When he reached the top of the crest he shifted to one side and crouched, peering between a couple of low shrubs, cautious, ready to bolt if the bear was ready to pounce. Mustapha had no illusions about how a second fight with this brute would turn out. It’s no accident that there are no wolf packs in areas where bears roam free. If there were bears in Africa, even lions wouldn’t be king of the jungle.
Mustapha was tough, but one of the keys to survival was to know the exact dimensions of your personal power. Without self-deception. No sane person lets his ego write a check his ass can’t cash.
He bent low and peered through the shadows.
He saw Gundersen.
He also saw a lot of blood. Smelled it, too. A delicious smell.
Slowly, slowly, Mustapha stood up.
He let out a slow breath, and then walked down the hill.
-11-
“You’re a damn mess,” he said.
Gundersen smiled. Even his teeth were bloody.
“Yeah, well, life’s a mess,” he said.
“What happened to you?” asked Mustapha as he crossed his legs and lowered himself to the ground. “I didn’t do all that.”
“You wish,” laughed Gundersen, and then his face twisted as first a spasm of pain and then a string of ragged wet coughs tore through him. It took a long time for the coughing fit to pass and when it was done, Gundersen settled back, pale and sweating. His chest, stomach, and left hip were soaked with blood, and Mustapha could see torn flesh through the dried blood and dirt caked on the man’s naked skin. Some of the wounds had begun to scab over—evidence that the were genes were still firing, still working overtime to try to repair damage at speeds no human physiology could match. However, other, deeper wounds still gaped. From the scuffed nature of the ground and the layered smears of blood on the tree trunk against which Gundersen sat, it was evident he’d been here for a while. Hours.
Gundersen nodded to Mustapha’s own wounds. “Aren’t we a pair?”
“What happened?” Mustapha repeated.
“The jackals, what else?”
“Jackals? What jackals?”
“You telling me you didn’t see them?”
“Since the game started all I’ve seen was that little fox guy, a pussy of a werepuma, and you.”
Gundersen grunted. “Which explains why you’re still walking.”
“Tell me.”
“Not sure where to start.”
“What came first, the darts or the jackals?”
“The darts.”
“Okay, start there.”
“It’s the game. It’s how it’s played,” said Gundersen. “You know it’s rigged, right?”
“I figured. But how? By who? And why?”
“Like I said . . . the jackals.”
“You’re not making sense, man.”
Gundersen nodded. “Probably not. My head’s all scrambled. Those damn darts. God only knows what was in them. At first I thought it was a tranquilizer. Something to knock me down a peg. You know—werebear and all. Odds were pretty much in my favor from the jump.”
“Really?” said Mustapha dryly. “I’d have never figured that one out.”
“So when I got hit I thought it was that. Something to level the playing field.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“Nope. Got a needle stick from ketamine once a while back. One of the convicts smuggled it onto the block. This was before your time. They were running K as a party drug.”
“Heard about that shit.”
“People call it a horse tranquilizer, but it’s used for all sorts of things. Point is, when I got hit the symptoms came on the same way, so there’s probably some K in there. Maybe as a base. But there was something else, too. LSD, maybe. Something like that.”
“So, basically, I had my ass handed to me by a stoned bear?”
Gundersen grinned. “Life is a complete bitch, isn’t it?”
“Testify.”
“Anyway, the drugs kick in and suddenly I’m Timothy Leary the Bear. Can’t see straight, can’t think worth a damn, but at the same time I felt my were self in a different way.”
“Stronger, right?”
“Not just stronger,” agreed Gundersen. “It was something else, too.”
Mustapha hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I know. I felt it. Or, maybe feel it. When I changed . . . I became a wolf, you dig? Not a werewolf. A wolf. Like I was sharing headspace with an actual animal. Some weird-ass shit.”
Gundersen closed his eyes. “God, yes. That’s it exactly. For a while there I was a bear. Kind of a . . . What do you call it? Not just a real bear, it’s more of a . . .”
He fished for a word until Mustapha provided it.
“A primal bear.”
“That’s it. It felt weird. It felt older, if that makes any sense.”
“It does. But what I want to know is why they’d put something like that in the drug? I mean, I can see dialing you down to make the fights more even. These assholes are gamblers. People are getting rich betting on us. There’s somebody out there now taking bets on what we’re going to say or do to each other right now.”
Gundersen shook his head and gestured weakly to the edge of his clearing. Three video cameras lay there, each of them comprehensively smashed. “No one’s listening. Mind you, they might come and fix that, but for now, it’s just us.”
“Good to know,” said Mustapha, then he prompted, “Jackals.”
“Right, right,” said Gundersen, wincing at a spasm of pain. “After we beat the shit out of each other, I limped off to lick my wounds. For real, which is something I wouldn’t ever admit to someone who wasn’t like us.”
“Yup.”
“I tried changing back and forth, you know? To see if I could clear my head? Seemed like the drug effect got worse when I was a bear. When I was human I could think better, but the injuries were worse. I had to risk it, though, ’cause I needed to think this through. Understand it. I drifted around, trying to spot and dodge the cameras. Avoided a couple of fights, too. There’s another werewolf—some clown from Arkansas, and there was a werewarthog, which is something I never even heard of before.”
