Stroud had rushed for the barrel of silver nitrate, toppling it now. The contents spewed forth but Kerac leapt back and out of sight, beyond a tree, swerving and coming straight for Stroud again. Stroud rushed for his rifle but Kerac got there at the same instant and snatched and hurled it away. The other two weapons were nearby but Kerac stood between Stroud and the guns.
Kerac's enormous claw swiped at Stroud, making him fall away and wheel toward the gas canister he knew to be to his right. Stroud grabbed for the canister and got hold of it, but at the same instant he felt Kerac's firm, painful grip on him and knew that Kerac was about to sink his fangs into him.
Just then a flare burst overhead, lighting up the entire scene, and Stroud realized it was Lou and Anna from above. She was likely trying to get a shot at Kerac this instant, but was unable to do so without fearing for Stroud's life. The sudden flare disoriented Kerac and in that second's hesitation Stroud lifted the canister of gas to ward off Kerac's attack. Kerac's ferocious fangs came down on the slender canister, sinking into it, spewing gas into his eyes as Stroud pulled free and rolled down from the hillock and away from the dangerous cloud beginning to form.
Kerac stumbled into the fire once more and a shot rang out from above, a shot that exploded the canister jammed in Kerac's mouth, sending parts of Kerac flying down over Stroud where he lay at the bottom of a ravine.
Stroud saw an animal of some size fleeing through the darkness from where he lay, but he couldn't make it out. It appeared, however, to have only two legs and it could be another of Kerac's kind, but then again, it could have been just a deer. Stroud got to his feet and rushed from the widening circle of gas created by the explosion.
* * * *
"We've got to be sure," Stroud told Anna and Lou Cage. "We must be absolutely sure that we did indeed destroy them all."
For the past twenty-four hours, Stroud had flown the helicopter in ever-widening circles around the site of the destruction. Where the table rock had collapsed, seeing it from the air, one might think a UFO had landed there.
"We've done all that is humanly possible, Abe," said Lou Cage. "And we've seen no activity down there in all this time. I think it safe to say our work here is over."
Stroud continued with the infrared equipment in the night, searching, obsessed with the idea that some of Kerac's pack had escaped the destruction below. Anna More was asleep on a cot in the cargo bay. All of them had become depressed and extremely upset over the loss of life, the final deaths of Saylor, Tulley and then Dave Michelson like a hammer blow to the heart. Cage also found that the recording equipment had been smashed and the film ripped away and missing. All of their "evidence" for the existence of Kerac's kind was gone, all but the film from Stroud Manse, and this, Cage knew, would be ridiculed if brought before other scientists.
Stroud assured him that someday they'd return here with an archeological team, and all the evidence of the wolf-people would be uncovered and catalogued properly.
Anna More, hearing this, got up and went to Stroud. "No, you must never disturb the site ... never!"
"You're not suddenly going superstitious on us, are you, Anna?"
"Leave them to their graves, Stroud ... please."
"She may have a point, Abe," agreed Cage. "We still don't know enough about the properties of their body chemistry, the venom they carried, their blood. Suppose their decaying bodies carried a dormant, transferable seed of some kind? Opening the crypt we just made for them could be very dangerous."
"Perhaps you're right."
"Let's go home, Stroud," said Anna.
Stroud nodded, turning the bird toward Anna's home of Merimac.
EPILOGUE
Saying goodbye to Merimac, Michigan was easy, but saying it to Anna Laughing More was difficult for Abraham Hale Stroud. But there was no staying, and from Anna's perspective there was no leaving her home. Not even for him. They had had a final passionate time together, a time that Stroud would remember for the rest of his life, and then he said his final goodbye to her at the airport, vowing that he would return to her some day, even though both of them knew better.
The Lear jet banked once and circled about the small community where so much had happened. Abe thought of home, of Andover, but he knew he must postpone going home long enough to stopover in Chicago to see how Cage was doing, and to hand over a final report to Commissioner Burns. Once these chores were done, he could think of home.
He returned to Chicago several days after Lou Cage had arrived in the city. Cage had quickly settled back into the routine duties of his job as Chief Medical Examiner of Chicago by the time Stroud had wandered in to see him. Lou was fine and hearty, back to his usual jolly self, but there was something troubling him, and he kept telling Stroud he shouldn't have come back to the city, that he should have gone elsewhere.
"Where else?"
