A Heart in the Right Place

by Heide Goody

  “Hey, something over there!”

  Nick shrank back at the shout from near the house.

  “Bleeding pigs!” another voice called back.

  “Never mind that. I’ve found the motor. Let me get a light on this.”

  Nick couldn’t see the men, but he could sense the voices moving away.

  “Right, I think it’s time to go,” said Tony.

  Nick got down on his hands and knees beside his dad and padded out of the door, into the crowd of boars. The animals were either possessed of a collective intelligence, or were being expertly herded by Pickles. It wasn’t clear. Whatever was driving them, they kept up the pretence of casual mingling while simultaneously shielding the interlopers and moving away from the shed.

  “If we can just get to that fuel trailer,” said Tony, “we can sneak round the far side of the house and up the logging track.”

  “That way, boars,” whispered Nick, blindly shuffling among the bristly bodies towards the house and diesel container.

  “You hear that?” whispered Tony at his elbow.

  “What?” said Nick.

  “He’s radioing your licence number to base or whatever.”

  Nick was about to ask why when the answers tumbled into his head. If they had a licence number they’d soon have his name and address; if they had those, did it matter if he and his dad got away today? Gangsters, bad men with long reaches, would be able to find and silence them at their leisure. And not just them. With the word out, they could have someone on his mom’s doorstep before they even got out of the woods.

  “What do we do?” said Nick.

  “One thing at a time, son.”

  A boar trod on Nick’s hand and he gave an ow! of surprise.

  “Hey!” shouted a voice. There was the sound of running feet and the snap and clatter of weapons.

  “Faster boars, faster,” urged Nick.

  “You! You two! We can see you!”

  Tony gave an experimental and frankly optimistic oink but the ruse was up.

  “Get up now or we open fire!”

  Nick looked to his dad and wished he could see in the dark, gauge any kind of expression or suggestion, but he didn’t have wolf-vision.

  “We surrender,” said Tony and nudged Nick. Together they rose from the mud, backs to the tanker trailer, boars still milling about them.

  The armed men had opened the boot to the Cadillac and the automatic interior light was enough to give them silhouettes. There were four in all.

  “Is one of you Col?” asked Nick.

  “Hands on your heads!” one shouted, which was no answer. There were all carrying guns. Nick’s knowledge of weapons began and ended with Hollywood action movies and broadly fell into the categories of AK47, Uzi 9mm, Walther PPK and .44 Magnum. Maybe these were Uzis or something similar. Nick wasn’t going to spend his last moments on earth worrying about it. But the one doing most of the shouting had grenades hooked onto his flak jacket which was kind of cool in a would be cool if he wasn’t intent on killing me kind of way.

  “I said, hands on heads!” he bellowed.

  Nick obeyed. From his peripheral vision he saw Tony do the same. Grenade man walked forward, pushing through the boar herd, while his colleagues held back.

  57

  Col tapped his ear and put his fingers to a throat mic.

  “You found them? Alive?” He glanced at Finn, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “Both of them? Finn here said she’d killed one of—” He paused and then shrugged. “Then she’s a feckin liar, isn’t she? Or incompetent.” He listened at length. “That’s grand, Stefan, but I thought I was clear. Cinco de fucking Mayo, I said. That’s – yeah, the one where they all fire into the air. Yeah. Mexicans. The—” He raised his gun to mime a little celebratory gunfire. “Yeah. That one. Tell me when it’s done.”

  He dropped his fingers from the throat mic and looked at Finn. “You said you saw to the old man.”

  “I did.”

  “You see, where I come from see to would mean to kill. Does it perhaps mean something different in your retarded little country?”

  “I got the heart,” Finn reminded him.

  “Whoop-de-feckin-doo,” said Col. “Next time I need something from the butcher’s I’ll know who to call.”

