The shock had taken years off Lou's life, he reasoned, and a great deal more off Saylor's. It amazed Lou that the man had had the presence of mind to fire when the creature came at him as it did.
Now all that Cage saw on each monitor frame was the cloud they'd created, an occasional lock in on a dead beast that had succumbed to the bullets. Cage asked now that some of the beasts be examined, to determine if any had been killed by the gas.
Saylor told his men to see to it, but to be careful. Several werewolf bodies without bloody wounds were found, and it was assumed that the gas did indeed have a deadly effect upon them.
"Good, good!" said Lou. "Now we can fight them from the air, Abe. Now you people can be pulled back without any further casualties."
"No way," said Saylor. "We're playing this out, Stroud, whether you like it or not."
"That's right," agreed Tulley.
All of them stopped in their march toward the drop site. Blue, coming up the rear with Nails over his brawny shoulder, agreed. "We're not wimping out."
Priest frowned, said nothing, only hefting the AK-47 that had been Nails' and made a gesture of agreement.
"You two go to the rendezvous point, Stroud. Get the woman out," suggested Saylor, his steely gray eyes not leaving Anna's.
"Now, just a minute," said Anna More. "Stroud doesn't talk for me. I'm here to see this thing through."
"Cage," said Stroud through the com link below his gas mask, "looks like we're going to stay."
"But Abe!"
"We put it to a vote, Lou."
"Move out," said Saylor.
"You're all crazy!" shouted Lou from above. "You know that?" In the chopper, Lou could see the expressions of each man's face as Anna More looked from one of them to the next, settling on Stroud. In a partition shot, Lou saw More's face behind her gas mask. The two of them, Stroud and More, seemed at first in a test of wills, but Anna's camera panned down to her hands and Lou saw that Stroud held her hands in his.
"They know the lay of the land," she told Stroud. "They know every hiding place, every crevice."
"Cage, see if you guys up there can advise us on location of our prey."
Cage was angry. "Damn it, Stroud, I'm telling you they vanished. Just vanished."
"They chameleon themselves against the land," Stroud told him. "At night, you'll have to go to infrared."
"You fools aren't planning to spend the night down there!"
"If we have to, Lou, we will."
"Crazy ... all of you are crazy."
"Watch the drop site. Let us know when they arrive."
Stroud said to Anna, "I only hope they take the poisoned meat. Kerac'll try to dissuade them. He knows it's poisoned, just like he knew about the transmitter."
"He's beaten down their leader. They'll listen to him," she said.
"Afraid so."
"Perhaps bringing him back here alive wasn't such a good idea, after all, Doctor?"
More started away, Stroud's eyes and his camera watching her go. Cage realized the depth of Stroud's feelings for More for the first time as he watched the scene unfold.
Then all of the brave, foolish people disappeared in the dense, sulfuric cloud that hung all around them. The cloud offered cover, of a kind. It also offered a kind of sanctuary, now the creatures understood its deadly effect on their kind. Still, it was eerie and terrifying to walk in the valley of it, not knowing what moment might be one's last.
Kerac, his painful forearm throbbing, surrounded by his followers, looked down on the valley of death where others of his kind lay facedown in the pine needles. He'd tried desperately to herd them all away from the deadly spray of gas that rained down on them, but some--many--failed to heed his bray of warning. He saw some of them stumble now from the periphery of the fatal mist, coughing, retching and keeling over, their bodies twitching as the gas made its way through their systems and finally to the heart. It was a gas concocted by this man named Stroud.
The others were following Kerac now, fully cognizant of his wisdom. Showing was better than telling. He led them blindly to find shelter among the thickets and toward the other side of the bowl of earth they had climbed from. Kerac was hearing rumblings from the others now, and a large portion had moved off in another direction, and Kerac feared the worst when he scented the sweet odor of blood in the air. It was Stroud's meat, dropped from the machine they had brought Kerac here in.
Kerac rushed toward the front of the herd wildly, trying to warn the others, but he was being ignored.
He came to a clearing where some sixty or seventy others had already gathered, feasting and fighting over the gift left by Stroud.
Kerac bellowed in rage and anger, racing in, tearing at some of the other males, ripping meat from their mouths and pointing to others of their kind that lay on the earth, groveling and writhing in wicked pain, as if their insides had been skewered with sharp hooks. Again, Stroud's silver poisoning.
