“And why’s that?” Ally asked, holstering her blaster.
“Because there are far worse things than bears that stalk these mountains at night.”
“That’s a risk we’re willing to take,” Matt replied, tossing the car keys and the money at Nuri’s feet. “We’ll be grateful for whatever you’re willing to spare. Then we’ll be on our way.”
Nuri took a moment to study them more, the fear lingering in his eyes now masquerading as caution. His eyes drifted down to the meager peace offering in front of him. These two were not only dangerous, they were crazy. They were also a disruption to the peace and wellbeing of this camp. The sooner they left the better. “Wait here,” he said, before turning and walking off through the camp. The other men all followed, giving Matt and Ally parting glares.
Eighteen
Matt and Ally slogged through the forest belt, headed deeper into the heart of the Carpathian Mountains. Ally’s rucksack was weighed down with the food and water Nuri had grudgingly provided them. Their rations consisted of stuffed peppers, two bread rolls, and some pickled cabbage. They were also each given a reusable bottle of water. It seemed with every step they took, the landscape became wilder and more ominous, with sunlight struggling to penetrate the maze of trees, many decorated with beards of hanging ice.
After another exhausting few hours of trekking, they spotted a break in the trees; a clearing where more light flooded in than anywhere else in the forest. They made their way towards it, coming upon a scattering of dark and twisted forms protruding from the ground. Downed trees? At this distance, it was hard to tell.
They reached the edge where the trees began to part, the clearing opening to reveal it was strewn with dead animals. Matt and Ally cautiously moved between rotting carcasses like they were treading a minefield; meat stripped raw, their giant, ice-crusted antlers twisting up from the snow. Decomposing boar and fallow deer were also piled across the clearing, their flesh turned black from the elements.
This was not a graveyard; it was a feeding pen.
Matt looked out across the sparse clearing, spotting another carcass in the distance. This one was different. It was a huge mass of black fur. He headed towards it, taking purposeful strides across the snow.
Face-down, the animal’s bleach-white bones protruded up through its haunches like crooked totems, polished smooth by the near-arctic winds. What remained of its exposed organs were freeze-dried, and its blood had been congealed from the cold. Matt concluded this kill was relatively fresh. A day old, at best.
“Is that a bear?” Ally asked, joining him by his side.
“Looks like a brown bear.” Matt’s eyes followed the trail of blood that was pocked across the clearing. It led to a towering, jagged rockface on the far side, where a dark, uneven slash ran down its front. Matt watched the cave opening for any sign of movement, then looked down to see yellow blots of urine in the snow next to huge paw-prints inked with blood. It took him another few seconds to realize they were surrounded by them. “We should keep moving,” Matt said in a tense hush. “I think we’re trespassing.”
After heading north-east for another hour, they wearily trudged down into a gully, pushing through a thick line of silver fir and beech, emerging onto the banks of a freshwater stream.
Ally pulled out two small mineral filter pads from her supplies and handed one to Matt. They dropped them into their empty bottles, crouched in the pebble bed, and proceeded to replenish their water supply. “All this snow… feels like we’re not getting any closer,” Ally puffed, her breath misting as she looked around, chugging the fresh alpine air into her lungs.
Matt slipped his water bottle back into his jacket then waved his hand over the jump band attached to his forearm. The strange Combine map blossomed to life, highlighting their current position with relation to the primary destination. “Another day. Two, if we get caught in that storm that seems to be following us—” Matt’s response was clipped by the sudden echo of heavy branches snapping.
They both stood and drew their blasters, heads on a three-sixty-degree swivel, listening for any sign of a threat. “Sounded close,” Ally whispered, her eyes sweeping the treeline on the opposite side of the stream. “Maybe it’s just some deer passing through.”
“Or a bear,” Matt replied, becoming aware of a dark line moving laterally out the corner of his eye. He peered deeper, eyesight adjusting to something beyond the edge of his periphery. He made a tchick-tchick sound to get Ally’s attention, his index finger following the line of shadows whisking fluidly along the ground.
