Way of the Wolf

by James Axler

  Beside the dock was a long, narrow boat, whose ends rose up in five-foot-tall spires that turned into carved goat's horns.

  Because of the distance, Albert wasn't sure if he really saw movement in the boat. But it looked like one shadow shifted slightly.

  Then a self-light flared to life, held in a bony, spectral claw. It burned, creating a nimbus of light that hurt the dwarfs eyes even at the distance. The man holding the self-light wore a long purple robe that seemed mottled with black mushrooms that grew out of it.

  "Are you coming, Albert?" The voice sounded like something from the last gasp of a grave.

  The robed figure put the self-light to a lantern hanging from the boat spire behind it. The wick caught, flaring up like it had been dry for days, before the heat pulled the oil through the strands. Then the robed figure threw the self-light onto the dark water of the underground river.

  Albert could see that it was a river now, could see bits of flotsam along the left. With the lantern light going now, he also saw they were bits and pieces of corpses. An arm floated by, missing three fingers and whose stubs showed they had been gnawed off by some kind of animal.

  "No, I'm not coming," Albert replied.

  "Stay there and you'll die," the robed figure whispered.

  "And if I go with you?" Albert demanded.

  "Oh, you'll still die." The robed figure chuckled, and it was the sound of dry bones rubbing together. "But it'll be later."

  "Fuck you," Albert said, pointing his blasters at the boatman. "You can't make me go."

  "No." The boatman settled the hurricane glass over the lantern. It was tinted a light blue, the color of a vein beneath a light covering of flesh. And it was in the shape of a fat-bodied spider, with ruby-colored mandibles protruding from its fierce mouth. With the wick burning and shifting inside it, the legs looked as if they were moving. "But I can make you stay here." He picked up a long pole made up of what looked like shin bones. "Mebbe it's worse than what you think might be up ahead."

  Albert turned as the earth shivered behind him. Without warning, the smooth slope of the short beach leading to the river ruptured in dozens of places. Things that might have once been human surged up from the ground.

  Lifting a blaster, Albert fired at the nearest one, expecting to see the .38 load knock the thing on its butt. Instead, a puff of dust rose from the thing's chest, and it kept coming.

  "Your choice," the boatman declared. "Mebbe you should think about the boat less traveled by." The dry bones laughter echoed mockingly throughout the huge cave.

  Greenish saliva dripping with maggots crusted the undead creatures' mouths as they came for Albert. Their chests were alive with eel things that looked every bit as hungry as their hosts.

  Albert fired both .38s empty, but the flying lead didn't slow the undead things at all.

  "Time grows short, Albert. You have to go to the lady in the lake if you want to survive."

  Abandoning his position, Albert raced for the boat, his boots thudding against the hewed logs. The boatman had already pushed it out into the current, so he had to leap to get there.

  "Who are you and what the hell is this place?" Albert demanded breathlessly. His hands shook as he struggled to reload his weapons. He scanned the beach anxiously, watching the undead things walk into the water. He shivered uncontrollably, thinking how the creatures might walk out under the water and gain on the slowly drifting boat.

  "My name is Bob," the boatman said, "and hell is precisely what this is."

  "Where are the others?" Albert demanded as he snapped the cylinders closed on the .38s.

  "There are no others," Bob answered. "You are the only one." He turned his tattered face toward the center of the river.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Me? Why I was scheduled to pick you up. I assure you, I had much better things to do. Napoleon was all set to conquer Europe again, but he didn't know Joan of Arc had risen once more to lead William's troops into battle. Or that General Custer had crossed the Atlantic after winning at the Battle of Little Bighorn to help the Germans."

  Listening to the boatman speak made Albert's head hurt. Some of what the robed man said made sense, but it was all jumbled up in there, as well. He pointed his blasters at the boatman. "You say you're taking me to see the lady in the lake."

  "Yes." Bob regarded him calmly. "That is your destiny. It has always been your destiny."

  "I don't know a lady in the lake."

  "Albert, please, you must calm down."

