by Rob Preece
Could she hope to explain, to persuade Mansfield that she was fighting on the wrong side of the biggest battle of the century? Danielle didn't think so, but talking was better than getting killed. Every second she gained meant that the boys were a step closer to safety.
"I thought my step-father killed my mother because he was a vampire. But it wasn't the vampire, it was the man who was evil. When I lived in the zone, I learned that they were just people, some good, some bad. Same as normals. The only thing is, I decided I wanted to be one of the good ones."
"Damn. That Were seduced you, didn't he."
Danielle tried to suppress the smile. It hadn't been Carl who'd done the seduction. She had wanted it, insisted on it.
She obviously didn't suppress it enough for Mansfield.
"Perversion."
The Sergeant launched herself at Danielle, her arms outstretched in a completely inartistic attack.
Danielle's arms went automatically into one of Carl's circular blocks, one hand pushing Mansfield's attack off and the other, morphing from block to attack, slamming a palm thrust into the older woman's ribs.
Mansfield blinked out of the blur and glared at Danielle, surprise written over her face.
Danielle blurred and followed up, hammering elbows, fists, and chops into the Sergeant until the older woman collapsed.
"Guess you learned something after all,” Mansfield said. She leaned against a tree, her fight, at least temporarily, gone. “Too late, though. Listen."
The turbine roar of warder black helicopters shook the sky.
Danielle took off running.
She angled away from the path that Simon and Fred would have taken, hoping that the warders would be confused by multiple infrared signals.
She was only a couple of miles away from the zone. Close, but way too far. Even in blur, it would take precious minutes to cover the distance. And blur would make her stand out like an infrared beacon to the warders manning the huge choppers that circled overhead.
Although her instincts told her to run, to cover whatever distance she could, she slowed to a deliberate pace, trying to send the message that she was a natural inhabitant. A deer, maybe, or a feral dog, or even one of the wild pigs that had once ranged only in east Texas but that now covered greater territory as the rains increased and as humans withdrew more tightly into their cities.
She splashed through a creek, climbed the limestone cliff on the other side, and looked down into the zone.
It was so close, she could almost touch it.
In the distance, she caught sight of two figures nearing thick strands of barbed wire. She hoped it was Simon and Fred, although it was too far to see.
Three hulking gunships, machineguns jutting from their ugly frames, floated between herself and the questionable safety of the zone.
As she watched, one of them veered from the circular pattern the others followed and headed directly for her.
Danielle scrambled back down the stream bank in a shower of limestone.
The warm water circled around her legs. It wasn't too deep. While Texas was wet relative to what it had been before the return of magic, it still lacked the huge rivers and lakes of most other states. It was enough, though. When she lay down, it was deep enough to fully submerge her.
She let herself float with the current, away from searching helicopters. Away from the zone as well, but there wasn't a lot she could do about that. With a great deal of luck, the warm water would distort her infrared signature, make her invisible to the technologies that the warders would throw against her.
* * * *
Danielle had floated for miles during the night, sometimes paddling along, occasionally holding her breath and plunging to the bottom of the stream as warder choppers circled overhead. Once in a while, the water shallowed and she'd had to walk. Only once, the stream crashed over a fall, taking her with it. She'd barely missed bashing her brains out on that one, but she'd survived with nothing worse than a few abrasions.
With daybreak, she left the stream.
She was out in the country now. Pine forest encroached on the tall-grass prairies of central Texas and provided cover.
She was desperately hungry, but she knew better than to try to raid one of the few farmhouses that formed the outposts of humanity's losing battle against the growth of chaos.
Warder training concentrated on staying alive when vampires or trolls tried to kill you. Wilderness survival wasn't even on the curriculum. So, while Danielle knew that it was safe to eat some bugs and plants, she didn't have a clue which ones.
Instead, she sucked it up, promising herself that she would get Fred to whip up something special when she made it back to the zone, and reminding herself that she needed to live long enough to get it.
She stayed off the roads, cutting across country and using trails that might have been left by neighborhood children, by game, or even by long-vanished Texas Indians, wiped out by the encroachments of the Anglo settlers.
Occasional abandoned farmhouses stood out like rotting teeth. Not all of this was the result of the return and global warming, of course. Increased farming efficiency and genetically modified crops had reduced the world's need for farmland. Still, Danielle couldn't help thinking about the elves who had tried to flee the Dallas zone. This was the kind of country they would have dreamed of finding, its pine forests providing sanctuary and its black soil rich harvests. Instead, the elves lay rotting outside the zone and the abandoned farms continued to disintegrate back into wilderness.
She left the streambed behind her, reasoning that the warders would recognize that she had used it for escape and would eventually send trackers along its length.
It took her only a couple of hours to retrace the miles that the creek had carried her during the night.
She holed up in an abandoned Washateria, the carcasses of washing machines and dryers still hanging from the walls.
The concrete floor provided a trace of cool in the hot day.
She let herself drift to a halfway state between full wakefulness and sleep, recharging her energy while she waited for the night and for her chance to return to the zone.