Ally followed his gaze, eyes narrowing to penetrate the white gloom between the trees, watching the dark-grey shadows cut through as branches and twigs snapped. “What is that?” she muttered, her grip tightening on her blaster.
Before Matt could answer, a series of deep bellowed howls ripped through the trees. Raw and bestial. A primal chorus that peaked to become a single, sustained snarl.
Matt tightened his aim, wired from a fresh surge of fear. “Wolves.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Five. Maybe six.”
“Sounded more like six-hundred. What are they doing?”
“Sniffing us out. Giving us a warning to leave. Gauging whether we represent a threat.”
When there was another graveling howl, Ally’s eyes searched for the source, her jaw clenched tight. “I’ve never heard wolves sound like that before.”
“How many times has a pack of wolves been this close to you?”
“Point taken. I thought they usually avoided human contact.”
“Usually. We should accept their warning and get moving. If we stay within their territory, it’ll only be a matter of time until they get more annoyed with us.” Through the trees, Matt’s eyes struggled to fix on anything tangible now. The mangy shadows had evaporated into the pale mist. The trees were still and silent once more. “With a little luck, a few more miles north-east and we’ll be clear of their territorial range.” Matt took another moment to listen carefully, blinking away the snowflakes landing on his eyelashes. “Once we get a fire going tonight, we’ll need to take shifts.”
As snow began to gently fall around them like feathers, Matt looked at the dark clouds drifting by overhead. Amorphous masses, moving peacefully and elegantly, but also carrying the promise of a storm.
Nineteen
Heavy snow fell that night as Matt and Ally sat huddled around a small fire. Visibility was only a few yards in each direction, and the smothering cold was starting to take its toll. Having reached higher ground, they were perched near the edge of a steep ridge. Forty feet below them, they could hear a half-frozen river slowly moving.
Matt dumped more sticks and branches onto the fire, but the flames were struggling to take hold. “You should try and get some sleep,” Matt said, watching Ally press her knees against her chest as tightly as possible, the cold biting into her bones.
“I’m fine,” she replied.
“You must be tired.”
“I can’t sleep when it’s this cold.”
Matt turned back to face the flames, nodding in agreement. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so damn cold in my life. Not even in cryo-sleep,” he said, doing his best not to let his chin chatter. “How’s our food situation looking?”
Ally rummaged through her rucksack, pulled out a half-frozen bread roll, and tossed it over to him. “Better make it last.”
Matt blew some ice off the roll and began gnawing on it. After chewing robotically in silence for a few minutes, he looked down and chuckled to himself.
Ally threw him a sideways glance. “What could possibly be so funny right now?”
“I just keep thinking about this time your mother and I visited her parents in Pittsburgh…” Matt had to stop himself from bursting with laughter. “This was a few months before the invasion. Karen was heavily pregnant with you. Anyway, she always wanted to visit the Carnegie Science Center. She loved astronomy. But this particular day, we made the mistake of
going on Flag Day. The entire place was jam-packed. People everywhere. The lines were brutally long…” Matt couldn’t finish his sentence without hacking out a raspy laugh.
“Enjoying yourself over there?”
“We got in line to take the Planetarium Tour and waited for over an hour. Let’s just say, your mother was not in a good mood. I think that was the maddest I’d ever seen her. I mean, she could have killed someone with just a look. To make things worse, there was also this fat kid in front of us – must’ve been no older than seven or eight. He kept turning around and pulling all these horrible faces at us - even gave Karen the finger. He just kept going and going, and his parents wouldn’t do anything to make him stop. So finally, Karen snatched the kid’s soda out of his hand and drank the whole thing in front of him. When the little shit started balling his eyes out, the parents threatened to call the cops on us. When I told them I was a cop, they wouldn’t believe me.” Matt paused to compose himself, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes.
“So what happened?”
“We left...” Matt began cackling between his words again. “Ended up visiting the Warhol Museum instead. But, see… when we came out later, we decided to grab lunch at a nearby diner…” Matt was hunched over now, almost crippled with laughter. “And… and who do you think the waitress sat us down next to in the opposite booth?”
Ally gave a small chuckle and shook her head.
