The Witch and the Werewolf (12 page)

A man rushed one of them
and a shot rang out. Multiple blasts quickly followed and the
unarmed refugees were cut to shreds. Dutch’s finger tightened on
the trigger and the rifle barked in his hands. The gunman who’d
shot first was flung backwards, a three round burst catching him in
the shoulder. The other men ducked behind cover, leaving him no
targets. He was tempted to wait around and kill the men anyway.
Maybe he’d sneak into their impromptu camp up on the bridge and
make a night of slitting throats. The anger at the senseless
slaughter threatened to boil over but nothing he could do, right
then, would bring the dead back.

And he had a mission. It
might be a mission from a crazy ass old priest, but it was still a
mission.

Dutch slipped away from
the bridge promising the dead he’d be back.

Cassandra led Jeremy through the mud, both of them shivering
to the point their teeth chattered in their jaws. They held onto
each other for warmth, which made it even harder to slog through
the mud. Though most of the buildings were scoured clean from their
foundations, she still recognized the general lay of the land. The
remains of the BigMart were easy to find and she guided the boy
there, hoping to find something else to wear besides the shorts and
tennis shoes she had on. They’d freeze to death long before they
ever made it to her house, at the rate they were going.

They were closer to the
wolf that shined like a beacon to the east of them, closer to the
point that she could feel fragments of his thoughts in her mind.
Pain, torture, fear… the wolf was in a dark place and someone was
hurting him regularly. He was at once the enemy and someone she
felt something for. If nothing else there was simple pity. She
didn’t want to see anyone tortured like that.

She wasn’t the only
survivor to think that the BigMart was the place to go. There were
a couple of dozen people in the ruins of the big store, picking
through the remains.

“
They’re safe,” Jeremy
told her. “They’re just hungry and cold, like us.”

“
You can tell that?” she
asked, shivering.

“
Sort of. They all are a
light green color. Light blue doesn’t seem very dangerous, does
it?”

“
No,” she agreed. “I guess
not.”

“
You’re a darker blue and
you’re not dangerous.”

She wasn’t sure if she
bought the kid’s reasoning or not, but shrugged it off. “Let’s find
some clothes.”

“
And something to eat. I
could eat a horse.”

“
And then home,” she said.
“It’s only a couple of miles from here, north,” she said trying to
figure out exactly where north was. It was hard to tell without the
sun in the sky but she knew the road by the BigMart led north, to
home. It was just a matter of picking their foundation out of all
the other wrecked houses.

“
And after that, to find
this Church of the Dead Wolf, right?”

“
Yup,” she said. If the
church was for killing the wolves she already liked them. And maybe
someone there could tell her exactly what she was.

The survivors in the
BigMart were a pitiful lot and she wondered how they’d survived.
Surely they all weren’t witches with mystical, magical force
bubbles pouring out of their guts? To a person they were wet and
dirty, covered in a layer of mud that gave them the look of a
primitive people from the jungles of the Amazon. They avoided eye
contact, keept their heads down, and dug through the muddy remains
of the store. Cassandra kicked at the mud, seeing if there was
anything underneath.

“
It’s so cold,” the boy
said, his shivering nearly convulsion like.

“
I know,” she said,
digging through the mud. The store’s products were tossed about
like a garbage heap. She finally found some large beach towels with
cartoon prints, wrung the water from them, and wrapped the boy with
them. “We’ll keep looking.”

The boy nodded in
agreement but she could hardly tell the difference from his
shaking. She kept digging, following the store’s layout from what
she remembered after being in it so many times. She came across a
duffle bag and began stuffing it with the other odds and ends she
found. There were a couple of water bottles, a six pack of Cokes
missing one, some cans of kidney beans… it took an hour of digging
to find a sealed comforter in a plastic bag. She pulled it from the
container and wrapped it around the boy.

“
No,” he said through
chattering teeth. “You keep it. I have these.”

“
Thanks kiddo,” she said,
forcing a smile, “but I’m all right.” She was lying, of course, but
she needed to be strong for the boy. His survival gave her a sense
of direction, a course to follow. If she was consumed with his
survival then she didn’t have time to think about her own
plight.

“
Okay,” the boy said
meekly.

“
Whaddya you got
there?”

The man walking towards
them was covered in grime. He had a garbage bag slung over one
shoulder and a hammer in his free hand. He had a maniacal look on
his face and his eyes darted about crazily.

“
He’s red,” Jeremy
whispered. “I don’t know what that means yet.”

Red means stop, Cassandra
thought. “Junk. Same as you.”

“
Lemme look.”

“
No, I don’t think so,”
she said, standing, a sword in each hand.

“
Whatcha gonna do with
them machetes?” the big man asked, letting his own load fall to the
mud. “You ain’t gonna stick no one with them.”

My mother dies and this
guy survives, Cassandra thought. “Stay away from me or you’ll find
out.”

The man eyed her bag
greedily and she was sure he was going to make a play for it.
Finally, though, he started to leave. “My BigMart. Can’t take stuff
from my BigMart.”

As the man turned and trod
off through the remains of the store, she heard a sound that
chilled her to her core. A wolf howled in the day time darkness,
not too far from them.

“
We have to move. It’s not
far now,” she said quietly, hoping the boy hadn’t heard
it.

“
They’re going to come for
us, aren’t they?”

“
Yes,” she said, but then
felt guilty for not saying the rest of what she thought. They were
coming for her, not him. He’d have a better chance of avoiding them
if he’d go a different direction. “But we’ll beat them if they do.
I already did it once, right?”

