They stretched out on the snow. Oddy was somewhat alarmed to find he could not feel his feet: his toes felt like knobs of wood knocking against the insides of his boots. Frostbite, or just poor circulation? Fuck it. If he got out of this alive he’d have them chopped off and replaced with solid gold prosthetics. Goldfoot, he thought. James Bond’s newest adversary.
“So,” he said, “what are you boys spending your take on?”
Tripwire smiled. This was a variation on a game every dogface and flyboy and ground-pounder played in ’Nam. The game was called “What Are You Gonna Do When You Get Home?” For some soldiers it was all about food: they were going to eat a garbage pail full of French fries, a rain barrel full of soft shell crab, a T-bone steak the size of a manhole cover. For others pussy was the passion: they were going to fuck homegrown bush till their jimmies waved a white flag.
For Oddy it was music. He’d just wanted to crank up the Hi-Fi, a little Chubby Checker or Ray Charles’ “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” snug on a pair of headphones and float away with the tunes. For Tripwire it was movies: sitting in the balcony Aladdin theater with a tub of hot buttered popcorn, feet cocked up on the balcony rail and some old film—The Maltese Falcon maybe, Bogart as Sam Spade—flickering on the screen. And, if he was lucky, perhaps there’d be some sweet young thing to throw his arm around. Heaven. The purpose of the game was simplicity itself: it provided hope. And in ’Nam, hope was the most valuable currency going—sometimes it was enough to get you through. Not always. But sometimes.
“How does this sound, Sarge,” Tripwire said. “I take that dough and make the porno to end all pornos. We’re talking A-List cast—Seka, Marilyn Chambers, Amber Lynn, Annie Sprinkle, Linda Lovelace, the whole starlet constellation.” Tripwire cracked his knuckles against his chin, warming up. “Here’s the setup: the year is 2020. The world has been ravaged by nuclear destruction. The only survivors are a group of super-hot models who’ve constructed an impregnable fallout shelter—”
“The fuck are supermodels doing building fallout shelters?” Zippo said.
“You’re watching a movie with your pants around your ankles, tugging at your pud, and you’re going to give a shit about logic?” Tripwire shot back. “Now, five years have passed since Armageddon. The chicks are down to their last can of SPAM, clean out of tampons, horny as fruit flies. They’ve been dyking it out for years and are starved for pole. Lo and behold, a knock on the door.”
Oddy said, “That pizza they ordered five years ago?”
“Better. A platoon of marines searching out any survivors. But the fallout has mutated their bodies in the most interesting way: their cocks are massive.”
“How fortunate for them,” Answer said.
Zippo said, “If that’s what radiation poisoning does, I’ll start hanging around nuclear test sites.”
Tripwire said, “We’re talking foot-long hogs here, thick as pop cans—”
“Ah, come on,” Zippo said. “No man’s got a hose that big.”
“You kidding?” Tripwire said. “Couple weeks ago a kid walked into my office. Face like a fucking bear trap, wicked case of acne and little niblet teeth like mongoloids got, but then he doffed his pants and—” Tripwire held his hands a jaw-dropping distance apart. “—to his knees. I mean, I don’t got a pussy and I was scared.”
“Oh,” Zippo said. His hand dropped to his crotch and gave it a self-conscious squeeze.
“So,” Tripwire continued, “the soldiers tell them Earth is uninhabitable. The chicks say no problem, ’cause they’ve built a spaceship capable of light speed—”
“A fallout shelter and a spaceship,” Oddy said. “These are some super supermodels.”
“You’d think they’d have spent their time inventing more effective vomiting techniques,” Zippo said. “Or perfecting the art of walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time.”
“I’m ignoring you,” Tripwire said. “So they hop into their space shuttle, which is decorated tastefully, with a lot of lounging chaises and throw pillows and balloons—”
“But of course,” said Answer.
Oddy said, “How could it be otherwise?”
“Christian Dior eat your heart out,” Zippo said.
