“Give it back, you son of a bitch!” Billy shouted.
John pocketed the bills. “You see? Being charitable ain’t so hard.”
Cheeks red with rage, Billy unleashed a spray of spit into John’s face.
Oh crap, I thought. Oh crap, oh crap, oh, crap.
Backing out of range, John calmly lifted the front of his T-shirt and patted his face dry. His stomach was lean and white with a strange network of veins. When he lowered his shirt again, his shaded eyes looked dead. “I’m a nice guy,” he said in a dangerous monotone. “I really am. It’s just every time I turn around, someone else is giving me shit.”
He pulled something from his jacket pocket, but I couldn’t see what.
“Sort of hard to be nice when everyone’s giving you shit, you know?” he said.
When he stepped forward a switchblade popped from his fist, the metal dirtied with dried blood.
Terror detonating through my body, I forced myself to stand. “He didn’t mean it.” But the words couldn’t seem to get past my throat. No one heard me. I tried to swallow, but my saliva had turned to paste. “Stop. He didn’t mean it,” I said with more force but the same result.
“So, fuck you too,” John said, and plunged the blade into my friend’s neck.
The shock kicked me from the dream/memory and into a stifling space. I was lying on the ground, a sleeping pad beneath me. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. I couldn’t seem to open my eyes, but I could hear voices outside.
“…needs to be kept in isolation until he can be medevacked,” Mauli was saying. “I’m the only one who goes in or out of that room.”
“They’re still telling me no rides till 0700 tomorrow morning,” Hotwire said.
“He gonna be all right till then?” Parker asked.
“I’m doing everything I can to bring his fever down,” Mauli said, “but he’s cooking. And his heart rate’s through the roof. I’m pushing IV fluids fast as I can, but his body’s not responding.”
I was vaguely aware of the needle in the crook of my elbow.
Segundo swore. “Centurion has a fleet of helos that could be here in under an hour. Try them again.”
“They’re not responding,” Hotwire said, “and I need to save battery.”
Segundo swore again as I plunged back into sleep.
The witch’s puckered eye sockets were clenching and relaxing in front of me.
“Gurgi Kabud,” she sang through her black lips. “Ha, ha, Gurgi Kabud.”
Shadows stalked over the walls, assuming the forms of wolves, their eyes flashing yellow. Men with sharpened canines and blue hair on their faces filed past. The barks of beasts thundered around us.
“Too late, Captain,” I heard Baine saying. “Bombs away.”
Bombs away, bombs away, bombs away…
The witch reached forward, her thumbnail biting into my cheek. “Gurgi Kabud,” she whispered. My punishment for raining death and destruction on her children. For not protecting them.
As she carved her nail into my skin, her face changed, morphing into the rotting wolf head. The head grew until it loomed over me. I tried to back away but was frozen in place. The wolf’s lower jaw dropped open, wrapping me in its feral breath. Above and below its swollen tongue, a set of razor-sharp teeth glinted in the growing darkness. The air turned impossibly humid.
It’s swallowing me, I realized in horror.
And then the dream began again…
Darkness beyond my lids.
I was on my sleeping pad, head hammering, body burning up. I could hear deep breathing and the rustle of sleeping bags in an adjoining room. Outside the Soviet bunker, I recognized the cadence of Segundo’s boots, the crunch of gravel like bones. Everything seemed so frigging loud.
“Can I have a word?” I heard Mauli saying to him.
“How’s he doing?” Segundo asked in a lowered voice.
“He’s incoherent, calling for someone named Billy and then babbling some foreign-sounding nonsense. I’m doing everything I can, but his vitals are still through the roof. And his head’s starting to swell. That probably means meningitis.”
“Is that bad?” Segundo asked.
Mauli blew out his breath. “We don’t get him airlifted to a hospital, and he won’t last the night.”
Billy lay in a fetal position on the ground. The boys had taken turns drinking the blood from his neck before stalking off, mouths smeared red. They hadn’t said a word to me. Hadn’t even glanced my way when they left. I could hear brush snapping beneath their distant footfalls.
