“Shoulda let me drive,” Jo Ann said. “I’m at least-”
The sound that cut her off pierced all of the Briarwood team to their cores. It started as the cry of a man, filled with anger and pain, only impossibly loud, but as it went on the cry changed, becoming deeper, fiercer, seeming to linger far after any mortal lungs would have run out of breath, until it slowly mutated into a full-on animal howl. A primal, terrible cry, instinctively more terrifying than anything that could ever emanate from a natural creature. The storm had frozen Horst’s skin, but that howl froze his blood.
The staff of Briarwood Eradication Services was actually quiet for once. Horst looked to his employees. Every one of them except for Loco was staring back at him with wide eyes. Their big man just grunted and went back to pulling his machine-gun out of the Caddy, probably too dumb to be scared.
“I think I just pissed myself,” Kelley said.
Jo Ann turned toward the grocery store. “What the hell was that?”
That was an actual monster. The other things they’d run into were nothing compared to that. The fear ran deep. It wasn’t any sort of conscious, logical thought. It was deeper, coming from the lowest part of his brain, warning him that they needed to get away before that awful thing consumed them all. Horst forced himself to speak, and tried to sound as confident as possible. “That’s the sound of money, baby.”
Then there was a second howl, even louder than the first, and somehow Horst instinctively knew that this was a different werewolf. Lins jumped. “There’s two of them? You didn’t say nothing about two of them!”
They were chickening out. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Everybody shut your stupid mouths.”
“This isn’t nothing like those zombies we killed,” Kelley exclaimed. “I’m outta here.”
Jo Ann and Lins were babbling, too, as the three of them started getting back in the Caddy. His dreams were falling apart right in front of his eyes. His people were scared senseless. None of them were cowards, but they hadn’t been expecting this. That howl was just wrong, and the answering one was even worse. He understood now that Stark had been telling the truth. This wasn’t a normal werewolf; that thing in there was ancient, and therefore worth a huge PUFF bounty. They couldn’t back out now. There was a reason the government had to pay such stupidly large bounties for this level of creature, because no sane person would willingly go looking for one.
Somehow, Horst found his courage. He was the leader of an elite company of monster hunters. If he walked away, it would be like all those stuck-up MHI chumps would be laughing at him. Ryan Horst had vowed that he was never going to be a nobody again.
He needed to do something quick. He thought back to his brief time with MHI. What would they have done? Those bozos were always motivated. What would Earl Harbinger have done? He would have gotten his crew fired up. I can do that. Horst reached into his coat, unsnapped his shoulder holster, and drew his FN 5.7 pistol. He hoisted it into the air and yanked the trigger.
The sudden bang got their attention. Horst realized how stupid that had been as soon as he’d done it, because the insides of his right ear suddenly felt like someone had hit it with a hammer. “Listen up!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, waving his gun toward the giant hole in the grocery store. “This is what you signed up for. Pull yourselves together, damn it. Each one of those hairy bastards in there is worth at least fifty large. Fifty large! We came all this way to kill these things. We got guns. We got silver bullets. What do they got? Teeth? Shit. They got nothing! I am not going home until I got one of these bastards as a rug. You hear me? We’re Briarwood, and we’ve come up here to show these animals who’s boss.”
The three mutinous members of his crew turned their heads sheepishly, afraid to look him in the eye. Damn right. Lowering his piece, Horst glared at them. After chewing them out, Earl Harbinger had always softened his voice when he was trying to make a point to the MHI Newbies, like they weren’t worth raising his voice over, but it forced you to listen extra hard. So Horst tried it, speaking quietly, but firmly. “So get your shit together and let’s go. We can do this.”
They actually surprised him then. His people responded and went to work. There were a series of metallic clacks as weapons were readied. A smirk crossed Horst’s face. Damn. I’m good.
Nikolai was on him in a flash, claws erupting from the ends of his fingers. Earl moved aside easily, the change pumping massive amounts of adrenaline through his system. His body was flushed with heat. Despite the freezing wind blasting through the gaping wound in the store, sweat rolled from every pore. Time slowed as Nikolai tore at him, Earl swung with all his might, hand open, fingers wide, and was rewarded with a spray of blood as his nails ripped through the Russian’s flesh.
