Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book One - The Earth Transformed

But they weren’t wolves. Not quite. Our bullets just sparked off their hides — didn’t slow them down, didn’t even make them stumble. And as they got closer, we saw why. Their fur wasn’t fur. It was like porcupine quills made out of ten–penny nails. Bullets slid off ’em like water off a thatched roof.

“Jesus!” I choked. “We can’t hurt ’em! Jesus!”

Athalia proved me wrong by shooting one straight through the eye and dropping it like a sack of meat, but then the rest were on us and we were fighting for our lives.

A big gray bastard put me flat on my back in the middle of the cacti, and I only kept its teeth from my neck by jamming my forearm against its windpipe and pushing back as hard as I could. Its jaws snapped shut an inch from my nose and its claws tore through my leathers and my shirt and ripped into my chest.

Hissing with agony, I jammed my pistol into its flank with my free hand, pushing the nose of it through the porcupine spines until it touched flesh. “Shrug this off, you son–of–a–bitch!”

The wolf yelped as the bullet smashed through its ribs. I sat up and drilled a second shot through its forehead as it flopped around on the ground.

Around me, everything was chaos. Thrasher was caving in the skull of a wolf with the yard–long piece of two–inch rebar he called his billy club. Angie was shooting point blank at a wolf that had Ace on the ground. Athalia was standing over a dead wolf and kicking another in the chops. Vargas and Hell Razor were back to back, blasting away at three circling wolves and, believe it or not, laughing.

I ran to Angie and Ace and did my trick again, stuffing the muzzle of my gun through the fur of their wolf before pulling the trigger. The three of us went and helped the others, and it was over in less than a minute.

Well, almost over.

All the wolves we’d been fighting were lying dead around us, but we were still hearing growling and snarling.

“Where the hell is that coming from?” asked Angie.

Then we saw it. A commotion in the patch of scrub behind us.

“No!” shouted Vargas, and he plunged through the cacti, stumbling and getting caught on the needles.

The rest of us charged in after him and saw a last wolf tearing at something near the wall.

“Goddamn it! Get off of her!”

Vargas blasted at the wolf and got its attention. It whipped around, snarling, and tried to launch itself at him, but Thrasher’s rebar took it in the mouth before it could jump, and turned its head to red pulp. It sank down with a whimper and revealed the body that lay behind it.

Poor Kate’s throat was open from chin to clavicle, and all her blood spilling out on the dry yellow ground. Her arms had been trapped in a bed of cacti. She hadn’t even been able to defend herself — not that it would have helped. Still, what a way to go. It was so pitiful I felt like crying.

Vargas did. He dropped down on his knees beside her, weeping and shaking. “I told you not to come. Didn’t I tell you? Goddamn it, I told you!”

A cactus off to our left spoke up. “Congratulations, volunteers. I am impressed. You are the first subjects to survive their first encounter with any of my progeny, and—”

Vargas bolted up and shot the cactus. “Congratulations? You son–of–a–bitch! You just killed a little girl!”

A rock in the other direction continued. “I’d still call that a victory. Only one casualty, and the weakest, least effective one at—”

Vargas shot the rock. “You heartless, soulless motherfucker!”

He started shooting at random — sky, walls, plants, rocks — his eyes crazed with grief and rage.

“We are not some goddamn experiment, you invisible asshole!”

BLAM!

“We are people!”

BLAM!

“And you killed the best of us!”

BLAM!

“Ain’t no research worth a dead little girl!”

BLAM!

CLASH!

We looked up. Vargas’s last bullet had whistled over the wall about twenty yards down. That area had been black and full of stars just like the rest of the “sky,” but now, as we watched, big jagged pieces of that black were falling away, and light was showing through from behind it. A one–way window.

Three more huge shards spun down and shattered on the wall below, and we could see a wood–paneled room through it, and also the silhouette of a man watching us.

Vargas raised his gun and fired and the silhouette stepped away, out of our line of sight.

“Come on,” said Vargas, starting forward and reloading. “We gotta get through that window.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

We filed in behind him and…

…that’s when the other Night Screamers started screaming.

There were three of them this time, shrieking and flailing towards us from three different directions, and behind their high pitched wails, the lower howls of armored wolves.

“They’re like fucking alarms!” shouted Hell Razor as he blew a screamer’s head off. “They let everything with teeth know where we are!”

“Is it on purpose?” Angie gut–shot another screamer and it collapsed in a mewling heap. “Are they working together? Is Finster signaling them?”

Vargas and I finished off the last mutant together, then he motioned us all back the way we’d come.

“Back to the corner,” he said. “We can’t let ’em get around behind us.”

We ran back and faced out, guns ready. They didn’t keep us waiting. Wolves were loping in from all over, twice as many as before. There was no escape from death this time, and part of me, the same part that had earlier said, “I just want to get it over with,” the same part that had jumped into the fight at White Mesa without thinking twice, the same part that had started the ruckus at the Black Market, was excited by the idea. I didn’t understand it. I should have been pissing my pants, but instead my heart was pounding like I was on a first date. I was having a hard time keeping myself from laughing out loud. The only thing that kinda killed the buzz a little was knowing that my all my friends were going to die too, but even that wasn’t enough to keep my blood from singing.

On either side of me Angie and Athalia were squeezing off head–shots as calm and easy as if they were at target practice. Two wolves dropped. Then another two. Vargas, Ace and Hell Razor weren’t snipers like that, and were holding their fire until the wolves got closer, while Thrasher had put his guns away entirely, and was rolling his shoulders and limbering up with his rebar. Me, I knew I had to get close — under that metal fur — to do anything, so I was wading out through the dead grass with a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, howling answers to the wolves’ challenges as I went.

We were all going to die, and it was going to be glorious.

But then, just as the wolves were close enough to see the glow of their eyes, Angie and Athalia’s guns developed a weird echo that didn’t quite match the shots they’d fired. Then a wolf they hadn’t shot stumbled sideways and I realized I wasn’t hearing echoes. I was hearing more guns.

“Watch your fire!” Vargas pointed beyond the wolves. “There’s people coming!”

It was hard to see who they were in the dark, but I could see the flashes of their guns just fine and, wonder of wonders, they weren’t aiming at us. All over Finster’s indoor outdoors wolves were yipping and turning as bullets caught them in the flanks. The shots weren’t doing much damage, but they brought the wolves’ charge to a standstill as they tried to face two threats at once.

We fanned out and moved to enclose them, and the people who had come to our rescue — whoever they were — did the same. Pretty soon, what had looked like it was going to be a dead ranger bloodbath turned into a dead wolf massacre. The ring closed and the wolves turned and lunged, bloodying up a few of us, but we knew what we were dealing with now, and we made our shots count. A few minutes later it was all over — no casualties on our side, high fives all around.