“Billy?” I said, finding my voice finally.
I had watched the whole horrifying show as if from a great distance, not speaking, not moving, willing myself to blend into the trees at my back. Now I dropped my fishing pole and stepped toward him. His face was white—too white—the splash of red freckles across his cheeks an alien constellation. My eyes fell to where he’d been stabbed.
Blood trickled from a pale, puckered gash a couple of inches above his collarbone. I would be told later the blade had severed his jugular artery.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Billy croaked.
I swallowed dryly and nodded as a cicada chorus rose to a feverish pitch around us. “What do I do?” I whispered.
“Go get my dad,” he said.
I ran the two miles back to town, horror-stricken for my friend but at the same time relieved that it wasn’t me back there on the ground, stabbed and drained.
The shame of harboring that relief, of not having done anything to prevent what happened, of allowing my friend to die in the woods that day, would haunt me for years—through high school, military training, every special ops deployment. In a strange way, I felt like an accomplice. A feeling made worse by the fact the teenagers were never caught.
In my feverish sleep, I tried to change that. Instead of racing toward town to get Billy’s dad, I veered in the direction of the killers. They’d had a good head start, but I was tracking their smell, which might as well have been splashed over the brush in red paint.
In my running dreams I usually felt like I was trudging through mud, but now everything was a rushing blur.
Before long, I picked up an exchange of voices. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, the words fast and foreign-sounding, but I had them. My lips stretched from my teeth. I was only vaguely aware that I was running on all fours, muscles pumping over my shoulders and flanks. I was too transfixed by the hunt. And the boys had no idea I was coming for them.
I skidded around a large tree and found them crouched behind a boulder, their backs to me.
But the scene had changed to nighttime, the woods becoming a high, wind-swept desert. And instead of denim and John Deere hats, the three were wearing dark, olive-colored clothes and black turbans. They chattered back and forth in Pashto, the language of the Mujahideen, AK-47s protruding from their grips.
I’d been coiling to pounce, but now I stopped cold.
I’m not dreaming anymore, I realized in horror. This is real.
10
I pawed for my pistol, but it wasn’t at my waist. I was wearing only my camo pants, tan undershirt, and what looked like a dark thermal top underneath. Though my shirt was damp, I wasn’t cold. Instead, the lingering fire of the hunt burned through me. I felt clear-headed, strong. But I was also defenseless and out in the open—regardless of how in the hell I’d ended up here.
One of the men turned, his eyes starting wide. He released a horrified shriek.
I sprang forward without thinking, my hand forming a hook. My fingernails ripped through tissue and cartilage. A spray of hot blood hit me across the cheek. Before the men beside him could get their weapons in position, I slammed one of their heads against the boulder hard enough to feel his skull crack, then buried my face into the other one’s throat.
Terrified cries sounded beneath my thrashing, tearing jaws.
A burst of radio chatter broke the spell. I stood back, dark blood dripping fr
om my hands, the slick, coppery taste filling my mouth. The men lay in a mangled mess at my feet, like the floor of a butcher shop. I looked at my arms. What I’d mistaken for a dark thermal top was matted hair.
The hell?
The hand I ran along my arm was huge, the fingers tipped with razor-sharp claws. I turned the hand over and looked at a palm layered in dark padded flesh. I touched the hand to my face and felt over a jutting, hair-covered jaw. A snout? My nose, which was picking up a riot of smells—blood, metal, desert scrub—seemed to have fused into the blunt muzzle. I felt over both ears now. They’d shifted higher onto my head and were pointed like an animal’s. I opened my jaw and ran my tongue over a serration of sharp teeth and massive canines.
This doesn’t make any fucking sense.
I was standing in a hunch, my arms and legs seeming to have stretched out while thickening with new layers of muscle. My bare feet were long, the toes bent like claws. I felt powerful and agile, like I could run forever.
