by Lynn Red
“I want this thing dead,” he snarled. Like before, the more excited he got, the more tendrils of saliva drooled out of his mouth. “I want him dead, I want the other two dead, and then I want you wherever I say.”
His voice came in fits and starts. He’d spatter out a few syllables, and then stop to catch his breath before continuing. And with every word came more spittle until I thought he’d end up giving Grave a shower before he was done with his threats and his over the top irritation. Grave shot his hand up from where it was pinned and grasped Todd by the throat. He squeezed, but from the grin on Todd’s face, there wasn’t anything happening that he didn’t approve of.
Finally, he cracked his mouth in a bloody, awful grin and started again cackling.
“Oh you… you don’t know what you’ve done,” he said in between peals of laughter. “You have no idea! You have no idea that all this time you’ve spent sitting around in here, playing around with me… I’ve already won,” his voice was getting weaker, but only slightly. “I… won,” he whispered. “I already… watch…”
With a flick of his wrist, he changed the image on the monitor above the desk from static to the little camp where I’d met the cubs. The huts and cave entrances were all smoking. The fires from underground burned hot and awful.
He started up again with that goddamn laughing and I bent over to grab my spear. Wild cleared his throat, I thought I knew why. I straightened back up, resting the tips of my toes on my weapon. I rolled it back and forth under the ball of my foot waiting, just waiting, for the right chance to stick it straight into Todd’s chest. For a moment I thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was better that I just leave well enough alone.
I cleared my throat.
He sat there for a second, still staring at me. I squared myself up and adjusted my feet. Grave, Wild and Craze were still moving around uneasily. I could tell they were about to pounce, but given how the last few thrashings had gone, I figured avoiding any more unneeded violence was for the best.
“You want them dead, is that right?” I asked in the softest, most motherly voice I could manage. “You want to take me and make me some kind of werewolf queen?”
“Sh…She’s getting it now,” Todd was starting to gibber. When he did, I saw a wound on his side. Not a big one, not by any stretch, but it was deep. Someone caught him at some point in their brawl, and he was losing touch. “She’ll know,” he said. “She’ll under… understand! We’re almost finished.”
He had stood up, the wound in his side was seeping a crimson halo into the silver of his fur, and he was just about as crazy as anything I’d ever seen. Looking up at the ceiling, he lifted his hands to his face and started talking to his damn fingers. “We’re almost finished. It’s all coming to an end. Soon, soon, yes soon, we’ll be the only powers in the forest. We’ll have free range to do everything we could ever possibly want.”
Stretching his hands out to me, he lowered his head and stared at me with such menace, such terrifying, single-minded purpose, that I had to swallow to keep my cool. “Come with me, Ade.” His fingers, long and thin and ghostly, began to tremble. “Come with me, leave these bears behind, do what you were always meant to do.”
“Don’t listen to him,” I heard Grave whisper. “He’s messing with your mind. All you were ever meant to do was be ours.”
Wild and Craze gathered on either side of him. “Stay back,” I said. “I have to do this.”
“Oh yes!” he was wildly flailing. “Oh, oh yes! She’s coming with me! All these years, all these plans, all this death and fighting and pain. And finally… she’s mine, she’s mine!”
I reached out and took his shaking hand in mine. “That’s right,” I said. I moved him away from the table, and away from the transceiver that could have sent the whole forest, and all of us with it, sky-fucking-high. “Over here, lover. Or… should I call you mate?”
He threw his head back, a mixture of laughter, coughing, spluttering and choking shook his entire body. “You thought you could fool me,” he said, immediately lowering his head and piercing my soul with his horrible eyes. Without any warning at all, his hand shot out. He clenched my throat, squeezing so tightly and so suddenly that the breath in my lungs didn’t have time to escape.
“Don’t,” he said in a low, dangerous hiss, “even think about it. All I have to do is move these two fingers and your mate is minus a throat.”
I heard footsteps shuffling. My bears were trying to come up with something, I knew they were, but he was so powerful, so immensely, absurdly strong. “Do you know what I’m making? With the smoke and the fires and all the twisted up wolf slaves?” He cracked a smile.
“No,” I squeaked out. “No, I can’t—”
“Breathe?” he tightened his grip. “That’s sort of the point of choking someone.”
Effortlessly, he lifted me off the ground, smiling as I started kicking my feet back and forth like a kid on a swing. “I want to show you something.”
With his free hand, he went to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a syringe. A milky, viscous looking liquid swirled inside as he turned the syringe back and forth. “Any idea what this is?”
“Son of a bitch!” Wild lunged, but Craze caught him just in time. “He’s drugging the wolves!”
“Not only that, little boy,” Todd said in the most demeaning, condescending voice I’d ever heard. “This stuff doesn’t just deaden them. Do you have any idea what it does to someone who can handle it?”
“The hell are you talking about?” Craze talked this time. “Handle it? Some kind of mind control drug?”
Todd’s fingers popped softly as he lightened his grip just enough for me to exhale and take another breath before he tightened it again. “Its only mind control if you’re weak. Want to find out what happens to someone who isn’t? Although…”
He pricked my skin with the tip of the barb. “I’m not sure she can handle it. She might end up braindead like those wolves, those overseers. Maybe I better take it instead.”
