"Count on it," DeVries said.
They had to prod brush out of the way to reach the cave mouth. It was larger than it had seemed from a distance, four feet high and three feet wide—large enough so that a man didn't have to get down on all fours and crawl inside. The sun-glare made the blackness within a solid wall.
Larrabee stood off a little ways, butted the Savage against his shoul- j der, took a bead on the opening. "Okay," he said to Hixon, "put the light in there."
Hixon switched on, sent the six-cell's beam probing inside the | cave.
Almost instantly the light impaled a crouching shape—big, hairy, wild-eyed. The thing snarled, a sound that was only half human, and came hurtling out at them with teeth bared and hands hooked like j claws. Hixon yelled, dropped the flashlight, tried to dodge out of the j way. Larrabee triggered his rifle but the suddenness of the attack threw his aim off, made him miss. The man-beast slammed into Hixon, threw him down; slashed at him, opened a bloody gash along his neck and shoulder; swung snarling toward Larrabee and launched himself like an animal as Larrabee, fighting panic, jacked another shell into firing position.
He wouldn't have had time to get off a second shot if DeVries hadn't held his ground below, if DeVries hadn't fired twice while the man- beast was in mid-lunge.
The first bullet knocked him aside, brought a keening cry out of him and put him down in the brush; the second missed high, whanged off rock. By then Larrabee had set himself, taken aim again. He shot the bugger at point-blank range—blew the left side of his head off. Even so, his rage was such that he jacked another shell into the chamber and without thinking shot him again, in the chest this time, exploding the heart.
The last of the echoes died away, leaving a stillness that was painful in Larrabee's ears—like a shattering noise just beyond the range of his hearing. He got his breathing under control and went in loose-legged strides to where Hixon lay writhing on the ground, clutching at his bloody neck. DeVries was there too, his face pale and sweat- studded; he kept saying, "Jesus God," over and over, as if he were praying.
Hixon's wound wasn't as bad as it first seemed: a lot of blood but no arteries severed. DeVries had a first-aid kit in his pack; Larrabee got it out and swabbed antiseptic on the gash, wrapped some gauze around it. Hixon was still glazed with shock, so they moved him over against one of the rocks, in the shade. Then they went to look at what they'd killed.
It was a man, all right. Six feet, two hundred pounds, black beard and hair so thick and matted that it all but hid his features. Fingernails as long and sharp as talons. The one eye that was left was a muddy brown, the white of it so veined it looked bloody. Skins from different animals, roughly sewn together draped part of the thick-muscled body; the skins and the man's bare flesh were encrusted with filth, months or years of it. The stench that came off the corpse made Larrabee want to puke.
DeVries said hoarsely, "You ever in your life see anything like that?"
"I never want to see anything like it again."
"Crazy—he must've been crazy as hell. The way he come out of that cave ..."
"Yeah," Larrabee said.
"He'd have killed you if I hadn't shot him. You and Charley and then me, all three of us. It was in his eyes ... a goddamn madman."
Larrabee didn't respond to that. After a few seconds he turned and started away.
"Where you going?" DeVries said behind him.
"Find out what's inside that cave."
▼▼▼
... I am one of the old breed—not the most fearsome of Us. And sickened by the things I'm compelled to do; that is why Vm warning you. The new breed ... it is with the new breed that the ultimate terror lies.
We are not all the same . . .
▼▼▼
DeVries wouldn't go into the cave, wouldn't even go near the mouth, so Larrabee went in alone. He took the Savage as well as the flashlight, and he went in slow and wary. He didn't want any more surprises.
He had to walk hunched over for the first few feet. Then the cave opened up into a chamber nearly six feet high and not much larger than a prison cell. He put the light on the walls, on the floor: more animal skins, heaps of flesh-rotted bones, splatters and streaks of dried blood everywhere. Things had been killed as well as eaten in here, Christ knew what things.
The stink was so bad that he couldn't stand it for more than a few seconds. When he turned to get out of there, the flash beam illuminated a kind of natural shelf in the wall. There were some things on the shelf —the stub of a candle stuck in a clot of its own grease, what appeared to be a ragged pocket notebook, other things he didn't want to examine too closely. On impulse he caught up the notebook by one edge, brought it out with him into the hot clean air.