"Anywhere else," said Lou, slapping a newspaper in front of Stroud. The absurd headlines had only worsened during their time in Michigan. "You're going to have reporters all over you if you don't get out of here soon," he warned Abe as they shook hands.
Of course, Lou had accurately gaged the interest of the newspapers and the public in Abraham Stroud, and so had Stroud. He had wisely used no limousines, traveling across the city by cab, drawing no attention to himself. He made his way to Commissioner Burns' office next.
Stroud read about himself in the back of the cab. The photo was one taken during the manhunt for Kerac, a not too complimentary likeness, in which he was grimacing like a madman. There was enough innuendo in the story to lynch him if this were 1924, but nothing in the way of solid evidence, nothing one could quite call fodder for criminal proceedings in a modern court of law. Yet, he knew Lou's concern did signal a very real danger. He knew there were going to be several unhappy days spent here in the city which he had helped save from the likes of Kerac and a long list of killers and rapists. He'd be hounded by the press and disparaged by other cops, Phil McMasters in particular. As for Burns, he was unlikely to be anything but the politician he was, only wanting to distance himself from Stroud.
Stroud saw himself a virtual prisoner in his suite at the Palmer House, his newfound infamy and celebrity a curse from which he knew he must run; yet he doubted escape was even remotely possible.
Stroud saw Commissioner Aaron Burns, detailed the entire incident for him and handed him all the documentation they had on Kerac and the existence of hundreds of werewolves in the forests of Michigan, showing how Stroud had, with the help of his team, eradicated them. Burns could do with the information what he wished, and apparently he wished to bury it. He had contacted Stroud soon after receiving the film in which Perry Gwinn was killed by Kerac, along with the affidavits from Cage, More, and Stroud himself. Burns suggested that Stroud keep any further information on the case to himself. Then Burns buried the file, but not so far that Burns himself could not get his hands on it when he might need it. He told Stroud that he would like to call on him in the future for any "unusual" cases.
Stroud replied that he wouldn't be interested. He was weary of things "unusual" and weird. Burns warned him that Phil McMasters and others had spread some misinformation about him, and that he might be reading about himself in the Star or the Enquirer in the near future, but that they'd gotten no help from Burns.
"What kind of rumors?" Stroud asked, although he didn't really want to know.
"For instance, that you are such a bored millionaire that ... that..."
"Go on."
"That you held a man captive, released him into the forests and hunted him down like an animal."
"Nasty enough."
"Your place in Andover'll be a hotbed for reporters for a while. I suggest you take a trip abroad."
"I'll take that under advisement, Commissioner. And thanks for the warning."
The following day the tabloids featured Abraham H. Stroud as a mad millionaire, onetime war vet with a steel plate in his head, a psycho cop and now a "playboy" of the bizarrest
order who, like Vlad the Impaler, enjoyed seeing other men suffer. There was a list of employees in Stroud Enterprises who were on the missing persons' lists of several major cities. The old story of how Stroud was at the center of controversy in his native Andover, where a strange case of mass disappearances was somehow linked to a terrorist raid on that town, was rehashed. It linked Stroud with the strange disappearances of literally hundreds in Andover--which only Stroud and a handful of faithful friends knew as the vampires they were. The story called him a disciple of the fictional vampire hunter Van Helsing from Dracula fame. It said that Stroud was insane enough to think himself a modern-day vampire hunter and killer, except that what he killed were other men.
The fools didn't even know that Van Helsing was indeed a real flesh-and-blood man that Bram Stoker had written about, that Dracula was a nonfictional account of diaries and letters compiled by Stoker, and that Van Helsing was the predecessor of the Stroud line, that Stroud's father and his father before him had all been vampire hunters. All facts too bizarre even for the Enquirer's editors.
Burns had been right. The tabloid press was having a field day with Stroud, undermining his reputation as a serious archeologist. The Chicago papers took up the case of the missing Perry Gwinn, whose body had never been found. They laid his disappearance at Stroud's doorstep, a warrant was gotten up and the manse was visited by FBI agents serving papers. They had found nothing, and could not locate the central chamber where Kerac had been kept and where Gwinn died, not without Stroud's cooperation, and he gave them none.
Andover was crawling with press. Stroud flew out, escaping the madness in search of peace, and he found as much as he might at the Cahokia dig. A new chamber had been discovered at a stratum that no one there even suspected. That night, Stroud telephoned Cage from the field to gloat over the fact, and to again thank him for all his brave assistance in Michigan. Cage was angry with Stroud for being lucky enough to be back at the dig, complaining about the amount of work that had piled up in Chicago during his absence. He also complained of his assistant, Ira Howe. Howe had not let Cage rest since the day of his return, pounding him with curiosity about Kerac and the outcome. Cage said that Howe was relentless about it.
