by Simon Archer
“Take the leader and the bunny.” The black-and-white mauler barked to the other two beside him, sporting his own cockney accent, but with a chipmunk-smoker-like voice. “The uppity slave with the musket is mine.” He was a good deal smaller than the other Wolves, and would not have been my second pick for leader of the pack. Guess we both made wrong assumptions at that moment, him thinking I’m a slave still, but my assumption wasn’t going to get me killed.
I got a few rounds into his chest before he was on me, and the blonde and brown Spearwolves had charged my compatriots. The leader’s plan involved using his war maul as a battering ram, slamming into me and crushing my bones into sand as it tore my flesh apart.
I did not let that happen.
Instead, a sidestep let me get a gash into his side. With the overcharging throwing him off balance, he didn’t have the time to dodge another shot to the back of the head. His stupidly immense strength, however, helped him to swing that metal block right for my side, throwing me off as I dodged just enough out of the way. That move put me right into a glancing shot to my side from the musketeers, who had just caught up to us to start firing.
For such a little beast, it could swing that hammer like it was hollow. I couldn’t so much as point my pistol in his direction before he had another swing heading for me from over his head. The machete was practically useless when he could swing the heavier weapon with just as much speed. The sound of it hitting the ground as I moved out of the way told me all I needed to know about the necessity of never being so much as glanced. My pistol also seemed to just be pissing this one off, so I changed up the strategy to using the shotgun in the hopes that having no face would keep the Wolf from attacking.
The musketeers had another shot at me while I switched around, keeping me from shooting to end this as I maneuvered away. And, like I suspected, it knew some basic strategy and was keeping me in his distance with his mobility. I tried kicking the damn dog man away, but I pushed myself more than moving him any. ‘Little,’ in his case, seemed to be more akin to ‘compact’ or ‘dense,’ swinging its big monster mallet just as well as if he were the size of the one I killed before this.
And these stumps weren’t making things any easier, keeping me from moving as fast as I wanted while always looking behind myself to keep from falling. But, maybe they could have been. I slowed my dodging pace and surveyed my surroundings to get a lay of the local geography, all the while teasing the beast to come in and hit me. It worked, as he swung harder and faster to try to hit me when I was getting so close. The musketeers’ shots were starting to feel more like flesh wounds now, but it wasn’t enough to do any real damage.
Like a moth to the flame, the Wolf took one step too aggressively and swung his hammer right above my head. Usually, he might be able to bring it back around for a second strike, making a bit of a twister motion as it stayed in the fight. However, this time there was a stump in the way of his foot. He was tripping, trying to regain his footing in the air, which led him to the second stage of my trap: the hill. With a landing place far below what he was expecting, he fumbled the acrobatic stunt he was trying to pull, giving me all the time I needed to blow the back of his head off. He tumbled down the hill like a rag doll, spilling blood from his open skull as he flopped and schlopped.
With a turn of the head, I was ready to put some pellets in some more wolves, but I was met with a termless surrender from the other Wolves. The musketeers had stopped fighting, and the spearman had knelt down in front of Toby and Hopper, the two attacking Wolves slashed and bruised to no end. Hopper’s assailant, the brown spearman, had the maximum number of black eyes, and Toby’s blonde was looking striped like a tiger. Meanwhile, the two of them didn’t look touched at all.
“So…” I looked at the parlaying Wolves, scanning for any signs of a trick. “We good? There going to be a problem?”
“You have beaten us and killed our leader.” The blonde one spoke up. “Our strength submits to yours. We shall serve you until one of us dies.”
“Do any of y’all have names?” I asked around with my gun.
They all shook their heads.
“Alright, so we begin.” I pointed to the blonde one. “Old Yeller.” To the red one in the back. “Foxhound.” The spotted one. “Scooby.” And finally, the brown one. “Lassie. Those are all your new names. Think of them as titles or whatever else helps you out. That is what I’m calling you individually.”
“Um…” The newly christened Lassie uttered. “Not to question you or your leadership, but I don’t know how to ‘lass,’ boss.”
