Wolf Running (8 page)

She lunged forward, leading with her shoulder. The impact sent the Rev stumbling backwards a few feet. Nowen turned and shoved through the door and then leaned back on it, forcing it closed. She had to move, now - the door wouldn’t keep the Rev from following her. She ran toward the police car, glancing south down the street as she did. And froze.

Drawn by the noise she had made, or the moans from the dead man, or perhaps some other sense entirely, the mass of Revs was looking at her. A great moaning came from them, an unearthly noise that rose and fell like an ocean wave. They began to move toward her, the sight of fresh prey increasing their shuffling pace to almost a jog.

From behind her Nowen heard more moans, the northern group responding to the call to hunt. She spared a glance back at the station in time to see the grey-skinned man fall against the door, pushing it open.
Damn. Damn!
One option left - get back to the hospital.

She ran, a full-out sprint. The Revs answered her challenge with another ululation, hungry in its intent. Reaching the green station wagon that blocked the alley she threw the blue pack over the top of the car and then moved to the hood and pulled herself up. Her palms were sweaty and she slipped on the hot metal, falling back to the street. The undead were moaning constantly now, and she could hear similar sounds coming from further away as other Revs picked up the call.

Nowen hoisted herself up on the hood again and then up to the roof. She looked behind her. The Revs had reached her, a group a sixty or more strong, and as she looked down on them she could see that Flux had spared no one. From the very young to the very old, from black to white and every color in between, the hungry mob were united in their desire to reach her. Bloody hands grasped for purchase on the slippery metal side of the car. Their jaundiced eyes were locked on her, tracking her every movement, and their jaws chewed the air in anticipation.

Nowen turned her back on the crowd and jumped down to the alley. The station wagon was proving to be an adequate block, but she wasn’t going to hang around to find out how long it would last. She scooped up the blue backpack and ran toward the hospital.

At the edge of the parking lot she looked up to see the open window from which she had climbed down earlier. Safety was so close now. But there was movement very near in the parking lot, and as she watched four Revs came from behind the painters’ van and staggered toward her.

Nowen tensed, every muscle and tendon drawing tight as a bow string. Strange thoughts flashed through her head, quicksilver and wild. These creatures had invaded her territory. They were a danger to her den, and they must be driven off or killed. The pack dropped unnoticed from her hand as she leaned forward, a deep feral noise rising from her chest and thrumming through her throat. They moved toward each other, the living and the undead.

She met them in a flurry of movement, the metal pipe rising and falling to smash against skulls and arms and ribs. There was a feeling that she stood outside her body and watched it do these things of its own accord. She moved like a dervish, cracking a skull so the brains spilled through, then leaping aside to avoid a bite before swinging around to deliver a crippling blow to another Rev’s legs. A face rose up before her, grey-lipped mouth yawning wide, and she slammed the pipe against the slack jaw. Teeth and blood exploded from the Rev’s mouth. She grabbed the back of its head, her fingers sinking into a greasy tangle of hair, and drove the pipe into a yellow eye. She could feel the bone of the eye socket shatter, and the Rev fell back in a lifeless heap. And then it was over and she stood panting in a pile of broken-limbed bodies, wreathed in the foul smell of the undead.

Nowen raised her shaking hands before her eyes. They were coated to the wrist in blood and dead flesh. She checked the window again - it was still open and still empty. She moved to the shade of the painter’s van and pulled a bottle of water from the pink backpack. Quickly she cleaned her hands and then ran her wet hands over her face and through her short hair. There was blood on her shoes and splattered across her clothes, but there was nothing she could do about that. She picked up her packs, then paused and looked at the interior of the van. A ladder caught her eye, and she pulled it out.

At the base of the hospital wall she propped the ladder up and saw with a kind of weary joy that it reached the top of the tier. She climbed up with her packs, pulled the ladder up behind her, and did it all over again until there was only one more floor to go.

“Hey!”

Nowen looked up, squinting against the overhead sun. Jamie was leaning out the window, smiling and waving excitedly. “You’re back!”

