He registered the fact that the blade wasn’t causing any sort of burning or sizzling on the man’s neck. He wasn’t a werewolf. But then, just what was he?
A thin line of blood appeared on Havlav’s neck, parting the fat like a slab of bacon. If Franco sliced in one direction or the other, or bore down, the skin—and more—would part under the almost supernaturally sharp blade.
“You wanted to kill me?”
“No!” Havlav chanced speaking, his eyes filled with terror. “I wanted to warn you! There are others on board who will seek to kill you and the priest. You must believe me.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. I have heard talk. Whispers. The crew, sometimes we hear things.”
“Then you have heard enough to tell me.”
“No, no. I do not, but I can, maybe, listen more…” His voice faded as he waited for Franco to decide his fate.
Franco stared into the older man’s eyes—and deep into his soul, he thought. Havlav was a thug and a borderline criminal…but at this moment Franco sensed he was truthful.
“Very well,” he said. “I will need your help.” He thought nothing of enlisting someone even against his will. “Otherwise I can just kill you and throw you overboard.” He was clearly not exaggerating.
Havlav nodded furiously. “I can help…”
“I need two lengths of chain. The heaviest you can still carry.”
“Chains?”
“Bring them to my cabin an hour from now.”
“What—why?”
“Are there guards on deck at night?”
“Guards?” Havlav seemed to be trying to define the term.
“Armed guards? Patrolling?”
“Ah,” Havlav said, light shining in his eyes. Maybe it was the dagger’s reflection. Franco was still holding it in the vicinity of his neck. “No, no guards, but there is duty officer or mate on bridge always. He may be able to see movement…”
“But he’s not looking for it?”
Havlav said, “No, he will be looking to get warm and comfortable. He might scan the surface for icebergs, but this far south they are small.”
Franco leaned on the dagger’s blade once more and nicked Havlav’s skin. “Bring the chains. One hour.” He gave the cabin number and stalked away, leaving Havlav shivering.
Chapter Thirteen
Lupo
His head still ached and throbbed, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
Despite the multitude of pins pricking his eyeballs and the blades slicing into them, and the pressure in his eye sockets, which were probably at least bruised if not cracked or outright broken, he knew he had opened his lids. He knew he was looking out at the ruined back wall of his cabin and the deck—now probably debris-strewn—that served as the cabin’s rear porch. The fire was still raging, though it didn’t seem to be spreading as fast now—thankfully, because he still hadn’t been able to move from where he’d been tossed like the proverbial rag doll.
He knew he was looking at it, but couldn’t see it.
Have to try and put out that fire before it spreads. Propane tank too close.
Fuck me, this could turn into a fucking forest fire.
Just one spark…
He tried speaking to himself internally in a calm voice. He wasn’t sure why he also couldn’t move his leg, or his left arm, really, but they’d been closer to the blast.
C4? Thermite? Plain old dynamite?
He was sure it wasn’t a drone strike. He knew very well now how those fucking drones sounded as they approached, and he knew the growly whoosh the Reaper missiles made before they hit their target, and he hadn’t heard that. He was sure he’d heard some geese overhead, just before the blast, barking like dogs in the sky. Unless some new kind of drone imitated that sound, there was no reason to think he’d been attacked by geese or goose-drones.
No, it was a plain old contact bomb. When the door opened…
When the door opened some kind of fuckin’ bomb full of silver shrapnel just about wiped me off the face of the earth.
But it hadn’t.
A mistake? A bad bomb-maker? Bad materials?
It didn’t matter. Lupo groaned again as the thoughts flashed through his brain. In his mind he could see the damn door, but the sight was dredged up from his memory. He was facing the far side of the porch, so he should have seen that. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see.
No matter what else he felt, the liquid fire still in his veins, the fact that his eyes weren’t working was somehow more terrifying to him.
And he couldn’t quite move. Something was keeping him down on the ground—something that wasn’t working. The multi-faceted pain had spread across all his nerve endings, some from the blast itself, some from the silver debris that had hit him, and—now, finally—from his own scorched skin.
Half his face was on fire!
Jesus Christ, my face…
It couldn’t really be the case, but it felt that way. If he’d laid his head down sideways on a grill he figured it would have felt this way and he could imagine his skin, charred and blackened and flaking off or melting…
He imagined all that, but he still couldn’t see it.
He knew one way to help fix his broken body, the one way he had been granted. All he had to do was force a change and, once in his wolf shape, he would immediately begin to heal. Since the silver shrapnel hadn’t killed him outright, then he knew from experience—hell, Heather’s experience, too—that it was possible to heal from just about whatever damage had been done.
Plus when they’d taken down Wolfpaw the first time, some of the stolen material the journalist Wineacre had given Heather had led him to believe that somehow he might have benefited from a stronger strain of the werewolf gene. It had been part of the reason he’d shown up on Wolfpaw’s radar in the first place. Perhaps the shaman Joseph Badger’s work, however esoteric it might have been, had tapped into the lycanthrope strain first developed in those Nazi labs. Perhaps that was why Nick Lupo was a stronger werewolf than average, somewhat resistant to the painful influence of silver. He’d managed to shoot handguns loaded with silver slugs and heal from the damage. Now he didn’t think others could do that.
