Coyote (24 page)

As the creatures landed from this long jump, still one perfectly coordinated, unified horde, they paused just a moment on the ground, absolutely still. It wasn’t long—maybe less than a second—but it was the first time they had ever paused. She knew it was significant.

“Oh, shit,” muttered Beast, behind her.

With their next jump, they came.

Leaping high in the air, each creature abandoned its path around the group and instead came in an arc, like a basketball shot aiming straight at the group. There was a still, crystalline moment when, looking up, she saw the creatures silhouetted against the sky at the apex of their leap. For that moment they hung there in the sky, casting the group in shadow, making her feel like there was a wave cresting over them from all sides. Then they came down and all was chaos.

The stillness was broken as people moved and weapons swung. The silence was broken, as her companions yelled and grunted. And the circles were broken—both the larger, predatory circle of the creatures and the smaller, inner circle of frightened humans inside it—as the wave crested and creatures washed over the humans like water over rocks.

At first, all awareness of the others was lost to her, as her world became a blur of crashing, sharp-legged creatures, each reaching to pierce her as they came down. She swung her knife and her hatchet, tearing right through and destroying several as they passed, but there were many. She felt a ripping pain at the back of her head, and another on her temple, moving past her eye and down her cheek. She felt many impacts on her jacket, but nothing was able to penetrate the tough leather and armor.

Then the creatures all landed and sprang back up directly at the members of the group. She felt pain as something pierced the back of her thigh, and turned to swat one of the creatures off her leg, leaving a bloody hole behind it where it had sunk its claw deep into her. At the same time she heard curses and shouts from the others, accompanied by growls and yelps from the dog.

She had lost track of the others as each of them moved, turned, and fought. Their circle was broken. She could not see how they fared—did not have the time to look. She only got impressions out of the corners of her eyes as she fought her own battle. Her companions were blurred, swaying forms in the chaos.

Another creature landed on her chest, and she swept a third and a fourth from her arm and her calf. One stabbed into the thick armor of her jacket in a blow that would have killed her if she hadn’t been protected, or if it had been a few inches higher, into her throat. This was a losing battle. One by one, they would go down to a hundred different wounds. She would not let this happen.

“Zpátky!” she yelled. “Back into the circle! Stand together!”

She moved back, not knowing if the others heard her, or would follow her orders, but soon feeling the shoulders and legs of others behind her. She got a sharp slap in the back on her way into the circle from what she suspected might have been the back end of Beast’s spear, but there was too much else to think about.

Soon they were together, shoulder to shoulder. The dog had been forced into the middle by the legs of the others, and there it spun, fighting, snapping and roaring as it tore into the creatures that ended up in the center of the circle. With the dog protecting her back, and the others guarding her sides, she could concentrate on those creatures that attacked from the front.

Now the fight was more even, but still brutal.

She slashed with her knife and her hatchet, back and forth, swatting anything that came in range. The others all did the same, and the bodies of the creatures began to pile up. Hack, slash, stab, and kick, she tore into everything that came at her. Several times her arms and elbows became tangled with the person next to her, and once she even saw a knife wielded by the Mule’s hand, skittering off the leather of her jacket sleeve. But she would not leave the circle, for if she did they would be on her from all sides again.

Later she would come to understand how combat slows time down—the more intense the fight, the longer it seems to take. But she was new to this, still, and she only knew that the melee seemed to last forever.

The dog was in the center of the circle, spinning, snarling, occasionally bumping against the back of her legs, but taking care of any creatures that leapt over the group and came down in the middle. The Mule was on her right, swinging a bat in one hand and a hunting knife in the other. To her left was the Professor, probably the most poorly armed of any of them for this conflict. He swung his six-inch folding knife in one hand and his other was empty. He had pulled the sleeve of his jacket over that hand and was clubbing the creatures as they came. He didn’t kill many, but he protected her side, as she protected his.

At one point their circle shifted, shrinking, as someone fell to the ground in the middle. For a moment she thought all was lost—that the circle was broken and they were going to be overrun. But and the rest of them tightened their group to fill the gap that had been left behind. She had no time to look and see who had fallen, or to wonder about their fate.

She fought on. The others fought at her side.

And then, like a summer rain shower stopping with a few last, desultory sprinkles, the tide of creatures slowed, and stopped. Suddenly there were only two in front of her, one of which had one leg sheared completely off and could hardly leap on the legs that were left to it. They came at her one at a time. She stopped them. She killed them. After that, there were no more.

Looking out from her place in the circle, still backed in shoulder to shoulder with the others, she heard a few last scrapes and scuffles around the circle, then all was silent.

The creatures still formed a ring around their group, but now it was a ring of the dead and broken. All around the group they lay in twisted, mangled poses. Some were still moving but unable to come back to the fight, and many lay still, dead. She saw none that had retreated, or run off to find easier prey. They had all attacked, and all died, together.

With the threat over, for now, she turned to the others to see how they had fared. They all looked tired, and at first glance she saw fresh wounds on almost all of them, but only one was down. It was Bait who had fallen into the center of the circle, where he still lay now. He was moving, at least—alive. Beast and the Professor were crouching over him, checking on his condition.  He was healthy enough to complain, which he was doing loudly. That must be a good sign.

“Oh, shit, oh shit, oh SHIT it hurts… God damnit, oh, shit…” his muttered profanity continued, sounding surprisingly weak in comparison to his normally energetic voice.

She crouched over him to see the extent of his wounds. Glancing around at the others, she noted they all had their share of punctures and gashes along their limbs and sometimes on their faces, but that the motorcycle jackets they had been wearing had largely protected them. Bait was the only one who had not picked up a jacket at the motorcycle shop, and he had paid the price.

