by Tad Williams
“No more guards…” he wheezed. “But you’ll die anyway…”
“Where are the civilians?” I gave it a little push, just like pressing down the accelerator pedal, and watched tears jump unbidden into his eyes. I wondered how often that had happened -- Doctor Uberhardt didn’t seem like the sentimental sort. “Where are the woman and the child?”
“Upstairs. Door… off… kitchen…” he said, then to my amazement, he smiled, bloody mouth and a couple of broken teeth and all. He looked so unfazed I half-expected him to spit out a couple of shotgun pellets, like Superman. “You’re dead, angel.”
“Yeah. Tell me something new.” I briefly contemplated simply blowing the doctor’s head off with the remaining shotgun shell, but I didn’t know how difficult it was going to be to get into the downstairs lab or whatever was down there: I might need some additional information out of him. Besides, Uberhardt might have been lying when he said there no other guards, in which case saving my buckshot would be a smart idea.
I had no idea what time it was, either, but knew I needed to get moving. My guns were lost somewhere in the house, but I had Henry’s sawed-off Remington, and also his big old knife, which I’d lifted from his belt because, let’s face it, he wasn’t going to be doing any whittling any time soon. I slid the blade into my belt and decided to take the doctor’s walking stick as well. Nice to have a non-lethal option when dealing with quite possibly innocent women and kids.
The kitchen was just as bizarrely normal as everything else I’d seen, smelling of gingerbread and cinnamon. There was no one on the stairs, and no noise from below, but I went up with the shotgun pointing ahead of me and the safety off. I wished I had the assault rifle Henry had been carrying earlier, but I didn’t have time to look for it.
The hallway at the top of the stairs had several rooms, all empty, but one door near the back was locked. I flicked the shotgun safety on so I didn’t accidentally blow my own head off, then backed up a couple of steps, lowered my shoulder, and smashed the bolt right out of the doorframe. I didn’t have much time to take in details -- a carpeted room, a beautiful view down the tree-covered hillside beyond the single window. There were toys all over the floor, a desk, a television, and a low table with the remains of a meal on it. Two figures sat huddled on a couch, a fair-haired young woman and a dark-haired boy of about seven or eight years old. Then a second woman stepped toward me from behind the door where she had been hiding. She was aiming a pistol at me.
“Go away! Get out of here or I’ll shoot!” She was an attractive, well-dressed older gal who looked like she could have been dean of a small university. She was trying to sound convincingly dangerous, but it was pretty clear from the one-handed way she was waving the revolver that she didn’t use guns very often.
I lowered the shotgun and saw her relax a little. “Obviously there’s been a mistake, ma’am,” I said in my calmest voice. I took a step toward her, gun held high so she could see I wasn’t pointing it at anything, then I knocked the pistol out of her hand with the walking stick. She just stood there, squeezing her now sore hand and looking scared and unhappy. “Now who the hell are you?” I asked. “Uberhardt’s daughter?”
She shook her head and pointed at the blonde woman on the couch. “She is. I’m… I’m just the governess.”
“Then lie down on the rug, Ms. Poppins, and put your hands behind your head.” As the older woman hurried to obey me, I swiveled the shotgun toward the room’s other occupants, but then thought better of it. The younger woman squeezed up against the end of the couch had ratty hair that hadn’t been brushed in a while. Her dress was plain and sacklike, something you’d expect to see on a patient in long-term care, not the pampered daughter of a wealthy man. She stared at me, the small boy held tight against her breast. “You,” I demanded. “What’s your name?”
Her blue eyes, big to begin with, got bigger. She looked from the woman on the floor to me, to the shotgun. “Maria,” she said in a small, childlike voice.
“Right, Maria. Are you Doctor Uberhardt’s daughter?” She nodded. “And is that child your son?”
She looked down quickly, as though to make sure she was still holding the same child, then nodded again. “He’s named Fritz.”