“You won’t get away with this, I’ll rip your goddamn guts out.” Craze’s voice was soft and deadly. But I have the feeling that no matter how angry he was, he wasn’t going to overcome Todd’s impossible power.
“Yes I will,” Todd said flatly. “Because with this stuff coursing through my veins, there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Absolutely nothing.”
With a grin on his face that peeled back his lips in a way that looked horribly skull-like, he stuck his tongue out and licked his lips. It was long, tentacle-like and so pale pink it was almost translucent. “Nothing,” he repeated, “can stop me now.”
One of his claws scratched the soft skin under my chin. I felt a warm trickle run down my neck and soak into the tatters of what used to be my shirt. With one smooth motion, Todd lifted the syringe to his neck and shot whatever was in there, straight into his vein.
“Ah!” he closed his eyes, inhaling deeply, relishing the sensation. “Strength,” he whispered. “Strength! Power! Yes!”
His ecstasy was so intense and so complete that for just a moment, he forgot all about me. His iron grip loosened just enough that I was able to turn my body and plant the toe of my foot right square in his crotch.
“I don’t care what you’re on,” I said as he fell to the floor, clutching himself, “that’s gonna hurt.”
No sooner did he crumple to the floor, than he was almost back to his feet. Instead of bemused insanity on his face, there was nothing but seething, red hot rage. The pale pink of his lips pulled back against his long, yellowed teeth was the image of grotesque horror, but I wasn’t budging. I had a plan, and for once in my life, I was going to stick the hell with it. I slid my foot out, and pulled the shaft of my spear back toward me.
I knew what I was doing, and my nerves were steel, but I needed an opening. I needed a distraction.
Somehow, that got across to my mates.
Craze and Wild, both at the exact same time, let out ripping, bellowing cries
and dove around either side of me to grab Todd. He easily slid around both of them, but there was one thing he didn’t think of.
In one smooth motion that I could hardly believe I had made, I bent down, grabbed my spear and slid it straight into his chest. He froze in place, slowly moving both of his lupine hands to the center of his body. “You,” he started and then finished with just a gasp. “But how?”
His mouth fell open and he cocked his head again. Fitting, I thought. “You,” he stammered, “you… stabbed?”
“You want my mates dead, my forest burned to the ground… and for what? To make some mind control drugs and make yourself into some kind of god? Not a chance. Not a chance in hell.”
“But… you loved me,” he said. Drool was running out of his mouth, and his eyes were fading.
Slowly, his face turned human, and then back to lupine. His snout shrank and grew, his teeth elongated and retracted. When it stopped, he was stuck halfway between. Todd reached out to grab me, but I easily moved away and swatted his hand. Then I got good and close, and pushed my axe-spear all the way through. “You tried to kill me,” I said. “You tried to kill my mates, and take away the only thing that makes any sense anymore. You wanted all of them dead, and me to be your queen?”
“It can still,” he spluttered, coughing raggedly. “Still… happen, it—”
“The only thing I want,” I cut him off, so close to his face that I could feel the breath draining out of him in slow, cold torrents. “Is to keep them safe.”
With one final shove, the blade went in to the hilt. He shuddered, he tried once again to reach for me, and then fell still. A moment later, a long, hissing breath escaped his lips, and he fell over forward, his head hitting the desk on his way to the floor.
I stood there, staring at his lifeless body, and trying to catch my breath. It came in hot, fast bursts, but as the seconds ticked by, my heart started to calm. He lay on the floor gawking and jerking around for just a moment before falling still. With one last gasp of movement, he pitched around in an almost full circle, and grabbed for my ankle, falling just short.
He curled his fingers against the floor, shuddered, and breathed his last.
At the same time that Todd let his final breath escape his lips, I exhaled a long, quailing breath, and caught myself just before a tear ran down my cheek. I bit my lip, hard enough to hurt, and waited for the wave of emotion to pass before I looked at anyone else. I couldn’t handle what had happened, although strangely it wasn’t because I’d killed him. I didn’t see it like that, not at all. As far as I’m concerned my ex-boyfriend never existed. I only did what I had to do to protect the ones I loved.
“You… wow,” Craze said. “You’re kinda bad ass.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “I don’t feel like one,” I said softly, still refusing to look at anyone. “I feel like I just did the only thing I could.”
A soft, almost calming beeping sound was made apparent as soon as the rest of the chaos calmed down. “What’s that?” I asked, looking up and catching Grave’s eyes. “We need to get out of here.”
The biggest of my mates shrugged his shoulders and started stalking around the room. “Something’s making that noise. I can’t imagine it’s anything good.”
Craze laughed. “It’s over,” he said as though he didn’t quite believe it. “He’s dead. It’s… it’s over.”
It wasn’t though. I knew it, and I think they knew it too. Those bombs were all still wired, and we were all still stuck in the middle of this building with no real way out. And, after all that, this building was still standing. We had to do something about that. We had to blow up even the last memory of Todd and his attempted reign of terror. “If anyone ever found this place,” I said with my fingertips trembling and my heart thudding in my ears, “this could all happen again.”
