Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

Keeping his head down and shotgun raised, Cole hurried to get to Lambert before he was stomped, slashed, or otherwise destroyed by the rampaging Full Blood or the growing number of guards. He tried to channel some of the power that had been in him earlier, but all that remained was the agony of broken tendrils cinching in around his stomach. Each step was harder to take than the previous one, but he somehow got to the fallen inmate and helped him to his feet. “Get up, Lambert. We gotta get out of here.”

Frank’s strained, hissing voice could barely be heard over the rest of the chaos as he dispatched one of the new arrivals by grabbing a gnarled quarterstaff from the guard’s hands and twisting it away. “Stairs should be this way,” he said while cracking the guard in the jaw with his own weapon. Then shots were fired at the Squam, forcing him to drop down and out of sight.

When Lambert looked his way, Cole told him, “Go on. I’m helping Frank.”

“Ain’t time for that, man. We got another minute or two at best before them guards find us.”

Already breaking into a run, Cole shouted, “Just go. This won’t take long.”

Frank climbed to his feet and staggered toward him. By the looks of him, Cole didn’t thing he had the strength to make another jump. The Squam’s yellowish skin was cracked and bleeding in several places, discolored to look like mud. His narrow vertical pupils shifted toward Cole. “They are keeping the Full Blood occupied, but won’t be able to kill it.”

“Go on and get out of here,” Cole said without sparing so much as a glance toward the battle raging a stone’s throw away. “If level two is a bust, then take the ramp. Cars get in and out of here, so there’s got to be a way for us to do the same.”

Frank nodded and did his best to run toward the ramp Lambert was now using. He kept his upper body hunched down so low, it looked like he was running on all fours.

The heat in Cole’s scars flared up until he reflexively pulled in a breath and tightened his grip around the shotgun. The club he’d taken from one of the elevator guards was tucked under one arm. Frank was almost at the top of the ramp now, but he dove off the edge to clear a path for another Full Blood that was stormed up.

It was one of the biggest werewolves Cole had seen. Normally, a Full Blood was smaller when it walked on four legs. Resembling a bear with longer limbs and a canine head, they used that form for speed or mobility and walked on two legs when fighting or climbing. This one, covered in dark gray fur, galloped like a horse and kicked up dust from the concrete as its claws scraped gouges into the cement and through the occasional speed bump. Where Randolph’s teeth grew at odd angles to slice through his face, this one’s were as organized as they were deadly. The creature pulled in a deep breath and barked in a deep baritone, displaying two sets of long fangs sprouting from each spot where canine incisors would grow.

After tossing the guard with the halberd over a minivan, Randolph turned toward the other creature. “Esteban!” he roared. “There is nothing for you here.”

The Full Blood with the gray fur looked as if he would cross the entire parking area in one leap, but shifted into his upright form to dig his feet into a car’s roof. “This place reeks of Skinners hiding treasures they do not understand,” he replied in a rumbling voice colored by a Spanish accent. “It is no surprise to find you here while the others cluster around the Torva’ox like children gazing upon a shiny trinket.”

Randolph charged at the other Full Blood with men attached to him by blades, hooks, or other weapons embedded in his flesh. The guards dangled from his sides and back like decorations until they were scraped against a post or brushed off against a parked car. The two Full Bloods collided like storm fronts, completely ignoring the wave of guards that had just arrived. In his upright form, Randolph was shorter than the gray werewolf, but wider in the shoulders. Once they clamped their jaws around the thick matting of fur protecting the other’s neck, Cole found his opening to put that place behind him.

He ran down the ramp and quickly spotted Lambert and Frank racing across a crumbling parking lot for the safety of a wooded hillside less than a quarter mile away. It was early evening and the sun was making its descent to the western horizon. Police cars and several unmarked trucks sped toward the building, which sat by itself at the base of a tall set of hills. Wailing sirens filled the air, a helicopter roared in from the east, and more vehicles sped down the road that led to the prison’s poorly tended fence line. No one, however, seemed to notice Cole and his companions working their way up the rise that led to higher ground covered by trees and dense bushes.

Above all the chaos surrounding the cement block of a building, Randolph’s howl was joined by the voice of the other Full Blood. Before the armed men could leave their vehicles, the werewolves exploded from the parking garage. The few remaining men trying to hold a line in front of the building’s main entrance were decimated by the gray creature’s teeth and claws as Esteban tore through them.

Even when he got to the top of the rise, it was tough for Cole to make sense out of which Full Blood was winning. All he could tell from his new vantage point was that the prison would need some repairs if it was ever going to be used for anything more than a quarry. Randolph jumped down onto the gray werewolf but was grabbed in midair before he could sink his teeth into Esteban’s flesh. He then found himself on the ground with the gray wolf on top of him. The group of men Cole guessed were police opened fire on the Full Bloods, unleashing a chattering wave of gunshots from everything ranging from handguns to high-powered rifles. The Full Bloods hunkered down beneath the pelting of bullets, too engrossed in their own fight to answer them. After tossing Randolph against the side of the building, Esteban grabbed his leg and lobbed him into the largest cluster of police cars.

“Well,” Cole said from behind the rocks he and the other two escapees were using for cover, “they can’t pin that one on me.”

“They would if they knew what you did,” Lambert replied. “Lowering them defenses was a stupid goddamn idea.”

“We would have been dead if we’d stayed there.”

“You think so?”

Cole looked over at him and said, “Yeah. If it wasn’t for the Legion of Doom over there tag-teaming the entire prison, we would have been locked away, picked apart, and cut to pieces.”

“He’s right,” Frank said. “Nobody knew we were there, and Waylon was after something important enough for him to kill to get it.”

Another wave of gunfire erupted from the police encroaching on the prison. Randolph rolled to his feet and shifted into his four-legged form to charge the armed men who had tried to flank him. With bullets thumping uselessly into his fur, he scattered the humans, lowered his head and came back around to drive it into Esteban’s stomach. Having flipped the other Full Blood into the air, Randolph shifted into his upright form to catch Esteban by two clumps of fur and fling him away. The werewolf clawed at empty air while snarling ferociously, but was unable to do much more than that before slamming into the side of the building with enough force to go through the outer wall. Randolph turned to face the cops then, warned them back with a primal, territorial roar, and leapt through the hole in the side of the prison to pursue his prey.

“We need to get moving,” Cole said. “There won’t be any better time than this.”

Lambert couldn’t nod fast enough as he jogged toward the top of the rise so he could put more distance between himself and the raging battle.