“Is it like ‘scoobing,’ sir?” Scooby asked. “I might need some help being a scoober.”
“I have two titles, boss.” Foxhound said. “When do you want me to do ‘fox’ tasks, and when do you want me to the ‘hound’ ones?”
“I THINK I SHOULD BE FINE WITH MINE, BOSS!” Old Yeller committed to his interpretation of his new name. “Oh, wait, am I only supposed to do that to the old slaves? May I ask who’s covering the younger ones?”
I think the next pack I take over is getting serial numbers.
“I’m only explaining this once,” I said slowly, thinking through how to streamline this. “Your name refers to you alone. It doesn’t have to do with any specific jobs at all. I, or anyone else, will be referring to you by this name, and I expect you to answer and obey when I do. Are we clear about that?”
“Almost.” Scooby put a clawed gorilla finger up. “Are any of us still expected to ‘scoob’ or ‘lass’ at all?”
“You’ll do anything I tell you to do.” I pointed an authoritative finger at him, taking the moment to head toward the tiny forest patch. “Don’t worry about the name so much as the sound. I make that sound, you answer and respond. This way, I can tell each of you to do different things without confusion. Supposedly.”
“Wait, is it like a noble name?” Foxhound spoke up as the group followed. “Don’t only nobles get to have noble names?”
“Nope!” Hopper chirped as she bounced to my side. “Under Lord Hank, everyone gets a special name that lets the master call out to you and helps you do your special job! When he gets his estate properly built, you will be expected to do anything that he wants, not just one job forever.”
“Yeah, it’s like a catch-all job title.” Toby helped out. “Anytime the boss wants something done, and you do it, you’re doing what your name means. I’m Toby.”
“What the devil is a Toby?” Old Yeller shouted. “Is his ‘tobing’ going to get in the way of my yelling?” That was a weirdly familiar phrase. Did Wolves have a devil to worry about? Did any of them?
“I just need a system to call on all of you!” I cut through the discussion. Noted: Wolves are denser than cement on a cold winter day. “I can’t be saying ‘that Wolf over there’ or ‘the other one next to you’ all the time, or we aren’t getting anywhere. It’s real simple: all you gotta do is respond when I call out the name, okay? No jobs, no skills, no nobles, nothing you gotta think about beyond the sound of it. It’s just a way for me to talk to you specifically when I need something from you specifically.”
“Oh!” Lassie said as I hoped he’d finally gotten it, so I don’t have to do this again. “That’s pretty smart, boss! The old bosses had just been calling all of us ‘hey, you.’”
“What?” The other four, including Toby, responded.
“See?”
“Yes, it’s a much better system,” I said, trying to relax, or at least loosen my shoulders from the frustration. “No more of that idiocy ever again.”
Now we’re moving on to the whole new idiocy. How did these meatheads manage to keep a whole race under their foot? There had to be a smart one among the nobles which was a scary thought. The dumb ones had given me trouble, but the smart ones might have killed me if they had gotten the chance.
Hopper, as attentive as always, had hopped onto my back with her legs around my waist, putting some tender love and care into my shoulders while the five
Wolves who worked for me argued about names and jobs some more. She was a ray of sunshine in the middle of all this. I was starting to invest more hope in this cache than I may have intended, if only because the alternatives of complete Wolf-army dependency were looking more and more unappealing by the minute. When I could finally figure out how to get these ideas in their skulls quickly, we were in business. Until then, I focused on cool breezes and quiet chirping birds to help me relax.
Humble beginnings, right?
8
I looked around the itty-bitty forest, searching the twenty or so trees around for anything suspicious or man-made. A hunter’s traps were fairly easy to find if you knew what you were looking for, and I was willing to bet that the Hunter was no great exception. However, the cache was probably more like a hunting blind, which was only slightly harder. As long as you weren’t a duck, you could probably just see it.
I was seeing no blind or trap in this little forest patch.
