Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  My skull stretched – stopped – stretched, a sudden fluid distention, the squeaks and snaps of which were tiny firecrackers in my head. All the claws came simultaneously, a feeling like ten big boils bursting at once, the only unequivocally pleasurable part of the whole routine. Lengthening thigh bones pushed me upright. There was space, at last, for my lungs. The hairs on the tips of my ears touched the ceiling. The final fang came up with a ludicrously intimate wet crunch.

  ‘Jesus,’ Tunner said, in spite of himself.

  Walker stood, bent, looking up at me from under his brows, beat against by my new heat.

  MOVE. DO IT. DO IT.

  Caleb was watching me with a look that said he’d never seen this trick before. Even in his state there was room for wonder. Don’t die, I sent him, though I knew he wouldn’t get it. Hard to focus under appetite’s total eclipse. Here, after all, were three human beings, warm and succulent and bursting with edible life, the nearest cuffed and bound and completely at the mercy I shouldn’t have promised. I took a step towards him. I could feel the first bite coming all the way up from my soles, a movement like a tennis player’s service action: the wind-up; the toss; the ball or my snout’s frozen zenith – then the descent and jaws striking like the racquet’s smash. Why had I thought I’d be able to hold back?

  But wulf, it turned out, had her own divisions. My children were her children too – and she wanted them back.

  THAT’S IT. HURRY.

  Partly to discharge the piling-up energy and partly to hold the Hunters’ attention, I threw my head back, opened my throat and howled. Good for me (the last trapped human bubbles burst), not good for them: the small space contained the sound terribly, mauled the human animals, roughed them up. Tunner’s zoo-stink had changed again, some past-caring pheromone that said fear was flooding out. I leaped, snarling, at the bars. Tunner couldn’t stop himself jumping backwards, though the gaps between the uprights were too narrow for me to get more than a hand through. Murdoch didn’t flinch. I pictured myself on top of him, one hand pinning his throat, the other dangling his casually torn-off cock and balls just above his face. His flesh would hold all the flavours of his violence and the plaintive reek of his inverted life. Wulf wanted him, the furious energies crowding his blood, the occult childhood, the mysterious heart, lonely as the Devil’s. She wanted it the way I (and my mother before me) always wanted to look, whatever the horror, if looking was possible.

  Meanwhile Murdoch stood suspended. He’d been expecting me, I supposed, to start in on Walker the instant transformation was complete. Now the glazed blue eyes admitted slight confusion. I made a great show of snarling and gnashing and flailing about for a few seconds – then stopped, abruptly. Went completely silent and still. Stared at Murdoch. Yes, I have this under control. No, I won’t be performing on cue.

  He lifted his chin, slightly, a gesture to reinforce his position as overseer.

  With pantomime exaggeration, I gave him the finger.

  Caleb laughed, though it sounded as if the exertion might kill him. Tunner laughed – or started to, but was cut off by Murdoch whipping out a knife (it must have been behind the gun holster), springing forward and plunging it into Walker’s shoulder.

  Even by my monster standards it was a fast move, one jab, in, then out. Murdoch didn’t say anything. He just stood with his hands on his hips and his hawk’s look of unhinged concentration, waiting to see the effect of his action.

  And, oh dear, there was the effect, the smell of fresh blood that hooked my nose like a cartoon potion. My nostrils opened and in went the scent of the body’s precious red liqueur. Compelling detonations in the belly and the brain, a dirty loosening into animal joy. Everything reduced to one two-headed fact: I was starving, and I could eat. Walker had fallen to his knees again. Now, in geriatric increments, he lowered himself onto his side, laid his head on the floor and closed his eyes. Do it. I’m finished anyway.

  I might have, too – if a very loud electronic alarm hadn’t gone off.

  Tunner covered his sticking-out ears. The sound was almost unbearable to me, with my hearing.

  ‘Fire alarm, sir,’ Tunner shouted, grimacing.

  Murdoch’s eyes closed for a moment in sublime irritation. He opened them, took a deep breath, then gestured with a nod for Tunner to go check it out.

  Tunner swiped his card. The door chirruped, gasped, unlocked – then flew open to the sound of screaming and the festival smell of slaughter.

