by Mike Arsuaga
Lorna followed him through the operations center to a conference room. Inside, a swarthy two-star general stood erect behind a pair of folded arms. With a square, dark head and black moustaches, he reeked of peppered spices vainly attempting to compete with ingrained body odor. Two officers and a civilian accompanied him.
“Hello, Lorna,” said the civilian. “We do seem to meet in the strangest places.”
For a moment, Lorna’s voice deserted her, gawking while the rangy man turned. Several seconds passed before she regained the power of speech. “Bobby. What brings you here?”
“Ten years of working with Gen El had to count for something. I made a lot of contacts while doing dear Father’s work. My new partners and I put our heads together, and with the help of our friends in Mexico City, came up with this wonderful win-win plan.” Bobby beamed with self-satisfaction. “Oh, I guess it’s not win-win for everyone. You and dear Father, along with the rest of the scum, lose out, don’t you?”
He spat out the words “Dear Father”.
“What’s the plan, Bobby?” Lorna asked.
“Simple. East Mexico gets this strategically valuable base. I run things for them. The job includes killing every woofer we find who fled to the jungle. Like I said, a win-win.”
“What about the humans? Are you going to kill them, too?”
Bobby contemplated a large, winged insect that had somehow ended up in the room after taking a wrong turn. The brightly colored bug awkwardly picked its way across the carpet, searching for an opportunity to take flight. Finding a draft, a pair of orange wings deployed.
Bobby casually crushed the unfortunate creature underfoot. “We won’t kill too many. We need some to run the equipment. Most will jump at the chance to work for Gen El. We don’t have as good a medical program or retirement, but there are other inducements.”
This vile man. How did I not see him for what he is?
“What about The Others who stayed behind? How will they be treated?” she asked, not sure whether there were any besides her.
Bobby rolled his eyes in a tease, the expression a cat has for a cornered mouse. “Depends on how they treat me.”
Sounds of a small commotion came from the hallway outside. Two young soldiers entered with Valeria between them. Each had an arm, and seemed intent on pulling her apart. To Lorna’s surprise, the young woman showed aggravation rather than fear.
“We found her in one of the rooms,” one reported in Spanish.
At a casual hand wave from Bobby, they released her. “She’s mine.” With the slightest of finger motions, he motioned for her to come to him.
To Lorna’s amazement, she slipped into position beside him. His arm wrapped her shoulders. No one in the room could fail to see the gleam of adoration in her eyes. Lorna remembered Clarisse, her predecessor, and hoped Valeria understood the peril her youthful adventuring had gotten her in.
Observing Valeria’s snuggles against Bobby, Lorna sensed his desire ranged beyond possessing the young hybrid. He wanted her too, but not until “Dear Father’s” children were out of the way. In the old days, the new alpha male destroyed the spawn of his predecessor, filling the females with his young. Filing the frightening scenario in the back of her mind, Lorna calculated how to turn the situation to her advantage.
The general spoke. “The airstrip must be prepared. We have aircraft arriving in four hours. There will be many of them.” He eyed Lorna coldly. “We expect to defend against sizeable resistance.” Whether he spoke about Ed’s force or a Brazilian response, Lorna didn’t know.
The general didn’t have to wait long for an answer. Upon receiving word of the arriving aircraft, Lorna went to the mansion’s highest vantage point. From there, the landing lights of the airstrip made two parallel lines through the night. Lycan eyesight allowed her to see what happened. The Others attacked the sentry posts on the jungle side of the runway. Moving faster than any human could, they defied the conventions of marksmen who still led targets based on human speed and agility. In minutes, Ed’s band wiped them out.
Surrounded by fresh kills cooling in the breezy night, Ed’s challenge would be to keep the band focused. He would exhort them to not to feed. Later, there would be time. The priority was to make the runway unusable for the arriving aircraft.
