by Jeff Strand
"We're going to be in a lot more danger tomorrow."
"Not if it was just a squirrel and two bears."
"Do you believe that it was?" Mia asked.
"No." Rusty sighed. "If I had to place a bet on it, I'd say that yeah, we're going to be in some danger when we go after the truck. But we don't know the scope of this. Maybe it's only happening to animals that drank from a certain stream. And maybe they are dead, and it's only the ones that died of some other cause after they drank from the stream. We may have already encountered the worst of it."
"It's possible," said Mia, though Rusty could tell that she was leaning much more toward "the entire forest is full of undead horrors."
"Anyway, we'll bring lots of weapons and we'll be extremely careful. I truly believe that we'll be fine."
Rusty did indeed believe that. Despite his overall aversion to the human race, he had occasional moments where he wasn't a completely cynical bastard. As long as they made intelligent decisions (for example, not walking to the truck in the darkness) they'd be okay.
Now they had one more window to deal with. The headless bear filled the entire thing; nothing could squeeze past it. That said, Rusty didn't want to leave the bear wedged in there, even if he closed the bedroom door. Mia agreed with him, so they went in there with a board and used it to try and push the bear out of the window.
It wouldn't budge.
"Its legs are in the way," said Mia. "You need to cut them off even higher. Right at the shoulder."
Rusty refueled the chainsaw, started it up, and completely severed the bear's front legs. He kicked them into the corner of the room. Then they used the board again. The bear still wouldn't budge.
"Fuck," said Rusty.
"Fuck," Mia agreed.
"Push harder."
They pushed against the board until Rusty's feet slipped out from beneath him, though he spared himself the indignity of actually falling. "I know that it's one of God's creatures, but I really hate this bear. I mean on a deep personal level."
"Just keep sawing away," said Mia.
"I don't want to chainsaw it any more. I want to go to bed."
"I'll take over."
"No, no, I'm being a whiner. We're almost done."
Rusty revved up the chainsaw again and cut off a great big slab of the bear. That chunk landed on the bedroom floor, while the rest of the bear fell away from the window and landed on the ground outside. Rusty cut the indoor slab in half and shut off the chainsaw. A few minutes later, he and Mia had thrown all of the bear pieces out of the window with the rest of it. A few minutes after that, they'd boarded up the hole, once again leaving a tiny gap to see through.
To keep more wild animals from breaking through the glass, they boarded up the unbroken windows. Then they went around the cabin, double-checking their work. A bear charging at full speed could probably break through, but otherwise, the cabin was safe.
"Get some sleep," said Rusty. "I'll wake you up at sunrise."
"What makes you think I'll be able to sleep?"
"Try to at least doze. We've got a busy morning."
"Shouldn't you sleep, too?"
"I'm going to keep watch."
"We've got, what, three hours until daylight?" Mia asked. "You rest for an hour and a half and then I'll rest for an hour and a half."
"I guess we could both rest. We'd hear anything that was trying to get inside. It's not like keeping watch is going to improve our situation all that much."
"We should keep watch."
"I agree. I was just throwing out another option for no real reason."
"Nudge me in ninety minutes," said Mia, lying down on the couch. "I won't be asleep."
A few minutes later, she was softly snoring. Rusty didn't blame her—it had been an exhausting night. He'd let her sleep until sunrise, even though she'd be pissed at him.
He got up to look through the windows. The floorboards were creaking now, so he stepped slowly and carefully. He peeked through the gap and saw nothing outside. Good. He sat back down on his recliner.
He waited another five minutes or so and then got up to check again. Still nothing out there that he could see.
After checking a third time, he decided that he should just scoot a chair over to the boarded-up window instead of walking across the room over and over. He picked up a wooden chair that Mia had made, placed it next to the window, and sat down. He peeked through the gap. Still nothing there.
That's right, stay away, he thought. What happened to your buddies can happen to you. Let the scattered bear remains be a lesson to everything that lives in this forest. Rusty Moss will tear you motherfuckers to bits.
He sat there for a while.
Suddenly it occurred to him that he wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting there. He hadn't fallen asleep, but he'd zoned out for a bit, and that could lead to falling asleep in this extremely well made chair. He stood up, crept across the creaking floor again, and got his alarm clock out of his bedroom. It was an old-fashioned wind-up model. Rusty almost never used it because he had a lifestyle that did not require him to get up at any specific time—the sun streaming through his window was his alarm clock. But the last thing he wanted was to wake up in a cabin surrounded by bears and discover that they'd missed their window of opportunity to escape, so he set the alarm for 6:30 AM and placed it on the floor next to the chair, just in case.
He peeked through the gap in the boards again. Still nothing dangerous that he could see.
Mia continued to snore.
Time was passing more slowly now that he could glance down and see what time it was. He wasn't looking forward to venturing out of the cabin, but he did wish that dawn would just get here already so he didn't have to sit here stressing out over it.
He kept waiting and peeking.
After about an hour, he thought he heard something scraping against the wood in his bedroom. He allowed himself about half a second to believe that it might be a figment of his paranoia-fueled imagination, but no, something was definitely scratching the wood.
