Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3

by McGregor, Tim

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Amy steered on. “I think when you become the wolf, some part of you is still conscious.”

  “Can’t be.” Lara watched the trees whip past. “It’s an animal. Not even an animal.”

  “When we were in the garage and you changed then, you didn’t attack me or dad. You…or it snapped and snarled but held off. It wanted to attack but something held it back. That was you.”

  “You’re reading too much into it.”

  “No. There was something in the wolf’s eyes. Some recognition or something.” Amy glanced at her but Lara stared out the window. “I saw that other one up close, the grey one. There was nothing but murder in that thing’s eyes. Hatred, savagery.”

  Lara stopped listening. Something was wrong and it was wrong immediately. She sat upright and looked back. “Stop the truck.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I lost them. Pull over.”

  Amy drifted onto the snowy shoulder and slowed. Lara jumped out before the vehicle had even stopped. Turning her nose to the road ahead and downwind the way they had come.

  Amy leaned into the passenger seat. “What is it?”

  “I lost the scent.” Lara climbed back inside. “Go back. They must have turned off the road somewhere.”

  Amy cranked the wheel and doubled back down the empty road. “Where did we lose them?”

  “I don’t know. Keep your eyes peeled for a turn-off or side road.”

  Amy slowed her speed and they scanned the ditch on both sides. Trees and snow and rock. It all looked the same, with no break or clearing. The dog was on its feet now and Lara lowered the back window so the husky could poke its muzzle out into the wind.

  “There,” Amy said, pointing to a faint break of bare white in the roadside. A windrow of snow bifurcated with tire treads.

  She turned into the break and plowed through the windrow. The side road, if it was a road, appeared as no more than a winding path of white cutting through the trees. Unplowed as it was, the snow was cleft with twin tracks that snaked ahead and vanished among the pine trees. “I don’t know if this is even a road. Is it on the map?”

  “No.” Lara checked the map again. “This is just some old logging trail.”

  “Are you sure they went this way?”

  Lara’s nose quivered. “This is it.”

  Amy shifted into neutral, coasting over the snow and toggled the shifter. A short grinding sound before the four-wheel drive bumped in.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED when the sun went down, sending Gallagher scrambling for shelter. One of the ramshackle houses had a fireplace and a few dry matches scattered on the mantel. He broke up what furniture there was for firewood and passed the night on the dirty floor. He didn’t sleep but he didn’t dream either.

  When morning came his back was stiff and his mouth parched. A sour ache churned his stomach and he couldn’t remember when he last ate. The ghost town looked as dead as ever in the grey light and he went back to the blacksmith’s shop to rummage among the broken tools for a weapon. There was an axe with a heavy blade but the petrified handle split under the first test swing. Tossing it back with disgust, he quit the shop.

  The treads of the van were still visible in the snow so he followed them. It would be miles of dense forest before any sign of life but it was better than staying in this hamlet of tombstone houses and dryrot history.

  Keeping a casual pace he lost sight of the town and was enveloped in a bleary scape of snow and tree trunks with nothing but the tracks before him to distinguish anything. He’d not gone far when he heard something rustle the trees. Gliding invisible among the pines, matching his pace. Stalking him.

  He should have looked harder for a weapon. Even a heavy stick would do but there was nothing in his hands and even less in his pockets.

  Another few paces and the wolf appeared. It sklathed out of the trees and onto the road before him. Massive in its girth, the hackles raised and its chops slung open to reveal the rows of outsized teeth. He assumed it to be Grissom but this wolf’s pelage was dark, almost black. It wasn’t Grissom. Some other lobo.

  A second wolf emerged from the treeline to his left and then two more on his right flank. Without turning around, he sensed the fifth one moving up behind him. Werewolves. A pack of them, like storybook beasts with their snouts curled back in snarls. Monstrous in their abhorrence, things that skulked the ragged periphery of the natural order. Blasphemous things all.

