Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “I forgot.”

  Deeds grinned. “Turn ‘em off, boys,” he commanded. He switched his off, and the others did the same.

  Alex did the easy part first, digging out narrow holes around the roots of the pines inside the rendezvous site and planting dynamite there. It helped him to remember how to do it all, how to attach the blasting caps and tie on the detonation cord, there in the daylight. That done, he turned to the more difficult task—the dens.

  The smell of the wolves came from the entrance on puffs of air, as if the earth itself was breathing. It was pungent and smelled like life.

  He hesitated there. He had a flashlight and a length of branch in one hand and a gun in the other. He bent over and shined the light in the hole, revealing a passageway that didn’t contract much as far as he could see down it. He couldn’t walk in it, even hunched over, but he could easily go on hands and knees. But not with the gun and the flashlight and the crate.

  And he was afraid. He didn’t like admitting it, even to himself, but fear was locking his joints up. Despite the cold and the snow that still fell, sweat ran down his sides.

  But he had to do it anyway. He knew that as surely as he knew the cold and the snow and the smell, the dampness seeping up through boots not meant for this kind of punishment, the unfamiliar hard shape of the pistol. He had been afraid since that summer week of his seventeenth year. Afraid that someone would realize that the fault was his, afraid to be underground, afraid of the dark, sometimes, because it reminded him of what those trapped miners must have felt as their lamps blinked out and the coal dust filled their eyes. Fear had been holding him back, he thought. He had spent his whole life without a real job, any accomplishments of note, a successful relationship. He had been skating on the surface of life.

  He was under no illusions that crawling into a tunnel and planting sticks of dynamite would solve those problems, turn him into a new man.

  But it might be a start.

  He liked Robbie—really liked her, in a way he hadn’t liked anybody in a long time. He didn’t know if he could love her, or if she could love him, or if they could make it work even if both unknowns proved true. They were so different. He might, he thought, like to make a life with her, or try to.

  To do that, he would have to do this.

  She was watching. She would require courage from a man, would need him to live up to his promises. He resisted the urge to look back at her. He knew she was there, knew she wanted him to go in and to come out again.

  He went to his hands and knees, tucked the gun into his waistband at the small of his back, laid the piece of branch across the top of the crate and shoved the crate in ahead of him. He played the flashlight all around. The area around the opening was worn smooth, and there were tufts of fur here and there, but it was mostly clean. Apparently wolves didn’t shit at home.

  He pushed the crate farther, and he went in.

  The interior was slightly warmer than outside, because there was no snow falling on him, no wind. He knew temperatures underground could be remarkably consistent, summer and winter, but he didn’t know if that applied to as shallow a tunnel as this seemed to be.

  Progress was slow. He had to shine the light ahead and push the crate and then crawl up behind it, watching the tunnel’s height because he didn’t want to scrape the gun in his pants against the ceiling. There was fur everywhere, matted on the ground, stuck to the sides, and the smell of their musk was strong. He saw bone fragments, pine straw, sticks and leaves the animals had carried in.

  He didn’t have a drill and didn’t want to spend that much time anyway, nor was the result of his efforts required to be as precise as if he had been blasting in a mine. All he wanted to do was to bring these tunnels down, collapse the dens. Not a lot of specificity was needed.

  As he went, he dug into the sides with the length of branch, then attached a blasting cap to a stick of dynamite, twisted the detonation cord on, and pushed a stick of dynamite in as far as his fingers could reach. He tamped it deeper with the branch. You didn’t want to use anything metal, not at that point. Wood was the way to go.

  The tunnel got smaller, though not prohibitively so. But then it connected with another one, and this one he would have had to pass through on his belly, pulling himself along on his arms. He went in less than one body length and felt panic return. With shaking hands, he clawed away a depression barely deep enough to put the dynamite in sideways. He put on the blasting cap, knowing that because the dynamite itself was relatively stable, the blasting cap was the real danger; he had seen men who had lost fingers or hands or, in the case of a retired miner he had met, one eye and most of his nose and his upper lip, because of a blasting cap accident. He put one stick on each side and backed out of the tunnel, back into the main one.

  He didn’t know how much time was elapsing, didn’t want to start looking at his watch because then he would never stop. At some point the wolves would return, and if he was still there, he would die. The people outside, Robbie and Chief Deeds and the rest, would shoot, but the wolves had already proven they could not be beaten by people with guns. There had been more people and more guns with the DOW group that had been torn to shreds than there were defending the rendezvous site. So even if he heard a cacophony of gunfire, some wolves would get past them and he would die.

  There were more side tunnels, and he could see that some of them connected to the other openings he had seen from outside, but others seemed to go ever deeper into the earth. This den was a maze, and he wondered how long these impossible wolves had used it. He couldn’t explore every avenue. He didn’t have time or energy or enough courage for that. So he planted dynamite where he thought it would be most effective and he twisted on the cord and he played the spool out.

  Finally, he was out of dynamite. There were blasting caps remaining but he didn’t care. He left the branch and the caps and he unrolled the spool as he went, and he hurried from the tunnel as fast as he could go without hitting something and injuring himself. For a moment he was afraid he had made a wrong turn, but then he realized that he was headed the right way, but the sky had grown darker and the snow was falling more heavily and the sun had ceased to break through the layer of clouds.

