Nightfall (35 page)

A deep calm eased the tension from his muscles. He had seen it in big cats, the mountain lions he'd devoted his life to. They limbered and relaxed just before leaping, as if their bodies knew the prey was already dead. The wind wasn't so fierce now. His hands didn't shake.

The beasts leaped. Toward Jenna. Tru. And the fallen child.

“
Penny
!” Ange screamed.

She killed one, wild with motherly rage, as if she no longer feared the gun in her hand. Good for her. They could do this. The demon dogs might have once been people, but they'd lost too much. They couldn't succeed against rational beings, no matter the magic in the world. Bravery mattered. So did solidarity.

He pumped the shotgun. “Tru, down!”

The boy hit the ground, protecting Jenna and Penny with his whole body. If the monsters got them, it would be because they chewed all the way through Tru's back.
Heart of a lion, this kid.

Chris fired and blew one wide open. Not too many left now. He fired again. With every pull of the trigger, monsters dropped dead. He liked that power. A lot.

Step. Fire. Reload.

Only four left. Turning as a pack away from Tru, where he huddled over fallen friends, they correctly judged Ange and Chris to be the real threats. You just don't fuck with a woman's child. She'll rip your face off with her bare hands. The beasts snarled a message that Jenna would probably understand. Chris didn't care what they had to say. Not even a little.

Raw fury surged through to his soles.
You're not taking anything else from me.

Weeks of pent-up anger and frustration found release as he plugged round after round into what remained of his old life. The monsters swarmed. For the first time he saw them up close, the unnatural
other
of them. Their awful aura made his skin itch and his brain misfire, tapping into deeply primitive places.

His scalp tingled with the surety of it. Magic existed. There was no other way to explain this or force it to make sense.
Adapt or die.
That old rule still held true. He'd be damned if his evolutionary progress halted today. Nobody would perish because he couldn't accept reality. The scientist could kill. And he did.

His shotgun sparked until the snow bled red.

Only two left.

Chris reloaded as a beast charged at Ange. With shaking hands, she raised her nine and pulled the trigger. Click. Empty.

“New mag!” he shouted.

But by the terrible resignation in her blue eyes, she knew she didn't have time. Her gun hand dropped to her side. The monster took her down before Chris could raise his shotgun. With ravening fangs, the dog ripped out her throat. Ange's blood sprayed all over the trampled, icy ground.

Five seconds later, Chris blew its head off. He wheeled on the other. Boom. Hole through the torso. Just like he felt.

Five seconds too late.

Later, he might review those five seconds. Relive them in his head, over and over. But he needed to get Jenna and the children inside. Tru wobbled to his feet, his shirt front frosted with snow. His lips were tinged blue. Tears frosted his lashes.

“I couldn't carry her,” he said, his young face tight with failure.

Yeah, Chris knew exactly how he felt.
Ange should've made it. I should've been faster.

No. Not the time for self-recrimination. He didn't know if more monsters prowled the area. He would make use of the temporary quiet to get everyone the hell back inside. Otherwise, Ange had died for nothing. She'd come back as a ghost to kill him in his sleep if he didn't see to Penny.

“You did great. Take Penny. I'll get Jenna.” Chris knelt before the woman's frigid body. She wasn't shivering. Not good. He lifted her from the snow. “And if you ever call me ‘Harvard' again, I'll throw you out a goddamn window.”

Tru shot the nearest dog in the gut, unable to look at Ange's body. It was the one that had killed her. “Whatever, man. I owe you.”

Snow and ice and Jenna's limp weight took running off the menu, but Chris kept his eyes on the door. Not far now. Twenty meters—nothing at all. Just a winter stroll. He kept moving, gulps of frozen air burning his throat.

He kicked the door wide and backed in, keeping Jenna's head from smacking against metal. He laid her on the floor and turned to help Tru secure the door.

“I'll get more ammo,” the kid said. “We gotta go back out for Mason.”

“We stay.”

