The ice pan tilted. Ice water surged over Zippo’s collar and down his back. Oddy watched them slide past. He couldn’t take a shot without the possibility he’d hit Zippo.
They struggled for a moment longer, perched precariously at the ice’s edge, before toppling backwards into the freezing lake.
Cold hit Zippo like a closed fist. It was near-paralyzing, and for a moment his heart stopped. They tumbled over and over in the dark water. His hands were snagged in the rough matted hair of the werewolf’s head and he could feel the heavy bone of its skull beneath. Gunmetal-tasting water surged into his mouth and nose, invading his ears in thin icepick streams. He twisted and struggled against the werewolf, matching its animal ferocity with his own will to survive. His legs kicked as his boots and pants grew heavy with water. His lungs burned for air. His head thumped against something hard and he had no idea whether he’d hit the ice shelf above or the rocky lake bottom below.
The werewolf’s paws raked his legs and suddenly the water was slightly warmer with his blood and his body slightly colder with its loss. Someone had thrown a flare into the water and greenish light spread in a mellow orbit above. The water’s surface shimmered. Zippo reached upwards. The stumps of his bitten-off fingers left a cloudy red wake. Blood flowed like cold mud through his veins. The werewolf slashed frantically, trying to free itself now. No way, José, Zippo thought grimly. No way I’m going down alone.
A shape entered the water above them, swimming downwards with powerful strokes. Zippo’s oxygen-starved brain was shutting down. He felt something thick and muscled pass by his face. The werewolf’s head jerked back.
The water trembled. A brief flash of light—muzzle flash—lit the werewolf’s destroyed face and, behind with his huge arm wrapped around its neck, Oddy. He pulled the Webley’s trigger and another slug tore through the werewolf’s head, exiting in a red haze, spinning away into the dark water. The creature’s paws continued to claw at Zippo, ripping deep into his flesh, severing muscles and tendons.
Oddy chambered the silver bullet and jammed the barrel beneath the werewolf’s chin. The flattened slug detached a massive portion of its skull and silver threads spooled from the wound. Moments—hours? days?—later, Zippo felt its limbs snap away like driftwood. Then Oddy’s hand was hooked around his collar and dragging him up.
They broke the water’s surface together. Oddy pulled Zippo to the ice’s edge as steam rose off their bodies in smoking eddies. Zippo sucked in great lungfuls of air and then, like a fratboy who’d drunk too much too fast, vomited a stream of blood and bile onto the ice.
“Help him out,” Oddy told Answer.
Answer laid flat on the ice, anchored himself as best he could, and offered Zippo his hand.
“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”
Zippo’s hand felt like cold slate. Answer pulled him out of the water and rolled him onto his back. His thighs were flayed open to the femurs. Blood spread in a red pool beneath him. His face was pale with shock and his teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Answer retrieved a syrette of morphine from the med-pack. “You want?” he asked Zippo.
“Y-y-yeah.”
He jabbed the syrette in Zippo’s chest and depressed the plunger.
“A-ano-another.”
Answer did as asked.
“A-ann-anno-another.”
“It’ll kill you,” Answer said. He had no personal stake in the decision. “You want?”
Zippo nodded…then, slowly, shook his head. “Not yet.”
By this time Oddy had pulled himself onto the ice. He’d only paused to strip off his parka and boots before diving in after Zippo. Now he shrugged off his sopping sweater and pulled the parka on. His feet, which he was now certain were frostbitten, he shoved back into his boots. He picked up the Webley and worked the cocking mechanism. It was frozen stiff. He hurled it into the water.
“We got another one,” Tripwire said. He pointed with weary desperation at a spot just beyond the final booby trap.
“Hunker low,” Oddy said. “and blow it.”
Tripwire jerked his arm back in a motion one might use to bring a leashed dog to heel. The final booby trap went off. A gaping fissure ripped the length of the ice, and a large plate broke away. When the smoke cleared the men were left on a floating crescent surrounded by deep black water. The only escape point was a narrow ice bridge that had somehow withstood the explosions.
Their packs and spare clothes were soaked. Dried food packets floated on the water, tinfoil squares bobbing on the slight waves. Each of them was wounded. Each of them was bloody. Zippo dry-heaved helplessly. Blood streaked his teeth.
“Look,” Tripwire said.
A single werewolf was hunched on the ice bordering the water on the far side. Smaller than the others, but sleeker, like a ballistic torpedo. It crouched on lean haunches and regarded the men with baleful red eyes. It seemed content to sit and wait.
They gathered around Zippo. Blood ran in sluggish rivulets from his legs and his front teeth had been knocked out. His hair was stuck to the ice in an uneven black fan. Tripwire reached two fingers into his mouth and scooped out pooling blood, afraid he’d choke on it.
“I-I’m f-fuh-fucking d-duh-done, Sarge.”
“Lay still, son.” Oddy felt for a pulse. There, but very weak. He asked Tripwire, “How’s that arm?”
Tripwire gingerly parted the rip in his parka. Something winked back whitely from the wet redness. He had a sneaking suspicion it was bone. “Deep, but clean.”
