Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  But without breaking eye contact, Notch took a step backward, then another and another. Somewhere there was a gun, and if Alex could find it he could kill the wolf.

  But Notch seemed to know that he would not. He broke the mutual gaze at last, and glanced once, dismissively, at Honeycutt, for a longer time at Christy, and walked out of the clearing. Within seconds he was gone. Invisible.

  * * *

  Christy got to the gun first, and she picked it up and held it on Honeycutt, who was weak, losing blood fast, and didn’t struggle when Alex took the handcuffs from his belt and clamped them over Honeycutt’s wrists. Christy told him which pocket of his belt her husband kept his key in, and sure enough, Honeycutt’s was there. Alex pocketed it and they walked at a quick but manageable pace back toward the vehicles. On the way, Alex scooped up snow and held it to his bloodied forehead.

  When they came to the police SUV and the truck, Alex pointed toward the cabin. “Do you know what that is, Mrs. Deeds?”

  She shrugged. “Looks like somebody’s hunting cabin, I guess.”

  “What about you, Officer Honeycutt? If I went in there, what do you think I’d find?”

  Honeycutt hadn’t said a word. He still didn’t. He tried to look casual, but Alex wasn’t buying it.

  “Keep that gun on him, and keep your distance,” he said. “I’ve got to check it out.”

  “I don’t know if Howie is aware of my husband’s demands or not,” Christy said. “He’s a good husband, and he doesn’t demand a lot. But he does insist that I own a gun, and that I know how to use it. I do.” She smiled. “A whole lot better than you, I guess.”

  “I never claimed to be a marksman,” Alex said. He felt confident that she would keep Honeycutt in line, and he climbed the hill. The snow was maybe slacking off a little, but the sun was nearly gone.

  The cabin door was still padlocked. He pounded on the door, and in response he heard a thumping from inside, and what sounded like a muffled but feminine voice. He dug in the snow until he found a good-sized rock, one he had to hold with two hands, and he smashed it against the lock, again and again.

  He could barely scratch the lock, but the hasp was old and the wood around it older still. Instead of breaking the padlock he tore away at the wood until the hasp fell free and the brand new lock was lost in the snow at his feet.

  He opened the door.

  Inside, Clara Durbin, bound and gagged, was on her feet, trying to get to the doorway. Beyond her were two women, for whom his arrival was far too late. He guessed they were the other two missing women, Marie Hackett and Barb Johnston.

  He stepped forward and took hold of the duct tape over Clara’s mouth and tore it free, and then realized that the other two also had their mouths duct-taped shut.

  And he remembered his dream of the silver-mouthed women, who had looked just like Clara and the other two, none of whom he had known at the time, and he wondered—not for the first time in the past few days—how much he would never know about the world he lived in, how much of what passed for daily life was really magic, thinly disguised, barely sensed.

  And then he laughed, and Clara Durbin looked at him as if he were a crazy man. “Maybe I am,” he said, putting an arm around her back to help her from the cabin. “Maybe I am at that.”

  39

  On the way back through town in the police department’s Tahoe, Alex driving while Christy held the gun on the handcuffed Honeycutt, Clara clearly uncomfortable to be riding in the same vehicle with him, much less in the same seat, they saw plenty of evidence of wolves. The doors of houses hung open and people were in their yards or in the street, draped over vehicles, bloody and torn.

  And they saw wolves.

  They weren’t attacking, not anymore. They were standing in clutches of three or four or six, looking for all the world like they were conferring, discussing what steps to take next.

  Nobody in the vehicle was speaking, not even Honeycutt, who in Alex’s admittedly limited experience rarely shut up. The sights were too awful, too numbing. Alex couldn’t count the dead. He didn’t want to try.

  They were almost to Town Hall when they saw two more department SUVs heading their way. He flashed his lights and got a flash in return, and he stopped in his lane and the front vehicle pulled up alongside. Ortega was at the wheel, with Deeds in the seat beside him and Robbie in back with the mayor. Alex killed the engine and got out at the same time that Robbie did, and she stepped into his arms and he breathed in the scent of her and tangled his fingers in her hair and lost himself in her eyes until she closed them because their lips were together.

  After they broke, she held onto his arm and said, softly, “We’ve been talking.”

  Chief Deeds got out, and the mayor, and they told Alex what they had in mind. There were problems, they said, issues. They told him what those issues were and he understood why they were talking to him about it. Well, that and Robbie would have made them. She would have insisted, but it wouldn’t have taken much arguing. Because he had what they needed.

  It took most of the night, but the wolves didn’t interfere. The snow continued to fall, but the wind dissipated and the snow was soft now, caressing instead of stinging.