Hixon was up on his feet, standing with DeVries twenty feet from the entrance; he was still a little shaky but the glazed look was gone from his eyes. He said, "Bad in there?"
"As bad as it gets."
"What'd you find?" DeVries asked. He was looking at what Larrabee held between his left thumb and forefinger.
Larabee squinted at it, holding it away from his face because of the smell. Kid's spiral-bound notebook, the covers torn and stained, the ruled paper inside almost black with filth and dried blood. But on half a dozen pages there was writing, old writing done with a pencil pressed hard and angry so that the words were still legible. Larrabee put his back to the sun so he could read it better.
▼▼▼
. . . Believe it. Believe me. I am the proof.
We look like men, We walk and talk like men, in your presence We act like men. But We are not men. Believe that too.
We are the ancient evil . . .
▼▼▼
Wordlessly Larrabee handed the notebook to DeVries, who made a faint disgusted sound when he touched it. But he read what was written inside. So did Hixon.
"Man oh man," Hixon said when he was done, with a kind of awe in his voice. "Ben, you don't think . . . ?"
"It's bullshit," Larrabee said. "Ravings of a lunatic." "Sure. Sure. Only . . ." "Only what?"
"I don't know, it ... I don't know."
"Come on, Charley," DeVries said. "You don't buy any of that crap, do you? Some kind of monster—a werewolf, for Christ's sake?"
"No. It's just . . . maybe we ought to take this back with us, give it to the sheriff."
Larrabee gave him a hard look. "The body too, I suppose? Lug it twenty miles in this heat, smelling the way he does, leaking blood?"
"Not that, no. But we got to report it, don't we? Tell the law what happened?"
"Hell we do. How's it going to look? He's got three bullets in him, two of mine and one of Hank's. He jumped us out of a cave, three of us with rifles and him without a weapon, and we blew him away—how's that going to sound?"
"But it was self-defense. The sheriff'll believe that . . ." "Will he? I'm not going to take the chance." "Ben's right," DeVries said. "Neither am I." "What do we do then?"
"Bury him," Larrabee said. "Forget any of this ever happened." "Bury the notebook too?" "What notebook?" Larrabee said.
▼▼▼
. . . You fools, you blind fools . . .
▼▼▼
They dug the grave for the crazy sheep-killing man and his crazy legacy in the grass above the outcrop. Deep, six feet deep, so the predators couldn't get at him.
AND THE MOON SHINES
FULL AND BRIGHT
Brad Strickland
▼▼▼
MOONSET.
Kazak lost his claws. His fangs. His pelt.
His muscles could have driven his lean lupine form through a forest three times as fast as a man could run, but now beneath his skin they withered to strings against the bones. They could not support him, and he fell. The floor softened to receive his collapsing form, then solidified again, leaving one patch warm and yielding beneath his left side. In utter silence and without fuss, the floor grew a bed to support him, lifted him to the proper hospital height, and then stopped. Th
e air in the room began to warm to suit his naked and unfurred body.
But the temperature was cold at first, so terribly cold. He shivered and groaned, his belly shrunken into a clenched fist of pain, his head light, spinning. His eyes, blurred and bleared from the wrenching transformation, ached at the hateful alien light. His seared lungs heaved. Icy air whistled in his nostrils, his human nostrils that only moments before had been alive to every possibility of scent, from the beast-reek of himself to the delicate spoor of Dr. Iglace.
Naked, sweating, shivering in his new form, Kazak lay on the fresh bed, gasping and only semiconscious.
The wall opened. As though in a dream Kazak heard light footsteps approaching. A warm cupped hand touched his forehead, soft fingers pried open one eye to the agony of light. "Weight," Dr. Iglace said.
In its precise child-pitched voice the room replied, "Fifty-five point eight kilos, representing a total loss of twenty-three point seven four kilos in twenty-four hours."
"Feed him," said Dr. Iglace.
