The Witch and the Werewolf Read online

  “You didn’t know that before?”

  “No.”

  “Wow,” Dylan mused. “I’m sorry. I’m sure she was just doing it to protect you.”

  Her mother had said something similar when she died. “I know. But there is so much I don’t know. I told you I wanted to die with Worm Fall. I had accepted my fate. But now I don’t want to die. I want to take those who took my mother and I want to know who I am.”

  “I understand,” he said, pulling her a little closer. Whether he meant to do it as a gesture of comfort or was just cold she didn’t know. But she leaned her head on his shoulder and listened to his heart beat though the howling wind for a bit. For just a moment everything was all right in the world. It didn’t matter that Dutch was a mercenary that was hired to come get her mother after the apocalypse. It didn’t matter that there were wolves behind them and death ahead. It didn’t matter that the mercenary didn’t know her from a complete stranger. All that mattered was his heartbeat.

  Jeremy sat straight up, looking around frantically. “The wolves are coming.”

  She felt them too and chided herself for not paying attention to those sensations. She’d been distracted by Dutch’s closeness.

  Dutch nodded, checking his rifle, and not bothering to ask her how them how they knew. The man had quickly come to the same conclusions she had. All was not what it seemed in the world. He’d more easily accepted the new world than she.

  “Then it’s time to go. Jeremy, you stay behind me. Stay low, but keep up. Cassandra, you come behind him. If they get past me, shoot them. If I stop, you stop. If I kneel, you kneel. Got it? Do what I do and we’ll be across that bridge in no time. And please don’t shoot me in the back. Ready?”

  Cassandra shook her head in agreement though she was in no way close to being ready for what she thought was coming. Dutch took off at a jog, Jeremy right behind him. They left the rubble and headed up an embankment.

  “Don’t look at them,” Dutch warned and it took her a moment to figure out what he meant.

  She gasped when she saw the corpses. There were a dozens of them lying twisted on the frozen tundra. She’d seen hundreds of corpses in the last couple of days but these were different. These weren’t twisted and destroyed by the tsunami. They hadn’t been killed by an act of nature. They had been shot in the head. These were the murdered refugees Dutch told them about. He’d been right, just as Jeremy said.

  Dutch paused just outside, where the bridge people had rolled and piled cars in order to form a gate. Two men stood outside the gate, smoking cigarettes and laughing. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world and weren’t even watching. The soldier went to one knee and sighted through his rifle’s intricate scope.

  Pop, pop, was all she heard and the two men dropped like stones. Dutch was up and moving, running towards the gate, Jeremy right behind him. She followed, trying to hold her rifle like Dutch did. He held it up, the sight never leaving his eye, and always scanning left to right. A man looked up at them from just inside the gate. He had a rifle a couple feet away from him and once he recognized the fact that Dutch was not part of his crew, reached for it. Dutch was quicker, though, and another shot boomed out. The round struck the man in the head, killing him where he sat.

  “Okay,” Dutch said, ducking behind a car. “It’s going to get worse from here on in. Just keep with me and keep shooting. We’ll be good.”

  Robert stood in the cleared out back of the eighteen wheeler, admiring his new harem. The boys, ages ranging from just nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, sat heads down, eyes anywhere but on him. The younger ones didn’t know what was going on and had no idea what he had in store for them. They just knew their parents were gone and something bad was about to happen. He was sure the older boys had guessed, but they hadn’t said anything. Good for them, he thought. They needed to learn their place in the pecking order early.

  “Well hello boys,” he said with a big grin. “Welcome to my home. I take it you’re all comfortable?”

  His home as it were, was an eighteen wheeler cleared of its cargo. The sheet metal walls were paper thin and despite the propane heater going in the corner, it was still freezing inside. It wasn’t as cold as it was outside, in the wind and snow, but it was still cold. That’s okay, he thought. I’ll warm it up soon.

