by Mia Archer
I sat up and felt myself all over. I didn’t feel like anything was broken. I didn’t have any stabbing or throbbing pains.
My ears were ringing, though. It was a steady Middle C. Other people were clutching their ears, arms, legs, or looking around like they’d been stunned.
What the hell had just happened? It was like I couldn’t remember the last few moments, and…
I turned to face a massive smoldering hole in the ground. A smoldering hole that’d been a house until moments ago. A house full of werewolves.
The houses to either side were smoldering and starting to catch fire. Flaming wreckage burned all around us, and a couple of people had bits of house shrapnel embedded in their bodies.
At least two of them looked like their shrapnel had sent them on to sing with the choir eternal.
Damn. Surviving werewolves only to be taken out by a good old-fashioned explosion was a bummer.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed.
People were wailing all around me as I got up. I was a little wobbly, you try getting hit by the pressure wave from a massive explosion like that and not being a bit wobbly, but I needed to find Kirsten. She’d been a hell of a lot closer when the house had gone up.
I limped over to her. Or rather I limped over to the lump on the grass I assumed was her.
There were a couple of other big hulking lumps where werewolves had been thrown by the explosion. I kept a wary eye on those, though most of them seemed to be in the process of transforming back into their human forms which I figured meant they’d also started pining for the fjords.
I worried more about Kirsten. She hadn’t moved since she landed. I worried that she’d landed wrong or something.
That was crazy the thing about humanity. I’d heard stories of people who’d fallen from planes that disintegrated around them from 30,000 feet and survived. Sure they got the shit kicked out of them by gravity on the landing, but the point was they survived.
There was a flip side to that coin, though. Someone slips on a slick surface, falls, and suddenly they’re paralyzed for the rest of their life. Or they die immediately because they happen to hit in just the wrong way.
I reached Kirsten and rolled her over. I probably shouldn’t be moving her, but most triage situations didn’t include werewolf danger. It certainly wasn’t something that’d been covered in a first aid class I’d taken back in high school.
She was covered in ash and soot. I ran my hand down her body. She didn’t have anything sticking out of her, which was good. Nothing sticking out of her meant she might still make a recovery.
Assuming the shockwave from that explosion hadn’t liquefied her insides. That was something movies got wrong about explosions. Like not being in the actual fiery part of the explosion meant walking away fine and dandy. They never accounted for the shockwave doing just as much damage.
Which meant she could look just fine on the outside while having all of her insides rearranged to the point of being incompatible with continued existence.
“Come on Kirsten,” I muttered, looking her up and down. I desperately wanted her to be okay.
Both because I thought I was falling for this girl, and because I was pretty sure if she bought it then we were totally screwed if more werewolves showed up.
“Wake up!” I said.
I felt like an idiot. Suddenly I’d gone from being in a horror movie to being in a cheesy action thriller where I was begging my partner not to die. As though the sheer dramatic weight of me crying and not wanting her to die would be enough to bring her back from the brink.
I was well aware that wasn’t how it worked, but it didn’t stop me as tears trickled down my face.
“Come on Kirsten,” I growled. “You can’t die!”
Suddenly her chest rose and fell. It looked like she’d had the wind knocked out of her, but she was breathing. That was something.
I let out a quiet sob.
“That’s it!” I said. “You can do it!”
Her eyes flickered. She looked up at me and blinked a couple of times. She was beautiful. Even with grass stains and soot all over her.
“Party… Out of danger?” she croaked.
I wasn’t sure if the noise I made was a sob or a laugh. I shook my head, and punched her in the shoulder.
“There’s a time and a place for quoting Wrath of Khan,” I said. “And it’s not when you just almost died!”
She tried to move, but groaned. Finally she sat down.
“There’s always a time for quoting Wrath of Khan,” she said.
More cracking and popping came from the house. I turned to look at flames rising high and casting a glow across the night sky. There’d be cops here soon.
At least I assumed there’d be cops here soon. Someone had probably already called them, and if emergency services believe them once they got over werewolves attacking a party they’d get here ASAP.
They say they don’t make them like they used to, and most of these houses were solid old-school wood construction. I had no doubt it wouldn’t take much for all of them to go up. I had visions of an entire neighborhood destroyed in a fire storm, with all of us trapped in it.
Maybe we wouldn’t need the werewolves to finish the job after all.
Then I saw something else that sent a chill running through me. Something stirred in the darkness. Some of those hulking werewolf shapes hadn’t transformed back into humans, and they were starting to stir.
That’d been one hell of an explosion, but I guess it wasn’t enough to keep down a supernatural creature of the night hell-bent on killing anyone and everyone around it.
I glanced around the yard. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, only…
My eyes fell on Kirsten’s gun. It’d come to a landing a few feet away from her. I dove for the thing.
“Where are you going?” Kirsten asked.
