“Behind you!” Tranelli’s eyes were wide, but he was quick enough to draw a Vatican blade. The other blade.
Franco whirled, his body still screaming in pain from the fall, and looked up just in time to see the silver-streaked wolf pounce on him from above. Snarling jaws and sharp claws all reached out for him. The wolf’s eyes glowed red like the demon he was, a demon straight from the pit of hell.
The Jesuit now behind Franco uttered both a prayer and a curse, and by the time the wolf was hurtling through the air, there were two targets. Momentarily confused by the quick movement, the werewolf’s focus slipped and threw off his aim. Franco expertly sidestepped him, keeping the snapping jaws away from himself in the process, then his body slammed sideways into the beast’s and his blade bit deep, tearing a long gash in its side from chest to haunches.
The wolf let out a hideous scream as the silver-edged weapon burned and sliced into its unholy flesh, releasing a hissing steam and a gush of corrupted blood onto the metal stairs.
Next to him, Tranelli’s blade also flashed and its point pierced below the monster’s snout and punched up, through its throat and into its brain.
The beast squealed and dropped to the stairs, convulsions wracking its body as the touch of the holy silver destroyed its internal organs and essentially burned it from the inside out.
The stench of scorched fur and blood was overtaken by something worse as the beast continued to sizzle, but now it was the mangled, disfigured corpse of a disemboweled human.
The same human Franco had followed aboard.
The body was half-melted, rivers of liquid fat and flesh congealing in revolting pools around its splayed-out limbs. They stood over it for a moment, and Franco thought the priest would pray, but he did not.
“You fool!” the priest hissed. “Now what? We’ve been following this pezzo di merda in order to find out who he’s delivering to, and now look at him.”
The Aryan was naked and very dead, his body a mass of still-crackling roast meat.
Tranelli lurched past Franco and up the steps. He picked up the package the courier had been carrying, abandoned in his piled clothes. He opened it carefully and pulled out a banded wad of notes. Franco looked up—he was young, but he’d seen American cash before.
“Thousands,” said the priest. “We wanted to know who he’d deliver to. We only know some of the transaction.” He was defeated.
Franco felt his face flush.
“Do they know him?”
“We’re not sure. He meets different ships.”
“I can take his place, deliver the money. If they don’t know him, I might pass.”
Tranelli laughed, but it was cold. “Do you speak German? No, I didn’t think so.”
“Well, when I am discovered we can turn the tables on the other one and kill him too.”
“You think too small, bambino. We don’t want to kill one termite here and one there. We want to find the whole treeful of insects and chop it down, then burn it to the ground.”
“Why haven’t the others heard any of this?”
Tranelli smiled. “The crew are still on liberty. Only the captain and a few motormen are on duty. But the engines are turning over, which means they’ll weigh anchor tonight.”
“Are any of the others wolves here, on board?”
“Child, we don’t know! It’s why we watch. And wait. It’s called gathering intelligence. You seem to be losing yours, whatever intelligence God has granted you.”
Franco talked fast. He had learned much in his stunted childhood. “He must have been coming to see the captain. Let’s assume that is the case. So I make the delivery, see what he says, then play it by ear from there. You are with Corrado?”
Tranelli nodded, uncertain.
“You tell him to get here before the ship sails and we can get the information out of the captain. I can be persuasive.”
Tranelli shivered visibly at the look that crossed Franco’s face.
Chapter Thirty
Wolfclaw
Somewhere in Northern Minnesota
The discipline room was misnamed.
It wasn’t a room for people to be punished.
It was a room where those who were being punished could be tortured and killed, then disposed of, all in one convenient space that incorporated a compact incinerator—ostensibly for trash—as well as drains to wash away blood set directly into the ground beneath the sub-basement. It was soundproof.
Now the room was occupied.
The man on the gurney had stopped thrashing due to fatigue. He’d been strapped to the rolling deathbed for over forty-eight hours and all his attempts to slip out of the restraints had failed, leading only to the loss of his strength and the incredible pain he now felt in all his muscles and extremities. His voice had become a croak from all the screaming.
Useless fucking screaming, because no one could hear him.
And they wouldn’t have helped him if they could.
He was clean-shaven except for stubble grown while in captivity. He was of medium-height and build, and he had infiltrated Wolfpaw Security Services two years earlier. Then he had been sucked into the slimmer, super-secret inner-sanctum group due to his willingness to engage in sex with a general of the armed forces.
That general did not know this lovely young man had been a plant. The general would be here today, too. And likely he would pay for his indiscretion almost as brutally as the man on the gurney.
Of course, the man on the gurney was past caring what happened to his lover, the general. He had been planning to talk plenty. He thought he’d drag the general down with him, if he could.
He doubted this would save him, but at least he could die knowing he’d exacted some payback.
He snorted, recapturing for a second his sense of counter-culture cynicism.
Hell, he’d been recruited and had taken up with the general specifically so he could help bring down that new symbol of the military-industrial complex, a man in uniform whose secrets were mind-blowing even to one as well-schooled as he had been. He had wormed his way into the inner command structure based purely on his abilities to give head and give and take anal sex as required by his lover, and not always within the group of two.
