried him more was the broken glass. One less barrier between them and the outside world. All the weapons within easy sight were gone. They’d need to make do with whatever had survived in the compartments.

  Bryce opened them, one by one. Some blades, a collapsible bow, and one handgun. It wasn’t much. He armed up, and gave a couple of blades and a gun to Sinna. This time, she hesitated for only a moment before she strapped on the belt and weapons.

  Satisfied she wouldn’t be putting them down like before, Bryce nodded his approval and went around to check inside the cabin. It was a mess. The back window had been broken; glass and leaves covered the floor and seats. He had to clear it all out to see the damage. The humans had taken anything that hadn’t been nailed down: weapons, food, water, containers, tools, even the dashboard hula doll Aiden had hidden in the side compartment where he’d thought Bryce wouldn’t find it.

  Bryce combed through every inch of the mule, hoping they’d overlooked something. He found a single, half-empty bag stuffed at the back of a storage compartment. Inside was an old shirt, a water canteen, and three protein bars reduced to crumbles in their packaging.

  That was it. The full extent of their provisions.

  “The tires look okay,” Sinna said. “Try turning on the engine.”

  Bryce sat behind the wheel. They’d scratched the dashboard to shit trying to start the engine. Not for the first time, he was grateful for the scientific paranoia that had led their tech guys to design this ignition mechanism. Bryce cranked the handbrake while pumping the gas pedal five times in rapid succession, then hit the center of the steering wheel. There was a very specific rhythm to the routine, and he didn’t hit it on the first go. Unwilling to be stranded in this place without conveyance, he tried again. Brake. Pedal. Wheel.

  The battery gauge lit up to half charged. “It’s alive.”

  “Thank God.” Sinna got in on the passenger side. “If we hurry, we can get a decent distance south before nightfall. We pretty much have the path trekked out already, so it should be easy going—”

  “We’re not going south,” Bryce said, carefully backing the mule out of the ditch and onto the road. There, facing away from the human compound, he stopped.

  Sinna stared at him. “What do you mean? We have to go get that girl to trade for Aiden.”

  My turn now, brother. I’ve got this.

  Damn you. “We’re going north.” Aiden would expect them to go home, get Sinna to safety, then come back with reinforcements and bust his ass out. Raze Haven to the ground, if need be.

  So that was the plan. They would go north.

  “You can’t mean that!”

  Bryce put the mule in gear.

  “Bryce, he’s your brother, you can’t just leave him there.”

  He said nothing.

  “Look, how far is it back to Gilroy?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Humor me.”

  He did some rapid calculations in his head. “About three days’ hard driving to get there, give or take.”

  “And how far to Montana?”

  “About the same.”

  “Then what difference will it make?”

  “It’s what Aiden wants.”

  “Bullshit,” Sinna snapped.

  Bryce stopped the mule. “You want to go to Gilroy, kidnap some girl who probably has no idea what’s going on, and drag her back to that German psycho to be used as a guinea pig? Because that’s what will happen—”

  “Who cares about her, if it gets Aiden back!”

  “—and we might never get Aiden back!”

  They stared each other down until Sinna’s eyes widened and her mouth opened in a little O as she realized what she’d said. “I didn’t mean that,” she whispered.

  “Yes, you did.” And he was damned proud of her for it.

  “No, I… I didn’t even think about it. I just—”

  “You put your pack first.” He shrugged. It was a matter of fact for him. But then, it had been part of his nature all of his life. Sinna was still adapting to her changes, a process that necessitated the breakdown of everything she’d ever known up to this point. But that would take time—something they didn’t have right now.

  Bryce turned back to get the mule going again, but Sinna laid her hand over his on the steering wheel. “Is that what life is out here? Us against them?” She looked so lost, so small and afraid.

  “No,” he said. “It’s us against everything else.”

  Her eyes dimmed with sadness for a moment, before she rebounded. “But what if the Gilroy people are different?”

  “People are all the same.”

  “How can you know that? Have you met every single person on Earth?”

  Bryce huffed. This was getting them nowhere. He eased off the brake, got the mule going again. The scent of blood kept him on a dangerous edge, and he was in no shape to carry on a pointless argument over the merits of the human race. He needed to wash up, get rid of the evidence, and clear his head.

  “We shouldn’t have separated,” Sinna said softly.

  Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

  “I’m sorry I yelled. I didn’t mean it.”

  Bryce grunted.

