The Fire and the Free City

by Eric Wood

  Behind the soldiers, the yellow eyes began to move, inching slowly forward. Apparently, whatever sort of beastly signal they were waiting for had finally been given. Roach grimaced. About time, furballs.

  "Captain, this is bullshit," said the one who had first advocated killing her. She'd call him Eager. "Ravagers don't travel alone," Eager continued, "if we waste time here arresting this damned thing, her friends will show up and slaughter us all."

  I'm definitely killing Eager first, Roach thought.

  "Stand down, soldier," the captain said, a slight irritation coloring his voice.

  "Sorry, Captain, but I can't do that," Eager said, steadying his aim on Roach. "I'll answer to the boss, but I'm not dying out —"

  A flash of dark fur and the start of a roar like a revving chainsaw was the only indication that the Howler had moved to strike. It barreled into the over-anxious soldier like a clawed, fanged truck, lifting him off his feet and then driving him into the dirt. The soldier's rifle went off as the Howler hit, sending a wild burst of gunfire zipping just past Roach's cheek.

  The clearing erupted into chaos.

  Roach dropped to her belly as the remaining soldiers began to fire wildly around the clearing. The one who had been holding the bright fluorescent lamp dropped it to the ground, where it shattered and plunged the forest into inky darkness. The only things she could see were flashing images, momentary frozen images lit by muzzle flashes. In the uneven light, she watched an especially tall Howler rake a soldier across the face before having its chest filled with a half-clip’s worth of point-blank rifle fire. To her left, a soldier mowed down three Howlers that had just crossed the tree line, and a moment later claws from yet another Howler burst through his back and out his stomach, just below the rib cage.

  Similar encounters were playing out all around her. Roach had to admit, these soldiers were more competent than she would have guessed. She wasn't sure of the Howler-pack's numbers, but the soldiers were both clearly outnumbered and giving better than they were getting, even with two of their group already dead.

  She didn't particularly care who won because either side would all but certainly kill her as soon as their opposition was finished off. She needed to escape. But is that a real solution? she wondered. There were all but certain to be more Howlers out in those trees, and in her current condition, she didn't like her odds against them, blade or no. Besides, as soon as I get to my feet, she thought, it will only take one shot for those soldiers to punch my ticket. I doubt arresting me is still on the table.

  That was when she saw the rifle. The first soldier had dropped it about the same time his throat was being ripped out, and the Howler had unsurprisingly ignored the weapon as it moved on to its next target. If she could get her hands on that gun, she’d have a real chance of living through this. Assuming she could actually make it to the damned thing.

  She took in a quick breath and scrambled to her feet, dashing forward crouched as low as she was able. She heard another bullet pass her head, close enough that it buzzed like an angry hornet. She dove forward, rolling as she hit the ground and coming up just a couple feet from the weapon. She crawled forward and wrapped her fingers around the grip.

  A black-booted foot stomped down on the rifle's barrel before she could lift it. She looked up just in time to see the lead soldier standing over her, raising the butt of his weapon to smash it down into her face.

  Something flared in Roach's chest, but it wasn't fear. I have had just about enough of this, she thought.

  In a moment that was as much instinct as any planned maneuver, she brought her near arm up in a looping backhand motion. It caught the side of the rifle as it descended, and in a flash of her old strength, Roach disdainfully knocked the blow to the side, where it glanced off of her shoulder. In the same motion, she was on her feet, her other hand on the captain's throat. Laughing to herself, exulting in her strength, she straightened her legs and lifted the soldier off his feet. He dropped the rifle and clawed uselessly at the hand wrapped around his neck, a gurgling noise coming from his mouth.

  "You probably should have killed me when you had the chance," Roach said, smiling and squeezing her fingers tighter.

  The captain dropped a hand to his side. I know that move, Roach thought. Still holding him up with a single arm, she caught the captain's knife hand by the wrist before he could jab her in the gut. "Too slow, cap'n," she said, before thrusting her head forward and smashing her forehead into his nose.

