by Sean Little
“They won’t come,” said Shun. “They know the wolves.”
“The werewolves?”
“They are servants of Dr. Enwright and Dr. Enwright alone. Even I can’t control them.”
“But…they don’t kill?”
“They have the potential to, but they’re not supposed to. At least, not yet.”
Clarke huffed a heavy breath through his nose. “I’m tired. I’m sore. And I really want to go back to America where things make sense. Tell them all to come with us, and that the werewolves are no longer out there. And then, I want you to explain to me what the hell is going on.”
Shun pulled a small glass vial from his pocket, cracked it open on the stone floor, and threw it at Clarke. There was a fine, faint mist that settled on him. In the span of time it took for Clarke to register what Shun had done, he inhaled and the fumes lit into his nose, lightly fragrant like a night wind.
Then, the banshee came for him.
Vividly white and opaque, the specter of the screaming woman lunged at him, skeletal claws scratching and slicing. Clarke dove backward, firing the Colt at the thing several times. The bullets passed through it harmlessly, ricocheting around the cavern. The Romanians screamed and ran for cover. One of the men made a cross with his fingers and another screamed, “Strigoi! Strigoi!”
The banshee screamed and wailed. Clarke stopped shooting. Shun wasn’t moving. He wasn’t reacting. The man’s eyes were shut tightly. Clarke remembered how Bobbins had seen the Black Annis. The banshee dove and swooped at him, but Clarke didn’t flinch. The skeletal claws passed harmlessly through him. It was a vision, an illusion.
Clarke stood and the banshee continued to scream. He closed his eyes and realized that it wasn’t his ears that perceived the noise—it was his temples, his mind, his cheeks. There was no real noise, only what his brain thought it should hear.
Clarke slipped the Colt into his holster. “So what do you see?” he asked Shun. “When you pop those capsules, what do you see?”
Shun’s eyes were closed, but he said, “Yaoguai. Demons. Horrible creatures with blood around their mouths.”
“It’s a chemical isn’t it? It brings out whatever we fear the most, right?”
Shun nodded. “Dr. Enwright called it ‘Ghost Mist.’ He said that it activates some part of our brain where we store memories of childhood fears and makes them manifest as something real.”
“That’s what he was using to try to drive us from the castle, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. He has a small machine that flies and sprays the mist. It’s very potent, but only lasts a short time.”
Clarke was amazed. Between the chemicals and the machines, Enwright might be as smart as Tesla. Maybe smarter. Already, the banshee retreated from his sight and the Romanians were calming. They huddled together, clutching each other for reassurance.
Clarke helped Shun to his feet. “Tell them to get ready to leave,” he said.
Shun repeated the order in Romanian. The group looked fearful.
“Tell them I will handle the wolves.”
“They won’t believe it. Dr. Enwright made sure they all got a good look at one of them. They will not believe a single man can defeat one of them, let alone several.”
“Fine. They can stay here. We’ll come back for them when the wolves are defeated.”
“I do not want to leave,” said Shun. “I have seen them. I helped build them. I want nothing to do with them.”
“Will they hurt you?”
“In the woods, there are no controls for them. They roam free. They are not supposed to kill, but there is no way to stop them from doing so if they malfunction.”
Clarke grabbed Shun by the arm and started dragging him from the jail cavern. “Well, you’re coming with. If we go down, we go down together. Where is my friend, Csupo? He is a young man, a boy, really. Tall, sour-faced, thin, Romanian. He was in the caves ahead of me.”
“I…I do not know. If I had found him, I would have brought him here.”
Clarke bit his lip. He wanted to look for Csupo, but he didn’t have time. Bobbins, Shaw, Tesla, and Andrei would be in the woods with the wolves. He needed to get back to them, to show the Shun. Csupo would have to take care of himself for now.
“C’mon, friend. Lean on me if you need to.”
Shun sighed and resigned himself to his fate. He hobbled next to Clarke and helped him maneuver through the tunnel maze back to the forest.
Clarke and Shun emerged from the cave north of Cărbunasatul. It was a different section of the forest entirely, but it looked painfully the same: Thick trees. Darkness. The late afternoon light filtered to a dull haze through the thick canopy.
