Breeds 2 (32 page)

Janice sniffed at a female corpse, this one in a shredded uniform, and scanned the area beyond her. Nick Dyer sniffed at the dead woman’s boot and crept to the next body––half-naked and apparently dunked in ink.

The warden’s eyes narrowed, catching an alien scent.

The thing called Bailey snapped forward like a closing bear trap. He grabbed Nick by the throat scruff and nipped the airways shut. Bailey held him with one arm, choking off the warden’s warning, and dragged him along like a distressed mule. Bailey finally lifted the werewolf off its paws and took three long steps before vaulting over a low wall, disappearing below.

Carma rushed to the edge and looked down in time to see Bailey blur out of sight underneath the overhang. Janice raced to the escalator landing and bolted down the stairs. Ken Cyler and Ian Bryce followed her.

Carma didn’t bother with the stairs. She jumped.

And as she fell, Nick Dyer flew through empty space just below. He crashed through a storefront’s display of flowers. Glass fell and the warden struggled to stand, a dark gush issuing from his neck.

Carma landed as Janice leaped onto the escalator. They grouped around Dyer, seeing dark rags hanging from his exposed throat.

The wounded warden’s claws scraped on tiles. Janice nudged the furry mass once before it ceased moving entirely.

The wolves gathered at the base of the escalators, beholding the
were
-thing called Bailey, the seemingly undead creature they had been charged to kill. It backed into a gym, its eyes and teeth stained in shadow most dire. Bailey had coated himself in blood, fooling the wardens’ superior noses. They would not be fooled a second time.

With the air of eager executioners, the five werewolves converged on their prey, flooding the gym.

Bailey retreated amongst the various machines and racks of dumbbells as growls grew in the confined space. Black eyes bore down on the abomination, promising a quick death. Janice rushed in, eyes bright with malice, her back arched, fur spiked, and lips rippling.

Bailey turned and grabbed the iron bar from a nearby bench press, a length some seven feet long.

Janice leaped as the pack’s circle collapsed upon their quarry.

With a speed unimaginable, Bailey set his feet and swatted the streaking mass of fur from the air, sending Janice flying across the room where she crashed into an unyielding shoulder press machine. Bailey whirled the bar like a quarterstaff, smashing Ian Bryce’s snout a split second before upper-cutting the jaw of a lunging Ken Cyler.

Bryce skittered across the floor.

Cyler flew into a wall.

Sam Mausler launched himself at the bare-chested Bailey, who released one end of the bar to catch the werewolf by the throat. Bailey’s outstretched arm buckled upon impact, and Mausler’s hind legs swung forward, clawing at a meaty thigh and drawing bloody runnels in denim and muscle.

Bailey screamed, crushed the warden’s windpipe, and flung him into a leaping Carma. The wardens collided like a pair of bowling balls before crashing across a rack of dumbbells.

As the wardens regained their feet, Bailey attacked, stabbing the bar into the face of the closest warden. Bryce glimpsed the metal just before the blunt spear broke his front fangs and lanced a good foot down his gullet. Bailey swung the choking warden around, swatting two more furry forms away, and flung the impaled werewolf into the shoulder press machine.

The wardens’ attack faltered, and the two-legged abomination pressed its advantage.

Dripping blood, Bailey slapped the snapping maw of one warden away, ripping one eye free of the beast’s head in a shower of skull stew. He punched another head and kicked a furred torso with a yelp. A werewolf leaped but Bailey ducked and the
were
sailed into a row of stationary bicycles.

Bailey scurried around Bryce, attempting in vain to disgorge the maddening spear jammed down his throat. Bailey grabbed the iron, gripped it, and pushed down another half foot.

Bryce convulsed.

Bailey left the shivering werewolf and stopped at a Christmas tree rack of forty-five-pound plates. He pulled the heavy discs off as if they were ceramic saucers and hurled them at the remaining wardens.

One disc caught Carma in the face, dropping her cold.

Another crashed into Janice’s ribs.

Two slammed into Ken Cyler, shattering a hind leg.

Teeth bared, Bailey soon exhausted his supply of missiles, so he grabbed for the nearby kettlebells, taking up fifty-five pounds of cast-iron in each fist.