His enemy stalked away, circling. Four lacerations crossed his heaving chest, having cleanly sliced through his ammo pouches. Nikolai ripped the canvas off and tossed it aside. “MURDERER,” Nikolai roared, his jaw already distorting. “I’ll rip you apart for what you did to her.” Nikolai leapt at him.
Earl caught his opponent in midair, using the momentum as a weapon, and hurled Nikolai down the aisle. Earl got one ear sliced nearly in half for the trouble.
Nikolai hit the floor, rolled, and slid on his knees to a gradual stop. The change was fully upon him now. “You die now,” Nikolai gurgled. He said more, but it was unrecognizable as he tore off his shredded clothing. “Die for thing you done.”
Earl had a hard time forming a response. His mind changed along with his body. Words became hard to understand, even harder to use. “Try me,” he answered, his voice a distorted growl.
After the heat came the pain. It started in the bones and radiated out from there. It was part fire, part grinding, all horrible. The pain in his jaw grew as bones twisted, cracked, stretched, and reformed. Blood leaked between his teeth as they changed, new sharp edges slicing through gum tissue. Heart rate elevated, breath coming fast, Earl cringed as his old skin ripped.
Nikolai was a mirror image as he went through the same process, matching cracking bone for cracking bone. Dark gray hair grew rapidly across the Russian’s body.
Clothing. Constricting. Earl pulled off the rest of his armor and kicked off his boots. The change wrenched through him, ten times faster than when he’d first been cursed, but the pain was all still there, just accelerated. Burning. Twisting.
Earl took a step forward. The soles of his feet were hard as leather, but he screamed as they hit the floor, bones cracking, heel separating. His toe claws dug through the garbage. Earl took another step, the pain traveling up his leg, joints tearing, burning, reforming. Muscles hardened, becoming tighter, and it was only because of long exposure that he was able to keep moving. He fell onto all fours, but as the geometries changed, that didn’t matter.
Earl scratched his claws into the floor and howled. The challenge had begun.
Earl was angry. Hungry.
Nikolai raised his face, showing his teeth in a vicious snarl. Earl wanted to eat that face.
As his mind descended into chaos and visions of cascading red, Earl’s last rational thought was a desperate plea. God. Help me now. Keep me sane. Kill enemy. Hurt no people. Amen.
Chapter 13
If I had used my one silver bullet on the Alpha, then Santiago would surely die with a knife through the neck. So I shot the girl. I was rusty, so it went right through the cheek, just under her left eye. It still killed her instantly though, and she went right over the side of the boat and took Santiago with her.
Seamus charged. He was already changing, faster than I could comprehend. He hit me harder than I’d ever been hit in my life. And I found myself halfway down the beach. I came up with a mouthful of sand, four lacerations that went clear to my ribcage, and a transforming werewolf coming right at me.
He called me a fool for challenging him. The voice had changed, the last word tapering off into a growl. He threw off the vest, and black hair was already growing across his body. His eyes were
glowing, fingers were getting longer, bones were cracking. Within seconds the most fearsome werewolf imaginable was towering over me. It was unbelievably smooth compared to the clumsy twitching suffering I went through.
He could have torn my human head right off then, but instead he stopped and cocked his head while his fur rippled in the breeze, crouched on all fours, claws feeling the sand, while he waited for me to catch up. I was a challenge to his leadership. And though I didn’t understand it at the time, a challenge was supposed to be met on equal terms. If it wasn’t, then your victory didn’t mean anything.
I could feel the animal inside, screaming to get out. It was angry. Angry at me. I had kept it locked up, only let it free when I had to. I’d mistreated it, but now I was calling on it to save my life. Furious, it could have denied me, left me to die, but it was part of me. And we both wanted to survive.
Let me tell you, the pain is fire. The jaw clenches spasmodically tight. Blood thunders in your eyes. Your muscles pulse with electric shocks of agony, clenching, unclenching, clenching again, so tight that at each surge you wish for death. You change. Down to the level of individual proteins, and you feel every single bit.