All this flashed through Lupo’s mind in seconds, but it was useless to him since the silver still coursed through his veins, scorching him from the inside out. It was small comfort to know he could handle it better than another creature…the pain was still excruciating and he could feel convulsions starting to develop. To shake him.
He was alternating from extreme heat, like a spiking fever, which made sense, to some sort of super chill as if his blood was turning to ice in the scorched veins and making his extremities tingle as if about to succumb to frostbite.
The shaking surprised him, like a symptom of Parkinson’s but somehow more frightening because its origin was a complete mystery.
The nearby flames seemed to be licking up the remaining portion of the cabin’s back wall, but it was almost a silent fire and it was the crackling of the combustibles themselves that gave its presence away. That and the heat that still radiated outward.
He was still aware that the flames could reach him if he didn’t try something soon.
Lupo half-dragged himself away from the fire and promptly rolled off the deck-cum-porch, bouncing down the sharp-edged three steps and landing on the weedy gravel with a grunt. And a new contusion on his face where the edge of a step or two left a furrow on his cheek and barely missed breaking his jaw.
Fuck!
Now he hurt even more, although this pain was more normal and manageable. He could understand the kind of pain that would end up leaving bumps and bruises. His problem was the silver and what it was doing to him, making his insides scream. He could still feel the fire’s heat and he rolled farther away, barely able to propel himself given that he was still somewhat paralyzed on one side.
Okay, now he sensed he was far enough removed from the flames.
H
e tried to gather himself and managed to somehow push himself onto all fours, even though because of his paralysis his balance was off and felt as though he would tip over sideways any second. He hung his head like a dog in pain.
He had to do what he always did to cause the change and bring the Creature inside him, his wolf, to the fore. They would both ride in the wolf’s head, so to speak, and though he couldn’t communicate with the Creature directly, he had learned to direct the wolf’s behavior more often than not, although sometimes the wolf seemed to prefer the Creature’s orders over Lupo’s.
With some difficulty he forced himself to focus, then he began to visualize himself as the wolf.
Normally this process would mysteriously—he would have said magically—resolve itself into a sudden, tingling change as his DNA realigned and he would hit the ground running on four paws, his body shifted into that of an oversized black wolf.
He visualized, squeezing his sightless eyes as he attempted to force his change in the only way he knew how. He visualized, but the image he managed to put together was blurred and hazy, and he did not feel the usual tingle and sexual arousal that paralleled the required DNA realignment…
Jesus. What the fuck?
He tried again, focusing harder in order to visualize the change. Sweat broke out of his pores and streamed down his forehead and into his useless eyes, burning like acid until he swore again and lay his head on the gravel so he could scratch himself. The burned patches on the skin of his face shrieked and so did he, but the sweat still burned and the image of the wolf still wouldn’t come, no matter how hard he tried to conjure it.
Goddamn it, it’s not working.
This had never happened to him.
But then, he’d never been blown up before. He had come close recently, when a secret Wolfpaw lab near Minocqua had been blown just as he and DiSanto were trying to negotiate the fence around it, but they’d been far enough from the blockhouse that the blast hadn’t hurt them besides tossing them to the ground. And there hadn’t been any special shrapnel…that was a difference.
Was it the silver in his system?
But no, he’d seen Heather manage to change when grievously wounded by silver, and she’d begun healing immediately, even if at a slower rate due to the severity of her wounds. But Heather was amazingly resilient—maybe she was also a beneficiary of the Nazi gene? Who had bitten her? Wasn’t it that Wolfpaw weasel they called Tef? Had he been a descendant of someone who’d undergone the wartime experiments conducted by the Nazi doctor who had worked for some general named VonStumpfahren?
If it wasn’t the silver, and if the explosion itself hadn’t yet killed him, then why was Lupo unable to shift into his wolf body?
Then it came to him, a jab almost as excruciating as the many sharp pains from which he was already suffering.
It had to be because he was blind.
Fuck, I’m blind.
And the one thing I need to do to start healing is the one thing I can’t do…
Shooter
He was still in the throes of his flashback, the narcotic cocktail roaring through his system but not diminishing the effects of the visions or the fever. The trashed motel room came in and out, and when it faded away…
He was there again, in the charnel house where his friends had been murdered by creatures that could not be. Monsters that could not exist in a God-fearing world.
He was there again, as if he had never left.
The grenades exploded, ripping and tearing apart the corpses of his squad, but the half-deaf Shooter was shocked to realize moments later that he was still untouched, as if selected by God himself. Covered in blood, offal, and bits of bone and brains, he stumbled to his feet and became a walking corpse. His rifle still in the steel-like grip of hands he couldn’t feel, he made his way through the slaughterhouse to the far wall, where another, smaller doorway led to a narrow hallway staircase. His nose by now closed to the stench of violent death, he ducked then tripped and rolled down the uneven steps until he lay near a rear doorway.