Nowen raised her hand in return and felt on her face, for the first time since she woke up in her hospital room, a smile.

Nowen lay on the cool sheets of her bed that night. She and Jamie had splurged a little on the food and spent some of their precious water on sponge baths. Jamie told her that she had watched Nowen’s journey until she got into the station. Then Dr. Westrick had called with questions about the pregnant woman, and Jamie had been stuck on the phone for half an hour. By the time she had returned to the window Nowen was almost back home.

Across the room Jamie snored lightly from her own bed. Nowen looked up at the dark ceiling and replayed the fight in the parking lot over in her head. She could have easily avoided the Revs, she knew. They were slow and the cars provided obstacles to their movement. And yet, she hadn’t. A primal urge to protect her
den?
home had taken over everything in that moment. She had relished the violence of her actions, the speed with which she moved and delivered death, had exulted in the slaying of the intruders.

The words were so much stronger now. They beat against the locked door of her memory, and she wondered what crouched in the shadows behind that door.

Who am I?

Now

Nowen paused at the top of the snow dune and raised her goggles, taking in the view. She stood atop a massive drift that had built up around a wrecked eighteen-wheeler. Her perch was at the edge of a large frozen sea of a parking lot. Wind-sculpted waves of snow rippled around other abandoned vehicles and lapped against the walls of the big-box store that stood like a lonely island below. Overhead the sun rode high in the cloudless sky.

She stood in the silence, closed her eyes, and breathed deep. For once the wind wasn’t blowing, and for once she wished it was. The wind could carry sounds and smells to her, warning of potential dangers or unseen hazards. She exhaled and breathed deeply again, tasting the purity of snow and the freshness of meltwater. The snap of an icicle breaking free somewhere came to her ears. She opened her eyes, re-adjusted the goggles, and shoved off with her ski poles, leaping the short distance to the ground.

Nowen sped over the snow-pack, angling for the front of the building. Near the entrance she kicked out of the skis, standing them on end next to a light pole. She approached the sliding doors, where shattered glass gleamed in the entrance. When she had come here two days ago, only one of the doors had been broken. She had smashed the other door and all the windows she could reach, letting the glacial cold in. She stepped through the door, pulling a flashlight from her parka and switching it on. The light beam played over empty registers and merchandise displays. In an open case near the front, long-dead flowers shimmered with frost. The silence inside was more absolute than the silence outside, and the crunch of her snow-covered boots was loud and intrusive.

Nowen moved through the store, studying the department signs hanging from the ceiling until she saw the one she wanted. She turned down an aisle of fabric bolts, stepping over the body of a large woman sprawled across the floor. The Rev twitched at her passing and tried to rise, but the intense cold had slowed the obese woman almost to a standstill, and Nowen didn’t even slow down. She saw other bodies as she walked. Some were truly dead, gnawed bones rising from their shredded and torn flesh. More were undead, but in the grip of winter they were as easily dismissed as their former prey.

Nowen reached her target, the far back corner of the store devoted to camping and hunting. A glass-faced gun display drew her attention, and she looked at the rifles and shotguns and pistols gleaming coldly in the beam of her flashlight for a moment before turning away.

She found an empty shopping cart nearby, and dragged it behind her as she searched the aisles for what she needed. She looked over the sleeping bags before deciding on a sleek black one that advertised that it would keep the occupant warm to thirty degrees below zero. She tossed it into the cart, where it was shortly joined by a multi-tool, several packages of fire-starters, and a hunting knife that came with a handy sheath and belt. She traded her flashlight for the convenience of a head-lamp and threw a couple of spares into the cart, then looked over her cache. Combined with what she had already scavenged from the few houses near her own, she felt satisfied that she was as prepared as she was going to be.

Nowen was almost to the front of the store when a sign pointing the way to the garden department caught her eye. Flux had struck just before the beginning of summer, and the gardening supplies were still on display, waiting for buyers that would never come. On a peg-board wall, next to rakes and hedge clippers, she found a long-handled axe. When she swung it the blade cleaved the air with a low whistle. She hefted it to her shoulder and headed back to her cart.