He scooped up the flashlight and hurried into the bedroom. Whatever was out there was scratching on the boards over the window. Vigorously.
He went up to the window and peered through the gap. He could see movement but it was too dark to identify the next possible threat to his life. Rusty turned on the flashlight and shone it through the gap, catching a glimpse of gray and white fur.
The creature snarled, startling Rusty so badly that he almost dropped the flashlight.
"What is it?" asked Mia, startling him so badly that he did drop the flashlight.
"A wolf, I think," said Rusty.
The flashlight rolled out of his reach, so Mia picked it up and gave it back to him. The creature continued to growl on the other side, and even though Rusty was very confident in the job they'd done boarding up the window, he still didn't want to stand too close to it.
Rusty didn't like this at all. A squirrel was ultimately harmless, and a bear would give plenty of advance notice if it charged at them through the woods, but a wolf was stealthy. If one of those leapt at them while they were running for the car, they were dead.
Mia left the bedroom, returning a moment later with the shotgun. By design, the gap was exactly big enough to fit the barrel through.
More scratching. This time against the wall, a few feet to the left.
Rusty took the shotgun from her, shoved the barrel through the gap, and tilted it down. The wolf didn't move as the metal pressed against it.
He squeezed the trigger.
The wolf let out a high-pitched squeal and Rusty heard it fall to the ground. Then he heard it get back up and resume aggressively scratching the boards.
He glanced back at Mia, who had her hand over her mouth as if to stifle a scream. He wanted to say something reassuring, but nothing came to mind, and it would be bullshit anyway.
Now something was scratching on the other wall. Not necessarily another wolf, but another something.<
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Rusty swiveled the barrel around, trying to make contact with the first wolf again. When the barrel smacked against it, he squeezed the trigger. He honestly couldn't tell if he'd hit it or not; the scratching didn't stop. He withdrew the shotgun and popped it open to reload it.
"I hear something in the front, too," said Mia, leaving the bedroom.
On one hand, it felt like a potentially fatal mistake to have waited in the cabin until it was surrounded. On the other hand, they'd be positively screwed if they ran into a pack of vicious wolves without the walls of the cabin to protect them. It didn't feel like it at the moment, but they'd made the right decision. He hoped.
He shoved two more shells into the shotgun, snapped it closed, and poked it through the gap again.
A couple of gunshots came from the living room.
"Did you get it?" Rusty called out.
"Yes."
"Did it do any good?"
"No."
Rusty cursed. He swiveled the shotgun barrel back and forth, squeezing the trigger when he smacked into the wolf. It yelped but didn't stop moving. He fired again. Another yelp. The scratching continued.
Mia fired her rifle a few more times.
"There are at least three of them in front," she announced.
They were just squandering their ammunition. If they were up against a whole pack of wild animals, they'd have to make every bullet count. Every shot had to be a skull-shattering hit, followed by another skull-shattering hit, and possibly even more than that, simply to take out one wolf.
He pulled the shotgun out from between the boards and went over to the doorway. "This isn't—"
"—a good idea?"
"Right. It's too dark."
"I can see the ones in front. I crippled one but I had to shoot both of its front legs."
More scratching behind him. A third animal was at the bedroom wall. No, a fourth.
"All wolves?" Rusty asked.
Mia peeked through the gap. "Not anymore."
"What else?"
"Looks like a bobcat. I can see part of its skull."
"A bobcat wouldn't hunt with a pack of wolves."
"It's not a normal bobcat, then."
Rusty reloaded the shotgun. His optimism was gone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The good news was that the boards were staying put. And they had plenty of unused boards left in case they needed to reinforce their work.
The other good news was that, presumably, it would take an extremely long time for a pack of wolves to scratch their way through the walls of a cabin. They'd wear their claws down to bloody nubs before they actually got through.
That was pretty much it for the good news.
The bad news was that there were now a lot of wolves out there. A pack almost never got larger than fifteen, and this one seemed to have brought the entire extended family. Plus at least two bobcats. And Rusty and Mia were basing this estimate on what they could see in the night. There could be many more.
Rusty preferred the kinder, simpler time when he needed only to contend with two grizzly bears.
If these were animals that would die when you shot them in the fucking head like animals were supposed to, it was a situation that could be managed. They had more than enough rounds to take out a large pack of normal wolves circling the cabin. Counting up the rounds in the two ammo boxes and what was already in their six guns, they had about a hundred and twenty shots. Those could disappear pretty quickly when trying to incapacitate undead wolves.
After some discussion, they'd decided to conserve their firepower. They'd need the bullets much more desperately when they were running for the truck than when they were holed up inside the cabin. Which meant that their current plan was, "Keep themselves safe inside the cabin, and hope that things outside didn't continue to get worse." Rusty didn't like any plan where he wasn't actively taking charge of his own fate, but he liked it a lot more than embarking upon a three-mile run where he couldn't properly defend himself against fierce predators.