The bed grew tentacles, flexible tubes that writhed and moved as if they were alive. Several pinioned Kazak's left arm, lacing it to the surface so that no movement of his could release it. Another, sharp- pointed and probing, found Kazak's brachial vein, penetrated it, and began to pump synthetic nutrients, glucose, proteins, amino acids, into his blood. The compounds reached his brain, and with a shuddering jolt Kazak felt himself yanked into consciousness. The doctor stood over him, gazing down with remote professional interest evident on his dark, ascetic features. No mercy showed in his expression or in his abnormally pale blue eyes.
"Why?" Kazak croaked.
"Because," Dr. Iglace said in a reasonable voice, "you are the world's last werewolf."
▼▼▼
He had been free once, some time before, in a place that formerly had been known by a name that marked it as a part of Central Europe. Kazak waited naked beneath an ash tree, waited for Sister Moon to rise and change him.
Parkland around him: rolling hills, trees evenly spaced, no people.
Below him, in the valley, sheep.
Sunset. Reds and golds in the west. Violet in the east.
Dark.
Darker.
Darkest.
The molten brass sphere of moonrise shone full in his face, reflected in his eyes, and led to the brief agony of change. He felt ancient forest- nurtured earth beneath his pads, springy, deep. The world had gone black and white and shades of gray, seen through new eyes. A universe rolled in through his nostrils, oh! leaf-mould and anthill, human-scent from picnickers, cold metal and other of their vehicles, and mutton warm, wool-clothed, bloodfull.
He felt the spring of taut muscle rippling beneath his coat, the stretch and crackle of joints, the dilating gape of a yawn. Driven by ancient instinct, he paused to lift his leg against the tree, to mark this place as his, though he had never met any others of his kind and never expected to meet any.
Then he was off, running down the slope, silent, and the moon- silvered forest glided by on either side. Scent of water wafted from farther ahead. A welcome breeze brought sheep smell, food smell. Drool pooled hot in his mouth.
His feet knew how to place themselves, to drive his body forward with only the minimum of effort, to steer him right and left around trees, around stones. They made no more noise than a patter of raindrops on the deep mould of the forest floor.
Below him drifted the sheep, stodgy, earthbound clouds. He caught the dry rotten-grass smell of dung, and in his ears rang the quavering anxious sounds of their bleats. Closer now, hidden by brush, singling one from the flock without pausing to consider—
Then bursting out, hearing the cries rise in pitch, feeling them scatter, guessing rightly that the one will move this way, the quick and merciful snap of jaws—
Kazak fed well that time. The last time.
He dreamed about it often in this place, this coldness of a laboratory. His jaws champed in sleep, his dreaming tongue tasted the sweet hot gush of blood, the life of the flesh.
But he always awakened to disappointment, to tests, to the room that obscenely seemed to live, to the dry cheerless benevolence of Dr. Iglace.
▼▼▼
"Though you are under-educated, you are not unintelligent," Dr. Iglace said to Kazak one morning after some tests, a morning between full moons. The interview took place in Kazak's cell. The floor had grown furnishings, a table, chairs, even an ersatz window looking out into a holographic representation of a country morning. None of it made the least difference to Kazak.
When he remained silent, the doctor, seated comfortably in one freshly-grown chair, continued imperturbably: "I think you can grasp your importance to us, and your position."
Kazak paced hopelessly. "Let me go. I have rights."
A silent chuckle made Dr. Iglace bounce slightly in his place. "You have no rights. The Planetary Constitution guarantees rights to humans, and you are a lycanthrope, something rather different. Homo sapiens ferox, perhaps."
"I'm a man. At all times except the nights of the full moon, I am a man."
"To outward appearances. And yet you are not, really. Shall I go through the list, Mr. Kazak? Shall I enumerate the differences in DNA and RNA, in hormonal balances, in bodily systems? No? They are informative, I assure you. Do you know that lycanthropy is genetic, Mr. Kazak?"
Kazak nodded. "My family," he muttered. "Cursed. Cursed for four hundred years, since a werewolf bit my ancestor—"
"Yes," the doctor murmured. "Your family is a special case, rather."