“How far back to town?”
Shun shrugged. “I don’t know for certain. Two miles? Maybe more.”
“Then let’s get a move on,” said Clarke. He took two steps and realized Shun wasn’t moving. The slender man looked very pale. He slid to the ground and rested his head against the cold stone of the cave mouth.
“I seem to be exhausted,” Shun apologized. Clarke checked the man’s thigh wound. He’d lost a fair amount of blood. No artery was nicked, but there was still more than enough blood to be of concern. Clarke took off the old bandage and cut a length from the end of his coat to serve as a bandage and tourniquet. He cursed silently as he did; he loved that coat. Shun’s head lolled to the side as he lost consciousness.
Clarke knew he could make good time if he just left Shun inside the cave. It was coming on winter, so any local bears would be hibernating by now. The wolf packs that roamed the mountain weren’t likely to find him, were they? After five seconds of mental debate, Clarke cursed and pulled Shun from the ground. The man was dead weight, compliant and unresisting, but heavier that he looked. Clarke tugged him onto his shoulder so the man’s body was hanging front and back. It was a common carry maneuver that he’d used often to drag bodies off battlefields. It was never easy to carry another human being after that human being grew out of being a toddler, but this was the only way he’d be able to get Shun back to town. Clarke began to walk as fast as he could with the man weighing him down. The way Shun’s arms bobbled and swung, it reminded Clarke of carrying a corpse.
There is a secret to doing anything that feels impossible: Don’t think about it. Clarke’s father used to tell him that he could endure any pain for a half-second. You could stick your hand in a roaring fire for a half-second. You could keep from screaming after you accidentally hammer your thumb for a half-second. Well, then it served, he told Clarke, that if you can do something for half a second, then maybe you use that same mental strength to do something for a full second. And maybe then two seconds. And if you can do something for two seconds, you can certainly do it for three.
It was a stupid premise, Clarke knew. You stick your hand in a fire, maybe you can hold it there for a half-second, but it will hurt like blue blazes and you’re a moron for doing it in the first place. However, when it came to things like ignoring a pain in your shoulder from using a pitchfork to pitch hay into a wagon all day, you could do that. The hay had to be thrown onto the wagon and trampled down. If it was not done, the stock would die over the winter. If the stock died, then you died. A temporary shoulder pain was easier to overlook than a slow death by starvation. Clarke got good at ignoring little pains in the service. A long march with a blister on your heel? Easy. The incessant itching because mosquitoes turned your face, neck, and hands into a coronation buffet while you slept? No problem. Dab a little swamp mud on the welts and keep moving.
Now, Clarke ignored the pain in his back from having Shun compress his spine. Clarke wasn’t young anymore. Back pain was part-and-parcel to daily life. Knee pain—same thing. Keep moving. The breath in his chest became heavy and labored. He reminded himself that he was lucky he was still breathing. Keep going.
Once, on a forced retreat from a battlefield in North Carolina, near Bentonville, Clarke had been on sniper duty, moving far to the east of the mass o
f troops, trying to pick off Rebs from a nest in a grove of trees. When the bugler blew the call to retreat, the Union troops went west and the Rebs followed. Clarke was alone and in trouble. He made it back to Union lines by running miles to the south and looping around. He hadn’t eaten in two days before that point, and he was without water. There were Confederate camps all around the area. There were Confederate scouts on horseback looking for stragglers. Clarke had still been a pup, and sitting down and crying was the first thing he wanted to do, but crying wasn’t going to get him fed, watered, or back to the Union lines, so he remembered his father’s words and ran for half a second. Anyone can run for half a second. Therefore, it only served that he could run for the several hours that it took him to get back to safety if he just concentrated at running for a half-second at a time. Keep moving.
Clarke readjusted, moving Shun to the other shoulder. He blocked the pain and got into a steady rhythm of padding through the undergrowth. His feet shuffled and slapped on the ground with a distinct cadence. It was like marching, but faster. The howl of a wolf rose from somewhere in the mountains to his left. It hit a high, pure note and held there unwavering. The sound caused the hair on the back of Clarke’s neck to rise.