With another snort, he realized that now he was leaking streams of tears out of the corners of his eyes, and it burned and made his cheeks and facial hair tickle almost like its own form of torture. And he could do nothing about it.
He wondered what they would do to him.
He’d seen enough to know what they could do.
He struggled again, briefly, then lay back down to rest. If they loosened his restraints, he would take whatever opportunity presented itself.
But time itself was against him, loosening his hold on ambition.
It might have been hours later, he wasn’t sure, when the metal door was unlocked and the generals filed inside. His general was one of them, but there was no eye contact between them.
The big gun, Lansing, took up position at the head of the gurney, so he appeared to be upside down. He waited for the others to encircle the bound man, who suddenly realized his opportunity had come and gone.
He was a dead man. Of this he was certain.
He prayed for quickness, but he was sober enough to know his prayer would not be answered.
Perhaps his general would intervene, he thought, however illogical it would be. He grasped this small bit of hope and clung to it like a man floating in the ocean might grasp a floating corpse.
“Gentlemen, behold our whistleblower. His name is irrelevant, but what he has done is not. You see, this miserable piece of human trash has endangered our entire operation by creating a file on our activities, a rather extensive file, and then disseminating it to another thorn in our side. You’ll be happy to note that particular loose end has been tightened, leaving us only this one.”
Suddenly Lansing’s hands shot out and grabbed both sides of the prisoner’s head, turning it aside so they a
ll could see the throbbing artery.
“Tell us who among us has helped you,” Lansing said as he lowered his head to stare into the man’s upside-down eyes. “Tell us and you’ll be spared.”
The prisoner knew he was finished, but now he hoped if he didn’t point the finger, his lover would take pity and find a way to rescue him. If he spoke out against the general, he would die anyway. If he stayed silent, however…
The warring emotions wracked his weakened brain.
He stared back at his tormentor now, feeling Lansing’s large hands squeezing his skull.
“One last chance,” Lansing said. “We can make things easier for you. It doesn’t have to end this way.”
The prisoner remained silent.
“Very well. General Johnston, it’s your move.”
The prisoner’s pupils dilated. They had the wrong man! There was hope after all…
But Johnston nodded once, then in a blur drew a Sig semi-auto with a bandaged hand and shot General Heissen once in the head.
The silver-plated 9mm slug blew up the general’s cranium and splattered everyone nearby, though no one moved. The dead general’s almost headless body crumpled to the tile floor with nary a twitch. Rivulets of tainted blood sought out the slope toward the drain.
“The Corps looks after its own in good times and bad,” Lansing said. He nodded at Johnston, whose hand was smoking, the stench of burning flesh strong in the close room. “Thank you, General.”
Lansing turned back to the prisoner.
“He will not be helping you, despite your hopes. I don’t know how you corrupted him and secured his cooperation, but you have cost us a good ally. Your actions will now cost you.”
At his nod, the remaining generals blurred and the prisoner had enough time to see their heads turn into monstrous wolves’ heads, complete with snapping jaws full of wicked fangs and coloration that resembled their human faces not at all.
And then they took turns ripping into his chest and belly, tearing out his organs and feasting on his entrails as he watched, screaming incoherently, until his eyes glazed and he was just meat to them.
As he had always been.
Prey
He was running, and he had been since the monsters had released him along with the others.
The others, the game they would hunt like deer or gazelles.
He’d heard the guards laughing about what would happen to them, and he had seen and heard what happened when the monstrous humans became true monsters and chased down his fellow prisoners.
His fellow game.
They were both food and also a game, a pastime for the fat-cat generals and their minions to play with until they bored of them, after which they would kill and devour them. If they were lucky, they’d be killed first.
He had seen some of his fellows devoured while still living.
It was a sight he would never forget, not if he lived to the age of one hundred. Of course, he knew he was not likely to live through the week. That he had survived this long, evading the two- and four-footed wolves who hunted them, was almost a miracle.
He wondered if his DNA had kindly left him with some sort of scent inhibitor. Or maybe he simply smelled less than his friends from the cages. It didn’t matter why, all he could do was keep running, hoping to cross some major road or freeway through this godforsaken landscape that might as well have been on the moon. He might once have enjoyed this portion of Minnesota, but frankly now it was just an alien landscape of impenetrable forest, rushing river, freezing lakes, and bare-topped hills.
He was just cresting a hill now.
The view brought home to him with a painful rush that this game preserve, as they referred to it, was hundreds of square miles. Not the kind of place you could walk out of without clothing and equipment. And food. Just the thought of the word made his stomach rumble, then flip with a sudden onset of nausea that bent him over with dry heaves so violent he hacked up blood.
When he was finished heaving the acid contents of his guts and blood from his raw throat, he leaned up against a tree trunk—another goddamn pine, there was nothing but pines—and tried to think straight.
He’d been held prisoner so long he had forgotten about choices, decisions.
