by Ilsa J. Bick
And that was when she felt a very strange tug.
Tom was … working a zipper? Yes, that’s what it was, and that was fine, it was good; she wanted this and him; she was so hot, burning up. And yet, she was also strangely cold, and why was that?
Suddenly, all these things—the sensations, her thoughts—slid and shifted like a slow dissolve in a movie. Now, there were other hands and a different body on hers. The aroma of wood smoke and musk gave way to shadows and sweet apples as—Chris, that’s Chris—his mouth found hers. The moment was electric, exactly like the morning, months back in Rule, when she and Chris had kissed in the sleigh: mist and darkness and a blaze of desire as their hands twined, and their bodies, too.
Yet there was still something off. She felt the hitch, the way her mind tripped over a detail that did not belong, and then she had it. It was the smell, no longer mist and apples but something fetid and spoiled. Oozy green pus flooded into her mouth. Wait. Choking, she recoiled, her throat working, the muck slithering down her throat, and now she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t …
“Ugh!” Gasping, she slammed back into herself, her consciousness collapsing to a point as she pulled away from the dream, and woke.
Wolf was there, haloed against a stunning, bright blue sky. He wasn’t draped over her body. His hands weren’t tracing her cheeks or the angle of her jaw, and his mouth was most certainly not on hers. But she was flat on her back, not in the snow but on a sleeping bag, and his fingers were working at a snarl of parka trapped in the teeth of a zipper, and he was trying to undress her.
“No!” She gave a spastic little jerk. She tried punching, but her arms were lead pipes, her muscles balky and uncooperative. This was like Leopard, coming for her in the mine and … Wait. Knife. I have Leopard’s knife … Get up, get up! She bolted to a sit. Caught off-guard, Wolf flinched back to sprawl in the snow, dangerously close to a small, crackling fire. Heart sputtering, she slapped awkward fingers along her right leg, clumsy fingers searching for the sheath.
Someone jammed a hand into her right shoulder and slammed her back. Thrashing, she got both hands up before Acne—the boy who had been Ben Stiemke—grabbed her wrists. Pinning her, he let his weight drop with a hard thump that drove the air from her lungs in a grunt. If she’d been thinking, she’d have twisted around for a bite or tucked her knees, but she was so panicked that she reared instead, craning her neck, teeth clashing. He jerked his face out of the way, a little too far, and that was just as good. She felt the pressure on her chest let up, read the bow of his back. Acne was off-balance and she wouldn’t have another chance. Howling, she rammed the point of her knee into his groin.
Acne let out an abortive guh! It was like she’d hit the emergency override. Acne’s eyes went round as headlamps; all the blood fled his face. She didn’t think he was even breathing. Then he crumpled, slumping to one side, hands cupping his crotch, mouth hanging open to let out this weird, choked aaawww.
As soon as his weight left her legs, she bucked him the rest of the way. Awkward as a crab, she scurried off the sleeping bag. Her body was electric, as if all the circuit breakers had been reset, the connections sizzling back to life. Dimly, she heard the clatter of bolts being thrown, the rasp of metal, and knew the others—wherever they were; she was so wild with fear she’d lost track even of Wolf—had drawn their weapons. She didn’t care. Screeching, she scrambled to her feet, Leopard’s knife now in hand, and shouted through terrified tears, “Get away, get away, get away!”
Discounting Acne, now moaning and slobbering on the snow, and Wolf, there were three others: Marley, that lanky kid with the dreads she remembered, and two younger boys, maybe sophomores and obviously brothers. Same pug nose, same piggy little eyes. Both had hair that was either very dark brown or black, and toted Bushmaster ACRs, the business ends pointed her way. The taller brother was the nervous, twitchy type; the minty fizz of his anxiety leaked through his pores. By contrast, his brother was rounder, shorter, calmer, and she thought, Bert and Ernie.
Wolf had made his feet. His expression, which was Chris’s in another life, was taut and intent but not drawn in the predatory snarl he wore right before zeroing in on his next Happy Meal. A second later, she also sussed out that telltale resin pop, the sparking of pine sap from a fire burning too hot, very bright. The air grew weighty as a heavy coat as the Changed did their weird, unknowable Changed-speak mumbo jumbo. Seated in her brain, the monster shifted, nosing up for a sniff as if about to butt into the conversation. Or only land her inside Wolf’s head again, as had happened in the tunnel during the mine’s collapse.
