Vegas Run

by Rachel A Brune

  They might have been human at some point in the past. They still stood on two legs, reached out with two upper limbs. Their skin still glowed under the lights with the pallor of human death.

  But that was where their humanity ended, and the monster began.

  "What in the cold hell…?" Karen's voice trailed off. In her grasp, Mengele began to giggle. After a few seconds, he showed no signs of stopping. The sound ricocheted around the room, returning to unnerve us once again.

  "Thus, once again, we all play God." Dmitri spoke in a flat, unastonished tone of voice. His words had no effect on the little man, who regaled us with his hilarity.

  I reached out with one fist full of claws and ripped out his throat.

  No one broke the sudden silence. Karen didn't even give me a disapproving look. Instead, she simply let Mengele's body–whoever he'd been–drop to the floor, sending its red pool out over the many-times-stained floor.

  A movement from somewhere in the ranks caught our attention. Karen raised her weapon. We waited, but nothing else happened. Not right away.

  I had thought Dr. Gratuszcak's twisted experiments strange enough. And indeed, these beings exhibited some of the same characteristics. They threw no scent. None at all. They lacked even the scent void that had marked other, similar experiments. For the first time it occurred to me that this enemy, I would find it difficult to track, let alone overcome.

  "What are they waiting for?" Calix muttered.

  At her side, Karen scanned the room, weapon tracking and at the ready. From the rank sweat clogging her pores, I sensed she had less faith in the rifle than she usually carried. "Are they even alive?"

  In answer, a hushed whisper slithered around the room. The creatures in the first rank shifted almost imperceptibly.

  "Not alive." Maria stood and moved her arms in a complicated gesture. Balls of green fire sprang to life at her fingertips. "Not quite."

  Beside me, Dmitri mirrored his daughter, although the light he conjured shone bright white and blinding. I blinked back against the glare and crouched. Speaking in this form was possible, but not easy, and I forced the words past drool and sharp teeth.

  "Flank ‘em." Drool. "Don't let them conth– concthethrate their mash."

  Karen rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the tactics lesson, Benji."

  Jaw deformities aside, I tried thinking up a suitably witty reply. I didn't get the chance before, in the instant she turned to me, all hell broke loose.

  A wave of sound erupted from the throats of the creatures, an eerie ululation that ran shivers down even my furry spine. The phalanx of monsters charged, sprinting toward our small group

  To Karen's credit, she didn't hesitate. Running to the left flank, she fired round after round into the packed ranks.

  From my crouch, I tensed my muscles and sprang up and forward. The roof of the giant room was higher than expected, but still low enough to impede my movement, and I didn't land as far in as I hoped.

  The monsters failed to give way under my landing, and I slashed with teeth and claws to find some purchase so as not to be overwhelmed. I'd expected them to turn and face my attack, break off their forward movement, but they ignored me in their march toward the others.

  "Sprava, Papa!" Maria's voice rang out over the din of Karen's weapon firing and the blood rushing in my ears.

  Something grabbed my arm and almost yanked my shoulder out of socket. Another grabbed my legs, hugging and tripping me. Immobilized, I fought to get free. Teeth found the tender parts of my body. Throwing my head back, I roared and snapped.

  These monsters were stronger, faster than I'd expected. It had been a long time since I'd felt fear in battle, but its icy fingers reached for me now in every hand and finger these things laid on me.

  Twisting, I managed to slice across one of the limbs holding my arms. At least their skin opened and bled like any other creature. One of them fell away, holding its severed arm. I expected it to scream. It didn't. At least its departure gave me enough room to scratch and claw and bite at the others.

  All the time I fought, the close formation of the monster troops pushed me forward, pulling me along. As we approached where the sliding door had opened, our momentum slowed.

  Now I started to get glimpses above the chaos. Scents and sounds. The others had formed a vague horseshoe to catch the formation. Dmitri and Maria stood at the head to block it, the soft scent and the flashing lights alerting to me to their position. Whatever they were doing, it seemed effective. Monsters were falling, thinning the herd.

