In the distance there were sirens, then a few minutes later voices in the hall. Then light, flashbulbs popping as police photographers recorded the scene. She raised her head far enough to see Wilson being carried out on a stretcher. “O-positive blood,” she called weakly.
Then somebody was beside her, looking at her, a half smile on his tired face. “Hello, Mrs. Neff.” He moved aside as medical orderlies slid her onto a stretcher. “Mrs. Neff, do you want to make a statement to the press?”
“You’re the man from the Post, aren’t you?”
“I’m Garner, ma’am.”
She smiled, closed her eyes. They were moving her now, the lights of the hallway passing above her face. Sam Garner hurried along beside her, trying to hold a tape recorder microphone in her face.
“It’s a big story, isn’t it?” he said breathlessly.
“A big story,” she said. Sam Garner smiled again, elbowed his way into the elevator already crowded with medical orderlies and her stretcher. Her leg throbbed with agony, she felt exhausted, she wanted to close her eyes, to forget. But she gave Garner his story.
Epilogue
« ^
Their mother jumped as soon as the gun had been emptied into their father. She would make the kill, then the four of them would destroy their father’s body.
Then the incredible happened. The gun crashed again and their mother was also killed.
They stood staring at her lifeless form, too stunned to move. All three of them felt aware of grief—and almost overwhelming anger at the monster who had killed their parents.
It sat waving its gun, and the gun smelled hot and deadly.
They watched, not quite sure what to do. Then there was a sound outside the door—more humans approaching, their breath rising and falling, their feet crunching against the carpet in the hallway. And the sharp, nasty scent of guns was upon them also. The three young Wolfen turned to face this new threat. The door burst open amid shouting human voices, and they prepared to kill whatever appeared there.
But it was two young males, dressed as those in the Dump had been dressed. All of this agony had begun when two such had been killed; they would not repeat the mistake. They ran past the two policemen into the hallway. Now the bodies of their parents would be left behind for men to see—but this could not be helped. They bolted down the hall, pushed through the heavy door there, and began to run down the stairs.
They raced across the lobby of the building, smashing the glass front door with their bodies, and running on, indifferent to the shouts and crashing glass behind them and to the cuts they had received.
They ran through the empty predawn city, moving north past the rows of luxury buildings, through the ruined streets even farther north, past crowds of homeless men huddled around open fires, not stopping until they reached the dark and rat-infested banks of the Harlem river.
The eastern sky was glowing fitfully, the light casting into black relief the girders of the bridges above the river. The three of them stopped. They had come to a well-hidden place, marked safe by the scent of the pack that roamed this area. All felt a terrible sense of loss. Their parents were dead, the pack they knew was ended. Worse was the fact that Wolfen bodies had been left behind in the hands of man.
They felt loss but not defeat. What burned in their hearts was not fear but defiance; hard, determined, unquenchable.
They howled. The sound echoed up and down the banks of the river, crossed the icy muttering waters, echoed again off the distant buildings.
High above them on the Third Avenue Bridge a repair crew was deploying its equipment. When they heard the sound the men stared wordlessly at one another. One of them went to the railing but could see nothing in the darkness below.
Then the howl was answered, keening on the wind as pack after pack looked up from their haunts in the City’s depths and responded to the powerful sense of destiny that the sound awakened in them all.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
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