After Matt was finished, he sat up and blew out an exhausted sigh, his breath pluming through the snowy drizzle. Despite his near-empty stomach, he felt nourished. It had been a long time since he’d found anything humorous. “Not sure why that popped into my head, but that was a good day. We had fun that day.” He sniffed the cold air, wiped his nose, then leaned over and scooped up another pile of kindling, tossing it onto the fire. The flames flashed a little higher.
“What was she like?”
“Strong… she was strong,” Matt replied, his mind drifting elsewhere. “Funny too. God, we used to laugh. She also loved the idea of being a mother – always talking about the things she wanted to do with you. She had this little wooden box that was filled with all these things. You know, keepsakes and stuff. Just everyday things she had collected over the years from when she was a teenager. They were like highlight reels of her life. Stuff she wore in high school, on her prom night, birthdays, graduation… anything that represented the celebrations of her past. She told me they were heirlooms she wanted to pass onto you someday.”
Watching the flames slowly build, Ally was saddened by the thought of a childhood and a mother she never knew. “I would have loved that.”
“Yeah, she would have too.”
Then, their cold solace was suddenly shattered by a familiar, earsplitting howl.
Drawing their blasters, they scrambled to their feet, eyes narrowing on the snowy murk surrounding them. “Looks like our friends are back,” Matt said as he watched Ally kick snow over the fire. “Won’t make a difference. They already know we’re here.” The guttural growls seemed to be moving closer now with more intensity. “They’ve been tracking us since this morning.”
“You mean, hunting us.” Ally replied, her voice pinched with fear.
Their weapons swept the misty treeline as the unseen pack began to circle, splintering undergrowth with loud snaps. Every breath Matt and Ally exhaled was now thick with fear. The wolves could smell it. They were carrying it like an odor.
And then, out there, just past the firelight, dark-grey lines shot past their periphery, yipping excitedly. Some wolves could now be seen maneuvering into position, while others remained still. They were cutting off any path of escape, creating a bottleneck.
“What are they doing?” Ally whispered tensely.
“Narrowing their kill-box,” Matt replied. When he spotted four sets of glowing yellow eyes materialize out of the pale dark, he fired a few warning shots into the treeline.
The highly incendiary properties of the rounds skewered the bark, igniting parts of the forest with a new source of firelight that revealed the pack amassing, forming ragged ranks, their heads hung low to the ground, teeth bared and growling. There were at least twelve of them, and none had retreated from the loud ripple of gunfire. They all just stood there, statue-still, exhaling thick plumes of steam, eyes fixed on them, waiting patiently.
On the edge of panic, Matt slowly bent down and grabbed a large wooden branch out of the fire, holding it up like a makeshift signal flare, illuminating the biggest wolf among them.
The Alpha.
When Matt’s eyes locked with the animal, he immediately knew something was not right. Its eyes were black as night, with nothing in them except the light it was reflecting. Thin stalactites of frozen saliva hung from its muzzle, but the skin around its snout was shiny and chitinous like the fur had been peeled back to reveal the semitransparent shell of a crustacean. Needle-like teeth glistened under pale-white gums as it emitted a threatening snarl towards Matt. It was as if this creature somehow knew him. Its coat also appeared to be rotting off its hide, the flesh underneath it, riddled with gristly welts and sores.
This was no ordinary wolf.
Matt’s eyes glassed with the grim realization of what he was looking at.
This Alpha was infected with the Scourge. Yet, the others appeared not to be. That meant, these wolves were somehow being controlled, with their minds and instincts exploited, and their bodies driven to attack…
Matt only managed to utter a single word. “…Cromwell…”
Wham!
He was suddenly hit hard - blindsided as if a bus had just rammed into him. Fighting blackout, he was already face-down in the snow, suffocating as warm blood flooded into the back of his throat. His blaster was also gone, lost in the frenzy of shock and pain. The wolf that had just attacked from his rear wasted no time locking onto him, its teeth snapping in a rabid blur. Unarmed, Matt flailed and twisted, screaming as the wolf continued mauling him, its snout rooting between his shoulders, ripping into the reinforced fabric of his jacket, its massive head, thrashing madly.