Packs of lycans and vampires met the first wave the instant the landing gear dropped. The air crews must’ve had just enough time to be confused by the dark, furred or large, sallow, humanlike creatures sprinting alongside before the apparitions blasted away with automatic rifles or hurled explosives. Quickly, two dozen fires marked ruined aircraft with their dead crews. With the airstrip unusable, the rest of the flight turned back. On the return, six of them ran out of fuel, dropping into the sea.
With the battle over, Ed would address the two hundred sets of gleaming feral eyes surrounding him in front of a pile of cooling human corpses. “Carry our kills back to camp. Tonight we feast.”
A cacophony of The Others voices, lycan howls accompanied by vampire cheers, filled the darkness. Lorna heard them back in the mansion as they intimidated all other night sounds into silence. “Go get ‘em, big boy,” she muttered to herself.
* * * *
Ulbert’s sources of information kept Lorna up to date. Through him, she learned that each night over the following week, Ed’s people struck somewhere, always against isolated small groups that let their guard down. In morphed form they moved with speedy silence, killing, and then carrying off the bodies. Morning reliefs found a deserted station. Minimal spatters of blood provided the sole indication of an attack.
“The assaults are getting to them,” Thomas whispered to Lorna. They walked in the gardens beside the mansion. “I overheard a major complaining how some sentries refused night guard. The watch officer had to triple the detail before they’d go.”
After nightfall, Ed hit the hotel by the waterfront, where the junior officers were billeted. Lorna was sleeping in the bedroom adjacent to Ed’s office when the sound of rifle fire awakened her. She threw back the drapes. The waterfront and bay seemed unchanged. The pale silvery light of a new moon beamed down on everything. Behind the hotel, the illumination profiled the bridge and masts of the troopship moored dockside. Then, repeating orange flashes reflected like strobe lights off the walls inside some of the hotel’s rooms, followed a second later by the tapping of automatic rifles, like an impatient fingernail on hard wood.
A lingering explosion blew out a floor full of windows. For several seconds, a feathery flame illuminated the street in front of the building. Dozens of running figures filled the scene before the relative darkness of light from the fingernail moon reclaimed everything. The humans were no match. Darkness provided no barrier to The Others’ superior senses, and they could break a neck in an instant. Another explosion showed a glimpse of growing numbers of inert bodies sprawled on the greens and village square.
Minutes later, the melee ended. Silence, accompanying a white pall of slowly coiling smoke, covered the area. Beams of vehicle headlights crisscrossed over one another revealed a blurred scene of slaughter. Lorna’s lycan senses alerted when a captain told his sergeant that forty-two were killed or missing. Eight of Ed’s force died.
Bobby, accompanied by the smelly general, together with most of his staff, stormed into Lorna’s office. His face flushed with rage, Bobby’s eyes bugged out. “Up to now, we treated everyone at the mansion like non-combatants. Well, no more.”
“What are you thinking?” Lorna battled to keep her voice calm.
“Follow me. You’ll see.” He turned, leading the procession of camouflaged officers thorough the Operations Center toward the mansion’s living areas. As they drew near, sounds of people being rousted from bed got louder. Groggy and uncomprehending, they lined the hallways outside their rooms. More than a hundred men, women, and children still in bedclothes waited more or less silently.
“Put the children aside and select every fourth adult,” Bobby said. His gaze settl
ed on Valeria, who forged a smile for him with her small, delicate mouth.
Ignoring the gesture, he turned to a colonel. A thumb jerked in her direction. “Begin with her.”
The smile vanished, replaced by a shocked gasp. Lorna expected Valeria to say something to change his mind, but she stood petrified, a confused expression on her face, until two burly privates exuding the same odor their general broadcast took her away.
When the colonel chose a victim, guards manhandled the unfortunate to a holding area, ignoring the pleas of relatives left behind. Soon, a confused crowd of twenty-five or so adults of both sexes gathered in front of the double staircase. The soldiers marched the bewildered group outside, dismissing the rest.
