by Ann Vremont
Jack-O-Lanterns: Wendigo
Ann Vremont
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Copyright ©2006 Ann Vremont
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Wendigo
Beyond the protective veil of densely packed white pine, snow fell on a meadow. The heavy flakes dropped fast, obscuring Shariya Markesh’s footprints from whatever stalked her. She visually checked the meadow one last time, then pressed her back against a tree trunk and started the mental process that trigger the nanocells housed in her body. Unfocusing her gaze, she imagined an immense, finely threaded net spreading out from her. As the net extended beyond her vision, the air buzzed, thinned, and then snapped back. Shariya’s eyes jerked into focus with the snap.
The nano detectors reported nothing of interest. Quiet blanketed the woods and meadow. Nothing stirred, at least not anything with nanocells swarming through its bloodstream. And what had been pursuing her halfway across Isle Royale was definitely hot with illicit technology. She was safe, at least for now.
She released the breath she’d been holding. Mist from the warm air joined the steam already rising from her overheated body. She lowered the zipper on her jacket a few inches, just low enough to reach the inside pocket. Removing a glove, she reached in and pulled out a thin carbon card. She kept the card shielded and turned back to the trunk, tapping the card’s edge with a fingernail. Blue light appeared across the surface of the screen, the display broken by static.
“Shit!” Shariya tapped the vidcard off, then on again. The same mess of pixels greeted her, with no way to even navigate to the card’s control panel, let alone the information she needed.
Still swearing beneath her breath, she shut the card off, stuffed it back in her pocket and visually scanned the meadow. Flattening her back against the trunk again, she sent out another mental scan. She didn’t trust the quiet. Not with what she’d seen back at the dock’s control station. Towering over seven feet tall, the creature’s body had been covered in fine white hair. The arms were long, running from the shoulders to below the thing’s knees and ending in curving, dark blue claws. It could reach halfway across a room to snag its victim and pull the person screaming into a set of jaws framed with daggered teeth three inches long. It had been exactly like the locals had described it -- and it had torn through Darrin James like a rag doll instead of the fifteen-year vet of the Ministry’s Illicit Use Department that he was.
Biting at her lip, she shook her head, emptying her thoughts of those last few seconds in the control station. Thinking about her dead partner wouldn’t get her out of the shit she was in now -- stuck in the woods in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of goddamn Lake Superior with a nanoshifter hunting her. Oh, yeah, and with her gun and cell neutralizer on the ground somewhere between here and wherever the hell the docks were.
One thing was sure -- she had stayed still too long and let too much cold air into her jacket. There were many ways to die in these woods. And, while laying down on the cold ground and falling into a permanent sleep had its appeal over death by mauling, she intended to avoid both scenarios. She flipped her collar back up, wishing for the first time in years she didn’t wear her hair cut pixie short. Next she zipped the jacket closed and re-gloved, trying to account for how fast and in what directions she’d been running the last two hours.
Best estimate, she was about a mile away from the shoreline of Moskey Basin. From there, she’d be able to get a fix on the Rock Harbor lighthouse and the facility’s headquarters. With the ongoing hostilities between the Canadian Body Corporate and the Federation over Lake Superior’s fresh water supply, there should damn well be more than enough guns to lay that creature down.
First, however, she’d have to reach the HQ building and she was standing on the wrong side of the meadow. That meant skirting it, and adding another half mile through the cold, or cutting across it and exposing herself to more than just bad weather.
“Fuck it.” She pushed away from the tree and pivoted to face the meadow. With her nanopathic implants, she’d feel the thing before it saw her, just as she had felt it coming at the control station. Only there, she’d been in a little box of a building with its big windows and lights glaring like a beacon through the night sky. She had a better chance out here in the darkened woods.
Taking her first step into the meadow, she bet her life on that slim hope.
* * *
Taking in the feminine form stepping from the woods, Eli Weiss recognized the woman for what she was, prey for his prey. Sure, she had a name -- Shariya Markesh. She was a pretty little thing, and he’d met her earlier in the week, making her for a nanopath from the Ministry of Technology. Now she was a nanopath without muscle, her partner dead and her gun dropped along the way. And somewhere out in these woods prowling for her scent was Jes Dupre -- the bastard who had turned him and three others in the two months since Dupre had returned from working at the company’s Nu Seato facilities.
Hunkering down, Eli tried to make himself invisible -- white on white in the deep piled snow -- and hoped the cold would mute his smell. If Dupre caught the slightest whiff of him, the coward would retreat and it would be weeks more of this game and more shifters for him to track down and kill. He didn’t like leaving the woman helpless, but he’d never had this good an opportunity to take Dupre out, finding him while he was on the hunt, filled with both blood lust and the desire to pull a female into the pack he’d been trying to form.