Oh no, you don’t. Her mouth felt crawly, as if there was a busy little spider in there, bustling over her tongue. Had Wolf kissed her? No, no, that was a dream. Or, maybe, that was what Wolf wanted: her and him, together. She could feel a new flare of hysteria as her self-control tried to unravel. It didn’t happen. You didn’t want him, you don’t. It was the monster, it was all the monster. Reaching out to its own kind, the way it had when she was slipping away, slowly suffocating under the snow? She remembered that bizarre moment when her mind had shimmied, stepped away, and how then she’d seen a field of snow and broken trees and rocks …
And a ski pole. My God, that wasn’t the bright light at the end of the tunnel. I was in Wolf’s head again. He was looking for me after the avalanche, trying to figure out where I was under the snow.
That was the only explanation for why she was alive. When she’d passed out for that final time, only minutes from death, the monster had slipped its noose, oiling out in black tendrils. Because like seeks like.
“What do you want from me?” Her voice quaked. Leopard’s knife wobbled, and she clutched with both hands to steady it. She was hunched over, very cold now, trembling uncontrollably. Her hair hung in icy clots, although her parka was … dry? How could that be? Her clothes were still wet. Wait, wait a minute. Her breath hung in her throat. My parka was sopping wet. How can it—
Her gaze drifted to her right arm, and she saw, immediately, why this parka was dry. The color, gunmetal gray, was wrong. It was also too large, the cuff loose around her wrist. The coat puffed out from her chest, and was clearly intended for someone much bigger and more muscular. The parka actually reminded her of Tom’s turtle-neck, the one he’d given her in the Waucamaw after he’d carried her, bleeding, unconscious, and soaked through, back to his camp and then gotten her out of her wet clothes to keep her warm.
Her eyes shot to Wolf, who reeked of sweat and boiled raccoon guts and damp iron. Blood crusted half his face. That rock; she remembered he’d been hit. Now that she was shocked enough to notice, she saw that he wore only a bulky wool sweater over which was knotted a wolf’s skin. From the streaks of amber in the fur, she knew this cowl was new, a replacement for the one Leopard had stolen when Spider took over the pack.
She understood then: Wolf had given up his parka for her. Her grimy white coat, still wet, was spread over rocks, close to the fire.
Only later would she appreciate the huge risk Wolf was taking. The day into which she’d awakened was clear. Judging from the stabs of strong light through trees, it was well into mid-morning, maybe close to noon, and yet the Changed were still awake, still moving. That fact alone—Wolf’s crew pulling their version of an all-nighter—should’ve clued her in on just how desperate they must be, and how dangerous the current situation was. The mine was gone. A lot of Changed and prisoners were dead. Any Changed who’d gotten away or been somewhere in the vicinity would be hungry—and she was fresh meat. Catch her scent, might as well ring the dinner bell. Once Wolf and his crew had pulled her from that icy tomb, they had to make tracks or risk being overwhelmed.
But then Wolf had made them stop and build a fire. He’d stripped her sodden parka and given up his to save her from freezing to death. It was exactly what Tom had done, what Chris would do in the same situation. Wolf was doing his best to keep her alive, and warm.
“Why?” she said
to him. “What do you want from me, Wolf? What do you want?”
She got a partial answer when the Changed got ready to move out and Wolf handed her a green canvas combat medic’s pack.
She’d seen one before. Her dad once stowed something just like it in the trunk of his cruiser because, by definition, all cops were first-responders. His wasn’t all that stuffed: just the barest essentials to keep a smashed-up person from tanking before the EMTs arrived.
This pack was much different, with a gazillion pockets and flaps, and loaded for bear: bandages, gauze, glucose tablets, syringes, scissors, a few dozen packets of antibiotics—even that special QuikClot gauze combat medics used to staunch bleeding PDQ. Kincaid would’ve given his eyeteeth for something like this.