  Finn decided it was time to smile. She pulled back her lips to reveal the fangs crowding her mouth. She bared them in an unholy grimace and let the change melt across the rest of her body. Her muscles rippled with power, and the last of her clothes split under the pressure. She flexed and grunted, the food mixer prosthetic snapped away as a fresh, clawed forearm burst forth from her stump of an arm. It hurt but felt orgasmically good. The new arm was covered in thick black fur, wet with the slime of its own afterbirth.

  “Fuck me!” swore one of the mercs.

  Finn admired the sheen of her new pelt as it shone in the moonlight. Maybe she wouldn’t miss the Muubaa after all. Fur was definitely back in fashion.

  Col took a step back. “Don’t go making this any feckin worse,” he growled.

  “Catch,” she said and threw the heart in a box. Col’s face lifted to track it, one hand raised to catch it. She’d thrown it too hard and too far. It arced up and over onto the still spinning blades of the helicopter.

  Col yelled something. The heart vanished into the roar of the blades, chopped so finely there was only a fine mist of blood. As attentions were diverted, Finn leapt to the side, landing on one of Col’s men. She lashed out with a clawed hand, rammed it under his body armour and rib cage, and felt for his heart. Her claws closed over it and dragged it out, noting the look of surprise on his face.

  She turned to the others.

  “Fuck you, Col!” she roared, threw the heart at his feet, before bounding away with a howl.

  “It’s fine!” Col yelled after, with what sounded like a laugh. “I don’t need Oz’s heart any more. I can just take yours. It will do the job perfectly.”

  They opened fire as she ran for the bridge.

  58

  When he first heard gunfire, Nick flinched, but it was in the distance, muffled by the night and forest. It sounded like rain on a metal roof.

  The man nearest to Nick and Tony smiled. “Loose ends,” he said.

  He settled his gun’s stock against his shoulder and aimed. Nick tried to think of something to say and found nothing forthcoming at all.

  “Hold on, Stefan, what’s this?” called a man by the car.

  Frozen with terror yet instinctively curious, Nick peered over. Pickles had walked out from the shadows of the house. This was regular-size Pickles: shrunk down to a modest, almost pitiful size. She held up a paw, limping painfully.

  “It’s just a dog,” said Stefan. “Jesus.”

  Pickles approached the men at the car with wide eyes and a whimper.

  “Aw, wassup, buddy?” said the nearest man. He knelt to inspect her.

  “Don’t interact with it,” sighed Stefan. “We’re not animal bloody rescue.”

  “He’s got a problem with his paw,” said the nearest man. “Let me have a look at—”

  Pickles erupted into full wolf form, inflating to pumped-up-on-steroid proportions mid-leap. She buried her teeth in his throat. Blood fountained an arterial spray which caught another man in the eyes. His shout joined the first’s gurgled cries. As the two recoiled, one in pain, one in shock, someone opened fire.

  Boars screamed. Bullets struck the plastic diesel trailer behind Nick’s head with hollow, drum-like thuds. Something splashed on him. A moment later his dad rugby tackled him, throwing him to the ground.

  Stefan yelled, “Don’t shoot me you— Nnnh!”

  Nick momentarily had a face full of dirt. Stinking diesel was pouring onto the ground around him. He didn’t want to be around when it caught fire. In the movies, fuel and guns always equalled a giant kaboom. Somewhere, one of the men was still shooting wildly. Nick followed Tony as he scrambled away.

  “It’s getting away!” someo
ne shouted.

  “Right you bastard!” another yelled. Nick thought it was the one named Stefan.

  Nick turned to check. Stefan, stumbling and wounded, snatched a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin. “Damned dog!” He lobbed his grenade.

  “No!” shouted one of the men by the car. “We’re—!”

  Nick heard the grenade bounce off the boot lid and into the car.

  “Get down,” hissed Tony.

  “My car!” wailed Nick.

  There was a yellow flash, and a bang which was far too loud. Seconds later, pieces of Cadillac rained out the sky.

  “Oh my God! My beautiful car.”

  The boars were all screaming and running as one. Stampeding, thought Nick. That was the word.