“It’s not over here, boss,” Scooby called out. The other Wolves were searching around along with him, sniffing the place about for anything. The fact that they weren’t finding anything meant that there probably wasn’t any gunpowder around, which would mean the cache had already been raided or it wasn’t here. But it had to be here. There’d be no other reason to post guards around the place.
“Not over here,” Toby called in.
“Not here.” Lassie followed.
“Nothing where I am.” Foxhound reported.
“I DIDN’T FIND THE HUNTER’S SPECIAL CACHE!” I was interpreting Old Yeller’s insistence upon the volume as his way of saying he was committed to the cause.
“That’s the whole place swept, my lord.” Hopper capered up to me. “Do you still think it’s here?”
“Whatever’s here is valuable to the Wolf nobles.” I inspected the trees some more. “Even if it isn’t the Hunter’s cache, we have to find out what it is so we can either use it or take it out of play. At the very least, we’ll have to find a way to block this off.”
“Do you want us to guard it again?” Foxhound lumbered over. “But, you know, for you?”
“No, that’s not necessary,” I said, feeling the side of one of the trees. “I’m pretty sure I found something.” I had a hunch about something, and I decided to give it a test.
As I pressed against the tree, I felt something give way, but couldn’t see anything. In fact, I saw fewer things, specifically my fingers, as my hand was slowly disappearing into the tree. That wasn’t normal tree behavior. I still felt the bark against my fingertips, and my fingers still moved, so I was sure I was fine. The scratching and rubbing of lumber against lumber crawled up my forearm until I could feel a space inside. Once I reached far enough in, there was some sort of shovel-handle kind of thing right at the edge of my fingers. That was about the point where the muscles in my arms lacked the leanness they were robbed of by a life of physical labor. But my hunch was right; the trees were kept right here because they were part of the hiding mechanism. They must have realized it only after they cut down most of the trees, but they didn’t know which one it could be. Since they could never find it, they just had to make sure no one else did. Wolves were just that dumb, as I was beginning to realize.
“Look at that!” I said, still trying to touch the handle. “Luckiest guess of my life. Glad that it didn’t take long. Could have been here another couple hours checking all of these trees for this.”
“So, that’s why we had the trees cut down.” Scooby theorized in astonishment as he approached. “They would have tried to eat us!”
He might have looked a little smarter if he had just left out that second part. He didn’t, and wouldn’t in the future.
“Hopper, would you mind putting your hand where mine is?” I said, taking my hand out of the illusion in the tree. Scooby, Foxhound, and Toby all marveled at the miracle they had just witnessed. “There’s a switch to pull, and my arm’s not letting me through to it.”
“I mind nothing you ask of me, my lord.” Hopper skipped over to my spot to feel up the tree, sliding her hand into the illusion.
“My previous hypothesis is now under suspicion as to the presence of a digestive biological component to this foliage,” Scooby said, wordier than a thesaurus with a soul.
“What?” Toby gave Scooby the tilted head of a confused puppy.
“Oh, I used to work for a noble who liked to read,” Scooby explained. “Used a lot of words to say stuff. I guess some of it stuck.”
“What did you just say, then?” Foxhound asked.
“I have no idea,” Scooby admitted.
Hopper moved her shoulder back, and a clank echoed in the tree. About ten feet away, a piece of the forest floor, about as tall and wide as two people, rose out of the ground, unguided by anything. Beneath it was a half-foot of stone, lined with strange symbols and drawings along the edges of it, glowing an arcane emerald. Below it, a stairway led into what appeared to be a dark room.
“What is that?” Hopper looked at the floating hatch door with a wondrous twinkle to her eye.
“Do you not know?” I asked her. “This is new for you, too? Because I was trying not to freak out earlier with the illusion because I thought this was normal here.”
“Such things are only used by the most powerful of nobles.” Hopper walked over to the top of the revealed staircase. “Even my old master didn’t have access to anything like this. It’s as hoarded and secret as it is powerful.”
“And ‘such things’ are literally magic?” I asked.