  A bestial roar to her left caught her attention before she could finish off the soldier. Another large Howler was coming at her at a full loping sprint. Roach turned and did the only thing that came to mind: She threw the captain's unconscious body as hard as she could, aiming for the beast's face.

  The toss seemed to use up the last of her glorious burst of strength, but it succeeded in knocking the Howler down onto his back. Roach collapsed to one knee as the nausea and dizziness that had been her recent and constant companions came thundering back, along with blinding pain that shot through the muscles of her arms and legs. She clenched her jaws hard enough that she thought her teeth might crack, all thoughts of survival temporarily chased out of her mind by the bone-rattling agony.

  She forced herself back into the present and raised her eyes to take in the evolving battle. She could wallow in the pain later. For now, she had to survive.

  Unfortunately, what she saw was an especially large Howler — probably the pack's leader, staring at her with furious yellow eyes, standing no more than a handful of yards away. She looked around for the rifles and located one a few feet to her left. There is no way I'll get to that before that hairy bastard reaches me and starts biting, Roach thought. She stood and clenched her fists, staring down the beast. Well, I'm sure as hell not going down quietly.

  The Howler charged. It didn't get more than a few steps before a fresh burst of gunfire chewed into its side, spinning the monster sideways as bullets continued punching into it.

  One soldier seemed to have survived. Lucky for me, Roach thought. She bent down and snatched up the rifle at her feet. As the Alpha Howler went down, she swung her sights around to the source of the gunfire and squeezed the trigger. The weapon barked and the final soldier went down. Roach was suddenly surrounded by quiet.

  And I thought that was going to be hard. Roach grinned, then grimaced as a fresh wave of nausea hit her. She bent over and threw up.

  She heard footsteps. A slow crunching of dead leaves, each step sounding all-the-louder in the new silence. She looked up and saw it: one final Howler.

  Well, you asked for it, my furry friend. She raised the rifle, sighted it on the Howler’s crest and squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The clip was empty.

  Crap.

  Roach did the only thing that seemed sensible in that moment. She dropped the useless weapon, turned, and ran.

  Branches whipped against her face and body in the dark. Roach had no idea where she was heading, knowing only that if the Howler caught up to her the odds of seeing dawn were extremely poor. Her eyes were slow to re-adjust to the darkness after the lights and flashes of the firefight, and she bounced off more than one tree as she moved, jarring one shoulder and then another. Still, she kept moving forward, not daring to risk a glance back.

  Fear was an unfamiliar feeling to Roach, and one which she disliked with a particular intensity. She was used to being the hunter, the destroyer, the enemy at the gates: the idea of being prey was equal parts terrifying and infuriating. Again, the desire to turn and stand her ground flashed into her mind, but her heavy, weakened, numb limbs advised her she'd fare poorly in hand-to-hand combat with a Howler. No, flight was her only chance, no matter how distasteful the idea was to her.

  She crested a ridge and began to descend its far side when her foot caught on an exposed tree root, and she fell. Head over tail she rolled down the hill, catching fresh injuries all along the way. Finally, at the bottom of a small hollow, she came to a stop, l
aid out on her back breathing heavily, looking up through the leaves and branches above to the black, starry sky.

  Silence surrounded her. Howlers were excellent hunters, but they weren't Reapers. They could move quietly, but not silently, and especially not at speed over ground covered with layers of dried and crackly leaves. Maybe the beast had decided to stay among the dead, to scavenge or even to feed on the bodies, as they were rumored to do.

  Maybe my luck is finally changing, Roach thought. She sat up slowly, groaning at her numerous fresh bruises, and held her breath, continuing to listen. Nothing. Complete silence, save for an occasional rustling of the leaves of tree limbs high above. She got slowly to her feet, continuing to listen for danger, and that was when she saw it.

