Frostbite (27 page)

In time the trees grew thinner on the ground, and thinner still, until she was no longer in a forest at all but in a sandy flatland punctuated here and there by the occasional dead stump. Streams rolled across bare rock and through drifts of shallow snow, as far as her eyes could see. After the myopia of the forest she felt like she could see to the very edge of the world. The starlight painted the ground white and the water black and the world seemed striped and piebald between the two. On the horizon she saw what could have been the ocean—an endless wrinkled mass of water. It had to be the shore of Great Bear Lake.

She pressed on.

The sun rose while she was still human. The sun’s warmth on her back and shoulders filled her up, made her skin tingle, eased the soreness in her joints, even as it painted the vast open ground with yellow light. It felt good. She knew it wouldn’t last.

“Dzo,” she said, as if he could hear her. She thought maybe he could.

She heard a splash behind her and saw him clamber up out of a black pond. His furs streamed with water, but by the time he reached her he was dry. He tipped his mask back onto the top of his head. “Uh, yeah?” he asked, as if he’d been with her the whole time. She still had no
idea what he really was, but she understood he was a lot more at home in this weird land than she would ever be.

“Dzo,” she said, “is it much farther?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But your wolf can make it today.” His face screwed up in bewilderment. “You scared or something?”

She nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“Humans seem to get scared a lot. When animals get scared, sometimes they just freeze. You know? Their muscles lock up and they can’t move. You ever try that?”

“That won’t work for me. Dzo—I killed a guy. Kind of. I don’t know what that makes me.”

“A predator?” He sat down on the ground and rubbed his hands together. “I’m not really the guy you ought to be asking these questions.”

She nodded. “I know. The funny thing is I’m not as scared of getting killed as I am of talking to Powell again. But you wouldn’t understand that.”

He raised his hands in weak apology. “Maybe you’ll get killed before you get that far,” he offered.

“Yeah.” She started walking again. “Thanks, Dzo,” she said.

“My pleasure. Listen,” he called after her, “this is as far as I can go. They poisoned the water out there and I can’t follow you now. If you do see Powell, will you give him a message for me?”

“Sure,” she said, turning around.

“Tell him I have his boots in my truck. In case he’s looking for ’em.” Chey smiled. It felt wrong on her face, but she liked it all the same. “I’ll do that.”

An hour after the sun rose, the moon followed.

The wolf didn’t understand
why the breath in her lungs felt rank and bitter. She did not understand why her skin crawled as she closed on her goal. She barely cared. The human stench was full upon her and a few toxins weren’t about to stop her.

She trotted out to the top of a sand esker, a long, low bar of sand atop slickrock that had been deposited by glaciers when true dire wolves still roamed the earth. She wanted to howl in jubilation and anticipation of the bloodshed to come, but she didn’t want to alert her prey to her presence just yet.

Her eyes were not sufficiently keen to see the buildings a half kilometer from where she stood. She could make out some square outlines—unnaturally square, humanly square. She could not see the red and green pigments that painted the tops of the waters all around, but she could smell the heavy metals floating in great swirls like oil slicks there.

She could not feel the radiation that leaked upward like darkness from the very ground she stood on. She could not in any case have understood that the very land here was cursed with uranium, with radon gas, with the vast deposits of pitchblende and raw radium that gave the place its old name.

But she could tell the place was cursed.

Cursed
, she panted,
cursed, cursed
. Cursed forever. She would have chosen another place if it had been up to her. Any other place. But she
was a predator and she followed her prey. If they went to ground in tainted earth she would wallow in poison to get to them.

And they were nearby, she knew it. Even over the bitter wind, over the stinks of heavy metals and broken ore and disturbed earth and rusted metal and decayed plaster and crumbled concrete, she could smell the humans.
The
human. The one who had chained her and tried to drive her mad.

As the sun began to set she picked her way down from the esker and into Port Radium, and it was there she yelped and whined, for the change came too soon.

Chey cursed and spat at the pain in her limbs. Her arms and legs were sore and stiff. She rose slowly and saw that the world had changed while she was gone.

