High Bloods (34 page)

Confinement and hangover were giving me the jimmy-jams. I saw, before I had to change the angle of my head to relieve pressure, that sweat was beading on her swarthy brow and there were flickering disturbances beneath her skin as if nerves and muscles were firing out of control.

Part of the training to be an ILC Wolfer is, you have to watch a couple of them hair-up. The time it takes can vary considerably, depending on the power of the human organism to resist the profound physiological change.

I was able only to bring my hands up a few inches before the strain on my shoulders became excruciating. I still couldn’t reach with my backward fingers the three small buckles that fastened the belt around my waist.

It was up to Mal, who had begun to slip away from me into a world where I had never been.

“You’re not close enough!” Mal said, with a gnashing of her teeth. “Suck in your gut!”

I did. Mal then was able to hook her fingers onto the stout belt and pull hard, with more than girlish strength. She bent me back until there was a drastic curve to my spine. I was sweating too, and I barely could handle the pain of my injured ribs. Mal cried out in an agony of her own. Then she began to snuffle and chew, grinding her teeth into the tough stitching around the steel loop. I felt her hands on me, desperate, pawing.

When she needed to stop for breath she panted and whimpered.

“Rawson. It hurts—so bad.”

“You are Mallory. Mallory Scarlett. Don’t give in to the wolf! Say your name.”

“Yes. I am—Mallory.”

“Get me loose from this chain. Or we’ll both be dead.”

I heard a faint pleading voice from the dark rear section of the aircraft.

“Rawson?”

The voice sounded like Miles Brenta’s.

“Hang on. I’m coming!”

Behind me Mal growled with renewed effort, tearing now at the heavy belt. The sounds she made chilled me. I couldn’t afford the effort to look at her again. Nor did I want to see her eyes, the cold baleful beauty of wolf light.

Outside I heard the diesel engine of a truck or SUV approaching the plane that I thought might be an old Mitchell bomber from World War II. Most of them had been torched for
scrap decades ago, but a few remained in the hands of collectors. The engine noise surged louder through the wind and hard sift of sand against the vinyl-sealed fuselage, then idled nearby.

And inside the odor of blood, birthing blood and a darker, saturating stain, absorbed my attention. I felt the sharp nudge of her teeth and distended physiognomy as she ravaged the biker belt with some remnant of purpose in her moon-drunk brain. But she was no longer satisfied to rip out stitching. She was devouring leather and still hungry for meat, muscle, bones; then the exposed sweets of liver and kidneys.

“Mal! Get me loose!”

The biker belt parted. I lurched away from her, tripped and fell heavily to the deck. I rolled onto my left side and made a grab for the slithering chain. I caught it with my right hand, pulled it out of the deck ring and rolled again farther away from Mal as she kneeled with her head thrown back, a howl beginning in her throat. Her teeth were bared in the snap, crackle, and pop agony of ongoing trauma and disfigurement.

A door opened in the left side of the plane. I saw a section of low canted wing forward of the door space. More sand than light filtered in. A man stepped off the ladder outside and climbed in with us. He wore gear that was useful in a blow like this: lace-up hunter’s boots, a lightweight orange parka, a skier’s darkly tinted face shield. The hood of the parka was pulled tight around his face. He carried a flashlight. As he ducked inside the wind caught the door and slammed it shut behind him.

The diffuse beam of his three-cell flashlight revealed Mal in the throes of hairing up.

“Jaysus Christ!” he said in shock. I thought I knew the voice.

The sight of the half-wolf girl bathed in his light transfixed him for eight or ten seconds. Mal was still restrained by the biker belt but her powerful shoulders and muscular forearms had easily allowed her to snap in two the plastic restraints.

