by Sky Winters
Luke bared his teeth and hissed; an open challenge for JP. Luke was determined to end this insanity once and for all.
JP dragged Jennifer back towards the porch and shoved her through the door and locked her in. She needed to be there when he was done killing her boyfriend. He tossed his leather jacket aside and quickly stripped. JP shifted into his own wolf form and leapt on Luke.
Jennifer tugged and banged on the door, “Help me! Someone let me out!” she screamed. She hollered and banged and kicked, all the while forced to listen to the shrieks and growls of the big dogs fighting in the yard. She dashed over to the window and peeked through the curtains.
She couldn’t tell the two apart. Both dogs were the same color and nearly the same size. Teeth and claws flew, ripping into furry flesh and delicate ears. Jennifer gasped when one wolf climbed on the back of his rival and bit down on his neck.
The suffocating wolf slowed, stumbling around trying to get his bearings to get away. Jennifer watched the top wolf adjust its grip on his rival’s neck and bear down harder. She had never felt so impotent in her entire life. All she could do was wrap her arms around her growing waist, and pray that Luke wasn’t the one dying.
She allowed herself to mourn for the fallen wolf as it hit the ground and stopped moving. Hot tears streamed down her face as she stared at the winner, who didn’t move for several minutes.
When finally, the wolf let go he shook himself and shifted back. Jennifer’s heart leapt when she recognized Luke’s strong form limping towards the house. The doorknob jiggled and rattled, still firmly locked. A moment a heavy bang struck the door, followed quickly by a second, then a third. On the fourth, Luke’s oversized frame tore the door off its hinges.
“Luke!” Jennifer cried as she ran to him. The man was a little wobbly on his feet, but scooped Jennifer up into his arms anyway.
“You’re alive!” Jennifer kissed Luke hard while wrapping her arms and legs around him. She refused to let go for fear he wasn’t real.
“Jennifer. I can’ breathe!” Luke forced the words through his teeth.
“I’m sorry. I’m just so happy you’re alive.” She loosened her grip and slithered off of him.
“Did JP hurt you?” Luke’s hands traveled over her body searching for any signs of injury.
“No. I’m fine. How hurt are you?” Jennifer stepped back to look him over. Luke’s body was decorated with a few welts and bruises, but was otherwise physically okay.
“Just a few scratches.” Luke peered out the window. The corpse of the big dog had shifted back into the form of a very battered and broken man. The body didn’t move, but from the distance the body lay, they couldn’t tell if he was breathing. Judging from the angle his head was hanging, they assumed not.
“How did you find me?” Jennifer asked.
“Melanie told me. She and her husband came with me to find you. I left them to take out JP’s cronies. Zara had taken off with the third guy waiting in another car. Mel told me everything. I guess Zara was the one that filled in JP about you.” Luke cast down his eyes, “I am so sorry, Jennifer. I should have known. I put you in danger… I should have just left you alone.”
Jennifer smacked his hand, “Leaving me alone would have been the most stupid thing you could have done. You’d have left me to raise this baby myself?”
“You’d have told me?” Luke seemed surprised.
“Of course I would have, dummy.” Jennifer took a deep breath to collect herself, “Look. Don’t blame yourself. I’m okay and you survived your fight, can we just go home now?” Exhaustion had settled deep in Jennifer’s bones. She really needed to lie down in her own bed.
“Of course. Grab the keys to the Tahoe and we’ll head out. Melanie and her husband will be joining us in a designated meeting place.” Luke wrapped his arm around Jennifer’s shoulders and planted a kiss on her head, “I’m glad my two babes are safe.”
The End.
Wild for the Wolf
Chapter 1
“You promised you would come back!” Raven shouted into the shortwave radio. She knew they had to be out of range. Somebody would have said something by now. The radio tower was the highest point for miles in any direction. Raven peered out over the trees looking for smoke from their campfire. She knew that they wouldn’t stay close by, but she scanned the trees every day, looking for Travis, looking for anyone.
