New Title 1 (32 page)

“It’s a hard job, but someone’s got to do it,” Oddy said.

“Fucking in zero gravity? Going to be fluids floating everywhere!” Zippo.

“—Cue a giant orgy. I’m talking constant, enduring fucking. Every orifice. Rotating partners. A sea of thrusting, moaning body parts.
Caligula
will have nothing on this flick!”

Oddy said, “What are you calling this opus?”

Tripwire considered. “How about
Intergalactic Space Sluts
? Or maybe
2020: A Space Orgy
?”

“Tough choice. They’re both so classy,” Zippo cracked.

“Ah, fuck it.” Tripwire threw his hands up. “You jokers wouldn’t know class if it yanked your pants down and blew you. What are your plans, Zippo—got any?”

“Whores,” Zippo said. “Whores and cupcakes, a million bucks’ worth.”

“Well, son,” Oddy said, laughing. “Gonna end up with a lot of fat-assed whores, I thi—”

From the darkened forest a feral howl arose. Moments later it was answered by another, this one from a different location. The sound ricocheted across the inlet, prickling the hairs on their necks.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that’d be your garden-variety timberwolf,” Tripwire said.

“Don’t suppose so,” Oddy said. “Let’s get back on the hump. Zippo, how do you feel?”

“Like a bag of smashed assholes.”

“Maybe we should hunker here.” Answer swept his arm to encompass the broad, flat landscape. “Like you said, nothing’s liable to sneak up on us. If we got to fight, might as well be on our own terms.”

“You’ve got a point,” Oddy said. “And I’ve got a feeling we’re surrounded, anyhow.”

Another howl arose, a long and shuddering and lonely sound that went out across the cold night air. The men’s blood chilled. They knew that sound. It was in their blood, that sound, an echo from far away and long ago, when all the world had been forest and jungle and primitive man had fled in terror before the pursuing pack. It echoed over the barren vista, unchanged over the eons, infused with the looming threat of the hunt.

Zippo retrieved the silver bullet from his pocket. He rolled the smooth cylinder between his fingers. One shot. He ejected the Llama’s magazine and slotted the silver slug in.

“Don’t put it on top,” Oddy said. “Don’t know about you, but my first shot’s most often my wildest. I don’t zone in until the fourth or fifth. Plus, regular bullets don’t much affect these things—they’ll charge right through to give you a clean close shot.”

Made sense to Zippo. He ejected four bullets, inserted the silver one, and re-loaded the rest. The others did the same. Oddy spun the Webley’s cylinder and snapped it home with a flick of his wrist, scanning the darkened terrain. What he saw was disturbing: in places the snow appeared to be
moving
. It wouldn’t stay still, and each time he refocused it would shift, hillocks becoming ridges becoming flat land again. The movement was furtive and sneaking: it possessed a pattern and connection just beyond Oddy’s capacity for understanding.

There was only one certainty.

It was getting closer…

««—»»

Excerpt from “
Never Cry Wolf
,” by Farley Mowatt (1963):

I have lived amongst the wolves of the arctic tundra for some months now. They see I pose no threat, and have come to accept my presence as a matter of course. Fall slips into winter, and their appearance adapts to suit the season. Their pelts, previously iron-gray, have changed to a creamy-white. This, I suspect, is a natural camouflage, aiding their pursuit of the nomadic caribou herds. It is effective, to be sure: in the gloaming they are nearly impossible to spot. They are one with the land, ghostly specters who live only for the hunt, for the kill…

««—»»

“…spotting something over here.” Answer pointed in the opposite direction. “Indistinct, but…something.”

“Something here, too.” Tripwire.

“Ditto.” Zippo.

Oddy stared skyward. The full moon was up by now, he knew, but hidden behind a bank of black cotton clouds. He willed the cloud cover to lift; he
needed
that moonlight. “Steady on those booby traps, son,” he whispered.

Tripwire knelt close to the ground. He’d wrapped the fishing lines around the index and middle fingers of each hand, both of which were trembling.
Steady, baby
, he told himself.
Keep your shit wired.

The acid burn of anticipation smoldered in Oddy’s arms, his hands, his finger squeezed around the H&K23’s trigger. He squinted. Something was out there. Odd movements, odd shapes. The whole landscape seemed to stare in at him—a watched feeling—and his eyes followed the forms that slid through the whiteness. Every time he pinned one down, every time the foreign contours began to coalesce into some recognizable silhouette, it melted into shadows again.

“Getting a bit flaked here, Sarge,” Tripwire said.

“Keep your head. Fortune favors the brave.”

It was their eyes that ended up giving them away: specks of slitted red glowing like well-stoked embers. Their brightness was such that they left lingering contrails wherever they moved, the way sparklers held by excited children do on Fourth of July nights.

“I got a bead,” Oddy said, nodding to a spot perhaps ten feet past one of Answer’s flares. He let loose with the Heckler and Koch. Bullets stitched a path across the snow, slugs slamming through the ice, gouts of water spurting up through the holes.

He didn’t hit a thing.

A growl arose from somewhere close by. Zippo jerked his head back, half-convinced a slavering jaw was within an inch of his neck. Nothing was there. A smell wafted across the unbroken expanse to where they hunched: a scent of fevered hunger, insistent as death.