"Take him to Burns," said Stroud. "Ira deserves to know the truth. Show him the film. That'll shut him up."
"Like it did Burns."
"What do you mean?"
"Burns isn't your friend, Abe, believe me."
"Meaning?"
"He sicked the press on you, Abe, to hang you out on the media line. I thought you'd have figured that one out on your own."
"I thought it was McMasters."
"Bet he told you to leave the country, didn't he?"
"Something like that, yeah."
"Bet he told you McMasters was behind the accusations, didn't he?"
"Yes ... yes, he did."
"The whole thing was too much for Burns to handle. Maybe it's too much for any of us to handle, Abe. You included, along with me and Ira, and Anna More."
The mention of Anna's name slowed Stroud's heartbeat. "Have you heard anything from her?"
"Abe, I know you love her. Why don't you go see her; talk to her."
"No, not now ... not with all the hullabaloo following me these days."
"Understood, and as for Ira Howe seeing anything in Burns' files--forget it."
"Bastard Burns."
"Abe, if any man deserves better, it's you. You should be a goddamned national hero. Instead, they're frying your ass in the press, making you look like ... like--"
"Like a fiend and a ghoul, like a sadist, a modern-day Marquis de Sade, a man-killer who likes to bathe in blood."
"Maybe you ought to heed Burns' suggestion, Abe."
"What? Go abroad? Turn tail and run? Admit to the world they're all right?"
"They'll find you at the dig; disrupt things for you and everyone there."
"I left a false trail."
"When they can't get any information from the Ashyers about you, or from your friends and enemies in Andover, they'll dig up the fact you've been spending time at Cahokia, and they'll be on those people there like ticks."
"Goddammit, Lou, what in hell do you suggest? The French Foreign Legion?"
"I have a friend who's involved in a fantastic find in Egypt."
"Egypt? A dig?" Stroud was instantly curious. "What sort of find?"
"The best sort, in the city of Nazlet el Samman, at the foot of the great pyramids, where they've found an archeological site below the city. It was uncovered during the excavations for a goddamned sewage treatment plant that the Egyptians asked the Americans to help build. All construction has stopped for the time being, until they can determine just what they've got."
"Sounds intriguing."
"Why not join them?"
"Can you arrange it, Lou?"
"Can a duck swim? Of course, and you won't regret a minute of it. You'll be as content as a hog at the trough. Meanwhile, everything here will cool; it'll all be placed in its proper perspective, and you'll be vindicated."
"Wouldn't go that far ... vindication's a lot to ask of people. I'll settle for silence."
"Least people'll learn you don't have blood dripping from your walls, maybe."
"Maybe."
"Egypt it is then, and I'll get back to you with the particulars. You can fly over as soon as you hear from either Mamdoud or me."
Stroud almost choked. "Dr. Al-lulu Mamdoud? The curator of the Cairo Institute of Egyptian Antiquities?"
"That's him."
"This must be something big ... really big...."
"Like a dream come true, isn't it? But believe me Mamdoud'll work your tail off. There's a time limit on the dig before the Egyptian authorities'll come in and close it down so they can get on with their damned plans for a proper sewage system there."
"Then I'd better hurry."
"Exactly. As for Cahokia, the place doesn't need you, Abe."
"Yes, well, my friends here are still my friends, but you're right. Once the place is descended upon ... Did I tell you, Lou, what we've recently found here ties in with the Wendigo belief?"
"What's that?"
"The new chamber revealed some new information on the Cahokia's so-called mythology about a half-man, half-beast that roamed about the fringes of their world. The cryptologist and linguist and pictographologist are treating it as curious, arcane and quaint information about the folklore of the Cahokia."
"Yes, well, between the wolf-people and Abe Stroud, it would appear there is something in common in that thread."
Stroud laughed lightly. "How so, Lou?"
"You're something of a folk tale yourself now."
"You sure Dr. Mamdoud will want a fearsome legend working for him?"
"Mamdoud is his own legend. He won't let it get in the way of his dig."
"Sounds like as good a hiding place as the world has to offer a celebrity like myself."
"I'll set it up, Abe. And, Abe ... for what it's worth, thanks ... thanks from me for every goddamned one of us."
Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2) Page 26