“—and, as the only remaining humans, their duty is to propagate the species—”
“It’s a hard job, but someone’s got to do it,” Oddy said.
“Fucking in zero gravity? Going to be fluids floating everywhere!” Zippo.
“—Cue a giant orgy. I’m talking constant, enduring fucking. Every orifice. Rotating partners. A sea of thrusting, moaning body parts. Caligula will have nothing on this flick!”
Oddy said, “What are you calling this opus?”
Tripwire considered. “How about Intergalactic Space Sluts? Or maybe 2020: A Space Orgy?”
“Tough choice. They’re both so classy,” Zippo cracked.
“Ah, fuck it.” Tripwire threw his hands up. “You jokers wouldn’t know class if it yanked your pants down and blew you. What are your plans, Zippo—got any?”
“Whores,” Zippo said. “Whores and cupcakes, a million bucks’ worth.”
“Well, son,” Oddy said, laughing. “Gonna end up with a lot of fat-assed whores, I thi—”
From the darkened forest a feral howl arose. Moments later it was answered by another, this one from a different location. The sound ricocheted across the inlet, prickling the hairs on their necks.
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that’d be your garden-variety timberwolf,” Tripwire said.
“Don’t suppose so,” Oddy said. “Let’s get back on the hump. Zippo, how do you feel?”
“Like a bag of smashed assholes.”
“Maybe we should hunker here.” Answer swept his arm to encompass the broad, flat landscape. “Like you said, nothing’s liable to sneak up on us. If we got to fight, might as well be on our own terms.”
“You’ve got a point,” Oddy said. “And I’ve got a feeling we’re surrounded, anyhow.”
Another howl arose, a long and shuddering and lonely sound that went out across the cold night air. The men’s blood chilled. They knew that sound. It was in their blood, that sound, an echo from far away and long ago, when all the world had been forest and jungle and primitive man had fled in terror before the pursuing pack. It echoed over the barren vista, unchanged over the eons, infused with the looming threat of the hunt.
Zippo retrieved the silver bullet from his pocket. He rolled the smooth cylinder between his fingers. One shot. He ejected the Llama’s magazine and slotted the silver slug in.
“Don’t put it on top,” Oddy said. “Don’t know about you, but my first shot’s most often my wildest. I don’t zone in until the fourth or fifth. Plus, regular bullets don’t much affect these things—they’ll charge right through to give you a clean close shot.”
Made sense to Zippo. He ejected four bullets, inserted the silver one, and re-loaded the rest. The others did the same. Oddy spun the Webley’s cylinder and snapped it home with a flick of his wrist, scanning the darkened terrain. What he saw was disturbing: in places the snow appeared to be moving. It wouldn’t stay still, and each time he refocused it would shift, hillocks becoming ridges becoming flat land again. The movement was furtive and sneaking: it possessed a pattern and connection just beyond Oddy’s capacity for understanding.
There was only one certainty.
It was getting closer…
««—»»
Excerpt from “Never Cry Wolf,” by Farley Mowatt (1963):
I have lived amongst the wolves of the arctic tundra for some months now. They see I pose no threat, and have come to accept my presence as a matter of course. Fall slips into winter, and their appearance adapts to suit the season. Their pelts, previously iron-gray, have changed to a creamy-white. This, I suspect, is a natural camouflage, aiding their pursuit of the nomadic caribou herds. It is effective, to be sure: in the gloaming they are nearly impossible to spot. They are one with the land, gh
ostly specters who live only for the hunt, for the kill…
««—»»
“…spotting something over here.” Answer pointed in the opposite direction. “Indistinct, but…something.”
“Something here, too.” Tripwire.
“Ditto.” Zippo.
Oddy stared skyward. The full moon was up by now, he knew, but hidden behind a bank of black cotton clouds. He willed the cloud cover to lift; he needed that moonlight. “Steady on those booby traps, son,” he whispered.
Tripwire knelt close to the ground. He’d wrapped the fishing lines around the index and middle fingers of each hand, both of which were trembling. Steady, baby, he told himself. Keep your shit wired.
