"Hang on," she said.
They burst into the curve that led to her private drive. Jane downshifted and cut across the road, barely slowing as she hit the incline. The headlights burrowed into the blackness before them. Her features jiggled in the dashboard light as smooth pavement deserted them, once and for all.
The deeply-rutted drive was dark and muddy and utterly deserted, the woods to either side ominous and thick, tree limbs gleaming like wet bones in the twin beams of light. The smell of plant life hung heavy in the air, incredibly oppressive, claustrophobic. Syd shivered. Ambush country.
"Jane . . ." he began.
"I wanted to do this before," she resumed, "but it just didn't seem like you were ready . . . shit!" She veered to avoid a broken-off tree branch jutting into the path. "Shit, Syd! You're still not ready! But this kinda forces the issue."
The road hooked up sharply to the right. The four-wheel drive dug in: mud and gravel spraying out behind it, floodwater sluicing in its tracks. Syd waited, while the blackness snaked down his spine. She downshifted and gunned it: the Jeep lurched and shot forward, up the last hump of the rise. Her features seemed to crawl in the dashboard light.
"Fact is," Jane said, tearing up the jagged waterslide home, "I understand a lot more than you think I do . . . "
"Oh god." Beginning, finally, to understand.
". . . and I've been watching you for a long time . . ."
They passed the PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. The path went wide, leveled into the clearing. The mist had thinned. He found that he was seeing clearly. Far too clearly, as a matter of fact.
The road smoothed. Her features continued moving.
". . . and I love you, Syd. I always will. But if you want to live, you'd better stay out of our way. . . ."
Up ahead, a light appeared through the trees. The porch light, softly illuminating the figure that hunkered beneath it now. Old and bent, stark in the light from the open front door. Crouching semi-upright and wailing in terror.
Wailing with a voice that bore no trace of humanity.
There was another form, too, coming around the side of the house. Coming toward them now at an incredible speed. The clearing was just over a hundred yards long. There was very little time. Jane slammed to a halt, threw on the brake, and dove out of the door. The thing kept coming. The thing kept coming. It was slowed by the mud and the rain. But not much. Not much at all.
Syd stared through the metronomic windshield-wiper streaks at the monster framed by the headlights' glare. It came on all fours, but virtually nothing looked right: the front limbs too gangly, the haunches too high. And its long tapered snout held a great leering mouth too huge, too huge for comprehension.
There was a tearing sound, and Syd turned to see Jane doubling over, ripping through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, the skimpy little denim skirt. She lowered her head and took a great sucking breath: the sound that came out resonated to the heart of his spiraling DNA. It was deep, wild, feral.
It was the song of the Change.
Jane was metamorphosing rapidly, expanding and mutating so fast he could barely lock on a feature before it rippled and twisted, shimmered and shifted, making the torturous, crazed transition from woman to were-thing to wolf and more in the handful of seconds it took for her assailant to cover ten of its last thirty yards.
Her torso stretched and contorted, hips dislocating into haunches as arms elongated into legs; her spine crackled, evolved a thrashing tail on the one end as her head triangulated at the other; the skull-plates shifting, as her face pushed outward, becoming a naked leering canine countenance. Ears sprouted and pinned back; lush fur bloomed as razored fangs grew and bared, prepared for attack.
"Oh god," he gasped, the last pieces clicking impossibly into place. "Oh my fucking god . . ."
Syd stared, numb with shock, as the wolf—that magnificent, mysterious beast from the woods—rose before him. It paused, turning its fearsome head toward him, its eyes filled with love.
Then she snarled and wheeled, launching her counterassault.
As Syd could not move, could not speak, could only watch in paralyzed terror as the two creatures hurtled forward on a killing collision course. They were inverse manifestations of the same primal power: one grotesque, the other divine. It was the very same power that raged inside him.
He watched, sickly wondering which side was the stronger.
In the very last moments before Nora was upon them . . .
. . . AND SHE WOULD pay, yes she would pay, the bitch who 'd snuck in and torpedoed her plans, laid waste to her hopes and left her with nothing but bloodthirsty Vic on her tail. She would pay, and then he would pay, for abandoning her when she needed him most. These meat-visions burned in her hindbrain, already telegraphing the taste to her tongue and her teeth . . .
