Wendigo Rising: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode Three) (Yancy Lazarus Series Book 3)

by James Hunter

  A pair of hands latched onto my coat and pulled at me with a furious yank, moving my body only a handful of inches, but enough to save me from a crushed lung. The hands dug under my armpits and tugged, dragging me clear just as the explosion went off.

  SEVENTEEN:

  Science Fair

  The BOOM shook the walls and sent a shudder running across the floor; the concussive force shoved me back another few feet. I collided with Ferraro and both of us went sprawling to the ground as a wave of hot, fetid goo washed over us like baptismal waters, ushering us into a new life: a life devoid of gator-women, but one filled with disgusting organ gravy. Winona lay on the floor ten feet away from us, motionless, though breathing. She was in bad shape—lots of blood stained her hair and each breath was a shallow, feeble thing.

  The few remaining Shit-Geckos, eight all told, were also on the ground, rolling around in hysterics, tails whipping madly, arms clutched about their heads as they shrieked and chattered. Could be I was wrong, but I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that the Little Brothers shared a hive intellect, each mind partially controlled by the Queen. Guess there might’ve been some truth to that, considering how poorly they were taking their mother’s untimely death. I guess lucky breaks do fall my way once in a blue moon.

  After a few moments of manic motion, the Brothers’ flapping and flailing ceased, the remaining survivors passing away from brutal life into a well-deserved death. Some part of me demanded that I feel bad for ’em, at least a little—death is never pretty, even when it’s occasionally necessary. Watching these things kick the bucket certainly didn’t give me pleasure, but neither could I conjure up a shred of regret. That in itself was troubling; when killing ceases to be painful, that’s when you know it’s time to give up the gun. And, for better or worse, remorse was a distant emotion—an ungrateful kid who’d grown up, skipped town, and only sent a postcard a couple of times a year.

  Hell, I even found myself secretly hoping that Fast Hands was also dying a horrible, slow death wherever he was holed up. Yeah, fat chance of that—I wasn’t that lucky. That asshole was like a cockroach: smash it with a shoe, set it on fire, nuke it with pesticide, and watch in horror as it keeps on going.

  Ferraro pushed herself up and struggled to her feet. She limped over to my side and knelt down, wincing in pain. “Yancy, are you alright?” she asked slowly, her voice loud and clear, the way emergency responders are supposed to speak to trauma victims. “Can you move?” she asked next, her eyes skipping over the chaos and carnage surrounding us.

  I couldn’t answer. The pain and weariness was closing in on me, crowding everything else out. I mumbled something incoherent and closed my eyes, just for a moment. A second later—or so it seemed to my bruised and battered brain—a warm liquid tasting of rotten fish and urine dribbled into my mouth. I gagged and tried to sit up, but an immense weight pinned my shoulders against the blood-slick floor.

  I blinked my eyes open and groped for my pistol, but relaxed when I saw Winona’s big hairy face swim into focus, hovering above me while Ferraro pressed something into my mouth.

  “Don’t struggle,” the Bigfoot said, sounding like a concerned mother bear tending to the boo-boo of one of her cubs. “The medicine is already at work in you. Be still, it will go easier that way.”

  The flow of liquid—like drinking the contents of a porta-potty—ebbed after another few seconds. Ferraro pushed something about the size of a grape into my mouth. It was slimy and tough as old leather.

  “Chew it and swallow,” Winona urged, again using her soothing mama-bear voice. I wanted to vomit, scrub my tongue with a Brillo pad, vomit again, then brush my teeth with industrial-grade acid. Instead, I manned up and just ate whatever the hell it was. I chewed, working whatever it was around in my mouth until it was pulpy, then gulped, forcing the gunk down my throat. The pressure on my shoulders lifted, Winona’s hands moving away. I gradually eased myself upright, which came as something of a surprise. Considering how I’d felt only a handful of minutes ago, my body seemed to be working surprisingly well. Suspiciously so.

