Coyote (23 page)

“You’re right,” said the Professor. “They were silvery. Not normal, white, dog teeth.”

“Maybe it was the firelight,” suggested Bait. “I didn’t see anything.”

“That’s because you were busy peeing your pants,” quipped the Mule, getting a laugh from the others. Bait frowned, but had no response.

“I wanna see,” said Beast. “Get it to show us its teeth.”

He was looking at her, but she just looked back. She wasn’t interested in trying to make the dog do tricks.

The Mule spoke up, “Bait, touch it again!” he suggested.

“Screw you,” was Bait’s only reply.

“Maybe just make it growl at you,” suggested the Professor. Apparently he wanted to see as much as the others.

“No way, man. I’m not touching it again,” said Bait.

“Don’t just reach out and touch it,” suggested Beast. Just put your hand out, real slow. The others all looked at Bait, liking the suggestion.

“Why don’t one of you do it?” he asked.

After that, there was silence for a moment.

“Because you’re Bait,” she responded. Now she was curious, too.

Everyone seemed to think it was decided now, and they just quietly watched Bait.

“Real slow,” suggested Beast. “Just reach out.”

Bait continued to frown, but after a few moments he started to move one of his hands towards the dog.

The dog noticed right away, and though its head continued to face the fire, its eyes were turned sideways, looking at Bait. As Bait’s hand crept forward, the dog began to emit a low growl, which made Bait freeze.

“C’mon, now,” said the Mule. “Don’t stop there.”

Bait withdrew his hand to the groans of the others. Then he moved his feet underneath him. Crouching now, looking ready to run, he slowly started to reach his hand out again.

As before, the dog remained facing forward but tracked Bait with its eyes. Slowly, Bait’s hand approached the dog, and slowly the dog’s growl built in volume. The rest of the group sat perfectly still around the fire, completely wrapped up in the scene playing out before them.

When Bait’s hand got about a foot away from the dog’s mouth, its lips began to twitch. Still, though, nobody could yet see the dog’s teeth.

“A little further,” whispered the Professor quietly.

Bait gave the rest of the group a fearful glance, seeming to say
you owe me for this
with the rolling whites of his eyes. Again he began to move his hand towards the dog.

Finally, when he was maybe eight inches away from touching the increasingly agitated dog, everyone could see its teeth. They were not the dirty white teeth of the dogs they had all grown up with as children. These teeth were a shining silver, glinting in the firelight as the dog raised and lowered its lips around them. These were not teeth. They were polished, metal weapons, and the group sat staring, fascinated.

Bait’s hand gave one more twitch, which proved too much for the dog. Its growl turned into a snapping bark as it twitched its head in Bait’s direction, snapping its jaws closed on the air three times before Bait could react. Each snap with those flashing teeth gave a glimpse of the dog’s mouth, ending with a solid, snapping sound as the jaws came together.

Everyone in the group jumped, gasping at the sudden action. Bait sprang completely up and away, giving out a nigh-pitched yip of his own as he scrambled back, following that with a stream of profanity.

This set the others to laughing again, and even the dog soon relaxed now that Bait was no longer reaching for it.

“Did you see that?” exclaimed Bait. “Silver! It’s teeth are fucking silver!”

“I don’t think it’s silver,” responded the Mule. “I read a post once about military dogs and police dogs, and how sometimes people will cap their teeth with titanium, I think it was, to make them stronger—to make sure they don’t damage their teeth when they’re attacking somebody.”

“Jesus,” said Beast. “Really?”

“It makes sense,” answered the Professor. “If you’re going to be siccing your dog on the bad guys, why not give it stronger teeth? And when it’s mouth was all the way open, you could see normal, white teeth in the back. It’s only the front ones—the ones used to tear and to attack—that are coated in metal.” He gave the dog a speculative look, then turned to her to continue. “That’s no family pet you’ve got there. With the vest, we pretty much knew it was a police dog or something, but with the way it listens to you, and the titanium teeth and all… That’s a military dog. It’s a weapon.”