She also knew what the pack meant and now had an inkling about why Wolf had gone to such trouble to rescue her. Wolf knew she had the basics down. After all, he’d eaten part of her shoulder and then seen her dress the wound. True, Wolf might have grown very attached to her, might want her … but for him, she was also a very valuable prisoner: a camp nurse with a skill-set that just might come in handy.
Winters were long in the U.P.; spring was a good month and a half in the future. The days were so bone-chilling that whenever Wolf and his crew weren’t out hunting, they all burrowed deep into their bags and in every stitch of clothing. Alex slept with her boots clamped between her knees and a water bottle tucked against her stomach to keep everything from freezing.
More and more frequently, Wolf and his people also hunted by day, because that’s when the scarce game was out and moving around. (Or maybe the Changed were Changing in other ways. If they grew to own the days … that was bad.) So far away from Rule, there were no more pit stops at the equivalent of a McDonald’s drive-through, no regular game trail or route they followed. This meant no convenient herd to drive from one fun house to the next. So, no more getting down, getting funky, getting laid, getting wasted on a Saturday night.
This also translated into no real possibility of predictable resupply for her either. She sometimes ate when they ate, depending on whether the person they hunted down had a pack. If that poor soul did, she might score jerky or a granola bar or sardines. Once, she even gagged down a tiny foil packet of cat treats that promised to maintain good gum health and scrub away all that nasty tartar: Crunchy outside! Soft inside! Whatever worked.
More often than not, however, she got zip because Wolf came up empty. Then she was reduced to pebbly, desiccated rose hips, withered cattail tubers, dried-up platters of oyster mushrooms. And forget those wildly popular novels where the heroine muses on how raw pine would do in a pinch. Hah. HAH. Drinking turpentine would have been easier. Boiling the mess worked, but she wasn’t prepared for what happened to the water, which turned a bright blood-red. Just oh so appropriate. On the other hand, since rose hips and pine had loads of vitamin C, she wouldn’t die of scurvy.
Oh. Yay.
Something was tracking them, too, and had been for the last week. An animal, although she wasn’t quite sure what. The scent was familiar and yet indescribable, one that made her think both of Ghost, her blue-eyed Weimaraner, and the road to Rule, where she’d seen the wolves and that yellow-eyed alpha male. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a wolf, not quite. She hadn’t spotted it yet, but kept a nervous eye peeled and her nose up. Any animal hungry and desperate enough would look for a chance to take down a person. Or maybe it was only after scraps? Shit out of luck, if true; Wolf’s crew even cracked bones to suck out all the yummy marrow. If anything, one whiff of Wolf’s cowl ought to send this animal running for the hills.
And that was odd, too. Because Wolf did have that wolf skin, yet neither he nor the others showed any awareness of this animal at all. Maybe they were too hungry to care.
Still. Freaked her out. Just one more thing to worry about.
She didn’t know where they were going, or even why. But there was something stuck in Wolf’s craw. It was in his smell, one that said family; that breathed safe in a sweet perfume of lilacs and honeysuckle; that was the scent of her father, ghosting from the haunted attic of her mind: Jump, sweetheart.
So she knew. Wherever they were headed, Wolf had been there already: hiding, healing, biding his time. Waiting for the perfect moment to come back and snatch her.
She supposed she ought to be grateful that she was off the Changed’s takeout menu, and that Wolf let her forage. Given how well they were doing—like, not—his new crew could’ve mutinied, killed him, and then eaten her. The fact that the other kids stuck with Wolf was a mystery, although in tough times, desperate people gravitated to a leader who at least held out hope. From the sparse pickings, she doubted other Changed were doing any better. Tom once said Napoleon figured out that armies marched on their stomachs, and the best leaders were those who not only got right down in the trenches with their men but took care of them first.
Wolf seemed to understand that. Whenever his crew bagged a nice, juicy someone, Wolf always hung back and made sure the others ate first before helping himself to whatever scanty leavings remained. So Wolf must have known just how precarious the situation was.
Which probably explained why, as they slept, Wolf always wedged himself between her and the others, spooning against her back: a proximity that made her throat flutter and her pulse quicken when her skin wasn’t trying to tear itself from her bones.