“Line them up on the driveway,” Bobby said. The colonel hesitated, checking with his superior. The general nodded. The soldiers formed up the bedraggled mass of humanity into a line before a covered truck.
The crowd became uneasy. Those not selected remained clustered together. Above the frightened voices of the sequestered group, Lorna made out Valeria’s husky pleas. Lorna sensed something terrible about to happen. This wasn’t another of Bobby’s petulant, humiliating stunts. “What are you going to do?” she demanded.
Bobby turned up the ends of his lips. “I hope Dear Father is watching.” The sharp pitch of his voice seethed with four decades of hatred.
Her eyes cut to the back of the truck. The tailgate dropped with a clang, exposing a fifty-caliber machine gun. “Do this,” Lorna said, “and you place yourself forever beyond your father’s mercy.”
If he heard her, he showed no reaction. With a wave of a hand, the machine gun opened fire, sweeping the line in seconds. The large slugs knocked each person around, holding them upright with the force of the impact. A few tried to run, but didn’t get three steps. Valeria took a head shot, going down as if hit by a bus. After the machine gun fell silent, two officers walked among the bodies, finishing off any who remained alive.
Shortly, a servant informed Lorna that Ulbert was among the dead. According to witnesses, the count passed him over, but he convinced the colonel to take him instead of another younger person.
“We’re not kidding around, Father!” Bobby shouted into the silent night. “Attack again, and next time the body of your lycan bitch might be lying here!” Leaving instructions to dump the bodies on the lawn leading down to the lake, he stalked back inside.
Lorna trembled with rage, but after a moment, she willed herself to be calm. Not helping matters, the babies kicked vigorously. Back in the room, she spent the rest of the night crying for the dead, especially brave Ulbert and poor tragic Valeria.
“If only I could find a way to get our people out,” she said to herself over breakfast the next morning. Thinking about the utility passageway ending at Cynthia’s closet, she remembered something different she’d discovered about it. This one had a draft, which may mean a way to the outside.
Not to escape.
But to bring Ed and the others in.
After supper, she disengaged from Karla. The parting had been abrupt, even sharp. The older woman, worried sick about Cynthia living as a feral, wanted to talk. “She’s such a delicate girl,” Karla fretted. “That kind of life isn’t for her.”
“We all must do what we must,” Lorna snapped, leaving Karla to think about everyone’s new position in the fast-evolving scheme of things.
Lorna brought the mansion plans and a flashlight. Under a utility light, she stripped down to morph. In the silence, she sniffed the cool dry air for any sign of a draft. A faint current teased the dark fur ringlets on her back, and showed the way. About a hundred feet from the panel accessing Cynthia’s room, where a female lieutenant-colonel now resided, the stone floor held an imbedded iron grate. An almost soundless hiss of air rose from below. Using a piece of scrap pipe for leverage, Lorna freed the cover, heavy even to lycan muscle. Peering down the hole revealed a set of ladder rungs. She was on the right track. At the bottom, another passage led off in what must have been the direction to the outside. The lower one had no utility conduits or lights. She padded along the cold, wet stones with the sound of her breathing for companionship. From her flashlight, a thin stream of yellow light, augmented by lycan eyesight showed the way. Urine marked the path for the return trip, not a problem, considering the liberties the babies took with her bladder. She concluded the tunnel was manmade, designed for a quick escape.
After two hours, discouragement set in. By her estimate, she’d travelled four to six miles without a sign of an exit. She had one hour before she had to turn back to avoid discovery of her absence, which would bring more suffering to the remaining hybrids and staff. “We must do as the Chairman asked,” a tiny, detached voice said.
Lorna alerted. “But we risk discovery by staying here,” another faint voice replied.
The path ahead inclined to a pile of rocks.
One way or the other, this is the end of the road.
Another minute of tense listening in the dark silence passed. Then someone said from the other side of the stones. “We’ll stay, and that’s final.”
