The Witch and the Werewolf Read online

  “All ahead port,” Ross screamed, scrambling to his feet. “Turn this ship!”

  “It’s not going to any good,” the first mate screamed as he fumbled with the controls.

  “We have to do something.”

  Taking on the Merick’s crew’s families and their last load, a FEMA shipment destined for a refugee camp, had been a last act of desperate hope on Ross’ part. The US government had hired hundreds of such cargo ships, filling them to the brim with supplies, and ordering them out to sea in the off chance they might survive and be able to supply the camps wherever they might spring up. The government had also fully stocked and populated hundreds of underground bunkers. Ross had even declined payment. The supplies in his hold were payment enough. Even the crew had agreed to avoid payment in exchange for having their family members come aboard the Merick.

  Of course, surviving the chaos would be another matter entirely.

  The cargo ship crashed into the sky scraper at an angle, bringing the rear around, and sending those foolish enough to be standing in the bridge flying. Suddenly they were turned around, facing the wave, and Ross cried out in panic as he watched the floods flow around them.

  But the ship was caught on something and wouldn’t move. It looked much like what he imagined Moses parting the Red Sea might look like.

  The water flowed and flowed and the men hid, the ship rumbling around them.

  “Please God,” Ross begged, “just let us live through the night. We’ll deal with the rest later.”

  Blood and Mud

  Dutch sat against a wall, pistol between his legs, listening to the sobbing as the gigantic wave pushed across the city of Houston, Texas. A mere fifteen feet of cement and steel separated the Church’s bunker from the surface and he knew, if the water did not recede, they would not live long. They’d run out of air long before the trickles of water already inkling their way into the bunker filled it and drowned him. The priest, Father O’Leary, walked through the mass of people packed into the bunker, stopping and saying a few words with each. The old Irishman tried to comfort them but the sobs of the frightened were louder than the roar of rushing water above.

  He looked up at Dutch, smiled, and then came and sat next to him.

  “We have done all we can do,” the priest said. “The wolf is confined behind silver bars, chained with silver shackles, and under a constant guard. The air supply is holding out, but we never intended to be at the bottom of the ocean. It may not last long enough.”

  “Why would you have an air supply at all in a bunker?”

  “Aye, strange that. We are but a few short miles from where seventy-five percent of this nation’s gasoline was made. The air supply was for a chemical event, something that would dissipate relatively quickly. We also never intended to pack this many people in here. Yet they kept comin’, a veritable flood of the faithful.”

  “I sort of get the feeling this isn’t that kind of church,” Dutch said with a tired grin. “What with the werewolf hunting and all.”

  “And you’d be right in that feeling, lad. The church is but a cover yet we did our best to minister to the community that needed it the most.”

  Dutch couldn’t help but think that those that needed salvation the most were junkies, whores, and the homeless, if the population of the bunker was any indicator. He’d have thought the priest would have laid in soldiers and the like for his proclaimed battle with the werewolves.

  “The wolf man in there called you the Church of the Dead Wolf.”

  “Aye,” the priest agreed, “though we never tacked that sign out front.”

  It was strange, the quickness with which he’d gone from nonbeliever in the paranormal to outright acceptance that the thing in the other room was a werewolf. And not just a werewolf from the movies, but an unadulterated killing machine.

  “I don’t get it, though,” Dutch began. “How is it these things have stayed hidden for so long? Sure, they’re in movies and what not, but beasts like that could rule the world. Idiots would bow down to them as gods. And if werewolves are real, what else is real?”

  “It’s all real, to some extent. The things you haven’t heard of are probably the worst. And not to toot me own horn, but the reason the paranormals don’t rule the world is because we haven’t let them. Between us and the witches we’ve done a right fine job of hunting the man eating bastards down and killing them at ever’ turn. Yet they are like rats. Always breeding, always filling the shadows with their rancid kind. All the while we’ve been a huntin’ their leader, the first wolf.”

  “I get the impression that you think if you kill him, they’ll all be gone?”

  “Aye, that is the legend, as it were. I have no idea if it’s truth or lie. Honestly, I’d just like to see the bastard dead. His progeny have been responsible for some of the most heinous crimes against man that you might imagine, and not just as the wolves. They’ve made murder and bloodshot an art form.”

  “How do you know that guy in there isn’t the first one?” Dutch asked.

  “Nay, he is not. He is very old and very powerful, no doubt, as evidenced by surviving three silver rounds to the chest, but he is not the one. The Alpha, as he’s called, is out there, waiting.”

  “But how do you know he’s not the one?”

  “He told you he wanted to die, right?”

  Dutch shrugged. “That was the impression I got.”

  “Why would the first of a race want to die when it’s finally their time? That doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I’ve known yonder wolf a long, long time. I know him well. He is not the Alpha, though he is old enough to know the Alpha as his sire.”

  “I have to be honest,” Dutch began. “I’ve been in a lot of situations in life where making someone talk, at the point of a knife or barrel of a gun, was important. That thing, in there, will not talk. You have to know that, if you’ve known him that long. Why keep him, then? Why not just kill him and be done with it?”