  On either side, Calix chewed through the flanks, sword flashing, eyes glowing. I caught glimpses as I fought my way back up.

  Once again, the surrounding creature overwhelmed me, slowly, gripping one by one until about half a dozen had immobilized me. The ones to my rear pulled back. Their fellows pulled forward and out, and even in my Überwechsel state, I resisted in vain. The tendons along my elbow and knee joints stretched, popped, and began to give way.

  "Scheisse!" Great. My last words were going to be a German swear word before a bunch of Frankensteins literally pulled me to pieces. Not the way I imagined I was going to go. And what the hell happened to Karen? Her weapon had gone silent.

  Fearing the worst gave me an extra bite of adrenaline. I twisted my head, gnawing in random directions, twisting under the creatures' grasp. I freed myself just enough…

  "Herr Keller!" Dmitri's voice rang out over the seething mass. Now that the rifle had stopped firing, I had no problem hearing him. My eardrums were almost healed, even if I was about to lose my arms and legs past the bendy parts. "You must get out of there."

  Easier said than done, but I didn't want to stick around to find out what would happen if I didn't follow Dmitri's directions.

  More and more creatures pressed against me. I cursed again. Death swept me with a tentative caress. And this stupid move had been my fault. Grunting and straining, I pulled and pushed and gnashed and slashed in vain. They pressed in so close, they were smothering me. My lungs, empty, fought to expand. Dark spots danced in front of my vision.

  Laughter echoed past me. I recognized Aleksy's chuckle. What the hell? He really was turning into my own personal Yoda. Except that was it. Just the laughter. Maybe he wasn't visiting me. Maybe I was going to visit him.

  "Rick!" Karen's voice rang out. "Get your ass out of there. Now."

  Her voice snapped me back to myself. No way did I die getting smothered to death by some weird mutated experiment. I drew a deep breath, tried to calm my racing heart, and released the Change. Just a bit.

  My arms and legs collapsed in on themselves, narrowing and shortening. My brain considered all the reasons why this wouldn't work, even as the wolf inside me suggested my brain shut up before I froze and couldn't do it. I'd never changed from the over-wolf to my mundane wolf, but now my life depended on just that.

  It barely worked.

  With my smaller frame, I twisted from their grasps before they could re-adjust to grab me again. All the time, we were moving forward. As my four legs hit the ground, I darted forward, twining myself through their legs, finding the smallest gap to squeeze through. My teeth gnarled and slashed as I went. I bit at their heels and tore streaming ribbons of flesh, the taste rancid on my tongue.

  No time to assess if I had an effect. I finally squeezed and shouldered my way past the first rank, tearing past the monsters and skidding to a halt beyond where the others waited in a ragged line, weapons at the ready.

  "Close your eyes, Volk."

  Dmitri and Maria barely waited until I had cleared the mass of oncoming soldiers. As one, they raised their hands and joined them, combining their weird lights.

  A crashing sound, not as loud as a sonic boom, but close, thundered through the rooms. The percussive roar threw me to the ground, immediately nauseous. Karen fell to her knees. Calix raised her sword. Blood trickled from their ears.

  The light expanded with the noise, washing out the room in a bright wave. I did not c
lose my eyes, and my vision whited out and then blurred to a gray and white static.

  Silence.

  I staggered to my feet. Breathing. Heartbeats. I wasn't alone. Dmitri and Maria came to me the strongest. Dmitri's heart rate was slightly elevated, but the man barely broke a sweat. Karen and Calix were still somewhere off to the left. Calix had a weird hiccup in her heart I hadn't noticed before.

  The creatures? Were they gone? Shit. More implications of an opponent that left barely any signature of their presence.

  "We need to get out of–" Even as Karen spoke, an alarm began to sound. Footsteps scrambled several corridors down.

  Cloth polished steel, and the smell of blood momentarily strengthened then diminished as Calix sheathed her blade. I blinked, my vision clearing to where I could just make out blurry outlines.

