Frostbite

by David Wellington

  “You’re not going to kill me?” Chey asked.

  “Not yet, no. We still need to catch your alpha. He’s smarter than your average canid, obviously. That’s the only reason it’s taken us so long to catch him. He’s still prone to the weaknesses of his kind, however. What we call, in the business, taxic behaviors. Instincts. For instance, he won’t abandon his mate.”

  “I’m not his mate,” Chey said. “He wants to kill me.”

  Pickersgill shrugged. “One lure is as good as another in this case. When he hears you, he’ll come.”

  Chey frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “When we had you up in that fire tower, howling like a bitch on heat, his exotic half couldn’t keep away. Every night he came closer, and once we even got a couple of shots off at him. If he had kept that up we would have had him. He must have figured as much. After that his human half just up and ran off and came here, far enough away that he wouldn’t be tempted by your vocalizations.” He scratched at his mustache. “Took us a while to track him. He’s real good at moving quiet up here. But now we got the two of you in one place, this should be dead easy.”

  “You think if he hears me howling here he’ll come to investigate,” she said.

  “You got it. As soon as the moon comes up you’ll start in to howling and he’ll show himself. Then we’ll finish this contract and we can all go home. Except for the two of you, of course.”

  “And your brother,” Chey said. Taunting Pickersgill was probably a mistake, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  “Yes. We haven’t heard from Frank in a bit. I suppose you had something to do with that?”

  Chey sighed. Guilt squished around in her stomach as if she’d eaten tainted food. “I killed him, I guess. My wolf did. I’m a predator now, it seems.”

  Pickersgill scratched his mustache again. She wondered if he had fleas. “Well, yes, I suppose you are,” he said, finally. “Which means I’m a better predator. I’m smarter than you and I’ve got better weapons. So I guess I win.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that.

  Pickersgill took a phone out of his pocket with his left hand and dialed a number. The pistol in his right hand drooped until it wasn’t pointing directly at her, but he didn’t holster it. He was pretty smart, she had to give him that. He’d thought this through better than she had.

  Well, Chey had never been very good at making plans. She’d pretty much followed her gut her whole life. And now it was going to get her killed.

  No.

  Her wolf wouldn’t accept that. It wouldn’t accept death so easily.

  There had to be something she could do. She stared out at the broken plain of the parking lot, at heaps of stones and broken chunks of asphalt. The helicopter was moving away, headed toward the far side of the town. Soon it was gone behind rust-stained walls and mounds of dark soil, lost in a purpling sky that was about to turn into darkness.

  Her mind turned over and over, trying to decide what to do next. If Pickersgill would just step closer she could kick him. Maybe get her legs around his neck and snap his spine. She could spit in his eyes and when he went to wipe them clean she could kick the gun right out of his hand. Then she could bring her knee up into his chin hard enough to knock him out.

  What she would do then, still handcuffed to the light pole, she had no idea. But it was worth a try. “Hey,” she said. Pickersgill looked up.

  “Your brother told me something right before he died.” “Yeah?” he asked.

  “Yeah. If you come over here I’ll whisper it in your ear.” He grinned at her. “Nice try.” He actually took a step back. Okay, she thought to herself. Time for plan B.

  She tried flexing her arms, tensing against the chain that held her hands cuffed together. She could feel how solid the metal was. She was stronger than any normal human being, but she didn’t think she could break that chain. In fact, she was sure of it. She pulled anyway. The muscles in her arms tensed and burned and the steel held. She grunted and gritted her teeth and pulled harder. The cuffs dug into her wrists and scraped at her skin like dull knives. Sweat broke out on her forehead.

  The chain held.

  “I didn’t think so,” Pickersgill said. He gave himself a good long scratch and let his pistol arm hang loose at his side. “Just relax, okay? It’s a long time until moonrise. You don’t want to dislocate your shoulders.”