There is an art to running through thick growth. It was an art that Clarke mastered when he was a young boy running through the woods around his family’s home, and then perfected during his time as a sniper. Every single aspect of that art was nullified when one was forced to carry a human body on one shoulder. Clarke banged into every root, shrub, and low-hanging bough. There was nothing graceful about any movement, but he didn’t stop. Left foot. Right foot. Trip over a fallen branch. Nearly lose footing. Stagger and regain balance. Left foot. Right foot. Keep moving.
After ages of running and stumbling, Clarke finally had to stop. His forty-something body simply could no longer move like it used to, and he was winded. He stumbled over a root and Shun’s limp form ragdolled off his shoulder and to the ground in a heap. Clarke was on his hands and knees gasping for air. He sucked wind hard, trying to ignore the stitch of pain in his side and the light-headed feeling that overtook him now that Shun was no longer on his shoulder.
Clarke flipped over onto his back and pondered just staying right there for the rest of the evening. Shun’s lack of response was the only thing that kept him going. The man needed a doctor and proper care. A night in the frozen forest would certain do the man in and that wasn’t a death Clarke wanted on his conscience.
Clarke pushed himself to a sitting position and reclined against a tree trunk, arms resting on his bent knees. Sweat ran down his head in thick rivulets that tickled his scalp. For a half-moment, he thought back to his time in Madagascar when he’d shaved his hair to the skin. In the rain forest, it had helped. Here in the Romanian winter, that probably wouldn’t be the smartest of ideas.
Clark crawled over to Shun and checked the tourniquet. The bleeding had subsided. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? Sometimes it meant the wound was on the mend, and sometimes it meant that the man’s heart was no longer beating hard enough to pump blood to the wound. Clark felt Shun’s neck with his fingers. He found the carotid artery and waited. There was a pulse—faint, but steady. Clarke had to get him to town.
Lifting Shun was harder this time. The thin Chinese man seemed to have put on thirty pounds since Clarke had dropped him. When he started to run, whatever fluidity of movement he’d possessed before (which had been nearly nonexistent) was now gone completely. Each step was an ogre’s stomp. There was no swivel in his hips or torso anymore to maneuver around branches. Clarke was just a battering ram.
Minutes ticked by and he continued his pace. He stomped gamely through the growth wishing for a game trail to follow. His face was scratched by sticks. His shirtsleeves were shredded from bearing the brunt of branches. All in all, not his best Saturday night. Not his worst—but far from his best.
Clarke’s ears, somewhat deadened to sound from the blood pounding in them due to his exertion, caught sound to his left. Something big. Something moving fast, splintering tree branches as it moved. He spun and saw a flash of white.
The werewolf had found him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Werewolf
Clarke had to ditch Shun. He needed to move fast. He dumped Shun unceremoniously at the base of a large oak and hoped that nothing bad would happen to the man. It was the best he could do, given the situation.
Pressing his back against the tree, Clarke quickly popped the cylinder of the Colt and filled the empty chambers with bullets from his belt. He hoped the bullets could do something against the werewolf. It’s not a real wolf, he reminded himself. They were controlled beings. Enwright ran them. They responded to a man. Real wolves were wild and answered to no one. If they answered to a man, they were not real wolves.
The wolf was speeding through the trees, a flash of white. Clarke only caught glimpses as it moved. It was unlike anything he’d seen before. It moved with a strange grace, fast and agile. Clarke raised the Colt and trained it on the wolf. He fired. The silence of the forest was shattered by the report, but the trees quickly swallowed the sound and there was no echo. The wolf deviated course. If Clarke hurt it, it didn’t show.
The wolf disappeared in the thick brush. Clarke tried to track it, but when there was a gap between the trees, the white didn’t appear. The wolf had shifted course, and Clarke lost sight of it. He could hear the crackle of underbrush and swish of leaves being disturbed, but he saw no sign of the beast.
Clarke pressed his back to the largest tree he saw. The creature couldn’t get the jump on him. He swiveled his gun in a wide arc from the left to the right. He couldn’t locate it by sound. The trees muffled and redirected the noise. It could be anywhere. The light was dwindling. The haze of twilight was making shadows stretch and play tricks with his eyes.
