Lucky's Girl (7 page)

When it had happened, she hadn’t been able to account for her behavior. It had nothing to do with survival, nothing to do with the scent on the wind, only with the unmistakable knowing that there was a pack to be had, a place that would finally be her home. Her territory. That she would be alpha, never starving or being driven away again.

She’d swum with the struggling cat in her jaws, breaking its neck with a quick twist, and then laid it, twitching and crying out at the base of the big white pine. It was an odd tree, gnarled and misshapen, with a smell of death about it. But she wasn’t afraid. She’d torn the cat open, spilling its blood across the exposed roots and then she’d
known
.

She would be alpha and all would cower before her in submission and then, when all the tribes had been vanquished,
she would take a mate
.

And now, here they were before her. Haughty, defiant, uncomprehending, unaware their new queen was seconds away from taking her throne.

They didn’t know that she
knew.

She
knew
that the alpha female of the first tribe, the one who’d savaged her and driven her away, was half-blind on her left side, with no peripheral vision. She
knew
the alpha female of the second tribe had a weak foreleg. She could run in a straight line and leap to one side, but not to the other.

Her pack stood behind her, too deep in the shadows for the other packs to see. She didn’t want to give away the game. She commanded them with a short bark and a growl to stay back, to not reveal their unbelievable strength until she willed it. She walked forward into the glade, brazen, ears up, giving no sign of alarm – and no sign of submission.

The enemy female alpha’s growling became a cacophony of fury. They were drawn here out of hate for what had grown in their midst. The bitch they had exiled had become an alpha herself, her pack all rogue males. No females, no pups, united by something unnatural. To them, death was natural and normal, they were killers, but what stood before them was an abomination, an inversion of nature, a corruption that must be torn apart lest its shadow spread.

Blackie walked out into the glade for all to see. Pure black, blue eyes boring holes into her enemies. She did not look away. She looked straight into the eyes of the one who had made her barren. She was a coiled missile of steely muscle but remained calm, giving no appearance of alarm. The alpha females became stupid with rage, too angry to think, too willing to join a fight they didn’t know was not in their favor.

She tilted back her head and barked the simple challenge to the one who had harmed her, the one racing across the field like a growling meteor of silver fur and bared fangs. Blackie did not move, only crouched, not in submission, but in anticipation of the other’s attack. The other expected to stun her with the sheer ferocity of her assault, but Blackie simply leapt aside at the last moment, forcing the other to come to a dead stop with Blackie in her blind spot.

Razor teeth clamped down on the alpha’s half blind eye, tearing it from the socket. Red blood fountained and she screamed in agonized confusion as a buffeting paw crashed across her snout, and teeth pulled skin from above her good eye, yanking the eyelid off. She screamed and screamed again in submission. The fight that should have been her triumph was over in a matter of seconds and she was blind!

Blackie took no time to gloat, to flatten her ears and stand above the vanquished as the female cowered at her feet because the alpha female of the second tribe was nearly upon her.

She feinted left and right in abrupt bursts, making the other bound to intercept. This one couldn’t swerve to the right, so when she tried, it was weak and halting, forcing her head down as she stumbled. Blackie came in fast and exact, grabbing the other by the scruff, tearing back and forth until the entire mass of fur covering the other’s neck came off in a bloody mass. It was over, the other was stunned, with no fight left in her. Blackie leaned in and sank her fangs brutally into the forepaw of the other’s halting leg until her mouth filled with blood and the small bones crackled and broke.

Two female alphas lay yelping and crying in submission in the empty glade as Blackie sat back on her haunches and sang out a victory cry of vengeance. Her enemies lay bleeding and crippled at her feet, but her victory had just begun.

She had seen it told to her, she
knew.

The wolves of the two tribes were growling and barking, but beneath was an undercurrent of confused whimpering and whining. They had no idea what they were seeing; this was simply not the way wolves lived. Males were the leaders, females the subordinates. Yes, the alpha female had a great deal of latitude, but she was ultimately subordinate. They were drawn here to address a rogue wolf, and the unthinkable had happened: the rogue female had dispatched the alpha females of both tribes
fast
.

And now Blackie stood up, addressing the two tribes with a short snarl of domination. She looked straight at the males, who flattened their ears and snarled back.

They were not hers to address this way.

She sat back down and raised her ears in an unthreatening manner, looked over her shoulder and barked calmly. The
nine
males of her rogue pack came out of the underbrush and stood shoulder to shoulder behind her, howling in triumph and domination. They had the power and the numbers, none could oppose them. Like a stream of black arrows they flew out at the two tribes with Blackie in the lead, but they didn’t do what any expected. They pinned the alpha males and dragged them thrashing and screaming into the glade, forcing them into supine stances of submission, then they dragged the only female that hadn’t run in terror back to the north.

This female was Blackie’s mother. She ran in circles, terrified by the ring of uncanny males surrounding her, hemming her in, preventing her from fleeing, forcing her into a smaller and smaller circle with the two bleeding and crippled alpha females of the now extinct northern packs.

And then Blackie and her nine males fed upon those who had harmed her as the captured alpha males of the two tribes were forced to watch. When the feasting had been completed the captured males understood what they must do to survive.

They fed on their own females while Blackie watched in supreme satisfaction.

