Outside of the Wire

by Richard Farnsworth

  “Easy, old-timer. Don¹t need a panic here.”

  Joseph started to exclaim loudly, then his head swiveled around on its ropey old neck and he looked behind at the crowd. He turned back and fixed Cadmus with his watery, old-man eyes. “You mean real ones?”

  “When you ever hear of real wolves this far out on the plain?” Cadmus patted the old man’s bony shoulder with a huge hand and turned him back toward his wagon.

  “There’s nothing to be done but keep going.”

  As they walked Cadmus said quietly, “Break out your silver-loads for the boy’s scatter-guns, quiet like, and we’ll keep it going. I’ll walk on the top of the berm till the land flattens back down level with the road.”

  The highway had been cut flat, while the hill rose a good ten feet above. It was a prime location for a bushwhack and that's why Cadmus had chosen the overpass as a lookout.

  "You busting out on us?" Joseph asked.

  "Gave my word on the deal, old man. Security for you and deliver the new-religioner's package and that girl to Sanctum's my end and that I'll do."

  The old man picked his way through the cracked asphalt, glancing up at Cadmus, but not meeting his eyes. "I just figure the deal was on the old highway. I understand if you might want to change your end, diverting south cause of the time-storm like we did."

  When the old-worlders tried to kill the world, seams that held space and time had pulled hard and sometimes little cracks formed. They called the cracks time-storms. Soundless, black tornados, sometimes yards and sometimes miles high, and it was best to stay clear. That brought them a day's pull south to the old Interstate, to the edge of a wolf pack's territory. Cadmus had warned Joseph, but thought they just might make it through. This late in the summer though, dry as it was, raiding parties ranged far.

  “We could turn back, and see if the way’s clear?” Joseph offered.

  “They have your scent now. They’ll follow whichever way you go.”

  Joseph made an indecisive old man sound.

  "I’m sticking. I made a point to point bargain, not a route deal.” Cadmus gave him a smile he thought reassuring and added, “Perhaps next time I should include a clause."

  Cadmus followed the old man into the overpass shade, out of the merciless sun, to the side of the old truck.

  "A clause. Sound like a lawyerey-man," Joseph scoffed. He pulled and the passenger door groaned open.

  "That's what my father did before the world died." Before the bomb shelter made for the wrong cataclysm, and the darkness and the chaos.

  "Hmmm. I did the same then as now. Mercantile. I used to own a slew of stores, called seven-elevens. Remember those?" Joseph reached into the cab and pulled out a small cloth bundle.

  Cadmus closed his eyes a second and thought back to a happier time. The scene accompanied by the sound of his father¹s harmonica. A skinned knee after a T-ball game, his father's big hand on his shoulder, a bell jingling as a glass door pushed open.

  "Slurpees?"

  Joseph's seamed old face cracked a little more as he smiled. He pulled a small handful of shotgun cartridges from the cloth and handed a few to each of his boys. They broke the guns open at the stocks and replaced lead loads with silver ones.

  Cadmus had almost laughed when he met this troop on the road, and was challenged by these two with three rounds between them. Security indeed.

  He gave them nods now, told one to go up front and one behind and then he headed back up the lip of the desiccated embankment himself, where he could see for miles. And be seen.

  #

  One of the cattle mooed piteously and set the others to twitching around in their makeshift corral. Cadmus stood motionless, bare-chested and ready just out of the circle of light cast by the watch fires.

  He heard the same thing the oxen did. Soft pads on the hard dry ground. Three wolves not four like he’d thought earlier, less than a hundred yards away in the moonless dark.

  Circling the camp. He had a silver-round chambered, but he wouldn't fire until he was sure of a kill. He slid the belt ax out, then slipped the leather loop around his left wrist and held it low. He'd get one with a bullet for sure, but that would leave the other two. He inhaled deeply and fixed the position of the group's alpha. Not enough of a location to get a bead yet, just a general direction. He growled a challenge at a pitch the normals couldn't hear.

  A snuff-snuff-snuffing of rebuttal came back to him from the dark and pulled his bare flesh up in patches of gooseflesh.