  Karen shrugged on a white lab coat. It didn't quite cover her weapon and tactical gear, but it might work in a hurry as an improvised disguise. She led the way to the door, taking a quick look before motioning the rest of us to follow.

  Calix headed out next, and I padded after. Better than wandering around the facility naked. Maybe I'd get mistaken for a therapy dog. The thought made me grin and drool a little.

  "I'm following after." Maria nodded to Dmitri. He and I paused outside the door to the first room, curious and impatient.

  Maria pushed first one hospital bed, then another, our way. She paused by the third bed, felt for a pulse, and then waved us on. Dmitri wrangled the beds out of the room as she opened one of the cabinets and pulled out two large buckets.

  The liquid in them burnt the inside of my nose and singed my newly-healing eyeballs, even from across the hallway. She cracked them open and carefully splashed the contents over the dead bodies, the electronics, more of the bodies, Mengele's notes, and so forth until the entire room reeked with the acrid stench.

  Maria hurried to the door and pull out a book of matches. Striking one, she folded it into the rest of the matchbook until it flared up, then tossed it into the room, slamming the door as she did so.

  From behind the door, the whoosh of oxygen being sucked out of the room thundered, and the door metal heated several degrees. Whatever she had stoked the flames with had started an inferno.

  "Davai, Papa." Maria hurried past us, taking the lead down the hall. Karen and Calix, ahead of us, had disappeared.

  Dmitri merely raised an eyebrow, catching my still half-blind gaze, and nodded. We followed obediently after.

  The rest of the facility teemed and swarmed with chaos. Several times, heavy footsteps converged on our position, usually made by heavily armed and armored men, heading to the door of the room we had so recently abandoned. At first, I wondered why they didn't stop us, but then of course, remembered Maria still had her credentials. After everything that had happened, I had almost forgotten.

  That struck me as weird. She had, quite quickly and comfortably, become a member of a team that was still having trouble actually becoming a team. We were taking orders and not even thinking about it. Must run in her twisted family.

  We finally neared the area that looked more like a health spa than a military research facility. Elderly patients shuffled along, helped by nurses in starched uniforms and burly men with pistols strapped under their armpits.

  The fronts doors had been propped open. In the hallway, the alarm had coalesced into an intermittent, ear-piercing blare, reminding us over and over to leave. Leave now. No problem. I intended to.

  As we headed out the front, one of the burly men who had positioned himself near the exit reached toward Maria. She flashed her identification badge in his general direction. Perhaps unfazed by the badge, or extra suspicious of my presence, he tried again.

  "Gaspazha–" He grabbed her elbow. "Dyevuchka."

  Maria did not stiffen or threaten. Instead, she paused. Turned to him. Smiled. "Darf ich Ihnen helfen?"

  Whatever he saw in her eyes convinced him to drop his grip and lower his glance. He mumbled something under his breath and went back to waving people through the exit.

  The three of us made it past the large crowd that had gathered a few hundred meters down from the exit. They presented quite a sight–patients shivering in gowns and thin blankets, flanked by paramilitary soldiers. From some of the patients' reactions, the military presence had come as a surprise.

  Whatever Maria had coaxed the fire with, it burned impressively. Smoke had flooded its way to the front of the building, and flames licked out of several windows on the way.

  "Wait, where's Karen and the other woman?" Maria looked around. "They were ahead of us."

  Shit. They were. I thought my eyesight, still healing, had kept me from finding them, but no. I should have sensed them, even in the crowd and the cold air.

  "I will get the van," Dmitri said mildly. "We should be ready to go before we draw more attention."

  I growled.

  "Calm yourself, Herr Wolf." Dmitri patted me absently on the neck and turned away. Any other man would have been disemboweled for the casual touch, but Dmitri's touch froze me instead.

  "They'll be here." Maria tucked her badge away and lowered her head, letting her hair fall around her face.

  Uneasy, I crept closer to her. One or two of the uniformed personnel looked at us, pointing. Don't do it, hero. Just stay with the old people.