“Who put you in charge?”

Chris grabbed Tru and slammed him into the wall. “I
am
in charge. You want to try me?”

“You're a fucking coward,” Tru gritted out, still struggling.

“I just saved your life. You keep it up and I won't bother again.” He glanced down to Jenna. “Assuming she doesn't bleed out on the floor, she'll wake up and want to know where Mason is. Either way, it won't be pretty. In fact, she'll probably be downright vicious, even without going wolf. And I haven't even seen what shape Penny's in. I'm going to need your help.” When Tru's struggles slowed, logic penetrating his skull, Chris eased up. “We have injured to deal with.”

Tru puffed out an angry breath, but he nodded. “I'll take Penny to the dorm. Her arm's bleeding. I can't tell how bad it is.” He paused. “I wish Ange was here.”

Those words lodged in Chris's heart like a steel blade. “But we have to make do.”

Downstairs, he gathered all the first-aid supplies they'd brought back from Wabaugh. He tended Penny first, perhaps as a gesture to her fallen mother. But Jenna also healed faster. She would probably recover before the child, even if her wounds were worse.

Penny had suffered a deep claw mark on her upper arm, likely where the beast gouged as it took her to the ground. Why hadn't it torn out her throat, like the other had done to Ange?
As if the light around her protected her somehow.
Chris lost himself in the mindless work of cleaning and stitching the wound, trying not to remember how ragged and helpless Ange had looked right before she died.

Tru proved a capable assistant as he handed over bandages and antiseptic without a single smart remark. He caught the kid watching Penny with a puzzled look.

“How do you think she got there?” he asked finally.

Chris shook his head. “Magic? Don't look at me that way. I have no clue. Just ... one minute she was with us, and the next? Gone.”

“Yeah.” Tru's wondering tone said he wasn't giving up on the topic. “She disappeared in the woods, went missing for a few minutes when the danger got too close. And she scared the crap out of Mason and me by popping up in our room when the door was shut and all.”

“Maybe. Probably?” Chris only knew uncertainty. He bowed his head down and kept working, although grief pulled at him like a determined undertow.

Not now
.
Later. More to do.

Mason shook his head. The clanging in his ears wouldn't ease up. His chest felt heavy and molten. Ice slivers melted on his face. The wind stole his body heat and scattered it into the forest. He looked up, then ripped off the ruined goggles. What remained of the tunnel's entrance lay smoldering beneath a pewter-colored cloud of smoke and soil.

He struggled to his feet and looked down. His coat had been sheared open. Blood formed a spatter pattern on his T-shirt. With unsteady fingers, he touched his chest and found dozens of tiny flecks of shrapnel embedded in his skin.

Dazed, he found the remains of his ammo bag. One of the explosions must have taken out what he had left, but he didn't remember any of it. He'd fired. Things exploded. Repeat. Until he'd wound up playing kissy face with the frozen turf.

Feeling numb despite his injuries—one benefit to falling into the snow—Mason found his AR-15 and checked the magazine. Empty. A second scan of the area confirmed that his ammo had gone up in the big boom. Although he didn't hear any dogs nearby, his sense of vulnerability sharpened the cold against his exposed skin.

Clutching his field jacket with one hand, he stumbled to the tunnel entrance and double-checked his handiwork. Rock formed a heavy, deep wall. He toed a couple of places, expecting the bulk to give way—maybe a hollow pocket behind a sturdy-looking facade. But nothing moved.

He turned and caught sight of the ax. Not the most elegant means of defense, but he wasn't about to complain. Pain lanced through his chest when he bent over to retrieve it. Every muscle whined. He felt exhausted and very, very old.

Blinking away the spots, he focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Get back to the station. Get patched up. Find Jenna.

He opened his mind, searching for her. Nothing. Panic skated through his guts. Trying again, breathing to find some level of calm, he reached out. Not even her wolf side howled back at him. He hiked the flat metal ax blade against one shoulder and set off toward the ravine exit. Although worry for Jenna threatened to cloud his senses, he bound and gagged every worst-case scenario.