  46

  Time did what it does at these moments, expanded and slowed, created a space within which to observe the details – Tunner looking up, Murdoch turning and fumbling for his gun, Walker lifting his head as if from a nap he’d never intended to take, Devaz’s arm – hairy, massive, blood-dipped and reeking of his new raw werewolf material – reaching in and wrapping its fingers around Tunner’s throat –

  NO. THE KEY. THE KEY.

  Murdoch fired his weapon, hit Devaz in the shoulder. Devaz, muzzle dripping gore from the swath he’d cut to get here, swung Tunner up by his neck to catch Murdoch’s next two rounds in the Hunter’s back.

  IT’S OKAY, THEY’RE NOT SILVER. GET THE KEY.

  Which was still around Tunner’s neck. Murdoch turned, ran to the opposite vault door and swiped the card. The blips’ innocent tune, the lock’s sigh and clunk. Devaz’s new pure predatory instinct strained against me to go after him.

  NO! FUCK HIM! GET US OUT OF HERE!

  There were other Devaz instincts to work with. His cock was up, meatus pearled, dorsal artery pounding. Naturally: here was fresh prey and a female. A female who’d already fucked him in her human form. A current of mutual knowledge on top of the species imperative. It wasn’t lost on me, either. The movie heroine would have seared focus: her child, therefore immediate escape, therefore no time for werewolf hanky-panky. Reality wasn’t so accommodating. My clit throbbed and my cunt yearned. Not quite fuckkilleat (I wasn’t in love with Devaz) but a cheaper, pornier alternative that was more than enough to drag at my will. In spite of myself I nearly went under.

  But I wasn’t, apparently, completely without control.

  NOT NOW. THEY’LL KILL US. THEY HAVE SILVER.

  Devaz’s drowning human hated me for what I’d done to him (which didn’t hurt his desire any, obviously) but the newly-made monster was under my will – just. It wouldn’t last. This was pseudo-parental authority with a butterfly lifespan. Two or three lunations and he’d be telling me to go fuck myself – or rather trying to fuck me himself. But for now the newly-changed blood did as it was told. There was a flash of pleasure in it for him, the submissive’s at his mistress’s heel, a potential he never knew he had, though of course that fed back into his desire, so that doing as he was told made it harder to do as he was told. Absurdities bred and swarmed. Well, I imagined Jake saying, you go around dishing the Curse out willy-nilly, Lu – what do you expect?

  The door closed behind Murdoch. Devaz ripped the key from Tunner’s neck and moved over to the control panel. In the room next door the gunfire had stopped, though the screaming hadn’t. Two or three different voices, I thought. I could smell Wilson out there, a thinner, meaner odour than Devaz’s mardi gras funk. He was close to satiation, glutted and dazed from too many victims. If he carried on eating he’d regret it.

  HURRY, PLEASE...

  It was a dreamy agony to watch Devaz’s hybrid fingers struggling for the precision needed to fit and turn the key. I wondered how many men the facility held, how many were still alive, how long before Murdoch got them regrouped. Someone, somewhere, would be breaking out the silver ammunition. For all I knew containment doors for just this sort of contingency were right this second sealing the place shut.

  One of the panel’s red lights turned green. The bars slid up. Walker’s steel cable dropped free. Devaz looked at me. He’d fed too, but not like Wilson. His hunger was still fiery, indiscriminate, up for anything – and here was Walker, barely able to get to his feet.

  NOT HIM. AND WE�
�RE TAKING THE KID.

  Devaz turned from me with a snarl and fell on Tunner, who was still alive, but barely conscious. One bite took half the Hunter’s throat out. The jugular spat its blood like a well-pressurised drinking fountain for a few seconds, then subsided. Walker, still in his wrist- and ankle restraints, watched, while I switched the key into the socket for Caleb’s cell.

  The boy had passed out. Never to return, for all I knew. He was still breathing, at least. Either my tolerance for vamp odour had hit a new high or he was so close to death he’d lost his species stink. Whatever the explanation I gagged only once when I first picked him up. He was practically weightless. I might have been carrying a bag of polystyrene chips.

