Breeds (31 page)

“Problem is, they don’t wait for very long,” Ross said. “They’ll come right in here and start killing people. Already done it. Everyone could be dead by morning. No, the best chance is getting to Bonavista tonight and bringing back reinforcements. Here.”

Ross handed Alvin the silver knife. “I’ll keep the shotgun, but I’d feel better if y’had this.”

Alvin took the weapon and studied its length, wishing it was broadsword sized.

The engine rumbling, Ross climbed astride the seat as Tom held out a red helmet. Ross put it on, slapping the visor up and facing the two men.

“You get back to the house and hold out. Shoot anything naked. I’ll be back in two hours at the most.”

“Follow the roads,” Tom yelled. “Enough snow on ‘em. You’ll be in Bonavista in thirty minutes or less. That animal y’got underneath ya can fly if I didn’t say so before.”

Ross nodded, slapped the visor down, and slipped his hands inside the handlebar muffs. He squeezed the throttle and eased out of the garage bay, the single headlight illuminating the way. Once onto snow, he gave the machine a greater shot of gas and roared away in a spray of snowy surf. Ross knew how to handle a snowmobile.

He slowed down while getting around Tom’s swamped Ford F150, and cut a path onto the road.

Once on the hill, he cranked it.

Brutus pulled back from the glass, smelling the draft blowing through the house. The wind changed direction, coming from behind and carrying with it the unmistakable scent of something very dangerous. The other breeds smelled it as well and they turned to see a shadow barely contained by the pitch-black hallway. The werewolf showed teeth that blazed in the dark, and growled a challenge.

Drawing himself up to his full, ominous height, his musculature rippling, Brutus growled back. He had no fear of this challenger. None at all.

Then, the darkness outside was abruptly split by a single staring eye of bright light, distracting both parties for a deciding instant. Brutus’s growl ended with a questioning grunt as the snowmobile charged out of the blizzard and turned.

Before shooting up over the hill.

Sensing something of importance was escaping, Brutus had the inexplicable impulse to chase it. He screamed and leaped through the window, snow rising well past his knees upon landing. The breeds shouted after him but he ignored their cries, fully expecting them to follow on his heels. Yelling every step, he bounded onto the snow-filled road and charged after the roaring light, the smell of exhaust in his nostrils.

He did not look back.

Kirk squared off against the pack, already facing him as he crept down the short hallway. It didn’t matter. He had them all in one place, and before the next minute was done, he intended to kill every last one. The largest of the pack, a brutal beast towering over the tallest breed and corded with heavy muscle, screamed and threw down a pose meant to frighten Kirk.

Brutal.

Kirk remembered the brass tag affixed to the leather collar, back in Borland’s store.

Brutus
.

A comet flash blazed through the picture window, washing the walls in fleeting light. The deep grumble of the snowmobile engine ripped through the living room as it sped off into the night. The tall brutal one turned around as snow lashed about him. He hesitated for all of a second before leaping out after it.

That one motion distracted the remainder of the pack.

Kirk lunged forth, jaws biting down hard on the naked neck of the nearest monster, pinching flesh and bone together like an aluminum can and leaving a rag doll at his feet. A single piercing squeak cut the air, frightening enough to get the full attention of the remaining breeds in the living room.

Then they were on him.

Kirk slammed one with his two paws, sending him flying backwards to crash into a wide-screen television against the far wall. He tore the face off another with a flash of claws, yanking the jawbone from the skull and leaving his victim thrashing on the carpet. Something landed on Kirk’s back while a breed swiped the side of his face, slashing his neck down to his collarbone. The creatures screeched and mobbed him. Kirk roared back and chomped an arm in two. He torqued his entire frame, swinging the breed with him, bowling two others over before biting clean through the limb. The man-thing on his back bit into his shoulder, crushing bone and soaking fur in a spurt of blood. Kirk howled and kicked, disemboweling a female just behind him, the thin flesh of her washboard midsection firm one second, then spilling a nest of eels the next. Claws sunk into Kirk’s chest, stabbing deep, pushing past bone. He twisted onto his back, squashing the air out of the breed riding him. Kirk untangled himself in time to face the man-thing missing its jaw bone. Jaw Bone shrieked pure rage at the werewolf, its single line of curved teeth all the more frightening against its ghastly wound. They leaped at each other at the same time, colliding like a fleshy gong, before Kirk’s superior strength pushed the breed against the wall. He slammed his paws against Jaw Bone’s thick shoulders and raked his talons downward in grisly runnels, right to a pair of bare upper thighs, sapping all fight from the creature. Kirk ripped its throat out in a black starburst. A breed grabbed his legs and slammed him into a doorframe, nearly breaking his neck in the process. Claws grabbed the werewolf, sinking into his flesh, hooking his ribs. Kirk twisted, snapped, and glimpsed a screaming, white face and swelling eyes. He swatted the head, flattening it to the shoulder with an audible
crack.
The creature––the female he’d gutted only seconds earlier––staggered back, suddenly wanting nothing to do with the werewolf.