  Cadmus smiled to himself in anticipation of battle.

  He savored the warm surge of adrenalin and said, "I am Cadmus of the Stove Bank Ursans. Come forward and we can parlay."

  The alpha crept closer, using the half-buried car-hulks and other detritus of a dead world as cover.

  The normals clustered somewhere behind him in the bay of what had been the garage of an old gas station. The burned-out building on the highway that headed north of the Interstate looked defensible against three or four wolves. The shell had no roof, but the walls were too high for a wolf to jump. The normals hid behind barrels and piled trash at the open side.

  The makeshift corral of squared-up wagons stood forward of the stumps of broken gas pumps. Cadmus had stashed his shirt and gear there in the back of the pickup. The fires he set were at the four compass points outside their perimeter and he set the two brothers feeding those hungry flames with whatever scraps of wood could be found.

  When there was no answer to his offer Cadmus said, “These normals are under my care, and if you come for them I will rip your heart from your chest." He meant no false bravado with his words, a promise, an invitation, nothing more as he stood alone, waiting in the dark.

  He felt the alpha creep closer and shift partway back. Cadmus caught the metallic scent of blood as the flesh tore and reshaped.

  "Leave them, Ursanthrope. We have no quarrel with you." The voice hissed from the darkness directly in front of him, but still too far to get off a clean shot.

  Cadmus answered, “We can pay a toll in goat. Or steer. A full belly for their trespass."

  "Their lives for the trespass. And the girl too," the not quite human shape growled in the dark.

  Cadmus growled his own reply, waiting for the wolf to strike. But it didn't. He smelled the musky sweat and blood as it went back all wolf and moved off to the right. He shifted his one-handed grip on the big rifle and waited.

  "Mr. Cadmus."

  Poised as he was on the edge of battle, he hadn't heard the little human creep up behind. He whirled around at the sound of her voice.

  Outlined by the fire, he could see she wasn't as young as he'd thought. Straight-backed and willowy tall, her helix pendant rested in the hollow between small high breasts. She was all the way into the first bloom of womanhood and smelled of health.

  "Go back to the shelter, little one. This is no place for you."

  "I think the wolf here is meant to distract you. The other two are around the back side. I thought you'd want to know."

  "You a reader, little Harmony-girl?"

  The young woman cast a sideways glance to the cracking fire. One of the new religioner women was calling for her in a fearful-shrill voice and headed this way.

  Harmony looked back to Cadmus and said, "They call me an earth witch. I see the land and these wolves are like blank spots on it to me."

  "Thank you, now on back. And tell the brothers to hold their shots, less they see what they shoot." And with that Cadmus left Harmony to the old woman's remonstrations while he stalked a slow circle to the opposite side of the camp in the dark.

  #

  His shot caught the wolf in the flank as it leapt, just behind the shoulder.

  Even if the bullet weren't silver, it would be unlikely the wolf could survive. Hitting where it did, the big thirty caliber round punched through ribs and tore through both lung and heart. The wolf made a pitiful, surprised sound as it died, but the momentum of its leap carried it into Domino, knocking him over. The
boy screamed as the fluid lupine form knocked him flat.

  That left Cadmus with two more wolves in the dark.

  Much better odds. With the belt ax dangling from his wrist he slid the bolt and chambered another round; waiting for the second to come. He strode into the light and kicked the smoking carcass off the sputtering boy.

  "Get up!" he hissed. "Now's not the time to give way to panic.”

  Domino scrambled to his feet, fumbling to get a grip on his shotgun. He smelled of fear and urine.

  "I told you to keep your head on a swivel." Cadmus sniffed at the night air again and couldn't place the wolves close.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Cadmus, I never saw it."

  The throaty howl of the alpha rent the night air to his left and silenced Cadmus’ reply.

  The second wolf replied behind and to the right, raising all the hairs up on the big man's neck.

  He waited. A third wolf howl came far off and to the right. A fourth, from the same direction and just a little closer.

  "Oh, shit!" Cadmus bellowed. He turned to the makeshift stronghold.