  I gave Winona and Ferraro a once-over, my eyes narrowed in mistrust: both women also seemed to be doing surprisingly well. Sure, there was loads of blood and I spotted a small army of cuts splashed throughout Winona’s disheveled hair, but both her arms were functional again, which sent up all kinds of red flags in my brain. Ferraro’s color was better too, less pale and clammy, though she was still spattered with blood, grime, and goo.

  I prodded at the worst of the cuts on my leg and was startled to discover it scarcely hurt at all. Someone had removed the gauze and duct tape I’d used to patch the gash up earlier and had smeared some kind of viscous yellow paste into the wound. The cut looked a week old instead of a few minutes old. It would leave an ugly scar, but I’d be back to walking around in no time.

  “The hell is going on here?” I asked, confusion capering through my body as it cackled in mad glee. I should’ve felt dead, dammit. “Why do I feel so good?” I demanded, dragging a finger through the yellow shit on my wound. “I don’t trust things I don’t understand.”

  Ferraro gave me a flat, level stare—she looked a little green around the gills. “I’m not sure you want to know,” she said. “Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, which, coincidentally, is pretty much what the inside of my mouth tasted like. “What happened?”

  “Ask her.” Ferraro hitched a thumb toward Winona.

  “Well?” I said, turning on her while I leaned back onto my hands, the rough stone cool on my palms.

  Winona sheepishly pointed to one of the Little Brothers. His arms had been hacked off at the shoulder joint. A bone saw and a surgeon’s scalpel, both covered in green-blue gore, sat close by the corpse. The Sasquatch held up an oval sac—gray, lumpy, and a little larger than a grape. I ran my tongue over my teeth, wishing for a swimming pool of Listerine to go backstroking through.

  “I have studied many of the species inhabiting Inworld and Out,” Winona said with a self-conscious shrug of her shoulders. “Like many reptile species, the Little Brothers have regenerative capabilities. They heal very rapidly and, in some rare cases, may even be able to regrow lost limbs. They are also resilient to most diseases and infections—an important survival feature considering where they live.” She glanced around at the moldy brick walls, the rust covered blades, and the stagnant water from the sewer. “The glands, when rubbed into wounds and ingested, have a similar effect on others.”

  “Told you, you didn’t want to know,” Ferraro said, her tone perfectly mirroring the utter revulsion working its way through my insides.

  I stared at the mangled reptile body in stunned, disgusted silence for a long beat. “Winona,” I said eventually, “that is the most repulsive thing I’ve ever heard. Repulsive-squared, multiplied by an exponential factor of disgusting-cubed. And I survived Vietnam, so that’s saying something.”

  I slumped forward, bracing my hands against my knees, making a deliberate effort to slow my breathing as I tried not to spew a fountain of vomit. As gross as it was, I guess there was a certain poetic justice to it: the organ thieves having their organs stolen. “Sorry,” I said to the Bigfoot once I finally suppressed the wave of nausea. “You saved my life, all of our lives. Gross but pragmatic. Thank you. If you weren’t a hairy Bigfoot, I’d totally kiss you.”

  The Sasquatch eyed me askew, her lips pressing tight in disapproval, her face scrunching up in a look that said, Not in a million years. “Please do not be offended, mage, but …” She faltered, grimacing as though a kiss from me would be somehow nastier than eating reptilian gland sacs. “You are …” she fell silent, appraising me with her big emerald eyes, “not my type.”

  Ferraro turned away, grinning like mad, stifling a genuine laugh—a rarity from her.

  Harsh burn. Shot down by Bigfoot.

  I staggered to my feet, trying to retain as much dignity as I could muster. It was tou
gh going, let me tell you. I was swaying like a drunk on a bender, my clothes were trashed and covered in gore, and I’d just been rejected by an eight-foot-tall woman covered head to toe in hair—I could fit my dignity into a thimble with room to spare for my pride.

  “We don’t have all day here, ladies,” I said, which earned another small laugh from Ferraro. I cleared my throat, ignoring her. “Winona, you take these glands or whatever, check for human survivors, and patch up any you run across. Ferraro, let’s take a look around—see if we can find an exit or figure out what in the hell they were up to down here.”