  Then he was outside, and a small cheer erupted from the watchers, led by Robbie. She met him halfway up the hill and she kissed him again and she whispered, “You will get the fucking of your life tonight, mister.” He wanted to say something in return, something clever and flirty and funny, but his voice had left him.

  Chief Deeds took over, anyway. “Okay, everybody, move back!” he called. “Way, way back. Jones, take the spool from Mr. Converse. He looks plenty tired, and he’s done everything so far.”

  Jones did as his chief ordered. “Thank you, sir,” he said as he took the spool from Alex’s hands. “You’ve done a good thing here.”

  “Hope so,” Alex managed. He was tired, he realized. All the strength seemed to go out of him at once, and he wasn’t sure he would even be able to stay awake for Robbie’s reward. He showed Jones how to keep unspooling the fuse, and they took it out as far as it could go, about eighty feet from the tunnel. He wasn’t sure that was far enough, but he had used a lot of it inside, crisscrossing all the various paths he had taken. So it was what it was.

  “Everybody take cover,” he said. “On the ground, arms over your head. I have no idea how far this stuff is gonna blow.”

  Deeds watched to make sure everybody had obeyed. When they had, he said, “Okay, Mr. Converse. Show us how it’s done.”

  Although Deeds had assured him that everyone was safe, Alex made a quick visual check for himself. Mostly he was looking for Robbie, but she was close by, a dozen feet away, with her knees and head on the ground, arms protecting her skull. Satisfied, he connected the wire to the control box. He wished he had one of the old-fashioned plunger detonators, because for such a primitive task it seemed more fitting. But he had a modern electronic control box instead. Certain that he was brea
king all manner of laws and OSHA regulations, he called out “Fire in the hole!” and pressed the button labeled “Charge” and held it down, building up the power. When the indicator light came on, he kept that button depressed and pushed the one marked “Fire.”

  Then he set the box down in the snow and assumed the position.

  The blast shook the earth. The den’s tunnels had not been far enough below the surface to contain the force of the explosion. Dirt and mud and snow and roots and bits of trees and shrubs flew skyward, reached a certain height, and then turned back toward home. The rocks hit first, slamming down like the devil’s rain, and then dirt in clods and brown snow and the rest of it all at once, thumping and pattering and crashing to the ground. People shouted and a couple screamed, and when it was over there were bloody scalps and cut hands and no doubt a lot of bruises under coats and down vests and sweaters and the like. But nobody was seriously injured, and most of them were laughing at the sheer spectacle of it.

  Robbie came to Alex and hugged him again and then held his left hand as they walked up the hill. People were coming up to them and congratulating him, clapping him on the back, shaking his hand. Were they cheering him for his demolitions expertise, or for getting Robbie to hold his hand? Even that strange cop, Honeycutt, shook his head, a huge grin on his skinny face, and said, “Fuck if that wasn’t the fuckingest fuckeroonie I ever seen!” Alex wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but he chose to take it as a compliment.

  The den was history. It was a collapsed ruin, with most of its roof gone and whatever tunnels might have been left filled in by the debris. The pines had been felled, one all the way and one leaning precariously. Sections of the stream’s banks had tumbled into the water. Alex felt a moment’s sorrow for the wolves that had used this place. He was glad there hadn’t been any pups inside, as Conklin had suspected there might be. He didn’t know if he would have been able to pull the trigger on a pup, and he would have hated to see wolf parts falling from the sky.

  He had been described as a rabid environmentalist, and yet he had just performed what was probably the most environmentally destructive act of his life. With luck, one he would never surpass. He had torn the top off this hill, just as surely as his ancestors had blown the tops off mountains throughout Appalachia. Same idea, smaller scale.

  That these wolves had attacked and killed human beings, including people he had known, made it a little better.

  Not a lot.

  While he stood there looking at his handiwork, Morris Deeds approached him with his chest puffed out and his right hand extended. “I guess maybe I’ve been wrong about you, Mr. Converse. A cop has to size people up in a hurry, and most of the time we’re right. But a man’s got to be able to admit when he’s not. That was a good thing you did here. Denied those wolves their safe haven. Don’t know if it’ll be enough to make them relocate, but it can’t hurt.”

  “All I did was plant the charges,” Alex said. “But thanks just the same.”

  “You didn’t see any inside?”

  “No. Lots of fur. They’ve been here, for sure, but they’re not here now.”

  “Hmm,” Deeds said, gazing off into the distance. “Wonder where in the hell they are.”

  30

  Clara Durbin understood that panic would only work against her.

  Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs were bound and she had something draped over her head, a rough, scratchy fabric of some kind, loose-fitting but impossible to shake off. Her mouth was sealed with tape and she was inside someplace but it was cold, wickedly so, and the floor was uneven, raw wood. She could hear the wind howling outside and every now and then the sound of something, probably snow, pelting against a window. It had been dark but now it was lighter, she could tell that much through the hood. And wherever she was stank like nothing she had ever known, like she imagined it would smell if she were inside a sewer underneath a meatpacking plant.