  The monsters were enormous but seemed thin and ragged. Deep scars riven across their snouts and dorsals. One was walleyed, as if driven insane by its condition and another loped in a peculiar trot, one hind leg missing from the shank down.

  His heart seized up at the sight of them, these things from his nightmares. His hands went numb, all the fight draining out of him. Encountering just one of these monsters had ruined his life but now this. A pack of them.

  Just lie down and die.

  Get it over with.

  The wolves circled at a distance, as if sensing his defeat and waiting for him to give up the ghost. Sidling in a trot, muzzles low to the ground. Grouping and then fanning out.

  A gap opened on his right flank and Gallagher moved, stomping through the trees, traversing uphill. The lobos sklathed forward and he clambered up a low foothill, keeping one eye on the pack as he went. For a moment he fooled himself that there was an advantage to this, moving uphill of the monsters but it was a pretense and no more. He was at their mercy and the wolves were simply taking their time with it.

  Clambering up, he saw a dark maw opening against the snowy hillscape. The mouth of some cave or cleft in the mountain. He scrambled towards it. Shelter or a last stand. An Alamo.

  The wolves closed in, bolting forward and running at a pass towards him without striking. Taunting him. Gallagher cursed them and flung a dead branch at the nearest one and clambered on with all he had. He heard their jaws pop at his heels, teeth snapping like death.

  It was a mine shaft. The mouth of it framed in moldering beams, a few broken tools strewn aside like artifacts from some mad archeological dig. Gallagher crashed over the broken timbers and scrambled inside. Moving further in, his boots slipping on what felt like loose shale. Impossible to run, visibility swallowed in the gloom. He fell, a rattle of dry sticks against his knees and then he looked back. The opening of the mineshaft was an orb of white light in the pitch.

  The wolves passed against the opening and passed again, dark forms against the light but they did not enter. After a moment they appeared no more and he knew they were waiting for him to come out again.

  Gallagher stepped warily but there was nowhere to find a firm footing, his boots crunching over this pile of dry sticks that blanketed the entire floor of the mine. When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw what he was treading on. Bones. The calcified ribcages and broken skulls and snapped vertebrae of man and animal alike carpeted the floor of the cave like some mass ossuary.

  This was no shelter, no last defense. It was a killing floor. The wolves lair. No Alamo, no last stand.

  Gallagher sunk down, rattling a slurry of drybones under him, and tried to remember the last words he had spoken to his daughter. It hadn’t been goodbye.

  The road winnowed down to a treacherous slice of snow, little more than a gap in the brush. The wheels dipped and clunked over the snowcrust, jerking and popping the Cherokee’s suspension. Amy’s knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel as she fought to keep the vehicle on the path.

  “Easy,” Lara said, one hand on the dashboard. Wondering if she shouldn’t take the wheel.

  “Sorry. It’s hard to see the road.”

  “That’s because there isn’t one.”

  Amy slowed to a crawl and followed the path as it meandered through the thicket of snowloaded branches. The road vanished as she negotiated a hairpin turn. Then she hit the brakes.

  An enormous tree lay across the pa
th. The massive trunk four hands in diameter and God only knew how many tons of it. There was no going around it.

  Amy looked at Lara. “Now what?”

  “We weren’t meant to drive any further.” Lara studied the fallen timber and the snowbound path underneath it. The vehicle treads they had followed passed underneath the deadfall. “The tree was pushed down after the vehicle drove through.”

  “Grissom pushed it down?” Amy blinked at the massive thing.

  Lara pointed to the sheared end of it, the sawdust splayed over the snow. “He cut it down.”

  “Okay. So what, we go in on foot?”

  “Yup.” Lara checked the road on her side. “But let’s turn the truck around so it’s pointed the other way. Just in case we have to leave in a hurry.”

  The tires spun in the snow and Amy cursed when she bumped up against a tree but got the Cherokee turned around in the tight space. She climbed out and let the dog out of the backseat.

  Lara strode away from the stink of the vehicle to catch the breeze coming through the brush. The hair on her arms stood up and something cold fingered up her spine. Trouble on the wind.