“Oh, of course he is. What’s your father running here, a stock company of The Nutcracker? And who is Fritz’s father, Maria?” She looked at me blankly, but I thought there must be something else going on behind those large, pale, sky-colored eyes. “Come on! Who’s the father?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Time was definitely being wasted here. If nothing else, it was going to be dawn soon, and then my friend George was going to be man-body, pig-brain and not much use to me at all. “Okay, enough chat. I need all three of you to get up and walk out of here with me. Carry the boy if you want, but get moving. Now.”
“Where is my papa?” the young woman asked.
“He’s not coming on this trip. You and your son are.” I looked down at the governess, who was trying very hard not to move or look up. “Nanny, you’re coming along too -- we’ll work all the details out later. Now come on!”
“No!” Maria’s voice turned stubborn. “Papa said to go in the room and stay if anything happened. We’re in the room. We have to stay.”
“Papa was wrong. Please, stand up. I can’t carry all of you.”
“No!” Maria said loudly. “Papa said stay!”
I was beginning to think there was something seriously wrong with Uberhardt’s daughter. I reached out to take her arm. “Look, I don’t care what …”
“No! No!” Her voice became a shriek as she jerked away from me, her hair in looping tangles over her face like a golden fishnet. “You’re spoiling Christmas!” And then she changed.
Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, weirder than watching George go pig to man or man to pig. Because unlike George, who’s usually half-buried in mud, it all happened in front of me, like a scientific experiment in good light, and I still couldn’t figure out what was happening. Because Maria Uberhardt just…shifted. Like she was going in and out of focus, but nothing else around her did. And all the changing seemed to happen right where I wasn’t looking. It was like watching a nature documentary while peaking on acid.
Bam -- a bright, yellow eye. Shadows sliding. Teeth. A sudden jagged edge of white fur sticking up like dune grass on a crest. Skin sliding into hair. The whole mass of woman-shape wriggling like a butterfly trying to get out of its chrysalis, then bam, bam, bam -- legs with claws at the end, a mouth open in a red and white snarl, a growl like someone dragging a tire iron down the slats of a picket fence.
Down on the floor, the governess was screaming into the carpet like her mind had snapped. At the other end of the couch, the little boy’s eyes were wide, but nowhere near as wide as they should have been, because his mama had just turned into a shaggy white wolf right in front of all of us. Which meant the boy had probably seen this before.
It wasn’t a full-moon night, either, I suddenly realized: we were still in the dark hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and the moon had been only a sliver. She’d changed because she wanted to change.
She leaped. I should have fired, although even the buckshot in the sawed off shottie probably wouldn’t have done any good, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t just that she was female: I’ve faced women-shaped things before and had no trouble pulling the trigger. It was the childishness I’d seen in her eyes while they were still human, the confusion and fear that all but shouted “victim”. Maria Uberhardt was not in her right mind.
Which of course just made things worse. It’s bad enough trying to prevent a fanged, two hundred pound monster from killing you without a head full of sentimental crap stopping you from trying to kill it right back.
So all of a sudden I was on my back under a lot of snarling woman-wolf, struggling to keep my face attached to the front of my skull. I think I would have been okay in more normal circumstances: I’m an angel,
after all, and I’m trained to fight. I think I could kill a big wolf with my hands if I had to, but I sure couldn’t do the same with a mentally ill woman.
As we rolled across the floor I managed to grab Maria by the ears and smack her head hard against a table leg, but it didn’t seem to hurt her at all. From the corner of my eye, I saw the governess scramble to her feet and make a run for the door. She left the kid behind -- hey, way to do your job, childcare professional! -- but there wasn’t much I could do about it. The boy was still watching, his face more curious than frightened.
Oh, crap, I remember thinking, has the kid already reached the werewolfing stage too? Is he old enough? Because Jochen Uberhardt had looked at least three or four decades younger than his calendar age, and I had no idea how old his daughter actually was, just that she looked no more than thirty. Who could guess? But I sure didn’t need a mother- and son-wolf tag team playing gang-pile-on-Bobby.
