The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  Be very, very careful, Mallory had told him. They may want your skin, or your heart, or your head. Or they may want all of you. So be very, very careful. But not more than a month later, it was Mallory who had not been careful enough. Missing for more than a week, he was found in the trunk of an abandoned taxi in an East London junkyard with his throat cut and his eyes gouged out. Valentine Vivian hired a small army of bodyguards and went on an author’s tour of America, his author’s name being Evelyn Tedford, and Cordwainer the new boy bought an attack dog to patrol his recently-acquired electric fence.

  Had something moved, or not?

  Michael got still. He heard the owl hooting again, and another answering. It came to him that just possibly they were not owls after all.

  The night hung on the edge of violence.

  There was this hero thing, Michael had often thought in less troubled times. This concept of the man of action. After all this time, he realized Rolfe Gantt had been right.

  Everyone loved the hero, but the hero walked alone. It was the nature of the hero, to be solitary. To live life on his own terms, and in his own time. To be neither rushed nor to rush toward oblivion, yet oblivion would claim the hero just as it claimed every ordinary man. And love? Ah, that. Love. What woman was it who could truly love the hero? Oh, they might wish to brush against the heroic flesh, or to have some fling in the heroic bed and make for themselves some memory of a heroic night, but love? No. When the chips were down and the night was cold, it was the ordinary man who won the heart. The man of meat-and-potatoes, the man who stayed fixed in place, the man who saw his destiny and future in a family, the man to whom wife and daughter or son transformed life into a hero’s dream.

  But such was not to be, for a hunter from the woods.

  The death of a hunter loomed large in Michael’s mind on this night, as it did on many nights. He was old and he was tired. He was hurting and he was slow. What was ahead for this hunter, who had already given everything? There was only one thing left to give: his life, in exchange for transfiguration from what was to what will be, as the lark ascends into the heavens and the last soft note fades slowly out.

  But it was not a soft note he suddenly heard, that made his wolf-bones jump and his green eyes widen.

  It was an explosion that cracked across the forest and echoed from every rock in the meadow of Four Brothers.

  It was, he realized, the sound of his house being destroyed.

  Several explosions followed the first. He saw the leap of fire through the trees and smelled the bitter tang of gunpowder in the concussive wind. They had blown his church to pieces so he might not find sanctuary there. They wanted him out in the open. They wanted him to know fear, because they moved as silently and swiftly as any wolves in the dark.

  And then a shadow shifted before him, very near, and the black arrow from the black bow fired by the ninja in black came at him with a serpent’s hiss.

  Even as he twisted his body to escape, Michael Gallatin knew the arrow would find its mark.

  It did. It hit him on the right side. Its soft plastic tip, about the size of a ripe fig, burst open on contact. It splashed and streaked his gray hair with the bright green glow of chemical phosphorescence. He was well and truly marked.

  The ninja moved again, in a blur. A gloved hand opened and closed.

  A net of some fine and pliable metal caught moonlight as it bloomed in the air. It sailed toward the lycanthrope, expanding as it came.

  Michael saw the fallen tree to his left and the narrow space between it and the earth. He flung himself into the opening, his claws digging into the ground for traction.

  The net hit the tree above him, snagged on its stubs of dead branches, and the wolf pulled in his breath to flatten his ribcage and scrabbled under the trunk. Then he quickly turned to face his attacker. With a running start he took a powerful leap, pushed off with his hind legs against the treetrunk and fell upon the ninja.

  It was not to be so simple. The ninja retreated. With incredible speed that turned the wolf’s leap into a slow-motion exercise, the assassin threw up a roundhouse kick that got Michael in the belly. As the wolf’s body twisted again, this time in pain, the ninja got his balance and drove a rock-knuckled fist into the center of the chest. He was gone as Michael crashed into the underbrush.

  Michael drew a wounded breath and righted himself. He saw the ninja moving through the foliage on his left. With an instant’s pause to calculate distance and speed he took off in pursuit.

  The ninja was fast and he was nimble, but this was the wolf’s world.