Zippo snapped off a shot that kicked up a puff of snow.
What good’s a clean sightline
, he thought,
if you can’t see what the fuck you’re shooting at?
For the first time since ’Nam, Zippo was scared: that sickeningly familiar sensation of fire-ants crawling at the back of his throat…

“There!” Answer said. His finger pointed to a shimmering shape near one of the booby traps. He said to Tripwire: “Hit it!”

Tripwire jerked his arm up, hard, like a bodybuilder performing a biceps curl. The fishing line tightened across the ice in a seismic wave of crystallized snow, then went slack as the grenade pin pulled free. The clip made a dull metallic sound ricocheting off the tin’s insides.

Oddy couldn’t tell which was louder: the grenade detonating or the lake’s surface shattering. The sounds were different—the concussive thunder of high-explosive versus the ear-splitting whipcrack of ice cracking down deep fault lines—but equally deafening. The frozen surface trembled and the clear ice beneath Zippo’s feet spiderwebbed and then went milky and opaque. Fist-sized shards of ice rained down and a swell of water surged over their boots. When the cordite cleared they could see a jagged-edged hole the size of a VW Minibus. Ringing the hole were chunks of meat clung with white fur.

I got it
, Tripwire thought savagely.
I got one of the fuc—

Howling with rage and pain, it charged. Though the explosion had torn its rear right leg off, it still moved with chilling speed. Its remaining limbs, girded with thick roping muscles, flexed with svelte animal power. Its ears were pinned back to a bullet-shaped head and its eyes glowed a hideous baleful red. Muzzle was black as coal, teeth long and sharp as ivory daggers. Slaver ran between them in long viscid runners. The men saw all this in the split-second it took to cover the twenty feet separating them.

Then it was in their midst.

Oddy swiveled with the H&K23 slung low. The werewolf lashed out with its foot. Razor-sharp claws cut deep into the back of Oddy’s hand, just below his knuckles, cleaving flesh and severing nerves. Blood sprayed from the wound to sheet his face. The machine-gun skittered along the ice and out of reach.

The werewolf’s paw pistoned out towards Tripwire in a murderous upwards sweep. His fevered mind saw, in that fractured second, the battered watch around its wrist, the tiny TIMEX logo written in orange.

Takes a licking
, his mind raved and then a paw tipped with heavy claws ripped a scar-line into his armpit, continuing through the junction where shoulder met arm. Pain sung along the raw gash as Tripwire spun with the blow’s force. In the process his arm flailed upwards…fishing line arced across the ice…the faint
tic
of a pin detatching…

BOOM
and the ice tilted madly beneath them. Ice chips sprayed like smashed teeth. There was another gaping hole now, to the left of the first, with a three-foot ice bridge separating the two. Chunks of ice and slush pelted down; a sharp wedge struck Answer on the shoulder and his right arm went instantly numb. The smell of wet gunpowder mixed with the wet-dog odor of the werewolf.

A buzz-saw of blood spurted through the vent in Tripwire’s parka and in his head things were exploding with dim popping noises, underwater fireworks. He fell down hard on his ass and the ice cracked beneath him. He felt as if he were sitting on a crust of spun sugar that could melt, or shatter, at any moment. Then the werewolf was towering above him, blood matting its jaws, canines like sharpened hooks, and all else was forgotten. He fought back the urge to bare his throat like a whipped mongrel.

A combat boot came down on Tripwire’s hand. Biting back a scream, he craned his neck to see the boot belonged to Zippo, and that Zippo’s gun was drawn and pointed at…
him
.

The werewolf’s head slammed into his chest and Zippo’s gun barked simultaneously. The bullet passed through the werewolf’s skull and exited from the underside of its chin, burrowing into the ice between Tripwire’s spread legs. The werewolf jerked as if stung but its jaws kept gnashing. Zippo’s lips were moving rapidly. He was counting off the bullets as he ran through the magazine.

OnetwothreefourFIVE—

The silver bullet spun from the cylinder to punch a neat hole just above the werewolf’s left eyebrow. It reared with a shocked howl. There was a gaping crater on the underside of its jaw. Tatters of fabric hung and swung from its jaws—the front of Tripwire’s parka looked as if it had been shoved through a wheat thresher.

Then the most amazing thing happened: silverish tendrils began to spread outwards from the wound. They opened out across the werewolf’s face, entering its mouth and snout and vulpine ears, before racing outwards across its limbs. This was accompanied by a sharp tinkling sound which Zippo associated with rapidly-freezing water. Within moments the creature was encased in a network of silver threads. Its front paws were raised above its head, teeth bared, hunched in pre-attack. Zippo shot it and the thing exploded like a tennis ball that had been immersed in liquid nitrogen and thrown at a brick wall.

“Sorry,” Zippo said, taking his boot off Tripwire’s hand. “Didn’t want another grenade going off.”

“S’okay.”

“Get bit?”

Tripwire looked down at his chest. He shook his head.

“You got the devil’s luck, then—”

“Over
here
!” Answer hollered.

Two sleek shapes rushed out of the darkness at a dead heat. Tripwire saw that they were maybe thirty feet from a booby trap. He wasn’t sure the ice could withstand another explosion. But what choice did he have? Ignoring the searing pain in his shoulder, he jerked his arm across his neck in a throat-slitting gesture to detent another pin.