With lycan fervor, Lorna pulled the rocks aside. The first opening to the surface admitted silent moonlight. Then, a voice demanded. “Who goes there?”
After returning to human form, she said, “Lorna Winters. Help me get this opened.”
“Quickly,” commanded someone. “It’s Chairman White’s mate.” With the announcement, a dozen pairs of hands applied themselves to the task.
Soon, Lorna stepped into the open, finding herself at a small cove where one of the corporation launches was tied up. The crew rushed by to complete clearing the entrance, while the launch captain approached with a blanket to cover her nakedness.
“Only yesterday, we learned about the killings,” he said.
“Yes,” Lorna answered somberly. “Many good lives were lost.” She surveyed the scene. Camouflage netting hid the launch along with the dock. From the sea they blended with the jungle. “Do you have contact with Ed—the Chairman?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Pulling the blanket tighter, she noted the approach of moonset. “I have to return or risk being missed,” she said. “Send someone to find him right away. Tell him I was here and to meet me tomorrow, just after dark. He needs to bring his followers. I’ve found a way into the mansion, and I have a plan.”
* * * *
The tedium of an ever-present female guard who followed her even to the bathroom maddened Lorna, made the day seem endless. She had a lot to do. In the afternoon, she took a nap, knowing a long night was ahead. The dour sentry took position outside her door.
When she awoke, darkness had nearly arrived. Having to pee again, she cracked open the door to Ed’s office. They’d changed the guard. In the hallway, another female dozed while sitting in the wooden straight-backed chair. In the course of exploring, Lorna had learned Ed’s bedroom possessed a panel on the back wall of the closet giving direct access to the passageway she needed to travel. Taking care to avoid the noise of the lock bolt seating, Lorna closed the door, stepped into the closet, and headed on her way.
Following the markers from the night before, the trip took less than two hours. At her arrival, dozens of figures stopped their aimless milling around to face her. Recognizing the launch captain, she asked. “Is he here?”
“They all are,” he answered. “Follow me.”
Leading her across a narrow gangway and down a few steps to the cabin of the launch, she paused to embrace Donatello on her way below decks. Ed sat on a padded bench built into the bulkhead. In front of him spread a café-sized steel table. Cynthia, Toby, and three lieutenants crowded the small compartment. Upon seeing her, Ed jumped to his feet. In his enthusiasm, he forgot the low overhead. His crown struck with a thud that sat him right back down. Cynthia smothered a chuckle.
“Oh, poor dear.” Lorna rushed to him. Embracing his shoulders, she kissed the bruised spot.
After a moment’s minis
trations, Lorna spread the rolled-up papers on the table.
“What’s this?” he asked at length, examining the plans.
“The network of utility passages for your house. I drew in the path to here.”
“What is this writing? Are these names?”
“That’s part of the reason why I needed another night. I listed the occupant of each bedroom.”
“Good,” Cynthia said. “We can kill them in their beds. They won’t have any leaders.” Her suggestion met with growls of support from the others.
“I had something a little different in mind,” Lorna said. “If you bring everyone, we can retake the mansion, plus take the general and the senior officers hostage.”
Ed smiled in understanding. “They’ll be like a headless serpent.”
“Exactly,” Lorna said.
“Then there’s no time to waste.” He rose, this time stooping to avoid the overhead. At Lorna’s movement to join them, Ed touched her shoulder. “No. You’re in no condition to go with us.”
Lorna whipped around to face him. “This pregnant girl got you to the dance.” Her eyes burned with determination. “Try not to fall behind.”
Ed smiled, shaking his head. “How can I argue? Lead on, my love.”
For two reasons, they chose to enter the mansion through Cynthia’s room. No sentry guarded the door, and the general’s suite was three rooms away. With the heavy sound of tense breathing from over two hundred of The Others behind her, Lorna slid back the panel, stepping into the closet.