The tower had once been a part of the Tillamook Airport. A collection of sheds beside a runway, airport was a fairly generous title. After the first wave of infections the whole town had moved to the airport. “It isn’t worth the risk.” Travis had said when Raven fought to stay in her family’s home. There was no way to disinfect the homes, many of which still housed dead bodies. The survivors left everything, even the clothes on their backs, behind.
Ignoring the obvious devastation it had actually been a fun day. It was the first time in months that people had come out of their homes. The mayor, Tom Hodgkin had organized the move to the airport driving around town in his SUV with a megaphone. Everyone brought soap and a smile to the splash zone in Danbury Park. Travis and Raven had even held hands as the survivors looted the stores downtown for clothes and food.
Travis had never been Raven’s boyfriend. In fact when people asked she introduced him as her complication. They were never really together, but never really apart either. Except for now. He hadn’t even looked back as they shut the large rusted tin doors of the Tillamook Air Museum. Raven had been locked up with everyone else that had been infected in the second wave. It had started right after they had made the decision to burn the houses of Tillamook. No one wanted to stay at the airport forever, but in hindsight it seemed like a bad idea. Raven had been the only person in the second wave to survive.
The virus moved fast. In the first two months 10,000,000 people died. The people of Tillamook weren’t worried. There was no way a virus was going to spread somewhere so remote. By the third month Tillamook had its first case of the lumps. It’s a weird name for a virus, but it made sense when you saw the deformed bodies of its victims. The virus had been released from the Russian permafrost by mining companies. They were strip mining gold and other resources that had been trapped under the Earth’s surface by ice and snow. They had no idea what else they were going to release.
All of the scientists who were trying to cure it had died. All that anyone had found out for was that it was highly adaptable. The lumps immediately adjusted to any environment. They could infect any living creature. Raven had even heard that they were infecting buildings and inanimate objects. It didn’t really matter if it was true, there was no way to get rid of the virus once it reached an area. There were even stories about the people who survived the lumps and walked the earth as monstrous contortions of their former selves.
“I am fine,” Raven yelled into the mic, “It was allergies, or a cold, I can’t believe you left me!” Letting the mic fall from her hand, Raven sat in the tower fighting the urge to cry. She didn’t know how, but she knew that no one could hear her words. She started moving down the stairs. It was her new philosophy. Raven had been in a rut since graduating from high school. She was going to take a year and make a plan for her life. That had been almost 4 years ago. “It only took a worldwide pandemic to get me to move out of my parent’s house,” she laughed to herself.
When a second wave of infection struck the Tillamook Airport Commune, Raven thought her life was over. Of the 300 survivors living in the airport 200 were laid out on cots under the vintage planes of the Air Museum. Raven was sweating and nearly delirious for what seemed like days. The only thing that she could see in the dark was the silver fuselage of the Fouga-CM 170 Magister. Raven didn’t know much about planes, but Travis had worked a summer at the museum. He had given Raven the official tour, just before the museum had become a tomb.
Then it was like a switch went off in her head. She heard a voice telling her to stand up. At first Raven didn’t believe it, she had already died in her ow
n head. Slowly she tested her muscles. She looked down at her arms expecting to see lumps and welts, but they were smooth. Raven got up and ran to the bathroom mirror. The lighting was very dim, but she could see that her skin was actually nicer. Before getting sick she had had acne scars on her face and black heads. Now her skin was smooth. Her long black hair had its shine back, even though it hadn’t been washed in weeks.
Raven remembered moving slowly. She didn’t want to step on anybody and risk getting infected. She would never forget the bodies she saw that day. They didn’t even look like people any more. Motionless mounds of stretched and bruised skin lay scattered all over the cement floor.
Raven found a small man door and left the airport behind for good. She ran straight for the radio tower. Travis had shown Raven how to use the short wave radio when they first got to the airport. Travis had always loved tinkering with things and he had tried to communicate with other groups. The people of their town were all hoping that there were other groups. It seemed like a waste of time to Raven, but Travis thought short wave radios would be the only lines of communication still open.