CHAPTER 9

Kenny woke up with the first rays of the morning sun filtering through the funky old brown shades. He remembered when his uncle Frank had ordered them out of the Sears catalog and they’d picked them up at the post office two weeks later. They were an off-white then, but time does strange things to plastic. He looked around at the faux wood paneling and the threadbare carpet. When this place was built in the late sixties it was probably envisioned to be a hunting cabin, but Uncle Frank moved in after Vietnam and had never left. A front door, a back door, and four squinty windows with brown shades. This was his world growing up, and now it was his again.

Truth be told, he had grown up poor and awkward, with no true parents, just a reclusive old Vet, but he’d been happy. He never knew what he didn’t have. He’d never known his parents, so hadn’t missed them. He’d never had money, no one did, so it was never something he thought about. It wasn’t until those very last days that things had gotten bad. Those had been some bad days, the worst he had ever experienced. They were the worst days of a lot of people’s lives. He remembered walking around in the days after, looking around at the town like he’d never seen it before. It was dark, it was poor, it was desperate. The scales had been lifted from his eyes and he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay; there was nothing here for him now.

He remembered walking through the door of the cabin, having decided to sit down with his uncle and talk about leaving. Going somewhere. Doing something. Something somewhere else, something anywhere else, but his uncle had beaten him to it.

He’d sat on the couch holding an application form along with a pile of VA paperwork. Apparently he’d been working on this for quite a while, quietly, never telling Kenny anything. He had saved up money somehow. He’d wanted to take Kenny to the Greyhound station and send him to a place where money practically rained from the sky, where a small-town kid could make good. A place called Galveston, Texas. There was a school there that the VA would pay to teach him how to weld underwater. He would make lots of money and could have a house, a wife, kids and cars. There was nothing here for him and his uncle had known it.

And now he was back, making coffee on the old stove, pouring it through the old metal filter, getting in the tiny old shower, wondering how to tell his kids about the lake.

It was about a hundred yards behind the cabin, accessed through a well-worn trail through the woods. There was a little pier with his uncle’s old rowboat, sitting on dry land, with Grove Island out about a half mile away. Just an unlikely mound with a stand of white pine topped by the biggest white pine of them all, The Big Tree. He could see its crown towering high above the others. It jutted out, twisted and gnarled and gigantic.

He had walked out here last night before Errol had stopped by to palaver. He’d stood on the pier, drinking his Molson and shining his flashlight out over the dried mud of the weird plain created by the absence of water. There were boots and tires and the debris of civilization, but no fish. There were no goddam fish in Elton Lake even though it was directly connected to the river. His uncle had got in this rowboat almost every day, paddling the mile to the river and coming back with their dinner. In deer season they’d eaten a lot of deer, in duck season a lot of duck. This was how he’d saved to get Kenny through welding and dive school. At least the part the VA wouldn’t cover.

He’d looked around the bend of the lake to the church. There were lights there, cars coming and going, but no music, so it couldn’t have been a church service, but something was going on. Later on, Errol had told him what it was and the lack of music had made sense. Kenny’s uncle hadn’t been a churchgoer but they’d come out here at night to the pier to enjoy the night, listening to the sound of the choir echoing out over the lake, into the night, into the sky.

There had been no music last night because there was no choir director, no sermon because there was no pastor. The Rev was dead. So on their first day here he would be taking his kids to the funeral of a man they didn’t know. He weighed not going but his conscience wouldn’t allow it. The Rev had been a fixture in his childhood, a rock in all the ways that his uncle hadn’t. He didn’t have parents but he’d gotten to see what real parents were like, and somehow their light had been sufficient. He didn’t feel bitter about his lack of parents or his uncle’s inadequacy. He had fit inside the penumbra of their love. Just witnessing it, just experiencing it had been enough. If there ever were real saints, it was the Rev and Mrs. James. He’d been a constant in their home. They’d never failed to get him birthday and Christmas presents, even if it was nothing more than hand-me-down clothes. He’d missed his own uncle’s funeral: he wouldn’t miss this.

CHAPTER 10

Lucky sat on the little pier on Grove Island, looking out across the barren expanse that had once been Elton Lake. He smoked his usual Marlboro Reds, frowning and looking at his booted feet dangling over the weird cracked dirt of the lake bottom. It was a surreal scene, one he wasn’t really crazy about.

Ever since pulling into the Upper Peninsula from Wisconsin things had gone from bad to plain old fucked up. He remembered the U.P. being backwards-assed, but this shit redefined the term broke. And the closer he’d gotten to Elton Township, the worse it was. This place was the most broken place in a broken state.

He didn’t want to venture in because he wasn’t sure how it was going to play out. He couldn’t just roll up on his Harley and declare himself. That could get hectic really quick. Instead he took the back roads, logging trails mostly, to get to the far side of the lake, the one furthest from anyone’s cabin.

On the opposite side of the lake stood the church and the rest of the “town”. Just the cop shop and a lone cruiser, Frankie’s Bar, the diner, the motel, the Laundromat and the little portable building serving as post office. Behind that the streets trailed off into a warren of cabins and trailers which got woollier the further back into the woods they went. Other than that there wasn’t shit. It literally hadn’t changed in twenty years and it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned either.