  "What is it?" Domino asked.

  "I thought there was four, one must have gone for the pack.” The boy looked at him without comprehension.

  “They’re coming.”

  “Who?” the boy said.

  “All of ‘em,” Cadmus replied.

  He waded through the paltry barricade and into the garage bay. He went straight to Harmony and brushed aside the new religioners that tried to block him. He slipped the rifle sling over his shoulder and grabbed her slender upper arm, pulling her up close.

  "How many coming?" he breathed into her face. There was no time to do this gentle.

  The big doe eyes were round and frightened, but under control. She was the only one but him that could know what was coming.

  "I can't tell exactly, but I'm thinking more than ten, maybe twenty." She said it slow and deliberate.

  The throaty sigh rumbled up from deep in his chest.

  "They're not more than a mile off," she added,

  The old new religioner man with the spear, leveled it at Cadmus and said, "Leave the child be."

  Cadmus snatched the weapon out of the old man's hands and tossed it back against the cinder-block wall. The others protested but kept distance.

  "Joseph!"

  The merchant was at his side. Cadmus kept his hold on the girl and asked, "Your truck runs?"

  "Well," Joseph started. His two boys were with him too, neither wanting to be out there with the howling wolves.

  "I can smell the fuel in it." Cadmus cut him off.

  "Yes, it runs. But ethanol is hard to come by, so the cattle. I only use it in emergencies."

  "This is an emergency. Come with me." The huge man stalked back out as a cacophony of howls filled the night, coming closer.

  Cadmus jerked Harmony along with him, the new religioners protesting in his wake. She pulled away, as if not sure of his intentions. He tightened his grip and when she started to scream he tucked her under his huge arm and jogged to the little truck. He put his back against the vehicle and pushed it out, opening the tight square that held the terrified oxen. When the truck was clear they stampeded past and into the night.

  Shuffling up in a rheumatic limp, Joseph yelled, "What are you doing? We need them!"

  "Perhaps they'll slow up a few of the hungrier wolves. Now get in your truck and get it started. It's a good forty miles to Sanctum."

  "We can't fit everyone on this truck," Joseph protested.

  "We're not gonna."

  Harmony squirmed around and got her teeth into the hairy bare flesh of Cadmus’ arm. He released his grip and when she relaxed her bite he grabbed her up by the hair and gave her a shake. He grabbed up the belt ax and brandished it at the new religioners that had followed them out.

  "Joseph. There's no time to discuss this." He paused as the multiple wolf howls twined into a single song of death. "There's upwards of twenty lycanthropes and even I can't fight that many off."

  "You can't leave all these people to that," Joseph pleaded.

  "Not gonna. I’m staying. You and the girl and the package to Sanctum were the deal."

  Harmony started to wail when she realized his intent and sank her fingernails into his forearms. Cadmus slapped her on the forehead with the flat of the ax.

  As she went limp, he stuffed her in the front seat of the pickup and then made to swipe at the new religioners. He slid the rifle off his shoulder.

  "Everyone back in the shelter!" Cadmus, tired of talking, pushed Joseph to the truck with the butt of his rifle. "They get a hold of an earth witch it'd be better she died. They'll try and turn her, you know. Now get out of here or I'll leave you and do the driving myself."

  The first mirror pairs of eyes could be seen just past the fire now. Cadmus snapped the rifle to his shoulder and put a round between them. Between the crack of the bullet and the echo he heard that satisfying thunk as the round went through bone.

  The smell of cordite masked the overpowering scent of wolf for just an instant before the breeze took it.

  He turned back to the pickup as the engine turned over to see Domino and Checkers scrambling up onto the tarp covered bed. The new religioner woman that had come for Harmony earlier in the night scrambled on after. Cadmus stood between the truck and the panicking crowd, not letting them flood onto the truck and prevent it from getting out.

  "I'll bring along whoever I can. I'll light a fire to the south of Sanctum two nights time. Maybe three. Bring my things and payment then. Don't make me come in and find you," Cadmus yelled to Joseph.

