Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) (34 page)

“Why, it is you,
hijo
. And here I always thought you were Irish.”

“I am, Loo. On my father’s side.”

The rest of the SIIU—Navas, Diakite, Brown, Rashid, and Grevenberg—were even more different from their virtual images than Hennessy. Sid Navas and Fred Brown looked nothing like each other in the material world, of course. Nor was Diakite an albino or Sid Grevenberg the bright green hero of a graphic novel. Rashid, however, was wearing a fedora and actually somewhat resembled Humphrey Bogart.

Perusquia looked slowly from one to the other of his men, noticing how old and out of shape they all really were, hoping they would be good enough for the task ahead, knowing that they
had
to be good enough. “You all heard what happened,” he said. “
Lobo
tagged Salisbury and me not an hour ago. Almost took us out. But now it’s our turn to take him out.
Ahora
. Diakite—give me a view from Great Jones to Fourteenth.”

“Right, Loo.” The detective snapped his fingers.

Nothing happened.

Diakite blushed. “Sorry, force of habit.”

Leaning forward, the desk sergeant offered them an ancient map of lower Manhattan. “Maybe this will help.”

Wordlessly Diakite accepted the tattered sheet and gingerly unfolded it. Perusquia pointed at Mulberry Street. “The bastard’s almost pure animal now,” he explained. “There’s not much man left inside him, if there’s any left at all. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even with Bernstein, and Bernstein was bad enough. Which is why I called you all together out here. Digital reality is sufficient for
lobo
, not any longer—he needs a fix of the
real
thing, and he needs it
now
. Real blood. Real meat between his teeth. He likes what he’s doing too much to accept any substitute. His compulsion is escalating. Brown, Navas—starting at St. Mark’s Place, work your way west. Get names, addresses, IDs. For the next eight hours every citizen out of doors is a suspect. Rashid, Hennessy: begin at Canal. Diakite and Grevenberg: start from the river. I’ll take Fourteenth Street going south. Any questions?”

The detectives glanced soberly at one another. No one spoke.

“All right then. Let’s do it,
gentes
.”

Perusquia watched his unit depart into the afternoon light of the real world.
Lobo
was somewhere out there, he knew it—he could feel the wolf’s presence, close as a caress. Maybe his men would all return to him. Maybe they would all survive.

“Excuse me, Lieutenant.” It was the sergeant.

“Yes?”

“Seems to me you’re a partner short.”

“You volunteering?”

“That’s the idea, sir.” The sergeant climbed down from behind the desk with a limberness that belied his white hair. He looked steadily at Perusquia. “To be honest, Lieutenant, you’re not in the best shape,” he observed. “Too much time virtual, I’d say. Maybe I could lend a hand.”

Perusquia couldn’t argue. “All right, Sergeant—”

“Floyd. Felix Floyd.”

“—glad to have you along.”

Outside they stopped a moment for Floyd to lock the doors to the station. He taped a handwritten note on them:

Gone Hunting

Then they began walking uptown.

The air was crisp with the touch of early evening. Past the Palisades the sun was setting, sending slanted shafts of wan light into the city. Except for automated traffic, the streets were empty, and for a quarter hour they met no one. Their footsteps on the pavement were the only human sounds. It felt as if he and Floyd were the only men left alive, although Perusquia knew that all around them, behind the walls of every building, behind every window and every doorway, millions of people were living and breathing, talking and sighing and making love, selling and learning, arguing and buying, singing, bartering, sleeping, teaching, composing, parenting, working, writing—all digitally, all through the electronic medium of the Net, all linked by the optical cables jacked into their brains, connected in a consensual universe without circumference or end.

A distant siren woke Perusquia from his reverie, the tolling of the ambulance reminding him that at least one aspect of existence remained to be delegated to technology. You could die in the Net, true—but your body still had to be buried in the real world.

“Do you have identification, ma’am?”

Sergeant Floyd was addressing a woman in her fifties wearing blue jogging pants and a pink sweatshirt. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail but several strands had worked free to fall in front of her eyes. She was breathing deeply and her face was flushed.

“What’s this about, officer?” she asked, continuing to run in place.

Floyd ignored the question. “May I see some ID?” he asked again.