Two hours later, she heard the dogs.
Los Angeles warders didn't use dogs. They relied on technology, on trained warder senses, and on outsmarting their targets. But a warder can be transferred anywhere. The Academy had given Danielle a rudimentary knowledge of the use of hounds in tracking. She knew how terribly effective they could be.
The dogs eliminated the option of waiting for night. She dragged herself to her feet and started across no-man's land.
She couldn't move quickly. Helicopters patrolled in the distance, but if they spotted a running figure, they could be overhead in seconds.
The dogs and their keepers weren't constrained by any such limitations. Their baying sounded continually closer.
She took off her shirt, ripped off the sleeves, and fashioned them into a makeshift sling before putting the rags of the shirt back on. As she jogged, she kept her eyes open for smooth rocks, stuffing a small supply into her pockets.
Against assault rifles and heavy machine guns, a sling and a few rocks weren't much, but they were better than trying to fight the dogs empty-handed. And it definitely looked like she was in for a fight—almost certainly her last.
Chapter 15
Carl listened to the two men. He'd been suspicious at first. Normals slum in the zone—they didn't migrate there. But these two sounded more and more convincing. Or rather, they sounded like Danielle had convinced them.
After she had been gone for a few days, he'd forced himself to consider the possibility that he'd been wrong—that Danielle had been playing him for a fool or had realized that her allegiance was with her fellow warders rather than with the magical. But if he could believe the story that Simon and Fred offered, Danielle was out there, trying to make her way back to the zone. Back to him.
"These two are criminals,” Mike the Vampire reminded him. “The
y'd lie about their mother for a beer. The warders are using them and you're the target."
"Danielle trusted us,” Simon shook his head at Mike's interruption. “If she'd left us, she could have gone on ahead and gotten through. Instead, she stayed and let us escape."
It was exactly the kind of thing Danielle would do.
But Carl wouldn't let her get away with being a sacrifice. If Danielle were out there in trouble, he'd share it with her. There was no other answer.
Carl considered taking out an armed party. He dropped the idea almost at once. The Tigers had been armed and it hadn't helped them. Their numbers had only made them easier to spot.
"I'll go,” Mike offered. “It's hard to kill a vampire."
Carl shook his head. “You've got work to do here."
He had work in the zone as well. They had put the week that Danielle had bought them to good use, building up defenses, organizing the mobs to a shared purpose, but they were a long way from really pulling together.
Still, the knowledge that Danielle was close changed his priorities.
"The warder was kicking her butt,” Fred told him. “It's probably too late to help her."
Carl only nodded. What Fred said made sense, but the warder helicopters were still circling, obviously looking for something. Danielle was the most likely something out there.
A part of him knew beyond mere logic that Danielle was still alive, still trying to get back.
He drove Danielle's little electrical car toward the southern zone border and abandoned it there, shifting to Were form before making his move.
He considered waiting until nightfall. With his heavy fur, a wolf made an indistinct infrared image. But the distant sound of hunting hounds persuaded him that he didn't have the time.
Danielle needed him now.
He hunkered low, following an abandoned storm drain out of the zone past the first line of warder defense.
He emerged into a thicket of hackberry trees and rusty barbed wire, pushed his way through, and sniffed for any sign of warder patrols.
His sensitive nose picked up only distant hints of humans, weapons, and dogs.
The wolf inside him hated dogs. Part of the instinctive makeup of every wolf sees dogs as evil cousins—beings who willfully abandoned freedom to serve human masters. But servility didn't make them safe. Both the human and wolf sides of his personality knew that dogs, especially packs of trained dogs, could be fearsome opponents.
He would deal with them when he had to. First, though, he had to find Danielle.
The roar of helicopter blades slicing the late afternoon air battled with the high-pitched baying of hounds that had caught the scent of prey and were moving in for the kill.
If he went charging about looking for Danielle, Carl would just become a target himself.
But doing nothing was no option.
He headed for the loudest of the dog packs hoping that he would run into Danielle before he ran into the dogs.
He did his best to project general dogginess to any warders who might be looking down.
Whether it was Danielle's distraction or some other reason, he didn't run into any of the warder patrols that kept a watch on the zone and prevented escapes. To his Were senses, the traps, mines, and sensors were obvious and avoidable.
Which was lucky, because from the sharp baying of the hounds, Danielle didn't have much time left.
He forgot about stealth, ignoring a wealth of wolf instinct, and sprinted.
Helicopters swooped nearby, but they ignored him. Like Carl, they seemed intent on the drama between the hunting dogs and the hunted woman.
Running at wolf speed, it took only minutes to cross the miles that separated him from the hunting dogs.
He arrived just as one of the baying hounds changed pitch, his bark morphing into a surprised squeal of pain.
He skidded to a stop in the shadow of an abandoned barn. Both his human and wolf sides concurred on the need to survey the scene, to plan a way to help his packmate.
Danielle ran into sight.
She looked stunning.
Sweat glued the remains of a man-styled shirt to her body like cellophane. Her black pants were torn, exposing long, tanned and muscular legs. Legs a man could lose himself in.