  Ahead of her, the forest ended. Beyond that, the sky glowed with a white light reflected down from the clouds above the horizon. Something was out there, over the final low, sloping ridge, and it was something big. Her heart pounded with a mix of excitement and fear. It could be an army, or the base of some western Ravager band, or a city bigger than any she had ever laid eyes on. I need to find out for sure, she thought. I need to —

  A great weight crashed into her from behind, throwing her forward and off her feet. Roach smashed headfirst into a tree, and for a moment everything went dark.

  She came to an instant later, flat on her back, her ears ringing and her vision blurry. What the hell? Her thoughts felt slow and liquid, and it was suddenly very difficult to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few seconds.

  A growling, drooling weight came down on top of her, an oversized clawed hand on each of her shoulders, and the obvious conclusion immediately followed. Of course, that final Howler. It all seemed to make sense then, and her fear returned.

  She threw her hands up in front of her face just as the Howler's jaws snapped down toward her neck. Its fangs cut deeply into the fleshy part of her left forearm.

  Roach screamed in pain, and in a surge of fear, reflex, adrenaline, and rage, punched the Howler in the eye with her other fist. It likely surprised the monster more than harmed it, but the blow did allow Roach to pull her arm free of its jaws. The Howler bit down a second time, again going for Roach's throat, but this time she caught its jaws with her hands, one over the thing’s stubby upper muzzle, the other over its lower jaw.

  If she could get to her blade, maybe she could actually win this fight. Unfortunately, the knife was pinned underneath one of the Howler’s legs. Roach strained against the Howler's jaws as it pushed downward with its immense weight, and she could feel her meager strength beginning to fade. Bright spots started to appear in front of her vision, while at the same time it became dark around the edges. She began, despite her surging fear and fury, to become very tired. Going to sleep sounded like an excellent idea, even if her present circumstance seemed to argue against it.

  Suddenly, the weight vanished as the Howler reared back and moved to rake her across the face with a set of its claws.

  Roach, desperate, reached out to her sides for anything that might help her. In a tremendous bit of luck, one hand found the cool, sharp edges of an apple-sized rock. As the Howler's arm descended with a killing blow, Roach, using the last of her strength, grabbed the rock and wrenched her body to the opposite side. She caught the Howler's arm at the elbow with her injured forearm and, ignoring the flash of burning pain, drove the uneven stone into the side of the beast's head as hard as she could.

  Immediately the Howler went limp. Without a sound, it collapsed bonelessly to the forest floor, a cloud of leaves rising with its impact. Roach, free from the weight of the monster, caught her breath and rose to her knees. She gripped the stone and moved to finish off the now-unconscious Howler. She raised the rock over her head, now feeling even more tired, and mustering what strength she still had tensed to bring it down.

  Roach collapsed before she could deliver the fatal blow. The last thing she remembered before the darkness took her was her head hitting the ground, her face no more than a few inches from the unconscious Howler’s drooling jaws.

  8

  The headache came first.

  Roach swam slowly back to consciousness. Before she could remember what had happened, where she was, or even who she was, the first thing that she experienced was intense, pulsing waves of nauseating pain between her ears. A few heartbeats later memory began to return, and it occurred to her that she might wake up feeling like this for the rest of her life. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant revelation. As she worked up the strength to open her eyes, and to greet the fresh wave of pain that the light of day would bring, she cursed Deacon for the thousandth time.

  She gritted her teeth and got on with it. As she expected, the light stung her eyes and sent the waves of pain up a few notches in intensity. Slowly, her vision focused, and with that, she began to take in her surroundings. She was sitting at the base of a thick, sticky tree, her body half bent-over to the side, which had caused her back to become painfully stiff. Her left wrist burned, and she looked down to find that a ragged chunk had been taken out of it, the wound about half-way between the wrist and the elbow.

  That damned Howler, she thought, remembering the attack, the snapping jaws, and the wet-dog stink of it. At least I gave the beast what it had coming, she thought with a weary chuckle, remembering the feel of the rock in her hand, and the heavy thud as she smashed the thing across the ear.

