Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  A low growl issued from the closest creature’s throat. That one scrambled along the floor as the other took a few steps and then sprung from both rear legs to clear the floor. Rico dropped and huddled into a defensive ball. Turning his shoulder so his jacket was protecting as much of him as possible, he willed a pair of long wooden blades to emerge from his gauntlet. As the first Half Breed latched on to his arm, Rico sank his blades into the second one’s belly and dragged them all the way through to its groin. That creature hit the floor amid a wet pile of its own spilled guts, thrashing its legs in spastic death throes.

  Rico bared his teeth as the Half Breed’s fangs punctured his sleeve. Before they could drill too far into his arm, he slammed his bladed gauntlet into the creature’s side like a boxer tenderizing his opponent’s ribs. After three or four hard shots, the werewolf went limp, and Rico shook free of its bite. Keeping that arm in front of him, Rico took a more stable stance and shifted his gauntlet into something that would give him better reach. Instead of several smaller blades, he melded the available wood into a single, longer blade curving up from the top of his hand like a slender tusk.

  Both remaining Half Breeds lowered their bodies to less than an inch above the floor and showed their fangs in a display that looked as if the front portion of their faces were being peeled away. Rico took aim with the Sig and squeezed off a few rounds that punched through one Half Breed’s eye. It snapped its head around and howled while scampering through a broken wall and into the neighboring store. Since the last creature was backing away from him, Rico decided to put himself between it and the girl.

  “How many of you are in here?” he asked.

  All he could hear apart from the low growl of the Half Breed was a trembling whimper from the room behind him. Without taking his eyes away from the werewolf, Rico snapped, “Answer me! How many of you are here?”

  “Just me,” she replied. “There were more but they’re….”

  “All right. Do you know a way out?”

  “We need to make those things go away. There’s too much here to just leave it behind.”

  “This place is done,” Rico said. “Those Half Breeds are already making a den in the next room and…what the hell?”

  Some of the Half Breeds had been killed and others wounded, so it wasn’t unprecedented for them to retreat and lick their wounds before taking another run at some fresh meat. Seeing one of them roll around in a pool of freshly spilled blood was something new.

  The Half Breed whined as it hit the floor and stretched out so the wounds Rico had given it pressed against the dirty tile. Its whines weren’t pained, however. Instead, they were more like contented panting that quickly drifted closer to obscene mating grunts. When it climbed to its feet again, the creature stretched out with its haunches raised and then shook the blood from its coat as though it had just come in from the rain. Although its wounds were still there, they were partially healed and dwindling by the second.

  “Get out of here,” Rico said. “NOW!” Without looking back, he charged forward to attack the Half Breed before it was fully healed.

  The werewolf reared back to pounce but wasn’t able to spring before Rico got to it. He drove the sharpened point of his gauntlet into the werewolf’s head. Even as he grabbed onto its snout to keep the thing from pulling away, Rico could hear the Half Breed groaning as though it was deriving perverse joy from the damage it was absorbing. Rico attempted to sink the weapon in deeper, but found it was wedged in place.

  He was only able to pull it out less than half an inch, which was far enough for him to see the viscous black crust that had formed between the gauntlet and the open wound it had inflicted. As he watched, blood that had coated the gauntlet was drawn into the Half Breed’s flesh, and the wound closed around the weapon like a toothless mouth.

  “You like that, huh?” Rico snarled. “Let’s see if this trips yer trigger.” With that, he focused all of his will into shifting the weapon even further.

  The Half Breed scraped its paws against the floor and bared its teeth while snarling in a way that reflected pure rage.

  “Now that’s what I like to hear!”

  Keeping his fingers wrapped around the creature’s snout without putting them in its mouth was a mix of practice and insanity. Most of the fighting Skinners did was up close by nature, but Rico’s weapon forced him to get his hands even dirtier. Rico pressed his hand against the Half Breed’s face while pulling his gauntlet from where it had been lodged. As the weapon slid out another inch, the Half Breed’s eyes rolled up into their sockets.

  When Rico’s weapon emerged from the werewolf’s head, it opened the entire top of its skull thanks to the twin hooks that he’d formed at the weapon’s tip. Thick chunks of brain matter were snagged on those hooks, emerging amid a spray of blood and bone chips. Once the weapon was free, Rico’s other hand sent the werewolf to the floor where it hit like a sack of bricks.

  He held the gauntlet close to his eyes while willing the hooks at the end of the blade to come together once more. “Daniels will wanna hear all about how I got THIS sample,” Rico said through a grin smeared in gore.

  “Who’s Daniels?”

  Turning toward the meek voice, Rico instinctively aimed the Sig Sauer at the skinny girl with the tattoos who’d asked the question. “I thought I told you to leave,” he said while holstering the pistol.

  “You did,” she replied while standing up. “Who’s Daniels? Is he your partner? Don’t Skinners work with partners?”

  “Usually, yeah. Standard procedures tend to go out the window after the apocalypse hits. Have you seen many of these things around?”

  She looked at the werewolf carcasses scattered throughout the room before staring at the hole in the wall. “There weren’t many of them. Just the packs that passed by outside. We were safe in here until a few days ago when those things started sleeping next door.”