I rolled her off me for a moment, then grabbed the coffee table and dragged it with me as I scrambled away, dumping crockery and food everywhere as I backed toward the window. The table was almost as long as I was tall, so I pulled it upright, legs outward, to use as a shield to keep Maria’s snapping jaws away from my neck and face. Her son was still watching us fight, but he seemed oddly detached, as though we were nothing more than some tense and exciting playoff game. It wasn’t exactly clear which team he was rooting for, either, which was another kind of weird -- no “Look out, Mommy!”, no “Get that evil man, Mother dear!”, just that expression of worried consideration on his little face, like a card player with a less than great hand. Then he tilted his head like he was listening to something, and suddenly called out in a high, worried voice, a word that sounded like “Hopa!” or “Opa!”
I didn’t have time to wonder about it, though, because just that moment the white wolf tried to climb up the coffee table I was holding, using the table legs to scramble over it so she could bite my head off. Her sudden weight made it too much for me to hold, and I stumbled backward with the weight of the table and the wolf pressing down on me. If that already blood-reddened muzzle hadn’t been snapping right at my face, I might have realized I was backing toward the room’s big window. Lucky for me, I slipped on a toy or something and fell over backward. Unluckily for Maria, she and the table went straight into the window, shattering the glass, and out into the cold, pre-dawn air. It seemed like long seconds before I heard the impact.
I crawled to the window and looked down to the distant cement patio. The furry white body lay twisted, broken, and bleeding from the mouth amid the splintered ruins of the table.
I turned back in time to see the boy standing up on the couch now, backed into the corner where two walls met. Something was banging and thumping down the hallway outside.
This time he looked right at me and said that word again -- “Opa. Opa’s coming.” I guessed it was the German word for “grandfather” only about half a second before the huge, gray thing shouldered its way into the small room.
“Well, shit,” was my weary summation.
Not so much like an ordinary wolf, this one. Uberhardt had changed over all those years into something not quite wolf or man, something big and hairy that stood on two legs. A ragged corpse in a dark, tasteful woman’s business suit lay in the hallway behind him -- what was left of the governess. I hadn’t been planning to apply for a job here anyway, but the severance package clearly left something to be desired.
Uberhardt in his were-form was about a foot taller than me, covered in coarse gray fur ticked with black. The eyes were like little orange jack-o-lanterns, ablaze with light, but the wolf-face was more human than the daughter’s, which only made it more horrifying. This was a monster that had haunted people’s myths and stories since history began in the darkness of the past. It might have been a mortal man, once, much like any other, but hatred and heedlessness and unspeakable, selfish greed had created something as close to pure evil as I’d ever seen.
I backed away, shotgun in one hand and club in the other. I had not the slightest doubt that I was in very, very bad trouble. Uberhardt-as-man was almost a hundred years old, but the were-Uberhardt looked to be in the peak of health and vigor. The hands were not just paws, but had separate blunt fingers, each ending with a hooked, razor-sharp claw. The head was the size of a holiday turkey, and jutted from shoulders nearly twice as wide as mine. And under the stinking, wiry fur I could see hard pit-bull muscles flexing. If the daughter had weighed a couple of hundred pounds, this monster was at least twice that, and I was already exhausted.
The beast looked at the broken window.
“Scheiss,” it said. “So you have killed her, then, poor thing.” I wouldn’t have guessed it could speak so clearly past all those teeth. “Gott sei Dank, I have still have the boy -- otherwise I would have to start over. As it is, you have nearly destroyed my family and my work.”
“Your family? What about Petar Vesić? You kidnapped and murdered his grandson, and murdered his daughter and her husband? What do you mean, your family?” The sawed off shotgun was still shiny with Maria’s wolf spit, but was also still loaded with its single shell. I leveled the shortened barrel toward him.
The fiery eyes flicked toward the gun, then back to me. A smile curled the not-quite-animal mouth. “You do realize you might as well throw popped corn at me, angel? This body is already dissolving the lead pellets that nearly killed my human form. Even high-velocity bullets barely wound me.”