Cell phones were getting no signals and the internet was not working anywhere in town. Tillamook had always been remote, but since the first wave hit it truly seemed like the people of the town were on their own. No one more so than Raven. She realized as she reached the bottom of the tower that she couldn’t stay at the airport. She was nearly out of food.
Bam! Klunck! It was coming from the makeshift kitchen they had built in the main building. Raven grabbed a bat that was lying discarded by the tower and went to investigate. “Screeeee!” The deformed racoon reared up and started to run at Raven. She was going to fight for the food, a few boxes of crackers and granola bars, but at the last second she chickened out and ran. She didn’t want to hit any living creature with a bat, especially not one that was going to infect her with lumps.
“I guess that settles it,” Raven said to the wind. She had packed a small bag the day before. She didn’t need much. Lately she had only been changing her clothes every couple weeks. It wasn’t like she had a way to get them clean. Raven had grown immune to her own stench. All she needed was food, and to be as far away from the smell of rotting corpses.
There were no land vehicles left at the airport and there was no way Raven was heading back into town. She headed through an empty field toward Highway 101. She stood on the asphalt for only a second taking in the scene. Then Raven started walking south, away from Tillamook, and hopefully away from the virus. Her backpack slung across one shoulder and a walking stick that she had made out of a broken shovel handle. Raven could sense that she was heading in the right direction.
It was midday already. The sun was hiding behind the clouds, but it was still very hot. Raven had taken off her long sleeve shirt and rolled up her jeans. The t-shirt she was wearing had been white when she stole it out of Grubner’s Department Store. It was grey now and dotted by darker grey blotches. Raven could hear her mother telling her not to go outside looking like that as she walked. It was comforting. She hadn’t heard her mother’s voice in months. Both of Raven’s parents were taken in the first wave.
In those first few months there was still hope. Bill and June Hepford smiled and air hugged their daughter, to avoid passing germs, as they boarded a bus for the Recovery Center. The centers were opening all over the country and it was against the law to stay amongst the general population once you started showing symptoms. Raven remembered smiling back at them. She wanted to be brave and show them that she would be okay. In her heart she knew they were never coming back.
As Raven walked down the middle of the two lane highway everything seemed very surreal. It was completely empty. There was no traffic and no movement in any of the houses that she passed. Raven had travelled this road many times. Her aunt lived in Cloverdale. No one in Tillamook seemed to know anything about how other communities were dealing with the virus. Raven hoped that she could just walk down the road for maybe a day or two and find a thriving community of survivors, and maybe even catch up with her friends.
Her head cocked to the left as a low humming came from off in the distance somewhere. It was coming from the North. It definitely wasn’t any of the vehicles that Travis and the others had taken. The military collection of the Tillamook Air Museum didn’t have any small quiet cars in it. Raven could still hear the deep rumblings of the heavy trucks that had left her to die in the dusty old hanger that was now a museum.
The compact car was whining under the weight of a metal trailer. Raven wasn’t sure what she should do. There had been reports of looters roaming the highways. She had personally never seen any of them, but she really wasn’t ready for that to change. Raven felt much better than she had days ago, but she was still feeling weak. Her body was running mainly on crackers, she had granola bars too, but she was trying to conserve them so she only ate one per day.
As the car got closer Raven decided to get off the road and take cover in the trees. There was a small farm house in sight and she could see the winding Tillamook River was just to the south of her hiding spot. As she weighed her options in her head, Raven dropped to the ground when she heard the brakes squeak in front of her. Three men got out of the small car. Two were all big men, over six feet tall and well-muscled, their faces were covered in bumps and weird scars. A shorter man with a screeching voice was barking orders. The men all had the same splotchy, reddened skin.
The driver’s dark, scraggly hair was blowing in the breeze as he walked up to the farm house. He kicked the front door in without even breaking stride. The looters made quick work of the house. Raven cringed with every crash of broken glass as the fast moving crew slammed and banged their way through the small house. The thieves loaded their treasures onto the wagon before pulling away.