  “Fair points all. But what you may not know about the wolves is that they are all connected in some fashion. Pain one feels is felt by the pack. That wolf in the silver cage, my lad, is nothing more than a werewolf beacon, sending out a signal to draw them right here to my Church. And believe me when I say that they will come for him.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we kill them,” O’Leary said with a clap of his hands. The priest stood and started to walk away. Dutch stopped him.

  “He said you’d been crazy since the Spanish Inquisition.” Dutch didn’t believe the priest was that old, but if he was, it would only go with the level of crazy that he’d already been witnessed to. The basement shook, as if shifting in the mostly gumbo like ground that lay beneath Houston. Dutch cringed.

  “My age may right be a merry old moot point, yes?” the priest said with a smile. “I must make my rounds, Dutch, and bring peace to the hearts of the frightened. If we make it through this evening I’d like to offer you a place here in our organization. You are very capable and trust me, we will need all the capable men we can get with the nightmare that is to come.”

  “You want to give me a job in the Church of the Dead Wolf?” Dutch asked, unable to hold back the laughter.

  “I know,” the priest said with a broad grin. “I finally get to run up the flag.”

  “And what are you going to do while I’m doing this? I mean, besides build a fortress?”

  “I, me friend,” the priest said, pointing at the huge ship, “am going to welcome the survivors of that ship into our midst.”

  The boy held onto Cassandra and she held onto the house’s frame, sure that the walls were going to come crashing down on them at any moment. He saw the approaching wave as a dark green blur on the horizon, a wall of death that they wouldn’t survive.

  “What’s your name?” the girl asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. He could tell she was weirded out by the lack of eyes in his sockets. He was too. Everything had happened so quickly. He hadn’t had a ch
ance to process it all.

  “Jeremy,” he said meekly. He was tired and scared.

  “Okay Jeremy. Take a deep breath. The water is almost here.”

  The wave hit the house with a vengeance and the entire structure shook in its wake. He took a deep breath as the water poured in the large hole in the roof and then up, from the floors below. He held her tighter as if the act would somehow save him. The house’s ceiling rafters shook and parts of the roof began to slip away. He gasped in the water, sure the end was near.

  He wanted to keep his eyes shut, to not see death coming for him, but he couldn’t look away from the destruction. But as he stared out, past the girl’s shoulder, he noticed something building deep inside her. It was like a fire starting in her belly, a swirling blue ball of light in her belly. Blue filaments snaked out from her and the energy surrounded them, weaving around them like a blue basket. The energy bubble pushed out, stopping the water, and keeping them safe.

  “How are you doing that?” Jeremy whispered.

  “Doing what?” the girl responded, eyes clenched tight.

  “Look,” he said. “Open your eyes.”

  The girl did and then recognition bloomed. “I’m doing that?”

  “I think so. It’s coming from your stomach.”

  “How are you seeing that?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, “but it’s the most beautiful blue color I’ve ever seen. You’re… you’re beautiful.” He felt stupid the minute he said it. But the girl’s colors were beautiful.

  The tsunami was miles wide and the wave pushed the house away around them, leveling it. But they sat there, on the inside of the blue bubble holding onto the rafter, neither flowing with the water nor crashing to the ground, levitating fifteen feet from the ground.

  “I can see where it starts in you,” the boy said, looking at her abdomen. “It’s like there’s a blue fire there and it’s burning the water away.”

  “Were you always blind?”

  “No,” Jeremy said sadly. “My father made me stare up at the explosions. I told him it was stupid.” And now his father was dead, his body out there somewhere with hundreds of thousands of other corpses. He felt guilty for not feeling bad about it.

  “Oh,” Cassandra said, “wow. I’m sorry. Where is he now?”

  The boy just shrugged. There was no reason to tell her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You lost someone too,” Jeremy said. Not a question. He could see her loss like a black spot on her otherwise azure soul.

  “How do you know?”

  “I can see it in you.”

  She nodded in agreement, closed her eyes, and concentrated as if the bubble protecting them might disappear at any moment.

  “You’re not normal, are you?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t think either one of us are,” the girl responded.

  “No, I guess not,” the boy said.

  Eight year old Jeremy had no idea how his life could change so much in a single day. Was this weird ability to see without eyes always apart of him or did the arrival of Wormwood somehow change him?

  He watched as cars and buses pushed by the bubble. The inatimate objects had their own life-force, that he could see, and were mostly a dull gray. He cringed when one car, intact and apparently fairly waterproof, whipped by, a family pounding on the windows to try and get out. Their auras were a bright red, pulsating with fear. There were bodies too, by the hundreds; so many that he the girl’s eyes were closed. The water was filled with garbage and debris. He panicked as a huge cargo ship passed over them, the bottom of its hull scraping the top of the bubble.

  “You don’t know how you’re doing that?” the boy asked again, as if to confirm.

  “No,” she said softly. “But I think my mother was a witch.”

  “So you’re a witch?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you have any other cool powers?”