She was standing, for one thing, on a road.

Not just a logging path or an animal track. A real, paved road. Long broken slabs of concrete led off to the horizon in either direction. In places they had cracked and rotted away, and in the gaps some grayish weeds had poked up, and the uneasy soil of the Arctic had bucked and shifted the concrete around until it looked half like crushed rock. Nature was busy reclaiming the abandoned road. But it was still a road.

Chey covered her breasts with her arms. She had become accustomed to waking up naked in an uninhabited forest, where the nearest voyeurs were hundreds of kilometers away. But now she was effectively in a town—and she was completely lacking in clothing.

She hurried off the road and between a pair of giant steel cargo containers, one rust red, one a faded and streaky blue. She ducked inside the blue one and listened to her footfalls echo alarmingly. She had to be in Port Radium, she decided. Her wolf must have reached the fabled town.

Peeking around the edge of the container, she saw buildings off to the west, long industrial sheds with lallen-in roofs and decaying walls. She saw dozens of smokestacks like cyclopean chess pieces on a board
of upturned soil. Nearer than the buildings she saw a forlorn bulldozer, its blade gnawed by rust, its black leather seat turned into a nest for some absent bird.

She got the message. Port Radium it might have been, but Port Radium had long since stopped being anywhere. There would be no people here other than those she’d come to confront. At least she had that.

Moving as quickly as she could, she ducked out of her cargo container and scrambled up a slope of loose dirt and fist-sized rocks. The nearest building looked like an aircraft hangar, an enormous structure of corrugated tin. Wind and rain had bored holes in it until she could see the setting sun right through its metal walls. She found a door, or rather the frame where a door might once have been, and slipped inside.

Orange light fell in dusty beams to make burning spotlights on the floor. Overhead a massive skeleton of iron girders remained partially intact. At the far end of the enclosed space stood a conical pile of rubble, bright brown and steep-sided. A dump truck stood by the pile, its bed tilted upward as if it had been abandoned in the middle of depositing a new load.

Closer to her a small portion of the building had been enclosed to make office space. The wide windows were broken and smeared, but she could see desks inside and lockers—maybe there would be clothes hanging up inside that she could use. She went to the office door and pulled up on the latch, half-expecting it to be rusted shut. Half-expecting that she would need her extra-normal strength to open it. Instead the door almost flew open and she staggered backward, nearly losing her balance. It felt almost as if the door had been kicked open.

In fact, it had. Bruce Pickersgill stood in the door frame, stupid mustache, fur collar, and all. He held his twin pistols at arm’s length, one barrel trained on her forehead, the other on her heart.

He had orders to shoot on sight. Chey closed her eyes and prepared to accept the inevitable.

He didn’t fire.

Chey’s feet padded effortlessly
across the broken ground, while behind her Pickersgill stumbled and cursed with every bump or irregularity of the stony earth.

Bobby’s helicopter stood motionless in the air, maybe half a kilometer away, maybe seventy meters up. The bubble cockpit was turned her way—was he watching her, was he watching Pickersgill march her across a field of broken stones? Was he wondering why she wasn’t dead yet? Maybe he wasn’t even inside. Maybe it was just Lester up there.

“Okay, head over to that utility pole,” Pickersgill said from behind her. He wasn’t taking a lot of chances—she had to keep her hands straight up in the air or he would jab her in the back with one of his pistols.

The field had been a parking lot once, she thought. It was relatively flat and it was interrupted here and there only by ten-meter-tall light poles, each crowned with a pair of long-broken Klieg lights. The poles were as thick as her arm and made of some metal that hadn’t corroded over the years.

“Listen,” Chey asked, “could I get a coat or a blanket or something? I’m freezing like this.”

He tossed her a pair of moth-eaten, grease-stained coveralls and she struggled into them. They were meant for a larger person than herself,
but she was glad just not to be naked anymore. “I appreciate it,” she said. “Can we talk for a second? I’d like to—”

He didn’t let her finish. “Turn around and grab the pole behind you with both hands,” Pickersgill said.

