Wolf and Raven

by Michael A. Stackpole

  One of the two bullets peppered me with concrete shards and lead splatter as it hit the wall near my head. The other one hit me square in the ribs and spun me back into the alley. I ricocheted off the opposite wall, then sprawled unceremoniously on stinking bags of garbage.

  Lynn dropped to her knees and reached out to me, then her hands recoiled in horror to cover her mouth as she saw the bullet hole in my jacket. “Oh, God, you’re shot!” The blood drained from her face and I sensed she wanted to run, but refused to give in to her panic. “I have to get help ..

  I held a hand up as my body once again let me breathe. “Wait... I’m battered but not bloodied.” Gingerly I opened my coat and the .45 caliber slid across my t-shirt and to die ground. “See, no blood, no foul.”

  It heartened me to see the relief in her eyes. I saw no reason to mention that the bullet had broken at least one of my ribs and that if the Weenies got any closer with their guns, my t-shirt wouldn’t stop their evil intentions, much less another bullet.

  I took her hands in mine and gave them a squeeze. “Go further along the alley. Duck down behind that big dumpster there. I’ll be along in a second. There’s something I have to do.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here all..

  “Just a second, babe, then I’ll be with you. Trust me.”

  As she headed back down the alley, I worked past the pain and reached inside myself. Deep in my heart I touched the Wolf spirit. The Old One hauled himself up into a sitting position and looked at me disapprovingly. The red rebuke in his eyes found allies in the scarlet shadows rippling over his black form.

  Even before die Old One had a chance to speak, I cut him off. “I need your strength and your speed and your senses, and I need them now! I have no time to debate you. Now!” Without waiting for his acquiescence, I pulled myself out of the self-imposed trance and smiled as the world reordered itself in accordance with my new perspective.

  Despite the fetid garbage surrounding me, I could still smell the lingering trace of Lynn’s perfume and the fear it helped mask. I heard the sounds she made as she ducked to safety, and the sounds of the rats in the dumpster behind which she hid. More important, though, I heard the asthmatic wheezing of a Weenie running toward where he’d seen me fall.

  In an instant—the broken rib a twinge of pain to be ignored—I was on my feet and had flattened myself against the opposite wall of the alley. The acrid scent of gunsmoke burned into my nostrils as the silenced snout of another Ingram Mk. 22 poked around the corner. Without hesitation I grabbed the gun and yanked, pulling the startled Weenie into the shadowed byway. I tore the gun free of his feeble grasp, then smashed its blocky butt against his head. He collapsed without so much as a moan.

  Following him came a gillette who’d learned to move almost silently. My first warning of his presence came when the forty-centimeter-long claws built into his right hand telescoped out with a click, then whistled as he swung them at me. His cut came waist-high and should have sliced my belly open, but I’d already begun to twist away from him before his attack began. The trio of polished steel blades shredded the right flank of my jacket and razored through the t-shirt and some flesh, but they didn’t get enough to put me down.

  Before he could turn his wrist around and try to backhand me with the blades, my right hand locked on his hand. I bent his hand inward toward his own chest. Anticipating my move, he retracted the claws and relaxed in preparation for using some esoteric martial art to turn my attack against me. That’s why it surprised him when I jammed his fist against his own chest, then smacked the gun in my left hand against his funny bone.

  The blow numbed his forearm and released the claws.

  I stepped over his dying body and out onto the street again. The half-dozen gangers and razorboys racing down the sidewalk collided abruptly as their lead elements tried to stop. I stroked the Ingram’s trigger twice, sending two three-shot bursts in their direction.

  Fortunately for them, and whoever does the workman’s compensation filing for the Halloweeners, a heavy-set ork up front absorbed most of the damage. One bullet lanced sparks from a gillette’s left-arm assembly and another folded an ork over as it drove his navel out through his spine, but otherwise it left the band unscathed.

  Four out of at least ten down, and me with a half-empty clip and busted barrel staves in my chest. Why the hell don’t these things ever happen to Kid Stealth?