  The smell of smoke got stronger, woodsmoke mixed with other more astringent aromas. If my sinuses were to be trusted, we were almost immersed in it.

  "Glad to see you guys made it out all right." Calix's voice sounded hoarse. She coughed wetly. "Why are you just standing around?"

  I have never in my entire life seen Dmitri as discomfited as the women's appearance made him. He didn't show it much–just a widening of the eyes and quickening of the pulse, then he turned and started toward the back of the parking lot where we'd left the van. By now a series of emergency vehicles were streaming onto the property. Not many were leaving, but I placed my faith in Maria's magic badge. Had to.

  "Had to duck out a side door," Karen explained. "Got a little hot in there."

  And now the crowd responded to the new arrivals who were corralling people up, sorting them, moving them. If we didn't get going, we were going to be corralled and sorted, too, which would kind of negate everything we'd done.

  Calix and Karen edged back and away, heading after Dmitri. With a final look at the facility and the faintest of shrugs, Maria and I followed after.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Crossing borders wasn't as easy as it had once been, with the spasms of nationalism the countries making up the European Union were feeling these days. I wondered how long it would take before the old country lines were drawn and re-drawn and fought over again.

  We didn't want to take a chance, nor did we feel like running into one of the random checkpoints that just happened to spring up here and there. None of us had any extra cash for a bribe, and while most of us could probably easily slip alone across any artificial geographic marker, none of us felt like doing so.

  Dmitri drove without asking for directions or offering an explanation. What the hell ran through his mind? His words from earlier ran through my brain. My daughter cannot be seen to leave the facility of her own choice … Funny, how that had worked out exactly not accordingly to plan.

  I had a million questions and four people with no desire to give me answers. Also, it appeared we were not headed back to the hotel we'd been at. It was probably a good thing I didn't have any luggage, the way we were bouncing from one knee-jerk reaction to the next.

  Grumbling to myself, I curled up in a ball and dozed until Dmitri finally pulled the van to a halt in front of a large, stone building that looked like Bram Stoker had once declined to use it in a book due to excessive dreariness.

  "We're here," Dmitri announced. "Get out."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The inside of the hostel turned out to be as depressing as the outside. At some point in the 60's, some Iron Curtain fashioni
sta had gutted the ancient building and re-dressed the inside from the Little Gray Book of Correct Interior Soviet Design.

  The rooms weren't any better. Small and narrow. I was willing to bet they had been split into two or three rooms from the original structure. Each contained a bed with a red and yellow blanket, a chair, a folding stand, and a yellowing paper taped to the back of the door showing where the stairs were in case of a fire.

  At the front desk, the old woman manning the concierge had frowned and spat a couple of rounds of fast Czech at Dmitri when she caught a glimpse of me. She'd been mollified by a short stack of Euros and shrugged, handing over a couple of sets of actual keys.

  Karen and Calix peeled off to their own closet-shaped room. Maria did the honors for me at the room across the hall. I'm good at several things, but opening a door without opposable thumbs is a trick I haven't learned yet.

  To my surprise, she followed me into the room. I growled. Top ten on my list of things I didn't want in my life was for Dmitri to see his daughter follow me into a bedroom and close the door.

  No luck.

  She sat down at the desk, pulled out a phone and started talking in a language I didn't recognize.

  I waited ten minutes, then gave up. I felt bone-tired. My brain tried to race around in circles, reminding me of all the things I should be thinking of, but my body decided to hop up on the bed, curl its furry self up, and rack out.

  My life is the moon waxing and waning. It pulls on me with ever greater urgency as the full moon approaches, no matter what form I'm in.

  I awoke as the moon set, two hours before sunrise. Had I been dreaming? I couldn't remember, but I thought I might have.

  A wrong note tugged at my consciousness. Something definitely felt out of place.

  Oh, crap. I was human. I had fallen asleep furry and woken up human. I hadn't changed in my sleep since I was a teenager. When we're younger, and the change is more fluid, sure there were plenty of night changes.