Kirk pushed ahead and caught her skull in his jaws, crunching it like a knob of hard candy.

He dropped the dying breed and placed his back to a wall, facing the last man-thing as it climbed to its feet. The man’s chest had caved in, and Kirk recognized him as the one who had clung to his back. A bitter wind cut between them, whisking away the steam snaking out of the dead or dying. The thing, visibly crippled and hurting, was barely able to stand, yet seethed undiluted anger at Kirk.

The remaining breed, the Bloodhound, fixed its harsh eyes upon the werewolf’s dripping shape and bared a shark’s maw of teeth. Its posture screamed hatred. Despite feeling mind-numbing pain and unable to fill its punctured lungs with air, Long Face wheezed, and in one final, defining moment of defiance, lifted its extended talons to attack.

Kirk charged in a brushstroke of fur and fangs and clamped down on the breed’s neck, dragging it effortlessly to the floor, shaking it until tendons snapped and it fell lifelessly from his jaws.

When it was dead, Kirk limped to the nearest moving body and tore the throat out of it. He killed every breed still clinging to life this way, and once he was done, he resisted the urge to sit on his haunches and howl at the hidden moon. Once again, the pack had taken a bloody toll on him, inflicting punishment the likes he’d never experienced in his life. His shoulder rattled and burned when it flexed. The urge to just feed and slink away to recover settled over his mind, but there wasn’t any time for that. Kirk regarded the shattered picture window. Brutus had taken off into the storm… and as long as one of the breeds survived, there was a possibility of this happening all over once more. That was something he couldn’t allow. Snarling with pain, Kirk willed himself to move. Every step left prints of blood. With a weary
whuff
, he crossed the soaked living room carpet and leaped into the blizzard.

Intent on finding the one that got away.

The Arctic Cat climbed, spitting snow in its wake. The machine plowed over and through rising drifts, at times jarring Ross from his seat. He huddled behind the windshield, concentrating on the shifting surface ahead. Twisting coils charged the single headlight, muting the beam just enough to illuminate the edges of the road, and no more than ten to fifteen feet ahead at best. Bonavista. He had to think it was a damn fine time to head out to the coastal hub. A damn fine time. Thirty minutes. In this storm and with reduced visibility, thirty minutes looked to be doubled. Christ. He hoped there were people left to save by the time he returned with the RCMP. But part of him, the guilty part, felt relief with his decision to get away.

The road ahead unraveled under the snowmobile’s light, and Ross leaned over the handlebars, absorbed with the task at hand and wondering what had happened to Doug. The man was missing in action.

A blustery gust of near-arctic air, blown from the icy lungs of Old Man Winter himself, damn near erased the road ahead, as if both of Ross’s corneas had been shaved from his eyes. Then the curtain dropped and the headlight revealed a massive wolf, bent over on all fours, with a blazing rack of teeth. Ross jerked the Arctic Cat to the right in reflexive fright, but the monster was simply too big to completely avoid. The front slammed into the animal, sweeping it off its legs. It rolled over the hood and plowed through the windshield with a fibrous
crack.
A mass of fur crashed into Ross’s upper body, sweeping him from the seat. His head was rudely pushed back on his shoulders. The Arctic Cat left him and he floated, weightless, for all of a split second before bouncing off a firm mattress of powder. The animal landed on top of him. The roar of the snowmobile ended with a boom somewhere in the blizzard, the engine dying as if speared through its heart.