Carma lunged for Bailey’s knee just as he swung a cannonball into her face and broke one side. With uncanny speed, he turned and brought a kettlebell straight down upon the brain pan of an attacking Janice, sending her to the matted floor. Bailey knelt and hammered her skull twice more, pounding the warden’s head with his improvised mallets and shattering bone.

A dripping Nick Dyer, risen from the dead, sped toward the abomination with his jaws open. He jumped as Bailey turned and struck the
were
-thing square in its chest. The pair tumbled back and over a low rack of dumbbells. Nick landed on top and raked flesh, raising inky geysers. Bailey released his kettlebells and grabbed for a throat, but Nick evaded and plunged forward. Bailey caught him by the soaking mane as the Maine warden chomped down on a shoulder, sinking teeth to the bone.

Bailey bellowed and rolled over, taking the warden with him, and together they tumbled across the floor, each attempting to mangle the other. Bailey landed on top and shoved the werewolf away, spun, and backhanded Sam Mausler flying at him through the dark, sending the creature through a glass pane in explosive fashion.

Carma slid across the floor in a skitter of claws and glass, stopped herself, and squared off against the standing man-beast. If the pack leader realized she was the last werewolf standing, she didn’t falter.

Bailey crouched and hissed at the one werewolf, swiping at air, daring the warden to approach.

Carma growled and snapped, edging closer.

Bailey blurred forward in a burst of killer speed, clamping a clawed hand over the werewolf’s muzzle while grabbing the scruff of her neck. Bailey reared back and whipped Carma through one of two reception desks.

The pack leader didn’t rise.

With the final foe down, Bailey reeled about in drunken fashion, blood dribbling from his war wounds. He spotted the convulsing Ian Bryce caught in the early transition from wolf to human form, a forearm’s length of iron bar still shoved down his throat, his paws struggling for purchase on the shaft.

Bailey walked over to the wounded werewolf and stomped on its neck, leaving the body in shivers.

Methodically, the
were
-thing dealt with the rest of the fallen pack.

The sounds of bones shattering reached Carma’s ears in a red fog that clung to her vision. She attempted to rise but her body refused, so she rested on her belly, knowing something terribly wrong had happened to her head. It didn’t hurt, not much at all, but a crippling nausea had clutched her innards, wringing them and causing a high-pitched death drone in her ears. An unending buzz disrupted by Bailey and the sounds of things being pulled, being squished, and being torn. Her head twitched and shivered, yet she made out the tracery of a doorway that twinkled at the absolute edge of her vision. The sounds of butchery increased behind her, a yawning tunnel of carnage that drew closer to her heels.

Carma pushed with her hind legs, unhooking herself from splintered planks. She inched her way through the widening pool of her blood, smearing the tiles underneath. She pushed herself a head’s length, stopped, and cursed herself in drunken agony for doing so. The screaming grew louder behind her, an ever-widening chasm of sound and fury that instilled fear. Carma pushed herself forward again with a whimper, identifying the rectangle as a portal. She didn’t know where it led, as long as it was
away
. She grunted, a spawny red frothing her determined sneer.

A loud crackling made her good eye flicker white as she glanced to one side in reflex. Unable to see anything, the noise drew another whimper from her and her claws clicked. Faster. She had to escape. Had to recover.

A hand grabbed her ankle, causing Carma to whine. It yanked her back a good mile, or so it felt, and the doorway disappeared. An eager hissing filled her ears as if a mass of snakes had invaded them.

Her free foot flailed at her captor and was slapped away. Her entire rear quarters were then lifted off the floor. The world spun, and she faced a hand possessing fat meat hooks as fingernails.

Resembling a demon that had clawed its way free of a tar pit, Bailey grabbed Carma’s skull and twisted the pack leader onto her back. She didn’t resist.

A low growl perked their ears.

Bailey looked up while Carma didn’t have to, recognizing the scents.

Two fresh werewolves plodded into the gym, but it wasn’t Kirk the
were
-thing focused on.

It was Morris.

The monster fixed upon the Pictou warden with an expression of puzzled wonder, as if realizing it should know him. Bailey didn’t move, seized in a vice of hesitation, and attempting with all his might to remember.

Morris never appeared more determined, marching toward the standing
were
.

Bailey tossed Carma away like an empty bottle, where she bounced off an exercise bicycle.