  Howie had brought her here and he had stayed a while. She had heard him moving around, eating something, she thought, and making other noises she couldn’t interpret. Sometimes he spoke to her, but of course she couldn’t answer. Once he hit her in the side of the head, hard, with what felt like a balled fist. There was a bruise there, she was sure, and probably swelling but she couldn’t put her hand up to check. Once he had groped her left breast, under her coat but through her sweater. She didn’t know if he had found it not to his liking, but he had let go after a few seconds and had not tried it again. She had tried to kick him, but her legs were tied together and she was sitting and had no leverage or freedom of movement.

  But now daylight had come. She had spent some of yesterday and all night here, and she knew Charles must be frantic. The town had probably organized a search party, as it had for Marie Hackett and Barb Johnston. In those cases, she knew, the searches had been unsuccessful.

  During the long hours of darkness and stillness except for the wind, she had despaired. She would never see Charles again, never set foot in the lodge. She would die and the flesh would rot off her bones and she would never again walk in the sunshine or sit in a window watching snowflakes or drink wine or taste her husband’s salty cheek after he had painted a room. She was as certain of these things as she was of her own name, of her love for Silver Gap, of her faith in the Lord and her delight in the way that Reverend Calderon interpreted His teachings.

  But daylight had come, and with it, hope.

  Just a glimmering, so far. She had always been an optimistic sort, always believed that after each storm, the sun would shine again. And here in this cold room, bound and hooded and gagged, that optimism only carried so far. She had been sitting on the floor in more or less the same position all these hours—once she had shifted so that she was lying down on her side, hoping that she would be able to sleep that way, but then she panicked, afraid she wouldn’t be able to sit up again. She was, but the process had been long and full of pain she wouldn’t willingly endure again. So she sat against the wall and even slept that way a few times, not for long but for minutes or perhaps an hour at a time.

  And shifting uncomfortably, trying to ease the aches that had settled in, she had discovered a large splinter on the wall behind her, a section of wood sticking out from the planks forming the wall, and she had caught her head covering on it, and only hours later did it occur to her that if she snagged it just right, maybe she could peel the covering off and she would be able to see where she was. Seeing, she was certain, was a precursor to finding a way out. First one, then the other. Logical.

  Logic helped fend off panic. So did prayer. So did action.

  So praying for forgiveness and for salvation of the physical as well as spiritual natures, Clara set to work, trying to snag the hood she wore on the dagger of wood.

  With no way of measuring the passage of time, she didn’t know how long she spent at it. Judging by the number of times her stiff muscles cried out in protest, it could have been hours. The daylight grew brighter, even filtered through the fabric, and the place she was in warmed slightly, and the wind changed from a howl to a high-pitched whistle.

  And then she heard something else on the wind. A new kind of howling, made by throats instead of air currents.

  There must have been ten of them. No, more. They were far away still, and she went on trying to catch the hood with renewed urgency. She almost had it once, had it well snagged, and she began the even more awkward process of trying to peel her head out from under it, but then she heard the animals howling much, much closer and she started and the hood pulled free of the spike.

  The approach of what had to be wolves made her heart pound. She could hear the rush of blood in her ears and her muscles, already weak and cramped, became even more reluctant. Clara was trembling as much as she had during the worst moments of the cold night, and as she tried to hook the fabric again, her head drummed against the wall.

  Outside, the wolves came closer still.

  Then she got the hood caught, a
good, firm connection. She heard the fabric tear as the wood speared through it. She prayed aloud as she struggled once again to pull her head free. The head covering caught on her chin, so she clamped her mouth shut—He could hear silent prayers just as well, she believed—and tried again, tilting her head to press her chin toward her neck. This time, the hood slid easily past that obstacle.

  She had to shift her bottom on the hard wooden floor in order to get her head lower than the splinter, which she had to do or else risk moving her head away from the wall—and therefore releasing the caught fabric—as she tried to pull free. That shift almost did it anyway. She felt the fabric tug and was certain it would release, but she froze in place and it didn’t.

  Her back screamed with the agony of the angle, shoulders against the wall, bottom well away from it. But she was able to continue the progress she had made, easing her head down and down, then another shift of her rear—pain lancing through her—and she felt it slip past her ears. A final tug, and she collapsed sideways on the floor. The hood, a brown piece of something like a burlap bag, fluttered down on top of her. She shook it off.

  She was in a cabin. The knotty pine walls were unfinished, as was the floor. It was small, although from her position she could see an upper corner of something that might have been a door to another room, perhaps a bathroom. By tilting her head slightly she could see a front door of heavy planks with crossbars and cast-iron hardware. There was what looked like a bed against one wall, beneath a curtained window, and a small kitchen area with a table and two chairs.

  Getting the hood off intensified the stench surrounding her. She could see the ropes that held her fast, now, but with her hands behind her back she still didn’t know how to get herself untied. She would think of something, though. Getting her eyes back was critical. What she needed now was a broader view of her surroundings.

  She needed to stand up.

  Given the shaky status of her muscles, that looked to be considerably harder than getting the hood off.