“What else would they be?” She looked at the symbols upon the edge of the stone.
“I don’t suppose you would know what this says or means?”
“I recognize the word for ‘cloud.’” The bunny touched the green lines upon it. “The cooks and butlers knew a little bit for their jobs and taught me a few things.”
“Eh, that makes sense,” I said, walking down the stairs into the mysterious magic bunker slowly. I stopped for one more follow-up. “Maybe I should have asked this earlier, but how do y’all know English, then, if you aren’t learning your own language or some Wolfspeak?”
“This language has been around as long as anyone can remember, my lord.” She said to me. “The old Rabbit language has been lost for ages before then.”
That was helping to confirm some of my suspicions about the Hunter of Legend’s identity. No way a separate world just came up with a language exactly the same as back in the human world, especially when they had one of their own already. It had to be introduced to them before now. If I was right, Hopper might have been more on the money about me being the Hunter than either of us knew at the time.
“I’ll tell you if it’s safe.” I broke myself from my thoughts and walked down into the bunker, looking around at the hidden treasure we had uncovered.
Good news: the Hunter cache was not a myth. The walls of the stone bunker were lined with weapons of all different kinds, armors of chainmail, and supplies to wage a one-man war against a beastly scourge. Tables of maps, plans, designs, and other such things laid bare on wooden tables set up with even more supplies underneath, all for devices and technology, possibly magical in nature, built solely for the purpose of helping the Hunter on his mission. The legacy of the Hunter’s crusade lived on in one more way, and this was more than enough proof that he was from my world in the past. With the time skips between this world and the other one, coming from my world in the fairly distant past meant coming to this world in ancient history.
Bad news: it was all old antique junk from the Revolutionary War. The weapons were all musket rifles taken straight off of George Washington’s back, with rotten wood in their handles. The metals of the barrels and the blades were rusted all to crap, along with the chainmail and armor. The supplies were mostly musky, damp gunpowder, save for one or two powder horns, half full each. There were twenty or so metal pellets, rusted to crap as well, which would mean twenty dead Wolves as long as my Wolf musketee
rs didn’t ever miss a kill shot. If they conserved powder, we might be able to keep the bullets from exploding from the cheap metal and hopefully recover and reshape some rounds to reuse. If we didn’t use enough powder, though, the Wolves would more than likely survive being shot, since my modern firearms had trouble when not shooting directly at their vitals. With the limited powder available, ten usable shots would have been a miracle.
Along with those plentiful stores, we had dank medical supplies, outdated since before the Civil War and expired since before America’s third president came into office. The maps, plans, and designs were torn, dusty, and written in the same writing as the symbols on the floating hatch door, so I was functionally illiterate. Maybe I could have gotten Hopper to read some words on it, but that’d have been more likely to help me build my own deathtrap than something helpful. The maps were obviously out of date as well, considering they showed drawings of the trees that are no longer there, making them distinctly unreliable.
This was everything I had at my disposal now. If I misused even a fraction of it at any point forward, we were all dead. I ain’t proud to say it, but a table was flipped. A yell was let out. A wall was punched. Just enough to take the edge off the rage while no one was around, and nothing could get hurt. Childish, I know. I put a few too many eggs in this basket with a missing bottom.
“Are you okay?” I heard the gentle sound of Hopper’s voice as she came down the stairs, responding to the tantrum I was throwing. She was more sliding down the stairs than walking, sitting on each step as she went.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay outside?” I snapped far too harshly. I wasn’t angry with her at all. It was just a little embarrassing for her to see me like this. I tried to pull it back as soon as it was let out.
“You said you’d tell me if it was safe.” She looked at me as if I was one of those Wolves outside. “Is it safe?”
“I… just…” I breathed out the frustration. She didn’t deserve any of it. And we had backup plans, so I had nothing to get in a tiff about. A foolish boy dreams of a magical fix to his problems, but a man takes action. “Yes. It’s safe in here. A setback like this won’t change nothing.”