“
You’re lying and you’re
scared,” the boy said, warming up a little. “You’ve got orange all
through you.”

“
You can tell that from my
aura?”

“
Yup.”

“
Well,” she said, forcing
a smile, “keep it to yourself, champ. We’ve got places to go and
people to see. We’re going to be all right. I don’t care what my
aura says.”

She knew they were getting closer to their prey simply based
on the level of excited emotions in the pack. They’d followed the
scent down into the broken city, through the twisted remains of
refineries and chemical plants, and were zeroing in on her. It was
a girl they sought, she knew, though her newness to the ways of the
pack kept her in the dark for knowing just why they hunted her. The
wolf had no idea why she was running and hunting, nor did she
care.

The smells in the cold
city of man were driving her crazy. Mixed in with the scent of man,
which made her stomach rumble, were the stink of chemicals and the
smell of death. It was hard for her to pick one scent out above the
rest. As the pack ran through the cold mud she knew, though, that
there was a large group of men somewhere in the miles ahead. Her
alpha was excited. The prey was near.

The area was vaguely
familiar, even with the destruction wrought by the wall of water,
and she knew it was just a remnant of her life before. It was a
memory in that hazy fog of her past. She saw glimpses of it,
remembered scents more than anything else, but couldn’t remember
much about who she’d been before the pack fell upon her. It didn’t
matter, though. She wouldn’t trade that life, whatever it had been,
for the pack.

The alpha paused, turning
to her and the other females, and she knew she was to wait. Their
prey was near. She felt their excitement yet there was a twinge of
fear about the entire thing. She didn’t like having to stay with
the females. She had no cub of her own. But the alphas will was
overwhelming. She couldn’t have fought if she wanted to.

She watched as the males
descended into the city, anxious for the hunt, anxious to run
again.

Home to a Hole in the Ground

The snow fell with a flourish and Cassandra was reminded of
the time her mother had taken her to North Dakota one winter. The
snow there had been beautiful. The vast grass fields were covered
in a blanket of white. The snow that fell now was different. It was
black, tasted of ash and dirt, and smelled like sour bleach. The
snow stuck to everything and by the time they’d made it the few
miles to where her house had once stood the blankets and towels
they’d covered up with were soaked through and starting to freeze.
The temperature was dropping rapidly and what little sunshine had
filtered through the dark clouds above started to fade. Night was
coming and with it Cassandra knew it would be too cold to stay
outside and survive.

And with each step he was
in her mind intertwined like an old lover. The old wolf was in
great pain and she had to concentrate to keep the visions of his
torture out of her mind. If she lived through this, she thought,
she was going to put an end to his misery. The wolves following
them, attempting to kill them, she’d kill with a passion. It was
her or them. But the old wolf to the west… it was different. She
felt mercy for it.

The old landmarks and
street signs were gone and instead she followed the clear spots
where the roads were buried in mud to her house. She had to count
foundations from the entrance to the neighborhood in order to
locate it. It was one of the few homes in the neighborhood with an
actual basement and her mother had paid more during construction
for it. The water table in the low lying areas of Houston was so
high that it normal made basements unusable. After some digging in
mud that was rapidly turning to ice she found the heavy iron door
leading down. It took her and Jeremy working together to pull the
door open.

She stepped down the
stairs and flicked the light switch and then laughed at herself
when they didn’t come on. Of course there wasn’t power. There
weren’t power lines or power stations anymore. Her mother had
mounted large mag-lites to the wall, though, and she took one,
pushing down the rubber button. The light was bright and surprising
after so long in the dark once the clouds had set in.

“
Would you look at that,”
she mused, checking the basement. Not an ounce of water had gotten
in.

“
What is it?” Jeremy
asked, still shivering in the snow.

“
Come down and see for
yourself,” she said, instantly regretting her choice of words. The
boy descended the stairs. It was painful for her to look at him in
the light. He looked broken, like he’d come from an ad for a feed
the children program in a third world country.

“
Wow,” Jeremy exclaimed.
“There isn’t any water down here. It’s all dry. And it’s kind of
warm.”

She’d only spent a little
time down in the basement. Mostly it was when her mother made her
do gun cleaning drills. Her mother, however, had spent a lot of
time down there in the months leading up to Worm Fall. There were
boxes stacked against the wall, each labeled as to their contents.
There were boxes of MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat, cases of water,
and vacuum sealed packs of clothing. There was a gun case against
the far wall and stacks of ammunition next to it. The small
basement was crowded and the largest free space was occupied by two
military style cots.

Cassandra guided the boy
to one of the cots and then began pulling his wet, icy clothes off
him. He blushed when she got to his underwear but did not resist.
Once he was out of the rags she used bottled water to clean him up
as best she could with wash cloths and then dried him off. Jeremy
suffered through the cleaning silently, staring straight ahead with
his eyes shut. She laid him down and heaped blankets on
him.

“
Is that
better?”

“
Yes,” the boy said
hesitantly, staring at her with empty sockets.

“
Is everything
okay?”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
There’s something
different about you. It was just a little black spot on your heart,
at first. I didn’t think much about it. But it keeps
growing.”

She knew what the boy was
talking about without having to ask anything else. But she’d just
met the kid and though they’d become instant friends in the
aftermath of Worm Fall, she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to tell
him.

“
You feel them, right,”
she asked.

“
The wolves? Yeah. I
guess. I see them farther out, but I can sort of feel
them.”