  The little village he was calling Bridge Town was coming along just fine. The survivors they’d elected to keep all had shelter and at least one meal a day. Clothing from the BigMart truck had been parceled out and most everyone had some protection against the elements. The trouble makers had been sorted out and the remainder knew just exactly who was in charge. Bridge Town had the makings of a kingdom and he was just the man to run it.

  “So who’s ready to play a game?” Robert asked the dozen boys in the trailer.

  Gunshots outside distracted him for a second. One or two weren’t strange, though he was going to have to talk to the gate guards about taking pot shots at shadows in the wastes. The third round of shots, and the volleys that followed, however, were more worrisome. He stood and buckled his gun belt around his waist.

  “Games are going to have to wait, boys,” he told them as he headed for the rear of the trailer.

  His men were running down the bridge, towards the southern gate. He could see the flashes of weapons fire, down there, and hear the screams of men as they were hit. Someone was attacking his kingdom. The audacity of it… did they know who they were messing with?

  “Get down there,” he screamed at the men. “Get down there right now!”

  He climbed down from the back of the truck and then stopped. He heard a sound that chilled him from top to bottom, a sound so primal it froze him in his tracks. Somewhere, to the south past the raging gun battle, wolves howled.

  Move, shoot, move, shoot, kneel, reload. Find cover. Move. Rinse, repeat.

  Dutch was a machine, moving up the bridge, killing anything that had a gun, anything that looked like it may want to do him harm. He was only partially aware of the boy and girl behind him. He knew the girl was shooting as well, but was zoned in on the task at hand. Bad guy pops up with a gun, shoot the bad guy. But the bridge was filled with more than just bad guys. There were people there that the thugs hadn’t kicked out. He was sure they had some useful skill or maybe the bad guys had just taken a liking to them. They were the petrified, staring out from cars they’d tried to make impromptu homes in. He tried to avoid killing them and as long as none stepped up to attempt to defend their little colony, he’d leave them be.

  “There’s a lot of people here, Dutch,” Cassandra said from behind him. He barely heard her. “They might need our help.”

  Dutch shot a man through the eye who was unfortunate enough to pop up behind a car at the wrong moment.

  “I know,” he replied, trying to hide the frustration at his earlier failure from his voice. He hadn’t been able to save the people out at the base of the bridge. He’d been too slow pulling the trigger. But some of these people were here by choice. Others were prisoners. He had no way of sorting them out during a running gun battle.

  “So what do we do?”

  “Keep shooting,” he ordered. “If they want to go with us they are going to have to follow on their own.”

  The girl grunted and he could tell she didn’t like his answer. It didn’t matter. They’d never be able to help the people on the bridge if they were dead.

  A wolf howled from behind them and Dutch turned just in time to see the beast leap over the barricade, fangs bared. He emptied the magazine loaded with standard lead rounds into it. It came down in a crouch near Cassandra, the lead bullets having done little damage to it. He dropped the half full magazine from the rifle and shoved in a silver one, released the charging lever, and aimed.

  Dutch watched in slow motion as the thing jumped out of his line of fire just as the precious silver rounds whizzed by, leaping at Cassandra, claws extended. The girl stared in horror at the beast in flight and Dutch was afraid she w
asn’t going to react. She did, at the last moment, and he watched as she let the rifle fall to its sling and, in a flash, had both silver short swords in her hand. She twisted out of the way, like a pro football player, and sliced at the wolf as it landed, gutting it from stem to stern. The thing screamed in pain at her, landing in a crouch, blood gushing from its two long cuts. It lunged at her, like a coiled spring, and Dutch managed to put four rounds in it before it got within five feet. It hit the deck, already returning to its human form. It died in a painful looking convulsion.

  Dozens of werewolves poured through the south gate, running on all fours. They covered eight feet in a single bound.

  “We have to go now,” Dutch said, dragging the boy forward, up the steep incline of the bridge. He hadn’t expected the wolves that early, so far from the other side of the bridge. But their arrival would just cause that much more chaos and maybe give he and his small group a chance to get across.