They all stared at the dog for a moment, soaking in the idea that what they’d had in their midst all this time wasn’t the familiar thing they’d thought it was. This wasn’t the all-American pet. It was a weapon. And weapons were dangerous.

“C’mon, Bait,” said Beast, breaking the tension. “If the dog were gonna eat you it would’a done it by now. Come on back and sit down.”

“Yeah, added the Mule. “Maybe give the dog a little hug as an apology.”

“Oh,
hell
, no,” said Bait, still several paces away from the fire. He walked to the other side of the group and plopped down between Beast and the Professor, making both of them scoot over. “I’m not sitting next to the metal-toothed psycho dog.”

She just smiled at him.

They were up and walking again in the morning. The walking order seemed to have settled into a permanent line. The dog roamed ahead, sometimes trotting down the center of the road, sometimes darting into the brush at either side, but always coming back. It seemed to understand its job as a scout. Every once in a while it would pause, and the rest of them would pause as well. She was usually fifteen or twenty yards behind the dog and would slowly creep up to be even with it, looking in the direction the dog was looking, trying to sense what had disturbed it. Bait, the Professor, and Beast were usually behind her by a few yards, but would stop in their tracks when the alert went up, putting hands to their weapons and forming a loose circle that the Mule would join when he caught up. He was the slowest of them, laboring under his heavy pack, but she did notice he wasn’t as slow now as he had been when they started out.

The group would pause like this, each in their self-appointed spot, wondering what was coming—could be nothing, could be the death of them all.

That day, though, it was all false alarms. After as few as two minutes or, once, as long as fifteen minutes, the dog would give itself a shake, rattling the loops on its armored vest, and continue, with all the humans falling back into line behind it. She pondered what it meant that some of the last surviving humans were being led by a dog.

Around the middle of that day, they passed a deserted ski resort on the right, and then signs for a town called Government Camp. The town was just off the main highway and could be seen through the trees, but she felt no urge to investigate it. After their visits to previous towns they were each carrying as much in food and supplies as they comfortably could and had no need of more. And what else could there be in another town besides more danger?

Less than half a mile past Government Camp, the highway crested a rise and they came to a Y in the road. To the left, the road narrowed and moved steeply uphill, following signs for Timberline Lodge. To the right the highway curved away, sloping gently downhill, following signs toward other distant towns. Here the dog stopped, looking back at her, as if inquiring what her desire might be. Perhaps they weren’t truly being led by a dog after all. But that left her as the leader. Even though they might be a group, she was still uncomfortable with the notion of being a leader.

Still, she did not stop to look back at the others. She turned left, towards Timberline Lodge. An idea was forming.

The rest followed without comment, as she had suspected and feared. Was it odd that they followed a sixteen year old girl? In the old world, it would have been. And it certainly wasn’t anything she desired. Here in this new world, though, things were different, and the others had made their decision freely. The consequences would be on their own heads.

They had been hiking up this new, steeper road for only about half an hour when the dog stopped again. As before, each member of the group came to a stop. She began to creep up to where the dog was, and the others formed a loose group a few yards behind them in the road. This time, though, the dog’s nerves were more evident. Its hackles were raised, and it spread its paws, getting low to the ground, ready to fight.

Before she could reach it, the dog broke out of its stance, turned to her and in less than a second had taken up the exact same stance, but this time next to her knee, still looking to the woods on both sides and growling low in its throat.

She took a step back, and the dog matched her. Step by step they both worked their way back to the group, now formed up shoulder to shoulder in the road. Silently, as if they had practiced it a thousand times, the group made room for her and for the dog, until they all stood there in a small circle, one pair of eyes looking out in each direction.

They waited, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. The dog’s growling increased, becoming a slavering bark, like they had only heard once before, when the giant thing had come crashing through the trees at them in the campground a few days ago.