“You losing blood?”
“A bit.”
“My b-buh-belt,” Zippo said. “T-tor-tourniquet.”
Tripwire said, “You sure?”
“T-th-the fuh-fuck I nuh-need ih-ih-it for?”
Oddy carefully stripped off Zippo’s belt, looping it around Tripwire’s shoulder and cinching it as tight as he dared. He looked at Answer. “How about you?”
Answer’s face was a mess of long shallow scratches, some precariously close to his eyes. Blood trickled in torpid rivulets from the wounds, tracing the curve of his brow and collecting along the ridge of his upper lip. “I’ll be fine.”
Oddy performed a brief self-inspection: left hand useless, the back of it shredded, tendons and sinews looking like frayed red yarn. Most of his toes, and perhaps his feet, would have to be amputated if and when he got home. The only way to survive was to keep moving. But that meant—
“G-g-go.” Zippo grabbed Tripwire’s hand and squeezed. His grip was weak, like an old man, or an infant. “G-guh-get the fuh-fuck ow-out of hu-hu-here.”
“Can we pick him up,” Tripwire said. “Carry him?”
“He’s dogmeat,” Answer said. “He knows it and we know it.”
“Zip that fuckin’ lip, son.”
Answer turned away.
“Huh-he’s ruh-right. I-I’m duh-done.”
They all knew it was true. But you just don’t say those things. Not to a fellow soldier. Not to a fellow human being.
“Give him the rest of the morphine,” Oddy said.
Tripwire uncapped the last two syrettes and curled them into Zippo’s palm. He positioned Zippo’s thumb over the plungers. “Just jab and push,” he whispered.
The lone werewolf sat licking its chops. Answer said, “What are we going to do about that one?”
“See any more?” Oddy said.
“No.”
“Is it going to attack?”
“Not us and not now,” Answer said. “It’s waiting.”
“For what?”
“For us to leave. Then it’ll take him.”
Tripwire pulled the DeLisle’s clip and ejected all the bullets except one. He slotted the silver bullet in on top and slapped the clip home. “Here,” he placed the gun in Zippo’s free hand, “one shot for that thing, and one more…for whatever.”
“W-wuh-whatever, huh?” Zippo said. Tripwire scooped more blood out of his mouth. It was cold, like jelly. “Tuh-take my g-guns.”
Tri
pwire retrieved the Llamas as Oddy crouched beside Zippo. The hitman’s eyes were almost closed and lake water had frozen around his ears and nose and lips. Oddy breathed into his palm and pressed it to Zippo’s forehead.
“Can you feel that, son?”
“N-nuh-no.”
Oddy breathed again, deeper this time, and reapplied his palm. Suddenly it was very important, suddenly it was crucial, that Zippo feel this warmth.
“F-fuh-fucking a-ah-amazing, ih-ih-ih-isn’t i-i-it?” Zippo’s lips were sticking together from the blood. Oddy wet his thumb and wiped them clean. “V-vuh-vamp-p-pires and wuh-wuh-werewol…and…a-an…”
“Last of the big game hunters,” Oddy said quietly. “That’s us.”
Zippo smiled, a subtle upturn at the corners of his mouth. “It’s n-nuh-not so bu-bad, Sarge.” He was thinking about Kazuhito Kawanami, the yakuza boss he’d killed. Thinking about how Kawanami had nodded, and sipped his drink, and accepted death with quiet dignity. “C-cu-cu-cold, b-b-buh-but o-o-o-okay…”
“One hell of a life we chose for ourselves, son. Hell of a life.”
“W-wu-wouldn’t h-huh-have it a-any other w-wu-way.”
Oddy pressed his palm to Zippo’s forehead a final time. The hitman’s flesh was cold, rubbery. “We’ve got to go now, son. I’d’ve done anything to see this go down some other way.”
Zippo’s eyes opened then, fully. Oddy was struck by the piercing blueness of them and, in that moment, he appeared almost childlike. “A-ah-anytime. A-a-anyw-wu-where. A-any-h-hu-how.”
Then his eyes clouded over again, and closed. His chest rose and fell in shallow swells.
The men gathered up what supplies they could. The ice splintered alarmingly beneath their feet. Oddy hefted the H&K23. His back screamed mercy and he dropped it. He still had one Webley and fifteen rounds. It would have to do.
Tripwire stopped beside Zippo. Blood ringed the hitman’s body like a chalk outline around a corpse. His eyelids were fluttering. “Remember,” he said, “just jab and push. It’s that easy.”
Zippo mumbled something unintelligible.
The ice-bridge looked about as narrow as a gymnast’s beam, although it was more accurately the width of a city sidewalk. The ice was transected with hairline cracks. There was no way to tell how much weight it could withstand.
“Put your snowshoes on,” Oddy said. “Disperse the weight.”
Tripwire and Answer did as advised, though neither relished the prospect of trying to swim with them on.
“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” Tripwire whispered, and set off.
The ice cracked. The ice groaned. But the ice held. Tripwire made it across, then Answer, then Oddy. The werewolf had not moved. Why fight when patience will bring an easy meal, it was no doubt thinking.
