Thorns whipped Mikhail in the face and tore across his shirt. He blinked back tears, his legs pumping. A shot rang out, and hit a tree trunk five feet away. “Save your bullets, idiot!” Schedrin commanded, getting a quick glimpse of the boy’s back before the branches covered his flight.
Mikhail ran on, his shoulders hunched against the expected impact of a lead slug. His lungs were burning, his heart hammering through his chest. He dared to glance back. The horses and men raced after him, dead leaves flying up in their wake. He looked ahead again, angled to the left, and ran into thick green undergrowth laced with creepers.
Anton’s horse stepped into a gopher hole. The animal bellowed and fell, and Anton’s right knee burst open like an overripe fruit as he landed on a sharp-edged rock. He screamed in agony, the horse writhing and trying to get up, but both Schedrin and Danalov kept up their pursuit.
Mikhail fought through the undergrowth, slanting down into a valley cloaked with green. He knew full well what would happen if the killers caught him, and fear gave him wings. His feet slipped out from beneath him on a bed of pine needles, and he slid through a place where the shadows had grown crimson mushrooms. Then he was up and running again, and behind him he heard a horse’s whinny and a man shouting, “He’s over here! Going downhill!”
Ahead was dense forest, close-packed evergreens and thick coils of thorn bushes and stands of wild red berries. He headed for the thickest of it, hoping to leap into the coils and fight his way to the bottom, to a place where the horsemen couldn’t follow. He reached out, parted the emerald growth with bleeding hands-and came face to muzzle with the beast.
It was a wolf, with dark brown eyes and sleek russet fur. Mikhail fell backward, his mouth open but the scream shocked out of him.
The wolf leaped.
Its jaws opened, and the teeth gouged furrows across Mikhail’s left shoulder as it slammed him to the earth. The breath was knocked out of him, as was all sense. The wolf’s teeth clamped on his shoulder, about to tear through the I flesh and crush the bones; and then the horse bearing Sergei Schedrin burst through the brush and reared, its eyes flaring with terror. Schedrin lost his rifle, and he cried out, clinging I to the horse’s neck as he saw the wolf beneath his boots.
The animal released Mikhail’s shoulder, spun around in a smooth, graceful motion, and bit deeply into the horse’s stomach. The horse made a strangled moan, kicked wildly, and fell onto its side, trapping Schedrin’s legs beneath.
“Holy Jesus!” Danalov shouted, reining in his horse on the hillside. Two seconds after he’d spoken, the large gray wolf that had been tracking him leaped onto the horse’s flank, clawed up over it into the saddle, and clamped its fangs into the back of Danalov’s neck. It shook Danalov like a rag doll, snapping his spine and driving him out of the saddle to the ground. The horse thrashed and tumbled, rolling down the hillside in a flurry of dead leaves and pine needles.
A third wolf, this one blond with ice-blue eyes, darted in and grasped Danalov’s flailing right arm. With a savage twist, the beast broke it at the elbow and the splintered bones tore through the man’s flesh. Danalov’s body jerked and writhed. The gray wolf that had knocked him out of the saddle closed its jaws on Danalov’s throat and crushed the windpipe with a casual squeeze.
As Schedrin struggled to free his legs the russet wolf finished tearing the horse’s stomach open. Coils of steaming intestines slid from the gaping wound, and the horse shrieked. Another beast, pale brown streaked with gray, leaped from the brush and landed on the horse’s throat, tearing it open with teeth and claws. Schedrin was screaming-a high, thin scream-and digging his fingers into the earth to try to pull loose. Only a few feet away Mikhail sat up, stunned and half conscious, with blood and wolf saliva drooling from the wounds in his shoulder.
Over the hilltop Anton heard the sounds of violence and gripped his ruined knee. He tried to crawl through the thicket, his horse struggling to rise on a broken ankle. He crawled perhaps eight feet-far enough to drive agony through every nerve of his body-when two smaller wolves, one dark brown and the other a dusky red, came together from the underbrush and each clenched a wrist, breaking the bones with quick snaps of their heads. Anton cried out for God, but in this wilderness God had fangs.
The two wolves, working in concert, broke Anton’s shoulders and rib cage. Then the red one seized Anton’s throat while the dark brown beast clamped its jaws to the sides of the man’s head. As Anton trembled and moaned, reduced to a mindless husk, the animals crushed his throat and broke open his skull like a clay pot.
Schedrin, his hands clawing the earth, had pulled himself partway free from the shuddering weight atop him. Tears of terror streamed from his eyes, and he grasped hold of a small sapling and kept pulling. The sapling cracked. He smelled the coppery reek of blood, felt sickening heat wash across his face, and he looked around into the maw of the pale brown beast.
Blood dripped from its mouth. It stared into his eyes for maybe three terrible seconds, and Schedrin sobbed, “Please…”
The wolf lunged forward, gripped the flesh of his face between its fangs, and ripped it off the skull, as if peeling away a mask. Raw red muscles danced underneath, and the grinning skull’s teeth chattered. The wolf planted its paws on Schedrin’s shoulders and gulped the man’s shredded face down with a shiver of excitement. Schedrin’s lidless eyes stared from the bloody skull. The gray wolf, large-shouldered and rippling with muscle, came in and broke Schedrin’s neck. The russet animal snapped Schedrin’s lower jaw away and tore the hanging tongue out. Then the pale brown beast seized the dead man’s skull, cracked it open, and began to feast.
Mikhail moaned softly, fighting to stay conscious, his senses brutalized.
The russet wolf that had bitten his shoulder turned toward him, and began to advance.
It got within four feet and halted, sniffing the air to catch Mikhail’s scent. Its dark eyes stared into Mikhail’s face and held his gaze. Seconds passed. Mikhail, near fainting, stared back, and in his delirium of pain and shock he thought the beast was asking him a question, and that question might have been: Do you want to die?
Mikhail, holding the animal’s penetrating stare, reached out to one side and picked up a piece of branch. He lifted it, his hand trembling, to strike the wolf’s skull when it lunged.
The wolf paused. Motionless, its eyes like fathomless dark whirlpools.
And then the gray animal roughly nudged the other wolf’s ribs, and the death trance broke. The russet wolf blinked, gave a snorted whuff-a sound of acknowledgment-and turned away to continue its feast on the ruins of Sergei Schedrin. The gray one shattered Schedrin’s breastbone and gnawed in after the heart.
Mikhail held the stick with a white-knuckled grip. Over the hilltop one of the animals feasting on Anton’s corpse gave a low howl that rapidly built in intensity, echoing through the forest and scaring birds out of the trees. The blond, blue-eyed wolf paused in its chewing of Danalov’s shredded torso and lifted its head to the breeze, replying with a howl that made a shiver course up Mikhail’s spine and cleared the misty pain from his head. The pale brown animal began to howl, then the russet wolf, singing in eerie harmony with blood-smeared muzzles. Finally the gray wolf lifted its head and sang a wailing, discordant note that silenced the others. The note wavered, grew in power and volume, changed pitch, and slid upward. Then the gray wolf abruptly ceased its singing, and all the wolves returned to their horsemeat and human flesh.
From the distance came a howling that lasted maybe fifteen seconds, faded, and died.
Dark motes spun across Mikhail’s vision. He pressed his hand to his shoulder. In the wounds muscle tissue showed bright pink. He almost shouted for his mother and father, but then the images of corpses and murder slammed into his brain again and knocked him witless.