The woman’s complexion was becoming deeper red, now more from irritation than from exercise. “It’s in my purse,” she said shortly, unzipping her tummy pouch and extracting a wallet, which she handed to Perusquia. “What right do you have to interrogate me, anyway?” she asked.

Perusquia flipped open the wallet and scanned the hologram within. “Ms. Silvestri,” he said, “could you please account for your activities during the past two hours?”

“Account for my activities? Just how stupid are you? What does it look like I’ve been doing? I’ve been jogging, for Christ’s sake. Some of us like to keep fit. We don’t sit at home all day plugged in and getting fat. Fat? Excuse me, officer,” she went on, looking Perusquia deliberately up and down. “I misspoke. Obese is more like it.”

They encountered six other people before nightfall and three more before nine o’clock—two joggers, a vagrant who didn’t even own a personal cortical interface, a couple doctors, four VNYNEX technicians stringing wire—none of whom, by the longest stretch of imagination, could possibly be
lobo
. The other teams reported similar results, and as he and Sergeant Floyd approached the rendezvous below Washington Square, Perusquia began to feel discouraged, doubting himself and the chain of reasoning that had led him out into the material world. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe
lobo
really was content to hunt the Net. Maybe digital blood and virtual flesh were still sufficient to sate his hunger.

Then shots reverberated through the night.

Perusquia thumbed on the radio. “Report.”

“Diakite here. It’s south of us, Loo.”

“Brown here. Me and Navas—we’re okay.”

Then Hennessy came on the air. “It’s got Rashid, Loo. Sweet Jesus, it has Ed!”

“Where are you, boy?”

It was hard understanding what Hennessy was saying. Rashid’s screams and the snarl of the wolf were drowning out his words.

“
Hijo
! Tell us where you are.”

“I hit him, Loo. I swear to God I hit him twice. But it didn’t do any good.”

“Hold on, boy. We’ll be with you. Just give us your position!”

Sergeant Floyd was already on his way, the stubby muzzle of his ancient semiautomatic pointed skyward as he ran, heading downtown at a pace that Perusquia matched briefly but couldn’t maintain. Unable to go on, he staggered to a halt at Eighth Street, leaning against a lamp post and swallowing great gulps of air as the sergeant proceeded on alone. Hennessy’s voice continued issuing from the receiver, an incoherent jabber overlaid by the fury of the wolf. Then there sounded the stutter of a full clip being emptied, the noise coming from the radio and through the night air simultaneously. The shots couldn’t have been more than three or four blocks south.

Hennessy fell silent.

Stifling a groan, urging his body onward, Perusquia started off again as fast as he could, praying that it would be fast enough. For the first time that evening he noticed that the moon had risen. Somehow it seemed appropriate that it was full.

“I have them in sight, Loo.” This from Grevenberg. “Rashid is down. Hennessy’s down.”

“Where’s Floyd? The sergeant?”

“I don’t see him. No—wait—there he is. Shit.
Shit
.”

Again Perusquia heard shots being fired, this time in methodical sequence rather than in a panicked spatter.

“What is it, Art? What the hell’s going on?”

Grevenberg didn’t answer. Perusquia turned the corner of Seventh Avenue. There, not a short block ahead, where Grove Street met Bleecker at an acute angle, was the wolf.

The moonlight joined with the sodium glow of a street lamp to illuminate the area in a wash of pale color. Three bodies sprawled on the pavement, two on the sidewalk, the other in the center of the narrow street. Only one displayed any motion, a painful twitching. Even from a distance Perusquia could make out dark stains of blood around the bodies. On the other side of the intersection, Diakite and Grevenberg were cautiously approaching the scene.

The wolf threw its head back, ears flat to the skull, and howled. Its call rang through the night, a rising and falling siren, a sound so atavistic that Perusquia shivered—not from fear or apprehension but from a surge of reciprocal emotion.

He edged nearer the thing. Its attention snapped toward him. Its gaunt black lips tugged back from its gums.

Perusquia crouched and flicked on the Glock’s laser targeting system, aiming carefully; a tiny red dot appeared on the wolf’s chest.

But he held his fire.

Perusquia tracked the wolf as it stalked toward him, sensing something anomalous about the situation yet not knowing what it was. Keeping his sights centered on the beast, suspecting that his survival depended on it, he groped feverishly for clarity.