If I took the time to explain what was going on then one of those things would be on me and killing my ass. From there it wouldn’t be long before it was killing Kirsten, and then everybody else from the party.
I brought the gun up as one of the werewolves scrambling to its feet and staring at me with beady eyes that glowed a dull yellow.
It was the kind of situation that seemed tailor-made to have someone emptying their bowels. Only I had a gun I could use against the bastard, which was a hell of a lot more than could be said for most horror movie characters.
Though the werewolf didn’t seem to think I was much of a threat. No, it let out a low chortling growl that I figured was its way of laughing at me, and then it started to move forward.
I didn’t bother to give the thing a warning. It was a monster. Telling a monster that you were going to shoot it if it moved any closer was the stupidest fucking thing ever. No, I simply lined up my shot and squeezed the trigger.
It went off with enough force to knock me on my ass. I stared up at the night sky, blinking in surprise. I hadn’t expected that.
I scrambled up just in time to see the werewolf waver, and then it toppled back like a massive tree in some ancient forest. It hit the ground with a thump that shook the ground.
I breathed a sigh of relief. The thing was dead.
It was right about then that the police started to arrive. They swarmed in from the trees behind the house, I guess they weren’t going to try and go between the flaming houses, and they all had their guns drawn and pointed at everyone as they told them to get down.
Which struck me as just a touch ridiculous. After all, it was pretty clear anyone at the party was a victim. But I suppose the cops had no idea what was actually going on here. I’m sure more than a few people had uttered the word “werewolf” tied into the craziness going on here tonight.
If the cops knew werewolves were real, which was a possibility considering what’d happened at that movie theater, then they probably weren’t taking any chances.
A couple of them ran up to me, shouting. Their lips were moving, but I was having trouble u
nderstanding them. Something about getting my hands up, but that seemed wrong. I was the good guy here. I’d saved everyone. I’d just shot a fucking werewolf!
Then I looked at the gun I still held. I shook my head and started to laugh.
I knew that was the wrong reaction when there were cops surrounding me with guns drawn. That was the kind of thing that got people shot. Sure I was a white college girl which meant I wasn’t as high on the list of potentially getting accidentally killed by the cops as some people, but I was still playing a dangerous game.
Finally someone came up behind the other cops, shouting at them.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted. “Get your guns down you assholes!”
This one was older. He had a bristling mustache and white hair. He looked kind of like an older Tom Selleck. Well, a Tom Selleck who’d let himself go. He looked at me, then to the gun, finally to Kirsten, and shook his head.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get your ass shot off waving that thing around,” he growled.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Between waiting for you idiots to show up and save my ass and saving my own ass I figured I’d rather live.”
His face softened. “That bad?”
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said, letting out a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a sob and a laugh. It’d been that kind of night.
22
Kirsten
I stepped out of a hazy darkness where I was being chased through a forest by something. I wasn’t sure what that something was. Only that it wouldn’t be good if that thing caught me.
It was almost on me, and I turned and socked it in the gut. I had a brief glimpse of baleful yellow eyes staring down at me, then those eyes turned to surprise as my fist connected.
Then it was gone.
The world dissolved around me. Which wasn’t the kind of thing the world was supposed to do. No, in my experience the world was supposed to stay in the same damn place, and…
I blinked a couple of times. The whole world seemed too bright. Like there was something terrible going on here.
Though I felt surprisingly good considering I was strung up with a bunch of wires and tubes.
“What the hell,” I groaned.
Memories came flooding back. None of them were pleasant. Running through a werewolf infested house was going to the very top of a pile of memories I could’ve lived without.
I groaned and put a hand to my head. Things still didn’t feel great there, but I was doing a little better.
“You’re up!” someone said.
I tried to turn and see, but a massive pain in my neck stopped that.
Something had happened. I’d been running from that house after I’d snapped a bunch of gas lines to blow it up nice and good. I figured that’d work just as well in the real world as it had in Dog Soldiers.
Something had slammed into me. I hadn’t been sure if that was the explosion or a werewolf, but the fact that I was lying here in a hospital bed and didn’t have giant gashes torn in my body would seem to favor the explosion theory.
The werewolf thing wasn’t something that somebody usually came back from. Though getting caught in a massive explosion also wasn’t the kind of thing someone usually came back from, to be fair.
“Who’s there?” I asked. “I swear to God, if the Chief put a campus cop here to babysit me…”
“Not a cop,” the voice said.
“Cara?” I asked, still staring up at the ceiling because I didn’t dare move my neck and risk more pain.
She appeared over me, beaming down with a huge smile. God she looked beautiful.
“Guilty as charged,” she said.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
Presumably I was in a hospital. Hospitals were usually sticklers about only letting family visit. She definitely wasn’t family, for all that I’d been closer to her than anyone in a good long time.
