High Bloods

by John Farris

  Ortega’s motorcycle wobbled but stayed upright; he poured on the speed and shot up to the left side of my truck. I saw the shotgun in his right hand. I thought it was more to scare me than anything else but I tromped the brakes again and ducked. Half of the windshield turned into a blizzard above my head.

  Cautious is as cautious does, Pym always liked to say.

  The pickup trailing Ortega’s Harley loomed when I glanced up. If the driver hadn’t seen McQuarrie in time, there was no way he was going to miss a mirror image of his own vehicle squarely in his path. He veered hard left and straight into the wingtip of the Mitchell bomber, which took out the windshield, sheared through the cab, and demolished the smaller rear window, splattering the driver like a blueberry pie flung against a white tile wall and probably killing both of the shooters who had been standing and braced in the bed of the pickup.

  Tonight’s mal de lune, I thought in a giddy, near-hallucinatory moment, was officially FUBAR. For another instant I had a sense of World War II flyboys in their leather jackets and cocky flight caps lined up along the spine of their bomber and laughing indulgently, but that image disappeared when I was distracted by a bloom of light like a desert rose beneath the impaled pickup.

  Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, wasn’t that what they used to say? I’d never been in a war, but this night’s confrontation would do.

  Raoul Ortega had accelerated past me following the buckshot-blowout of my windshield and was bearing down on Mal Wolfgirl. His left arm was raised and away from his body, shotgun extended.

  Buckshot. Another sportsman.

  The miserable bastard shot Mal Wolfgirl. In the back, from less than thirty feet away.

  Mal went down in a cowering hairy bloody heap, but her head came up and her eyes blazed as she watched Ortega make a cautious wide sweep around her. Then he turned his sexy chromed superbike in her direction, a single bright eye lighting up Mal as she jerked her head toward him and red froth sprayed in the wind.

  For a few seconds he sat on the Harley with one foot down, gunning the engine as if he dared her to come bounding after him. I don’t think he was paying attention to me. He might have thought I was busy picking glass out of my eyeballs. Or bleeding to death.

  When he lifted his foot and raised the shotgun again I screamed something no one could hear, yanked the big pickup around in a 180, and drove straight at him.

  That kind of challenge Ortega didn’t care for. He didn’t like it that I had a gun too. When he saw the muzzle-wink and his headlight blew up, leaving him with only a few small running lights, he forgot about finishing off the wolfgirl and drove his bike between a torpedo bomber and a C-47 transport parked close to each other on the line, ducking low in the saddle to clear the right wing of the bomber.

  I had no room to maneuver and took the same wing half off as I followed him, losing my rooflights. The flight line was quickly behind us; we were in terrain laced with arroyos hidden by manzanita and sagebrush, all of it so dry a spark from the exhaust pipe of either machine could ignite it. I glanced back once but didn’t see Mal Wolfgirl. Maybe, as hurt as she had to be, instinct had made her seek shelter in the dark.

  Both Ortega and I had power to spare. The pickup I drove was equipped for desert running. His Harley couldn’t cope with the loose desert drybed for long. He was already enjoying a clumsy ride. He had to change his tactics or take a breakneck spill. And he had the shotgun.

  We had traveled no more than half a mile into the full force of the harsh wind when he steered his bike down into a narrow arroyo. I couldn’t follow. All I could do was block the arroyo at my end and hope that there was no way out for Ortega except on foot.

  I killed the pickup’s engine but kept the lights on. The wind slackened long enough for me to hear Miles Brenta coughing and moaning in the bed of the truck. I had been too busy for a while to give him any thought. It was a small miracle that bouncing around back there hadn’t finished killing him.

  I also heard werewolves, some distance behind me. A howl was answered by another even farther away. No surprise if the Hairballs on the loose already had attracted desert-dwelling rogues. I heard shouts, saw gunflashes along the flightline. The pickup that had driven into the Mitchell was a pyre, smoke rolling sky-high with the wind.

  What I didn’t hear was Ortega’s Harley. With no way to drive out of the arroyo he’d shut the engine off. All I saw of the bike was a red speck of taillight some three hundred feet away and deep in the brush-thick arroyo.

  The wind picked up again with its moaning sweep and dust devils like small tornadoes, but where I was crouched beside the truck the mesquite around me barely trembled. There was no movement in that part of the arroyo illuminated by the truck’s headlights. From where I was with the blue-steel Uzi I could still make out the Harley’s taillight.

  Miles Brenta thumped in the bed of the truck and made a pathetic low noise that was almost like the yowl of a run-over animal.

  “Well, jefe,” Raoul Ortega said chummily on the CB radio, startling me with the nearness and clarity of his voice, “what we do now?”

  I wondered if McQuarrie had loaded tracer rounds as the first feeds in the Uzi magazine: helpful for homing in on a loping Hairball in the darkness. Maybe I could have burned Ortega out of his end of the arroyo.

  But I did nothing, only waited.