  Cassandra shrugged. “Maybe. But my mother is gone, now. I don’t know how I’ll find out if I do or not.”

  “How do you not know the powers your mother had? Wouldn’t that be like Bruce Wayne having a son and the son not know his father was Batman?”

  “More like Wonder Woman,” the girl commented and Jeremy, despite the situation, couldn’t help but smile. “But no, I don’t know. She kept me pretty sheltered. I didn’t get out much and that part of her life was a secret.” He could hear the sadness in her voice.

  “Those things got her, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said, and the bubble faded to bright red, matching her anger. “Werewolves. I’m going to find them and I’m going to kill them.”

  “They were black as night,” the boy told her. “I mean… their, colors,”

  “I think aura is the word you’re looking for,” she said, interrupting.

  “Yeah, auras. They were black like evil.”

  “What do you mean? Is that how you’re seeing? Like colors?”

  “Yeah… your glow, when you’re mad, is red. Before that you were blue, like the bubble. I’m kind of a purple. Those things, though, they were black. I didn’t like them at all.”

  “I don’t blame you, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid. I’m almost nine.”

  “Sorry,” she said with a grin. “Maybe we’re both witches.”

  Which would be about the weirdest thing Jeremy could think of to happen at the end of the world.

  “How long do you think you can make it last?”

  “The bubble?”

  “Yeah,” he added. “Do you feel weird or anything?”

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Can you keep it up till the water clears?”

  “I…” the doubt was evident in her hesitancy. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I’m doing it.”

  Jeremy watched as another ship passed over them, churning sideways and pushing an island of garbage in front of it. He could see men alive, inside the holds of the ship, glowing red with panic.

  It was going to be a long night.

  “We made it,” Ross said as the waves receded. “We really made it.”

  The Merick had come to a rest in the remains of downtown Houston, Texas. Buildings were ripped away and the streets were filled with the debris and remains of cars and, worse, so many corpses. His wife stood next to him on the deck, looking over the side at the devastation Wormwood had wrought. The skies were filling with black clouds and the temperature, despite the summer month, was dropping rapidly.

  “It’s getting cold,” Maria said, huddled up to his side. “And look at those clouds? Why are they so dark?”

  “They aren’t clouds,” Ross told her. “Not like regular ones. They are dust and debris kicked up from the impacts. They will, over the course of the next couple of weeks, blot out the sun.”

  “Oh my god, Ross. How will we survive without the sun?”

  “The hold is filled with enough supplies to last a camp of a thousand several months. It will last our little group much, much longer. We’ll make it till the sun comes out or help arrives,” he told her.

  “But what about the other people?”

  “What other people?”

  “The ones down there?”

  Ross followed to where she was pointing and saw the group of people milling around the ship. Where had they come from, he wondered. How could someone survive that destruction on the ground?

  “They can’t get to us,” Ross assured his wife. “And even if they could, we are armed. We will be fine.”

  “But they survived. Shouldn’t the supplies FEMA gave you be for the survivors?”

  “Quite right,” Ross heard from the shadows behind them. “Just what would the government think about you keeping all the goodies for yourself?”

  The voice was different. There was glee in it, along with evil. It sent chills down his spine as he slowly turned to face the man hiding in the shadows.

  “You get out of here now,” Ross ordered, th
ough the fear in his voice made is sound more like a plea than a command. He could just barely make out the man’s shape in the gloom. His bright red, glowing eyes though, were easy to spot. “Get gone.”

  “Tell me…” the thing said, easing forward from the shadows. “Who would know the most about this vessel?”

  “Ross… make it go away,” his wife pleaded and her fear palpable.

  “I reckon I would,” Ross replied meekly. “I am the captain.”

  “And how many souls upon your fine vessel?”

  “Who are you mister? And how did you get here in the first place?” Ross said, wishing he’d already unlocked the arms locker and taken a pistol.

  “I am the death that comes in the night. I am the bringer of darkness, the devourer of souls. I have come for this place, Captain, and it, and your crew, are now mine.”

  Ross started to turn and run but was distracted by the flash of steel teeth as the creature stepped forward, grinning. The thing was on him in an instant and it was right. It was death incarnate.

  Two Moon Dawn

  Cassandra had no idea how she’d created the bubble and didn’t know how long she’d held the bubble that surrounded her and Jeremy. But when the water finally receded back into the ocean, she collapsed in a heap on the wet, murky ground that had been swept clean. She closed her eyes and dreamt of a wolf.

  The being in her mind was in dire pain, but even through that torture, she could feel his sadness. He was sad that his people, the wolves, had devolved into the pack of angry animals that hunted her. Cassandra was sad for what her people had done to his. So much sadness and pain. She knew the thing was the enemy. It was of the beasts that killed her mother. But she felt bad for it anyway.

  She awoke to the sound of a fire crackling and the smell of wet everywhere around her. She sat up groggily, and rubbed her eyes.

  “Good morning,” the boy told her. “Or afternoon. It’s hard to tell without the sun. I guess we could have been a whole day? Asleep? It feels like day time though.”