The sleeping bag went on her back, tied just above the waist. She strapped the knife belt around her hips and put the rest of her supplies in a canvas tote-bag. She slipped the axe handle between the belt and her jeans, grabbed the bag, and left the quiet building.

A light breeze had sprung up, bringing with it a hint of colder air. Nowen looked to the west, where a bank of grey clouds was building up along the Snowy Range. She turned her back on the approaching storm and headed for home.

Chapter Eight

Then

Nowen dreamed.

She is running through a forest. It is twilight. The trees are black strokes of ink against the setting sun. They tower above her, rising so high they disappear into the darkening sky. The forest floor unravels beneath her. Pine needles and dead leaves, small mushrooms as pale as milk, tiny skittering things that flee from her as she flees from something else. A shadow is chasing her, something with glowing eyes and sharp teeth, and it is waiting only for the fall of true night to reveal itself. The dying sun sinks below the horizon. In the totality of her despair she wheels around to face that which is following her and sees-

Nowen shot up in bed. Cold sweat beaded her forehead and her heart trip-hammered in her chest so hard her scrub top trembled. She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them. The utter, mindless fear she had experienced in her dream was frightening in and of itself. She breathed slowly, trying to slow her heartbeat, trying to wash the remnants of the run through the forest from her mind.

The absence of snoring alerted her to the fact that she was alone in the dark room. A shaft of moonlight fell on Jamie’s empty bed and rumpled sheets. Nowen swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood up. She pulled on a pair of scrub bottoms and went looking for her companion.

She found Jamie at the nurses’ station, talking on the phone. The harsh overhead lights bleached the young woman’s face of color as she yawned widely. Nowen caught her eye questioningly and Jamie mouthed “Dr. Westrick” as she hit the speaker button and placed the handset in its cradle.

“-and I’m pleased to say that both mother and child are doing fine.” The rich and self-satisfied voice rolled out from the small speaker. “My experience working under stressful conditions in the operating room enabled me to take control of this situation. Under my guidance the delivery went smoothly. Of course, the nurses provided valuable assistance.” Jamie rolled her eyes at this, then leaned over to Nowen and whispered “Why, the mother hardly needed to be there at all!”

Nowen turned away to stifle her laugh as Jamie said “Wow, that’s some good news, Dr. Westrick. And I’m pleased to tell you that our first supply run went really well. We’ll be sending down-

“Just a moment, please.” The doctor interjected, concern evident in his voice. “Can’t you quiet him?” This seemed directed at someone near the doctor. “Well, I think it might be good idea if we did. Now!”

Jamie looked quizzically at Nowen. “Dr. Westrick, is something wrong?”

“The infant is crying, and it’s rather loud. The infected people outside the delivery ward are attracted to the noise. There’s quite a few of them at the main door, now. No, you fool, move everyone back!” The doctor’s voice faded slightly as he pulled away from the phone to yell at someone. The sound of a baby’s cry came faintly through the speaker. “Jamie?” Dr. Westrick’s tone had shifted from concern into genuine worry.

Jamie leaned over the phone as if she could crawl through the wires down to the second floor. “Yes, I’m here! What is it?”

“We’re moving everyone as far from the entrance door as we can, but it looks as if every infected person on this floor is here. We’re hoping that if they don’t see or hear us they will disperse.” There was a pause, and then the doctor continued. “The worry now is that they will get in somehow.”

“Like through the glass or something? ‘Cause I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem. We haven’t seen the Revs exhibit any kind of advanced thinking. It’s not likely that they’ll try to break the glass by throwing things at it.”

“Could their combined weight break the glass?” Nowen said.

Jamie shot her a withering look as Dr. Westrick gasped. “No, no, don’t freak-I mean, don’t worry. It’s all, like, safety glass down there. And as for any other way they could get in....the doors can only be opened from outside by swiping the hospital ID across the sensor pad. So unless one of the Revs has one, you should be ok.”