“A werewarthog? Jesus.”
“I know, right? Anyway, I was just starting to get my act together. Wounds were healing well enough for me to make some good time. I wanted to get to the end zone.”
“I thought they wouldn’t let us go there unless we wanted to opt out of the game.”
“What the hell you think I was trying to do? I was going to opt out and then get to the first phone I could find and call the cops. Maybe the FBI. If this game is as rigged as it seems, then soliciting us from all over the country—and following that up with interstate phone calls and e-mails—makes this a federal conspiracy to commit. I mean, this whole game couldn’t be legal. I did a pretty thorough net search and there’s nothing about this for TV. There’s no preorder pay-per-view website. Nothing in the cable guide. No production company listed on the Internet Movie Database. These guys aren’t legit. I figure this whole thing is really about the blood fights, the were-versus-were stuff. And it’s probably subscriber-only, going to a very select clientele. People will pay big bucks if they think someone’s going to get maimed. Or die. There was something like this with vampires over in Thailand. Anderson Cooper did a story. Even had some human assholes climbing into the ring against vamps on the odd chance of winning a big purse. Lot of people died. So . . . sure, this was crooked from the jump.”
“Which makes me wonder why you’re even here, Gundersen. Upstanding prison guard and all that shit.”
“Yeah,” said Gundersen with a sigh. “Everybody makes mistakes. You know that much.”
“What was your mistake?”
Despite his wounds, Gundersen colored. “Doesn’t matter,” he mum
bled.
“Come on, man. Out with it.”
“You’re going to laugh at me.”
“I probably am.”
Another long sigh. “Shit. Online poker.”
“What?”
“Ran up a tab. Big tab. Nine thousand. No way I could pay it off, and the interest was insane. I could have lost my house.”
Mustapha didn’t laugh. “I can understand it. I did it to get me and Warren the hell out of Dodge. For good.”
“Warren—?”
Mustapha hesitated. He’d kept his sexual orientation under wraps while in prison. A gay man could quickly become everybody’s punch in the joint, and he didn’t want to do all his time on his knees. And he didn’t really feel like baring his soul to Gundersen. On the other hand . . . fuck it. What could this man do with that knowledge? Not a goddamn thing.
“He’s my partner,” he said.
Gundersen didn’t even blink. “Cool. He a good guy?”
“The best.”
“Cool,” the guard said again. “Good to have something worth fighting for. Someone to go home to.”
“What about you?”
“Wife left me, took the kids. But I get them on weekends and every other Christmas. I wanted to get clear of my debts so I could . . . I don’t know . . . so I could be the dad they think I am.”
They looked at each other, nodded at the way the world spins.
“Jackals,” Mustapha said again.
“Jackals. So I’m making my way to the end zone when half a dozen guys step out of the woods. Pretty nice ambush. I’m so into my own pain and still half in the bag from the drug and suddenly there they are. None of them that big, but there’s six of them, you know?”
“Sure. What happened?”
“Exactly what you think happened. They shifted into a pack of jackals and went for me.”
“Damn, son. How’d you get away? Six to one, why ain’t you dead?”
Gundersen gave him a small shrug. “Still a bear.”
“There’s that.”
“Jackals versus bear. If I hadn’t been hurt, there’d be six dead goddamn jackals and me on the phone to the feds.”
“But—?”
“But I was hurt and I was still whacked out on the drug. So now there’s one jackal dead and five jackals who didn’t have the kind of afternoon they wanted.”
Mustapha grinned. “I’d have paid to see that.”
“Somebody probably did. There were plenty of cameras in the trees. That’s probably why they chose that spot. Lots of coverage. Must have looked great on TV.”
“Unless you were betting on the jackals.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t claim to have won every fight I’ve been in, but I never went down without a fight.”
“Heard that.”
“So, I got out of there. I had enough strength left to run, and I guess maybe I scared them bad enough so they didn’t follow. At least not right away. Getting here, though, that took some doing. I’d spotted this place earlier today. The cameras don’t really have a good view here, and I kind of nudged the ones around here to give me a bigger blind spot. Not something so obvious they’d send someone out to fix. I needed to rest up. The jackals, though, they cowboyed up after a while and came hunting. The five survivors and a few more. Maybe eight in all.”
“That many?”
“Yeah. But there could be more.”
Mustapha grunted.
“What?” asked Gundersen.
“You know, man,” said Mustapha slowly, “maybe this is something more than a handful of these jackal jerkoffs messing with us out here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe this is their game. Maybe the deal is that they get the rest of us to beat the shit out of each other, kind of take the edge off. Maybe they film that, maybe they don’t. Then they wait until one of us comes along—tired, weaker, maybe hurt—and then they attack. If you’re a jackal—and let’s face it, they’re smaller, and one-on-one they’re not worth a wet fart—and you’re on camera taking down a werebear? Or a werewolf? Even if you have buddies helping you, that’s status. That’s going to get you laid by some jackal honey or some were groupie. If you’re doing it on some kind of pay-per-view murder channel, it’s going to get you laid and rich. Who knows how many werejackals there are around the world with cable access and a PayPal account.”