  Michael caught the killer’s right ankle between his teeth and crushed it. The ninja suffered in silence, but would not go down; he gave a one-legged leap toward the nearest tree and began to climb it, using what Michael thought must be small metal pitons embedded in his bootsoles. Michael leaped up, caught the man’s left ankle and dragged him down. The ninja whirled around and like a cornered animal fought with everything he had: fists to the skull, a knee to the muzzle, stiffened fingers thrusting toward the eyes and the edge of the hand chopping for the throat. They did their deadly dance in silence, as flames crackled from the werewolf’s church and red sparks whirled to heaven.

  Michael took a blow to the side of the head that made him whuff with pain. He dodged a strike meant to blind him. Then in a split-second calculation his animal instinct determined where the fist would be next and his jaws were there waiting for it. He crunched the fingers and torn human flesh to shreds. Blood sprayed into the air. The ninja gave a quiet noise not unlike a sigh of resignation. His remaining hand came at Michael with a slim-bladed knife in it and plunged the blade into the wolf’s left shoulder.

  But Michael had his bloodlust at full charge now and the sharp bite of Japanese steel would not turn him aside. When the ninja withdrew the knife to strike again, the wolf gripped his arm at the elbow and with a ferocious thrash broke the bones and nearly tore the limb from its socket. The knife flew away from dead fingers. Michael seized the throat and ripped it open from ear-to-ear. A glistening black flood washed over his muzzle. Then something gave a small pop on the ground next to him and smoke welled up into his face. His eyes stung. He smelled an odor of bitter almonds. His lungs hitched and his heart was racing. He held his breath, even as the second gas grenade exploded behind him. A second ninja had joined the battle.

  Michael let the first one slither to the earth and then he turned and ran. At full speed, or whatever speed he could manage. A third grenade popped to his right, spewing a noxious cloud. He squeezed his eyes shut and ran blindly. Even a half-breath of the stuff was strong enough to nearly knock him senseless. He thought this was how they must have subdued his companion, then slashed the throat and taken the eyes. Maybe the gas had worked its will on Mallory, too. He began to feel his usually innate sense of direction betraying him; where was he, and where was he going? He crashed through a thicket and fell through thorns and down an embankment into a hollow where a pool of water smelled green. He plunged his head into the pool and opened his eyes to wash them out. Then he shook his head to clear it as best he could and lapped up water with a tongue that felt burned.

  He stood breathing hard through swollen lungs, his heart pounding. He saw the woods through a drugged mist. When he tried to move, he staggered. Wait, he told himself. He kept breathing, deeply and slowly. Maybe he could get his heartbeat regulated. He listened to the night and for the things that stalked in the night. How many ninjas there were, he had no way of knowing. He was going to have to get out of this hollow before they found him here, dazed and confused. And go where? he asked himself.

  There was only one answer.

  Go back to what had taken him to Octavius Zloy’s trailer in the dead of night. Go back to what had brought him out of the ruined church in the Russian village, when he’d seen Valentine Vivian being carried away by men with guns. Go back to what had made him ask Paul Wesshauser if he could make a torpedo. Go back to facing Rolfe Gantt’s pistol and sayin
g he would let no man tell him what to do on the last day of his life. Go back to telling the Gestapo’s Ice Man to take his hand off Franziska Luxe’s arm.

  Go back to being a man, even if he wore a wolf’s clothing. Go back to the fight.

  Always, always…go back to the fight.

  Michael Gallatin climbed up the embankment, pushed through the thorns and the thicket, and he was very much aware that his phosphorescent glow would bring them coming now, at any minute.

  He was ready to kill, and he was ready to die. But he would go out as he had lived, and no fear would cripple his cause.

  A wind moved through the trees. It stirred the new leaves on the old branches.

  It was the zenith of summer, and looking up at the scythe of the moon Michael opened his mouth and howled for what life had meant to him. For the joy of it, and yes for the sorrows too. All were important, in the grand scheme of things. He had not chosen this path. It had chosen him. But he thought—he hoped—he had walked it well and with honor, as both wolf and man.

  They fell upon him from the dark.