At the same moment, Ally had to process what she was witnessing. There was a wolf on his back. Before she could take aim at it, she swung around and fired at another one that was about to leap onto her. The round grazed it. The wolf skittered back and howled with pain. She fired again and found her mark. The wolf yelped and went limp, plowing forward into the snow, sending a cloud of white haze billowing into the air.
As she pivoted back to Matt, redirecting her aggression, another one rushed her right flank. She swung around and fired, but the animal had already hit her square in the belly. They went sprawling across the snow, limbs splayed until they landed on the rim of the fire. Her blaster flew from her grip, her arms raking embers as she desperately scrambled to regain some distance. The wolf clumsily skidded off her, its hind legs grazing the fire, scalding it enough to yelp.
Back on her feet, with no time to recalibrate, or even think about searching for her felled weapon, Ally dropped into a combat stance and began circling the wolf, moving low to the ground, arms affixed in front of her, making her way towards Matt.
As Matt’s wolf kept savaging Matt, he roared with a superhuman effort and shoved himself upward, the animal’s full weight still attached to him. He staggered to one knee and spun his body around, the wolf clinging to him, nostrils flared, its hind legs paddling air as he desperately swatted, trying to get the damned thing off him. He could feel those powerful jaws working hard to purchase skin as he continued to writhe, fighting against the hundred-plus pounds stuck to his back. He managed to snatch a fistful of mangy fur, gouging and punching the feral thing with his other fist. Anything to loosen its grip. Then—
Wham!
He was hit again from behind, propelled forward as if shoved hard by some unseen entity. Somehow, he remained upright, despite the crushing weight of two wolves now hanging from him. When the other one got to work on his left side, Matt began thrashing left-and-right, gr
owling louder than they were. Finally, he twisted around far enough to grab the one clamped to his side. He started bashing it with his elbow, but the wolf only burrowed deeper. Matt screamed, bashing harder now, trying to crack its skull. That’s when he heard the dull click of its jaws locking. Fortunately, the jacket Matt was wearing was made from a nanofiber specifically designed to withstand Afflicted bites, but that did not make it any less painful. If a third wolf decided to attack, it would be over for him.
Ally’s wolf continued to slowly circle with her. “Get the away from him!” she screamed, moving laterally towards Matt. But the wolf saw what she was doing and mirrored her movement, cutting her off to allow its brethren to continue feasting. Trying to gauge its next move, she kept her eyes on its snow-crusted fur, bristling like thick blades of grass as it kept low to the ground. Without looking away, she could sense the Alpha was assessing everything from a safe distance. It had purposely sent in three foot-soldiers to test their defenses. This attack was merely a prelude, designed to wear them down before the final kill.
As she drew her tactical blade from the small of her back, the wolf in front of her flashed its teeth, ready to come at her again. In that split-second, she decided to switch to an offensive position, rushing headlong into the prone animal, thrusting her blade through its head with the speed of a cobra strike. The serrated blade slipped through the animal’s skull. It cried sharply then gave a short spasm before going limp. Ally dived on top of it and began driving her knife into its hide for good measure, over and over, her mouth frothing with fury.
Suddenly, she was jerked away from the dead animal and was sliding backward along the snow on her stomach. Two more wolves had a hold of each leg and were dragging her into the treeline. Legs bucking wildly, she spun around and slashed at one of the wolves, missing it by inches. The wolf released its grip and reared up, snapping at her face. “Get the fuck off me!” she screamed, twisting back onto her stomach to claw at the dying fire. She was able to grab the end of a thick, partially burning branch with her gloved hands. She then swung around and clouted the wolf across its muzzle. Wood shattered and embers exploded into its eyes. The animal yelped and reared back, dazed and confused, its balance faltered. Ally wasted no time. She lunged forward and drove her knife deep into its neck, twisting it before yanking it back out. The wolf flopped forward onto her, still thrashing and gnashing, its teeth and snout now sodden with blood. When she saw a vacant stare marble over its eyes, she heaved the dead beast off her.
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