Behind him, he heard the crash of ordnance piercing the walls, followed by multiple explosions.
RPGs.
He knew without a doubt that the Wolfpaw murderers were obliterating the evidence, which now would likely resemble an enemy RPG attack on an unsuspecting squad of Marines. No one would test the fragmented corpses. The rocket-propelled incendiary grenades would turn his dead friends into liquefied hamburger.
He crashed through the doorway and rolled into another narrow alley, this one narrower and apparently between buildings. The sounds of screaming and gunfire behind him led him to run stumbling in the other direction, taking a jagged right as soon as he could and finding another narrow corridor between walled courtyards. An abandoned neighborhood, most likely. Now dragging his heavy rifle after him, he continued to take alternating lefts and rights in order to escape the marauding mercenaries…
And whatever they were.
He knew what he had seen, what had chased and almost killed him. Hell, almost eaten him.
Still he refused to contemplate the nature of what he had witnessed, but deep inside a psychosis was taking root, though he was unaware of it.
He thought he heard snarling behind him and gathered his strength to run faster despite the broiling sun overhead, despite his dazed condition, and despite the heavy equipment he had never had the chance to drop.
Were the monstrous canines or wolves still giving chase, or had he escaped their notice after the massacre of his squad.
Lockett was dead, Karicke was dead, they were all dead.
All dead. No, all murdered.
They’d been murdered by those Wolfpaw monsters, he knew that, but who would believe him?
Who the fuck would believe him?
And how many more of the monsters existed?
Where they everywhere, all around him? Was every black uniform one of them?
He didn’t realize it then, but his right eye had started to twitch.
And, just like that, his career as a sniper was over.
But his career in insanity had just begun, and it continued to worsen.
The psychological discharge came about six months later, when he could no longer function as a Marine, let alone a Marine sniper. They went easy on him, considering, choosing not to blame him for the death of his squadmates. But the military meat grinder turned and deposited him into the clutches of a Veterans’ Administration hospital that was overwhelmed with battle scars, both actual and virtual, and his own had worsened so much that one by one his advocates folded up their tents and apologetically left him behind.
And by the time the next two years passed, Shooter had begun to see the masks of humanity slip—the monsters inside showed themselves to him on the sidewalks, in the stores, in parks, in the places where he was hired only to be fired within days. And on public transportation…they were all over the country’s trains and buses. He couldn’t afford to fly, not on his meager benefits, but he bet even planes overhead were filled with the filthy monsters.
Someday he would get to them. But for now, his mission had changed. It had become all about ridding public transportation of the bloodthirsty creatures, and he had become an expert at spotting them no matter what “normal” human mask they might be wearing—he could always see behind the grotesque masks to the real features behind the façade.
His first bus shooting liberated humans who didn’t know enough to be grateful. They’d screamed and screamed, and he had been forced to convince them to keep quiet—and when they’d disobeyed he realized that the monsters even controlled the innocent people, who were therefore no longer innocent.
He began with the very next bus shooting to spare no one, to deal out death to monsters and potential victims alike. He started to see it as a cleansing—but he was unsure whom he cleansed more: the monsters, the victims, or himself.
And he moved from city to city, rooting out the monsters as they rode the city and county buses, killin
g them and anyone near them indiscriminately. After all, he knew that surviving the bite of one of them brought you back as a monster yourself—and he had made contingency plans should he suffer a bite.
He killed again, and again, and again.
The werewolves were everywhere.
Interlude
Berlin Underground
The Führer Bunker, April 1945
Three hours had passed, and by then VonStumpfahren had to find his own way into the bunker’s secret doorway in the garden of the old Reich Chancellery and down the concrete-encased staircase. The beautiful secretary was gone, replaced by an old man in an ill-fitting uniform who showed him into the same waiting room he had recently used. By now several cracks had appeared in the ceiling and the sound of shelling didn’t seem quite so muffled, or perhaps it was his imagination.
He gave the military salute as he entered, and the three men who awaited him stood stiffly at attention and returned it.
“You are to come with me, Herr Untersturmführer,” he said to the young second lieutenant with the special collar flashes. To the other two, his armed escort: “You are to wait for my orders.” The two noncommissioned officers clutched their black scorpion-shaped MP-40 machine pistols with the paratrooper stocks folded.
All three men clicked their heels. He noted that their boots were no longer shiny, and their uniforms had been patched. The shortages had hit everyone, and he felt the bittersweet sting of nostalgia for the days when the pageantry had seemed eternal.
He followed the old man into the inner sanctum, and the second lieutenant followed him without question. Inside the empty office with the huge desk, he ordered the officer (whose name was Beutner or something like that) to disrobe. While the young man did, VonStumpfahren clicked open his briefcase and removed a special set of four manacles connected by short chains.
If Untersturmführer Beutner was surprised, he did not show it. He stood naked now, his leanly muscled physique still a tribute to the Aryan ideal, his penis flaccid but classically shaped and more than acceptable, VonStumpfahren noted.
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