  There were two. One whirled a chain around Michael’s throat and tightened it so hard the blood thundered in his head. The second had a baton in one hand and a net in the other, and Michael realized they meant not to kill him but to trap him. To take him on a drugged journey and place him before the Family of the Silver Thread, whose scientists would like to know what little boys who became wolves were made of.

  Michael turned toward his attackers. With a snarl and show of fangs that would have dropped any ordinary man to his knees, Michael first lunged toward the ninja who chained him. He got a kick to the muzzle from a man who was as quick as a cobra, but Michael was not stopped nor was he slowed. He hit the ninja with all the power he had and slammed the man’s back against a tree. Then lifting up on his hind legs and pinning the ninja with his forepaws he tore into the masked face as one would scoop the flesh from an exotic fruit. He saw the wet terror in the man’s eyes as fangs tore meat and muscle away from bone, and in a frenzy of killing Michael shivered to his animal core.

  He enjoyed it.

  The chain loosened. Michael pulled it free from the ninja’s hand. The thing in front of him had no lower jaw but it was trying to scream. Something stabbed him on the left side. In the next instant he was lifted off his hind legs and thrown to the ground and he smelled the ozone of the electric shock after the searing pain had ripped through him. He struggled up to his knees, his muzzle dripping blood and his eyes full of red fire. He realized he was connected on the right side by a pair of wires to the baton in the remaining ninja’s grip.

  A finger moved, a spark jumped, and the current delivered agony to Michael Gallatin.

  As the shock tortured him, he changed back and forth. From wolf to man and back again, an involuntary reaction to the electricity. He fell again to his side, in wolf form, and tried to get up again but once more the finger moved and the current obeyed and the electrical shock coursed through his body in waves that took him from wolf to man and man to wolf in a matter of seconds. His mind felt blasted; he had no sense of abrupt change, but rather that he had always been both wolf and man at the same time all his life and he had never known it.

  He told himself to get up. To keep fighting. He reached for the wires to yank their hooks out of his flesh.

  But the next long and terrible shock told him to stay down, and to give up.

  He lay as a man, weak and naked and bleeding. His strength was gone. He watched as the ninja came forward to throw the net, and then maybe there would be another gas grenade or a blow to the head and Michael Gallatin knew his freedom would be over.

  The death of a hunter, he thought in his suffering and near-delirium. He tried to change back to his more powerful form. He couldn’t open the soul cage. Not this time.

  The wolf was paralyzed by shock, and the door of the soul cage was sealed shut.

  The ninja came forward, a graceful evil.

  He never reached his destination.

  For in the next instant a coal black wolf sprang at him from the side, and bearing him down to the earth it planted its paws upon his chest and took his throat between its jaws and with an explosion of power nearly ripped the head from the neck. Then it cracked the ninja’s breastbone like an eggshell and winnowed its muzzle in and plucked out the still-beating heart. It turned its head to show Michael Gallatin the prize, and Michael saw that the black wolf’s eyes were ice-blue. The wolf ate the ninja’s heart.

  It licked the last of the blood from around its mouth.

  Then it stood up on its hind legs, and with a shiver of anticipation it began to change.

  As the black hair disappeared into white flesh, as the bones remade themselves and the spine drew its tail inward, as the ears became human and the face began to compose itself, the man walked toward Michael. He stood about two inches over six feet and he had a narrow-waisted body with wide strong shoulders. He moved with confidence, and Michael thought there was some arrogance in there as well. Fully revealed, the man was maybe in his mid-thirties, with thick black hair that tumbled over his forehead. He had a handsome, intelligent face with high cheekbones and the elegant nose of a lost aristocrat. A Russian face, Michael thought. The man’s intense blue eyes remained fixed on Michael, even as he knelt down and pulled the hooks out from Michael’s phosphorescent-streaked side.

  Michael just stared in amazement at this walking miracle. But he realized he recognized the eyes. With a start, he remembered whose they were.

  The younger man spoke with a distinctive Russian accent. A warmth came up in his eyes that melted all the ice away.

  “My name is Peter,” he said.

  And he added, “I think you are my father.”