The once-refuge of the wolfpack had become a charnel ground. Human and wolf blood mixed in rivulets, melting the snow and salting the ground. Predators would come calling. Some of the men's hearts still beat. After a moment's deliberation, I tore their throats out.
They were probably dead soon anyway, but I'd left enemy to my back before, and I won't be making that tactical error ever again.
The first aircraft had crashed and crumpled, but not burned. The pilot slumped over the controls, still bleeding although life had left his sightless eyes. I dug around the cockpit and his pockets for any kind of papers or identification, a task made harder by both the Change distorting my hands, and the fact I streaked gore over everything I touched.
In the log book, I finally found something. Enclosed in a plastic sheet protector, a single piece of paper displayed the specifications of this particular helicopter model, as well as the registration number, pilot, and license numbers. The black and green logo told the name of the holding company that apparently owned the craft.
Black Mountain Holdings and Subsidiaries.
I flipped it over. The same information, only this time in the Cyrillic alphabet. Interesting. Or maybe not. A Russian-owned outfit ferrying weekend warriors to sport hunt defenseless wolves wasn't the weirdest thing I'd ever encountered.
Another howl started in my gut, working its way to my throat and erupting in a primal scream of rage and sadness. Yet another refuge, yet more friends, had been ripped from me by men bearing rifles.
Caught in a wave of anger and blind fury, I savaged the fallen men with teeth and claws, until they were no longer recognizable as human beings. My vision became one, long solid panorama of blood.
Pausing, I searched the sky. The full moon cast her light without mercy or judgment over the tableaux below her. She had not even reached her midnight position overhead.
Gathering my feet below me, I stood over the bloody ground. The sweet taste of blood in my mouth had gone slightly sour. There would be time later for revenge and hatred and whatever decisions I would have to make. Perhaps it was time for me to go back to my human half.
But for now, the Change called. It sped the wind under me as I took off into the darkness.
I ran and ran, and this time those small creatures erupting under my path did not make it far. I snatched and crunched and chewed, flinging bones and small bodies as debris that littered my route.
I would run and run and run under the moon until the Change spent itself. And then, it would be time to leave the North.
CHAPTER THREE
As always, the Überwechsel left me about ten pounds lighter and one hundred percent meaner. I usually spend a few days after in solitary hunting, waiting until I made a kill and ate most of it before returning to the pack.
Now, I didn't have much choice. The Change left me strung out and twitching like a junkie, but I had to get back to civilization, or whatever approximated it this far north.
I'd left a cache for myself when I decided to spend some quality time with me, myself, and my furry id. Packed in a weatherproof container, hoisted up in a tree, I found the stash intact. Thankfully. Pair of pants, flannel shirt, and jacket. Hat. Gloves. Wool socks and waterproof hiking boots. Key. I travel light.
Wish I had thought to pack a protein bar or something. I was half-tempted to go back furry and just find another pack. My stomach growled, and bile rose at the idea of having to be human. Or at least pretend to be. I wasn't sure which side I wanted to be on these days.
The hike to the nearest town took the better part of a day and a half. I broke down halfway through, slipped through the change, and took care of the hunger with a few small kills. I used the snow to wash myself off, got dressed, and headed back to the trail.
I didn't want to go back. But every time I slowed down and thought about turning around and living out the rest of my life with a tail, the image arose in my mind of a black-and-green logo and the men who laughed as they killed from above.
The joy of the Change had turned to hatred, and it stopped me from retracing my steps.
∞ ∞ ∞
The signs of the city appeared as grumblings of traffic and light furrows of small Cessna-type planes as they circled and landed at the small airstrip on the edge of town. It wasn't a huge place, not much of a population over ten thousand, but it had built itself up as a hub for transportation in the area.
As I trudged down the road, I checked out the aircraft dotting the fields along the strip. Most were the smaller fixed-wing craft I expected. But now, there were several of the Black Mountain craft. I wondered how good the airport security might be. Could be worth checking out. At the least, I could cause some damage and be gone before they realized.