  "I am calm." But Albert knew he was lying because his hands shook as he held the .38s.

  Abruptly the spider-shaped hurricane glass pulled free of the lantern, somehow keeping the burning wick trapped inside it. The glass spider with its belly full of fire climbed down the spire and started along the edge of the boat for Albert.

  "Now see," Bob said irritably, "you've gotten Morris upset again. Put those bastard guns away or he might bite you."

  Instead, Albert turned the blasters on the glass spider and ripped off two shots. Both of them hit the spider but ricocheted off.

  "You can't harm it," the boatman said. "Remember? Or mebbe you don't remember anything at all."

  Albert shook his head in disbelief. "Every time it gets harder for you," the boatman stated. "I worry about you when you're gone." He raised his voice, but it was only a stronger, sibilant whisper. "Morris, leave him be."

  The glass spider froze, glinting cobalt blue crystalline. It stood up on its back four legs and raised the front four as if scenting the sulfurous air. Reluctantly it began the journey back to the lantern base. "I want to go back with the others," Albert said. "And if you can't arrange that, I want to go back to Hazard. At least there I understand things."

  "Everything here will be made clear soon," Bob said in a gentle tone. He continued poling, pushing them out into the center of the river.

  "Who is the lady in the lake?" Albert asked.

  Even though he knew his blasters were pretty much useless, he found he couldn't holster them. The idea of going through this with empty hands turned his stomach. Sweat dripped from his face, and he realized that some of the heat he was feeling came from the river water.

  More body parts drifted by, some of them bumping briefly against the boat with soft thuds before floating on. There were, he saw, a great number of internal pieces now, as well as body parts. Gobby masses of intestines floated past, looking like obscene jellyfish. Chitin-covered insects clung to them like they were life rafts.

  "To know her is to love her," Bob said with a sigh. "I know I do."

  "What does she want with me?"

  Bob turned his rad-blasted face to Albert. "I don't know. Honestly. The whole concept of her needing you is beyond me. I never thought she did. And I don't think you've fooled her into thinking you care for her." He poled once more, waited a moment, then put his pole in front of them. "Well, here we are."

  The boat stopped, cresting the gentle current of the slow-moving river.

  "Here we are where?" Albert asked. He looked all around the boat, seeing only the black water. But the thought of the undead corpses walking along the bottom unnerved him.

  "Where she is," Bob answered. "The lady in the lake."

  "How deep is the water here?"

  Bob took a moment to think about the question, then glanced at the glass spider. "Morris, do you know?"

  The glass spider did some quick arithmetic on its four front glass legs, then twisted toward the boatman. The legs flew in quick answer.

  "About ninety feet, give or take two or three," Bob replied.

  "Your pole isn't that long," Albert argued.

  "A gentleman doesn't talk about the length of another gentleman's pole." Bob the boatman drew himself up to his full, tall, thin height and wrapped his robes more tightly around him as if incensed.

  "You can't have been touching bottom all the way to pole us out here."

  Bob drew the pole up, displaying the cracked but polished colle
ction of shinbones that made it up. "Albert, haven't you ever noticed that no matter how tall or short a man is, his legs always touch the ground? The pole, just because it is a pole, has not lost that ability."

  To Albert that made no sense. Without warning, nausea seized him again, feeling like it had back in the elevator in the redoubt. He dropped his .38s and fell to his knees, retching as he clung to the side of the boat.

  The water roiled in front of him, tossing the gobby chunks he'd just spit up back into the boat and over him. When they landed, they started running around, forming tails and legs.

  "She's coming!" Bob cried in his thin, dry voice. "The lady of the lake is coming!"

  "This is a river," Albert argued, "not a lake." Somehow it seemed important to point that out. "Shouldn't she be called the lady of the river?"

  Before Bob could answer, a typhoon suddenly took shape beside the boat, erupting from the water. Gory parts of corpses and whole bodies twisted up in a column of water that shot over twenty feet into the air. A woman formed of the water, as black as ebony and smooth as marble. Her eyes were green rot scraped from a mildewed coffin, and her teeth as hard and thick as tombstones.