  There was no shortage of blood. I dipped my fingers in the pool gathered around Tunner and touched them to Caleb’s lips.

  Two seconds. Three. Five. His tongue moved, tasted, registered. The soft mouth closed tight around my finger. I fed him a little more. His eyes opened. Fought back the reflex to get away. I opened Tunner’s thigh with a claw and held Caleb next to it.

  ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘He’s dead. Can’t drink... dead.’

  Instead he lapped at the blood on the floor like a cat at a puddle of milk. Non-toxic, I supposed, because it had flowed while Tunner was still alive. I looked up at Walker, who stood holding his ribs, leaning against the remaining bars. Fear came off him, but weakly. This was quite something, what he was seeing, the situation he was in, but it didn’t change what had happened to him. It irritated me, suddenly. Stop being such a fucking baby. A woman is raped every minute in the US. You think they should all give up and die?

  I tore off Tunner’s pockets until I found one that had a set of keys in it, then tossed the bunch to Walker. You’ll think I don’t recognise you. But I will. He knew I did, but he wasn’t taking anything for granted. The confined space was hot and full of brutal possibilities. Since Tunner’s thigh was open anyway I ripped a sliver of meat from it and crammed it into my mouth. Oh my God yes. More. More more more.

  But there wasn’t time for more. If we didn’t get out now, we didn’t get out. I ducked back into the cell, gathered up the gown and the journal and shoved them at Walker. Then I grabbed Caleb and hauled him to his feet. He hissed at me, but without conviction. He hadn’t drunk a fraction of what he needed (he could barely stand) but it would have to be enough. Walker had got the restraints off. I stepped over Tunner’s ravaged corpse, left a slipstream of will for Devaz, dizzy from the hit of fresh meat, to fall into. Walker, clutching his ribs and limping, brought up the rear.

  The state of the next room – the site of Caleb’s cage trials – testified to the soundproofing of the vault door, because even with lupine ears I hadn’t heard any of the things that had evidently been going on in here. The cage itself was intact, though the door had been wrenched off and some bars bent. There was blood everywhere, grandly splashed, desperately smeared, clotting in puddles. The Tag Caleb scoreboard was face-down on the floor. One long spiral of razor wire had been yanked through the bars. A young dark-haired Hunter in a blood-soaked Metallica t-shirt and the regulation black combats was entangled in it, dead. Five other bodies, one of them, guts open, still being nauseatedly picked at by Wilson, who was flecked and winking with gore from head to foot.

  Caleb’s knees buckled and he fell. Wilson turned, saw us. He was going to spring. I felt it coiling in his legs and haunches.

  NO! NOT THESE!

  He knew me: I was the woman who’d fucked him and given him the mother of all lovebites; I was the werewolf voice in his head, the werewolf will in his limbs. The blood-glut weighed down the resentment he might have felt on an emptier stomach. Wulf had him, completely, from ears to claws. He stood upright and his cock arched up with him.

  GET US OUT OF HERE.

  Caleb had found potable blood and was sucking it up from the floor. I couldn’t afford to let him take too much. Not just because we didn’t have time. I reached down and grabbed his arm. He flailed at me. I hoisted him and slung him over my shoulder. Quicker this way, at least until we ran into trouble. Walker was on his knees over one of the dead Hunters. His hands were by his sides, his body completely relaxed. He might have been about to commence a meditation. There was a machine gun (Sobel’s, throat bitten out, left arm off) within reach of my foot, so I kicked it across the floor to Walker. It struck the side of his leg.

  Yes, pick it up. It didn’t need telepathy. (The commands to Devaz and Wilson were in a medium that wasn’t quite language nor quite pictures, available only in imperative chunks that had the feel, to those receiving them, of imposed instincts, forces that caught and moved them like an undertow.) Walker picked up the weapon, but made no move to get to his feet. In spite of everything else going on some part of me was considering the question of whether he was less of a man to me now. Yes, he was – too much of my human idea of masculinity was to do with power for it to be otherwise – but he was no less sexually interesting for it. This is how it goes, I realised. Once your own fundamentals start to morph and dissolve all the others matter less and less. Everyone should have a year as a werewolf. Like national service. Teach them not to be so hung-up on categories.