She did as she was told. The metal was freezing cold and plenty sturdy, though she could feel that the pole was hollow. Nothing more complex than a pipe sticking out of the ground with a few wires running through. Pickersgill moved around behind her and clicked one end of a pair of handcuffs to her left wrist. She could feel him fumbling around behind her with the second cuff—he had to do it one-handed, since he kept a pistol in the crook of her neck the whole time.

“It ain’t silver, but tensile steel’s got to be worth something,” he told her. He clicked the second cuff shut and came back around to face her. He had one pistol in his hand, the other in its holster.

“You’re not going to kill me?” Chey asked.

“Not yet, no. We still need to catch your alpha. He’s smarter than your average canid, obviously. That’s the only reason it’s taken us so long to catch him. He’s still prone to the weaknesses of his kind, however. What we call, in the business, taxic behaviors. Instincts. For instance, he won’t abandon his mate.”

“I’m not his mate,” Chey said. “He wants to kill me.”

Pickersgill shrugged. “One lure is as good as another in this case. When he hears you, he’ll come.”

Chey frowned. “Are you sure?”

“When we had you up in that fire tower, howling like a bitch on heat, his exotic half couldn’t keep away. Every night he came closer, and once we even got a couple of shots off at him. If he had kept that up we would have had him. He must have figured as much. After that his human half just up and ran off and came here, far enough away that he wouldn’t be tempted by your vocalizations.” He scratched at his mustache. “Took us a while to track him. He’s real good at moving quiet up
here. But now we got the two of you in one place, this should be dead easy.”

“You think if he hears me howling here he’ll come to investigate,” she said.

“You got it. As soon as the moon comes up you’ll start in to howling and he’ll show himself. Then we’ll finish this contract and we can all go home. Except for the two of you, of course.”

“And your brother,” Chey said. Taunting Pickersgill was probably a mistake, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Yes. We haven’t heard from Frank in a bit. I suppose you had something to do with that?”

Chey sighed. Guilt squished around in her stomach as if she’d eaten tainted food. “I killed him, I guess. My wolf did. I’m a predator now, it seems.”

Pickersgill scratched his mustache again. She wondered if he had fleas. “Well, yes, I suppose you are,” he said, finally. “Which means I’m a better predator. I’m smarter than you and I’ve got better weapons. So I guess I win.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that.

Pickersgill took a phone out of his pocket with his left hand and dialed a number. The pistol in his right hand drooped until it wasn’t pointing directly at her, but he didn’t holster it. He was pretty smart, she had to give him that. He’d thought this through better than she had.

Well, Chey had never been very good at making plans. She’d pretty much followed her gut her whole life. And now it was going to get her killed.

No.

Her wolf wouldn’t accept that. It wouldn’t accept death so easily.

There had to be something she could do. She stared out at the broken plain of the parking lot, at heaps of stones and broken chunks of asphalt. The helicopter was moving away, headed toward the far side of
the town. Soon it was gone behind rust-stained walls and mounds of dark soil, lost in a purpling sky that was about to turn into darkness.

Her mind turned over and over, trying to decide what to do next. If Pickersgill would just step closer she could kick him. Maybe get her legs around his neck and snap his spine. She could spit in his eyes and when he went to wipe them clean she could kick the gun right out of his hand. Then she could bring her knee up into his chin hard enough to knock him out.

What she would do then, still handcuffed to the light pole, she had no idea. But it was worth a try. “Hey,” she said. Pickersgill looked up.

“Your brother told me something right before he died.” “Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah. If you come over here I’ll whisper it in your ear.” He grinned at her. “Nice try.” He actually took a step back. Okay, she thought to herself. Time for plan B.

She tried flexing her arms, tensing against the chain that held her hands cuffed together. She could feel how solid the metal was. She was stronger than any normal human being, but she didn’t think she could break that chain. In fact, she was sure of it. She pulled anyway. The muscles in her arms tensed and burned and the steel held. She grunted and gritted her teeth and pulled harder. The cuffs dug into her wrists and scraped at her skin like dull knives. Sweat broke out on her forehead.