  “But the people in the cars…” Cassandra pleaded, staring in horror as a wolf landed on the roof of a minivan and tore it away. It hoisted a smallish woman in nurse’s scrubs out, pulling her head from her body in one easy motion. It threw the head at Cassandra and she danced away, screaming.

  Dutch put three rounds in the beast, knocking it off the top of the van. It fell where he couldn’t see it and he hoped it had died.

  “You people have to run that way,” Dutch screamed, pointing north to where the bridge thugs were making their way towards them. The people in the cars stared at him blankly. Cassandra fired three shots into the air.

  “If you want to live,” the girl screamed, “get out and get moving.”

  Several did, rushing towards the opposite end of the bridge. More often than not, though, the people stayed in their cars, staring wild eyed as the werewolves poured through the gate. Dutch grimaced as one woman pushed down the door lock of the station wagon she was hiding in. As if that would stop the beasts. The wolves spread out, tearing into the vehicles and ripping the people from them. Howls and the screams of the attacked, punctuated by gunfire from the north, filled the night.

  “We have to move, Cassandra,” Dutch insisted, dragging the boy along with him. “Just run.”

  The girl looked back one last time and then followed him into the chaos.

  Robert raced down the bridge, slipped on the black ice, and then fell forward, face planting on the slippery pavement. He got to his knees and watched as people from the southern end of the bridge rushed north, towards him. Only a couple were shooting, however, and they were firing behind them, covering the retreat of his people. None of it made any sense until he saw the wolf like things darting in between the cars further down the bridge.

  Robert had seen wolves in a zoo. They were majestic creatures that, as one killer to another, he’d greatly admired. These were a combination of those animals and a man. They ran all fours, taking great giant leaps, but stood when they were fighting. He watched one throw a small car, occupants still inside, at the shooters who just narrowly danced out of its way. They were incredibly strong and covered in thick brown fur. Their long canines were sharp and easily ripped flesh from bone.

  They were majestic, he thought. They were the single greatest killing machine he’d ever seen, a fusion of death and fur.

  His men, both the inmates from the bus and those few he’d selected from the ranks of the bridge’s survivors, were running north, away from the battle. He didn’t blame them. You didn’t stare at fur covered death long and not run away. The two people shooting, however, did fight. There was a man who had that look of a soldier who’d seen combat. He moved with a stoic grace, easy under pressure, yet deliberate with every action. The other, a teenage girl, moved like a dancer. She was a ballet of blades and bullets and the wolves gave her a wide berth.

  “Where the fuck are you going?” he asked Hank as the man ran past him.

  “Fuck it,” the man screamed over his shoulder. “I didn’t sign on to fight werewolves.”

  And Hank was, of course, right. They were werewolves. While he didn’t know if they turned into men after the full moon or not, they were most definitely bipedal, upright walking wolves. Hank was also right in another aspect.

  “Yeah, I guess I didn’t either,” he said, taking a longing glance at the truck full of boys. There would be more, he knew. There would be time to play later.

  He got to his feet and started to run and then felt a force like a ton of bricks at his back, shoving him back to the ground. He turned around just long enough to see the long fangs of the wolf sinking into his glint in the fire light as the werewolf tackled him.

  She felt the pack’s recklessness and the alpha’s anger with them like a dagger to her heart. They’d followed the prey through the wastes and to the base of the bridge but the pack had become distracted by the buffet of flesh before them, losing sight of the goal. The alpha tried to coax them from their blood fever, urging them towards the prey. But the defenders and scouts were not convinced and most avoided the girl by with a wide berth.

  Even the alpha avoided her and their fear disgusted her. She had no idea why they wanted the girl that badly. It was an ominous sense of dread that hung over the pack. They could not be complete until she was dealt with.

  They were afraid of her, the female knew. The mighty wolves of the pack were afraid of one little girl with two silver swords.