  The sound of something violently puking shocked her to attention and sent her scrambling for the blade at her belt, which was nowhere to be found.

  The thick, growly retching stopped, and they were followed by an exhausted-sounding series of grunts, all of which was taking place somewhere behind her. She scrambled around the tree trying to get a look at the source of the noise. A few yards away, standing bent over with one hand pressed against a tree was a shaggy-haired man wearing a layered set of furs.

  In a panic, she patted her various pockets, desperately searching first for her treasures, then for the data drive that was, for some reason, so important to her. She let out a relived sigh when she found everything still in its right place. Her next thought was that she was more vulnerable now than she had been since leaving Deacon’s, and her meager possession were all she had left. She couldn’t stand to lose them; not after she had lost everything else. She located a wide, gnarled knothole on the tree beside her and quickly stuffed everything inside, then covered them with a handful of leaves and dirt. She made a mental note of her surroundings—atop the highest of three small hills, a stone outcropping to the west, a dry creek bed to the southwest, and a distinct, half-fallen gigantic elm to the north. She closed her eyes tight and committed these details to memory. She made a mark just below the knothole, something that she would immediately recognize but would be unlikely to be noticed by anyone else, then prayed to all the gods of plunder and destruction that she wouldn’t forget this location. She’d always thought she had a good sense of direction; though since that serum, I don’t know what I have anymore.

  Hearing her movements, the fur-cloaked man turned and looked toward her. Roach tensed, but he didn’t make any further moves. Roach relaxed a bit, but was she was sure to keep ready in case she had to run or fight. Neither of which sounded particularly great right at the moment.

  “It’s about time,” he said, his voice a rumbling, raspy bass. “I was worried you weren’t going to wake up.”

  Roach looked at him, confused, and didn’t speak.

  He turned, and his back now to his tree, slid down to a seated position facing Roach. “Not that I would have been too upset, considering you about bashed my head in with that rock. But if you were dead, I wouldn’t be able to ask you the question that has been running through my mind all morning: What in all the caged hells did you do to me?”

  Roach narrowed her eyes and looked at him a bit more closely. It couldn’t be, could it? His jaw was less pronounced, and despite the long, vaguely-greasy hair and woolly beard he had less hair, and there were no
visible claws… But she had gotten an all-too-close look at him last night, and his face looked far too familiar to dismiss the possibility out of hand. She thought about what had happened to her after she’d been given Deacon’s mystery serum. She couldn’t deny that she was far more human than Ravager today. She thought about the itchy, irritated wound on her arm, and she noticed the red stain around the man’s mouth. It would be a bizarre lie to tell, she thought. But wait a minute—

  “You can speak?” Roach said. For some reason, the possibility of this young man—and despite the beard, he was young, he couldn’t have been more than 20 winters— speaking actual words seemed far stranger than the possibility that her blood had made a Howler into a human.

  He laughed. “Why would you assume we can’t, Ravager? We may be the Wild, but we’re far more civilized than you.”

  Roach grabbed a small stone from beside her and hurled it at him, as hard as she could. He turned his head away, and the rock bounced harmlessly off the tree behind him.

  “Case in point,” He said, smiling a slightly-queasy smile.

  Asshole. “Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr. Wild,” Roach said. “You’re not looking terribly Howler-y this morning. In case you haven’t noticed. And if what I think happened really did happen to you, I would start getting used to the whole puking thing.”

  “So you do know what is going on,” the not-Howler said. “Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Let’s just say you might need to start thinking about investing in some more clothes if you don’t like getting cold at night.”

  He rubbed his arm, which now looked like it belonged to a quite-hairy man rather than a bear or a wolf. “I do feel kind of naked right now. It’s…disconcerting. I assume you’re telling me that whatever it is you did to me, it’s permanent.”

  Roach scoffed. “Hey, I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t chase you down, and I didn’t bite a mouthful of meat off of you.”