She blushed, then looked to the door. I got the feeling she’d been telling some tales to stay in here.
“I lied and said we were related so I could be in here,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if one of those things was going to come back or…”
I smiled despite myself.
“And what exactly were you planning on doing if a werewolf decided to come around and cause some trouble?” I asked.
She grinned, and reached down to my purse which she’d obviously salvaged from the blown up house party. She opened it just enough to show off my silver slinger.
Well then. I wasn’t sure how she snuck that into the hospital, but I felt better knowing she’d been keeping guard over me.
“How long have I been out?” I asked.
“Only overnight,” Cara said. “Not that bad.”
I bit back a couple of curses. Overnight might not seem like all that long to her, but it might as well be an eternity. Who knew what those bastards had gotten up to while I’d been knocked out.
Then again…
“What happened at the house?” I asked.
“It blew up,” she said. “There were a bunch of werewolves trapped inside when it blew, and they weren’t werewolves after that. The cops were still picking bodies out of the wreckage when we got carted off in an ambulance. From the way the chief of police was walking around screaming at his people and then trying to be nice to the people at the party I get the feeling he wasn’t happy about something like that happening in his town.
“They never are,” I said.
I closed my eyes. I was tempted to go back to sleep. They must’ve been pumping some feel-good drugs into my system. They felt almost strong enough to overcome my body’s new inclination to heal itself.
Which wasn’t a good thing. I needed to heal up, and whatever drugs they were giving me could inhibit that. At least I’d heard dear old dad complaining about that before and assumed the same was true for me.
“I was worried you weren’t going to wake up,” Cara said, her voice suddenly quiet. “You seemed so vulnerable, and…”
I felt a surge of something odd coursing through me. She looked so odd standing there with the juxtaposition of that fearful look on her face while she was idly running her hands along that massive gun that could do so much damage.
That had me feeling something very close to what I’d felt at my grandmother’s house, only it was different.
I’d never felt anything for my grandma like the warm feeling settling down in the pit of my stomach and then moving down between my legs to give me one hell of a thrill.
I was pretty sure I was falling for this amazing woman. I held my hand out, and she reached out to take it.
I winced as her hand touched mine. There was still pain there. That was good for a frown that hurt because every part of my body hurt.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, clearly concerned. “You’ve been looking like you’re in pain even in your sleep, and…”
She ended with a small hiccuping sob. I felt for this girl. I really did. She’d been sitting here this entire time terrified that I wasn’t going to wake up.
If it were anyone else who’d been caught that close to a gas explosion I probably wouldn’t have woken up.
Only…
Something was wrong. I shouldn’t be feeling this shitty if the family curse really had taken me. Especially if I’d had an overnight in the hospital. No, it could only mean…
I looked down to the wires that ran all around my body. I followed the IV running from my arm up to a bag and frowned. I couldn’t quite make out what was in that bag.
Which was also wrong. I should’ve been able to see the label just fine. I’d never had any issues with my vision before.
“What is that stuff?” I asked as the machine beeped and pushed something into my body with a cool rush.
“The nurse said it was saline,” Cara said.
“Who put that there?” I asked.
“One of the nurses?” Cara asked, starting to sound worried. �
��Why?”
“Because…”
I tried to finish the thought, but again it was difficult to finish much of anything. No, it was as though I was staring at the world through a fog. As though something was…
I reached down and pulled at the wires attached to me. Some of them were attached to little sticky things which hurt like a motherfucker coming off, we’re talking it felt like getting waxed on steroids, but others came off pretty easily.
The room filled with a cacophony of angry beeps as I ripped at the stuff. Clearly the equipment wasn’t happy about me pulling those patches off, which meant that very shortly there was going to be a nurse or a doctor or something coming along to let me know just how unhappy they were that I was making the machines that went ping unhappy.
I wanted to be out of here before anyone official came along.
“What are you doing?” Cara asked, sounding even more worried. “You need to rest and get better!”
“Not a chance,” I said.
“But those werewolves almost killed you before. If they find you like this…”
She looked over her shoulder. As though she expected to see a werewolf standing at the door. For all that there was enough daylight streaming through the windows that I didn’t think there was a chance we were going to run into any of our lupine friends.
“It took a hell of a lot more than a werewolf to knock me on my ass last night,” I growled. “And it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a werewolf to knock me on my ass now.”
I pulled out the IV. If the sticky bits attached to my body had hurt like a motherfucker, well the IV hurt like… I don’t know. It shouldn’t have hurt like that, but it did. I ripped it out, and there was a hole, nice as it could be, in my arm.
A jet of blood even flew out, but just the one jet before things cooled down.
“Kirsten!” Cara said, sounding for all the world like I’d just ripped out the life-saving medicine that was going to keep me alive or something.
Only I was starting to get a sneaking suspicion there was a hell of a lot more going on here. That the IV wasn’t anything good.