Lifting his snout, Eli sniffed the air around him. No trace of Dupre but the woman’s odor reached him. Even tired and sweaty with her partner’s blood on her, she had a sweet spice smell to her, like cloves or ginger. He could see why Dupre had targeted her, smelling like that, with a tight little body, and a threat with her implants unless Dupre found a way to neutralize her. What better way to accomplish that than to make her the very thing the Ministry had trained her to hunt?
So where the hell was Dupre?
A low growl vibrated on the air, its direction coming from upwind, and Eli raised his head for an instant. That was all it took to get a nose full of Dupre and see a darker shade of white moving from the tree line opposite the woman. If the woman continued walking in the same direction, he was positioned directly between her and Dupre. One ear cocked in Dupre’s direction, he watched her start across the meadow, a silent prayer on his lips that she would not spot him and give away his location.
The snow lay across the meadow in drifts, in some sections no more than a foot high. Where Eli waited, it had banked four feet deep. It made for a hard trudge and the woman moved slowly through it, pushing her legs forw
ard in her fatigue rather than lifting them with each step. Had she seemed less tired, Dupre might have waited for her to reach the center of the meadow.
Instead he just waited for the first stumble. Seeing her go down, Eli heard Dupre pounce forward from the tree line, heard the pound of the shifter’s elongated hands and feet hitting the snow, the whoosh of the white stuff being flung behind him. Eli counted each hit and measured off the likely distance Dupre traveled with each jump.
When Dupre was about fifty feet out from the tree line, Eli heard the woman’s first scream of terror. He closed his mind to it. Her fear was a necessity now, something to fuel Dupre’s lust and make him reckless. Another fifty feet and she was half standing, stumbling forward one step and falling again. She was quicker to rise the second time, the snarl ripping from Dupre’s throat apparently fueling her fear.
Eli waited until Dupre was five feet past him and still running before he jumped into Dupre’s tracks. On the second bound, Eli was less than two feet from his target. On the third, he should have been sinking his claws into Dupre’s back, snapping down on his neck and shaking until the shifter went limp beneath him. Instead, Dupre twisted mid jump and landed on his back with his powerful hind legs thrusting up, the claws ripping into Eli’s belly. Pain sliced through his abdomen but he didn’t stop moving, swiping his claws across Dupre’s eyes as he rolled forward. He braced for another attack, but Dupre leaped over him, his hind legs passing just close enough to Eli’s head that Eli peeled a layer of skin from Dupre’s flanks.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw the woman racing toward the trees, legs pumping as she finally managed to control her terror and fatigue. Dupre stayed hot on her trail. Eli knew Dupre only needed one bite into a fleshy area and less than ten seconds to release a swarm of nanocells into her bloodstream with the SHIFTER virus. Then he’d be able to focus his attention on finishing off Eli.
Not gonna happen. He spun, kicked out, sliced into Dupre’s heel to slow the shifter down. It wasn’t enough to keep Dupre from overtaking the woman. Both shifters pounced, arms stretched forward to snag their prey. Dupre wrapped his arms around the woman’s legs, pulled her to him just as Eli’s arms encircled Dupre’s waist. Two sets of jaws bit down at the same time. Dupre’s sank into the woman’s thigh, gnawing on the flesh, the glands beneath his tongue releasing saliva packed with nanocells that followed the bite wound into her bloodstream at the same time a hunk of flesh was torn from his shoulder and neck. Dupre held on, jerking the woman’s leg side to side, swallowing her blood even as it poured through the hole Eli had torn in his throat. Dupre kept tearing, grinding, life spilling into him and from him, waiting the full ten seconds to make sure she was infected.
Arrogance, Eli thought, feeling Dupre weaken beneath him, and took another gaping bite into the shifter’s neck.
* * *
Two ghosts in the snow -- running, fighting, weighing her down. It was the last thing she remembered before she had passed out from blood loss and pain. Shariya rolled onto her side; fire shot through her right thigh.
“Stay down.”
A masculine voice cut through the fog of hurt; strong hands pushed her down.
“You’re too weak to be moving around.”
Shariya opened her eyes, found herself in a darkened room and staring into the familiar face of a middle-aged male. Steel gray hair fell around his face and shoulders; pale green eyes looked down at her. She tried to place the face, her head pounding from the effort.
“Don’t think, Shariya. Just close your eyes and rest.”
Her gaze narrowed as she summoned the nano detectors inside her. If he was a nanoshifter, she should know already, but she wasn’t going to take any chances in her weakened condition. With the summons, she felt her whole body respond in a surge, felt her skin begin to prickle and peel.
The next instant, she felt a knee in her gut and a hypo-press punching into her neck. The prickling stopped, the surge receded.
“What the fuck was that?” she bit out.
“The shot or your body’s reaction to the summons?” the man asked, leaning back on his haunches and studying her.
Summons? Shariya hesitated, then answered, “Both.”
“The shot was a nano suppressor -- not quite like your cell neutralizer. This doesn’t kill anyone infected more than twenty-four hours before the shot.” His mouth drew tight before breaking into a hard smile. “Does that answer both your questions?”