  She stared right into his eyes and pulled and yanked with every muscle fiber in her body. She felt the blood pounding in her head, felt the bones of her arms flex and start to fracture. She pulled harder. The chain didn’t give.

  Instead the light pole behind her did. As she heaved forward the chain put pressure on the hollow pole and it crimped, slamming forward across her shoulders. The pole flicked forward and the twin light fixtures at its top slapped against the ground, shattering what little glass was left in them. Chey was thrown sideways by the toppling pole, her wrists screaming with abrasions. Feeling like an idiot, she looked over at Pickersgill.

  He didn’t look back. The collapsing light pole had connected with the space between his shoulder and his neck. Maybe it had broken his spine, or maybe it had just given him a concussion. Either way, he lay sprawled across the broken stones, his eyes wide open but seeing nothing.

  Chey kicked and kicked at the pole until it broke off at the crimp and clattered to the ground. She pulled down on the cuffs until they came loose from the pole. She struggled and bent and twisted until her hands were in front of her. Then she ran over to check Pickersgill’s neck. She couldn’t find a pulse.

  Behind her she heard someone clapping, very slowly. She looked up and was not surprised to find Powell standing not ten meters away.

  53.

  Night had officially fallen. The stars were out, thick in the heavens, and they gave enough light for the two of them to see each other but not much more. The moon had not yet risen, so they were still human.

  Powell wore a pair of coveralls much like her own—she guessed he, too, had been forced to scrounge for clothing since he’d been in Port Radium. He didn’t have Dzo around to follow after him in a rusty pickup truck anymore.

  He had an ugly scar across his forehead and cheek. Either he’d been injured since his last change or he’d had a near miss with a silver bullet. His icy green eyes were quiet—she couldn’t quite gauge what he was thinking. Or what he was planning.

  She wondered if he’d given as much thought to this confrontation as she had.

  “Hi,” she said, moving toward him as sedately as she could manage. “Powell. Listen. There’s something I have to tell you, something I—” “Save it,” he said.

  Then he leapt right at her, his head down, his arms wide. He grabbed her around the midsection and knocked her off her feet. She went skidding along a rough section of asphalt and her head bounced off a broken stone. Light erupted behind her eyes and she couldn’t seem to breathe.

  He was on top of her, a piece of rubble in his hands as big as her head. He brought it up high, clearly intending to use it to smash her face in. She lunged upward with her knees and he flew off of her. Rolling onto all fours, she looked over and saw him doing the same.

  “Just give me a second,” she called. “Just let me—”

  “No more lies,” he said.

  Together they jumped to their feet, their arms in front of them. They wheeled around each other like sumo wrestlers. Chey had been trained in unarmed combat by the U.S. military. She knew how to hold her own. But Powell had had a century to learn how to fight. He rushed her and she dodged, but he must have expected it—he turned in mid-swing and grabbed her around the waist, twisted up underneath and slammed her to the ground. The wind went out of her, but she managed to kick out with her legs and hit him in the ankle, toppling him to the ground, too. They both rolled over, panting for breath. Then he looked up and met her gaze.

  Could he kill her? Did he even want to?

  “Please,” she begged. “Just let me explain.”

/>   For a second they just stared at each other. Then he reached out and grabbed the chain that held her hands together. She cried out as he yanked, hard, and dragged her across the stones, but she couldn’t get her feet underneath her, couldn’t twist out of his grip.

  He dragged her inside the big corrugated tin building. The darkness inside was nearly complete. He pulled her a ways farther, then dragged her up and off the ground. Both of his hands grabbed at her flesh and then she was airborne, hurtling over the poured concrete floor. She hit hard enough to make spit fly out of her mouth.

  “So you’re just going to kill me? You won’t even talk to me first?” she shouted. She couldn’t see him at all in the shadows.

  “I never want to kill anybody,” he said. “It just sort of happens.” He was moving around, circling her. She thought of her training. She needed to move, too. She needed to get a wall at her back. “I’m sorry that I killed your father, but believe me, I did what I could to prevent it. You should understand that by now.”