To my surprise, Wild was fiddling with the safe on the wall that Todd had been using when we first entered. “I think this is some kind of self-destruct command,” he said. “Looks like it’s a code for the transceiver.”
I grabbed the piece of paper from him. “SELF DESTRUCT CODE: 51828112” it read. “Did you just guess it was a self-destruct command, or did you bother to read the slip of paper?”
“Shut up,” he said with a grin. “I never went to school, you know that.”
“Well, this is all well and good, but we better not trigger this thing before we’re out of here. I don’t want to get caught up in any massive, terrifying conflagrations,” I said.
“I never went to school,” he repeated, smiling in a way that warmed me to the core.
“I don’t want to blow the fuck up,” I said, smiling slightly. “Better?”
“Much. But that doesn’t get us out of here. Unless,” he trailed off in a way that made me think that he was, perhaps, coming up with a plan. Part of me hoped he’d come up with something good, but in the back of my mind I realized that probably wasn’t very realistic.
“How about we blow the place up and then escape while it’s falling down?” Craze asked. The way he was eyeing the transceiver didn’t make me feel very good.
I looked at him for a long moment, just drinking in the beautiful naked man in front of me and also drinking in the fact that he, apparently, is a daredevil with a death wish. “I’m sorry,” I said slowly, “did you just say that your idea is to blow the place up and then get out while it’s falling apart?”
“Got any better ideas?” Wild joined in, siding with craze. “Fact is, that alarm’s going off, there are probably about a million wolves and overseers going crazy out there, and now that boss man is dead, I have the sneaking suspicion the mind control’s going to start wearing off.”
On cue, from outside of the small room where Todd lay dead on the floor, a general din of noise began to rise. There were roars and shrieks and yelps and groans. “Sounds like they’re ripping each other apart,” I said. “We have to do something.”
“And we have absolutely no idea how to get out of here,” Grave added. “The time is almost here for us to…”
His trailing off had a certain gravitas to it. Before I realized what I was thinking, my cheeks flushed red and my nerves began to tingle with electric anticipation. I stared at him for a second, watching his eyes as they slid up and down my body. Finally he shook his head as if to ward off a distraction. “But before that,” he said, “we have to stay alive, and from the sounds of things outside, we don’t have much of a chance if we get caught up in that chaos.”
“I’ve got the buttons right here,” Craze said. “Say the word and we’ll throw the dice.”
“Do we have any choice?” I asked. As though to answer me, something that sounded very much like a body hit the closed office door panel. Shrieking, clawing, gnashing and weeping flooded my ears, and if I needed any convincing before that, afterwards I definitely didn’t.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this. Do we even know how high up we are?”
Grave shook his head.
“That room we found you guys in was up two flights of stairs, so we’ll survive the fall. Assuming, of course,” Craze sighed, “that the ceiling doesn’t collapse on us and crush us to death before the wall cracks or whatever it is we’re hoping happens to get out of here.”
The wailing outside the door was getting louder. “They’re coming in,” I said as a bang and a boom accentuated my guess. “We better get out while we still can.”
Instinctively, I reached for Craze. He grabbed my hand and held it tight. Wild took the other, pressed it to his chest, and stared into my eyes. A moment later, I felt Grave’s hand fall on my shoulders. “Whatever happens,” he whispered, “we have each other.” He kissed the top of my head.
“We do have each other,” I said. “I’d just prefer to be with you and also have all our body parts.”
“Here goes nothing,” Wild said, chuckling as he went to key the code. He was so slow that it reminded me that he’d probably never used a number pad before in his life. It’
s those weird little things that keep bringing me back to the fact that I’ve exited the reality I always knew. Those little hints that keep reminding me that nothing’s the same as it was a month ago.
Then again, all the fear had just ended seconds before. We had just finished a decades long war and we had to get out. If we didn’t, we were dead. Every single one of us would be dead in minutes, sucked into the hell of the spreading chaos swelling around us.
“We’re really doing this, aren’t we?” I asked. “We’re gonna blow this place up and try to get out while it’s falling.” I was announcing all this to myself, more to make up my own mind than to inform anyone else of what was happening. “This is crazy. This is so, so, so goddamn crazy.”
“Oh, live a little,” Craze said. “Five-one-eight,” he said as he punched the buttons. “And… err, what’s this?”
“Enter,” I said. “Push the button with the arrow on it on the keypad there.”
“Oh right, I knew that.”
At first there was no sound, only a brief silence that seemed almost ominous. The stillness haunted me, probably always will, in the few instants before the shaking started. In the back of my mind, I was calculating how the command travelled from the transceiver to wherever it was going. From the handset to the stillness haunted me, probably always will, in the few instants before the shaking.
When the rumbling started, it came so fast it was hard to believe. The floor shook first, and then the walls wept plaster dust. It came out in torrents, in massive, awful clouds that burst out of cracks that opened in the seconds following the blast. All around us, huge crevices split from the floor to the ceiling.
And then the heaving began. The building lurched and pitched all around us, making my stomach churn like I was on a high speed rollercoaster. “I don’t think we’ll be disappointed about the place collapsing. I just hope it doesn’t turn out like—“