Gundersen thought about it. “Shit,” he said.
“That’s what I think’s happening. And I think you killing one of them isn’t going to help ratings.” Then Mustapha corrected himself. “No. I’m wrong. It’s going to jack up the betting ’cause this shit’s real now. You killing one of them made this a real life-or-death show.”
“Balls.”
“Kind of sucks that you just made the game better for them. Worse for us.”
“Goddamn it.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, chewing on the facts. The night deepened around them and the moon was moving toward the mountains. Soon it would be pitch-black. Gundersen flexed his legs.
“Cuts are healing. Hurts like a bastard, but better all the time.”
“Faster than usual?”
“Much faster. I think I could walk again soon.”
“Same thing with me. Those slashes you gave me should have put me down for the night, or maybe down for good. But now . . . all they do is itch.”
“That’s weird.”
“It’s weird I don’t mind,” said Mustapha. “Don’t understand it, but I don’t mind, that’s for damn sure.”
“You think it’ll last?”
“I don’t know,” said Mustapha. “But I doubt it. It’s a drug. It’ll pass through us. I think we got this for now, but not for long. So we’d better use it.”
Gundersen nodded.
An owl inquired of whatever passed in the night.
After a moment, Gundersen said, “You think they used the drug on anyone else?”
Mustapha chewed his lip for a moment. “Maybe. That werepuma I fought. Much as I’d like to take credit for kicking his ass so easy, I think maybe he was whacked out. He fought sloppy and I took him out like he was nothing. But, shit, man, he was a puma.”
“So he was drugged?”
“Don’t know, but I’d bet he was. Maybe there was some asshole sitting in the bushes with a blowgun.”
“Pretty sure they use rifles.”
“Not the point. I think they wanted to amp all of us weres up. Make us go crazy and beat the shit out of each other. Then maybe they’d hunt the winner.”
“That would be risky for them, though.”
“Would it? If we’re all doped up and going ass-wild on each other, what are the odds any of us would be in perfect shape afterward? Shit, look at what we did to each other. If the jackals had caught up with me a few hours ago they’d have been able to bitch-slap me all over this forest. Maybe they already took down the puma and whoever else. The people watching TV wouldn’t know the jackals were fighting a doped were. All they’d see is jackal versus puma, or jackal versus wolf. That’d be some big shit on a high-def TV.”
Gundersen ground his teeth. Then he cocked his head to one side and said, “If that’s true, then I think that proves they don’t know about the side effects. About what that stuff did to you and me. Amping up the primal versions of what we are.”
Mustapha nodded. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“You think anyone else’s figured it out? Any of the other poor dumb schmucks like us?”
Mustapha grinned. “Be kind of fun to find out.”
“Fun? How the hell would that be any fun?”
“How could it not be, man? You think any of them are going to be happy about what those jackal dickheads are doing to us?”
“No, but . . . it still leaves us six miles up shit c
reek. The jackals are holding all the cards right now.”
“Maybe not. Maybe they done stuck their dicks in a doorjamb.”
“How so?”
“Because I think I just figured out how to win this game.”
-12-
The jackals moved in a pack.
Gundersen had been wrong about the size of the pack. There were twelve of them. All average-sized men. Maybe on the smaller side of average. Five-seven, five-eight. One-sixty or thereabouts. Individually, nothing. In a pack?
Deadly.
Mustapha watched them from beneath a pile of pine boughs he’d torn down. They moved along a firebreak cut into the vastness of the big forest. One of them walking bold as balls down the center, the others split into two smaller subpacks that ranged forward just inside the forest walls. One pack, nicely placed for an ambush.
Twelve of them.
Mustapha cursed under his breath.
He was bone tired and bleary-eyed. It had been a long damn night. First the fight, then the ravine, then Gundersen. After that . . .
A long night.
Now the red eye of morning was opening. It was one of those mornings where the sun seemed to light a match to the streamers of clouds. The sky looked as if it were too hot to touch.
Mustapha took a deep breath, mouthed a silent promise to Warren, and stood up. The pine boughs fell away as he rose and the bloody sunlight painted him crimson from head to toe.
He took another breath, then bolted across the width of the firebreak, running as fast as two human legs could carry him. Even tired and recovering from wounds, Mustapha was fast.
“There’s one!” came the cry from the jackal walking point. “He’s making a break for it.”
Mustapha cut a look over his shoulder and saw them all freeze and turn their eyes his way. Twelve men. Naked, painted in camouflage military greasepaint to let them blend in with the forest.
Bet they think it looks great on TV, thought Mustapha. He thought they looked like a pack of damn fools.
And then the men were gone.
The air around them shimmered as if heat were rising from the ground.
The men changed. The features of each man seemed to melt and run. Painted skin stretched over bones that were reshaping. One by one they dropped to all fours. Skin ruptured with a wet glop and bristled along their sides and shoulders and legs. Tails stretched out, ears elongated.
Dead But Not Forgotten Page 17