  “Looks like you were safe for a while. I’m gonna have a look to see if you have any more new neighbors waiting to say howdy. I’d tell you to leave before you get hurt, but if you ain’t already gone, me repeating myself won’t help much.”

  “I can help,” the girl said. “We have weapons.”

  That stopped Rico in his tracks. The hole in the wall loomed in front of him like the mouth of a cave. Squinting to try and make out any signs of movement from the next room, Rico asked, “What’ve you got?”

  “Some shotguns.”

  “This was a tattoo parlor which means there should have been some alcohol in here for sterilizing needles and customers. You got any of that left?”

  “Plenty. We haven’t had many customers lately, and the people we did work on weren’t too worried about being clean. I guess that’s one of our standard procedures that went out the window.” Although she’d been relaxing a bit now that there were no Half Breeds in sight, the sound of throaty snarls from the next room put her right back on the defensive. She slid behind one of the barber chairs and crouched down to make it clear she wasn’t about to move from that spot anytime soon.

  “What’s your name?” Rico asked. When he didn’t get anything from her other than a few dazed blinks, he added, “Mine’s Rico.”

  After swallowing hard, the tattooed girl said, “Haley. I’m Haley.”

  “Haley? Kind of a cutesy name for a rocker chick, ain’t it? I don’t know about you, but I fuckin’ hate cutesy shit.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Me too. That’s why I started getting inked.”

  “Do me a favor and get some of that alcohol together along with some rags, matches and anything else that’ll burn. I’m gonna step next door, but neighbors like them need a bit more than please and thank-you before they get the hint they ain’t wanted.”

  Haley nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Good,” Rico said while approaching the hole in the wall. Pointing to the floor near the edge of the tattoo shop’s waiting area, he added, “When you get all that stuff together, just set it down here. Don’t
come over where I am…no matter what you hear. If I ain’t back in five minutes, toss as much alcohol around as you can and light a match.”

  “Ok.”

  The gauntlet had shrunk down to a smooth shell encasing Rico’s fist. He slipped it off and put it on his left hand before drawing the Sig with his right. It was good to be on his own again, but he wouldn’t have minded an IRD fire team at his back when he stepped through the broken wall and into the decimated interior of what had once been a diner. There was a counter on the far side of the room and two rows of booths on adjacent walls, all of which had been broken beyond hope of repair. The entire place looked as if it had been set upon by a rowdy bunch of fans from several years’ worth of speed metal concerts. Every inch of the walls that hadn’t been stripped down to the studs was covered in scratches and filth. Judging by the smell, Rico knew only some of that filth was dirt. Tables and chairs had not only been overturned but were pulled apart and piled into heaps that the Half Breeds were using as beds. The one that had been shot through the eye lay there, curled into a ball and licking its forepaws.

  Rico moved forward cautiously with Sig Sauer held at the ready. There were no other Half Breeds in that den. The dull burn from his scars assured him of that much. The faint itch beneath the scars told him something else. When he got close enough, he could see the werewolf wasn’t licking its paws but was instead slopping its tongue along a length of bone protruding from flayed skin that was covered in matted hair. The creature looked up at him with one eye that was clouded by feral rage and another that was already partially reformed into a clean, glassy orb.

  The Half Breed started to whine like the wounded animal it was. However, the longer it cried out, the more its voice grew stronger and hungrier. Rico responded with a voice of his own, but allowed his gun to talk for him. The Sig barked several times, bucking against his palm to spit its rounds into the Half Breed at close range. He kept firing while walking forward. Although he wasn’t as well-versed in using the gauntlet in his left hand, he was more than able to form a row of short, edged knuckles along the top of the weapon like small teeth growing from its surface. As soon as he was close to the creature, he started pounding his left fist into its face. Bones snapped and were driven into softer matter below as Rico destroyed the portion of its head that he’d already shattered with gunfire. Before turning the wounded animal’s skull into paste, he reined himself in and took a few breaths.

  The Half Breed was dead. No matter how many evolutions they went through, there was no mistaking the shuddering, grateful breaths marking the end of their agonizing existence. Rico waited for the thing to become still and then lifted what was left of its head up so he could get a closer look.

  “This is new,” he said as he stared at the lower jaw that now hung loosely from the lower portion of its face. He tucked the Sig back into its holster under his arm so he could use both hands to hold the creature’s head and tilt it back and forth. At certain angles, he could see spots at the tips of its fangs that looked to have been rotted away. “Did you live long enough to get cavities?”

  Still gripping one of the werewolf’s ears in his left hand, Rico dug into a pocket for a small flashlight. The narrow beam of light was more of a hindrance at first, but when he pointed it down into the Half Breed’s throat instead of right where he wanted to look, the glare became less of a problem. Most of the fangs toward the front of the Half Breed’s mouth were chipped and cracked open at the tips. The longest ones were split the widest, and some of the blood that had been smeared onto them was being soaked up into the fangs through the cracks.

  “Daniels is gonna want to get a look at this,” Rico said as he flipped the flashlight around so he could use it to knock out a few of the teeth. Pausing, he grunted, “Eh, to hell with it. More is always better.” He then let go of the Half Breed’s ear so he could form one single bladed edge along the side of his gantlet that effectively turned his hand into a hacksaw.