  Winona nodded and moved off toward the surgical tables while Ferraro and I picked our way through the mutilated corpses and into the lab proper.

  “Split up?” she suggested.

  I bobbed my head and moved further into the room even as she headed over to a paper-strewn work desk next to a set of file cabinets.

  I beelined for the giant, liquid-filled, sci-fi test tubes—odd lab specimens floated within. There were four suspended test subjects, each slightly different from the last, though all shared certain common characteristics: all were severely deformed—basically just a lump of twisted white skin and muscle. All had eyeless faces of creamy white with gaping fish-like mouths filled with jagged saw-blade teeth. All of them looked like they had, at some point, been human or at least a distant relative of Homo sapiens—halfies maybe.

  I’d seen these things before, or something damn close to them at any rate. The violent, cannibal zombies from future Seattle—meatbags, I’d called them.

  That’s when it all clicked into place: these creatures also shared a passing resemblance to both the Little Brothers and to the Wendigo. Doctor Hogg must’ve been using the Wendigo blood to create an infectious virus. And if what we’d seen in the future held true, that virus would produce a mutant army capable of turning the world of man right on its head.

  “Hey, Ferraro, get your ass over here—you gotta see this shit.”

  A few heartbeats later she slid up next to me, gaze drifting over the floating test subjects. She stopped a few feet away, eyes gliding over each tube, filing away all the details for later.

  “The zombies,” she said, finishing her detailed survey. “Doctor Hogg is the one responsible for making the zombies.”

  “Looks that way,” I said.

  She frowned and nodded her head. “It all makes sense,” she said a second later. “Come take a look at what I found over there. You’re not going to believe it.” She paused. “Or maybe you will.” She turned away, heading back across the room, bound for the desk.

  I took one last solid look at the floating bodies, suppressing a small shudder, before following Ferraro. It was one thing to see some nightmarish shadow future, but seeing that awful reality take form in real time was unnerving. A bit like walking over my own grave.

  Ferraro was leaning over a large map spread out on the doctor’s work desk—it was a map of Seattle, with a variety of locations circled, some in red ink, others in green, with barely legible notes scrawled in chicken scratch next to each spot. Locations and times.

  There were grocery stores and high schools marked out, movie theaters and shopping malls selected. All places that would accommodate large numbers of people, while still being “soft targets”—locations which weren’t well guarded and, thus, highly susceptible to attack.

  Next to the map was a hand drawn blueprint for some strange machine, which, to my technical and professionally trained eye, looked like a cross between a generator and a washing machine.

  So I’m not a tech guy—no one’s good at everything, okay?

  “What am I looking at?” I asked, trying to put all the pieces together in my head. I leaned in next to her, my shoulder pressing against hers as we looked down.

  “Remember how I told you I’d been working a case up in Seattle?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded.

  “Well, this is it.” She jabbed a finger at the map, then pointed to the machine blueprints. She shook her head, glancing back and forth between the images. “I can’t believe this. I mean what are the odds?” She ran a dirty hand over the map, smoothing out one curling corner while also spreading around a smear of drying blood.

  “I’m the Hand of Fate,” I said, and shrugged, “an agent of destiny, and my immediate supervisor is Lady Luck—I think it’s safe to say there aren’t many coincidences.”

  “We were called in to assist local authorities in relation to a possible terror attack,” Ferraro replied. “Several locations, these locations”—she pointed at a handful of locations marked in green ink—“all experienced minor explosions at approximately 9:50 AM, three days ago. EOD checked the sites and found the remnants of pipe bombs and the machines in these blueprints. As far as we could tell, the machines were designed as some sort of dispersal system, but there wasn’t a biological component present. No anthrax, no smallpox, no VX gas. Whoever set these things up released water vapor.”

  “So it was a test run?” I asked.

  “We weren’t sure, but that was our working theory. There weren’t any links to known terror groups, though, and none of our guys had run across the tech before, so it all amounted to a bunch of dead ends. But it all makes sense …” She chewed on one lip, a nervous tell. “It was a dry run. He was making sure the dispersal systems worked. Why did he plant pipe bombs?” she asked, half to herself, half to me.