From the other side of the street Grevenberg and Diakite fired. Several rounds tore through the wolf, entering its body on the left, erupting from the right in a spray of blood and fur. It screamed, healed itself, whirled and leapt toward them.

That was when Perusquia
knew
.

The simple truth was that they weren’t in the Net. Nevertheless, a wolf faced them, not a man.

He stood up, crossing himself with one hand while discharging the Glock into the air with the other, recalling the wolf’s focus onto himself. “Hey,
lobo
,” he shouted. “Get your ass over here,
hijo de la gran puta
. We’ve got business to finish.”

The thing stopped less than a meter from Diakite and Grevenberg. Ignoring their fusillade, it spun around and started back toward Perusquia.

This time he understood what he was looking at. Instead of the perfect wolf that he had wrestled with in the Net, the flawless child of
will
and code, the faultless image made real in every detail by the compulsion of a madman—instead of such an immaculate creation of mind and software and electronic circuitry, Perusquia knew that he was now facing something at once less fully realized and yet far more marvelous.

Somehow—perhaps because of practice gained exercising its
will
in the Net, perhaps because of its psychosis, perhaps because of a more subtle process—the thing had achieved authority over the automatic processes of its physical body, allowing it to reinvent itself in the real world.

What he had thought was fur was body hair grown long. Its paws were the hands and feet of a man unnaturally fitted into an animal mold, its muzzle a human jaw elongated cruelly, its tail a coccyx stretched like taffy, its teeth tame dentition turned feral, its ears the round cups of a man’s honed into points.

Will
had done this.
Will
had created the thing before him.
Will
must destroy it.

“That’s right,
lobo
,” Perusquia said. “Come on over. You know who I am, don’t you? Well, I know what you are.”

He reached beneath his shirt and took out the small silver crucifix he’d worn for so many years in both the virtual and the real worlds, and held it to his lips.

“Hey,
lobo
, who would have thought we’d need a silver bullet out here? Out in the material world,
verdad
? I mean, there isn’t any such thing as a werewolf. At least outside of the Net there isn’t. Not until now.”

Perusquia slipped the silver chain into the barrel of the Glock, fitting the end of the cross into the muzzle. The wolf’s amber eyes followed his every motion.

“And we all know how to kill a werewolf, don’t we?”

The question was rhetorical but the wolf provided an answer.

It was upon him before he could aim the pistol, its canines sinking into his wrist, grating on bone. Perusquia dropped the gun. He smelled the iron essence of his own blood. Yet he felt no fear, the pain summoning forth only rage, reminding him of what it had done to Salisbury and Rashid and Hennessy and Floyd, and Perusquia threw himself upon the wolf, locked his elbow across its throat and his legs around its waist just as he had in the Net, letting his weight wrestle it down.
Madre de Dios!
The thing was strong, agile, incredibly lithe. It twisted around and clawed at him, ripping his shirt, leaving long red scratches on his stomach.

In the material world Perusquia was too fat to be shaken off.

Maintaining his hold around its windpipe, he groped with his good hand for the Glock. His fingers brushed against the pistol but it lay just out of reach. The wolf made another attempt to dislodge him, shaking back and forth, and Perusquia lunged toward the weapon, snatching it up by the handle.

He brought the gun to its head, burying the exposed cross in its hair, and placed his lips to its ear.

“We all know what kills werewolves, don’t we?” Perusquia repeated.

The wolf writhed in a savage spasm.

“Silver,” Perusquia whispered. And pulled the trigger.

Propelled by the bullet, the cross shattered the thing’s skull, exiting from its temple in a cloud of blood, bone, and tissue.

The wolf jerked explosively in his arms, then become still. Perusquia felt a warm liquid spread against his legs as its bowels and bladder relaxed.

He rolled over and sat up. He stared numbly at the wolf, drained of all feeling except for a dull amazement that he had survived their encounter.

He was still alive when material EMS technicians stabilized him. They loaded his physical body onto a stretcher and delivered him by ambulance to St. Vincent’s, where he received seventy-three stitches. Flo Salisbury, heavily sedated, was in the next bed. A huge swaddle of bandages hid her reattached fingers. She had even more tubes in her than Perusquia.