  A little bonnet flag, burning along one edge, drifted in the wind.

  59

  On the bridge, Finn ducked under the cover of one of the wall struts as Col’s men advanced. They were firing haphazardly but still had her somewhat pinned down. Maybe pissing them off to their faces wasn’t the best combat tactic; fun though. Now, she needed to get to the cover of the woods where she could pick them off individually. Unfortunately, the woods were at one end of the bridge and the men at the other. Wolf-speed or not, they’d have too much time to shoot her down.

  She could jump over the side, but it looked around a thirty foot drop, and there were leg-snapping rocks at the bottom. Bullet wounds and broken legs might be temporary upsets to a werewolf in the fullness of her power but she didn’t want to injure herself unnecessarily. Not while she was having fun.

  She looked down at the water. It reflected the moonlight. She held out a hand, feeling the Moon’s power as an almost tangible thing. She wanted to revel in it. She crouched low: Col’s men were moving into position on the bridge.

  She looked towards the forest. There had definitely been an explosion from that side of the bridge. As she listened carefully, she picked up another sound: something growing, rumbling, punctuated by terrified squeals. Blobs of orange fire flicked between the trees.

  “Sir!” called one of the mercs. He sounded worried. Finn reckoned he ought to be worried: it was the sound of a hundred charging boars.

  She smiled; she was always adaptable. With her new skills, she was more than ready to take advantage of whatever came next.

  The mass of boars hit the far end of the bridge. The mercs, perhaps realising they were trapped in a bottleneck with a hundred tons of porky death bearing down on them, opened fire. One mook ran forward and took up a position not five feet from where Finn crouched.

  These boars were not for turning. They had a surging crowd at their backs. Some of them were on fire. On actual fucking fire. The mercs were going to be trampled to death.

  It was time for Finn to leave the scene. An idea had popped into her head, and she wanted to try it out. She grabbed the man nearest to her, swatting his weapon away, and raked a deadly incision across his stomach. As his mouth froze in denial, she pulled out a loop of his intestine.

  “The gut ish shaid to be around twenty feet long,” she said. She pulled him close to the bridge wall. “Hold on.”

  She dived over the wall, clutching the intestine. The man automatically braced himself as she dropped, his guts unravelling en route. As she reached the end, she felt the briefest tug of elastic resistance. The man’s brief scream became a terminal erk! His internal organs tore free, and she dropped the few feet to the water below.

  60

  Nick and Tony sheltered against a farm building wall, away from the remains of the burning car and the as yet unlit pool of spreading diesel.

  Nick panted, hands on knees. “Did we just kill two of the bad guys?” he asked.

  “At least that,” said Tony. He raised a hand.

  Nick looked at it. “What?”

  “High five?” said Tony.

  “You want to high five?”

  “Is it not appropriate to congratulate ourselves for taking down villains?”

  Nick shrugged. “I just thought you’d think high fives were too … urban for your tastes.”

  “Urban? You’d rather we gave each other a hearty handshake.”

  Nick shook his head and high fived his dad. Strangely he felt a surge of happiness, even though they were still in big trouble.

  “And now we run away,” said Nick.

  Tony was shaking his head. “We can’t. They’ve got your registration number.”

  “So we need to warn mom, call the cops.”

  Tony pointed at the surrounding mountains, above the moonlit trees. “If we’re lucky, they’ll not yet have been able to get a signal out. Not until they leave in that chopper of theirs. If we take them all down before then maybe – maybe – we’ll be safe.”

  Nick stared at his dad long and hard. “Has becoming a werewolf suddenly made you reckless and a little bit, you know, Die Hard?”

  “I liked that movie,” said Tony. “Although the last one, with the riddles and the bombs was good too.”

  Nick thought for a moment. “That wasn’t the last one. There’s been five Die Hards. That was only number three.”

  “Really? Surely Bruce whatisface is knocking on a bit now. It’s a tad unbelievable having geriatric action heroes running around, taking out bad guys.”