  I glanced down at the map with its scribbled notes. There were two sets of times for each location. “He’s not just targeting the victims at each site,” I said, “he’s targeting the first responders, too. The first release goes off with the bomb, dosing anyone in the vicinity, and the second release is timed to go off when the first responders show. Make sure they get sick early on so that emergency services won’t be able to effectively respond once the shit really starts hitting the fan.”

  She furrowed her brow, staring at the map as though she might yet be able to drag a confession out of it. “That’s a common terrorist tactic,” she said. “The insurgents used to do the same thing to us in Iraq. They’d plant one IED, hit the primary target, then set up a daisy chain to take out EOD techs and medics. The tactic works so well because it exploits basic, human compassion …” Her eyes took on that glazed, faraway look you sometimes see when someone is reliving one of their shittiest memories.

  “Even if,” she said after a time, “you know there’s a chance it might be a trap, it’s almost impossible to watch another human being lay there dying when you might be able to help. Especially if it’s someone close to you. The need to save is programed into us.” She shook her head, her ponytail waggling. “And the worst part is, Seattle isn’t the only city they’re planning to hit.”

  She pulled up the edge of the Seattle map, revealing more city maps beneath: Dallas, L.A., Washington, DC—and that was just stateside. There were also plans for London, Florence, Berlin, Moscow, Bangkok, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

  “So this is how it happens,” she whispered, “this is how the world ends—not some natural disaster, but a purposeful, manmade virus.” She gathered up the maps and the blueprints just as Winona padded over with a man carefully cradled in her arms like a wounded puppy.

  “There is one survivor,” she said, her eyes sad, her voice low and somber. “He is heavily sedated, but I’ve treated his injuries and he should survive.” I glanced at the unconscious man: he was in his late forties or early fifties, his black hair long, shaggy, matted, and peppered with gray. He had a massive beard and wore the same dirty clothes I’d seen him in the night before at the motorhome. I thought about the two who hadn’t made it, a man and a woman—two people who’d been abducted, experimented on like animals, and murdered. All because they were homeless: expendable lab rats for an unethical doctor and a madman looking to grab a fistful of primal power.

  A surge of hatred, hot and heavy, reared up in my chest. Someone was gonna pay for this, dammit.

  “We will bring justice,” Winona said, se
eming to read my thoughts, though I knew my mind was closed off to her. “I have found the exit,” she said. “We should go.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shoving away the fiery emotions churning inside me, storing them up for later, for the right time. Winona led us out of the lab through a connecting corridor and into an adjoining room with a wide doorway—a doorway which looked out into the clearing outside the mill.

  “You ladies head out,” I said, “I’ve just got one last thing to take care of. Won’t take but a couple of seconds.”

  Winona regarded me for a moment, then shrugged and loped through the doorway, the lone survivor in her hands. Ferraro turned to me and placed a hand on my arm. “Anything I can do?”

  I shook my head. “You’re already doing everything you can,” I replied, my grief and anger impotent, ineffectual, but demanding some kind of release. “You’re here, you’re helping—that means more than you know. I’m just gonna clean this place up a bit. Make sure the doctor can’t come back here after we leave and start right up where he left off.”

  She turned away with a small grunt of approval and moved through the doorway, a single step taking her from the underground warren of the Hub sewers to a forest in rural Montana. I was drained, little more than an empty, crushed beer can, but my power was starting to return, thanks to the nearly miraculous power of the Little Brother cocktail I’d been force-fed.

  I opened myself to the Vis, pulled in a torrent of energy, and let loose a sweeping wall of fire which washed over the room, crackling as it consumed papers, furniture, and dead bodies. A rough cleansing for an evil place. The poor souls who’d perished here deserved a true burial, but this was the best I could do to honor ’em.

  First, I’d reduce this place to smoldering slag, then I’d burn the totems on the other side, ensuring no one else would be dragged down here again—not for a while, anyway.