Wolf on the Road (2 page)

Her stomach sank into her toes, almost audibly hitting the ground.

The lights turned toward the exit ramp.

“Shit,” she swore, under her breath.

She had a million thoughts going through her brain right then—although none of them were that these lights were a AAA roadside assistance team. Something was coming, and whatever it was, Mali got the very strong sense that she didn’t want any damn thing to do with it... with them, whatever.

Mali gathered herself, and decided to leave the umbrella propped up on her bike as a distraction. She didn’t know why that made sense, but it did. She felt at once very stupid, for thinking that whatever was on the road cared at all about her, and at the same time, absolutely terrified because she
knew
that they did.

She took two steps before her ankle gave.

Sticking her hands out in front of herself, she managed to keep from knocking her head on the ground, but in the process, carved bloody scratches into her palms. She pushed herself to her feet and hobbled toward the nearest dune, thinking that maybe she could cross the hundred yards before whoever was out there, whoever it was giving her the worst chills she’d ever had, figured out where she was.

Either way, as slowly as she was going, it still felt good to be doing
something
, even if she hadn’t a clue what it was she was running from.

It was just out of reach. The dune was fifty yards, and if she made it that far, there were all kinds of rock outcroppings to hide underneath. Then again, she had to make it that far in the first place. Mali looked back and saw the lights gliding down the exit ramp toward her bike’s resting place. Still, there wasn’t any sound, which of all the strange things that had happened in the last ten minutes, struck Mali as the strangest.

She gave up on the idea of limping toward the dune and had instead taken up just dragging her foot behind herself. It was faster, sure, but she was also leaving a track behind that anyone with half a brain would be able to follow.

Half a brain.

“Derrick!” she said with a start. She pulled her phone out and as she dragged her foot, dialed her friend. If those things—whatever they were—really were after her, she didn’t want him to get hurt. Then again, she had no idea why they’d be after her anyway, which added yet another ridiculous angle to this whole mess.

She was still dragging her foot along behind her like a really sad, old dog, when Derrick answered. She didn’t give him a chance to talk. “Stay away from here,” she hissed. “There are all these lights and I have no idea what they’re—”

The lights surrounded her bike, and stopped. Now she could see. They
were
headlights and they were mounted on motorcycles and there were, of course, riders on top of said motorcycles.

“Mali?” he asked. “What’s going on? You’re freaking me out.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, still trying to drag herself to the dune. She saw one of them turn, and point. A bike swung around, highlighting her against the starkness of the desert. And then they were coming toward her.

She swallowed, hard, and stood her ground. What the hell else was she going to do? Run away from people on bikes? Or rather, limp away?

“Hello?” she called. “Hi! Uh, I have a flat tire and uh...”

There was still no sound from the engines. The only thing she could hear was the chirp of crickets, the hum of desert toads calling out and... something running?

She turned back quickly toward the dune, and saw a shape, something vaguely humanoid, come up the hill. It stood, but with the lights in her face, she couldn’t make out anything but an outlined silhouette.

And then they were on her. She didn’t feel any pain, but she felt herself flying. Mali was vaguely aware of the sound of rubber hitting her body, of the sound of her limp form flopping onto the hard scrabble desert. She felt like her consciousness was somewhere outside her body, looking down and watching her being thrown around.

Her head hit the ground, and she snapped straight back into her own body. Her eyes were wide open, her throat burning like hell, and she realized that when she screamed, nothing came out. She tried to suck air, but couldn’t; something stopped her lungs from filling. She blinked dumbly, and tried to move her useless arms. She heard a hissing sound, that she thought must’ve come from her own mouth, but couldn’t understand what it was.

She was on her back, staring up and just watching the stars. It seemed at the time, the best thing to do. Finally, she heard a sound. It was just a whisper, just a terrifying, ugly whisper, from one of the bizarre things that chased her.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

She still hadn’t breathed, and was becoming keenly aware of a burning sensation deep in her chest. But she was detached, not panicking, and was somehow completely calm. Her head flopped to the side, though she wasn’t sure if she’d moved it, or her muscles just went slack. She licked her lips and was immediately impressed that she’d managed such a fine movement. In the next second though, her chest burned again. Her heart, which she thought had stopped beating, thumped again in a slow, irregular pattern.