More radio chatter.
I reached down and lifted the radio from the gore. I didn’t understand the words, but I knew they were coming from another Mujahideen fighter. I peered around, the night clear and vibrant in my vision. I could see for miles. I was on the ridge opposite the Soviet bunker. My men were on the hillock around the bunker, calling my name, spreading into a search. But I couldn’t think about that or whatever was happening to me right now. I had to think like a captain.
The men I had mauled were a scout team. They had been spying on our position, which meant a larger force was nearby. Without heavy weapons or air support, Team 5 was vulnerable—unless I acted.
I scanned the valleys and hills that spread from the dry river valley. We had examined the map of the area the night before, identifying the most likely routes the Mujahideen would take if they were coming up from the south.
My gaze settled on a narrow valley running roughly parallel to ours. When the wind shifted and came up over the rim, I smelled the pungent odor of the men. I caught a whiff of their weapons too—a combination of oily metal and gunpowder. Knowing we were a small unit, they wouldn’t expect a rear assault.
I slung two of the AKs over my left shoulder and looted the men of their spare banana mags, stuffing them into my pants pockets. Despite that my hands were altered, I had a powerful prehensile grip as well as dexterous fingers.
I was turning to leave when I spotted the metal tube of a loaded rocket launcher on the ground beside the boulder. I picked it up by the strap and pulled it over my right shoulder. Fully armed, I ran low to the ground, remaining behind cover as I circled the fighters’ position. My new body seemed to posses its own muscle memory, moving with efficiency and strength. Despite my fifty-pound load, I climbed in and out of craggy ravines with ease.
When I reached the floor of the narrow valley, I could hear the enemy fighters. Their voices were coming from a honeycomb of caves about two hundred yards up the valley. Three fighters formed a small security perimeter around the caves, while a spotter stood on the ridge above them, using a night scope to scan the terrain toward our valley. When he spoke into a radio, I recognized the high voice as belonging to the man who had been trying to contact the scouts.
He’s going to know something’s wrong soon.
Picking out a cluster of boulders across the valley, I pressed the weapons to my sides so they wouldn’t clatter and made a run for it. I crossed the hundred-yard distance in seconds and concealed myself. No shots. No shouts of alarm. The fighters hadn’t seen me.
But I could see them, the nighttime like a light dusk in my enhanced vision. Heat auras radiated around their bodies. I counted about twenty-five of them. The smaller unit the Mujahideen had dispatched the night before had been meant to gauge our force size and strength. Tonight’s attack would be larger and better coordinated. And with my team isolated and outgunned, not to mention distracted by my disappearance, the Mujahideen would have an advantage.
The spotter radioed back and forth with a commander in the caves now. The urgency suggested they were preparing to move. I dug into a pocket for my foam earplugs and stuffed them into my enlarged ear canals. Lifting the rocket launcher to my right shoulder, I checked behind me and then lined up the sights on the cave where the commander was shouting orders. A handful of fighters clustered around him, several kneeling in prayer.
Time to take out the leadership and create some chaos.
I squeezed the trigger, my muscles absorbing the concussive recoil. In a jet of vapor, the missile hit its target, obliterating the commander and his men in a burst of smoke and fire. Flames shot into the adjoining caves and blew dust into the valley in giant plumes. Survivors scrambled for their lives while secondary explosions boomed and the men on security looked wildly about.
Check and check.
I ditched the launcher, raised one of the AK-47s, and picked off the perimeter security with short bursts. By the time I raised the weapon to the spotter, he was out of sight. I’d find him in a minute. In a chattering stream, I emptied the mag’s remaining rounds on the fleeing survivors. Switching AKs, I sprayed the caves, changing out the mags until nothing moved beyond the dust. I emerged from my concealment and stalked toward the caves.
Feeble moans crawled through an air thick with smoke, sand, and gunpowder. I took aim at the sounds and silenced them with single shots. I then slung the AK around my back and climbed past the caves on hands and feet. Nothing moved now. The annihilation was total.