  They fell into an uncomfortable silence after that. Bryce took it easy on the way back west to spare the batteries. Much of what had happened in Haven earlier was a blur, but he remembered mention of an awful lot of converts hanging around these parts, ones who were
attracted to Wolfen pheromones, not repelled by them. Good going, Klaus. You sick Nazi fuckhead. They’d need to keep driving through the night, even if it was at a snail’s pace. It’d be safer than stopping to make camp.

  Sinna fiddled with her silver cuff, reminding Bryce his own had been taken. He felt the silver’s absence like an exposed wound. It made him raw, much too alert to every small rustle, every twitch of a branch in the wind. The feeling only worsened when he found an intersection and turned north onto a service road.

  The front side windows were cracked, but had somehow managed to survive the crash. Bryce cranked open the one on his side and stuck his head out to scent the air. Forest, moist earth, and moss. Water nearby. If that dried-out creek near Haven was a branch off of a bigger stream, they could be nearing a possible bathing spot. He kept going, eyes and ears peeled.

  If he’d kept the window closed, he would have missed it.

  The scent was subtle; a soft undertone of unnatural rot and decay. He stopped the truck and sniffed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Bryce held his hand up to silence her. The blood messed with his senses. He couldn’t get a bead on the source, but he sure as hell recognized a convert hive when he smelled one. At that concentration, it should have been visible already. That it wasn’t told Bryce the hive was a distance away, but densely populated.

  He straightened and closed the window, debating.

  Could they risk it?

  The mule could haul ass, but not through wooded terrain, and certainly not on half power so close to nightfall. Darkness was convert hunting time. Bryce and Sinna had no cover and not enough protection to hold off so many. Fire would attract them—hell, the blood was probably attracting them already.

  “I don’t like this,” Sinna whispered.

  He didn’t, either.

  “Can we take another road?”

  And turn back south for who knew how long? Maybe if they headed east, off road, they could drive into the creek bed. It was almost empty, anyway. Good as any road, and lower than the surrounding land, which would mean more cover. It was a feasible option if—

  Sinna grabbed his arm and pointed northeast.

  A shadow moved.

  A few yards to its left, another.

  Three more came, forming a solid group of five emaciated, long limbed, gray-skinned creatures hunting for food. They weren’t as frail as the ones back in San Francisco. These seemed to have a steady food supply, which would explain their numbers.

  Sinna jerked her chin farther north. Another group, and more shadows in the distance behind them. They moved together, like a barely coordinated army, sweeping the woods, noses lifted to the breeze.

  Seventeen in all.

  A chuffing sound off to the west brought Bryce’s head around.

  Make that twenty-nine.

  Something dropped to the forest floor right in front of the mule, startling them both. A bony gray hand propped onto the hood, claws digging into the paint. It was small enough to be a female, but Bryce had never expected this. The convert pulled herself up and slithered onto the mule, hissing like a snake. She had no eyes. Her face had indentations in the skin where eye sockets would be, but somehow had never developed actual eyeballs or eyelids.

  Her head twitched from side to side, and Sinna’s fingers dug into Bryce’s arm. “Drive,” she whispered, barely a sound.

  Bryce shook his head. Too dangerous.

  The others were coming closer, baring fangs, sniffing the air. They drooled and quaffed, but didn’t vocalize. For all their lack of balance, these things didn’t stir a single leaf or snap a single twig.

  The female on the hood made a clicking sound and twitched her head so far to the side, it looked like she broke her own neck.

  A deep growl off to the left answered her, and Bryce slowly turned his head toward several large males headed straight for them. While he’d been watching the snake woman, more converts had melted into being through a thick mist that rolled in from the north.

  The snake woman reached forward and slid her hand down the front window. She groaned like a rusty door hinge, then slapped her palm onto the glass, and hissed viciously.

  Bryce put the mule in reverse and stomped on the gas pedal to dislodge her.

  A chorus of blood-curdling screams rent the air.

  “Hold on!”

  Converts charged, running faster than the mule could move in reverse. Bryce stepped on the brake and turned the wheel hard right, spinning on the service road until they faced forward. It cost him precious seconds and slowed them down enough for a couple of converts to land on the truck bed.

  Bryce swore and punched it. One fell off, but the other hung onto the jagged edge of the back window. Sinna pulled out her gun and fired over her shoulder without looking. She missed, wasting one of the few bullets they had.

  “Aim first!”

  Intent on a meal, the convert reached in through the window, but the bumpy ride kept slamming him up against the top edge, and knocking him back down to the truck bed. Bryce drove across a ditch, bouncing the mule hard, and the convert impaled his hand on a sharp piece of glass. He didn’t even notice.