Getting some sleep, or even dozing, was a laughable idea at this point. Rusty wanted to start cleaning up the mess the bear had made in the kitchen and living room, just to give himself something productive to do, but Mia had vetoed the idea, insisting that they needed to conserve their energy. Rusty had negotiated his way down to sweeping things up but leaving the labor- intensive cleanup for later.
Frickin' bear, he thought as he swept broken dishes into a dustpan. It was going to cost a fortune to get this place back in shape.
"Are there more of them out there?" he asked Mia as she peeked out the window.
"Doesn't look like it."
"Are there fewer?"
"No."
"At least there aren't more."
"Yeah."
"That's me saying that the glass is half full."
"It doesn't suit you."
Rusty almost chuckled, then decided that he didn't feel like chuckling. He continued sweeping up the broken dishes. At least he wasn't the kind of guy to have an affinity for any particular coffee mug—the destruction of each of them pissed him off equally, but none had any sentimental value. They were just mugs.
Soon he'd cleaned up everything he could without violating Mia's "don't exert yourself so much that it slows us down when we're fleeing wolves later" rule. The kitchen and living room still looked like crap, but if the Queen of England showed up unexpectedly, he'd be less embarrassed than before.
Finally, it was dawn.
Now that they had some sunlight, Rusty and Mia were able to better gauge the situation outside. And it sucked just as much as it had in the darkness. Fourteen or fifteen wolves, about half of which had visible bones. Four bobcats; Rusty wasn't sure if the original two had been joined by two more, of if he simply hadn't been able to see the others at night. A few squirrels. At least there were no new bears.
Most of the animals were pacing around the yard. Some of them, including a bobcat whose face was ninety percent exposed skull, were on the porch.
"Did we make the right decision by waiting?" Rusty asked.
"I think so," said Mia. "Things look about the same out there. It would definitely be safer to make a run for it now than it would've been when it was dark out."
"Still not safe to make a run for it, though."
"No, not at all."
"I can't kill twenty of those things before they take me down."
"Me either."
"What kind of armor do we have?"
"We've got that vintage suit of knight's armor in the study."
"You don't have to be a smartass," said Rusty. "I meant protection. We can bulk up. Wear multiple layers of clothing. Strap on pieces of furniture."
Mia looked at him closely. "I can't tell if you're being serious."
"Of course I'm being serious!"
"You think we're going to make it past an entire pack of zombie wolves with a few extra shirts and a shield made out of a dresser drawer?"
"Well, what do you suggest?"
"Not going outside with the wolves."
"So we just sit here forever?"
Mia shook her head. "No, not forever. Until it makes more sense to go out there. How do you know we won't be rescued?"
"Who the hell is going to come out here and rescue us?"
"Mr. Olander?"
"We haven't seen him since your thirteenth birthday. He's a good guy, but he's not going to lead some rescue expedition. We're on our own. For twenty-five years I've been perfectly happy with the arrangement so I'm not going to whine about it now. If your plan is to sit on our thumbs until some lawyer shows up then I need to be the one making the plans."
"That wasn't my plan," said Mia. "I was just mentioning it as a possibility. Yes, it's a remote possibility. Really remote. But I think we should look at really remote possibilities for rescue before we march out there to get devoured."
"It was stupid to even mention it."
"Fine."
Rusty wanted to kick
something, but he'd just cleaned the place up, so he sighed instead. "Shit, I'm sorry. We're not supposed to be at each other's throats at a time like this. I don't think I need to explain that my stress level is pretty high right now."
"Mine too. So, we got the bickering out of our system. Now we can work together in perfect harmony until we get out of this nightmare."
Rusty walked over and peeked out the front window.
"Are all the wolves still there?" Mia asked.
"Yeah."
"At least they aren't actively trying to get—" Mia was interrupted by a loud scratching from her bedroom window. "Never mind."
They both looked up as something scurried across the roof.
"I think that was a squirrel," said Rusty.
Something else scurried across the roof.
"I think that was another squirrel."
Nothing else scurried. Two squirrels. No big deal. They might not even be zombie squirrels.
"I apologize for making fun of you about the armor," said Mia. "It's not a completely stupid idea if you really think about it. We've got plenty of boards and duct tape. If we taped strips of wood to our arms and chest it would help a little, right?"
Rusty nodded. "If it makes us ten percent less likely to get torn to shreds, it's worth it."
"Let's do it."
The table saw was in the shed, but they had a couple of hacksaws in the cabin. This wasn't going to be anything elaborate; in fact, Mia and Rusty were going to look and feel ridiculous. And it would weigh them down enough to prevent them from taking the three miles at a sprint. But if it provided sufficient protection to get in a good swipe with the chainsaw before any particular wolf could mangle them, it might be the secret to their survival.
The wolves continued to claw at the boarded-up windows while Rusty and Mia sawed the wood into properly measured pieces. Rusty didn't like that the animals were focusing all of their attention on the windows. The bears had randomly scraped at the walls, but the wolves were concentrating on the weakest part of the cabin. No, they weren't going to be able to break through; still, Rusty didn't appreciate the way they were demonstrating intelligence.
"Do you think we could trap them?" Mia asked.