The acid burn of anticipation smoldered in Oddy’s arms, his hands, his finger squeezed around the H&K23’s trigger. He squinted. Something was out there. Odd movements, odd shapes. The whole landscape seemed to stare in at him—a watched feeling—and his eyes followed the forms that slid through the whiteness. Every time he pinned one down, every time the foreign contours began to coalesce into some recognizable silhouette, it melted into shadows again.
“Getting a bit flaked here, Sarge,” Tripwire said.
“Keep your head. Fortune favors the brave.”
It was their eyes that ended up giving them away: specks of slitted red glowing like well-stoked embers. Their brightness was such that they left lingering contrails wherever they moved, the way sparklers held by excited children do on Fourth of July nights.
“I got a bead,” Oddy said, nodding to a spot perhaps ten feet past one of Answer’s flares. He let loose with the Heckler and Koch. Bullets stitched a path across the snow, slugs slamming through the ice, gouts of water spurting up through the holes.
He didn’t hit a thing.
A growl arose from somewhere close by. Zippo jerked his head back, half-convinced a slavering jaw was within an inch of his neck. Nothing was there. A smell wafted across the unbroken expanse to where they hunched: a scent of fevered hunger, insistent as death.
Zippo snapped off a shot that kicked up a puff of snow. What good’s a clean sightline, he thought, if you can’t see what the fuck you’re shooting at? For the first time since ’Nam, Zippo was scared: that sickeningly familiar sensation of fire-ants crawling at the back of his throat…
“There!” Answer said. His finger pointed to a shimmering shape near one of the booby traps. He said to Tripwire: “Hit it!”
Tripwire jerked his arm up, hard, like a bodybuilder performing a biceps curl. The fishing line tightened across the ice in a seismic wave of crystallized snow, then went slack as the grenade pin pulled free. The clip made a dull metallic sound ricocheting off the tin’s insides.
Oddy couldn’t tell which was louder: the grenade detonating or the lake’s surface shattering. The sounds were different—the concussive thunder of high-explosive versus the ear-splitting whipcrack of ice cracking down deep fault lines—but equally deafening. The frozen surface trembled and the clear ice beneath Zippo’s feet spiderwebbed and then went milky and opaque. Fist-sized shards of ice rained down and a swell of water surged over their boots. When the cordite cleared they could see a jagged-edged hole the size of a VW Minibus. Ringing the hole were chunks of meat clung with white fur.
I got it, Tripwire thought savagely. I got one of the fuc—
Howling with rage and pain, it charged. Though the explosion had torn its rear right leg off, it still moved with chilling speed. Its remaining limbs, girded with thick roping muscles, flexed with svelte animal power. Its ears were pinned back to a bullet-shaped head and its eyes glowed a hideous baleful red. Muzzle was black as coal, teeth long and sharp as ivory daggers. Slaver ran between them in long viscid runners. The men saw all this in the split-second it took to cover the twenty feet separating them.
Then it was in their midst.
Oddy swiveled with the H&K23 slung low. The werewolf lashed out with its foot. Razor-sharp claws cut deep into the back of Oddy’s hand, just below his knuckles, cleaving flesh and severing nerves. Blood sprayed from the wound to sheet his face. The machine-gun skittered along the ice and out of reach.
The werewolf’s paw pistoned out towards Tripwire in a murderous upwards sweep. His fevered mind saw, in that fractured second, the battered watch around its wrist, the tiny TIMEX logo written in orange.
Takes a licking, his mind raved and then a paw tipped with heavy claws ripped a scar-line into his armpit, continuing through the junction where shoulder met arm. Pain sung along the raw gash as Tripwire spun with the blow’s force. In the process his arm flailed upwards…fishing line arced across the ice…the faint tic of a pin detatching…
BOOM and the ice tilted madly beneath them. Ice chips sprayed like smashed teeth. There was another gaping hole now, to the left of the first, with a three-foot ice bridge separating the two. Chunks of ice and slush pelted down; a sharp wedge struck Answer on the shoulder and his right arm went instantly numb. The smell of wet gunpowder mixed with the wet-dog odor of the werewolf.
