They were circling the shack now. Moving with quiet footfalls. He could hear them scratching at the shack. But what he heard then made no sense: growling. A low, throaty, bestial growling. No man made sounds like that. Maybe they had brought a dog. He could hear it sniffing, pressing its nose up against the boards, growling low and snorting like a bull.
Runyon aimed the. 38 at the door.
The first one in was a dead man.
The door began to rattle, to shake as someone pulled at it. The boards were shuddering, groaning beneath great force. Nails began popping free. The entire shack was in motion now, swaying back and forth as something out there clawed and tore at it. It wasn't built for such stress. The roof was collapsing, snow raining down as planks fell all around Runyon.
The lantern went out as it was engulfed in snow.
With something like a scream in his throat, Runyon began kicking at the rear of the shack, knocking boards free. Just as he pulled a few planks clear and squeezed his bulk through, the door was shattered to kindling.
Runyon plowed through the drifts, his ears reverberating with the deafening howls of the thing that could not be a man. Runyon ran through the swirling, blowing snow, tripping, falling, dragging himself forward. Behind him, there was an awful low evil growling and something that might have been teeth gnashing together.
He turned and fired twice at a blurry, dark shape.
A huge shape.
He could smell the beast now. It came on with a stink of decay, a reek of rotting meat and fresh blood.
Runyon screamed now, a high insane screech that broke apart in the wind.
And something answered with a barking wail.
Down in the snow, breath rasping in his lungs, fingers frozen stiffly on the butt of the Colt, Runyon saw a great black form leaping at him. Much too large to be a man. A giant. Runyon fired four more bullets and the gun was knocked from his hand.
But the wetness.
It steamed from his wrist.
In the numbing cold he hadn't even felt it, but now he saw. The thing had sheared off his hand at the wrist. And as these thoughts reeled in his head with a quiet madness, the black nebulous shape attacked again.
Runyon saw leering red eyes the size of baseballs.
Smelled hot and foul breath like a carcass left to boil in the sun.
And then his belly was slashed open from crotch to throat and he knew only pain and dying.
Runyon was the first. But not the last.
8
By dawn, the storm had abated.
The wind was still cool and crisp, but only a few flakes of snow drifted from the clear, icy sky. In the Union Pacific Railroad yards in Wolf Creek, it was business as usual. Just before nine a flagman discovered the wreck of the signal shack. Searching around out back, he saw a single blood-encrusted hand jutting up from a snowdrift.
Within the hour, the law was there.
'What you make of it, Doc?' Sheriff Lauters asked. He was rubbing his gloved hands together, anxious to get this done with.
Dr. Perry merely shook his head. His hair was white as the snow, his drooping mustache just touched by a few strands of steel gray. He was a thin, slight man with a bad back. As he crouched by the mutilated body of Abe Runyon, you could see this. His face was screwed tight into a perpetual mask of discomfort. 'I don't know, Bill. I just don't know.'
'Some kind of animal,' the sheriff said. 'No man could do this. Maybe a big grizz.'
Perry shook his head, wincing. 'No.' Pause. 'No grizzly did this. These bite marks aren't from any bear. None that I've ever come across.' He said this with conviction. 'I've patched together and buried a lot of men in the mountains after they ran afoul of a hungry grizz. No bear did this.'
Lauters looked angry, his pale, bloated face hooking up in a scowl. 'Then what for the love of God?' This whole thing smacked of trouble and the sheriff did not like trouble. 'Dammit, Doc, I need answers. If there's something on the prowl killing folks, I gotta know. I gotta know what I'm hunting.'
'Well it's no bear,' Perry said stiffly, staring at the remains.
Abe Runyon was missing his left leg, right hand, and left arm. They hadn't been cut as with an ax or saw, but ripped free. His face had been chewed off, his throat torn out. There was blood everywhere, crystallized in the snow. His body cavity had been hollowed out, the internals nowhere to be found. There was no doubt in either man's mind-Abe Runyon had been devoured, he'd been killed for food.
With Lauters' help, Perry flipped the frozen, stiffened body over. The flannel shirt Runyon had worn beneath his coveralls was shredded. Perry pushed aside a few ragged flaps of it, exposing Runyon's back. There were jagged claw marks extending from his left shoulder blade to his buttocks.
'See this?' Perry said.
He took a pencil from his bag and examined the wound. There were four separate claw ruts here, each ripped into the flesh a good two inches at their deepest point. On the back of the neck there were puncture wounds that Perry knew were teeth marks. They were bigger around then the width of the pencil, and just about as deep.
'No bear has a mouth like that,' Perry told the sheriff. 'The spacing and arrangement of these teeth are like nothing I've ever come across.'
'Shit, Doc,' Lauters spat. 'Work with me here. Dogs? Wolves? A cougar? Give me something.'
Perry shrugged. 'No wolf did this. No dog. Not a cat. You know how big this… predator must have been? Jesus.' He shook his head, not liking any of it. 'Hell, you knew Abe. He wasn't afraid of man nor beast. If it was wolves, they'd have stripped him clean. And he got off five shots from his. 38, so where are the dead ones?'
'Maybe he missed,' Lauters suggested.
'He was a crack shot and you know it.' Perry stood up stiffly with Lauter's help. 'Well, I'll tell you, Bill. No bear did that, no way. Those teeth marks are incredible. The punctures are sunk in four, five inches easy.' He looked concerned. 'I don't know of anything in these parts that could do this. And I hope to God I never meet it in the flesh.'
'You saying we got us a new type of animal?'
Perry just shrugged, refused to speculate.
Lauters spat a stream of tobacco juice into the snow and looked up towards the mountains. He had a nasty feeling things were about to go bad in Wolf Creek.
9
When Joseph Longtree rode into the quadrangle of Fort Phil Kearny, the first thing he saw were bodies. Eight bodies laid out on the hardpacked snow and covered with tarps that fluttered and snapped in the wind. They were all cavalry troopers. Either wasted by disease or bullets. Both were quite common in the Wyoming Territory. He brought his horse to a halt before the bodies and followed a trooper to the livery.
Longtree had been to the fort before. But like all forts on the frontier, its command roster was constantly changing. During the height of the Sioux War of '76, this was especially true. Troopers were dying left and right. And now, two years later, that hadn't changed.
His horse stabled, Longtree made his way to the larger of the blockhouses, knowing it contained the command element of the fort. It was warm inside. A great stone hearth was filled with blazing logs. A few desks were scattered about, manned by tired-looking officers, their uniforms haggard and worn from a brilliant blue to a drab indigo. They watched him with red-rimmed eyes.
