Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

The exhaustion — both physical and mental — was overwhelming the last traces of adrenaline that had kept her going. She surrendered to it and slid down to the ground beside Corben. They just lay there in silence for a while, staring at the bonfire, listening as it crackled and popped, watching as the flames licked and curled around the twigs before pulling them down and consuming them.

“Last thing I remember is going out to meet my mom for a drink,” Mia eventually said. “How did we end up here?”

Corben chewed on it for a brief moment. “Because of assholes like the hakeem. And me.” His hollow voice was laced with regret.

Mia turned to him. “You wanted it that badly?”

He shrugged. “It kind of beats everything, doesn’t it?” He winced. “Everything except a bullet in the gut.”

“Did you kill Farouk?”

Corben’s nodded faintly. “He was badly hit, but…yes.”

“Why?”

“Greed. Self-preservation.” He mulled his words. “Greed, mostly.” He leaned around so that he was facing her. “I’m not a good person, Mia. I wasn’t trained to be good. I was trained to be effective. To get things done. And I’ve done some questionable things, some awful things that were applauded by my superiors.” He shook his head with remorse. “I guess somewhere on that road, I decided I could also do it for myself.”

“So my mom, me…we were just, what? Useful?”

He shook his head faintly. “There was no master plan. It just kind of took me — took us all by surprise and sucked us all in. Something happens, an opportunity pops up, and you go after it. But the last thing I wanted in all this was for you to be put in harm’s way, to get hurt. That’s the truth. And regardless of my motives, I always thought I’d get your mom out, as soon as it was possible. The thing is, in my business, the first lesson you learn is that things rarely work out the way you plan them.” He coughed up a bit of blood and wiped it off his mouth. He looked up at her. “For what it’s worth, I…” He shook his head, as if deciding against saying it. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

Just then, a spine-tingling cry shattered the stillness of the night. It was the unmistakable howl of a wolf. Another quickly responded, its cry echoing around them.

Not a wolf.

Wolves.

They never hunted alone.

A sudden feeling of dread wrung Mia’s gut. Her eyes swung over to Corben. He’d heard them too.

“It’s the blood,” Corben reported gloomily, straightening up. “They’ve smelled it.”

Another howl pierced the night, this one much closer.

How quickly did they travel?

Mia sat up, her eyes and ears on high alert.

“The guns,” he mumbled. “Get the guns.”

Mia hurled herself to her feet and pulled a flaming stick out of the fire. She scurried away on rubbery legs towards where she remembered the mokhtar’s son had fallen. She thought she remembered seeing the mokhtar put the boy’s rifle down there. She’d seen submachine guns by the two fallen villagers, but they were further afield, and she wasn’t sure she dared venture that far.

She advanced cautiously, sweeping the lighted brand left and right, scanning the murky obscurity for any sign of the predators. Her eyes picked out the old hunting rifle, propped up like a talisman against the tree where the mokhtar’s son had lain. She stepped towards it, and just as she reached out to grab it, she saw the gray forms lurking in the shadows. Her heart skipped a whole bar as she watched them skulk there, eyeing her. She stabbed the brand at them, causing them to flinch and retreat a step, but they weren’t easily cowed. They inched forward again, baring their teeth menacingly, their sleek bodies taut with anticipation.

She steeled herself and sliced the air with the brand, shouting at them as she took a careful step to the rifle. She snatched it with her free hand, its weight taking her by surprise, then pulled away, keeping her back to the bonfire, retreating while swinging the stick manically around her. Farther away, she heard yelps and angry snarls, and the three wolves that had been stalking her rushed off into the darkness. She heard them working feverishly on something and realized they had found the villagers’ dead bodies.

She hustled back to Corben before they came back for more. He’d managed to get himself up and was half-crouched, his back to the fire, a flaming brand in his hand. Mia handed him the gun.

“What about the automatics?”

“I couldn’t get to them,” she said fearfully.

Corben checked the rifle and frowned. It was a Russian SKS carbine, ex-Iraqi-army-issue. Its magazine had a capacity of ten rounds. Corben thought he’d heard two of them go wild, and the third had ripped through him, which meant he had seven shots left, if it had been fully loaded. He felt under its barrel. Its bayonet, normally swiveled, tucked in under it and nondetachable on the military-issue weapon, had been taken off, much to his dismay.

Mia was watching him from the corner of her eye. “What have we got?”

“Seven rounds, tops,” he informed her glumly.

The ghostly shapes soon materialized in the darkness around them, the golden glint of the flames flickering in their eyes. They swirled around Mia and Corben like a legion from hell, crisscrossing each other’s paths calmly, almost as if they were conferring with each other and planning their onslaught. They snapped their jaws and bared their teeth, taunting their prey, darting forward and lurching back just as fast, playing with them, testing their defenses.

Their fetid smell clawed at Mia’s nose as she lunged at them, her eyes stinging from the heat of her torch, her back inches from the raging bonfire that licked hungrily at it.

“We’re not going to be able to hold them off forever,” she hissed to Corben, “and there’s more than seven of them.”

Corben had been thinking the same thing.

His eyes had been scouring their perimeter, trying to gauge how many they were up against. From what he could see, there seemed to be ten of them, maybe a dozen. At least, those were the ones he could see on the front line.

He faltered, his strength long gone, his legs living on borrowed time. A couple of the predators decided to push a little harder and darted at him, their long muzzles wide-open, their wet tongues slobbering ravenously, their sharp fangs gleaming in the firelight. He stabbed back with his brand, struggling to remain on his feet, the throbbing of an overtaxed heart deafening in his ears. The wolves dodged the flames with ease, pulling back with lightning agility. As if sensing his faltering life force, one of them decided to go for the kill and leapt at him, paws and jaws flung wide and aimed at his neck. Corben squeezed off a round that caught it in midflight, and it yelped and dropped like a sandbag, at his feet. Another grabbed the opportunity and pounced at Corben, who stopped it with another shot. The others seemed momentarily spooked by the gunshots and the sudden deaths of their brethren and retreated, receding into the darkness.

“You alright?” Mia asked, her eyes still locked on the shadows stalking them.

Corben could barely stand or keep his eyes open. He felt as if he were sinking into a smothering abyss.

“We’re going to need those automatics,” he rasped through clenched teeth. A burning sensation, more fierce than the heat from the bonfire, was scorching him from the inside. “Where’s the nearest one?”

“Down that way.” Mia pointed in the direction of the fallen villagers. “But they were too far to reach, I told you.”

“We don’t have much choice. I’m not going to get the rest of them with the handful of bullets this piece of junk has left in it. And without them, we’re dead anyway. The fire’s going to give out sometime. They’ll just wear us out, it’s what they do. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen on ending up as wolf feed.”