“I’m dead?” she whispered into the darkness. It wasn’t a sad statement, wasn’t anything but an observation. Mali blinked, and saw that shape again on the dune. It was hunched over and as she watched, moved closer.

Her eyes had gone so out of focus that she didn’t realize he was standing right next to her. “Dead? Not yet,” he said. He dove over her, and try as she might, she couldn’t follow his movements with her sluggish, syrup-filled head. All she could do was blink and wonder what he meant, and also wonder who he was and if he was real, or if it was just the fading memory of a dying brain.

She heard sounds; distant, clashing, terrible sounds. There were screams, crackling sounds, and burst after burst of thunder. Lightning crashed in the way it can only do in the desert. The brilliant flashes made her eyes throb, but past that, she had no sensations, she had no recognition of the fact that she was a broken mess.

“This is gonna hurt,” she heard. It was the same voice from earlier that told her she wasn’t dead. She blinked and tried to see, but her vision was blurry, Vaseline-smeared and useless. She felt the heat of his breath against her neck, and then something pricked at her throat.

Mali’s eyes shot open. She stared up into the blackness and screamed louder and harder than she ever had.

She didn’t know if she was dead or not, but she knew one thing.

This stranger? He wasn’t lying about it hurting. Holy
shit
was he telling the truth about that.

––––––––

A
lone in the dark isn’t a very good place to wake up, especially if you are almost completely sure that you’re dead. It gives a person the uneasy feeling that maybe, just maybe, the Greeks were right.

Mali opened her eyes slowly, expecting... well, not knowing quite
what
to expect. The first thing she saw was nothing at all.

“I’m dead,” she said flatly. “I’m dead and now I’m in hell. Great. First a flat tire in the rain, then I got run down by a bunch of bikers, and now I’m dead and in hell. I guess I shouldn’t have complained so much about work.”

“You gotta do what you’re good at,” a voice—a familiar one—said. “Seems to me, anyway.”

Immediately, Mali recoiled like a cat in a bathtub. She kicked her legs, pushing her body backward until she found herself caught up in a canvas enclosure. “Get away!” she said. “I’m dead!”

A dull ache throbbed in her neck. She put her hand on the origin of the pain and probed a number of holes in the skin. “I’m dead,” she repeated. “Right?”

It was dark, but not pitch-black. Mali could make out the shape of a person moving toward her. He tried to grab her hand. She batted him away and once again scooted along the floor. “Where the hell am I? Am I dead?”

He laughed a dry, humorless sort of laughter. Mali tried backing up again, but found her feet just scrabbling against a familiar-feeling floor. “A tent?” she asked. “Why would I be dead and in a tent?”

“Hold on,” he reached for her again, this time his hand shooting out with impossible speed. He grabbed her wrist and squeezed in a way that seemed to Mali to be a warning not to try and get away again. “You’re hurt. Bad. But you’re not going to die. Of course, the reason you aren’t going to die might not make you exactly happy.”

Mali shook her head. “Why wouldn’t I be happy about being alive?” Once again she fingered the holes in her neck. “What happened to me?”

“Quiet,” the man said, his voice gruff and soft at the same time. “You keep trying to get away from me, and you keep talking, you’re going to make this whole thing take an awful long time. You need to heal, and then we need to get the hell out of here.”

Something about his voice calmed Mali’s nerves. Or maybe it was that she just had no choice but to either panic, or to relax, and she couldn’t remember the last time that panicking did her any good. Though that didn’t stop her from panicking, truth be told.

“Who are you?” she asked, trying to calm her nerves by talking. “And where am I?”

“A tent,” he said and then shrugged. “As for me, I’m just someone who happened along and found you in trouble.”

Mali was shaking her head. “But I was just going to work,” she said. “Going to my boring security job. And then I got a flat tire, and then the lights... wait, you know what those lights were, don’t you?”

“Boy, don’t I know?” the man asked flatly. “I’ve been trailing them for hundreds of miles trying to figure out what they are, and if they’re any threat to James—” he cut himself off, as though he’d said more than he meant to say. “Anyway, just trying to figure out what they are. I’m just a curious sort, I guess.”