  The old man nodded as he mashed the gears and tried to find the groove. The car lurched forward and sputtered dead with a popped clutch and a wash of dark exhaust.

  Three sets of eyes and raspy panting now, past the fire. Cadmus took aim again and the eyes disappeared.

  "Get back to the shelter!" he bellowed at the people milling about in panic.

  The engine rasped and finally caught.

  Cadmus snapped a round at another pair of eyes, but the bullet found only empty air.

  The gears mashed again and the truck lurched forward without stalling.

  Cadmus took aim at another pair of eyes and caught sight of the shape in his peripheral vision just as the jaws locked onto his bare right bicep. He roared indignant pain and held the rifle left-handed by the barrel. There was no way to use it in this tussle now, so he tossed it to Domino as the truck went past.

  "I'll want it back," he yelled as the truck started to pick up speed.

  Now with hands free, he flipped the ax on its thong into his hand and chopped through the back of the wolf's neck. The smashed vertebrae let out a dry wood crack and the limp form made a wet thump as he dropped it to the cracked asphalt.

  A wolf leapt at the speeding truck and was hit with a shotgun blast. A second wolf caught one of the boys by the leg and pulled him to the ground. He was dead before Cadmus realized it was Checkers.

  Bleeding, bare-chested, with the rage building in him he turned to the pack advancing.

  Screams came from in front of the garage bay as the first wolf got in among the normals that hadn’t made it to shelter.

  Cadmus dropped his ax and made as if to hug the wolves. He called up the bear inside him and felt the burning and tearing as he shifted. He roared the pain. He roared the primal challenge.

  "I am Cadm-," he growled as the massive teeth tore up through his gums. The thick, golden-brown fur of a grizzly erupted out of follicles and covered his rippling muscles. Man’s flesh reinterpreted into an ursine form.

  His world went to shades of red as the first wolf leapt at him and he sank claw and fang into the steaming warm flesh of his enemy. The bear roared and snarled, but the man inside laughed maniacally with the berserkers’ joy of battle.

  The rage-clouded brain no longer registered the human cries of pain and fear.

  A wolf on his back, and he rolled forward. Wet snapping as he crus
hed it under his bulk.

  Cruel jaws clamped on his leg. He raked claws over the ladder-slat ribcage, pulling the wolf to him when the claws stuck in something wet. He bit down and roared into the mouthful of coppery-wet wolf flesh. Shaking and ripping as he struggled back up on hind legs.

  The pack parted from him and he saw the alpha.

  Bigger, stronger, less wolf-like than the rest. Wicked teeth bared as it stalked him.

  Swaying side to side, foamy red spittle dripping from his rage-twisted muzzle, the bear roared and then Cadmus lurched forward.

  The alpha leapt. The circle of wolves closed, and the golden-brown behemoth disappeared under the gray wave.

  #

  Cadmus stood back from the fire, watching the walls of Sanctum. They weren't walls really, but rather old semi-truck trailers turned over on their sides and filled with dirt. This side was a snakey quarter mile long. Along the forward lip was an unbroken line of concertina and barbed wire and Cadmus could make out little guard shacks spaced out on top.

  Silhouetted against the wall in the dark, a little trio ambled up.

  "Mr. Cadmus, you out here?" It was the old man's voice. Tense. He carried a pack and the big bolt-action rifle. Another silhouette fidgeted with a shotgun.

  For an instant Cadmus thought they just might plug him. "Joseph, over here."

  The old man relaxed and loosened his grip on the rifle. He held it by the barrel and rested the butt on the ground. Only then did Cadmus let the bear rest and step forward into the circle of light.

  The girl sucked in breath.

  A huge nude man covered in fresh healed wounds must have been a sight. The blush spread up her neck, stopping only at the ugly red and purple bruise across the bridge of her nose and forehead. Looking past him now as if there might be someone else in the dark, a complicated expression of sadness formed when she saw no one.

  Cadmus reached for his pack and then pulled out his shirt and faded jeans.

  "Domino, Harmony. Glad to see you all made it safe."