Moonbane

“How can we get down without them seeing us?” Wyatt asked.

“We’re going to run like hell,” Cowboy replied humorlessly.

“How—” Wyatt began, but Cowboy cut him off by standing up.

“If we wait any longer,” he said, staring into the rising Moon, “they’re going to charge and we’ll get lost in the middle of it. If we do that we’ll have both the wolves and Kramer trying to kill us.” He looked hard at Wyatt. “Sorry, but you stay between us, Wyatt. No heroics. They need you more in there than the rest of us put together.”

Wyatt began to protest.

“Just do it,” Pettis growled.

Wyatt hesitated, then said, “All right.”

“Let’s go.”

We started at a soft trot, pounding down the soft slope in front of us, and worked up to a full-blown run as we hit the valley floor. There was something exhilarating and primal about it: an all-out race in the night with the cool desert air blowing across the face; adrenaline, despite a whole day of our walking in the heat, pumping through the entire system. This is the way racehorses must feel, or lions in full hunt, as the entire force of creation shoots through the body in this, the most vital moment of existence. This is what men in battle must feel when there is no choice and no turning back.

I found myself screaming, amid the horrid howls of the wolves, screaming not in fright but in self- declaration—“I am me! I am alive!”—and I turned my head to see my companions running as fast and as recklessly beside me, their open mouths betraying their own abandon. Man, too, is an animal; perhaps at that moment we were closer to our enemy than at any other.

We broke through the line of wolves at a dead run as they concentrated on the Moon and the hated base before them. Kicking pyramids of bones aside as we ran, we were twenty yards past them before there was any reaction.

Ahead of us, a mere hundred and fifty yards away, I heard faint cries that I assumed were for our benefit.

They were not.

Behind us, the wolves had charged.

From a vehicle, I had seen the hypnotizing grace of the wolf in flight, but from the ground, it was terrifying in a new way. I felt what the zebra or gazelle must feel when chased by the lion. I have already mentioned the lion. It is a most terrible machine to watch. Seemingly lazy, sleeping twenty hours of the day, it is, when hunting or angered, God’s most fearful creature. It did not garner its title as King of the Beasts through whimsy. Its body in flight is a smooth, sleek piston flow of muscle crowned with the cool eyes and visage of an emotionless killer.

Subtract from the lion his sloth, his easily satisfied gluttony, his flaccid temper unless aroused, and you understand the werewolf completely.

“Run, damnit, run!” Cowboy shouted. He fired his Uzi wildly into the air and then behind. We fought to keep Wyatt between us. The fence grew closer, and we began to angle over toward the front gate.

“Run! Run!”

A hundred yards to go.

The front line of wolves, burning eyes like lamps from hell, tongues hanging from the sides of open mouths that glowed with long white teeth, closed to within ten yards of us. Pettis whirled, spraying bullets into the nearest, holding their progress up as those around the wounded fell upon them.

“Goddamnit, run!”

Fifty yards. The gate grew near; I could make out figures, some of them pointing at us. A spotlight flared on, lighting our distance, illuminating the dented but still intact sign that said kramer air force base. Now the shouts from within the base were spurring us on.

The wolves closed on us. One, four legs fluid, beautiful in balletic motion, drew up beside me. His lamp eyes locked onto mine, rear legs tightened for his spring—

The night was filled with the mad wails of wolves, and something else.

The wolf beside me, in mid-leap, was cut neatly in half by a searing green pencil beam of light. I could not see momentarily because of its brilliance. I smelled the sizzle of burned flesh, a barbeque smell. The green light flashed again; three wolves that had been cutting the distance between us instantly went down.

All around us, the night was severed by pencils of green brilliance. They fired and were gone, leaving death behind. I heard the boom of rockets and mortars, the popping crack of rifles. Kramer Air Force Base erupted like a Fourth of July celebration. Behind us, the howls of hate and lust turned to wails of pain.

Through all the noise, someone shouted at me through the gate. I was close enough now to see his waving arms and hear him shouting, “Come on! Come on!” I glanced behind me. I had outdistanced the others by ten yards. As Cowboy stopped to pick off any wolves that strayed too close, Amy and Wyatt closed the distance between us. The night roared; overhead, rockets screamed out of the base into the line of beasts; the dull thump-thump of mortar launchings mingled with the snap of rifles and machine guns.

Over and through it all, flitting darts of deadly green light were emitted from thin, long cannons which, I now saw, were emplaced every forty or fifty feet along the inside perimeter of the base.

“Move it!” the man behind the gate shouted. He wore a torn and dirty NASA technician’s uniform. He pulled the gate open for our entrance.

Pettis fired wildly into the air. Amy threw her empty handgun to the ground and ran on. Wyatt, between the two of them, ran desperately, gulping for air, a man at the end of his race straining for the finish line.

Through tears of exhaustion and relief I saw the open gate; saw the encouraging, dirty face of the NASA technician; saw his hand reaching out for me—and, as my own hand stretched out for his saving hold, I saw out of the corner of my eye a wolf tearing wildly along the fence toward me, legs pushing it like a jet over the ground and then into the air—

The world exploded in color and light. Green streaks of flame, three at once, intersected just above the wolf’s head, outlining it in lime fire. Its leap continued. As it raised its scythe-like claws I saw the badly healed wound in its shoulder and recognized the deformed limb of the wolf I had seen on the road twice since I had left my home. It angled its twisted front limb to slash at me, and I saw the single missing claw in its ravaged paw. Full recognition bloomed.

“Richie!” I cried.

A cannon boomed. I heard the staccato crack of Cowboy’s Uzi—and then my son fell upon me, his eyes madly yellow, his mouth open and hungry. And then I screamed his name again, and knew no more.

CHAPTER 23

The Waking

There were many voices. Somewhere far off, I heard laughter.

Laughter. More than anything, that spurred me to life, made me swim up from the formless dreams, the nightmares, the snippets of false existence that had been my life for—how long? I remembered wolf faces in my dreams, snapping at me, laughing a different kind of laughter, my torn flesh sprouting wild hair even as it was ripped living from my body.

I opened my eyes. There was laughter, and faces around me, but they were human faces, Wyatt and Amy among them, and a man in a white coat who looked like a doctor, and a man in a NASA jumpsuit with a huge mustache and the bluest, steadiest eyes I have ever seen. I knew that face from television commercials, magazine ads, from the stereo in my living room days ago, telling me to come to Kramer Air Force Base, saving my life. I knew that face. Jimmy Rogers.

“Jeez, he ain’t one of ‘em after all,” Rogers said, spitting tobacco juice. I heard it hit the floor somewhere.

“Good to see you, Jase,” Wyatt Proctor said, helping me sit up.

I tried to stay but felt dizzy and eased back down again.

“You’ll feel fine in a little while,” the doctor said.

“What happened to me?”