A vehicle passing almost hit me from behind, swerving at the last minute. A large, bearded man cussed me out as he wrestled with his vehicle.
"Fuck you, too, lumberjack." I indicated my feelings with a one-finger wave, then realized I'd been the asshole. Lost in observation, I'd wandered to the side and was now walking in the middle of the road. Fucking civilization.
Down the road, a place in town rented storage lockers on both a short- and long-term basis. I brought the key from my cache and used it to retrieve a few more belongings–my St. Jude's medal, a backpack, change of clothes, razors, a certain notebook I probably should have burned when I found it, paperback book I was in the middle of reading–and a good deal of cash I hadn't wanted to leave out in the cold. I turned the key in to the attendant and spent a few minutes canceling my account. I wasn't coming back.
The next order of business–food. Metric fucktons of food. My mouth started to water at the thought of meat that someone had actually cooked and seasoned before I shoved it in my mouth, and I could swear I heard a cup of coffee call me by name.
"Hey, asshole, over here."
Aw, crap. That was not actually a cup of coffee. Rather, the voice speaking to me in such a loving tone belonged to a big, burly red-flannel clad jackass by the name of Randall Tso.
"Yeah, jerkoff. I'm talking to you." He strode across the street, ignoring the honking horns around him. A giant pickup truck almost clipped him as he hopped up on the sidewalk, but it didn't faze him one bit. "You got that twenty you owe me?"
Tso loomed over me. He only stood at five ten, but he was wide. And I'm short.
"Ask your sister for it, fucker," I told him. My voice came out raw. Rough. Hadn't used it much in over half a year.
His mouth split open in a huge grin and he laughed, pounding me on the back. "Don't worry, I already got it from your mom." His final pat on the back caused me to stumble forward with its enthusiasm. "She said I was the best she ever had. Gave me a tip."
I forced a smile in return. My mom … let's just say, greater men than Randall had met her and not lived to tell the story. Just the thought of her had me breaking out in a cold sweat.
He finally finished laughing at his own joke and settled. "Seriously, man, where you been?" Stamping his feet, he tucked his hands under his armpits. For all his girth, Randall still felt the cold easily if he wasn't moving around. "One moment, we were heading out on a job, the next you fell off the face of the earth."
I shrugged. He wouldn't believe me if I told him to his face.
"Ah, whatever, man." He put his arm around my shoulders and started walking. So I started walking, too. "What's twenty bucks between friends, especially one who leaves without telling the other one where he's going. Let's get lunch. Your treat."
∞ ∞ ∞
We settled into a booth at the end of the long diner. I found an electrical outlet under the table. My old battered cell phone had been part of the package I picked up from the storage unit, and I plugged it in to charge before the waitress even brought our first cup of coffee.
"What are you, a teenage girl?" Randall nodded at the phone. "Gotta check your Instagram? Maybe send a Tweeter?"
"I'm sending a dick pic to your mom," I told him. "She must be lonely with me g
one this whole time."
He rewarded me with a guffaw and called the waitress "hon" when she waddled up. Her name tag read "Lara H.", and she poured us cups of thick, steaming coffee, and when she walked away, he slapped her ass.
Guess he noticed my raised eyebrow. The woman had to be at least four months pregnant. Barely showing, but I could sense the extra heartbeat and see it in her wary gait, a sort of hunching self-protectiveness.
"You and her?"
In the space of a heartbeat, Randall Tso went from gruff poster boy for lumberjack masculinity to a puddle of puppy love.
"Yeah." He grinned, displaying the results of a new dental hygiene habit. "We started dating after you left. Getting church married in the spring. Gonna do it up real nice with her family and everything."
"Mazel tov." I raised my coffee cup and surreptitiously checked the battery on my phone. A little green charging light blinked on and off. Hooray.