The beast broke through a stretch of overgrowth nearly in front of him. Clarke fired two shots straight into its broad head. The wolf swung to the left and went skittering into the underbrush. Clarke followed firing two more shots. The wolf disappeared again into the woods. Clarke popped the cylinder and refilled the chambers of the Colt. It would do no good to run dry on bullets at that point.
The wolf came back around from behind the tree. Clarke spun out and fired three times, dropping the hammer with his free hand as fast as he could. The wolf ducked its head and barreled into him, slamming into him with speed and force. Clarke was launched backward, the Colt flying from his hand. The world dissolved into a whirl of color and shadow as he spun helplessly through the air. The stout trunk of a fir tree stopped his progress, all his breath left his lungs, and he gasped and clawed for air.
The wolf was on top of him in an instant. For the first time, Clarke got a good look at the beast. It looked like no wolf he’d ever seen. It was large and blocky with a big square head. The face was vaguely wolf-like, but it was not a real wolf’s face. The maw was too thick, too boxy. The eyes were dead black glossy circles, not the intelligent eyes of a wolf. The fur was too matted, too long. There was nothing man-like about the “werewolf,” either. Clarke could see the bullet holes where he’d shot it in the head. There was no blood. It was a construct. A machine. It was an incredible machine, but a machine nonetheless. And it was standing over him, ready to finish him. The jaws opened wide and shining metal teeth glinted in the moonlight.
“Son of a b—”
The air crackled with static and the scream of a thousand trumpet blasts deafened Clarke. He slammed his hands to his ears and curled fetal against the noise. The wolf shuddered and slumped. When the sound dissipated, the wolf was in a heap in front of him.
Lord Bobbins stood twenty feet to Clarke’s right, Dolly Shaw, Tesla, and Andrei behind him. In his hands, Bobbins held Tesla’s cone-shaped gun. “By her Majesty’s wrinkly socks—that was some noise!” he shouted. The gun hung from his shoulder by a leather strap and he jammed his pinky fingers into his ears in an attempt to clear the ringing.
“You could have warned me, Nicky.”
“Nikola.” Tesla’s face was still an unreadable passive mask.
“You have to give that thing a name,” said Bobbins. “Something catchy. The Sound Hammer. No—Screamer. No—Ruprecht! No—I’ll think of something.”
“I call it Prototype Sonic Weapon 1-1.1A,” said Tesla.
Bobbins looked disgusted. “That will look horrible on the print ads. We need to work on it.”
Shaw held out a hand for Clarke. He accepted it and she helped him to his feet. “Who’s the stiff?” She nodded at Shun.
“The key to what the hell is going on. We need to get him some help.”
Tesla knelt by Shun’s still body and he palpated the small man’s neck feeling for the artery. “He is not well.”
“I was trying to get him back to town,” said Clarke. “What just happened? Where did you come from? What the hell is that gun and how did it stop the wolf?”
Bobbins waved off the inquiries. “Questions, questions. Let’s look at this thing.” He held out a hand to Andrei and the woodsman pulled out a small knife placing it handle-first in Bobbins’ waiting palm.
Bobbins cut into the faux hide of the beast and peeled back the outer layer. It was fake fur, probably made from some hairy, decidedly non-wolf creature like an elk or a buffalo, dyed white. Inside the fur was a mass of metal and gears, all entwined with some sort of tubing in which ran some sort of liquid, a glowing, ethereal spectral blue and thick as jelly. A large box sat just behind the framework for the head. All the tubes and wiring in the beast connected to the box. When Bobbins popped the box open, it was a mess of wires, blue tubes, and black tabs connecting everything.
“Nicky, you ever seen anything like this?” said Bobbins.
Tesla left Shun’s side and bent over the wreckage of the wolf construct. He squinted at the materials, probing them with a finger. “No. Never. This is…incredible. It is like nothing I have ever seen. It is like nothing that is even possible. Whoever made this is decades, maybe centuries beyond current scientific engineering. This is like something from the future.”