“How’d you get me away from them?” she asked. “There was a whole bunch. I can’t remember...”

“What
do
you remember?” he asked when Mali trailed off.

She shook her head softly. When she did, a dull ache throbbed in the left side of her skull. Lifting her hand, she massaged her scalp and pressed her thumb into her temple. Then, she felt the mystery man’s hand on her neck. “Let me,” he said. “I told you, you need to heal.”

He massaged gently at first, and then a little stronger. A swirl of relief trickled through Mali, and she let out a sigh of pleasure when he stuck his thumb into the hollow of her shoulder blade. He moved around behind her, supporting her weight with his chest, which Mali realized was very hard and very warm. Inhumanly warm.

She relaxed against him. “That’s good,” she whispered. “You’re pretty damn good at that. I don’t know if my neck’s ever hurt this bad.”

“Well, you’ve probably never been run over four or five times within thirty seconds. I imagine that’s enough to give you a pretty nasty cramp.”

She stiffened.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to alarm you. But it’s important that you tell me what you remember. I don’t like rushing you, but,” he took a long, deep breath that he let out slowly. “Yeah, like I said, important.”

“I—I don’t know,” she finally said. “I remember my bike getting a flat, and then I pulled off the road. I called my friend and—oh God,” she hissed, “Derrick! God I hope he’s—”

“He’s fine,” the man said softly, still massaging Mali’s back, and then moving to her other shoulder. “I sent him home with your motorcycle. He seemed a little concerned, but, yeah, he finally listened to me.”

Mali arched an eyebrow, which somehow hurt. “What did you do to him?”

“
To
him? Nothing. He showed up a few minutes after I... er, well after I began seeing to you. There was a pretty good mess, so I think he just wanted to make sure you were all right. He wanted to take you to a hospital, but it was too late for that sort of thing. Way, way too late for that.”

“That’s ominous,” Mali said. “And I’m still not sure I’m not dead.”

That time, he laughed out loud. “No, you’re not dead. Can we move on to the other topic?”

She shivered, and then shrugged. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I just have really fuzzy memories. Nothing really clear at all. After the lights, I tried to run but my ankle was sprained and—” she looked down at her foot, flexing it up and down. “How the hell?”

Her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dimness. “It was sprained. Or twisted... or something. I couldn’t walk. I could hardly hobble. How does it not hurt?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll explain things soon. But I need to know if you remember their faces.”

“Faces?” she asked. “No, I don’t remember anything that specific. I just remember... wait, were you the thing on the dune?”

“Thing, she calls me,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “Save a girl from a bunch of shape-shifting biker assholes and—oh hell, I just said that out loud didn’t I?”

From the way Mali was staring at him with her mouth wide open, he got the idea that yes; he had indeed said it out loud. “Damn it.”

She shook her head slowly from side to side, and then cocked her head to the left and closed her eyes. “Shape shifting bikers? What the hell are you talking about? Oh shit,” she said as memories flooded back. “You mean to tell me... you
were
the thing on the dune! You’re... what
are
you?”

“Not important,” he said, trying to think quick. “My name’s Jake Danniken, my brother’s the, alph—the mayor of a city called Jamesburg, and I need to take you there.”

Mali just stared. “No,” she said flatly. “Why the hell would I go with someone I’ve never met to a place I’ve never heard of?”

“Fate?” he offered weakly. When she just put her hands on her hips and pursed out her lips, he shrugged. “Yeah, didn’t think it’d work. Look, I can’t explain things because honestly I don’t understand them. All I know is that I’ve been following those jerkoffs for three days, and never saw them do much of anything except drink shitty beer and play grab-ass. That is, until they saw you.”

Mali was beginning to get an inkling of the situation, but the whole thing was just too ridiculous to take seriously at all. “I’m nobody special,” she said. “And I don’t mean that in a depressive sort of way. I’m a security guard at a hotel. Like... why the hell would a gang of—and I’m just saying this because you did—shape shifting bikers want anything to do with me? I was obviously an easy target and they were looking for a cheap score.”