"You should see the place I'm building," Tso started off. He began telling me about it–a little cabin, right outside of town, she could walk to work, sister would watch the kid, blah blah blah. If Randall were the same guy I'd known before I wolfed it out of there, he could hold up his end of the conversation for a few hours, requiring nothing out of me except the occasional grunt and nod. He was my favorite conversational partner. I hate conversation.
The phone chimed on, the battery finally full enough to stay powered up. I expected maybe one or two calls. Maybe Randall trying to figure out where I'd gone to.
Instead, my entire voicemail was full, and a series of texts filled up the tiny, ancient device's memory. Should have canceled my data plan.
Tso kept talking even as the waitress came back around again. I simply pointed to the menu. Biggest combo I could find. He paused to kiss her cheek and kept going. The coffee tasted so strong and rancid either it had to be leftovers from yesterday, or I'd forgotten what coffee tasted like. Still, it helped keep me focused.
Who the fuck had been calling me and blowing up my phone? I briefly considered deleting my entire voicemail box at one go and possibly also breaking the phone and burying it in concrete somewhere.
"Yeah, and then after you left, we got this new dude who took your shift," Tso was saying. "Really off kind of dude. Like he wasn't all there, you know?" He shook his head. "He didn't last long." He paused as the waitress came and set down our food. "Darlin', you remember that dude's name? The weird one, worked with the crew for a bit."
She thought for a moment. "John something. Mell or Fell."
I flinched, and the coffee splashed across my hand. The lukewarm liquid didn't scald me, but I paid it no attention in any case.
"Yeah, he was a skinny blond dude," Tso said. "Didn't think he was going to last. And he didn't."
"You boys enjoy," Lara said. She twisted away from Randall's embrace. "I got other customers, babe." She gave him a kiss before she went off to pour coffee.
Randall didn't notice my reaction, just went back to his soliloquy about his woodland retreat.
"This John guy, he stick around town?" I asked, interrupting him mid-syllable.
He took the interruption in stride, not missing a beat. "Yeah, man. Pretty sure I saw the dude the other day. Got a job working for that outfit that moved in. Chern-ey something. Russian outfit. Name means ‘Black Mountain.' They're doing some kind of surveying or whatever. Taking rich dudes out on hunting parties, that sort of thing." He shrugged. "They tried to hire a bunch of guys off the crew, but man, nobody wants to work for a bunch of rich fuckers coming up here to trophy hunt, now they lifted all the regs. Fuck those guys."
I grunted in agreement, which he took as his signal to return to his original topic.
The food was good, and Lara brought out a lot of it. By now, the insides of my stomach were twisting from hunger. The hearty biscuits and gravy tasted like heaven, and the bacon … well, let's just say, if I hadn't been eating in public, I would have shown a lot less self-control.
The only sour taste leaving an acid burn in my insides was learning a skinny blond man by the name of John Last-Name-Rhymes-With-Tell had followed me up north. Last I'd seen or heard of a man fitting his description… Well. I'd keep an eye out. I'd thought our mutual enemies had killed him. It wouldn't take much to correct that oversight.
Scrolling through the phone, eating my way through the mountain of food, with one ear tuned to any break in the conversation requiring me to grunt, I checked out my calls. The vast majority of messages were from one number. There were a few from spam numbers, the ones that fake you out with faux toll-free numbers, but the last one caused me to almost vomit everything back up.
Dmitri. Holy shit. I must have gone pale, because Randall stopped his word spew.
"What's up man?" he asked. "Look like you just farted, and it came out solid."
He came closer to the truth than he realized.
"I … need a ride to the airport." I shoveled more food in my mouth and spoke through the hash browns and sausages. "Like A-S-A-P." Choking, I coughed, dislodged a piece of whatever, and kept shoveling. "Or after we eat."
"Yeah, sure, man," he said. "You sure are a strange one." He shook his head.
Randall Tso was not a complicated man, but he was a good friend, and I don't have too many of those. I wasn't about to clue him into my past. I hoped by not telling him about it, it wouldn't touch him.
Vain hopes.