The forest resumed to the west. Dark shapes moved within the tall pines, watching, waiting.
“Let’s get humping.”
««—»»
Shshshshsh…
Daniel Coles, who, as a man, would earn the nickname “Zippo,” could not tell if the sound came from the dim and fading world around him, or was an internal echo within the darkening corridors of his own mind.
Shshshshsh…
Opening his eyes required a colossal effort. Above, the sky was a blissful, muted purple—the most beautiful purple he had ever seen. Gorgeous, he tried to say, but no word came out. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that sky. The stars shone brilliantly. Although he had no knowledge of astronomy, their order made some kind of elemental sense to him.
Shshshshsh…
The pain resonated at a distant level, like a cathedral bell ringing many blocks away. He stared down at his body. It was a testament to his beatific state of mind that the sight did not disturb him: the flesh flayed open and the stiffly frozen tatters of fabric peeling away from horrific wounds like dead birch bark from a tree trunk. His legs, bent at awkward angles, looked like stogies that had been crushed in someone’s pocket.
“Shshshshsh…”
Something was moving through his hair. A hand. A woman sat beside him, stroking his hair. She was, without question, the most beautiful woman Daniel had ever seen. Her skin was the color of burnt caramel and it glowed in the dusk. She was naked but seemed neither cold nor self-conscious. Her breasts were small and her ribs visible. It looked as if she had not eaten in quite some time. But her body, the leanness of it, the ropes of muscle running long beneath smooth brown skin, realized some kind of essential symmetry.
“You’re hurt very badly.” Her voice was rich as cream and honey.
“Y-yuh-yes.”
She asked his name.
“Daniel,” she repeated, “such a nice name.”
Her hair and eyebrows were shockingly white. And if her face was slightly too long, the angle of her jaw slightly vulpine, Zippo neither noticed nor cared. Her eyes, though too close-set, flashed with colors he had never seen, nor could put a name to.
“You are going to die soon, I’m afraid.” She scratched behind her ear. Not with her hand but with her foot, in the manner of a dog.
“I cuh-could h-have b-buh-been r-ri-rich.” She had stopped stroking his hair. He wished she would do it some more. “A muh-muh-million b-bucks.”
“That would have been nice, I suppose.”
Tripwire’s gun was nowhere to be seen. Zippo couldn’t have shot her, anyway.
She bent down and pressed her lips to his ear. “I can help you.” Her breath was sweetly bitter, like fresh-mown grass. “Would you like me to try?”
More than anything in this world.
“Y-yuh-yes.”
“Alright.”
Her mouth moved further down and her breath warmed his throat. Then her teeth—small and white and very, very sharp—were biting into his flesh, saliva mingling with blood…
…he felt himself moving, pulled across the ice on a bier of flexible saplings. The bier hit a rut and pain, thick and fibrous and sickening, hammered down his legs. He passed out…
…in a dark, warm place. In the darkness, noises. A sound like trickling water. Another like the spirited play of puppies. He touched his face to find it matted with a layer of coarse fur. A beard? How long had he been here…
…he was in a cave. To his left a fire flickered, casting strange shadows on the rock. The woman crouched between his legs. She was licking his wounds, cleaning away the blood and pus with her small pink tongue…
…terrible fever dreams. Every man he had every killed appearing before him as they had at the moment of death. Kenny Webb, the first man he’d killed for money, twenty-one years old with powder burns frosting the bullet hole in his neck. The father-and-son Viets, the look of utter hatred on their faces the moment before he’d flamed them in that tunnel outside Song-Be. The dreams deepened, darkened, spiraled. Now he dreamt of the great caribou herds, the scent of them, a crystal-clear sense-memory of their flesh, their taste…
…in the cave again. Small creatures at play near the fire. Some were wolf kits, some young children, some an uneasy combination of both. Beneath a fine layer of white hair his legs were slender and scarred. Jagged scabs healed along their length. She appeared at his side. Firelight etched the contours of her face and reflected off her kaleidoscopic eyes.
“Who?” he said, pointing at the wolf kits.
“Mine alone,” she said. “My mate was killed by the black man.”
“Why did you save me?”
“Because you are a hunter.”
She pressed her lips to his cheek…
…and then he was outside under a full moon. She was at his side. She was as beautiful, or more so, in lupine form than she was as a human. Her fur was white as snow and her body radiated grace and power. Wolfish yips emanated from the cave, interspersed with childish laughter.
“Young mouths to feed.” Her voice was a guttural growl.
He stared at his feet. They were longer now, and furred. His nails were dark, and hooked, and very sharp�
��claws. There were dark pads on the underside of each foot and he barely felt the snow beneath them. His mouth felt crowded with too many teeth. He tried to stand but his spine had acquired a streamlined curvature that made moving on all fours more comfortable.
So he did.
He could hear things he’d never heard before: it was as if someone had cranked the volume of the world to full blast. His nose was alive with scents more tantalizing and more deeply-textured than he’d known to exist. He opened his mouth to speak and a howl tore out of his throat. To his new ears it was the most natural sound in the world.
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