  I have lost, I thought, mental appropriateness.

  Wilson was already in the brightly-lit corridor accessed from the door across the hall, Devaz not far behind. A single leap took me with a feeling of deep joy clean over the cage (I remembered my dad lifting me up above his head when I was a kid, the ceiling’s remote landscape suddenly shockingly close-up). There were three more Hunters with missing throats, blood spattered Pollock-style on the gleaming walls. We ran to the end and, following Wilson, turned right into another, broader corridor that led to a metal staircase. A section of fractured floor-to-ceiling glass on our left showed a room with a bank of TV monitors and three or four desks with laptops. An agent, gashed from navel to throat, lay shivering in a thickening puddle of his own blood. His visible guts looked like a curled-up alien creature in quivering sleep. His eyes were open and full of incredulous life. We ignored him and ran to the staircase. Five steps up I nearly fell, turning an ankle on a human head, the body of which remained on the first landing. Devaz stopped again, bent, bit a chunk from the midriff and all but swallowed it whole.

  HURRY.

  Wilson was two flights ahead, but slowing. The meat-glut was catching up with him, an effect like over-oxygenated blood: you went fat in the vessels and veins, hands and feet full to bursting. I joined him where the stairs ended – another corridor, with a reflective vinyl floor that smelled of disinfectant – just in time to see two WOCOP agents disappearing up a second stairway twenty yards away. I looked back past Devaz. Walker was struggling up the steps. He looked as if any minute he might stop, sit down, close his eyes. I couldn’t wait for him.

  A bullet hit me in the shoulder. Another struck Caleb in the thigh. A neatly muscled agent who looked about twenty, dressed only in red running shorts and blinding white sneakers and armed with a handgun, had sprung out of a door on our left, seen us and fired, though he would have known from basic training it was pointless without silver. Devaz caught him in three strides and spun him by his hair. The agent dropped to his knees, facing me. He got another round off – hitting a wall – before Devaz kicked the pistol from his grip. The young abdominals were beautiful things. Devaz yanked on the hair to get the head back, then claw-swiped the tautened throat, which waited a moment before splitting and sending out a thin arc of blood. It was too much for me. I leaped forward, dropped Caleb, slashed my lethal fingernails across the supple midriff, then fell to my knees and sank my teeth in just below the ribs.

  A never-off-duty analyst in an alcove of my brain said: You’ll have to watch it, there’s a preference emerging for healthy young men. You can’t afford to establish a type. Establish a type and you establish a pattern. Establish a pattern and you get caught... Oh, but it was good. It was good to feel his life thudding into me (it wasn’t all mine; Devaz scored random chunks, ha
ving slammed his fist through the sternum and torn out the heart); the double hunger forced by last month’s pass made each fragment bright: his fair-haired mother and a sun-smashed white yard with a red pedal car and the peachy diptych of a brunette’s ass he couldn’t believe had got straight into a sixty-nine with him that one time and the guy passed out in a pool of vomit at a White Stripes show and all the remote giant sensations of childhood like that time the clouds were racing and if you lay on your back in the street it looked like the buildings were falling and his dad carrying him upstairs when he was ill and suddenly through his fever he’d known in the warm strong arms the certainty of his father’s love but somehow it spun away or diluted and so much of his head now was full of junk and TV and porn and he didn’t even want to join these guys but Nog said he could get him in and it would be a laugh—

  Stop. Stop.

  But I didn’t, immediately. Feeding cons you out of seconds, minutes, hours. The life-haemorrhaging flesh stretches time. Like a black hole. Just a few more seconds. Just another bite.

  The corridor was qualitatively different when I raised my snout, as if someone had opened a sluice and all the noise and urgency had drained away. The fire alarm had stopped, but the silence had more to it than that. I turned and saw Caleb on his hands and knees lapping up the before-death blood. He was still weak, but there was a new tension in his bent elbows, new promise in his wrists. I got to my feet and grabbed him. He wasn’t strong enough to offer anything but comedy resistance but I wondered what would happen to me if he bit me, which, when I slung him back over my shoulder, I felt sure he was going to do. He didn’t, however.