At the place where the spotter had been standing, I found his night scope and radio in the dirt.
Good, probably fled before reporting the attack.
I sniffed around until I picked up a scent sharp with adrenaline and fear. It trailed toward an assemblage of boulders off to my right. I removed my earplugs and listened. I could hear the spotter’s breaths, cycling in and out in a rapid whisper that sounded like praying.
I bounded up the boulders until I was looking down on him. The young fighter couldn’t have been more than fifteen, his face smooth except for a threadbare mustache. He gripped a pistol in his right hand and a string of wooden beads in the other. He had no idea I was right above him. I dropped, tearing the pistol from his grip. He cried out in terror. Aiming the pistol at his head, I backed up so the kid could get an eyeful.
“G-Gurgi Kabud,” he stammered. “Gurgi Kabud!”
They were the same words the old witch had spoken. The boy threw himself prostrate on the ground and began to babble. Though I couldn’t understand him, I got the message. He was begging for his life. A feral urge to tear him apart clawed up inside me, but I forced it back down.
“Go home,” I said in broken Pashto, my voice deep and guttural. “Go back to your village.”
His right ear had been burned, I saw, held to a flame until it was a lumpy mass of flesh—a common Mujahideen punishment. He had probably been recruited when he was just old enough to hold a rifle. He was as much a victim as those the Mujahideen had tortured and murdered.
“Go!” I repeated, jabbing a taloned finger south.
The boy nodded quickly and scrambled to his sandaled feet.
In the next instant, pain seared through my right shoulder. It took a second for the crack of the shot to register. As the pistol I’d been holding thudded to the ground, I spun to find a bloody Mujahideen fighter on his stomach, holding a shaky AK-47 at an awkward angle. He’d slipped from the carnage somehow, and in my struggle to spare the boy from whatever instincts had overtaken me, I hadn’t heard him.
I streaked toward him as he tried to adjust his aim and finished him with a hammering blow that crushed his skull.
I wheeled back around, but the boy had already fled. My muscles tensed to give chase, a part of me already anticipating the hunt, but I reminded myself he was a child, conscripted against his will.
I let him go.
By the time I returned to the ridge that looked across to the former Soviet bunker, eight members of Team 5 were crossing toward me. Havin
g heard the shooting and explosions, they assumed I’d been spotted. They were racing over to engage the enemy before I was captured or killed.
I considered shouting down to them, but I crouched out of sight instead. The priority needed to be tomorrow’s airlift and getting the team safely out. My condition was of secondary concern and would only distract from that objective. I stole another look. The entire team was coming except for Parker and Mauli, who were standing guard at the bunker, and Dan, the junior weapons sergeant, who was covering the advance group from the opposite ridge.
I needed to reach Mauli. As team medic, he could assess me, tell me what was going on. I ran along the ridge, remaining out of sight of the team, until I reached a bend in the dry river valley. I crossed there and scrambled partway up to the opposite ridge where Dan couldn’t spot me from above. I moved swiftly, the pain in my right shoulder diminishing until I could hardly tell it was there.
I reached our hill as the eight-man advance group was climbing to the opposite ridge. I approached Mauli from behind. His M4 was in firing position as he tracked the group with a pair of night-vision goggles. Hunkering behind a clutch of dried brush, I whispered, “Mauli, it’s your captain.”
He spun toward me. “Wolfe?”
“Shh. Go inside and bring me an emergency blanket.”
“What’s going on, sir? Are you all right?” He craned his thick neck for a better view.
“Bring me an emergency blanket,” I repeated in my that’s-an-order voice. “And tell no one I’m here.”
He disappeared into the bunker and reappeared a moment later with one of the foil-like blankets.
“Toss it over.”
When he did, I draped the blanket over my head and shoulders, clutching it at my neck to form a deep hood. With my face concealed, I emerged from the brush in a low crouch to disguise my height.
Blue Curse (Blue Wolf Book 1) Page 7