Breeds (30 page)

It was a good thing Alvin only worked with a quarter lung power. He was the type to throw violent gesticulations into the storytelling once he got going.

“Y’didn’t see anything out there?” Leo Tucker asked, the first to recover from that verbal salvo.

“Saw dick all out there. Snowin’ so bad I’d need a map to find me own tackle.”

“Daresay y’need a map at the best of times,” Tom Dawe smirked.

“Hardee fuckin’ har,” Alvin blazed back.

“All right,” Ross said. “Here’s what we do. Phones are still down?”

“They are,” Tom answered.

“Then one of us needs to take your snow machine and drive it outta here.”

“And go where?” Leo Tucker asked. “Bonavista’s twenty klicks away.”

“Well, then, that person goes twenty klicks to the cops. And they come back with guns or whatever. Whatever the hell they’d use in a situation like this.”

“The hell they gonna do with regular guns?”

“Can’t do it,” a dour faced Tom Dawe commented. “Took the track off the machine yesterday. Worn out. Had to replace it. Had Bill helping me.”

“Y’didn’t finish the job?” Ross asked.

Tom shook his head. “Got the track off. Ain’t no tickle to do. So when we finished we got on the beer and watched a hockey game. Never figured we’d be fucking invaded.”

“Montreal and the Oilers?” Roger asked, off topic. “I watched that.”

“Good game,” Tom stated.

“
Fuck
the hockey,” Leo Tucker blurted out with military authority, silencing the men. “You can’t get the track back on?”

“Yeah, we can,” Bill Bryne spoke up in a rusty chuff of a voice, his weathered features swaddled up in a blue scarf and stocking cap. “But it’d take an hour or so to get the new one back on.”

“If that.” Tom straightened. “Everything’s out back in the garage. Not like it’s outside or anything.”

“Putting a track back on would be no trouble for you,” Ross pointed out.

To this Tom smiled slyly. “Me dad used to say, ‘Flattery is like handmade soap––fifty percent is lye.’”

“Well, can y’do it or not?”

“You up for it, Bill?” Tom asked his buddy.

“Sure ting, sure ting.”

“Okay, that’s done. Who’ll drive it?” Leo Tucker put to the group.

“I nominate one of the young guns here,” Tom said, nodding at the two men sitting at the table. “I’m sticking around here. Protect what’s mine. Besides, who here wants to leave their wife behind with them things out there? Besides Phil, that is.”

They grinned at that, except Phil.

“I can’t do it,” Alvin huffed. “Never drove one before. Runnin’ low on oxygen as it is.”

“Hospital’s in Bonavista,” Tucker pointed out.

Alvin looked across the table and Ross saw the fear on his pleading face. The man had been through enough and probably would have to go through more before the night was done. But to travel all the way to Bonavista on an exposed snow machine, in the dead of night and at the height of a storm, was too much to place on his shoulders.

“I’ll do it,” Ross said with finality. “I’ll go.”

Tucker appeared pleased. “Good. That’s settled then. All right, what’s next?”

Tom adjusted the semi-auto under his arm, pulled Bill away from the group, and the pair of them left for the shed. The remainder stood about with their assortment of old weapons, suddenly quiet, while the women chattered and fussed in the living room.

“Load up whatever guns we got,” Ross said. “It don’t kill ‘em, but it hurts ‘em all the same. Maybe enough to keep ‘em away.”

“And man the windows,” Roger Moore added.

“And man the windows.”

They had four shotguns and three rifles amongst them. Four boxes of shells got plopped down on the kitchen table and arthritic fingers dug into them. The air
clicked
and
clacked
with the act of filling magazines and working bolts. Gun sights were lifted to cheeks and checked. And all the while, Ross could only marvel at how these old-timers, all in their twilight years, set about preparing for war with such a grim determination that he didn’t possess.

Cocking a single eyebrow, Leo Tucker caught him staring as he put his cheek to check a gun sight.

“Y’think we are? Bunch a pussies?”

Kirk cracked open his eyes and saw broken claws littering the carpet, gleaming like snapped knives. They had been in him and his body had pushed the things out during the healing process. Still in werewolf form, he growled and pushed himself up on all four paws. He sniffed the air, thankful that his nose had healed. Bodies of slaughtered dogs surrounded him. One was missing both legs, and most of its lower body. Another had its belly dug out and Kirk turned away from it before seeing any more. At one point, during the feeding, he’d stopped thinking and had only consumed until passing out, whereupon his body broke down what it needed for repairs.