  Still, she was beautiful when she smiled.

  She reached for Albert, lifting him gently from the boat. At first her watery grip felt soothing and warm, like a bed in the middle of winter.

  Then the flesh began to melt from his bones as the acid ate into him.

  Chapter Twenty

  "You've gone far from your roots, Krysty. Far, far away. You may never become at home again. Just a rolling stone, and rolling stones gather no moss. No more gathering ye rosebuds as ye may."

  Krysty Wroth walked through the garden and felt sick to her stomach. Everywhere she walked, all the green and growing things died. She halted and looked back along the path of destruction she had made through the garden.

  "Who are you?" she demanded.

  The voice belonged to a female, but that was all she was certain about. And the words were hauntingly familiar.

  Ryan and the others walked ahead of her, easily within hailing distance, but Krysty chose not to call out to them. They walked in formation, the way Ryan would have ordered them to, but no way would she have been walking drag at his request. Not unless Ryan or J.B. was severely wounded. They all appeared healthy. Where they walked, the grass didn't die beneath their feet.

  A wild rose vine brushed against the back of her hand. Immediately, as if in fright, the vine recoiled like a child shrinking from a nighttime monster.

  "Gaia," Krysty said, turning her face up to the rad-blasted orange sky, "help me to understand."

  "Gaia no longer hears you," the voice continued in a childish taunt. "You are only fallow ground as far as the Earth Mother is concerned. You have no future, Krysty, and now you have no past. You have only today, and that is but fleeting hours."

  Krysty cried, feeling the tears course down her face. She called out to Ryan, but evidently he didn't hear her. She was torn, unwilling to continue across the beautiful garden and leave only blighted ruin in her wake.

  The companions drew even farther away from her, not even bothering to turn to look in her direction to make sure that she was there. Ryan always made sure when they were on patrol that two others watched over one, and the one was responsible for looking over two others. It was a network that had saved their small party a number of times in the past.

  "Ryan!"

  Even Krysty didn't hear her own voice this time, though she knew for a fact that she had screamed her lover's name. Frightened now, she ran across the garden, taking huge bounding leaps so she wouldn't trample as much of the greenery. But when she looked back, she saw that a wide strip of the garden was dead anyway. All she had to do was pass over it, not simply touch it.

  "Your time is past, Krysty," the voice taunted. "All that you've been taught to revere, you've walked away from. Mother Sonja wanted you to build, but you haven't built. You've had a hand in more destruction than anything else. You and your precious Ryan Cawdor."

  "Not true," Krysty denied. "Sometimes we couldn't fix the horrors, or we would have been killed ourselves. But at times…we made a difference."

  "Lies," the voice contradicted her. "You're misremembering events and things as badly as that old cretin, Doc Tanner. Do you know why he forgets? Because it's bastard convenient, that's why. But Gaia doesn't forget, Krysty, and you've broken covenant with her. Time and again you've asked her to help you, asked her to help you help your precious companions. And what have you done for her?"

  Krysty ran on, feeling her lungs burn in her chest. She shouted to herself, trying to drive the maddening voice from her head. It was no use; she continued to hear it plainly.

  "Nothing," the voice shrilled, "you've done nothing for Gaia, but you've expected everything in return. Now Gaia will have her own back."

  A summer storm gathered in the orange sky above in a heartbeat. The wind picked up speed, becoming a raging vortex that sucked cankerous clouds into the area overhead that looked like a collection of bruised boils.

  Ryan turned then and came running back to her. His face was a mask of concern, given darkness by his black eye patch.

  Tears streamed down Krysty's face as she reached for her lover. But a white-hot lightning bolt sizzled down to touch her with its caress. The world exploded in a bright flash of incandescence. She dropped, seemingly lifeless, to the ground, unable to control her body anymore. She felt the grass curl away beneath her, pulling back into the ground.

  "Somebody help me!" Ryan shouted, kneeling beside Krysty. "Mildred!"