  “Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe better than you think.”

  He didn’t bother to reply.

  She could feel him nearby, but she couldn’t determine where he was. She scrabbled up to her feet and started moving toward the wall ahead of her.

  She felt his body heat a moment before he scooped her up and threw her back into the dark. She landed badly with an arm underneath her, crushed by her own weight. She cried out in pain.

  “You done yet?” he asked. He was close, but not close enough to hit. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone? I never wanted any of this. I just want to survive the mess you’ve made for me.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. You have to see my side, though. You killed—you killed my father. I had a right to…to something. But things have changed. I’ve changed. And I know, now, that I can’t do this alone. Like it or not, you’re the only one who understands me right now. Who knows what I’m going through. And those assholes out there want me dead, too. We’re on the same side. Aren’t we?” She crawled forward through the gloom. Maybe this time he’d actually heard her. Understood that she didn’t come here to fight.

  But he hit her hard, then, hard enough to pick her up and carry her, screaming, across the floor. They smashed into the wall and through it. The corroded tin collapsed under their combined weight and she saw stars, real stars as they rolled back out into the parking lot. Her shoulder gave way with a popping noise—if it wasn’t broken it still hurt like a bastard. He pushed her away and staggered into the night. She knew better than to think he was done with her.

  54.

  The pain curled her inward on herself. It made her want to scream. She forced the pain down, away from her, and rose to her feet. If not for the strength her wolf shared with her she knew she would be unconscious, maybe even dead already.

  She spun around in a circle, looking for Powell. Looking for any sign of movement—a flash in the darkness, a dull glint. There was nothing.

  “Talk,” he said. “You want to talk to me. Fine. Talk.”

  But she couldn’t think of what to say. So instead she looked at Port Radium.

  It lay beneath her, spread out at the bottom of a long, rolling hill. What few structures remained intact had collapsed roofs or had tumbled down to fall in on themselves. There had been dozens, maybe a hundred hangars and warehouses and who knew what else, once, but the vast majority of the buildings had been burned to the ground. The roads remained, long dark ribbons sectioning the land into parcels. Long poles of stripped wood had been pounded into the earth at every crossroads and intersection. She knew what they were for—when the snow came, as it would early this far north, that would be the only way for anyone to know where a building’s foundation lay. There were streetlights as well, in some places, but the metal poles had sunk and listed as the permafrost beneath them shifted over the years until they stood at angles like the trees of the drunken forest.

  Abandoned—no, more than that. There was a pall over the remains of the town, nothing visible or even tangible, really, but there was a wrongness about it. Chey felt like waves of regret and desolation were rolling up out of the ruins. Maybe they were haunted. A ghost town, in more ways than one.

  Between Chey and the ghost town’s near edge glimmered the black mirror of a pond, a big oval pool of water. A heap of twisted metal and broken rock stood in the center of the pond like a gigantic cairn. She recognized a few outlines, of dump trucks and backhoes and cranes, but most of the metal had softened and lost its shape to rust and wind until it became a single agglomeration of bent girders and decaying engines. Hundreds of tons of forgotten equipment, left to soften like compost over a span of millennia. She could only imagine how toxic the water must be with runoff from the dead machinery. “Jesus,” she said, astounded despite herself. After spending the last few weeks in the utter natural serenity of the forest this man-made ruin startled her. “What was this place?”

  Powell answered her from the shadows. “It was a mining town, once.” She didn’t turn or give any sign she’d heard him. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want him to hit her again—her shoulder still hurt from the last time. “The rocks here are some of the oldest on Earth and they’re full of radium, cobalt, and chromium. It also contained one of the biggest silver lodes ever discovered.”

  “And you thought it would be a nice place to hide out,” she said, quietly. “Why was it abandoned if it was so lucrative?”

  “This is what you wanted to discuss?” he asked. The scorn in his voice made her spine shiver.