I was out of range of the light, motionless, waiting. It occurred
to the visitor that I wasn’t sprawled unconscious and drunk where I ought to have been. He flashed the light on me then but I was already whirling to gain momentum. He may have heard the whip of the chain coming but couldn’t move fast enough in those boots to skip completely out of the way. The chain lashed around his right ankle and I pulled hard. He flew up and back, losing his grip on the flashlight, and smacked the back of his head on the deck. The hood of his parka did little to cushion the jolt. He was knocked cold.

al Scarlett writhed on the floor of the barren old airplane
, another repetition of the devolutionary freak-show, the genomic calamity known as Lycanthropy. For her the changeover was excruciatingly slow. Her eyes, wild from the pain and the animal desire to be free of a trap, were fixed on me. The air inside the fuselage was thick, gamey, vile.

“Rawwwwssson.”

Her plea for help was the last intelligible thing she had to say to me. But there was nothing I could do now except try to protect her until her spell broke, which would be many hours, as much as a full day from now.

The unconscious man had a walkie on his belt that crackled with static and someone’s faint inquiry. Others would be coming if he didn’t respond.

I kneeled beside him. I needed a knife. He had one, in a woven leather belt scabbard. He also had a gun, a fourteen-shot Sig Sauer 9-millimeter automatic. Full magazine. Now I liked our chances better.

I was able to pull the knife without cutting myself. No way I could grip it usefully to slice through the tough plastic wrist restraint with the partly serrated, six-inch blade. I needed help.

“Brenta!” I called. “Can you hear me?”

He answered weakly. I got a grip on the flashlight with my other hand and hunched my way on the seat of my pants to the back of the plane.

Miles Brenta’s eyes squinted shut when the light hit his face. He lay on his back on a slant ladder used for deplaning, an arm across his chest. The forearm was badly broken near the wrist, a compound fracture.

Into the AC vein at the elbow of his left arm a needle had been inserted and taped down. A small nearly noiseless transfusion unit had pumped about 250 cc from a bloodpack suspended from a ceiling hook overhead. The bloodpack was labeled with a big red O. Presumably Brenta’s blood type; another type would have killed him quickly. Someone had taken care. I didn’t think it was loving care, or that he’d been given blood to save his life, but to turn the life he had left into yet another revelation of hell on earth.

I let go of the flashlight and awkwardly peeled away the transparent tape, then pulled the needle from the antecubital vein. Blood welled from the small wound. He sucked in a breath.

“Oh Jesus. So much pain. I need a doctor.”

“Brenta, can you use your left hand?”

“Use it… ?”

“Pay attention! My hands are still tied. The other guy is out but he may not be unconscious for long. I have his knife. I want you to cut my hands free.”

“Try,” he said. “Put the knife… in my hand.”

I did the best I could. His fingers were slippery from blood, or nerveless. The blade rattled on the floor.

“Shit,” he said dispiritedly.

Brenta breathed deeply then and there was a commotion in his chest that had him panting desperately. Blood came to his lips. He moved very slowly but closed his hand over the leather hilt of the knife.

“The blood. He did it.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Raoul Ortega. Gave me… bad blood, didn’t he? Made me… one of them.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I damn well did know.

Mal, her transformation nearly completed, howled and jerked at her chain. Maybe it would hold her. A full-grown male werewolf, forget it. I was a gusher of sweat, holding down the reasonable, primitive impulse to save myself and get out of there.

“The girl… my God. Not me! Not me.” Brenta’s eyes appeared delirious; his voice was breaking. The size and color of the swelling on his forehead looked dangerous. “Don’t… let it happen to me, Rawson.” His lips pursed in a childish way. He shook from terror. I was about to lose him to the terror.

“Cut me loose, damn it!”

Brenta moaned hopelessly but reacted with strength, hacking away with the blade, with enough accuracy to avoid slashing either of my wrists. Finally I could pull my hands apart. Brenta sank back on the ladder coughing, blood on his lower lip and chin. He moved the point of the hunting knife to the pulse of the carotid artery beneath his jaw.

“Help me. Do it. Spill it all out of me! I
will not
. Live like
them.
”

Instead I took the knife away from him.