“Drop your packs,” she said, as she worked her arms out of her own pack and brought her rifle off of her shoulder, raising it, ready to fire. She heard rattling and shifting behind her as the others dropped their packs and prepared themselves for what was coming. The dog left her no doubt that something was indeed coming.

He seemed uncertain, though, where it was coming from. He looked left and right, to both sides of the road, as he barked and growled, occasionally even turning to bark at the trees behind the group as well. Still, they could not see what he sensed.

“Shit, let’s get out of here, man!” said Bait. She glanced back at him, over her left shoulder. He was looking back and forth from her to the trees and back again, and shifting on his feet, almost bouncing, ready to run.

“She does not think you can out-run this,” she answered. “Whatever it is…”

“There!” interrupted the Professor, and all eyes turned to him, on the other side of the circle. He was pointing to the side and behind the group.

“There’s something in the trees!”

They looked, and they did see it. There was motion in the trees. And not only where he had pointed, but now all around them. Now that they knew what they were looking for, they could each see that in the forest, on all sides, there was movement.

First all they could discern was the swaying and twitching of branches. Then they began to see the shapes. Small, dark shapes, perhaps the size of a house cat, were flitting from branch to branch, never still, never pausing.

“They’re flying,” said Beast, and indeed, it seemed he was right.

As the shapes came closer to the road, they became easier to see. She raised her rifle, trying to draw a bead on one of the things, but they moved too quickly and too erratically. Up, down and sideways, in quick, jerky movements, almost like they were bouncing off of the branches. She wasted two rounds, both times hitting only the leaves where something had just been, before she decided the rifle was useless. She crouched, setting the rifle down on the ground behind her and drawing her knife.

All that time, the group was seeing more and more movement in the trees. Whatever was out there, the crowd was growing.

It seemed like an eternity, but must not have been more than a minute before the first of them started to fly out of the trees and occasionally land in the grass at the edge of the road, or sometimes on the road itself. Even then, they were never still, immediately bouncing in a different direction as soon as they landed.

Seeing them come out in the open, though, did give the group a better view of what they faced.

In the brief moments that they landed, or as they flew through the air on the way to their next destination, she began to see what these things were, or at least what they looked like. They were large squirrel-like things, with sharp, two-pronged claws at the end of each of six or eight long, pointy legs—they were never still long enough for her to count the legs. One would come flying out of the trees, hit the ground on its long legs, and immediately bounce off in another direction. Momentarily poised on their long legs before their next flight, they began to look more like spiders than squirrels, but the long, droopy things covering them in place of hair—the strands were thick but flat, looking almost like seaweed—made sure nobody would forget just how alien these things were.

“They are jumping,” she said to the others. “Not flying.”

“What do they want?” wondered the Mule.

“What has everything we’ve met wanted?” responded Bait, his fraying nerves showing in the sharpness of his voice. “They want to eat us.”

“We don’t know that. Maybe they’re just passing by,” responded the Mule. “Maybe they think we’re weird, big monsters, and they’re curious.”

“She doesn’t think they are just curious.”

That was the moment, whether it was the sound of her voice, or just coincidence, that they attacked. Suddenly, individuals were bouncing out of the trees and lancing towards the group in their protective circle.

The first one came at the Mule, aiming for his face. The Mule swatted it down with the bat he’d been carrying since he’d first picked it up back at the farm. It fell to the ground, still making twitching motions but definitely out of the fight.

Another one came sailing in from the other side, right at the Professor. He managed to impale it on his knife, but it still struck at him, lashing out with one long, pointy appendage and ripping down his arm. The Professor’s jacket showed the scratch but protected his skin, though it left a good-sized gash on the back of his hand. He flailed wildly, flipping the thing off the point of his knife and down to the ground a few feet away, where it gave a few desultory hops before Bait stepped forward to kick it, casting it into the grass at the edge of the road, where it continued to writhe.