Stunned, Ross merely stared up at the blackest night, unaware of what it really was holding him down. Then a great weight rolled off him. Ross shifted away from the monster, got to his hands and knees, too dazed to move any further. The Arctic Cat rumbled weakly in his ears, choking to death. His eyes squeezed shut and he fought to reorient himself, wanting air,
needing
air, seeing that shocking beast in his mind’s eye. That was no regular wolf. It was something escaped from a lost age. A
sorcerous
age. The back of it alone had to be the width of a refrigerator.

A low growl cut through the blizzard’s squall, prompting Ross to turn his head to the side.

“Oh,” he breathed, feeling a spike of fear lancing the length of his spine. His breathing abruptly stopped, then started up again in great gulps. The wolf, or an honest-to-God
werewolf
, crept into sight, appearing none too happy. Ross backed away, speechless, awestruck by this miasmic apparition fading in and out of sight. He glimpsed the Arctic Cat on its side, impaled on a picket fence. The werewolf slunk through the streaking snow, behind the overturned snowmobile, until only the arch of its back could be seen. Its snout came around the front of the machine, while the beast’s haunches were
still
visible at the other end. It moved funny, and it took him a heartbeat to realize that the wolf was missing a paw.

The wolf from Borland’s cabin.

Movies had the hero muttering something cavalier at being confronted by such a beast, but not Ross. A sputter of monosyllabic sounds croaked from his throat as he backed off in a frantic shuffle of hands and legs. The movement caught the monster’s attention, and it curled its impossibly huge head around the Arctic Cat. Images of being eaten
alive
flooded Ross’s mind in a white-water rush that damn near paralyzed him to the core. Then fear gushed into his limbs, powering them with energy. He did at least fifty in reverse, charged entirely on adrenaline. In his retreat he flipped himself onto his feet and, with arms cartwheeling for balance, shot off into the storm, bounding through snow drifts that swallowed his legs to his knees. The urge to look back struck him, but the fuzzy dark spared him from spotting his pursuer.

But, as God was his witness, Ross swore he sensed it, keeping pace just out of sight.

The second time he glanced back ended with him falling down an embankment in a man-sized avalanche. He whimpered, got to his feet at the bottom, reached for his shotgun and realized it was gone. Wheezing fright and knowing he had to get away or at least hide, Ross sprinted into a small clump of stunted trees. He dove inside, hugging the drifts as if they offered protection.

Then he heard it. Something stomping through the snow, feet punching deep, the hurried breathing and a harsh growling. The night swirled and sped by like black static on a television, coating his visor in a misty slush. All concentration went into tensing for a quick sprint if needed. The smell of chilled fir needles cut across his nose, disrupted at times by the winds. Ross hunkered down and peered into the night, waiting for a shape to materialize, letting his breath out in a controlled wheeze that tortured his racing heart and lungs.

Trees behind him cracked. Ross stopped moving, making side eyes, and finally looked over his shoulder. Something huge forced its way through the firs. Ross moaned and exploded from his hiding place. He huffed it through the whirling clouds of stinging white, focused only on getting away, getting away now, but expecting that terrible set of jaws to clamp down on his ankles or neck at any second. Perhaps rabbits felt the same hot rush of terror before the crushing pinch of predatory teeth.

Ross staggered on blindly, arms burning, chugging at his sides, until a length of metal took him full across the chest and planted him on his ass. For a moment, he lay there, feeling the burn in his torso, not quite realizing what had just happened. He propped himself up and stared ahead, discerning the pole rising up out of a snow drift. Then a second pole, joining at the peak like an upside down V.

A swing. A swing set for kids.

I’m on the playground
, Ross realized in a daze. The old playground just at the edge of town. His flight from the top of the hill had him backtrack at an angle, until he rammed into the metal swing set with a full head of steam. The playground itself was over thirty years old, left to rust and ruin as the children grew up, departed the coves, and weren’t replaced. When the wind subsided, he heard the old groan of joints and chains swinging.

Ross gripped the pole and hauled himself up. To his right was the curve of a dome- shaped jungle gym.