. . . and then there was only the blood and momentum, the moment of collision, the tangle of limbs. Then there was only that deathrush sensation of wading in, face-first, muzzle lunging for flesh. Nora used the sharp claws of her malformed paws to tear holes in the wolf-bitch's back as they snarled and snapped and rolled. She smelled blood, felt soft pelt and dermis tear.
The next blood she smelled was her own.
NO! A gushing divot, torn raw from her breast. Nora yowled, lashed out, took flesh in kind. They rolled again, locked on each other: jaws snapping as they slashed bloody ribbons from each other's flailing limbs.
And there was no thought, no time for thought, no percentage in thought at all. Just the purity of instinct and unmitigated rage. The deafening bloodthunder and the roaring in her ears. The enormous satisfaction of inflicting mortal damage. The excruciating payback of her own flesh, giving way. They rolled, and Nora felt herself under, then over. She lashed out at Jane's throat, missed, went under again.
And the bitch was strong, there was no doubt about it, the bitch was much stronger than Nora 'd believed. But the truth of that didn't entirely come home until she felt those jaws lock on the flesh of her cheek. She howled, tissue shredding, the meat peeling back, muscles slicing like cheese as fangs raked over bone, sending hot grinding sparks of anguish to brightly ignite in her horrified brain.
NO! screamed the dim voice of her human side, NOT MY FACE! NOT MY FACE! But before she could stop it, her left eye was gone: impaled and then squeezed till it squirted vitreous fluid and gore.
And then Nora went utterly, terminally mad; hind legs coming up beneath Jane's unprotected belly, razored claws tearing at the vulnerable flesh. She felt the abdominal walls give way, felt the agonizing tremors wrack the core of her rival. She didn't stop until the bitch was hitting the high notes and the stink of open bowels was everywhere.
Then she rolled again, over, ignoring the pain, wanting only to feast on the vitals she'd bared. Her adversary writhed in the red mud beneath her, thrashing and flailing.
Nora's half-face showed teeth all the way to the roots, the ragged lips pulled back in a sneer. She lunged for Jane's windpipe and almost nailed it, opening a bone-deep gash that ran the length of the jaw.
It was, in retrospect, a very stupid move.
But by the time she understood, it was already too late.
The pain didn't come for a full second, clearly separating itself from the rest of all creation. It came with a blast of hot breath on the hole where a very large piece of her throat used to be. Nora let out an agonized shriek, full of odd harmonics that whistled and sprayed. She screamed again, and the full pressure of the wolf's jaws came to bear on her trachea, punching down hard.
And then the world was shaking, shaking, a blur of motion and growling sound that burbled and roared and overwhelmed her, battered to silence the thoughts in her head as the killing jaws clamped down on her neckbone: sawing it back and forth, snapping the nerves running up through its core, bursting the arteries and veins that supplied the brain with blood and drainage.
And she knew she could have won, but then the thought just went away; gone, along with all the pretty pictures s
he'd been saving for just this occasion. There was no cosmic film projector, replaying her personal highlights and lowlights. No award ceremony. No burning hell. No godly affirmation of glory or shame. No Syd, no Michael, no Vic, no Nora. No pups of her own, and no childhood memories.
She'd always believed that, at the end of your life, God owed you a chance at understanding.
That chance disappeared, with her last dying brain cell.
And then, just like that, she was gone. . . .
36
THE TRAUMA WARD at Huntington Memorial Hospital was a state-of-the-art high-octane offshoot of Emergency Services, where pandemonium was the rule rather than the exception, and battle lines between life and death were drawn in deepest red.
Weeknights were slow, the vast bulk of public mayhem saving itself for the weekends, when a Friday or Saturday night would routinely see the carnage from upward of a half-dozen shootings, stabbings, drug overdoses, and D.U.I, traffic victims side by side with asthma attacks, burn victims, and the periodic full cardiac arrest as some hapless senior's bum ticker gave out.