  I ducked back into the alley and looped the machine pistol over my shoulder by its strap. I grabbed both of the men I’d downed and dragged them to the dumpster. Lynn’s eyes grew wide enough to fall out of her head, and I suddenly realized that with the silencer on the gun and the way I dealt with the first two people, she had no idea any fighting had taken place.

  I dropped to one knee and brought the Ingram to hand again. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Lynn, believe me I am.” I nodded toward the bodies. “I need you to go through the razorboy’s pockets and get whatever he has—guns, knives, bullets, anything. I’ll do the kid. It’s our only chance at survival.”

  She reached out to touch the ragged furrows cut in my coat. “You’re hurt.”

  “Not as bad as I will be if they get you because of trying to kill me.” I started to pat the Weenie down, then liberated the spare Ingram clips in the thigh pockets of his khaki fatigues. “Charles the Red or Mr. Sampson somehow learned that Raven and the others were out of town. They decided to make a move against me. Chuckles has been planning this for some time.”

  “How do you know that?” Lynn said as she pulled wires and datacords from the dead man’s pocket and stuffed them into her own.

  I whirled around and pointed the Mk. 22’s snout at the alley mouth. A short burst blasted a grunge back over a parked car. “This won’t do.” I stood and twisted the dumpster so it blocked the alley, then answered her question by pointing at the razorboy and his purple-spiked coiffure.

  “He was one of the ones in the park when we arrived. He was jacked into one of the public tables. It’s my fault: We’ve been too predictable—always going to the park before we go elsewhere. He just let the others know we had arrived and the gears started grinding.”

  Suddenly I felt the alley walls close in on me like a trap. I lunged forward and covered Lynn’s body with my own. The bullets sprayed down through the space where I’d just been crouching and, somehow, missed my splayed-out legs.

  As spent cartridges tinkled down in a brass rain, I rolled over onto my back and burned the rest of the Mac’s clip. Bullets traced a line up the alley wall and through the street samurai who’d taken the high ground. He pitched back out of sight, his body looking like a pinata filled with cherry Jell-O, and I reloaded the gun without thinking.

  Lying there on my back gave me a unique view of the world. From beneath the dumpster I saw a truck turn into the alley. Its tires squealed and smoked as it fought for traction in the garbage choking the alley mouth. As it picked up speed and the obscenities being shouted by its occupants fought over the roar of the engine, I realized the Weenies meant to use the dumpster to smear us into a thin, bloody paste.

  Off to my left I saw a sewer grating lurking like a grime-smeared island in the midst of an oily patch of waste water. I leaped to it and single-handedly ripped the grating free. “Lynn, over here, now! Get down in here.”

  Tears streaking her face, she crossed to the hole and started her descent. The slimy, rusty rungs made the climb difficult, but she moved as quickly as she could. My enhanced olfactory senses sampled the sewer miasma with the relish of a wine connoisseur sipping Stemo. The stink gave me ample reason not to follow her, but the gangers in the truck allowed me no alternative.

  “Drop, just drop!” I yelled as I thrust my legs down into the hole. I let myself slip into the darkness as the truck slammed into the dumpster with a horrendous clang. My left hand grabbed the top rung and my head slipped beneath street level as the dumpster’s leading edge guillotined its way above me. I felt a grinding in my shoulder and a
jolt of pain as my handhold stopped the drop short, but I was too intent on other things to worry about injuries at that very moment.

  I shoved the Ingram back up toward street level and tightened down on the trigger. Like a bandsaw cutting wood, the bullets ripped along the truck’s midline. Just behind the cab, the slugs lanced through the gas tank. Almost instantly the acrid scent of gasoline filled my nose and I let go of the ladder’s top rung.

  The truck exploded before I completed the five-meter drop to the river of sewage below. I saw a tremendous flash, then felt the thunderous detonation shudder through my chest. The scream of metal twisting out of shape as the flaming truck cartwheeled through the narrow alley sounded like a banshee death-wail and was made yet more haunting by the acoustics of the subterranean sewer tunnels.