  The fact infuriated the female. She too disobeyed the alphas orders to stay with the females and cubs and launched into the fray, barreling through the male wolves. She fought with a vengeance, ripping to shreds any man that got between her and the prey. The girl ran behind a soldier and a boy, switching easily between sword and gun, both spitting the hated silver, death to the pack.

  The alpha toppled a man further up the bridge, having bypassed the prey altogether, and was busy gorging. She growled at her leader’s own blood lust, losing sight of their goal, and rushed at the prey, intent on deciding the issue once and for all.

  She jumped at the prey and suddenly stopped in midair as if she’d run straight into a brick wall. Blue fire emanated from the girl and that fire formed a wall between them. She slid to the ground, growling, and then ran at the girl again. The blue wall faded, just as quickly as it had appeared, and she jumped.

  As she leapt through the air she saw, in horror, that the prey was prepared for her, two swords of gleaming sliver held low. She just barely avoided the full force of the swords, twisting in a way that left her cut but not harmed significantly. The cuts burned, though, and she howled in the night, unable to move. The wolf watched as the prey ran further, shooting and stabbing her pack mates at will.

  She decided, right there, that destroying the human was her only goal, pack or no. The girl was the single most dangerous thing her kind faced.

  Dutch stopped and knelt at a BigMart truck, reloading his rifle and scanning to the south. A group of refugees from the fight huddled with him and Cassandra watched as the man did his best to console them.

  “We’re going to make it,” Dutch said softly as the group caught their collective breath. “It’s only a mile to the next gate and then…” Dutch paused.

  “And then what? Where are we going to go from here?”

  Cassandra wondered the same thing. Oh, she knew they were going to the Church of the Dead Wolf. She just didn’t know what exactly that meant. The only thing she knew about the Church, at that point, was that they were incessantly torturing a werewolf. She didn’t know if the place would safe, if there would be food… she didn’t know anything about it. Dutch seemed like an all right guy and his actions on the bridge, both what he’d told her about and what she’d witnessed, led her to believe he was a good guy. She had to trust him, for the moment.

  “That’s a little more difficult,” Dutch said, glancing past the survivors to the mayhem below on the southern end of the bridge. The wolves had stopped their pursuit in order to feed on the survivors there. “There is a shelter, in downtown Houston, and a ship. T
he ship came to rest in downtown and, when I was leaving, they were getting ready to open it up to use as shelter. I don’t know that the conditions are going to be any better than here, but there’s a large group of survivors and they have a few supplies. They are organizing, though, and trying to get more. I also know they don’t exile anyone and they sure as crap aren’t shooting defenseless people out in the snow. If you don’t want to follow us I completely understand. But they’ll be coming soon,” he said, pointing at the wolves. “And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather survive in a place called the Church of the Dead Wolf than on the outside. It at least sounds like they know what they’re doing to fight these things.”

  A ship, she thought, remembering the bubble and the ships that had pushed past her and Jeremy. Was there a ship downtown? What was he talking about? Dutch looked at her, grinned, and then winked. Something passed between them and she realized that fighting alongside the man had changed her impression of him. He wasn’t a hulking brute of a soldier, ready to smash and bash to get his way, though he would if needed. He was a leader of men, a natural at combat, and, she thought with a giggle, one hell of a cute guy under the grime and mud.

  “And what the hell are those things?”

  “Werewolves,” Cassandra said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “And they eat people. Come or go,” she began, “but we have to move now. Come on Jeremy,” she said, brushing past Dutch. The small touch was electric and she knew, from his smile, that he approved.

  She stopped cold in her tracks, listening to banging coming from inside the trailer. She went to the back and opened the doors. A dozen young boys stared back at her. The boys were dirty and scared, eyes wide at the carnage just down the bridge.

  “Hey guys,” she said with the best smile she could muster. “Are you ready to get out of here?”

  She heard the big truck roar to life and a couple of moments later Dutch returned to the rear of the truck. “Load them up,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”