  She couldn’t find the right words, though. The words that would explain what she’d done to him. “Just humor me,” she said, bargaining for time to find the words.

  He growled in frustration. But then he answered her question. “It was too expensive to mine the silver profitably. It cost more to dig it up and ship it back to civilization than it was worth.”

  “So everybody just left.”

  “Not quite,” Powell told her. His voice came from over to her left—she was sure of it. She had to be ready, in case he attacked her again. She could feel his anger like heat on her back. But so far he was still talking. “They found something else here, too. This is where the Americans got the uranium for their first A-bombs.”

  She gasped in spite of herself. “Really?”

  “They hired the local Dene Indians to carry it out of here in burlap sacks. They’ve always claimed they didn’t know how dangerous the stuff was, but an entire generation of Dene men died young here. You see those dark mounds down there?” he asked, and she nodded—there were piles of dark earth almost everywhere, sticking up from the empty ground like mammoth anthills.

  “Those are pitchblende tailings, what’s left of what they dug out of the ground after they refined the uranium ore. Every couple of years someone from the government comes out here to measure how radioactive they still are.”

  “Radioactive. This place is radioactive,” she said, and cold sweat burst in pinpricks under her hair.

  “I didn’t think your friends would follow me here.” He was closer now, she could tell by following his voice. “I figured they had to know how dangerous it was. Maybe you can tell them. Maybe they’ll leave, then.”

  “Bobby wouldn’t listen to me now,” she said. “He doesn’t think I’m human anymore. And he’s right, isn’t he? That’s what I wanted to tell you. That I understand now, what we are. I’ve…accepted it.” She turned, her hands up, ready to reach for his. He was so close she could smell his skin—she could smell his wolf.

  She expected him to lunge forward and knock her down. He didn’t. She overbalanced and had to stagger to keep from falling. When she’d straightened again, wary, too stiff, he raised a hand toward her and she swung to block his punch. He wasn’t punching, though. He had a square black pistol in his hand. He must have gone back to Pickersgill’s corpse and recovered one of the man’s guns.

  “Powell,” she had time to say.
“Please. Don’t do that. Don’t you understand? I know why you came here. I know why you’ve spent your life away from other human beings. I know I have to do the same thing, now. But I can’t do it alone. You’re my only chance, if I want to survive. I have to learn from you.”

  “I killed your father,” he said. “How could you ever forgive me for that?”

  “I…can’t,” she said. “But that’s not the point, that—”

  “I’d be an utter fool to trust you,” he said. “Do you think I’m a fool?

  Get the hell out of here, Chey. Run away and don’t come back.”

  “Without you I won’t make it,” she told him. “I can’t survive up here alone.”

  He turned around and started to walk away. He gave her one last glance—not so much a look of sympathy as curiosity, as if he expected her to say something or do something to make him stop.

  “Powell,” she said, “I need you.”

  It wasn’t enough. He kept walking and soon the darkness swallowed him whole.

  55.

  For a long time she just wondered what to do next. It had seemed so simple, back in the fire tower. She would find Powell, convince him that they needed each other. Then they would run off into the horizon together. Find some way to survive, together.

  Without him she was doomed to an eternity alone. Trying her best to do what he had done, to get as far away from people as she could so she didn’t end up killing them. It seemed like the worst possible fate she could imagine. Was it really so much better than taking the way out Bobby wanted for her, one quick silver bullet to the head?

  She was supposed to have died on the Yellowhead Highway. Lycanthrope kills two in bloody road rampage, no survivors—that was one way it was supposed to have played out. She had thought many times that she might have, well, actually, preferred it. The guilt of surviving her father’s death, the blankness and trauma and fear and depression and unhappiness that followed, the sleeplessness that had defined her life—none of those things would have had to happen. If she died now, if somebody killed her twelve years after the fact, things would still balance out. In their own bad way. Chey knew she understood very little about the universe, but she knew that things coming to a bad end was not unheard of. That sometimes happy endings were too much to ask for.