The false window shimmered and changed, now representing sunrise over a placid ocean. Kazak gave it one disgusted glance. "I can't stay here. I can't stand being confined. You're killing me."
"Nonsense. We're caring for you very well. Where was I?"
"The condition is genetic," the voice of the room said in its childish soprano.
"Yes, to be sure. But it is also contagious. Lycanthropes are actually genetic variants of basic human stock. The genes that make you a werewolf are scattered throughout the human species. Not everyone has them, of course—fewer than one in thirty thousand these days, according to computer analyses."
"And I happen to be one of the lucky ones."
"Mm. Different, anyway, for in your family the genes have proved dominant. In all other surviving cases, the genes are recessive, dormant. Did you know, Mr. Kazak, that the bite of a lycanthrope in lupine form carries with it a secretion of the salivary glands that alters DNA? Changes it subtly but crucially in people with that recessive lycanthrope gene? That's what makes lycanthropy communicable, though the odds of your finding and biting someone with the gene are very small indeed."
"I've never hurt a living person."
"Why not?"
Kazak looked away. "Perhaps I was never hungry enough."
"And when you were hungry, you dined on humbler fare. Sheep and forest animals." Dr. Iglace sighed. "Show us the Szamos Park," he said.
Obligingly the window expanded and elongated until it filled an entire wall of the room. The scene shifted, became the wild landscape where Kazak had roamed. Where he had been trapped.
Kazak knew that it was only holography. Yet his nostrils twitched
and he had to restrain himself from flight, from a futile attempt to run into that scene. "You recognize it, I see," Dr. Iglace said. "What do you think it is?"
"My home," Kazak said. "The wilderness."
Dr. Iglace bobbed again with his silent chuckle. "Don't be absurd. The wilderness died four hundred years ago. That is a park, and the animals are either domestic or genetically reconstructed ones, bio-engineered to be harmless to humans."
"I was free in the wild."
"You never lived in the wild. There is no wilderness left, Mr. Kazak. Oh, the government claims that the Inner Planet colonies are settlements in the wilderness, but that's a lie, a recruiting tool. Mars and Venus are only half-domesticated frontier worlds, but they have no indigenous 'wilderness,' indee
d no life of their own, only such genetically engineered plants and creatures as we have provided."
The doctor leaned close, so that even in his human form Kazak could smell his delicate odor, a faint sweetness. "Would you claim those animals as wild creatures, Mr. Kazak? They are spawn of test-tube and genetic manipulators, not beasts of the wild. In fact, Mr. Kazak, 'nature' has not existed for centuries, not anywhere in the settled solar system. Least of all here."
The scene became a view from space, with the globe of the Earth hanging against the velvet black, cold stars pricking the darkness. "Earth is completely tamed, Mr. Kazak, and fully occupied already by humans. You have no right to exist on it."
"Then kill me," Kazak said. "It only takes a silver bullet."
But the scientists had something worse in mind for Kazak than killing him.
They studied him.
▼▼▼
They caught him again in dreams.
He was lupine and running, running beneath a full cold moon, sandpaper-crusted snow burning the pads of his paws, frosty air keen in his nostrils. They flew behind him in small craft a few meters above the tallest tree branches. He could not smell or hear them, could glimpse them only brokenly and momentarily, but he sensed pursuit.
The silvery eggs flashed moonlight at him, spears thrust through the black canopy of tree branch and needle. His reserves were great, his energies all but boundless, and he needed every ounce of power. To cease running, to go to ground, would doom him. Yet the pursuit was relentless.
As a wolf he did not count, but more flying things than he had legs pursued him. Time after time he broke for deeper cover, headed for darker forest, only to see ahead the telltale flash of light as a different hunter circled to forestall his flight. Even his iron will and sinew at last began to fail him. The breath seared in and out of his lungs, and his knees began to tremble with weariness. Once or twice he crossed a clearing, stood challenging them, a lone wolf waiting a chance to strike. They refused the challenge, merely came to rest in a ring around him, as high as the trees, hovering silently.
The Ultimate Werewolf Page 27