A third one jumped high, coming down from almost straight above Beast. He swung his fire-hardened spear like a staff, smashing the thing out of the air while it was still three feet over his head, then watching it arc down into the road in an unmoving pile of limbs and seaweed-like fur several feet away on the road. These were not durable creatures.

After those few initial, probing attacks by individuals, no more came in for a minute or so.

“Still think maybe they’re just passing through?” asked Bait. “Maybe that’s how they say ‘hello’ where they’re from?”

The Mule gave him a dirty look but had no response.

The things continued to jump out of the trees, into the road, surrounding the group, but seemed to be circling the group instead of attacking. Each creature would hit the ground and, without any discernable pause, launch itself in the air again. None of them ever stayed where they landed. Soon the swarm grew thick around the group, until it was impossible to count numbers or to track an individual creature. There were so many that the sound of their claws clicking on the concrete became a rolling susurration, like the sound of the surf at the ocean shore. It grew louder as more creatures filled the road, orbiting around the small circle of humans.

Their behavior was coordinated in some way—almost purposeful. It made her think they might be even more dangerous.

“What are they doing?” yelled Bait, looking at the Mule, standing just to the right of Coyote in the circle.

“I dunno,” he answered. “Getting ready?”

He was more right than he knew. As the creatures continued to swarm around the group, none of them approached any closer, but a pattern began to emerge.

“They’re all going to the right!” yelled the Professor. And she saw he was correct. Many of the creatures had ceased their almost random movements, and had begun jumping only to the right of the group members, circling the group in a clockwise direction. As the behavior spread, it became more obvious until finally, perhaps only fifteen or twenty seconds after the Professor’s observation, all the creatures were swarming around the group in the same direction, as if the group was at the center of a tornado formed entirely of bounding creatures.

This was not the limit of their strange behavior, either. More and more of the creatures started making their jumps in a similar rhythm, bounding off the ground until they were about twelve feet in the air, landing, jumping and jumping again in a steady, even rhythm. Soon the rhythm was picked up by more and more of the creatures until somehow, without any visible signal she could see, all the creatures were jumping in unison. They still made no sound but the noise of claws hitting pavement, which began to sound like a marching army now that all the creatures were jumping in unison.

Now they formed a solid ring, rotating around the group and moving up and down in unison. For an instant the ring of creatures would be on the ground, and she could see the forest past them, then they would bounce back up into the air, all cresting several feet over the heads of the group, and then coming down together. This ring of creatures bounced and rotated around the group again and again like a solid thing. It was almost hypnotizing, and could have lulled a person into a trance if they didn’t know the ring was formed of sharp-clawed monsters.

“Oh, this is no good, man. No good!” yelled Bait. “What are they doing, man? Oh, this is no good!” His words faded in and out of hearing. In the moments that the creatures were on the ground, the clicking of their legs on the road would drown him out, but when they were in the air they were silent, and Bait could be heard.

This strange behavior was fraying the nerves of the group. Glancing around, she could see Beast twisting his hands on his spear, the lines of muscle standing out on his forearms. She saw Bait moving his feet, twitching a little from side to side as if torn between running in two different directions. The Professor was bouncing on his toes and weaving his knife in little, nervous patterns in the air, and even she was becoming nervous, crouching and shifting her feet as she reached to her waist and pulled her hatchet from its sheath, feeling better with one weapon in each hand.

The only one who wasn’t moving was the Mule. He stood solid and still at her right side, bat cocked back over one shoulder and ready to strike.

She knew that this couldn’t last. The horde was evolving towards something, “getting ready,” as the Mule had said. Soon they would come for them. They must come for them.

They did.

One moment the ring of creatures was leaping and sailing around the group in their unnatural, silent rhythm, and suddenly one of their leaps took them twice as high as any other. They all sailed up, perhaps twenty feet in the air. This jump also took them away from the group a bit, expanding the ring so that it was now almost twice as wide, with the group still at the very center.