  “Sinna, shoot him!”

  She pulled her knees up onto the seat, turned around and, with both hands on the gun, aimed and fired off a shot. Convert brains splattered the back of the cabin, and the horde outside gave a collective high-pitched squeal that stabbed through his eardrums.

  Bryce roared in pain.

  Sinna covered her ears, lost hold of the gun and her balance. She fell against Bryce, accidentally turning the wheel left and sending them off the road. He swore, yanking the wheel sharply to correct, just in time to avoid an outcropping.

  “Oh, God, they’re gaining!”

  “Too much weight.” Bryce steered the mule back onto a proper road. There went the intersection. “We need to get him out.”

  Sinna nodded and scrambled between the front seats into the back. She pushed and shoved the bleeding mass of refuse out of the cabin, then crawled through to get it off the truck.

  On fairly even cement now, Bryce sped up gradually, careful to keep them straight. One more bump or sharp curve and Sinna would go flying off the truck along with the corpse. He kept checking the rearview mirror to make sure she was still there. The body was twice Sinna’s size, and had to be heavy as hell. She struggled to move it even an inch, and the longer she spent out there, the more incensed the horde became. Bryce gritted his teeth and turned his attention back to the road. Out of the corner of his eye, he counted gray shadows as they multiplied beside them.

  Fifty miles per hour, and the converts weren’t falling back. If the mule ran out of steam, they’d never make it. The sun was going down and the battery had already drained to a quarter—he had no idea how much longer they could keep going like this.

  The chassis rose a couple of inches as Sinna shoved the body off, and Bryce eased up on the gas a little to hurry her back inside. It cost them a few more feet of distance and from his side, a massive male altered his route, throwing his weight into the mule.

  Sinna cried out, falling against the window. The damaged glass gave way and she crashed halfway out the opening.

  “Sinna!”

  Another male made a run at them, claws aiming for her.

  “Hold on!” Bryce stomped on the gas pedal, gripping the steering wheel so hard, he felt it warp in his hands.

  Sixty miles per hour.

  The convert screeched, lagging just enough to claw the truck instead of Sinna. She shimmied back inside and shrank to the floor between the front and back seats, hyperventilating.

  Seventy miles per hour.

  The horde ran on, screaming and whooping, not about to give up on a ready meal. Several moved in close to the back of the truck, claws scraping metal. One tripped and fell, bowling over three others, but five more remained.

  Eighty miles per hour.

  A set of claws dug into metal and held on. Bryce snarled and fi
shtailed. He managed to bat away a good number of them along the sides, but that one seemed to be stuck. They came up on cars stalled along the road, and Bryce swerved to get around them, but slammed against their sides to dislodge the last hanger-on, deliberately scraping more paint off as metal screeched against metal. The extra weight came loose. Bryce checked to make sure, and saw bloodied claws stuck into the mule’s side. The rest of the convert was gone.

  Behind them, the horde slowed, giving up as the mule pushed almost ninety-five miles per hour on open road, leaving them in the dust.

  Bryce didn’t slow down until full night had fallen and he was sure they were in the clear. By then, he had no choice; the mule slowed on its own, crawling for a few more miles before it finally gave out and quietly powered down.

  They were a half-night and untold miles away from the convert hive and Haven—in the wrong direction.

  Son of a bitch!

  Bryce got out, slammed the door, and rammed his fingers into his hair. He was shaky, hanging on by a thin thread, and couldn’t believe he’d kept it together this long. By the light of the moon, he inspected the damage: more photovoltaic paint gone with no way to repair it, and the remaining glass in the side windows was useless. He broke it all out, more out of frustration than any practical considerations. At least the windshield was still salvageable.

  Sinna came out the other side. She was talking to him, but he didn’t listen.

  The scent of blood—convert and human—seeped too deep into everything. Bryce took off his shirt, balled it up, and wiped down the mule’s interior as best he could. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. When he finished, he dug a hole to bury it and used a fistful of moist earth to scrub himself. It wouldn’t clean him by any stretch of the imagination, but at least he didn’t smell like a butchery anymore.

  “Bryce,” Sinna said. “What do we do?”

  He chuckled without humor. “Mule’s dead. At least for the moment. We have no food, no water, not enough weapons, and too many converts standing between us and Montana. Guess that means you get your wish, little bit. We’re going south.”

  The news didn’t thrill her. “Maybe they’ll be different.” Her tone belied her words. “Maybe they’ll help us.”