  Mildred rushed over and grabbed Krysty's wrist.

  Krysty's eyes remained opened. She saw everything that was going on, but she couldn't move. And she couldn't feel. That was the worst thing of all. She knew Ryan was holding her head in his lap, but she couldn't feel him at all.

  "She's dead," Mildred replied. "I'm sorry, Ryan, but she's dead and there's not a thing I can do about it." Tears welled up in the woman's eyes, then spilled down her cheeks.

  "No," Ryan said hoarsely. "She can't be dead. I won't let her be dead."

  "You don't have a choice," the Trader said, stepping up somewhere from behind the companions.

  Krysty thought it was strange that she hadn't seen the old man earlier, but she'd seen stranger things in the past few minutes.

  "You take her any farther from this spot, you'd just be carrying a corpse on your back. But you aren't going to leave here without burying her," the Trader said. "None of those people who traveled with me are ever going to be left behind without a proper hole to be covered up in. Won't allow it."

  Krysty watched, unable even to blink, as Ryan and the others dug a hole for her. She wanted to cry, but even that was kept from her. She prayed to Gaia to have mercy on her, but only silence greeted her prayers.

  The hole was finished in short time, only things didn't go exactly as Krysty thought they would. They put her in the grave, but they put her in it standing up, like they had dug a well instead of a gravesite.

  She lay back against the side of the strange grave, looking up at the man she loved and the best friends she had ever made, listening to Doc say words over her as if she really were gone.

  "I am reminded at this time," Doc said, his white hair whipping around his face, "how we humans have a span of time between two eternities, and into that last eternity we now send reluctantly one of ours, she who was like a flame that could warm and burn and heal. May your emerald eyes light the ways of angels. Gaia keep you in her graces, dear sweet Krysty."

  Krysty tried to move, but her limbs lay leaden. She tried to shout, but her voice stayed removed from her. Then a wild burning began in her toes. They moved. At first she thought her paralysis was draining away. But that was before she felt her toes elongating and stabbing deep into the rich, dark earth. Her arms rose at her sides, reaching toward the sky above. Somehow the rain clouds had all blown away, leaving only the dreadful orange sky above.r />
  Her skin sloughed away, revealing hard bark beneath. Ryan and the others stepped back, their faces dropping in shock at what was happening.

  And Krysty continued to grow. Her arms split out and became branches that changed the course of the mild breezes blowing over the garden. Her hair became foliage festooned with bright blossoms. Mixed in with her branches, though, were whiplike, barbed appendages that coiled restlessly.

  Ryan came forward, calling out to her.

  Krysty felt the hunger building in her, an appetite like none other she had ever known. The barbed appendages slithered through her branches, tracking their prey.

  She still had a face; she felt the rough bark skin that overlaid it. But she had no voice. She wasn't able to shout a warning to Ryan.

  The barbs leaped from her, swift as striking cobras. They penetrated Ryan's body, shooting completely through his chest, killing him instantly.

  "As this man took you from Gaia," the feminine voice spoke, "so shall you now take what you need to replenish yourself for the Earth Mother."

  Krysty felt Ryan's blood coursing through the appendages to fill her and whet her appetite. She drank hungrily, tasting the salt of his blood, hating every drop, watching Ryan's body turn white in her deadly embrace.

  RYAN OPENED his eye.

  His mouth felt like desert sand, and his head throbbed like someone had slammed it with a thirty-pound sledge. He ached all over.

  Cautiously, afraid his head might drop from his shoulders if he moved too quickly, he turned to search the mat-trans unit for his companions. Krysty lay beside him, tears running down her temples and blood dripping from the corner of her mouth where she had bitten herself during the jump. She mewled in pain, but he felt it was more from whatever she was imagining than from any real physical discomfort.

  Ryan sat up with care, feeling his head go spinning around him. He glanced up at the armaglass walls, finding them as white as mother-of-pearl, almost angelic. The room on the other side of the walls was dark, so he couldn't discern any details yet.