Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  37

  Robbie handed him a shotgun and an automatic pistol, and gave him the quickest of reminders on how to use them. He would if he had to, though he held onto hope that it wouldn’t come to that. He looked through the peephole into the store, where there were still several wolves gathered around Conklin’s body. At the same time, Robbie checked the alley behind the shop. “Looks clear this way,” she said.

  “Good, because it isn’t here.”

  “We should head for Town Hall,” she said. “See if the police need any help.” She had tried calling police headquarters a couple of times, even tried the reception desk at Town Hall, and the mayor’s direct number. No answers at any of them, which Alex didn’t interpret as anything good.

  “Okay,” Alex said. He didn’t have any better ideas, since he couldn’t figure out how to put never having come to Silver Gap in the first place into action.

  “So when we go out the door, we go right. At the end of the block we’ll cut over to Main. Unless we see wolves there.”

  “Got it.”

  “I just don’t want to get separated.”

  “Believe me, neither do I.”

  She smiled and quickly kissed him, and then she opened the door.

  Nothing jumped in at them. She looked right, then left, then right again, She had a rifle in her hands and two pistols, one in a coat pocket and the other jammed into her pants. Alex only had the one, in his pocket, since he was certain if he tried the pants trick he would end up shooting his own dick off.

  “Clear,” Robbie said.

  He followed her example, checking both ways before he joined her in the alley. They moved at a quick, steady trot, fast enough to cover ground but not likely to leave them winded, should they need to fight. At the alley’s end, Robbie checked around the corner, again looking in both directions, and she scanned the alley they had just covered. “Looks good,” she whispered. She gave a little nod in the direction of Main Street, and started that way.

  Robbie reached that corner about six paces ahead of Alex. He saw her tense up and drop into a crouch and snap the rifle into place. She squeezed off three quick shots, then raised her left arm and waved Alex back. “Wolves,” she said. “They’ve got some people surrounded. Stay put a minute.”

  Alex wanted to move forward, to play his part. But would he be a help or a bother? If the people were surrounded by wolves, he wouldn’t dare to shoot because he’d be as likely to hit them as the animals.

  She disappeared around the corner. He risked going that far, to make sure she was okay and to see if there was anything he could do. The situation was worse than she had implied. There were three people on the sidewalk, two women and a man. One of the women was sitting down, bleeding heavily from a gash that ran from her right elbow most of the way to her shoulder. Robbie had dropped one of the wolves that ringed them, and wounded another, but there were still four, huge and menacing.

  Alex tried to gauge the distance to the wolves versus his nonexistent skill with a gun, wondering if he should try to shoot one. As if it sensed his gaze, the one closest to him—and therefore to Robbie, who was moving forward, trying to keep the people calm with a steady, soothing patter—whirled around and saw him at the corner. It charged suddenly, racing right past Robbie and coming toward him. At the same moment, the other wolves lunged at the woman on the ground.

  “Alex, run!” Robbie shouted. “Meet me at Town Hall when you can!”

  Alex fired his rifle at the oncoming wolf, but missed. Then he saw a second one emerge from the nearest doorway. Robbie was shooting at the wolves surrounding the people, and couldn’t help.

  So he took her suggestion.

  He was both tired of running from wolves, and getting better at it, however mutually exclusive the two might have been. He figured the best place to go was back to Robbie’s shop, where he could lock and bar the door, and where he would have as much ammo as he could ever need.

  But when he reached the alley, there were two wolves coming toward him from that direction. That changed the plan. Instead of turning, he ran straight across the alley. Robbie’s house was in that block, so maybe he could go there.

  Before he had covered half the block, he knew he’d never make it.

  The rifle was slowing him down, for one thing. He hurled it over his head, hoping that if nothing else it would hit one of his pursuers. Instead, he heard it clatter to the ground.

  Even without it, he just wasn’t fast enough to outdistance them for long. He could hear the huff of the nearest wolf’s breath. He still had the pistol in his pocket, but feared that trying to retrieve and use it would slow him down just enough.

  He made it to the corner, could see Robbie’s house. It seemed so far away.

  Then he saw a truck, idling at the curb, almost right in front of him. Nobody behind the wheel, the door open. It was almost too good to be true, as if the wolves had laid a trap for him. He shifted course and circled around it, heading for that wide-open door.

  It was only when he got to the other side that he saw the driver, half-dragged from the seat, dangling onto the road. Most of his face was gone, his throat torn open, blood everywhere.

  Alex glanced up at the wolves. They had hesitated when they reached the corner, as if concerned there might be danger behind the truck.

  He couldn’t count on that hesitation lasting. He tugged the body from the door, silently apologizing, and dumped it in the road. Then he got in and slammed the door. The wolves sprang then, one of them colliding with the truck and bouncing off, another hanging on for long, terrifying moments, by claws and teeth, before releasing and dropping back to the street.

  He could shoot through the windows, but that would weaken the glass and increase his vulnerability. Instead, he shoved the gearshift into drive and pulled away. The wolves gave chase, like dogs after a car. But the streets were empty, so he floored it and left them behind.