His shoulders and haunches ached, the bones shifting and grinding together like ill-fitting steel pieces without grease, but he was alive and standing.

The dogs around him had been torn apart. Only now could he fully appreciate the destruction wrought upon their forms.

He left the carnage upstairs, willing his still healing body to work. The wind pulled at the house, making it creak like a merchant ship’s rigging. Kirk padded to the destroyed front door, sniffed at the air, and took a moment to reorient himself. His nose led him outside, where the storm slammed into him in a shock of freezing snow. He hunkered down and sniffed around the house, searching for the road. The cliffside. Snow pelted him, turning his fur white. The road, he soon found, ran to the southwest in a wavering line. The drifts, smoking around him with each step, rose to his underbelly.

The barest of scents pulled him through the storm, to a ravaged corpse almost buried in the snow. A man left to freeze, gutted and turned inside out like a slab of fish. A smashed doorway yawned open in the swirling night, and Kirk padded into the house. The breeds had violated the home, spoiling it with their stink, with their spoils. A woman lay on her back, sliced into runny bits. Both arms twisted out of her sockets. Kirk didn’t sense the enemy in the house, so he turned about and stopped at the doorway. Another scent caught his attention and he recognized it as Ross’s. Kirk hoped the man was still alive.

Trotting back into the storm, the trail led to a guardrail. Kirk inspected it for a moment, hearing the awesome crash of surf below, pummeling the shoreline with watery slaps.

He plodded a few steps more and halted, baring teeth in a hiss of steam.

There, just ahead and on its knees, was a man.

Kirk sniffed.
Not
a man. Another breed. Unmoving in the snow. Growling, Kirk crept forward. The breed lifted its hairy head and whined. Fear filled its single blackened eye, the other one destroyed, puzzling the warden. The creature appeared to have been run over by a machine. Half of its ribcage had been crushed inward in a gruesome cavity. Blood and huge, dark splotches of frostbite mottled its skin. It knelt, leaning into the shoulder of the guardrail, and Kirk wondered if the thing had frozen onto the metal.

The breed whimpered again, cold beyond cold, and fixed the werewolf with a suffering gaze.

Kirk stepped in close and nuzzled the man-thing, growled in its face, but the breed didn’t respond. The warden studied the creature’s face, the wounds on its naked body.

This one, shivering, cuddled up like a child, was different.

Who knew what dark magic Borland had practiced to bring about this change? Who knew the full, warping effect upon its helpless test subjects? Here, in the depths of the storm and dark, Kirk sensed that this… dog… was
aware
of what it had become. Knew it wasn’t natural. It was still a dog, despite its shape, retaining all of its intellect, its sense of noble self, and its personality. It never asked for any of this, yet here it was, shivering to the bone, stricken and alone. Forever changed.

For the worst.

And because of that, Kirk knew what had to be done, no matter how much he dreaded it. No matter how much he wished things could have been different for a madman’s victim. The dog looked at him then, its one good eye simmering an understanding.

Pity welled up inside Kirk.

I am not a monster. I am NOT…

Weakened beyond thought, feeling the elemental burn deep in its hairless flesh, the man-thing, once known as Maximilian, watched through narrowed eyes as the werewolf nuzzled his bare cheek and did the absolute last thing the German Shepherd expected.

It licked him.

The wonderful, warming heat from that intimate contact closed Max’s eyes, in gratitude, squeezing the last few drops of unfrozen water from them which ran down his cheeks. Only as long as it took for the wolf to lick them away.

Tender enough that the dog actually
smiled
, weakly, unaware of its facial muscles actually forming it––simply reacting to the contact it so desperately needed.

Then the kisses were over, the heat lingering, dissipating.

Max no longer whimpered.

And Kirk ripped out his throat in a sudden, glittering arc.

“Y’sure them things are out there?” Phil Crout asked, sounding a little too eager. He hunched over, peering out a window with one corner curtained with snow, a hunting rifle at the ready. Tom Dawe’s kitchen and its many windows faced a junction of the cliffside road and the lane heading up over the hill. Visibility remained poor as the blizzard continued, but every now and again, the wind dropped out just long enough to see a short distance.

