“Before we make a run for those lights, you guys have any more cold-weather gear you can spare?” Stark asked through chattering teeth.
“If we did, I’d be wearing it,” Lins answered sharply as he sat on the Caddy’s bumper. Balancing his M-4 carbine between his legs, Lins pulled his sweater up over his mouth and nose, then shoved his hands into his armpits. “What’re we supposed to do about Jo?”
A slimy hand landed against the interior of the back window. A horrible visage rose behind the hand. The face was slack and pale, dripping sweat past bloodshot eyes. Drool spilled out as the mouth opened wide. The monster’s face hit the glass with a wet thud.
“Threat!” Stark shouted as he went for his sidearm.
“No, wai-”
BANG.
A hole appeared in the glass. The horrible face disappeared.
Lins fell off the bumper. “Son of a bitch! You shot Jo!”
Stark slowly lowered his Glock as the hand slid down the glass until it also disappeared from view. “Jo?” He looked to Horst, but the lead Briarwood man was just standing there, mouth hanging open, apparently in shock. “Who’s Jo?”
“ That was Jo Schneider,” Lins said as he got to his feet. “She’s with us. She’s Horst’s girlfriend! Shit, man, you just capped our secretary!”
It took his numbed hand a few tries to get the Glock back into the holster. “The one with the sexy voice?” Stark mumbled. “Well…Huh. I pictured her as better looking.”
“She was, before a giant scarecrow robot puked her up,” Lins said.
Horst stepped forward without a word and opened the back of the Cadillac. Stark looked past Horst’s shoulder. The woman had been wrapped in a blanket and appeared to have been in really rough shape even before the gunshot wound. He’d seen healthier looking zombies. “In my defense, she looked like a monster.” Jo Ann was still alive, but probably not for long. Stark’s bullet had punched through her shoulder, and from the amount of blood, he assumed that he’d severed the axillary artery “Well…Shit. Sorry, I guess.”
Jo Ann squinted at Horst. She was having a hard time focusing. “I…I was just gonna…tell you I was feeling…better.”
Lins urgently tapped Stark on the shoulder. “We got company.”
He turned around. There were dark shapes moving against the white backdrop down the block. The undead were back. They weren’t running this way yet, but they would be soon. “Time to go, Horst…Horst?” He turned back to find Horst still staring at the woman. Stark leaned in and whispered, “We don’t have time to be sentimental, kid. If you want to put her out of her misery, do it quick and don’t make too much noise.”
Shaking his head, Horst stepped back. “Naw. I’m cool.”
“Ryan?” Jo Ann croaked.
“Nothing personal, baby, but my pop used to say that if you’re being chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear, just your slowest friend.” Horst’s expression was as cold as their surroundings.
Jo Ann reached out for Horst as he turned away. She managed to snag his coat sleeve and held on for dear life. “Don’t leave me.”
Horst jerked his arm out of her grasp without giving her so much as a glance. “If we’re lucky, they’ll slow down for a snack. Come on. Let’s go.”
Stark whistled. That was harsh, even by MCB standards.
Earl swung the locking bar shut on the stainless coffin before stumbling away, wincing at the pain. He could feel the burning of the fresh cut across the top of his chest. Heather had sliced him good. A little higher and he would have lost his throat, so he’d gotten lucky, but he still needed to tend to the injury quickly before it became an issue. He always kept an extensive first-aid kit on hand, though it was normally for his Hunters. It had been a real long time since he’d needed one for himself.
Earl addressed the only other person remaining in the street in front of the Alpha’s house. “Everyone else had the sense to run. You’re a stubborn one.”
“I ain’t seen nothing like that before.” Aino had made the decision to help, and had even had the guts to help lift the unconscious Heather into the box. “Her grandpa saved my life, pulled me out of a collapsed mine. I thought you aimed to kill her; figured I owed Aksel to see that to the end. Surprised me when you picked her up instead…You’re bleeding. Let me see that cut.”
Earl opened his coat. Heather had managed to tag him just above where it had been fastened, and one claw had made it through the Kevlar beneath. “Just a scratch,” he lied.
It wasn’t fair to blame Heather. It wasn’t like she’d done it on purpose. Earl reasoned they were probably even, because he’d smashed the Thompson’s steel butt-plate over her head until the stock had cracked. Just shooting her would’ve been the safe move, but she was a good girl. Even though the odds of her beating the curse were near zero, she deserved a chance. Santiago would have done the same for him. Though Heather was going to be mighty surly when she woke up inside that dark little prison box.
Once safely back in the truck, Earl turned on the interior dome light, found his first-aid kit, and unbuckled his armor. Heather had scored a solid laceration just over his collarbone. A flap of skin was dangling, loose, leaking blood in a wide circle. “Damn. That’s ugly.”
“Just a scratch, huh?” Aino grunted.
“It’s wide, but shallow. It’s the depth that gets you.” Earl shoved the skin back into place, wiped it with iodine, and applied a pressure bandage. As soon as he had a spare minute, he’d give himself some stitches. It was too big to glue. The hard part would be keeping an eye on it at that angle. Since the last time he’d given himself stitches had been in the 1920s, he was a bit out of practice. “Turn up the heater, would you?” Earl asked as he closed his eyes and leaned back against the head rest. “Why do people live someplace this damn cold?”
“Keeps out the riff-raff…This was a quiet town, ’til recently.”
“Got me there.” Earl lit a cigarette and got back to work, having decided that thirty seconds was too much sitting around. He could bleed later. “I need you to figure out what that journal says, and I need it fast.”
“I can do that. What about Heather?”
“Through no fault of her own, she’s one of them now. Locked up, she can’t do no harm, but if she gets out…She’s not the girl you knew before.”
“Is there a cure?”
Surprisingly, there was. If that amulet could cure Earl, then it could cure anyone. He had a sneaking suspicion that it was the same device that had started the curse to begin with, so it reasoned that it could end it, too. Not just for Earl and Heather, but for all werewolves, everywhere. If he could get his hands on that amulet and figure out how the magic worked…
The truck lurched. A terrible grinding sound came from the back, claws against steel, followed by an enraged roar. Heather was awake, and not surprisingly, she was a fierce one.
“There’s a cure,” Earl said with renewed determination. He had accidently created the monster that was terrorizing this town, but he could make that mistake right and in the process end the curse forever. “And I know who has it.”
The storm was finally breaking up, having transitioned from blizzard to horrible snowfall in the last hour. That should have made Horst happy, but instead that just meant that the werewolves could see them better. Sadly, sacrificing Jo Ann hadn’t seemed to slow them very much. The awkward creatures weren’t much more agile in the deep snow than the Hunters they were chasing, but they didn’t seem to be getting tired, whereas Horst thought his heart was about to explode. The monsters were gaining on them.
“We’re almost there!” Lins shouted. The only other remaining Briarwood Hunter turned out to be the fastest on foot, and was a good twenty feet ahead of the other two when he stopped to urge them on. He raised his M-4 and popped off a pair of shots at their pursuers. “Come on.”