Carl felt himself transforming to human form at the sight and ruthlessly suppressed the shift. He needed to protect his mate, not join her in death.
Danielle climbed to the hood of a rusting pickup truck, swung her sling, and loosed.
The dogs were getting wise to her weapon. The on she'd aimed at swerved and her shot missed.
But that swerve created a momentary break in the circle of dogs surrounding her. She took advantage of the apparent opening, darting from the truck where she'd taken temporary refuge and heading toward the zone.
The dogs might not like the sling or the rocks Danielle shied at them, but they weren't cowards.
They rushed after her.
Danielle had already picked her next stand, a low ridge near an abandoned barn. She ran recklessly toward it, blurring one more time to put all of her flagging energy into speed.
The bloodhounds in the pack gave voice. For the most part, though, this was a hunting party. Rottweilers, Doberman Pinchers, and a Chow took the lead. Only occasional snicks of sound warned her how close they really were.
Danielle's blur let her move faster than any normal human. But dogs are faster than humans and she was flagging. Her efforts wouldn't be enough. The animals would hamstring her, knock her to the ground, and hold her until their human masters arrived.
Another canine broke from the barn almost directly in front of her.
Danielle forced down her despair. She would die fighting.
To her surprise, the animal caught the largest dog, a Rottweiler, in the flank, knocking the animal down and out, then turned to snarl at the others.
It wasn't a dog. It was a wolf. What was Carl doing here?
The dogs stopped abruptly, not unnerved by Carl's attack so much as cautious. They'd been caught by surprise once and didn't want more of the same.
Danielle scrambled the rest of the way to the rise and turned to face them.
Seeing no other wolves, the pack circled around, rushing in to snap at him, and retreating from Carl when he countered.
"I'll keep them distracted,” he shouted. His voice came out mostly as a hoarse bark but Danielle had spent time with him and knew what he'd be saying. “Get away while you can."
As if.
A Doberman got too close to Carl and he sank his teeth into the animal's throat and shook, then dropped it when three other dogs charged.
They were hunting well as a pack, distracting him, not letting him finish them off piecemeal.
Two of them mistimed their circling and got too close together. He rushed them, making them pay for their mistake.
Again, though, the other animals charged, forcing him to back away and bare his teeth at them, and preventing him from finishing either of the animals off.
Against a pack of twenty, with more coming soon, Carl was one dead wolf.
* * * *
Danielle took aim and let a rock fly.
Alone against the dogs, her sling had been only marginally effective. Dogs were smart. Once they'd figured out what a sling can do, they learned to avoid the shot. She'd been forced to feint, to waste time setting up targets. And the dogs were happy to help her waste time. Their humans were coming. They needed only to delay her.
With Carl distracting the dogs, her sling became a deadly threat. The animals couldn't dodge when a stone flew hard and straight into their flanks or faces.
She landed four consecutive hits before the animals broke away, fleeing into the brush and out of range of her shots.
"Move it, Carl. I'm hungry,” she shouted.
The wolf loped over to her. Blood marred his perfect fur.
"I told you to head for the zone,” he growled. “We wasted too much time."
"So stop was
ting more,” she answered. “Come on."
She took the lead while Carl trailed behind guarding against the dog pack.
The dogs regrouped and gave voice, but they had learned their lesson. Against Danielle or Carl alone, the dogs would attack, confident of victory. When she and Carl hunted as a team, they could force the dogs to hold their distance and wait for the arrival of their masters.
If the warders had been on foot, they would have gotten away then. Carl could move faster than any normal human, and Danielle was getting the knack of Mansfield's trick, quickly switching from blur to normal modes. This allowed her incredibly fast sprints across open land without completely depleting her sadly low energy stores.
But the warders weren't limited to running. Black helicopters circled overhead. Turbine engines propelled armored personnel carriers through the rough bush. The warders were still a ways away, but they were closing fast.
"Any ideas?” she asked.
The wolf grunted. “You were supposed to head for town."
"I wasn't going to leave you out here alone, Carl."
"Too bad you aren't Were,” he told her. “We might blend in with the dogs."
She'd never thought of being normal as a handicap before. But being magical would solve a lot of problems. She hadn't let herself think about anything long-term with Carl, but what would they do if they somehow survived the current disaster? They hunted well together, but did a hunting team form the basis for anything permanent, anything human? Could a normal and a Were have a chance together?
She forced herself to consider Carl's words. He was right. They needed to find a way to blend in. Since she couldn't turn wolf, the answer had to be to blend in with the humans, to become a warder again, at least for a little while.
She turned, heading at right angles to the zone.
"Backtracking won't work,” Carl argued, speaking as clearly as he could through his wolf vocal cords. “The dogs will spot us."
She nodded grimly. “Unless you have a plan of your own, why don't you play along with mine?"
"Fair enough.” He ranged ahead, drove away the pair of dogs who had decided to test whether he and Danielle were tiring, and then dropped back behind her. “Lead the way."