  Amy unloaded the weapons from the duffel. She checked the load on the Eagle and laid it aside and checked the Glock. This she stuck into her coat pocket and reached for the shotgun. Pumping it once to find it unloaded, she took up the hulls loose in the bag and loaded them into the chamber.

  The dog was antsy. Nose twitching at the road ahead and pacing in a circle only to stop and sniff the air again. Amy turned, saw Lara acting strange too. Stock still and staring off in the same direction as the husky. “Lara, you okay?”

  Lara didn’t respond, didn’t move.

  “Is dad out there?”

  Lara shook her head as if to clear it. “Yes. So is Grissom.”

  “I guess the dog smells them too. He’s acting weird.”

  There was more than that on the wind. Exactly what, Lara couldn’t tell but she didn’t like it. Could Grissom’s musk be that strong or was it something else? She looked at Amy. “I think you should stay here. Keep the truck ready to go when I get back.”

  “I’m not doing that.” Amy went back to unloading their gear.

  “Something isn’t right here, Amy. Please.”

  “We’ve run this number already. I’m not staying back. Not if that bastard has Dad.” Amy plucked a flashbang from the bag. “What’s out there?”

  “More wolves.”

  Amy stopped what she was doing. A heartbeat and then she hauled her backpack onto her shoulders and closed the hatch. She came round with the shotgun in one hand and the 50 .cal in the other. “I don’t care.”

  The husky slunk between them and leaped onto the fallen tree.

  “If you can smell Grissom from here, can he smell you coming?”

  “Yes.” Lara registered the weapons in Amy’s hands. “Where’s the Glock?”

  “In my pocket.”

  Nodding to the Eagle and the shotgun. “Which one do you want?”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Find your father. Kill Grissom.”

  Amy held out the big handgun. Lara took it and chinned the Mossberg clutched in the girl’s hand. “Are you okay with that?”

  “The spread is lethal,” said Amy. “If there are other wolves, I want a good shot at blowing them to pulp.”

  Lara scrutinized the girl’s eyes. For the hundredth time she questioned the wisdom of bringing her to this place but there was no turning back now. She cinched up her coat and Amy did the same and they set out on the trail, the husky loping through the snow before them.

  Nothing passed before the mouth of the cave, nothing blocked the light coming in. Gallagher sat among the bones and scrambled his brains for a plan. He rummaged through the ossified remains, the bones tinkling like dry wood, until he found a thick stem of femur broken off at one end in a splintered point. Barely a weapon.

  A shadow rose up before the mine entrance but the silhouette blocking the available light stood on two legs, not four.

  “Come on out of there,” the figure called out.

  Grissom.

  Gallagher held his breath, didn’t move.

  “The wolves are gone,” Grissom hollered up, his voice ringing off the walls of the mine shaft. “Come out of there. We need to talk.”

  No sense in hiding. Gallagher made for the entrance, his bootheels grinding the skeletal twigs under each step. The splintered bone spur clenched in his fist. If he was lucky, he might get a chance to drive it through the son-of-a-bitch’s eye.

  Stepping out of the darkness into the pale light, he scanned the terrain. No wolves, just the man.

  Grissom stood back from the entrance, raising his palms as if to prove there was nothing up his sleeve. “They’re gone. I called ‘em off.”

  Gallagher gritted his teeth. The last thing he wanted from this bastard was to parlay. “Where did those things come from?”

  “All over.” Grissom lowered his hands. “This country, some from the States. One of ‘em came all the way from Mexico.”

  “And they’re all like you?”

  “No, they’re nothing like me. They’re true wolves now.”

  “True wolves?”

  “True as can be,” Grissom said. “They changed all the way, no shred of humanity left. They can’t ever change back.” He kicked at the snow with his boot. “So no, they ain’t like me anymore. Or Lara. They’ve gone all the way.”

  Gallagher eyeballed the distance between himself and his abductor but there was too much ground to strike. Grissom was strong and he was fast. Keep him talking, draw him in. “What is this place?”