  They stopped at every house, even the ones where it was clear that no one still lived. Those they entered, looked around, checked in closets and under beds in case there were survivors. In the end, they found two hundred and eleven, out of what Mayor Stewart said was an official population of five hundred and ninety-two.

  Alex made to each one the offer he had discussed with the others, and when the mayor and the police chief and Robbie weighed in, everybody eventually agreed to it.

  The first blush of pink in the morning sky found Frank Trippi driving his precious snowplow down the mountain, carving a path through snow that was three and four feet deep in places. Behind the plow came a convoy of other vehicles, trucks for the most part, with a few SUVs and passenger cars and a school bus mixed in. Few carried just one person; most, like the snowplow, were packed to capacity with people and pets and things, possessions too precious to leave behind. No one had time to pack completely, but everyone was given a few minutes to grab whatever was most likely to be missed.

  Alex rode in the open back of the snowplow with Robbie, and Morris and Christy Deeds. Robbie and the chief both held rifles and scanned opposite sides of the roadway. Alex’s Lexus followed behind, driven by a waitress who had worked for Belinda Stewart. The mayor was her passenger, along with her three golden retrievers. Officer Ortega drove a department Tahoe with Howie Honeycutt in the back, handcuffed to a D-ring mounted between the seats.

  “This was awfully generous of you,” Robbie said quietly. “You didn’t have to.”

  “I know,” Alex replied. “But I figure it’ll cost about the same as the movie would have. Since I’m not ever gonna finish the movie, why not?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. It’s appreciated, even by those who are too proud to want to accept it. Nobody likes the idea of leaving, and nobody likes the fact that some rich guy can make it so the hit is more emotional than financial. So yeah, they resent it, but they’re grateful at the same time.”

  “Wolf,” Morris Deeds said. This had been an ongoing thing—wolves standing by the side of the road, watching them pass. None had attacked, though, not since around dusk, according to Robbie.

  Not since around the time that Alex had encountered Notch, the time that some unspoken understanding passed between them.

  Deeds didn’t raise his gun, and neither did Robbie. The peace was uneasy but it looked as if it might hold.

  Something else nobody liked—which no one had phrased in quite this way, at least not in Alex’s earshot—was admitting defeat.

  But that’s what they were doing. They were abandoning Silver Gap, leaving it to the wolves, in hopes that it would be enough. In hopes, Alex thought, that whatever force had drawn the wolves together, brought them to this place, made them strike out against humanity, could be halt
ed or reversed.

  Alex would cover resettlement costs for the survivors, because what he could offer was money. He wasn’t good with guns or tracking or building houses, but he had plenty of money and sometimes that had to be good enough.

  He stood next to Robbie, the motion of the snowplow jostling them so that they were always in contact, shoulders or hips or thighs or hands, and he looked at her profile in the morning’s half-light, at the way her straw-colored hair fell across the scar on her cheek, and he thought that something good had come from this ill-fated journey, because if a woman like her could come to love a man like him, then miracles were possible after all. He thought about Christy Deeds and her husband, on the other side of the truck bed, and he thought about the widowed Clara Durbin and Titus Johnston and Alden Stewart and those who hadn’t made it, whose loved ones were trekking down the mountain without them, and that filled him with sorrow, but then he thought about those who had survived and he knew, he knew, that magic infused the world and touched everyone in it. Not all the time, perhaps, but often. Enough.

  He took Robbie’s hand in his and he felt her warmth against him and she graced him with a smile. “It’s been snowing pretty much since you came to town,” she said. “Global warming, my ass.”

  And she laughed, and he joined her, and that simple universal thing, laughter shared between lovers: That was magic, too.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeffrey J. Mariotte has written more than forty novels, including original supernatural thrillers Cold Black Hearts, River Runs Red and Missing White Girl, horror epic The Slab, thriller The Devil’s Bait, and Stoker Award-nominated teen horror series Dark Vengeance. Two of his novels have won the Scribe Award for Best Original Novel, presented by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.

  His nonfiction work includes the true crime book Criminal Minds: Sociopaths, Serial Killers and Other Deviants, as well as official series companions to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. He is also the author of many comic books and graphic novels, including the original Western horror series Desperadoes and the original graphic novel Zombie Cop, some of which have been nominated for Stoker and International Horror Guild awards.

  He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the International Thriller Writers, the Western Writers of America, and the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. With his wife, Maryelizabeth Hart, and partner Terry Gilman, he co-owns Mysterious Galaxy, a bookstore specializing in mystery, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He lives on the Flying M Ranch in the American southwest with his family and pets, in a home filled with books, music, toys, and other examples of American pop culture. Find him online at www.jeffmariotte.com and www.facebook.com/JeffreyJMariotte.

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