Kerac lifted one huge chunk of red meat after another and hurled it far into the air. Some of the others raced after it, as if it were a game. Kerac then threw himself at others who continued to feast. Some simply could not comprehend the situation until one and another and a third of the writhing ones stopped writhing. This was followed by others, two, four, six, eight, ten. Now all who had taken the least bite of the tainted meat began falling, knees buckling. Some rolled their large eyes up at Kerac, who stood on the carcass heap dropped by Stroud's devils. All around Kerac, his followers were dying, all but those who were just now arriving.
Overhead, a helicopter soared across the field and Kerac lifted a clenched claw up at it and bellowed his frustration.
A second helicopter flew by. This one dropped something from its cargo hold, and Kerac's bellow of frustration turned into a roar of warning. He raced as fast and as furiously as he could from the meat, and behind him, he could hear the deadly weapons open fire on his kind.
Kerac climbed and clawed his way over the bodies of his dead brethren, knocking aside others in his way to get free, knowing that just one of Stroud's silver-doused bullets meant his death. Suddenly, one of the deadly bullets struck him in the leg.
Kerac collapsed on a second heap of meat. He bent full over and clamped his teeth down hard on the bullet's entry wound, tearing out his own flesh and the bullet lodged there, spitting it out in rage. He then got up and leapt a full ten yards onto the earth, away from where the bullet had come from. The dirt beside and around him exploded in short, powerful little bursts, and a tree he passed was cut in two. Someone among the killers was aiming directly for him. Stroud, no doubt.
He fell instinctively to the earth, pretending he'd been hit again and killed. From this vantage, with the deadly rain of toxic gas coming ever closer, Kerac's eyes met those of the Indian woman again, the same one who had stood outside his cell aiming a gun at his eyes. She fired again, but her gun jammed. When she looked up, Kerac was gone, replaced by hundreds of others like him. She fired into the mass, instead, watching them fall.
Warren Priest opened fire with the others in a mad attempt to strike every howling beast before them, including those already poisoned by the meat. Ringing in his ears was a deafening mix of automatic gunfire, the roaring of wounded and affronted monsters, and Stroud's powerful voice shouting a warning about the need to return to their masks. Priest looked up and saw the cloud of gas descending rapidly over them, realizing it could kill him quicker than it could the beasts for which it was intended. He stopped firing long enough to strap on again the full face mask and turn on his oxygen supply. As he did so, he realized that Tulley, ahead of him every step of the way, had already covered himself in this regard and was continuing the fight.
Priest again lifted his own weapon when suddenly he felt an enormously powerful grip take hold of him from behind. He tried to bring his gun around to fire on the thing that had hold of him. He screamed for Tulley, but his voice was drowned out by the roaring and gunfire all around. He realized that the werewolf that had h
old of him had appeared from what seemed a hole in the side of the earthen hill, hidden by the dense foliage. The beast lifted him off his feet, and suddenly Priest registered the awful, gut-wrenching feeling of its enormous fangs as they lodged into the flesh and bone at the nape of his neck. It was the last sensation he felt, and his hands opened in nervous reaction, the unlucky AK-47 that had been Nails' dropping to the earth in front of him. He saw it as if it were happening in slow motion. He felt himself dragged into the darkness as if it were a dream.
Priest realized that he was drugged and stiff and unable to use any of his limbs or muscles. He could not speak, and his hearing had become desensitized. It was a condition that would drive him mad. He could not even feel the force tearing him along now through what seemed a crevice in the earth known only to the beasts.
Priest's heart felt as if it would burst with fear, and yet, it would not burst. Even this horrendous fear was controlled by the deadening venom coursing through his body. He was worse than dead, he told himself. He was trapped alive by the werewolves.
He felt himself lifted and turned as if on a spit to come face-to-face with the maimed Kerac, who was crouched and bleeding and angry. Something dire and wicked crossed the features of the cunning bastard, and Priest knew that his fate would not be so easy as Nails' had been.
Priest watched Kerac wrestle a long polelike stick from another of his kind. Priest's eyes seemed the only thing working over his entire body. He saw Kerac circle him with the dirty stick, and he felt the nudging and force as Kerac worked at his back, roaring and shoving the others from Priest. Then Priest felt himself go suddenly horizontal and he was suspended in a macabre fashion somehow, staring down at the earth, his feet off the ground. He felt his own dead weight being jostled and bumped along as his body was being moved now through the cave. And when Warren Priest saw his own dripping blood discoloring the earthen floor, the soldier of fortune mentally retched, as his bodily need to do so was quite out of his control. Priest realized what Kerac had done with the pole; realized they'd attached him to the dirty stick, ramming it through him like a pig sticker.