A buzz-saw of blood spurted through the vent in Tripwire’s parka and in his head things were exploding with dim popping noises, underwater fireworks. He fell down hard on his ass and the ice cracked beneath him. He felt as if he were sitting on a crust of spun sugar that could melt, or shatter, at any moment. Then the werewolf was towering above him, blood matting its jaws, canines like sharpened hooks, and all else was forgotten. He fought back the urge to bare his throat like a whipped mongrel.
A combat boot came down on Tripwire’s hand. Biting back a scream, he craned his neck to see the boot belonged to Zippo, and that Zippo’s gun was drawn and pointed at…him.
The werewolf’s head slammed into his chest and Zippo’s gun barked simultaneously. The bullet passed through the werewolf’s skull and exited from the underside of its chin, burrowing into the ice between Tripwire’s spread legs. The werewolf jerked as if stung but its jaws kept gnashing. Zippo’s lips were moving rapidly. He was counting off the bullets as he ran through the magazine.
OnetwothreefourFIVE—
The silver bullet spun from the cylinder to punch a neat hole just above the werewolf’s left eyebrow. It reared with a shocked howl. There was a gaping crater on the underside of its jaw. Tatters of fabric hung and swung from its jaws—the front of Tripwire’s parka looked as if it had been shoved through a wheat thresher.
Then the most amazing thing happened: silverish tendrils began to spread outwards from the wound. They opened out across the werewolf’s face, entering its mouth and snout and vulpine ears, before racing outwards across its limbs. This was accompanied by a sharp tinkling sound which Zippo associated with rapidly-freezing water. Within moments the creature was encased in a network of silver threads. Its front paws were raised above its head, teeth bared, hunched in pre-attack. Zippo shot it and the thing exploded like a tennis ball that had been immersed in liquid nitrogen and thrown at a brick wall.
“Sorry,” Zippo said, taking his boot off Tripwire’s hand. “Didn’t want another grenade going off.”
“S’okay.”
“Get bit?”
Tripwire looked down at his chest. He shook his head.
“You got the devil’s luck, then—”
“Over here!” Answer hollered.
Two sleek shapes rushed out of the darkness at a dead heat. Tripwire saw that they were maybe thirty feet from a booby trap. He wasn’t sure the ice could withstand another explosion. But what choice did he have? Ignoring the searing pain in his shoulder, he jerked his arm across his neck in a throat-slitting gesture to detent another pin.
The grenade went off just as the werewolves reached it, the force of the explosion propelled them high into the air. Answer steadied himself as the ice pan see-sawed beneath him. Tracking the airborne werewolves, their white bodies stark against the purple-black sky, he selected a target, raised his pistol, and started firing. The fifth slug punctured the lycanthrope’s sternum and silver tendrils burst instantly from the wou
nd. It twisted midair, clawing its body, movement slowing as the threads unfurled. Then the motionless body was hurtling downwards at him. Answer fell back against the ice and it buckled inwards under his weight and icy water bubbled up through hairline cracks to soak his hair. He fired at the plummeting mass, which exploded like a pane of glass. Slivers of flash-frozen werewolf cut into his face and hands like razor blades.
Zippo snapped off four shots at the second werewolf before it hit him square in the chest. Air whoofed out of him in a bloody-tasting gust as he was knocked to the ground. His skull hit the ice and he dropped his guns. The force of impact propelled them across the slippery plate of ice. The werewolf’s head was cocked at the predator’s deadly questing angle and it was all Zippo could do to keep its jaws from his throat. He got his thumb up and jammed it into the werewolf’s left eye. The retina popped like a bath bead and his thumb sunk in to the knuckle. The wolf’s jaws snapped in pain and rage, taking three of Zippo’s fingers.
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