He sure acted like he was telling the truth. Not that I was going to throw my only gun away, but it meant my self-defense options were probably down to running or begging for my life. I wondered if I could maneuver him away from the door, then get through it before he tore out my spine.
“What about the boy here?” I asked, hoping to distract him while I sidled a discreet bit to one side. But when I moved, Uberhardt moved a little also, like a canny old tennis pro playing against a younger opponent. “Young Fritz. Is he Vesic’s great-grandson?”
A chuffing bark from deep in the monster’s throat -- a laugh. “In a sense, yes. Even God used the clay of the earth to make His creatures. But it does not matter. In all the important ways, he is mine.”
“If you’re leading up to explaining why you raped your own daughter for science, I think I’ll just blow my own head off now with this shotgun, thanks.”
“Fool.” But Uberhardt didn’t seem outraged. “There was no need for such unscientific Verrücktheit. It was merely a matter of DNA splicing and epigenetic programming. Others are learning to do it now, but when I began so many years ago…!”
“Let me guess.” My finger was sweaty on the shotgun trigger. “They called you mad.”
He smiled. Yes, the wolf-thing smiled. It was extremely disturbing watching a mouth not meant for it twisting that way. “No, they called me a liar. And of course I could not show them my results, because of the pointless demonization of human experimentation.”
He had barely moved, but I was cut off from making a break from the door. I had no choice except to keep stalling, but Uberhardt had said something that caught my attention. “Hold on, you said ‘DNA splicing’. You took DNA from Vesic’s grandson?”
“Among other things.” That laugh again. I really, really wished I had something better than buckshot. A silver-throwing bazooka, maybe.
“But you can get DNA from a cigarette butt these days -- a discarded soda can! Why did you have to kidnap him?”
“Because I didn’t need his genetic information when he was human, foolish angel. I needed it after he’d changed. But come, I know you are trying to delay me. You cannot hope to understand what I have done -- not a hundred men in the world could manage that. See the boy? See my grandson? He is what I have created. A lycanthrope like me, but capable of passing along the trait with his own genes alone, no matter who the mother might be. Do you see? My bloodline will live forever. That posterity is far superior than a family name or a fortune or some piece of land. Where the
Nazis failed, with their childish love of uniforms and marching and their obsession with racial purity, my descendants will forge a true thousand-year Reich. They will be the Wulfenvolk, and the rest of mankind will be their cattle.”
Oh my sweet Lord, the crazy was thick in there, but despite the copious villain-speak, Uberhardt wasn’t completely caught up in his own words. He had already shortened the distance between us.
“So that’s your loving gift to your grandson, is it -- you’ve made his grandfather’s insanity genetic? What do you think God is going to think about that?”
“God?” Uberhardt laughed. A little froth gathered at the corner of his jaw. “When I die, long years from now, I am sure God will respect me as an equal. After all, I have done nothing He has not already done. The strong will continue to rule the meek until the End of Days, whatever nonsense that charlatan of Nazareth might claim. But now the strong will be my descendants…”
Without any change in tone, he lunged. I was ready for it but he still nearly caught me, sweeping at my legs with his long, hairy arm. I knew if I hit the floor for more than a second he’d be on top of me, pinning me down while he shredded my throat, so I did my best to roll and then bounce up into a crouch. As soon as my feet were under me, I made a ridiculously unlikely attempt to vault right over him. He’d anticipated me, though, and his reflexes were at least as fast as mine; his yellow teeth snapped and caught my pants cuff. It tore away, but the contact also pulled me sideways so that I crashed against the edge of the bed, knocking Uberhardt’s grandson onto the floor.
A moment later Doctor Wolfbreath was on top of me, just as I feared, although somehow I had managed to hold onto the shotgun. I had a split-second choice between trying to get my arm free for one blast from the shotgun (that I seriously doubted would cause him any permanent damage) or doing something else; I chose the something else, and shoved the butt of the Remington sideways between his teeth to keep them from closing on my face. It was only a moment’s respite. His weight was already crushing the breath out of me, my muscles were nearly limp with fatigue, my lungs squeezed flat inside my chest.