And Morris charged.

The werewolf barreled into the standing monster, who attempted to catch the
were
’s neck and failed miserably. They tumbled backwards as a ball of angry energy, spinning around on the ground like a flesh and fur turbine freed of its metal housing.

Morris had his head slammed into a wall of iron plates. His hind legs cut bloody runnels down Bailey’s abdominal wall. Bailey howled, turned and shoved Morris’s wide head through the second reception desk, the panel wood shattering with an arctic ice crackling. Forgoing any further offensive, Bailey staggered back, reeled and made for the door. One hand cupped about his lower extremities.

Kirk struck the monster before it cleared the threshold. His jaws snapped against the side of Bailey’s head, snipping off an entire ear, and then they were crashing into the framework of the doorway. Metal buckled. Glass popped. Kirk chomped down on a shoulder and shook his head, rattling the fallen
were
-thing until Bailey jammed a handful of fingers into his face. One talon popped an eye, the pain electric, and Kirk howled and kicked the
were
away.

Bailey rose, no longer smiling, the right side of his head a grisly display of mauled flesh. Both shoulders appeared wrecked but his right one possessed a wound resembling a snowman’s smile. Bailey attempted to lift the limb but couldn’t move it. He grunted, turned, and intended to stomp on the werewolf at his feet just as Morris crashed into him.

They rolled outside of the gym. A three-foot-high floral display halted their tangled path.

Bailey landed on the bottom, his good hand gripping Morris’s neck.

The Pictou warden snarled back and pushed forward.

The strain drew a grimace across Bailey’s face. He panted, wheezed, and stared into Morris’s canine eyes.

For a fleeting second, they stayed that way. Breathing. Trembling.

Then Morris started digging, shredding the bare chest and abdominal wall of the monster underneath him. He clawed with all the frenzied energy of having discovered a tasty bone, ripping out a black tide. Bailey screamed and thrashed but soon relaxed, his expression softening, his grip on Morris’s neck relaxing.

The reborn
were
twitched when the warden’s claws hooked backbone.

And when Bailey’s hand dropped away completely, Morris buried his muzzle in the man’s chest cavity and ate his enemy’s heart in two savage bites.

In a semi-conscious daze, Kirk heard the commotion. He felt like a hornet’s nest had been shaken and stuck to his head.
Jesus Christ,
he seethed in agony, realizing he just had an eye hooked out of his head a second time in the same year. He rolled over, vision skewed, but still managed to see Morris’s immense and shadowy mass hunched over Bailey’s body that jerked and twitched with morbid life. Perhaps it was the gravity of Kirk’s wound and the skewed sense of time, but it seemed to the Halifax warden that Morris took a long time before pulling his head clear of the hole in the dying
were’s
torso. The werewolf paused, jaws dripping and eyes aglow like the tips of hot iron pokers. He took a step and considered the
were
beneath him. The warden snorted in the fallen monster’s face and prolonged the inevitable by revealing the jaws that would take Bailey’s life.

Kirk knew what was coming next, but was distracted when a weight thumped across his shoulder. Carma collapsed at his side, the bashed side of her face like a bloom kissed with a flash of napalm. She nuzzled his shoulder and he shied away in pain. Determined, she whined a protest and planted her body tight to his.

You don’t know anything about wolves, do you?
Janice’s raspy voice asked him.

Kirk’s heart sputtered with dreamy shock at such an unexpected connection, before settling into a deep and powerful rhythm. Carma’s warmth diverted his hurt like a rock splitting mad torrents of white water. He weakly nuzzled Carma’s forehead, and licked at her face’s good parts.

And in doing so, Kirk completely missed the execution of the reborn
were
called Bailey.

Taken from the
Halifax Metrus Journal
, dated November 16, 2015.

The city of Halifax is in mourning from the horrifying killing spree that paralyzed the city and centered all its attention upon the downtown Martin and MacDonald Mall. Halifax-Dartmouth police have confirmed that several sets of human remains have been taken from the Martin and MacDonald Mall, where the city is still reeling in the aftermath from the rampage of a disturbed individual identified only as John. An official number of victims killed in John’s one-man rampage has yet to be determined. Meanwhile, the province’s chief medical examiner is expected to release further details later today regarding the identity and background of the assailant.