"Masks! On with your masks, again! Now!" shouted Stroud. They had circled the clearing to almost better than halfway when Kerac leapt in, tore away at the others, trying to frighten them off. They saw Kerac climb atop the tainted meat, fending the others off in a macabre version of King of the Mountain. Then the choppers came in, dropping their deadly balms, and then Anna More fired, hitting Kerac.
To the amazement of the humans, Kerac tore out a large portion of his leg to combat the poison to his system, as he had with the implant. Now, bleeding, he appeared for a moment shot again where he fell, and then somehow he eluded them.
With the first volley from Anna More came a full-scale fire barrage from the others, racing to kill as many as possible before the gas closed in around them, blotting out their targets. Stroud and Saylor had told Cage to hold back with the cloud this time until they could destroy as many as they could with the bullets, but Cage either misunderstood or had simply disobeyed Stroud, fearing for their lives.
Many of the beasts came straight at them, launching a counterattack. Blue relentlessly mowed them down, as did the others. Tulley and Saylor feared some of the beasts were getting around them, preparing to cut them off from one another, and they were right. Several came at the soldiers from behind.
Stroud fired a volley that brought down some of these. Others slinked off and blended in with their surroundings so well, Stroud may as well be trying to fire on a gnat. Stroud kept Anna plainly in view, covering her back as well, turning, when suddenly gunfire exploded near him and a huge beast fell into him, dead. Anna had just killed one that was about to take Stroud's head off. The weight of the creature knocked Stroud dizzy, and he dropped his weapon. Anna rushed to him, to drag him from the helpless position of being half under the huge werewolf, when another leapt from a tree. Stroud grabbed for his weapon, but it was inches from his fingers. Blue, screaming and firing, rushed in, tearing the creature in two with a rain of bullets.
Saylor raced to Blue, yanking his gun from his control and slapping him from side to side. "One bullet per customer, damn you, Blue!"
Anna knelt over Stroud, and with some assistance from Tulley, pulled him free. Together, the humans formed a circle and Tulley said, "Where's Priest?"
No one had any answers.
Stroud tried to hail Cage, to ask after Priest. The others began shouting for him.
"Warren!"
"Yo! Priest!"
No answer came, and Cage was out of range. "He must be hurt, unable to answer," said Anna.
"Where'd you last see him, Tulley? He was with you, wasn't he?"
"He was beside me when the firefight started, but after that ... hell, I guess I didn't see him."
"Scout around, eyes peeled. Careful of the trees," said Saylor.
"Priest! Priest! Where the hell are you, man?" shouted Blue to no avail.
"He chickened," said Tulley. "That's it. He chickened, doubled back."
"How do you know that?" asked Saylor.
"Was talking funny, Earl. I told him to drop it, but he was talking funny there for a while."
"What kind of funny?"
"Like maybe the guy in the helicopter was right; like maybe we ought to just nuke them from the air; like this is crazy, what we are trying to do."
"And so, you think he split?"
"If he did," said Stroud, "alone, out here, he's dead meat."
"What the hell're we going to do now?" asked Blue.
"We carry on with our mission," said Saylor just as Tulley screamed.
A tree beside Tulley had reached out and grabbed him by the throat, choking him, except that the tree had become one of them. "Shoot! Shoot it!" shouted Blue.
But there was no way to shoot it without killing Tulley in the bargain. Saylor knocked Blue's weapon from him as Tulley grabbed his bayonet and began stabbing at the powerful hands about his throat. The grip loosened, and the thing that had Tulley went to its knees and crumbled like a dying flower, a victim of the gas.
"Jesus," said Tulley, gasping for breath, "these things are everywhere."
"Damn that Priest," said Saylor. "I never would've taken him for a deserter."
"Maybe he didn't desert," said Stroud.
Anna More agreed. "Maybe they've got him."
This thought silenced the professional soldiers.
"If that's so, then we'd find his weapon," Saylor finally said. "Take me to the last position you two took up, Tulley--exactly."
They followed Tulley to the spot, and there lay the AK-47 that Priest had commandeered from Nails.
Tulley hefted Priest's weapon, inspecting it carefully. "It's hot, but the magazine's near full."
"No sign of blood," said Stroud, "either on the gun or the ground."
"They've taken him alive," said Saylor, a bit shaken at the thought.
"No sign of his mask, or any of his other equipment," commented Anna More.
Stroud had to agree. "It does look like abduction, and if that's the case, it's the work of Kerac."
Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2) Page 20
