I blasted the truck’s horn, twice. The wolves, five of them I could see now, didn’t even flinch, but I hadn’t intended it for them. The sheriff looked up and we made eye contact as I put my foot to the floor again and aimed straight for the doorway. I got lucky for once. The defenders leapt aside, I plowed forward, ran over two wolves with a lurch and a crunch of wheel on bone—the wheels won, then I hit the building, still accelerating. I heard the back cabin door open and another line from a movie ran unbidden in my head—Marines, we are leaving. The door slammed shut again; I had to assume they were safely aboard as I shifted into reverse and backed out fast. Something metallic squealed and complained below me then we were free and reversing away across the forecourt. I saw the cap reverse his truck out to follow me. Back at what was left of the doorway there were now half a dozen dead wolves on the ground, one of which was trying to drag itself away despite the fact that its rear end was mashed almost to a pulp.
There was no other sign of movement.
I stopped right on the edge of the forecourt, the cap swung round in front of me and when he headed back up towards the cabin with the vault, I followed him.
When we pulled up at the steps the cap was out of his cab and opening the back door of my truck before I even got down out of the driving position. Wilko and Davies jumped out, but Jennings wasn’t going to be jumping anywhere. He lay on the floor of the cab, his head cradled in the sheriff’s lap, dead eyes staring right at me.
“The bite got his femoral artery,” Davies said, “and he bled out before I could get time to get a tourniquet on him. The wolves were…”
I put a hand on the lad’s shoulder.
“There’s no fault here for you,” I said.
The sheriff looked up at me, tears in her eyes.
“How many more?” she said. I thought she was talking about Jennings, but the cap got her gist better than me.
“There’s still a big one out there somewhere, the one Wiggo saw. Apart from that? I think, I hope, we’ve got the bastards. Here, let me take the lad.”
I interrupted.
“No, Cap, this one’s on me. It’s my shout.”
Cap herded the others into the cabin, I fetched a body bag from the back of the truck and tried to say my goodbyes to a lad I’d never known, but now owed a debt.
“I should have done better by you, lad,” I whispered as I zipped him up. His dead eyes seemed to agree with me. I put him away with Watkins—out of sight out of mind—and stood on the doorstep. I smoked two fags before I felt fit enough to be seen in company, then went inside to join the others.
A discussion was in progress. Davies was advocating the ‘nuke the site from orbit’ argument but the sheriff was having none of it.
“I’ve got a load of townsfolk expecting to come home to a safe place,” she said. “I’m not leaving here until that can happen.”
The cap spoke softly.
“I understand that. And we can certainly deal with the things down below us here, however unpleasant that might be. But there’s still, at least, a big wolf and one of the primates out there. They’ve been smart enough to stay out of our way thus far. I don’t think bait is going to work on them.”
A howl rose from somewhere out in the forest. It had none of the choral quality now, just a single high wail, and although there was still beauty in it, it sounded more like pain and loss than anything affirming. It got an answer from the cells below us, the high cries of the Alma rising in counterpoint to the wolf, harsh and angry. I knew that tone, had used it myself in my youth in the south-side gangs.
Come and try it if you’ve got the balls.
“Maybe we’ve just been using the wrong type of bait,” the sheriff said.
Wilko spoke from the doorway.
“Whatever we’re planning I think we need to get to it soon. The weather’s closing in again.”
I went over to have a look. The sky had darkened from the north, heavy, lowering clouds, and the wind was now much fresher in my face. I suspected we were in for more snow, and plenty of it, and the sheriff confirmed my suspicions.
“We’ve got to leave right now if we want to get back to town tonight,” she said.
“What’s the alternative?” Davies asked.
“The alternative is we stay here, in a possible whiteout, with an unknown number of, as Wiggo here calls them, big fucking howling things snapping at our asses for the duration, which might be a few days.”
“We’re staying until we can figure out what to do,” the cap said in a tone that didn’t allow for any argument. “We can hunker down in the rear cab of one of the trucks; they’ve got bloody huge batteries we can run the heating on for a while and the one I was in at least had a full tank of gas so we won’t freeze. Wiggo, I need an inventory of what we’ve got in terms of both food and ammo.”
The Alma below us continued to bellow.
“What about them?” the sheriff asked.
“Fuck ’em,” the cap replied. “Let’s get ourselves sorted out first before the weather starts making our decisions for us.”
My inventory didn’t take long. We had plenty of ammo, and not much in the way of food. We each had a pack of hard biscuits and water, we had some coffee and the wee camp stove, there was more water in the trucks, and somebody’s stash of chocolate in the dashboard hideaway.
“There might be something we missed in the main complex,” I said. “There’s a wee mess down there and…”
“We’ll leave the scavenger run until it’s really necessary,” the cap replied. “Let’s get into the truck. Here comes the snow.”
- 14 -
The cap wasn’t kidding about the snow. By the time we all piled into the back of the truck it was coming down hard. We had the truck turned so that the wind wouldn’t blow in when we opened the door but even then the cab rocked and rolled as the storm ramped up.
Davies got out the wee black boxes and went back to work on getting them rigged for electroshock.
“Quarter of an hour, no more,” he said. “Then all four will be ready.”
The rest of us settled into a routine of coffee, smokes and three card-brag. The sheriff proved all my suspicions about her card playing skills right by rooking us for most of our fags while the storm ramped up and night fell. When the banter stopped the only sound was the whistle of the wind and the whisper of snow against the cab windows, beyond which there was nothing to see but snowflakes whirling in the blackness.
The cap hadn’t had his mind on the game and was the first to get cleared out. Now he sat by the door that was cracked open by quarter of an inch to let air in and smoke out as he chain-smoked in silence. I knew he was mulling over our situation; I’d been doing the same to little avail. After I lost the last of my fags, I shifted over to sit by him.
“Any thoughts you want to share, Cap?”
“I was thinking about Jennings,” he said. “I should have done better by that lad.”
He had unwittingly echoed my own thoughts.
“He showed balls at the end there,” I said. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”