  Robbie had told him to go to Town Hall, and he knew that’s what made sense. That’s where the cops would be, and being around trained people with guns seemed like a good idea.

  But ever since that dream, that flash of one that he’d had in Robbie’s office, he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that the cabin Flannery showed him meant something. And driving that truck away from the wolves, he realized where he had seen it before.

  That first day out with Robbie. That was the cabin they had found when they’d heard the elk in the woods, and weren’t sure at first what was making the noise. It had been padlocked from the outside, he recalled, and the lock had been considerably newer than the cabin around it.

  It hadn’t been too far from town, but it was isolated, and far enough away that people weren’t likely to casually happen across it. He and Robbie had, but their intent had been to get away from civilization.

  He thought he remembered how to get to it. They had found it on foot, but there had been a dirt road leading almost straight to it, and on the way home Robbie had pointed out where that road met the highway.

  The snow made driving in anything but a straight line on a clear path difficult. But the truck had good clearance and its tires seemed to grip the roadway. It couldn’t do anything for visibility, but if he didn’t try to drive too fast he thought he could manage.

  And he thought it was important enough to try.

  He still couldn’t begin to understand what the whole dream business meant, or how Jared Flannery—years after dying in a mining disaster—had directed him to Silver Gap, where his sister was in trouble. But he believed that Clara was the key. She was the reason Jared had come to him. And if that was true, then the cabin had something to do with Clara’s disappearance.

  At any rate, he had to check it out. He had already failed Jared once, in a big way. He couldn’t do it again.

  * * *

  On the way out of town, he saw a few wolves. They looked up at the truck but none bothered to chase him. One group, chowing down on somebody just off the edge of the road, didn’t even b
other to glance his way.

  Whatever Conklin had believed about the number of these hybrid beasts had to have been way off. There must have been hundreds of them. That was unheard of for a wolf pack, according to what Robbie and Conklin had told him.

  What if it wasn’t one pack, though? Conklin had suggested that there might be many such packs, spread out along the highest spine of North America. That was sheer speculation, based on having seen wolves here in Colorado and evidence that might have pointed to others in northern Canada. Could the truth be that there had been multiple populations, but some force, climactic or other, had brought them together? Maybe they were all right here, gathered in the mountains around Silver Gap—and moving lower in elevation all the time.

  He was lost in contemplation and trying to see through the snow so he almost missed the turn. But he saw the dirt road as he was passing it, and managed to brake without losing control of the truck. He backed past it and took the sharp right slowly. The road was thick with snow, but there had been traffic on it recently; the tracks of passing wheels were still visible, the snow not as deep in those depressions.

  He took the road as fast as he dared, feeling the truck’s tires slip on the snowpack. He hadn’t seen any wolves for a while, which he knew didn’t mean they weren’t around. Most people never saw wolves, but that didn’t mean wolves didn’t see them.

  He came over a rise and saw the cabin on the far side of another hill. But between here and there was a police department SUV, stopped and seemingly abandoned at the road’s low point. The passenger door hung open.

  What that was doing here, he couldn’t tell, nor could he interpret how it might affect his mission.

  He pulled up behind the Tahoe, hoping there was a way around it. When he reached it, though, he could see that it blocked so much of the road that he couldn’t pass, and with the snow he was unable to tell if the surrounding ground was safe to drive on. Instead he turned off the truck, which he had come to think of as a gift, a deliverance of some kind, and pocketed the key. Before he got out, he tried his phone, to call Robbie and let her know he was okay, but he had no signal at all.

  He put the phone away and took out the gun. It was a Colt, she had told him. Semiautomatic. Nine-millimeter. A little bit of a kick, but not too bad. Fifteen-round magazine. He knew what the words meant, but that was about it.

  It didn’t feel good in his hand. He put it back in his coat and got out of the truck, and as soon as he did he heard a loud crack, not far away, that over the past few days he had come to recognize conclusively as a gunshot.

  It was off to his right. A snow-covered path snaked through pines, some of them the very same ones he and Robbie had been looking at, their branches red and sparse. Now that he was standing here he saw two sets of footprints cutting through the snow in that direction.

  So a cop was shooting at wolves. That wasn’t a bad thing. He looked back at the cabin up on the hill, surrounded by pines.

  He heard another shot and then he heard a woman scream, and then he decided he needed to check it out after all.

  It was cold and the snow was blowing and the sun, which he hadn’t seen all day, was heading for the horizon. If he was going to find out what was going on, he had to do it fast, and then get back to the cabin. But if the woman who had screamed was Carla, he had to do something. Even if it wasn’t, it sounded like somebody in trouble.

  Alex was no hero. But it looked like he was the closest thing around.

  He pulled the gun from his pocket again and followed the path of the footprints.

  38

  Alex huffed his way up a steep hill. At the top, he started to think this whole escapade was hopeless—by the time he caught up to whoever was out here, he would be out of breath, ready to collapse.

  But then he heard the woman’s voice again, and a man’s. It was familiar, and it was close. He looked down the other side of the hill and there, in a clearing, stood Howie Honeycutt. He held a shotgun and he was pointing it not at a wolf but at a woman, and it took Alex a minute because he had only met her once, hours that seemed like days ago, but it was the police chief’s wife.