Now, ten days after pulling a Lady Lazarus, her luck had finally run out. She only had herself to blame. At the time, she was boiling a mess of white pine, daydreaming about food, and plotting murder—and so just wasn’t on her game.
Their current accommodations were miserable: a sad, two-room pile of aging logs and a couple busted windows. The walls were so warped, thin drifts of snow had silted in through the chinks. From the lingering aroma of aluminum and that small mountain of crushed empties in one corner, she suspected the original owner was some guy who came out to get away from it all. A little shooting, a lot of boozing—what’s not to like?
Judging from the rose light spraying an intact west window, it was late afternoon. Out of habit, Alex’s eyes automatically fell to Ellie’s Mickey Mouse watch, still on her wrist: 7:13. Of course, that wasn’t the correct time. For Mickey, it was always thirteen past seven, the moment when the watch finally threw in the towel after all that water. Another minute or so under the snow and she figured she would have, too.
Anyway, call it … five o’clock? Wolf and the others should be back soon, oh goody.
God, I hope he’s got something. An awful thought, but it wasn’t as if getting all broody about it would help whoever Wolf hunted down. Carefully easing Leopard’s knife into a dented camp pot seated over coals in the cabin’s fireplace, she gave her bloodred pine bark stew a stir. She couldn’t live on this stuff. It was famine food, like acorns. Of course, since she was starving, it was better than nothing. Hadn’t she read somewhere that you could fry the bark with olive oil, add a dash of salt? Yeah, the backwoods equivalent of potato chips. At the thought, a ghostly aroma of crunchy fried potatoes, of grease and salt, made her mouth water.
Come on, cut it out. This was the problem with hunger: all you thought about was food. She had to get a grip. Having been here before, she knew she was heading into dangerous territory as her body crept ever closer, day by day, to a very desperate place. Every time she pushed to a stand now, she got dizzy. The pit of her stomach was a continual sharp, beaky gnaw. Sometimes, she thought her monster had migrated down and was trying to eat its way out of her guts.
We’re all starving. She poked at the pine, moving very slowly, all too aware of Acne’s glittery stare and the urgent, raw fog of his hunger and just how closely his Mossberg tracked her. The last thing she needed was for Acne to mistake a sudden move and splatter her brains over a lousy piece of boiled bark. Given how famished he was, he might do it anyway, then beg Wolf’s forgiveness later: Yeah, Boss, I know, bad call. Acne’s hunger had a real reek, too, the gassy aroma of fermenting fruit.
Wonder if I smell the same way. She’d never stopped to think much about that. Probably, to Acne and the others, she smelled like raw steak. Nice southwest rub, juicy and done rare so the fat melts when you take a bite …
“Oh God, what I wouldn’t give for a steak,” she said. (To her left, Acne’s response was a fresh fume of rot and starvation. No surprise.) If only Acne hadn’t been in such a rush to get back indoors. Outside, she’d spotted all that chicken wire and thought, Garden? Somehow those crushed cans argued against it, but it was worth checking out. Man, she would kill for a wrinkly old potato or wizened carrot.
Also near the garden, against a shed, was a weird mound that smelled like a bakery. A compost pile? Could be. Stuff that hadn’t rotted yet, especially with the cold: gnawed melon rinds, leathery apple cores. Half-eaten cobs. Banana peels had potassium. She would take anything she could get. Boil the hell out of it, swallow it back, and not think too hard about it. And what about that rickety shed? People left all kinds of things in drawers or tucked in knapsacks or hanging from hooks and joists, jammed in glove compartments. Petrified granola bars. Candy. Power bars. Those little boxes of raisins and bags of nuts. Just thinking about what she might find made the saliva pool under her tongue.
And there could be other things I might use. Sheds were excellent places to forage for weapons. Anything would do; she wasn’t persnickety. Nails, an old hammer. Rope. Electrical cords. Saw blades. A gun would be best, but shotgun shells would be almost as good. Crack ’em for the powder, make bang-sticks. Something.
Yet she had to be cautious. She had more freedom this time around. Wolf let her forage and keep Leopard’s knife. No way in hell she’d risk losing that. The knife and a flint striker were her only survival tools. Without them, she was as good as dead when and if she managed to make a run for it.