With his mind unguarded and searching, he pulled in odd images and sensations—that sick, sliding out-of-body feel. It swelled and darkened until his senses receded, like he'd turned down the volume on the physical world. He fingered the ax haft. The crunch of his boots sounded far away. The back of his neck itched.

He turned.

A single monster stared at him from between two black barren trunks. It tipped its grim, greasy head to the side, jowls tinted with bloodstains. A scraggy pelt hung in limp patches across its back and haunches. Claws like a bear's poked out from its foot pads and dug into the icy snow. A waft of dead carrion stink crept over the chill air.

But Mason didn't move. He could have tried the ax. He could have wrestled the thing until its damn rotted head tore off. But he waited.

Slowly, with the building energy of a thunderhead, the beast's body realigned. Mason had once dislocated his shoulder in a bar fight, and he'd never forget the sound of popping his humerus back into its socket. The dog snapped and wriggled in its own skin with those same popping sounds, bones changing places and shape. He lengthened and grew, his haunches straightening into human legs.

Briefly, Mason thought of Jenna. He'd yet to see her transform, and part of him was damn thankful. But whereas Jenna's silver-tipped wolf eased back into her supple human form, this monstrous creature transformed into a living nightmare. Still deformed. Still rotten. Just a little bit more human.

He was the humanoid thing Mason had seen with Jenna in the basement—the one in charge of this winter horror show. Naked, a layer of thick body hair covered his pale skin. His underbite made lower canine teeth protrude. Bushy eyebrows topped a pronounced brow.

A guttural grumble. A whine. Then a look of frustration that appeared almost human in that wrong, deformed face.

Mason lifted the ax from his shoulder.

The clicking grunts in the monstrous throat came nearer to language. “Hungry,” he slurred.

The reality of what he was seeing turned Mason's stomach. He felt pity. After years of fighting these beasts, he felt actual pity. This thing used to be human, just like those putrid dogs. They were caught in a fiendish hell, as much as Mason and the others. The rules of living on Earth had changed, perhaps forever.

“Cold,” the grotesque thing spit out.

“I know,” Mason found himself saying. He needed to just lop the monster's head off and be done with it—put him out of his misery. But the remainder of humanity, in the thing, in himself, wouldn't let him. “You need to call off your curs. There's only death here.”

“Hungry.”

“Sorry. Not gonna happen.” Mason gave the ax a few practice twirls.

That aggression angered the beast-man. His back hunched into a distinctly canine pose. He lifted those bear-claw hands and snarled, his human side pulled under by pure animal rage. Mason held up the ax and slashed the air with it. The monster flinched, hustling back a few feet.

“Remember this?” Mason shouted. “Remember home-improvement projects and logging—human things. Remember cars and computers and books? Human things. Remember?” He poked the blade into the space between them, but the beast didn't retreat again.

A bunched tangle of bushes shivered to his right. Mason turned in time to catch a leaping demon dog as it sprang into attack. He chopped it cleanly through the neck. This was the one thing he knew how to do well. Fight. It didn't matter how many lurked in these woods. He'd go down swinging. The beast landed on its back and didn't try to get up. The bony, bloody chest simply heaved.

But Mason was done trying to understand these creatures. He was tired, cold, injured, and pissed off. He sank the ax into the dog's stomach, his hands jerking against the impact of blade on bone. No satisfaction in ending their lives anymore. Simply the knowledge that his species would not endure if theirs thrived. Grim. Unavoidable.

More beasts came, their attacks sluggish and uncoordinated. Their leader, the feral man, slunk back between the naked trees, his face twisted with what looked like disappointment and fear. Mason took each predator as it lunged and fought, each one of them clumsy like toys running low on batteries.

Edging backward, swinging the ax to ward off what remained of their attack, Mason made steady, slow progress. He could see the top of the station from between the last of the trees.