It hurts like a stone-cold motherfucker.
It didn’t matter that there were no witnesses. He waited. That was the way it was done. To kill me unfairly would make his victory meaningless. We were werewolves, creatures of instinct and a strange tradition. One would die. One would live.
The pain ends, and then there is the euphoria. I was whole. Beast and man, one. I became We. Then the other werewolf attacked us with a ferocity that had never been imagined. Bigger, stronger, faster, more experienced, the enemy tore into us. Within seconds the sand was soaked red with our blood. We should have lost. Rolling, tearing, snapping, thrashing, and then our teeth were in his neck and hot arterial blood flooded our mouth.
He tried to shake us off. Claws opened our stomach, spilled the stinking bowels, but it was only pain. Pain was nothing compared to the blood in our mouth. We got a better angle and chomped harder, cracking vertebrae and slicing meat. The tearing continued as our enemy grew weaker and weaker, until the claws dropped away from our eviscerated stomach and lay twitching, grasping futilely.
Somehow, we’d defeated our better. Then the beast was gone, leaving me alone with the pain.
It was the first time I went through a challenge. It would not be the last.
Lins held out his lighter, and the gas-soaked rag stuffed into the bottle caught fire. Kelley took that bottle and used it to light the one in his other hand. “Awesome!” the bearded firebug shouted as he started toward the grocery store, flaming Molotov in each hand. “I’ve got them now.”
“Cover him,” Horst ordered as he ground the butt of his rifle against his shoulder. The other three got their guns up, ready to shoot as Kelley hurried down the relatively cleared path left by the crashed plow, the dump-truck end of which was visible at the opposite end of the building. Kelley was cackling maniacally as he got within throwing range.
“What if there’s some bystanders trapped in there?” Lins asked quickly, realizing that they hadn’t talked through that possibility.
“Screw ’em,” Jo Ann spat. “I’m not going in there.”
Horst scowled, but his girlfriend had a point. They hadn’t thought that far past “burn it down and shoot anything that comes out,” but listening to the racket coming from in there, the idea of survivors was doubtful. “Sucks to be them, I guess.”
Lins didn’t seem to like that, but he went back to looking through the Aimpoint on his carbine and didn’t speak up.
They’d divided up their one case of silver 5.56 ammo. Horst had bought everyone their own full-auto and then done just like that four-eyed geek Cooper had done during MHI training and yelled at them to only shoot semi-auto, and at ten bucks a pop for the Fed’s “misplaced” ammo, he could understand why MHI only used the good stuff on missions. Horst had kept his FAL, along with a few mags full of silver. 308 he’d managed to sneak out of Alabama when he’d left. Everyone except for Loco had gotten an M-4 carbine. He’d given him the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, because it seemed logical to give the biggest dude the heaviest gun.
The plan was simple. Burn out super werewolf. Hose it down. What could possibly go wrong?
Their arsonist was in range. Kelley chucked the first Molotov squarely through the front of the store. The glass shattered, and gasoline ignited across the broken shelves. Kelley had said that if they had more time he would have made up a better mix with other petroleum products, because that would have really made it stick, but judging by how fast the fire spread, there was plenty of flammable material inside there already.
With a crazed gleam in his eyes, Kelley pumped one fist in the air, then switched the other Molotov to his throwing arm. He cocked back his arm to throw this one deeper inside, but then stopped, his head jerking to the side as something startled him. Trying to see what had distracted his man, Horst squinted, trying to figure out what the tall, narrow thing coming through the windblown snow was.
It was way too tall to be a person, and unless MHI had totally lied to him, it sure as hell wasn’t a werewolf. Thin, its lump of a head bobbed rhythmically, and what looked like its baggy clothing swayed back and forth as it approached Kelley. Its pace would have seemed almost leisurely if each of its long, spindly steps hadn’t covered such a massive distance.
“What is that?” Lins shouted.