  I hit water and the bottom one after the other. Fire sparked in my right flank as the water gnawed into the claw wounds. Water hissed as it touched the gun’s silencer and evaporated into steam. Gathering my feet beneath me I hauled myself to the surface and stood in the waist-deep river of sludge. As quickly as possible I moved upstream. By doing that I rejoined Lynn and avoided the flaming liquid dripping down in long burning rivulets through the hole above.

  I slipped my left arm around her shoulders and tried not to react as she wrapped her arms around my middle and hugged. I failed and she recoiled. Her hands came away bloody. She stared at the black stains on her palms, for the burning gasoline’s light was too feeble to give the blood its true color.

  She looked up at me as if her world was folding in on itself. “You’re bleeding. This water . . . You need a doctor.”

  I forced a confident smile onto my lips. “You have that straight. I need Dr. Raven.”

  She gave me a puzzled look. “But you said he’d left Seattle for a while.”

  “True, but Raven keeps tabs on things through the Matrix. That's why he took Valerie Valkyrie with them.” I frowned. “Unless we get to a place where we can use a deck, we’re up a creek without a sewage treatment plant in sight.”

  For the first time since we left the park, Lynn smiled. She plucked a short datacord from her pocket and I recalled having seen her strip it off the gillette I killed. “Get me to a junction box or public telecom access jack and from there I’m in.” She pulled her hair back away from her left ear and snapped the cord into the datajack implanted there. “You’ve got the access codes—I’m not going to have to cut any ice, am I?”

  I hesitated. The access codes and link numbers for Dr. Raven’s private commnet were secrets I ranked right up there with knowledge of my particular brand of lunacy. They were the most precious secrets Raven had because if they fell into the wrong hands—read the Halloweeners, Mr. Sampson, or the legion of Raven’s other enemies—it would be possible to uncover a whole string of Raven’s safehouses and resources. Sure, Raven is far too intelligent to keep all of his secrets on-line anywhere, but any information gleaned could jeopardize operations I knew nothing about.

  Furthermore—and far more important to me personally—giving those codes to Lynn would be bringing her into a world I wanted to save her from. I wanted to shield her from the danger I accepted as one of Doc Raven’s aides. By giving her the codes I would increase her risk. It wouldn’t matter to someone like Mr. Sampson that anything she knew would become obsolete the moment Raven replaced the codes—she would become a target for getting at Raven.

  She looked up at me and I saw she’d done some hard thinking. “Wolf, if we don’t reach Raven, what are our chances of survival?”

  I took a deep breath—as deep as my broken ribs would allow anyway—then pursed my lips. “Without contact of any sort, Raven would get suspicious after twenty-four hours, but he probably wouldn’t return until after forty-eight or even seventy-two hours.” I sighed wearily. “I could hold out that long—hell, with a quick trip to my doss I could even carry the war back to the Weenies.”

  She looked down at the torpid river swirling around our legs. “Do the odds change when you have me in tow?”

  “Somewhat, yeah.” Slinging the gun over my shoulder, I cupped her jaw in my hands and kissed her. “I’d take you back to the tower...”

  “But they’re probably anticipating that, and it would only put my parents in jeopardy.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” I didn’t add that we had no way of knowing how long they’d been watching us or how much they knew about where I was likely to go. “I’m sorry I’ve put you in this danger. If there was any other way . . .”

  Lynn pressed a finger to my lips. “If you were anyone or anything else, Wolfgang Kies, I’d never have gotten to know you. Never regret or deny what you are. It’s what I love about you.”

  I kissed her again. “Well, then, let’s find a telecom box and get to work.”

  * * *

  Finding a phone junction box was actually easier than I’d imagined, and I immediately ripped it open. The wires inside looked like so much rainbow spaghetti to me, but Lynn recognized things right away. She smiled and snugged the datacord into a slot. In a hushed whisper I gave Lynn the link number I’d been assigned and the access codes, including the one that disabled the pattern checker. I had to do that to verify that I wasn’t using the codes or the computer would see an input pattern totally out of sync with my previous access and would sever the connection.