He had cuts all over him. Not just on his arms and legs, but on his torso as well. The hoodie he had been wearing was a tattered thing, with rips all over it and one of its arms completely missing. As the Professor pulled it over Bait’s head she could see that most of the cuts had gone through his t-shirt and into his skin, as well.

They sat him up, and he switched his mutterings from the string of profanity to a narration of his self-examination.  “Look at that one, on my arm. And my leg, oh, shit, look at that gash! And here—here’s another, right in the center of my chest. Shit this one stings…” he went on, gracing the group with a continued litany of his wounds.

None of the wounds were deep, but they were many. She supposed this was the way these creatures hunted. They swarmed their prey, bringing them down with innumerable small wounds. Death by paper-cut.

Bait’s voice was getting weaker as he continued to catalogue his injuries. There was a lot of blood on his clothes and a lot of it on the street where he had been lying. She caught the Professor’s eye and saw the same doubt there that she had in her mind. How much blood could a person lose and still live?

Still kneeling next to him, her thoughts were interrupted when he broke off his narrative, looked her right in the eyes, and said “I tried, man. I tried. I stood up with you as long as I could man, just… couldn’t take any more.”

Uncomfortable with him confessing to her like this, she didn’t know what to say. She considered standing and walking away from it, but now they were all looking at her.

Instead she shrugged, looking back into his eyes. “Each person will do what they can. Everyone has their own limits. We found yours.”

Bait said nothing, just dropped his gaze to the ground. She knew it wasn’t what he had wanted to hear, but who was he to look to her? He wanted her to tell him that it was OK that he gave in, falling back and putting the rest at risk when he broke the circle. He wanted her to make excuses for him, perhaps telling him that he only fell because his sweatshirt gave him no protection.

She stood, looking at the others. They were all looking at her with some degree of reproach—all but Beast, whose attention was on supporting Bait’s efforts to remain sitting up.

What did they want from her? She was not their mother, and had never wanted this role as leader of their group. It had been forced on her, placed on her head by the unspoken agreement of the others. She couldn’t get out of her leadership position, but she would not stoop to comfort them with platitudes. She would not be their mother.

Bait had not fallen unconscious or been knocked to the ground. He had given up. He had been wounded, he had been hurt, but he had given up when he should have stood and fought. She knew this, and by his lowered gaze Bait knew it as well.

“Do not look to her for comfort,” she told the others, looking each in the eye. “Follow her if you wish, and she will fight with you, she will fight for you, but she will never be your friend or your mother.

“She has told you that you all will most likely die. But if you give up, or you surrender,” now she looked to Bait again, “you will die sooner.”

With that she turned away from the group clustered around Bait. There was nothing she could do that others weren’t already doing for him, and she had no more stomach for discussion.

Looking at the rest of the group, it was clear that Bait was not the only one the worse for wear. Each of them showed numerous gashes or punctures on their faces, arms, and legs. The Mule, who was the most heavily armored of them all, seemed to have come off with the least damage. He had one long gash across his forehead, and there was some blood on one thigh, but that was all she could see. The dog was limping on one leg, and she could see some cuts seeping blood on its face, bit it was but standing and moving well enough. Its armored vest had protected it from the worst that the creatures could do. The Professor and Beast each had several cuts on their hands and legs, with Beast sporting two long gashes on his upper arms, where his leather vest hadn’t been any help.

For her own part, she had to keep wiping blood off of her face as it slowly trickled from a wound on top of her head into her eyes, she could feel another long cut going down one cheek, and the back of her neck was sticky with blood as well. But the punctures on her thigh and her calf hurt the most, with the one on her thigh becoming a bone-deep ache that throbbed in time with her heartbeat. That one was deep.

The group needed to move. They needed to be away from these things before any more showed up, and they needed a place to rest and heal—someplace they could stay for several days, at least. Her almost whimsical choice, deciding to bring them up this road that ended at Timberline Lodge, was now more than just a notion. Now she would put it into action. She knew they could find sanctuary at the top of this road. They only had to get there.

But getting there was tough. For more than two hours, the group hiked, limped and stumbled up the road, seeing nothing but the increasingly expansive views as the road rose up the mountain. In time, they started to see the occasional patch of snow in a shady part of the forest. They were getting higher.

The walking was hard. All uphill with no let-up, and each of them tired and wounded. Bait had the hardest time of it. At first Beast worked to keep him distracted, getting him to think up a name for the creatures that had just attacked us (he came up with sea-squirrels, because they were like flying squirrels covered in seaweed). Then Beast worked to take Bait’s mind off the journey by trading stories, then dirty jokes, then, of all things, favorite racial slurs for a while. In time, though, even these amusements failed to distract Bait, and his usual chatter became morose mutterings instead. Soon enough after that, each member of the group was taking their turn putting one of Bait’s arms over their shoulder, where they would limp along together for a time, until the burden became too much and they passed him to another member.

After everyone else in the group had taken their turn, the Professor called her back from her customary position at the front of the group, caught up with her while she waited, and then unceremoniously leaned Bait against her, draping his arm over her shoulder. The Professor was too tired to care if it would make her angry, and she was tired and hurt enough not to have the energy to protest. Even though by the time Bait was draped over her shoulder he was as close to unconscious as a person could be and still shamble forward, the touch of another person, any other person, made her skin crawl. She actually accelerated her pace, forcing the rest of the group to struggle a bit to keep up, wanting to end this experience.