She shook her head, her hand sliding down to the wound in her right thigh. “I’m not infected.”
The man whipped away the blanket covering her. She was naked beneath it except for an eight-inch swath of gauze over her thigh. He peeled back the bandage and forced her to look at the wound. “That,” he said, gesturing at the almost closed punctures, “is thirty-six hours after the attack.”
Grabbing the hem of his sweatshirt, he pulled it over his head. Long claw marks shone a dark red from his nipples to somewhere below his belt line. “And I left half my guts back there in the meadow. Now you tell me you’re not infected?”
Shariya reached for the blanket that had covered her, dropping her gaze to it in concentration as she pulled the fabric over her exposed body. “Wendigo.” Her voice was high pitched as she named the security outpost where she’d seen him earlier in the week while she interviewed staff. He was post commander for the Wendigo location. “Eli Weiss.”
He nodded and pulled his sweatshirt back down.
“How’d you pull it off?” she demanded. If the nanoshifters had found a way to bypass detection, she needed to get that information to the Ministry.
Eli laughed, the sound bitter, and reached up to pull a thin cord hanging from the ceiling. As light flooded the small room, she realized it wasn’t a room at all, but makeshift quarters in one of the island’s many abandoned mine shafts. He jerked his chin in the direction of the rock wall next to her with its thick vein of copper.
“I don’t get it --”
“And I don’t get you still trying to figure out how to do the Ministry’s job for it. You’re spoilt goods to them now -- to be terminated with extreme prejudice.” He stood up, turned his back to her, and rummaged through an ice chest. He pulled out slabs of cooked ham, put the lid back on the chest and used its top for a cutting board. When he finished cubing the meat, he scraped it onto a tin plate and turned back to her.
He nodded at the copper vein again as he handed her the plate. “It’s called copper tempesting -- government uses the technique to shield its technology from electronic and other types of waves. It’s the same idea as how the iron deposits are so heavy on the west end of the peninsula that a traditional compass won’t work.” He reached across her to tap a knuckle on the rock wall. “The basement you interviewed everyone in was completely surrounded with copper deposits. There was more than enough of the mineral there to confuse your detectors and make them interpret any foreign nanocells as belonging to their own host.”
He dropped his gaze to the untouched plate. “Better eat that, sweet cakes. You’re in for a rough few days.”
* * *
Rough was an understatement. In one respect, she knew exactly what to expect, had seen video studies of those infected in their first week. After twenty-four hours, the nanocells carrying the SHIFTER protocol were sufficiently embedded in the host’s organs. Any attempt to remove them resulted in instant death. Before that, a cell neutralizer had a solid chance of stopping reproduction and embedding. Those victims reached in time would sweat, piss and shit the cells out of their system -- if they were lucky.
Those who were reached too late or had too virulent a strain of programming in their nanocells to neutralize went into metabolic overdrive. They screeched, they clawed, rending their own bodies only to heal before inflicting the next wound. But they’d never gotten into the mind of one of these lost victims -- never had a victim coherent enough to explain the frenzy. All the researchers could do was categorize the symptoms the SHIFTER virus produced a
nd then kill its human host.
On the mattress, strapped down by Eli so she wouldn’t hurt herself, suppressor shots delivered every few hours for relief, she had a better understanding. Sensations were intense, the odd draft through the mine, the touch of fabric against her skin, the trickle of sweat down her thighs, the sound of Eli’s heart beating. Everything was magnified. She begged him to strip the blanket from her, maddened by its weight and indifferent at first to the way he watched her writhing naked on the mattress.
At first, but then all the other sensations dropped away as she caught his scent, smelled his excitement at seeing her naked and struggling with sweat making her skin slick and shiny.
“Fuck me, Eli,” she cooed after a suppressor shot made her calm enough to shape the words. He got up, staggered down the mineshaft trying his best to ignore her. She called after him, her voice a singsong delirium of need. “I can still smell you, Eli. I can smell how much you want to.”
He came back, called by the sound of her thrashing. His cock was hard in his pants. The pulse of blood through it boomed in her ears. She whined, wriggled, tried to twist her legs so her lips were splayed and she could show him how wet she was.
He shook his head, retreating into the corner. “It’s not you doing the asking, Shariya… it’s not what you want.”
It’s what you want… what the things inside me want, she thought, her facility for speech once again drowned out by the myriad sensations as the suppressor shot wore off.
Tears wouldn’t dissuade him. Not her tears, or his throbbing cock or the weeping need of her cunt.
She broke her bonds on the third night, pouncing toward him as he scrambled up from his mat on the floor in search of a hypo-press. She felt her body changing mid-air, felt the fine hairs on her arm lengthen and become almost transparent in their thinness. Her fingers elongated as she reached for Eli, her motion half swipe, half caress. He hit her double fisted in the stomach, a hypo-press in each hand. She fell to the floor panting, the nanocells retreating under the drug’s influence.