“Damn,” Cowboy said, starting up the rise.
“That’s far enough.”
Pettis stopped as a human figure stepped away from the brush, holding Amy with a long knife to her throat.
“Let’s everybody stay where we are,” the man said. He was sun-baked, his eyes wildly alert, his voice hysterically loud.
Pettis raised his Uzi to eye level, sighting down the barrel.
“I don’t think you want to do that,” the man said. The blade of the knife was pressed firmly to Amy’s throat. “You shoot me, I’m likely to fall back and cut half this little girl’s head off before I hit the ground.”
“Then let her go,” Pettis stated calmly.
“Not likely, friend,” the man replied. He began to edge up the slope, taking Amy with him. “Truth is, I’m doing you all a favor. Saving my own skin in the bargain.”
“You living up here alone?” Cowboy asked, matter-of-factly. He lowered his gun slightly, at the same time motioning me to move up and around the other side of the man. Slowly, I began to walk.
The stranger eyed me nervously, brandishing the blade under Amy’s chin. “I told you to stay,” he said.
I stopped, but Pettis motioned me on. “You’re up here alone?” he repeated.
The man’s eyes darted back to him. “Sure I’m alone. And long as I give them what they want I’ll stay that way.”
“Who would that be?”
The stranger’s nervous glance went to me, back to Pettis. “Are you crazy, man? Haven’t you seen them?” He turned to me and shouted, “I said stay!”
I kept walking, and Pettis said, “Seen who?”
The stranger turned his attention on Pettis. “The gods, man! Didn’t you see them fall from the sky? Don’t you know they’re here to take what they want?”
“What is it they want?” Pettis continued, reasonably. The man’s attention was split between Pettis and me. I slowly widened my circle around him, prolonging his confusion.
“You people are crazy,” the man said. “I’m trying to do you a favor!”
“What would that be?” Pettis asked. He had raised his gun again.
“Save you, man! If I give them the girl, I can hide, and you can run!” His gaze swiveled wildly from Pettis to me, his hand with the hunting knife clenching and unclenching nervously.
“Where do you hide?” Pettis inquired.
“In the cave, man! I leave the bodies at the mouth, then run to the back and up into the crawl space.” He tittered. “I pull my feet up real tight, and they can’t get at me!” His voice rose to a shout. “And you can get away! You can run!”
“How many have you given them?” Pettis asked calmly.
The stranger concentrated. “There was a man the first day, and three girls the second, then an old man and his wife yesterday. I offered to save one of them, but had to kill them both—”
I raised my shotgun. The man darted a look at me, the knife jerking away from Amy’s throat. Pettis fired.
The stranger cried out and Amy threw herself away from him. Pettis kept firing, walking up the slope, the man’s body twitching in the sand and finally laying still.
Amy stood trembling.
Cowboy came and held her. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said. Suddenly she pushed away from him, pointing up above. “Oh, God.”
The ridge was filled with wolves.
“Back to the road!” Pettis commanded. Doc and Wyatt were already retreating, and we followed, Pettis letting off a burst of fire. A howl went up, followed by the now-familiar bestial feeding sounds.
We backed to the roadway, where Doc and Wyatt were positioned with rifles balanced on the rail guard.
We joined them as the wolves advanced. They were sluggish, but much more active than we had seen them in the daytime. Amy fired her handgun, wounding a closing wolf in the shoulder. It shrieked but continued toward us. Pettis stood and finished it off. As the beasts closest to it leaped upon the corpse, we retreated farther down the road.
“That full Moon last night must have really charged them up,” Pettis said.
Only three of the creatures followed. Pettis turned and fired a volley; two of them turned on the third as a bullet pierced its neck, spraying blood.
“Keep moving,” Pettis snapped. He eyed the hills in front of us, pointing to an outcropping of rocks halfway up a small rise to our right. It hid the area behind. Any wolf adventurous enough could jump us. “They’ll go for us there.”
“They’re going to kill us, and it’s my fault,” Amy wailed.
“Nobody’s going to kill us,” Wyatt drawled.
As we reached the outcropping, wolves seemed to rise out of the ground, surrounding us.
“Maybe I should take that back,” Wyatt amended.
At Pettis’s instruction, we formed a tight circle in the middle of the highway and began to fire. I dropped two wolves in quick succession; the first began to devour the second before a third dropped upon him. The others scored hits; Doc concentrated on picking them off when they leaped the outcropping as Cowboy had predicted.
“To your right, Jase! To your right!” Pettis shouted.
My shotgun was empty. I reached for two shells and discovered my pocket empty. I jammed my left hand into the other pocket and came up with a single shell, slapping it into the barrel as a wolf made his jump. Wyatt, next to me, dropped him with me. He, too, was now out of ammunition.
The smell of blood was thick as mist. There came a momentary halt in the wolves’ assault. But even as those around us contented themselves with picking clean the bones of their dead brethren, more wolves were making their way down the slopes toward us.
“Move!” Pettis ordered. We backed with him through a gap, stepping over partially devoured bodies. “Run, damn it!”
We broke into a trot. I looked at Doc and saw exertion playing across his face. The heat was brutal, drifting down at us from the sky, up at us in waves from the tarmac.
“Move, damn it, move!”
Doc stumbled, went down. Behind us the wolves busily fed on corpses, but one or two were stirring from their frenzy, throwing glances at us. One in particular, which held its arm in a strange position against its side, stared straight at me.
We opened a distance of fifty yards between us and the beasts, but they could close it very quickly.
Wyatt and I supported Doc; he was gasping, trying to speak.
“Don’t worry, Doc,” Wyatt said. “We’ll keep an eye on you.”
Ten yards ahead, Pettis waited impatiently.
“We’ve got to get moving or we’ll die right here.”
“I can…try,” Doc said.
Cowboy brought his face very close to Doc. His eyes turned hard. “You’re not going to try, Doc—you’re going to do it. Because a lot of people at Kramer Air Force Base are counting on you—and because if you don’t, these hairy sons of bitches are going to kill you.”
“I…” Doc nodded. “Yes. I can do it.”
We continued on. Wyatt and I paced Doc. Pettis and his daughter pulled ahead. Pettis fired random rounds into the hills around us. After we passed under a low outcropping of rocks I noted with relief that the hills widened out and began to flatten.
“A little more, Doc,” Wyatt said.
The sight of the flatlands invigorated us all. Soon Doc was walking on his own, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.
Four wolves made a tentative charge behind us. We knelt and fired. One of them went down. Two of the others immediately turned on the body, but the third, the one with the deformed arm I had noticed before, stood regarding us. Again I had the feeling it was singling me out—