“It’s not a given,” I said. “If you know anything about Lycanthropy you know the virus is unstable in unrefrigerated blood. Maybe you’ll get a break. But now I’ve got things to do if any of us are going to have a chance.”

I went back to the man sprawled on the deck. He was snoring and wheezing through his parted lips. Mal the wolfgirl snapped and lunged at us.

“Calm down, sweetheart,” I said. I undid the drawstrings of the man’s parka, pulled off the protective face shield, revealing by flashlight the face of Cale DeMarco.

I felt as if my personal gods, whoever they might be, were nudging and winking at each other.

His walkie was staticky again. I sat DeMarco up, stripped him of his parka, and laid him back down. After I hogtied him with the chain I put the parka on, then the face shield. It was tinted to cut glare without reducing visual acuity. The Sig Sauer went inside my belt, his wristpac on my wrist. In a flap pocket of the orange parka I found a package of condoms and a container of a popular vasodilator for men. That gave me another reason to dislike Cale DeMarco. He’d come back to the old warplane just before the kickoff of tonight’s
mal de lune
for a grungy hack at a helpless girl, no doubt inspired by the tales of just how eager and passionate young female Lycans could be during their Auras and just before the hairing-up cycle began.

I checked the Lunarium stored in DeMarco’s wristpac. We were less than an hour from peak moon.

Mallory was momentarily quiet, watching me, back on her haunches.

Something of Mal remained, vaguely, in the long stare, the dark muzzle of the distorted face. But the impression was weak now, apparitional, overwhelmed by cold diabolism. I wondered if in her new shape she might suddenly twist and squirm free of the encompassing biker’s belt and be all over me in an instant. She made a low sound in her throat and stared. Stared heartlessly. The knife I had was not silver. Nor were the bullets in the Sig auto. But DeMarco would have had full silvertip loads in the rifle he’d probably left in his vehicle.

I flashed the light on Brenta. He was motionless, suffering. His eyes were open, looking straight up. There was more blood on his lower lip.

“Get me out… of here. I’m dying, Rawson.”

I used up half a minute finding out if the wristpac I had taken from DeMarco was going to work here. But the steel fuselage of the airplane and the strong winds outside blocked access to a satellite.

I slapped DeMarco a couple of times. He groaned but didn’t open his eyes. A hard man to wake up. So I picked up the slop bucket, which was about half full, and let him have all of it in the face.

He sputtered and choked himself awake, gagged.

“Where’s Raoul Ortega?” I said.

“Rawson?” His eyes must have been stung by the urine. He was having trouble making out my face behind the amber shield. He looked anxious. “Why did you tie me up like this?”

“Did you hear the question, DeMarco?”

He struggled with the chains. “You son of a bitch!”

Behind him Mal Wolfgirl growled.

DeMarco twisted his head painfully to get a look at her.

“
Oh—shit.
”

“One more time before you two get cozy. Where’s Ortega?”

“The hangar. With the others. Most of the others.”

“Having themselves a swell party? Yeah, I’ll bet. Just where are we?”

“Old airfield. Ten miles from Barstow. Flight line of old World War Two junk. They get rented out to movie companies.”

“How long have you and Ortega been buddied up?”

“Awhile. I had an opportunity. I took it. Let me out of this, Rawson. Ortega is the one you want anyway.”

“Where are the wolfmakers that were trucked away from XOTECH yesterday?”

DeMarco acquired a stubborn look.

I put the flashlight down, grabbed him off the floor, and dumped him a couple of feet closer to Mal Wolfgirl.

“You two have a good time.”

“You’re not going to leave me with
that?
”

“Why, yes I am, numbnuts. Thanks for asking.”

“Rawson. Rawson!
Please
. We can deal.”

“Who’s outside waiting for you? Diamondbackers?”

“Just Vollmer and McQuarrie.”

Vollmer, I knew, was governor of the Privilege. McQuarrie was in the casino business. They would be seasoned
mal de luners
. I wondered how they were going to like hunting werewolves with sticks and stones.