  Christy Deeds.

  She was on her knees in the snow, twenty or thirty feet from Honeycutt. Honeycutt was maybe forty yards from Alex, down a hill that was covered in snow, but not enough snow to hide the big rocks studding it.

  No way could he get down the hill in time. And at his range, no way would Honeycutt miss the woman who was kneeling—or praying—before him.

  But Alex had a gun, and his gun had fifteen bullets in it. He didn’t know what was going on here, but he could tell who the bad guy was.

  He started down the hill, trying not to slip. He took a couple of steps and then he stopped and aimed at Honeycutt and squeezed the trigger. Three shots rang out in quick succession, and the gun’s kick was much stronger than he had anticipated. The first shot hit the ground a dozen feet ahead of Honeycutt, and the second sailed well over his head and the third would have been dangerous only to passing avian life.

  He took a few more steps and stopped again. Aimed. Fired.

  Just two shots this time. Closer, but no cigar. By now Honeycutt was staring at him and the woman was halfway to her feet, also staring.

  He took a couple of steps. Stopped. Honeycutt dared to look away from him, back at Christy. She must have looked like she was thinking about running, because he leveled the shotgun at her and Alex could see him pull the trigger, and he pulled it again and again, but nothing happened.

  Alex fired three shots. He was getting closer still, but he had not yet come near enough to his target to seriously threaten Honeycutt’s health.

  Honeycutt had his duty belt on and what looked like a holster with a gun in it, but maybe he had forgotten it, because he glared at the shotgun as if it had betrayed him.

  Alex fired, missed.

  Honeycutt threw the shotgun at him. It twirled end over end but fell well short.

  Alex fired three shots. One came uncomfortably close to Mrs. Deeds. One could have hit Honeycutt if he had weighed about two hundred more pounds. Alex was getting better all the time.

  As if he had finally remembered it, Honeycutt reached for the holster on his hip. If he drew that gun, Alex was dead and so was Christy Deeds. Alex raised the Colt and aimed it and blew out his breath, steadied his right hand with his left, and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun barked and shot flame and danced in his hand, one shot, two, three, and click, and click.

  Honeycutt laughed and drew his gun.

  Alex tried Honeycutt’s stunt, throwing the pistol. It soared through the air, coming closer to the cop than any of the bullets had, but in the end falling into the snow eight feet away from him.

  Honeycutt examined the weapon in his hand as if he had never seen it before. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Christy was still where she had been, and then looked at Alex, and he smiled and raised the gun. He said something, but the wind snatched the words away and Alex couldn’t tell what they were. He raised the weapon and sighted in on Alex and—

  The wolf was only a blur against the snow, a dark streak hurtling through dusk-shrouded air.

  When it stopped, Honeycutt was on the ground and the wolf was standing on his chest. Honeycutt wore a look of utter terror, and blood was spreading into the snow around him, and the wolf’s muzzle was poised above his throat.

  Alex darted forward, and as he did he saw that the wolf’s right ear had a wedge-shaped piece missing from it, and he knew that this was the wolf they had called Notch.

  The wolf—Notch—paused, as if waiting to see what Alex had in mind.

  Alex wondered that himself.

  He had no weapon. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Honeycutt’s gun when the wolf jumped on him, but it wasn’t in sight. And less than a minute ago, he had been trying to kill Honeycutt, and Honeycutt had doubtless intended to kill him.

  But Honeycutt was a human being and, for the moment, he was alive. The
wolf was a savage animal, leader of a pack that had been slaughtering humans.

  Really, there was no contest.

  He reached a high spot above the clearing and he jumped.

  For an instant—less than—he was sailing, soaring, airborne, one with the blowing snow.

  Then he made impact. Fur and fangs and smell, grunting and clawing, the taste of dirt in his mouth and he couldn’t see, it was all too fast. He got an arm looped around the beast’s thick neck and the wolf snapped at him and it was so, so strong. Alex tried to press a knee against its spine, thinking if he could do that and pull on its neck maybe he could break it.

  The wolf writhed and twisted from his grip and batted at him with a paw, cutting his forehead, and almost instantly his eyes filled with blood. He blinked and punched the beast in the nose, hard, and Notch blew out a breath and drew his lips back in a vicious wolfen grin and he was about to bite, about to finish Alex. One bite. One bite would do it, now.

  But the wolf didn’t bite.

  Instead it backed off. Alex was on hands and knees, bleeding, panting, gasping for breath. Eye level with Notch. And Notch was gazing at him with those big, golden eyes, and there was intelligence in that gaze, there was understanding. Notch was no dumb animal, acting on pure instinct. He knew what was going on. He knew what Honeycutt had done and what Alex had done and he knew everything else, about Silver Gap and the people there and he probably knew that Alex was the one who had blown up the rendezvous site.

  He could easily kill Alex. That much was certain; Alex knew it and so did Notch. For a long moment Alex was convinced he was seeing the last thing he would ever see, the wolf, strong and beautiful and deadly, and Christy Deeds behind it and Honeycutt bleeding in the snow, staring at them.