“They’re out there,” Ross answered, still seeing the corpses of the Mosebys in his head. Remembering the deaths of the Cooks. “Guaranteed.”

“You see for shit anyway, Phil,” seventy-five-year-old Chris Hallet muttered, the newest addition to the company after Ross fetched him and his wife Sophie from their nearby house.

“No need for that, Chris,” Leo Tucker admonished. “No need.”

“Didn’t mean it,” Chris muttered. “Phil knows that.”

“He’s been giving me shit for most of me life,” Phil said, still scouring the night. “Course, it’s only shit he can’t say in front of his missus.”

That lifted the tension amongst the men in the kitchen. The wives remained in the living room, tending to the revived Flossie Jones. A wood stove pushed heat throughout the house. The first words out of Flossie’s mouth concerned the whereabouts of her German Shepherd, Maximilian, to which the women had no answer.

The back door opened, allowing the outside temperatures to suck out the warmth. A few seconds later Leo Tucker trudged into the kitchen, not bothering to kick off snow and appearing as if he’d just dug himself out of an avalanche.

“Tom’s got the track back on,” he reported, making Ross exchange looks with Alvin, who had clothed himself with a few items from Tom’s wardrobe that just fit.

They hurried to the shed.

Brutus woke on his comfortable throne and considered the dark forms in the living room. A female had climbed up on the couch with him, and he’d welcomed her body heat as currents of air swept through the house, coming from the ruined entryway. She’d also pulled a thick blanket over them. The temperature inside had dropped significantly. Now, however, after their brief rest, his own primal urges brought him to his feet. A breed slept under the carpet, sheltered from the cold, and Brutus stepped on the beast, getting a shocked yelp. He shouted at the rest of the sleeping pack, rousing them to stretches and complaints of the cold.

Snarling and flourishing claws, Brutus marched to the picture window and shattered the glass with both forearms. The wind buffeted his bare flesh, summoning shivers, but he sensed that fresh meat was close.

He intended to find it.

Rising out of the blizzard’s might, hunched over and unflinching, Kirk stalked the house just a few leaps away. He’d gotten a little lost in the depths of the storm, wasting time in between the ravaged houses he did find, until coming upon the latest. The front door lay smashed open and the stink of the breed hung off it with malefic menace. But the real clue was the throaty yelling from within.

Kirk sniffed and crept downwind of the open door, head hanging low between his shoulders. From somewhere inside, the sound of breaking glass perked his ears.

Baring his canines, Kirk slunk inside, intending to end the monsters.

Or die in the attempt.

A baleful hue of light hung over the gathered snow, emanating from the garage with its doors thrown wide. All manner of handyman equipment hung from peg walls or were piled up on workbenches, giving the interior the cluttered feel of a flight hangar. The single headlight of the snowmobile blazed a cone across trampled white. Tom stood over the machine, one leg on its seat, revving the engine and listening. Ross and Alvin trudged over a raised wooden walkway that led to a side door in the garage. The snowmobile’s rear, resting on top of some cement blocks, greeted them upon entering.

Tom turned around, stepped away from the machine, and pointed at it with a smirk. “All done and ready to haul ass.”

“Didn’t take you too long,” Ross said.

Tom shrugged, a motion that seemed incredibly weary. “Yeah, well, the rest is all yours. Lift the ass off the blocks there and put her on the ground. You can drive her right outta here.”

Ross did just that, lifting with his legs and dropping the weight with a thud. It was an Arctic Cat model, sleek and painted red that shined under the garage’s lights. A Plexiglas windshield would take the edge off any gusts. Thick hand muffs covered the handlebars for greater protection against frostbite. It was a low-riding slingshot, capable of reaching well over a hundred kilometers an hour, weighing nearly a hundred and fifty kilograms. Story had it that Tom bought the racer off a dealer friend in Clarenville.

“She’s too much woman for ya, Tommy b’y,” Alvin said, huffing as if he’d just run a marathon.

“Go fuck yerself.” Then to Ross, “You still gonna head out? Been thinkin’––probably better to stay in the house and wait them out. Phones be up in the morning. If they come, we fight.”