  Lynn winked at me. “Don’t worry, lover. No one will get those codes out of me. I promise.”

  “I know,” I said, but she was already gone. The smile remained on her face, but her eyes got a glassy look as she jacked in. Her eyes REMed and then I watched her grin broaden, which had to mean she’d gotten into Raven’s system. For the next minute she looked utterly enraptured, then her eyes blinked and she returned to the land of flesh and blood.

  She stared at me with incredible joy flashing in her eyes. “When I used your codes and gave the system the override, I heard Raven’s voice say, ‘That’s not necessary, Ms. Ingold.’ He had a pattern check already built into the system for me! The man’s unbelievable!”

  I suppressed a smirk. “Yeah, that’s putting it mildly.”

  “I left a message telling him that the Halloweeners were after you and me. I also said you thought you could hold out for seventy-two hours, but any help would be appreciated.”

  I nodded. “Good. That will get him back, or he’ll cut someone loose to help us.”

  Obviously pleased with herself, and the fact that Raven had gone to the trouble of building a pattern file on her—from data undoubtedly stolen by Valerie from the Fuchi system—she unplugged the datacord and tucked it away in a pocket. “What do we do now?”

  I pointed further on down the tunnel. “We’ll head toward my apartment, but we’ll wait until dark before we go up to street level. At my place I can get weapons and some more suitable clothing for both of us. We’ll let your folks know we’re going to ground, then we lose ourselves.”

  Lynn frowned. “Isn’t it possible they know where you live and might be waiting for us?” nodded. “That’s why we wait until dark. We’ll scan the situation and walk away if anything is weird.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “That it is.” I smiled and started splashing my way deeper into the tunnel.

  Lynn took my hand. “I think we make a good team—one too good to split up.”

  “I agree, kid.” I gave her hand a squeeze. “The only way we’ll part company is over my dead body.”

  II

  By the time we made our way through the tunnels to my part of town, the cold had soaked into my bones and I was shivering. I knew, without a doubt, that the cuts in my side were infected. I needed antibiotics and bandages, as well as dry clothes, dry shoes, and the better part of the arsenal I owned. Fortunately all those things were available in my apartment.

  The full moon had risen far enough above the horizon that the ball no longer looked huge. Lynn and I returned to the surface through a grate in a storm culvert one street over from my apartment h
ouse. With it still being early evening and the neighborhood being on the peaceful side of residential, not many folks were out and about. I took that as a good sign—in these parts “neighborhood watch” meant folks kept score in gun-fights. If no one was out looking around I could allow myself to assume there was no trouble brewing.

  Once we made it into the lobby of my apartment house I felt a lot better. I checked the security door down the back hallway and saw it was closed tight. With me in the lead, we ascended the stairs as they angled their way up and around three floors. Each flight had twelve steps, forty-eight steps between floors, and we took each one as if it was our last. I kept looking up and down the stairwell core and saw nothing.

  Giddy is the only way to describe how I felt when I reached my door. I was tired and achey and stank like raw sewage, but that was all secondary to the happiness I felt in reaching sanctuary. Lynn clearly felt the same way and even the Old One yipped inside my head to signal his pleasure at returning to our lair.

  I keyed the lock, opened the door, and reached inside to turn on the light. I tapped the switch and nothing happened. That struck me as unusual, but not dire. Blown bulb I told myself, and stepped into the darkness.

  Looking up I saw two red eyes burning balefully about two meters above my eye level. A hand closed about my forearm, covering it from elbow to wrist. Suddenly I found myself yanked off my feet and flying through the darkness into the middle of my apartment. As I whirled through the air I saw the silhouette of a troll eclipse my vision of Lynn.

  She screamed, the Old One snarled, and I hit a knot of bodies in the dark. The Old One filled me with strength and dulled my pain. I lashed out left and right, connecting solidly. I heard grunts and groans, then I slipped off balance and began to back-pedal in the darkness. Something shoved me and I exploded out into the night through the apartment window.