Horst had no idea. He must have gotten kicked out of Newbie training before the day Paxton got around to giant, gray, metal, scarecrow robots. “Damn if I know.” It caught up to the scrambling Kelley in three big steps. Screaming his head off, Kelley ran for it, flaming bottle sloshing dangerous and forgotten in his hand. The thing’s arms were so long that they dragged through the snow. The creature lifted one arm, and Horst could see that the block that passed for a hand ended in three big points, like a mighty garden trowel. “Shoot it! Shoot it!”
The four of them opened fire. His earlier instructions about “rapid, aimed, semi-auto” went right out the window as everybody started shooting like mad. Holes puckered in the snow, sparks flashed off the monster, and Kelley looked down in disbelief as a plug of goose-down erupted from his coat as one of his teammates accidentally shot him through the chest.
“Don’t shoot our guy!” Horst shouted, but it didn’t matter. The creature swung its metal claw, striking Kelley in the arm. The bottle shattered as he went down, showering gas all over the burning rag and Kelley’s coat. There was a flash as fire tore across their arsonist’s body. Letting out an ungodly cry, Kelley thrashed and flailed away, flopping into the snow and rolling like mad as the fire melted clothing to skin. Within seconds he was engulfed in black smoke and orange flames. The tall creature stopped to watch.
“It killed Robb!” Jo Ann shrieked.
By the time Horst’s gun was empty, Kelley had quit screaming. The monster watched for a moment, as if assessing whether Kelley was dead or not. When it was obvious that stop, drop, and roll hadn’t worked out, its misshapen head swiveled up on its too long neck and it emotionlessly started toward them.
Everyone else had run dry except for Loco, because he had a two-hundred-round belt in the SAW and was actually firing it in short, controlled bursts like he’d been told. Even with one eye, Loco was the only one that seemed to actually be hitting the monster. “Reload! Reload!” Horst shouted as he struggled to get another magazine out of his pocket.
The creature was closing fast. Its giant legs pumped methodically, leaving a trail of huge, three-toed, birdlike footprints behind it. Most of their panicked shots were missing, and the ones that did hit didn’t seem to have much effect.
Closer now, its head was round, featureless. It had no eyes, no nostrils, just a long slit from one side to the other that had to be a mouth. The neck was abnormally long, and the front of its neck swung back and forth with a jiggling mass of loose skin. Parts of it seemed to be made of a rough metal
shell, but the joints looked like gray meat. What he’d thought had been loose clothing was actually skin, swaying rhythmically. It was like an obese man that had lost tons of weight, way too fast, leaving a skeleton inside a sack of drooping skin, and then the devil had crammed the whole mess into a suit of rusting metal armor. “Slow down and aim!” he shouted. “Aim for the soft bits!”
Taking his own advice, he put the sights on the bulbous mass of a head. Horst had used guns his entire life, mostly cheap ones fired out car windows while driving past the homes of people who owed his uncle money, but it was MHI that had actually taught him to aim. Turns out that he was pretty decent at it.
The bullet hit the monster right between the eyes, or would have, if it’d had eyes. It stopped, a plug of meat dangling from its face, leaking green slime. Jo Ann stepped past him, shouting, “How you like that! Huh? How you like that!” as she shot at its head.
She got her answer a second later when the creature lumbered over to her, its gash of a mouth stretching wide open. Its two huge hands landed on her shoulders, trapping her. Jo Ann’s head disappeared into its mouth as its metal hands scooped her up. “Holy fu-” she screamed as the creature lifted her and reared its head back. Her lower half was visible as it choked her down, her feet kicking wildly. The flap of loose skin under the monster’s neck stretched, like a pelican eating a fish, as it swallowed her whole. Her shoes disappeared as she travelled down its long throat. The skin stretched in places, Jo Ann’s body visible through the slick membrane as she rolled around and fought inside the pouch.
The creature lowered its head and closed its mouth gash. It rumbled around, towering over Horst. The skin stretched madly as Jo Ann kicked, like a kid playing under a blanket. Her muffled cries could barely be heard as the now-full pouch dangled across the front half of the creature’s body.
A giant, chicken-footed, faceless, scarecrow, robot, pelican monster had just eaten his girlfriend. “Fuck this. Retreat!” Horst said as he turned and ran like mad. Lins was already twenty feet ahead, sprinting for the road.
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