As they pulled away Raven decided it would be safer to follow the river. She didn’t want to run into any more trouble. She waited for a while after hearing the car pull away. The sun was high in the sky as she finally stood up from behind the bush. The river bank was covered in thorny brush that cut at Ravens jeans and shirt. She was trying to find a clear spot to walk, but the path was not often travelled. Raven could feel the tiny cuts all over her body as she pushed through the brush.
The smell was the first thing that Raven noticed. It was hard to really see the dark brown cabin in the dim light of the woods. It was pine burning in that fire. Raven had always loved the smell of a pine fire. The brush seemed to disappear the closer you got to the cabin. Raven wanted to go and get some food, but she wasn’t sure what was going to come up against if she knocked on that door.
“Grrrrr!” The snarling sound of an angry dog caught Raven’s attention. She had risked walking closer to the cabin to avoid the thorns, but Raven had given herself away. She turned around to talk to the dog and found herself face to face with the long snout and greyish fur of a timber wolf. It was the biggest she had ever seen.
Raven had been through outdoors training. Her parents had sent her to take survival courses in Portland. They thought that living so close to nature their daughter needed to know how to take care of herself in the woods. Raven knew what to do. First you should make a lot of noise. Second you never turn your back to the wolf, and don’t try to out run it. The third thing to remember is that you never show fear. Raven knew all of this.
Raven couldn’t remember any of her training as she ran for the door of the cabin. It was 30 feet and the wolf should have caught her, my fear must have super-charged my legs. Raven thought as she slid down the inside of the door and sat on the floor of the cabin. The door had been left open, but the heavy steel door had nearly taken off Raven’s leg as she ran past it. The pain had been delayed by fear. It wasn’t until Raven got the door closed that she realized what had happened to her leg.
It was purple and swelling fast, Raven tried to put pressure on the knee, but the shooting pain was heading right up her thigh and into her back. She moved across the floor trying
not to move the leg. There was a fridge in the kitchenette. Hopefully I can find some ice, Raven thought as she slid along the plywood floor.
“Ahhhhh!” Raven screamed as she tried to stand up. The freezer on the top of the fridge was too high to reach any other way. She took a few deep breaths. Then in the middle of a really deep inhale Raven pushed herself up and opened the door. She grabbed the door of the fridge for support and grabbed some ice out of the freezer. Raven grabbed a tea towel that had been left out and put the ice inside.
On one leg with the injured knee up off the floor, Raven started hopping over to the bed. The cabin was all one giant room. Even the bathroom was open concept. There was a little oriental blind in front of the toilet. Raven was hopping for the bed when her shoe caught on a rough spot in the plywood.
“Got you,” Raven felt the strong arms wrap around her. She tried to scream, but her voice was gone. She stared wide eyed at the dark hair and bronze skin of the cabin’s owner. She was trying to read his face. He didn’t seem happy to see her. “Are you okay?” He had lifted her into his arms and was carrying her toward the bed.
Raven tried to avoid eye contact with the man who was so easily carrying her across the room. He was at least 30 with a little wisp of grey behind his right ear. He set Raven down and helped her get the ice into place. “You’re cut,” he said as he looked at the lines running through Raven’s jeans. The blood was seeping through the fabric. None of them were very deep, but they were starting to sting.
“It’s nothing,” Raven mumbled to her feet as the man went to the cupboard in his bathroom and pulled out alcohol and band-aids.
“You have to stay to the trails around here,” the man said. He seemed concerned, but also annoyed. “Those thorns will get you every time.”
“I think it will be fine,” Raven was trying to stop the man who was now rolling up her pant legs. As she did he grabbed her arm and rolled up the sleeve. He poured the rubbing alcohol right on to her arm. The pain was nothing compared to her knee, but Raven tensed her face and started blowing on it like her mother used to when she cleaned out Raven’s cuts.