  Nick coughed meaningfully and looked at his seventy-something year old dad.

  Tony sniffed. “I think we’ve been pushed around enough by these people,” he said. “We need to take them down.”

  Nick realised he was grinning. He felt more than a little light-headed. He wondered if he’d been shot without noticing and was losing blood. He checked himself.

  “You did say you wanted to spend some father-son time together,” said Tony.

  “Yeah.” Nick laughed. “Take them down,”.

  “It’s a plan?”

  Nick clapped Tony on the shoulder. “It’s an awful plan, dad, but, yeah, let’s do it.”

  “We’ll need to find some equipment.”

  “I don’t want to go crawling around in the dark looking for equipment.”

  “Dark?” said Tony. He tutted and tapped the corner of his golden eyes. “I forgot. Wait here.”

  Before Nick could complain, Tony disappeared into the shadows. He was back within thirty second, although thirty seconds in the nerve-wracking, bladder-clenching darkness on the edge of a firefight felt a hell of a lot longer.

  “Here,” said Tony. “Put these on.”

  Nick felt the contours of the night vision goggles. “Oh, cool.” He slipped them on. Suddenly the world was picked out in a washed out but clearer green. His dad nodded approvingly.

  A thought came to Nick. “You stole these off a dead bloke, didn’t you?”

  “He didn’t need them. Accidentally shot by his own men. Friendly fire. Here.” Tony handed over an earpiece. “We can keep a track of what they’re saying. And this.” Tony passed him a handgun.

  Nick almost dropped it. It was surprisingly heavy. “What am I meant to do with this?”

  “I think the general plan is to shoot people,” said Tony, straight-faced.

  “Yes, but…” Nick held the weapon gingerly. “I’ve never used a gun before.”

  “You were the one who wanted to go shooting this weekend.” Tony chuckled. “Funny how things turn out.”

  “Funny. Yes.” It wasn’t the term Nick would have used. “I just have no experience with guns. I don’t know how to cock them. I mean, do you even cock modern guns?”

  “You’ve watched enough films. What do they do?”

  Nick thought. He gripped the gun in both hands. He prodded the little levers and buttons on the side. He pulled at the slide on the top. It made a satisfying mechanical sound when he did. “And then I think you—”

  The gun went off. It was very loud and it nearly snapped his hand off at the wrist. He stared in numb pain.

  “That seemed to work,” said Tony.

  “Ow,” said Nick, not sure if what had just happened was
super-cool or utterly terrifying.

  “And now let’s go get our equipment,” said Tony.

  61

  On the bridge, men and boars screamed.

  The river was cold. Finn gloried in the sensation and swam to the shore. She felt a surge of joy at the sinewy power of her physique as she emerged onto the dusty bank.

  She used all four limbs to run – it made perfect sense to her. She ran into the edge of the woods, swung on one arm from a tree and launched herself into a cluster of boars which hadn’t joined the stampede. They squealed and grunted in fear and pain as she rampaged through them.

  She crushed the life out of one just because it felt good to feel its deflating body shriek like a giant, tortured whoopee cushion.

  Death was beautiful in all its varieties.

  Finn climbed to the highest boughs of a birch tree and howled at the glorious Moon. She knew she should be down on the forest floor, creating death and havoc. Tonight was all about sending a message to Mr Argyll. There was only one werewolf contract killer in the business: Finn. And if he wanted her services, it was going to cost.

  Tonight it was going to cost him the lives of ten men.

  62

  Nick and Tony crouched amongst the trees. Each of them had scavenged what they could from the outbuildings, while keeping out of the sights of the surviving gunmen. They reconvened with a Pickles who had jaws slathered with blood and an idiotically happy look on her face. While Tony took an inventory of their haul, Nick tried to listen in on the radio chatter.

  Col had ordered his men to sound off over the comms. The best Nick could tell in the confusion, there were around six left. Some were down by the helicopter on the far side of the river. Others were in the woods. Nick wasn’t sure where. It didn’t sound like the men were sure either.