  “But maybe you don’t want to kill me,” Ortega speculated. “Because, you know, I have the amuleto like you say. I don’t mean she is with me now. But arrangements have been made. I go down, she goes down. And all the rest of them. The seesters. The Mission of Arroyo del Cobre. Soch a shame if that old place is destroyed one night. It have historical value, no?”

  We both listened to the wind a little while longer.

  “What am I worth to you dead, amigo? Nothing. The cost is too great. So why don’t you back that truck up out of there and we go our separate way.”

  This time he didn’t give me the chance to respond, if I had wanted to. The speculation was back in his voice.

  “Or maybe you no in condition to drive. What a shame.”

  More than my physical self had taken a pounding during the last forty-eight hours. The sixth sense that had almost always looked after me was AWOL. I was crouched there like a dummy, eyes fixed on the taillight and picturing Ortega also sensibly crouched away from his machine with the cord of the CB mike stretched to its limit, shotgun in his other hand, waiting for his own instincts to plan his next move for him.

  But handheld CBs were commonplace, particularly in areas where wristpacs lacked range, and it was more than likely Ortega had been chatting me up while circling slowly toward me with the wind in his face, shotgun ready.

  I brought up the muzzle of the Uzi, turning at the same time. He spoke to me again, but not in his radio voice.

  “Buenas noches. Put down the chatter gun.”

  I set the Uzi on the running board, otherwise not moving. I assumed he wanted to talk some more, enjoy his moment. Or I would have been dead before I knew he was there.

  “Mira me,” he said.

  I let out a breath and looked up and around. He was standing in the aura of a sidelight on the truck, above me and about eight feet away. Both hands on his shotgun.

  “Just leave Elena alone,” I said, and added with a bitter taste in my mouth, “please.”

  I could see nothing of his face inside the protective hive of his headgear. What I saw reflected on the face shield was something he wouldn’t have noticed with his head tilted down, his eyes fixed on me.

  “Por supuesto,” Ortega said graciously. “But your other one—mucha mujer. I will look her up. Take good care of her for you, jefe. So—now you can die.”

  He should have punctuated his last statement by blowing off my own helmeted head, but maybe he was enjoying himself too much. Or he wanted to hear me scream for mercy, the way some of the condemned will do. That would’ve been worth waiting a few extra moments for. The death scream.

  Which turn
ed out to be Ortega’s.

  The werewolf that was still partially Miles Brenta leaped from the bed of the truck and dragged Ortega to the ground. A load of buckshot put a hole in the door but above my head as I grabbed the Uzi. Ortega was getting to his feet, hurling the crippled wolf-thing away from him, when I trained the Uzi on his midsection and emptied the box. He never got off another shot.

  The virus in the blood that Ortega had pumped into Miles Brenta had only half done its work. There was hair and there was beast and there were the human eyes of a dying man as he got to his feet, a human broken arm dangling, fingers useless.

  “My turn,” he said. His voice calm, not pleading.

  The Uzi was empty. I dropped it. And slowly reached for the 9-mil Sig on my belt.

  I don’t know how long I drove around the desert looking for Mal. But the sky was lightening in the east when I had a glimpse of a naked female body half hidden in sagebrush.

  The wind had died down. I got out of the pickup and walked slowly toward her, saying her name. But she didn’t respond until I put a hand on the back of her neck.

  I took off the parka and dressed her in it. Then I sat on the ground holding her for a few minutes. ILC helicopters came and went in the distance. I watched them with sore eyes and thought about being alive. Dawn thoughts.

  “It was so stupid!” Mal sobbed, clinging to me for what warmth I had to give her. “I thought it would be, you know, fun to be that big and powerful and scary. Most of my friends were already Lycans. But I don’t want to be a werewolf anymore! Luvagod, isn’t there something that somebody can do?”

  I kissed a salty cold cheek, smoothed her hair back from her forehead. She shuddered in my arms, fetched a hopeless sigh, and closed her dreary blue eyes.

  “I’m not giving up,” I said.

  I got to my feet with her; somebody else could have built a house in the time it took to pull that off. Mallory cried in pain and I was mindful of the double-aught silver pellets embedded more than skin-deep in her back.

  Last of the Beverly Hills werewolves. I carried Mal to the battle-worn truck and laid her on her tummy on the backseat and drove slowly toward the pall of smoke above the old warplanes on the flight line. They were just a hazy vision now of what had been indomitable in an old war, in another time. But all wars ended, faded from memory. The latest war, against a tiny virus casting its malevolent spell from an unknown fortress deep in the brain, also would end. Because it had to.

  I just didn’t know how, or when.

  25

  t eight o’clock in the morning I dropped Mal Scarlett off at her mother’s house in Beverly Hills. She was wearing church barrel-casual and old running shoes and was wobbly on her feet. But halfway up the walk, as the front door opened, Mal put a hand on my arm and looked up at me with a wan smile.

  “I’ll be okay the rest of the way.”

  She continued to the front steps. Ida Grace had come outside. I saw Duke in the foyer of the house, not looking too bad off.

  All’s well that ends well—until the next time, when it probably won’t. So went my thoughts, but then it had been a long twenty-four hours and my mood demanded hot black coffee.