Still, experience had taught that even on the deadest nights things could go from zero to one hundred in the time it took for the big glass doors to hiss open, the next gurney full of mangled humanity to roll in. And the men and women who staffed the ward—from the techs to the nurses, the interns and resident surgeons to the battery of on-call specialists—were battle-hardened adrenaline junkies, accustomed to fighting 'round the clock for their patients' lives.
They had seen a thousand forms of damage, faced death head-on hundreds of times.
But they had never seen anything like this.
She's not dead yet, was the thought that kept echoing through Tanya Martin's head, quickly changing to I can't believe she's not dead yet.
It was two thirty-seven when they brought the Jane Doe in. Tanya was the head ER nurse on the night shift, an attractive and intelligent five-year veteran of the Trauma team. She was twenty-nine, with a ready, easy smile and strong youthful features offset by a cascade of copper-colored hair and the clearest gray eyes. Only her eyes belied her age, bore witness to how much suffering she'd seen.
Tanya was by the front desk when the panicked, staggering man came stumbling through the door. He was soaking wet, semicoherent and frantic, bearing a muddy, blood-soaked bundle in his arms. Tanya raced to him and grabbed ahold of the bundle, eased it down. She peeled back the folds of cloth, bit back a gasp.
It was a woman, or used to be. She was nude, semiconscious, and she looked like she'd been through a threshing machine. Tanya reacted instantly, calling a code yellow full alert and scrambling the team, then tried to keep her cool as she sussed out her condition.
It was beyond severe: a half-dozen lacerations of the face and torso, any one of which should have killed her outright. A deep cut along her chin, that hooked down and missed the carotid artery by millimeters. The jawbone gleamed, visible through a frothing sheen of bloody saliva. An eight-inch gash across her lower abdomen had eviscerated the bowel. Pink intestine looped and bulged from the hole. The blood loss could only be described as massive.
Strangest of all were the deep puncture wounds that spanned her arms and legs and back. They were huge, ugly, brutal. Tanya recognized them instantly, though she had never seen anything this bad before. Bite marks. All over her body. Animal bite marks. Like a dog, but bigger.
Much bigger.
There was no time to waste. Diaphoretic shock had already set in: sweating tremors, heartbeat racing, body temperature and blood pressure perilously low. They got her onto a gurney and barreled down the hall, got her triaged before they even got her name, tagged her Jane Doe 114. They took X rays and abdomen film and started IVs running even as they drew blood and sent it to the lab for blood-gas analysis, typing, and tox screens. The team worked frantically, creating a blood-spattered hornet's nest of activity around the dying woman. Heart monitors were set up, beeping out the ragged tempo of life; catheters and nasal-gastric tubes were run, draining off blood and waste fluid.
Trauma transformed into a hive-mind, a single cacophonous interlocking organism in blue scrubs and surgical gowns. Their mission was to get her stable: stop the bleeding, keep her breathing, suture the smaller lacerations, and pack the bigger stuff until they got her into surgery. There was blood in her mouth, fluid in her lungs. They suctioned and inobated her, running tubes down her throat to clear the passage.
And that was when she went altered.
And started to fight.
Jane rolled her eyes, slipping in and out of oblivion.
Fear raced through her, tearing her mind in two. There was light and noise and yelling voices. There were hands all over her, doing things. Her human side dimly sensed that they were friendly, that they were only trying to help. But the other side of her was animal, and it was wounded. It wanted them to stop.
It would hurt them if they didn't.
Jane gasped, tried to warn them. Her mouth wouldn't work right. Something was in her mouth. The room fragmented, went black, came back again, bringing with it pain. So much pain. Molten agony blossomed in her belly, spread through her limbs and reverberated back, telegraphing torment. There were tubes in her mouth, tubes in her arms, tubes in her groin.
The smell of her blood was everywhere. It made her animal side crazy. Voices filled her head, strange frantic buzzings tortured her ears. Blood glued her skin to the sheet, dripped from the tips of her fingers and the corners of her mouth. Blood was leaking out of her at an alarming rate. She took another ragged gasp, tasted Nora on her breath.
"Look out!"