  Grissom stuck his hands in his pockets, casual as can be. “Used to be called Blackwood back in the gold rush days. But you won’t find it on any map. Quiet, ain’t it?” He rocked back on his heels, friendly and gregarious. “That’s what I like about it. Mind you, about two years back, we had some folks set up camp here, looking to build some half-assed hippie commune. They didn’t last too long neither.”

  “Why was that?”

  The man grinned. “They didn’t cotton much to its true residents.”

  “You.”

  “Us,” Grissom said. “The pack winters here. Come the spring, we’ll move back north.”

  Another step closer. Grissom remained relaxed, like he was chitchatting on a streetcorner and didn’t seem to notice that Gallagher was closing the distance. Gallagher kept jawing. “Why’d you bring me here?”

  “Lara needs a little push. And I knew she’d come if I hauled your sorry ass up here.”

  “You think she’s coming?”

  “I know she is.”

  “So what then? You take her prisoner?”

  “Won’t have to.” Grissom scanned the trees about, the mountain. “Once she’s here, among her true kind, she’ll stay of her own accord. Take her place in the pack.”

  Gallagher turned his head and spat into the snow. “Just like that, huh? You think she’s going to settle in with you filthy mutts.”

  “Where is else is she gonna go? With you? We both know that ain’t gonna work.”

  “Why? Why go to all this trouble?”

  “Every pack needs a female.” Grissom kicked at the snow. “Our numbers have been cut down. All males now. The pack needs to rebuild. That means breeding.”

  Gallagher almost dropped the spur, taking in what the man said. “Breed? Are you fucking crazy?”

  “It’s not easy, not with our kind at least. But Lara’s strong. She can do this.”

  Gallagher gritted his teeth to stay calm. A half step. He ballparked the distance to six feet. Almost there, keep him talking. “And what happens then, when Lara joins your pack?”

  “I think you know.”

  “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Fraid so.” Grissom shrugged, like it was all out of his hands. “See, Lara’s got one last step to make to become a wolf. She’s never taken a human life and that’s where you come
in. When the prodigal returns, you get to be the fatted calf.”

  Gallagher snarled. “Then I hope you choke on my bones you ugly son of a bitch.”

  “That’s the spirit, detective.”

  “Course, that’s assuming Lara comes at all. She’s no dummy.”

  “Oh she’s coming all right.” Grissom turned and looked back towards the town. “In fact, she’s already here.”

  Grissom’s back was almost turned. No better chance. Gallagher sprang, slamming the man into the ground. The bone spur in his fist plunged deep into Grissom’s neck. Blood erupted up over his hand, gurgling onto the snow.

  The roar from Grissom’s throat was an echo straight from Hell it sounded so inhuman. He bucked like a bronco, throwing Gallagher.

  Gallagher rolled across the snow, sprang up only to be flattened by a ten-ton weight. Blood spackled over him as Grissom shoved his face into the icy ground. Hissed in his ear. “You’re a tough old bastard, ain’t you? Tough meat too but maybe we can tenderize that some.”

  Gallagher felt the blow to his skull, but only for a tiny moment.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE DOG HAD picked up the scent, bounding ahead on the snow-packed trail. Lara trudged on, the hair on the back of her neck bristling at each step. Grissom and Amy’s father were close but there was something else jagging her nerves raw. The vastness of the evergreens and the mountains, a steamy fog lifting from the snow. The absence of people and their stench. The immensity of sky plucked at some chord in her heart that was hard to deny. Had it been so bad, those days of exile with no companion but the birds? It would be so easy to shrug off her skin and slip into the wolf. Lara Mendes could be left behind like the husk of a moulting snake while her lupine shadow ran free.

  The only thing spoiling the moment was the sound of Amy’s boots grinding the snow.

  The girl marched in silence, cutting a grim figure for someone so young. Armed with the pump action and a cast of pure murder in her eyes, she bore little resemblance to the seventeen-year old she had left behind in Portland. Maybe she was feeling the wild call to her too.