  Mother and daughter looked at each other for a few moments. If either of them said anything I didn’t hear. Then Ida put an arm around Mal to guide her into the house.

  On the threshold Ida paused and looked back at me. There wasn’t enough expression on her face for me to tell what was going through her mind.

  Then she nodded.

  Probably all the thanks I would ever get from Ida. It was enough.

  Beatrice had dozed off in the front seat of the ILC Humvee I had requisitioned at the mal de lune site. When I got in gingerly, feeling the ache of effort in most of my body parts, she opened her eyes.

  “Nobody can say we don’t have fun together,” I said.

  It didn’t earn me a smile.

  “I was thinking about those missing wolfmakers,” she said. “There must be a way of tracking them. Give me a few hours on my computer and I’ll locate them for you.”

  “I know you will,” I said. “Meantime, how about coffee? A roll in the hay is optional, if I don’t have to do the rolling.”

  Bea studied me critically. “How about a week in the hospital?”

  “I hate hospitals. Okay, maybe a couple of stitches. I’ll be good as—”

  Bea looked incredulous. I saw a shine of tears before she turned her face away.

  “Are you nuts? That is not brave. It’s not being tough, either. It’s just, it’s dumb. You survived a helicopter crash and werewolves. You’re bloody and you’re hurt and being smartass about being hurt doesn’t make you half the man you think you are!”

  “Hey!” I said, surprised and maybe a little pleased by her outburst.

  She looked at me again, wiping away tears.

  “And I, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you except—just—just keep on doing it!”

  We looked at each other. Bea sniffed a couple of times.

  “Does that make sense?” she said finally.

  “Does to me,” I said.

  I leaned awkwardly toward her and kissed her. Except for the fact that I was, as she’d correctly pointed out, pretty well flogged and needing a bath and redolent of werewolf, Bea didn’t seem to mind.

  “I hope your mother will like me,” she said.

  “Which reminds me,” I said.

  Bea glanced at me.

  “I’m entitled to a few weeks off. I’d better use most of them trying to locate Pym. If she could have come to me, by now she would have. Instead she was having conversations with Artie X. I need to know what that was all about.”

  “Unless Artie erased those e-mails, shouldn’t be hard for me to—R?”

  I put the Humvee in reverse and backed out of Ida Grace’s driveway.

  “What?”

  “You look worried.”

  “I am. Because Pym may have made a discovery.”

  “Discovery? Do you mean—?

  “Yeah. The Holy Grail. The cure for Lycan disease she’s spent most of her adult life looking for.”

  “But why—”

  “Go to Artie with it? Don’t know. What I do know is that Pym has had failed trials and errors in the past. The bad news is, she was always too willing to use herself as a subject of preliminary trials.”

  We waited for the gates of the minka to open.

  “Oh, no,” Bea said softly.

  I nodded.

  “You can’t cure what you don’t have,” I said.

  I drove up to the house. Parked, took my hands off the wheel, and watched them tremble.

  “So your mother can’t come home again.”

  “Two ways. As ashes in a vase, or after she’s finally found the means to change the fate of the rest of us poor benighted bastards.”

  I got down out of the Humvee and that was it, I couldn’t take a step. So I just leaned against the side breathing like a foundered horse until Bea came up beside me, turned my head gently, and kissed me.

  “When do we leave?” she said.

  GLOSSARY

  Acey-Deuce

  Bisexual.

  AUGIE (Augmented Galvanomagnetic Intercept Effector)

  Used for werewolf deterrence.

  Beefer

  Bodyguard; any man vain about his physique.

  Bitch Eye

  Hostile look.

  Black Dahls

  Stimulants; uppers.

  Bleat Blog

  Internet gossip sites devoted to celebrities.

  Bloodleggers

  Dealers in black-market, frequently tainted blood.

  Boneyard Shuffle

  High-fashion show with ultrathin models.

  Capone’d

  Women wearing the male clothing of Prohibition-era gangsters.

  Cold Dish

  Stale gossip.

  Coochputty

  Birth-control chewing gum for Lycans.

  Curb Roach<
br />
  Teenage Lycan hooker.

  Dead-Red

  Assassination target.

  Flogged

  Tired to the point of exhaustion.

  Frenzies

  Stimulants; uppers.

  Gas Attack

  Any speech by a politician running for office.

  Geekers

  Very high-tech, as opposed to stylish, sunglasses. Used by ILC agents only.

  Gold Certs

  Bank-issued certificates redeemable 100 percent in gold.

  Hairball

  Slang term for werewolf.

  Hairing-up

  The process of becoming a werewolf.

  Heavy Dupe

  Excessive public relations drumbeating, usually with spin.

  ILC

  International Lycan Control.

  Jesus Nut

  Indispensable item that holds the rotors onto a helicopter’s mast.

  LUMO

  For Lunar Module, referring to an injectable type of Snitcher.

  Lycan

  Any human being infected with the werewolf virus.

  Mal de lune

  Literally “moon sickness.” In popular usage, a staged werewolf hunt.