Rob Thurman - Roadkill

I stepped back.

Delilah gave me a smile ripe with anticipation of the chase before us. “In case we hunt no more.”

“Great for you two,” Robin complained. “But what if Niko and I end up ‘hunting no more’? Where’s our kiss of potential death? Or quickie of potential death? I’m open to all options.”

Both Delilah and Niko snorted and Robin did without. I knew he was serious about the kiss; I wasn’t as sure about the rest as I saw him finger his cell phone before hitting a number. Speed dial. This relationship could be more serious than I thought. Monogamy and ranking on Robin’s speed dial. He turned his back to us, but that didn’t keep wolf or human ears from hearing. “It’s me… of course. Who else would bother to call your cranky feathered ass?” He paused, listening. “No, everything’s fine. We’re about to wipe this walking, talking, antibiotic-resistant son of a bitch out of existence, and I should be back soon.” Goodfellow could lie like no one I’d seen in my life, except my mother, but this time, I wasn’t so sure he pulled it off. “I only wanted you to know that you are wholly responsible for the vow of the priesthood I took on this trip. And if by some completely unlikely chance I don’t survive, I fully expect you to pack your dick away in shipping foam and never use it again. Fair is fair.” He paused again, then said briskly, “No, I’m not saying that or implying that. I just wanted… oh Hades.” He flipped the phone shut. Good-bye was what I guessed that he refused to say and when the phone rang, he turned it off, sticking to his guns on the subject.

I didn’t blame him. Saying good-bye was an impossible thing sometimes; no matter how long you had to prepare yourself. Niko and I’d learned that a few times more than I wanted to count. And when you didn’t know in your heart precisely what you were saying good-bye to… that had to be worse.

Delilah turned out to be right about Rafferty. He was gone and Catcher had disappeared with him, but they weren’t far away. We caught up with them in a short matter of time, all of us: Niko, Robin, Delilah, Abelia-Roo and her four men, and lucky me watching our flank. Fortunately, it was Delilah’s flank I was watching and if I was going to die, that wasn’t a bad last image to take with me.

We moved quietly along wooden walkways surrounded by trees, some kind of pine or fir. Big though, whatever they were. More than a hundred feet tall, easily. The wind played through the needles, a song you couldn’t quite make out the words to, but a nice song. Peaceful-until the trees fell; hundreds of them, in slow motion, as roots gave way and they tore loose from the ground. The first one would’ve landed right in front of some of us and on top of the rest if we hadn’t heard the creak of wood and been hit with a cascade of now-silent needles, brown and dead from above.

No one said run. The situation was self- explanatory in that respect, and if it wasn’t, then Darwin was ready to take your hand and lead your oblivious ass to extinction. Delilah and I ran past Abelia and her men. I didn’t help little old ladies across the street. I should have, but I didn’t. And if I didn’t do that, I wasn’t going to play out the tale of the Frog and the Scorpion with Abelia- Roo. It was the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog. It would be Abelia’s pleasure to stab me in the back if I hoisted her up on it, only unlike the scorpion, she’d wait until I’d hauled her to safety first. I let her men deal with scooping her up and fleeing with her.

We caught up with Niko and Robin as the first tree crashed across the walkway behind us. It shook the ground hard enough that I felt my feet leave it for a split second. As the rest of the hundred or so fell, that shaking became a good imitation of an earthquake. We ran, we dodged, and in one spectacular, humanly impossible leap, Delilah sailed over the huge trunk of one already down. I started to look behind me once and Niko grabbed my jacket and yanked me along faster. Within minutes we raced out from the wooded area and stopped to see… just to see. A massive stretch of destruction lay behind us. The giant trees, dead but not gone. They lay across the pathway, every one a stand- in for a bullet through the head. Trunks piled upon trunks, branches bare as needles had dropped away-the death of nature itself.

With almost every step Suyolak had taken here before us, everything around was dying-or had already died. The trees, the grass I bent and felt break under my palm, the rabbit dessicated to nearly nothing by my foot. Once Suyolak had started his engine, he’d stopped the same in everything else he passed, holding back only enough that the death throes were timed to crush us flat. I nudged the rabbit corpse off the wooden path and onto the dead grass. Not much improvement for it, but it was the best I could do.

“Let’s keep going,” Niko said, turning back to move on. As we did, I caught a glimpse of one of Abelia’s men looking over his shoulder uneasily at the remains of what we’d barely escaped. Uneasy-holy hell, if he were smart, he would be fucking terrified. We were trailing after the actual embodiment of death; not the idea of it or the chance of it, but its purest distillation. Terminal cancer and every plague known to man crossed with a great white shark and we were chasing the bastard down. If that didn’t make you think twice, then you had nothing to think with. Suyolak was loose, the Plague of the World, and he was already killing that world around him.

We found Rafferty and Catcher just off the walkway by a sign that heralded the Midway Geyser Basin. Sounded scenic and me without my camera. No way to capture the memories. What a pity. Or what a pity if I were alive next month to worry about it. As it was, even if I had a photo album, I think I had only the one picture for it-my sixteen-year-old yellowed and curled-at-the-edges Santa photo, and Niko wouldn’t give that one back. My life didn’t much lend itself to pictures I cared to revisit. If we got to live, maybe I’d do something about that.

Rafferty had stopped with Catcher standing stolidly at his side, waiting for us. “He’s ahead,” he said, “past the Grand Prismatic Spring. Too bad it’s not daylight. Dark blue water, ringed by red bacterial mats. Colorful. Nice.” That was a lot of words for Rafferty and none of them curse words. I was impressed. If he could do it, maybe there was hope for me yet. I raised my eyebrows and Rafferty shrugged. “Catcher’s a tree hugger. We’ve been here before.”

“Wonderful. You’re an informative tour guide. Should we, by some slim chance, survive this, I’ll be sure to tip you generously.” Robin massaged his forehead as we ringed the healer and the wolf. “Are you absolutely positive this time? Because, honestly, he’s led you by the nose up until now and rarely in the right direction, not to mention he did just try to swat us with several acres of trees. On the other hand, that rather bears mentioning. He tried to kill us with trees. Extremely tall Christmas trees and how diabolical is that? To ruin a gift-giving holiday and celebration of the pagan winter solstice all in one.”

“Not kindly or succinctly put, but something we need to know. Rafferty?” Niko was carrying his sword and had discarded his coat when the wooden path had ended. There was no one and nothing to see us now; only the dead. “You do know where he is? If Suyolak is going to kill us, I’d prefer he do it from ahead and not behind. Granted deceased is deceased, but we’d have something more of a chance if we knew his position.”

“He’s ahead all right, more than ready and willing to play,” the healer replied impassively. “He’s in my head now. Talking, talking. Bastard won’t shut up. This is what he wants. He doesn’t think any of us is worth hiding from.”