Should he climb over the hills, or around them? They were gentle, glacial in origins—not that he cared—and normally they would have been hardly impossible obstacles.
But again the thought hit him that without good boots, a warm coat, hat and gloves, and food, and water…then it might as well have been the surface of Mars. And he wouldn’t last that long, while his hunters would have all the time in the world. He’d seen guards driving ATVs, so they didn’t even have to run him down on foot.
Or on four paws.
He made his decision and crawled up and over the small hill’s crest, suddenly aware that there was no cover.
And suddenly aware of a buzzing noise rising up behind him.
A high-pitched, insect-like buzzing that rose in volume until it was almost deafening.
Chapter Thirty-One
Prey
He was on the bare hilltop when a pair of round black helicopter-like flying devices crested behind him, their motors screaming like angry wasps. They hovered over him as he whirled, staring at the machines that seemed to be watching him.
They were watching him.
He had no time to feel fear, but his guts heaved and he knew his destiny was playing out.
He threw himself to the side, scrabbling for the opposite slope, steep as it was, hoping to outmaneuver whatever the hell the things were.
But they followed him, swinging sideways in unison so they were still overhead as he rolled partway down the rocky slope, scraping arms and legs on jagged rock outcrops. His right knee shattered and he screamed at the sudden pain, but he kept rolling, and then he heard his left forearm snap, and by then he was whimpering and rolling, heading for the nearest trees and knowing that crashing into any of the trunks would break his spine or shatter his skull.
And still the two flying devices followed, maybe fifty feet above him, keeping to a simple formation—one flying slightly higher than the other.
He screamed.
Wolfclaw
Camera lenses followed the rolling, falling body.
They “saw” his face, bracketed the features in a square reticle the image of which was immediately transmitted to the distant control room, where the Wolfclaw group was assembled in real time.
“At this point recognition has taken place,” Lansing pointed out as if he were leading a museum tour. “All it took was a good clear look at his face, and the software did the rest.”
The generals looked at each other and nodded.
“Engage targeting,” Lansing ordered, and one of the remote pilots repeated the order, flipping a switch on his console. His monitor display changed to a set of red pulsating crosshairs like might be employed in a video game. “Reapers armed,” reported the pilot.
“Reaper is our own design of miniature missile,” Lansing explained, though most of his group had read the literature. “Each UAV, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, deploys one missile. At present.”
The unfortunate target, designated an expendable, was attempting to stand on a sprained or broken limb, his face turned toward the UAVs, his mouth open in a soundless scream.
“Once locked on target,” Lansing explained clinically, “there is no kill-switch other than a self-destruct sequence both pilots must initiate. The drone is armed, the target is acquired, and the preprogrammed countdown begins. If the target seeks shelter, the UAVs hover until the target is acquired again. Their batteries last eleven hours, allowing them to outlast most targets.”
They watched intently as their targeted human raised an arm as if to protect himself from the hovering, screaming vehicles.
Lansing turned toward his compatriots. “The countdown sequence has begun due to its near-Artificial Intelligence brain, which makes decisions faster than we can without th
e hesitation.”
“Ten seconds,” said the pilot. “Five. Three. Zero.”
As they watched on the screen, the image blurred when the camera shuddered, and then a silent contrail was briefly visible until the Reaper missile exploded and nearly vaporized the struggling human target on the hillside.
There was spontaneous applause in the control room. Bits and pieces of what had been a man rained down silently and covered the hillside.
“Pilot, hold the second Reaper.” Lansing smiled at his audience. “No need to waste a second weapon, as one was most obviously sufficient. Had he managed to somehow evade, which is unlikely, the second Reaper would have finished the job.”
On the screen, the bloody remains of their experimental prey smoldered in neutral black-and-white.
“Return the UAVs to base,” Lansing ordered.
“Sir.”
The feature demonstration was over.
A handheld device was handed to Lansing. He stared at some lines of text, then swore.
“Gentlemen, it appears our containment team was unexpectedly outwitted by a werewolf. Not one of ours, I might add. We’ve taken losses, and we do not have the flash drive.”
In a rage, Lansing swept half the modules of an unoccupied control pod across the room and into a wall, where they shattered.
The others filed out of the control room, leaving him alone to fret in any way he preferred.
He brought up the data and information he’d been given by the Wolfpaw inner circle, and ordered one of the technicians to feed it into the UAV control software’s blank fields.
Lansing frowned.
There was danger of all their plans going to hell, and he was not going to let that happen. The fools in Wolfpaw had done enough damage. And now there were these thorns in his side, these annoying human obstacles. Led by that obstinate cop, they’d become a tight little group of obstacles. Lansing was still interested in the cop because his origins were different—he was different—though not many understood why. Lansing knew it was due to what that one shaman, Joseph Badger, had been able to accomplish, which had made Lupo a stronger, more resistant strain of werewolf. Others had been genetically engineered by Nazi scientists using soldiers as guinea pigs and slaves as experimental prey. But somehow Badger had succeeded in nearly replicating the Nazi successes without the genetics. If only they could take Lupo apart in a lab…
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 22