∞ ∞ ∞
The airport wasn't actually so far away I needed a ride. I mean, I'd literally walked by it on my hike into town. Rather, I wanted to get there with no interruptions and no chance meetings with anyone I hadn't prepared myself to meet. If MONIKER had sent John up here looking for me, then it would be in everyone's best interests if I slipped quietly out of town before they knew I'd come back.
Once out of the wilderness, gunning for Black Mountain, I'd wanted nothing more than to come and lay waste, but spotting Randall and then meeting his pregnant girlfriend had put an end to my original trajectory. Rage–red-hot and vision-blurring rage–still filled me when I thought of what those men had done to my pack. But I wasn't willing to risk the lives of friends and family just for a little revenge.
Besides. MONIKER and this Russian outfit, hanging out in the same town together–coincidence? I think not.
Yeah. Slip quietly out of town. Let's see how this works out.
I borrowed a ball cap from Randall, with a vague promise of returning it if I ever made back up north. He broke off his one-sided conversation long enough to ask when I planned on coming back. I shrugged. Really no idea. He accepted it. Before meeting Lara, back when we were both working together, we were the same–moving from place to place, working and drinking until we got bored, then moving on.
I liked Randall. He understood and didn't ask a bunch of dumb questions or try to convince me to stay.
By this point, my face hadn't seen a razor in well over a year, I wore a sweaty ball cap, and none of my identification had anything like my real name on it. Still, I couldn't hide the fact I'm a short, blond, German-looking dude traveling by myself. MONIKER likely had people stationed behind the counter of every mode of transportation out of town. Whatever. They could follow me. I'd lose them back in civilization–or else, they would disappear.
I travel light at the best of times, and this was no different. The man behind the counter didn't give it a second thought. Most of the flights out of the tiny airstrip were commuter runs down to Sea-Tac, and people traveled there for all sorts of reasons. I still had a good deal of cash from the pile in the storage locker, which I used to pay for my flight. Once I got there, I'd figure out my next move.
The next flight left in an hour. There wasn't any kind of a security line to go through. The airport was so tiny they would shuffle us through a quick check during the boarding process. I sat down in one of the hard, plastic chairs, pulled down the brim of the cap, and flipped open my phone.
The line of voicemails and texts waited for me. Grimacing, I
decided to go for broke and find out what Dmitri had to say. Scrolling down with the tiny arrow keys–yes, kids, that's what you had to do with these old-fashioned devices, now get off my lawn–I pulled up the notification with his name.
Well, shit. It wasn't a voicemail. Just a missed call. From about three days ago. Crap. Making a mental note to call him back, I then made another mental note to avoid doing so for as long as possible and also to not answer the phone if he called again.
I am an ancient creature of blood and magic, but Dmitri is an old Soviet spook who scares the fuck out of me.
One number still showed up–one that wasn't programmed into my machine. The same number had filled my voicemail and text messages. I scrolled to the first message they'd left, selected it, and put the phone to my ear to listen.
The voice on the other end clenched me up inside. I pulled the ball cap even lower over my face and hid my reaction with my hand. I couldn't help the wave of heat and emotion her voice, even after all this time, spurred in me.
"Rick. Call me back. I know you still have my number." Click.
Scrolled up to the next one. Hit play.
"Rick. I need you to call me back. This is Karen." Pause. "I know you know who this is. Call me back." Click.
Okay. Weird. Figuring the rest of the messages went more or less along the same lines, I tap-scrolled back up to the very last message she had left.
"Rick, you fucking prick." Uncharacteristic, but not out of the realm of possible Karen reactions. "I don't know where the fuck you are. I don't care if you're out on some communing with nature in Canada bullshit." Well, that answered the question if MONIKER still tracked my whereabouts. "You better get your ass to Vegas by Monday or I swear to God I will hunt you down and make you into a rug." Click.
Damn. Even the click at the end sounded extra unhinged.
Under the verbal abuse–not her normal M.O., but not necessarily out of the ordinary where I'm concerned–I could hear strain and nerves. Something had her rattled.
Vegas Run Page 2