Tanya ducked as Jane's right arm came up, a wild roundhouse slash at the tubes anchored to her left elbow. It missed her head by inches, caught the rigging leading to the IV stand instead. The needle ripped out; the resulting tangle sent saline bags and stainless steel crashing to the floor. Her arm continued on its arc, as her hand grabbed the inobation tube and pulled it out. Brinks, the intern surgeon, looked up from packing the abdominal laceration.
"Goddammit, keep her down!"
Simmons, the surgical resident, gestured to Tanya. "Hit her up! Secs-and-Pav, two hundred ceecees!"
Tanya nodded. Seconal choline and Pavulon, enough to paralyze a pissed-off rhino for a good thirty minutes. She ran to the cabinet, pulled out a hypo, tore the bag open.
Back on the table, all hell broke loose as Jane stiffened, back arching off the table and slamming down hard, her legs kicking and spasming. Four more orderlies came barreling in, grabbed on to her limbs, tried to pin her down.
"Jesus Christ, she's strong!"
"Is she fucking dusted, or what?"
"What does the tox screen say? Parker!!"
Parker, the lab tech, came running in. "Blood tox says negative, she's clean," he reported, "but that's not the bad news." He waved a chart in their direction. "We can't match her type."
"What?!"
"Just what I said, the lab can't match it! Her blood type is weird; I've never seen values like this!"
"Fuck," hissed Simmons. "How's her bleeding?"
"Bad," Brinks said. "We're gonna need more units in here."
"Put her on the infuser, recycle her blood, and keep running saline until we get her matched." Jane's left leg kicked, catching the orderly square in the chest and knocking him back three feet. "And get some goddam restraints in here!" Simmons ordered, then shook his head. "She keeps thrashing like this, her guts are gonna be all over the floor!"
The orderlies grabbed the leather cuffs, began strapping her arms and legs to the operating table. Jane writhed in their grasp, and a low growling sound issued from deep inside her chest.
"What the fuck is that?"
"WHERE'S THAT GODDAMNED HYPO?"
"ON ITS WAY!" Tanya came back, swabbing the space below Jane's collarbone. The needle punched home, deep into the subclavian artery. The drugs took effect almost instantly: Jane's limbs went limp, slacked off. Her head dropped and lolled to the side. Th
e orderlies finished strapping her and looked up, out of breath.
"Okay, she's down."
"Get her on oxygen," Brinks told Tanya, "and talk to her. She's gonna be freaked."
Tanya grabbed the oxygen mask and positioned it over Jane's face. As she did, she checked her eyes. Jane's pupils were completely dilated, her gaze erratic, unable to lock. Fight-or-flight syndrome; Tanya sympathized. Secs-and-Pav was scary stuff; nonnarcotic and incredibly potent, it paralyzed the body but left the mind completely conscious. It allowed them to work undisturbed, but for the patient the feeling was rather like being imprisoned inside his or her own skin.
"I know you can hear me," Tanya said softly but urgently, directly to Jane's ear. "We're trying to help you. You're gonna be okay, but you've gotta stop fighting us."
Jane's eyes spun, made momentary, fleeting contact. Tanya's words seemed to register, but the terror there was immeasurable. Tanya grabbed a sponge, gently dabbed Jane's forehead. All around her, the team labored madly.
The X rays came back from the lab; Brinks took one look and flipped. "These can't be right," he said, pointing to the shadowy mass on the film. "Look at the shape of her heart."
Simmons looked up, scanned them. "Jesus," he said. "What the fuck is that?"
"I don't know, some kind of growth or something."
"What are her vital signs?" he asked.
Hines, the pulmonary tech, looked up from the charts. "Pulse one-fifty, blood pressure ninety-five over palp, oxygen saturation eighty-five," he replied. "She's slipping."
"Body temperature ninety-two and falling," Hillary, the OR nurse, reported. She looked at Jane. "Shit, she's going dusky."
This was seriously bad news. In the space of a second Jane's skin changed color, drained from a pallid chalky-white to slate-blue as her circulation turned sluggish, unable to oxygenate.
The electrocardiogram started flipping out: the signal turning muffled, arrhythmic, unsteady. The waveform on the screen was a ragged, asymmetrical horizon line.
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