  After he’d gotten what he was after, Rico took his souvenir back into the tattoo shop where some bottles of isopropyl alcohol and a few lighters were waiting next to a pile of black and gray t-shirts. Rico picked up one of the shirts and held it so he could get a look at the design on the front. The phrase “Never Too Tatted” was scrawled in jagged lettering above a mascot that could have been perfectly at home on the cover of any Iron Maiden album. The endearingly gruesome character grinned while several oversized needles drilled into its arms, chest and legs.

  “Niiiice,” Rico said as he found two of the largest shirts. One of them was used to wrap up the grisly cargo he’d brought from next door, and the other was draped over his shoulder. The rest of the shirts were doused in alcohol and tossed through the hole in the wall.

  After soaking another t-shirt, Rico lit it and threw the flaming rag on top of the rest. He stayed just long enough to watch the flames spread and then left through the front door. Haley was outside, standing amid a pile of old gym bags with a shotgun propped over one shoulder.

  “Might wanna get farther away from here,” Rico warned.

  “Are there more of those things around?” she asked while bringing the shotgun down into a two-handed grip.

  “I don’t think so, but the smell of that smoke will be enough to put a skunk onto its ass. Nice t-shirts by the way.”

  When he started walking through the parking lot, Haley placed the shotgun on top of one of the bags, scooped them up and hurried to follow. “What’s that?” she asked while pointing at the bundle wrapped in a t-shirt that hung from Rico’s hand.

  “You don’t wanna know,” he told her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to find a phone that works. You know where I should start looking?”

  “There’s one back there,” she told him.

  Rico stopped and turned to face the strip mall. Flames could be seen behind the shattered windows of the diner to create a flickering display inside. It was his experience that a lot more fuel was needed to burn a Half Breed den to the ground. Most of the time, they were located inside caves or pits in the dirt which weren’t exactly fire hazards. Now that Half Breeds also had their choice of buildings, they tended to cover the floors and walls with anything ranging from dirt and mud to blood and excrement. Although those didn’t burn very easily either, the smoke created by any good-sized blaze would suffocate a werewolf just like it would a human. At the first sign of a fire in their home, Half Breeds tended to bolt and find somewhere else to lay their heads. Since none had emerged from the diner yet, Rico could assume the place was clear.

  “Guess I should have asked about the phone before I torched the place,” he said.

  “No,” Haley quickly told him. “Not there. There!” She pointed to one of the other stores in the strip mall; the one at the end on the opposite side of the tattoo shop.

  Rico couldn’t see much apart from a few narrow doors and some windows that were completely blocked by faded paper and cardboard. The only legible sign to be found was a little square advertising hours of operation from the days when the place used to be open for business. “You sure there’s a phone in there?” he asked.

  “Yes. We used it all the time. Not that there was a lot of people to call, but the phone still worked. The guy who ran that place kept everything locked up real tight, even before the packs started running through here.”

  Now that she was stringing more words together, Rico could detect a drawl in her voice that wasn’t as syrupy as a Georgia accent and less twangy than one from Texas. It was as distinctly West Virginian as the tree-covered mountains to the east. “I’ll give it a look.” He started walking back toward the strip mall when he heard her once more.

  “You hungry?”

  “Just about every exit on the highway has a sign for Biscuit World. I don’t suppose any of those are still up and running?”

  “No,” she replied. “But I can scrape up something.”

  “Don’t bother. Just go find somewhere safe for the
night.”

  “But…there ain’t anyone left. I’d just be fending for myself.”

  “Join the club,” Rico grunted.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Iowa

  Fort Dodge was like many other towns across the country or around the globe. A few years ago, it had been home to some and was able to stand on its own well enough to earn its space on the map. When the Full Bloods howled loudly enough to be heard across the world and the packs started to run, it became a shell of what it once was. Mailboxes, bike racks, light posts, street signs and anything else left in the open were torn down or swept away by rampaging beasts. Such things weren’t exactly crucial to survival, but they gave a place its identity and made it a functioning part of the larger world.

  Without names, the streets were just paths of pitted cement.

  In a short amount of time, the town looked like an incomplete project that was slapped together by a child who only wanted to knock it down.

  Next to be hit were the larger structures. Buildings were scratched, windows shattered, bridges scraped down to their support beams, towers clawed until layer after layer was peeled away. But Fort Dodge didn’t have much by way of towers. It was a small town filled with survivors hardened by the coming of the unthinkable. Now, years after the world had been thrown to the wolves, this town would be hit once again.

  As the sun was on its way down, bathing thick layers of clouds in a burning light, a flurry of paws slapped against the street. Claws sparked against specially treated sheet metal that had been laid down for that specific purpose. Seconds later, the sentries watching for those sparks from nearby rooftops activated sirens that had previously been used to warn of approaching tornados. The low wail rose and fell in a tone that was repeated and echoed throughout town. It wasn’t long before the werewolves surging in from the desolate surrounding land added their voices to the mix in a rising and falling howl as if to mock the humans.