Any Given Doomsday Page 9

  “You’re not that lame.”

  “Who said it would be an accident?”

  He choked on a laugh as I began to smile. At least we were happy when the werewolves found us.

  The alley was dark, but the horizon behind the rangy beasts had gone gray with approaching dawn, throwing them into stark silhouette. There was something off about those silhouettes. They almost looked human, as if men, and a few women too, crept on all fours, backs hunched, heads swaying to and fro as they caught the scent of prey. The wolves also seemed much bigger than the average wolf. Not that I’d ever seen any outside the Milwaukee County Zoo.

  Other than their size and strangely humanoid shadows, they resembled wolves. I couldn’t determine the shade of their coats in this light, but their eyes glowed yellow.

  “Don’t stop shooting until they’re all dead,” Jimmy said.

  “What if—?” I began but never finished.

  Didn’t need to, because my question What if they don’t die? was answered as the first silver bullet plowed into the nearest wolf, and it exploded outward, coating the animals on either side of it with ashes. Their snarls ended mid-chorus as we sprayed the pack with ammo.

  Surrounded as we were on both sides with concrete and stone, the sound of gunfire was deafening. Above us the sky continued to lighten as we finished the job.

  Sudden silence descended. In front of us lay only ash. which stirred and lifted onto the morning breeze.

  “Cleanups are a cinch,” 1 said in my best fifties-housewife voice.

  Jimmy ignored me, moving down the alley, skirting the tiny piles of disintegrated werewolves to peek around the corner. I tensed, expecting him to start shooting again, but he glanced back, shook his head.

  The eerie stillness I’d marked upon entering Hard-eyville continued Shouldn’t the townspeople have been alerted by the gunfire? Shouldn’t they be spilling into the streets? At the least, calling out to one another or us?

  “The werewolves will return to human form at sunrise,” Jimmy said, staring out at the empty town.

  I lifted my gaze to the slice of sky between the two buildings. It had turned blue-gray.

  “Let’s get going,” he continued. “It’s much easier to determine a werewolf in wolf form than human.”

  Crossing the short distance between us, 1 neatly side-stepped the quickly dissipating piles of ash. “What gives it away?”

  “You saw their shadows?” I nodded. “If it’s a moonless night, that makes things harder. Werewolves are bigger than the average wolf, reflecting the weight of their human counterparts. Real wolves, even Alaskan timber, rarely go above a hundred and twenty pounds.”

  “A lot of people don’t either.”

  “True.”

  I frowned. “Then how do you know?”

  He shrugged. “If I see a wolf, I shoot it.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Aren’t wolves endangered or protected or something?”

  “You gonna arrest me?”

  I remained silent for a minute. I didn’t like the thought of blasting any wolf that 1 saw, but what was the alternative?

  Allowing werewolves to roam free. I didn’t like that any better.

  Jimmy noticed my hesitation and made an exasperated sound. “Real wolves don’t venture into populated areas. They’re afraid of humans. If you see a wolf where there are people you can bet your sweet ass it’s either a werewolf or rabid.”

  I nodded, understanding. “In either case, shooting them is a good idea.”

  “Now you’re catching on,” he said, and slid out of the alley.

  I hurried after. “What about when they shape-shift back into a human?”

  “What about it?”

  “How can you tell if they’re a werewolf?”

  His eyes met mine. “You can’t. Or I can’t, which is why I have you.”

  “I shouldn’t go around touching everyone in the uni-verse. And if 1 touch them and get the werewolf vibe, you can’t just shoot them on the street.”

  “I can’t?”

  We were hurrying down a road parallel to Main, where we’d left the Hummer. More shops lined the sidewalk—a Laundromat, a drugstore. At every window, Jimmy paused and peered through the glass. They were all empty.

  “You’re going to wind up in prison for murder if you don’t watch yourself,” I muttered.

  “They aren’t human, Lizzy, so it isn’t murder.”

  “How you gonna explain that when they come for you?”

  “I’m not.” He stopped and faced me. “You’re right, shooting them in the open is bad business. But it’s an easy enough thing to lure them somewhere isolated and do tire deed.”

  I began to ask how he enticed them to shape-shift just so he could shoot them, then paused. What if he said he didn’t bother? And I had a sneaking suspicion that’s exactly what he would say. Would I ever be able to look at him again without seeing him shoot a person, then walk away as if it were nothing?

  According to Jimmy, the Nephilim weren’t human.

  Except they were. At least half.

  I rubbed my forehead. This was a moral dilemma I wasn’t up to dealing with.

  I lowered my hand, lifted my chin and met his gaze. “We’re a little short on villagers. What next?”

  His wary stance relaxed at the proof I wasn’t going to push for difficult answers. At the moment.

  “We keep searching,” he said. “Eventually someone, or something, has to turn up.”

  We did the best we could, hurrying from shop to shop, then house to house, ringing bells, tapping on doors. We found no one, and I began to get twitchy. There had ob-viously been people here once; now they were gone as if they’d disappeared into thin air. As far as I knew, that wasn’t possible. Unless…

  “Could this have been a town of werewolves?” I asked.

  Jimmy snorted. “Yeah, right.”

  We’d reached the outskirts of Hardeyville. A short distance away loomed what appeared to be the school— brick like everything else, but squat, with a flat roof and a whole lot of concrete parking lot rimmed with playground equipment. Jimmy stood where the sidewalk ended and the dirt began, scowling at a brand-new field house.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Maybe a few came for a visit, then turned everyone in the place.”

  “Turned?” As if he were having a hard time tearing his gaze from the gymnasium, Jimmy faced me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “A few werewolves decided they wanted a place for themselves; they wanted a pack.” The more I thought about it the better I liked the idea. “So they scouted out a nice town in the middle of nowhere, and they bit everyone in it.”

  He was shaking his head before I finished. “We aren’t living in a B movie. Werewolves can’t make other werewolves by biting them.”

  “Then how do they make more werewolves?”

  “They don’t really need to. There are enough to keep us busy for a very long time.”

  “Where are the pets?” I asked. We hadn’t found one dog, cat, or parakeet, though we had seen evidence of all three.

  “There’s something about shifters that makes domestic animals go bananas. Either they took off and they aren’t coming back, or they were—”

  Appetizers. My mind helpfully filled in the blank.

  “If dogs go nuts at the sight”—or maybe it was the scent—”of shifters, why don’t we have a few on the payroll?”

  “Not a bad idea, and some DKs do, but since most of us travel a lot and have our cover jobs, dragging a dog along with us is more of a pain than it’s worth. We aren’t all Paris Hilton.”

  My lips twitched at the image of Jimmy carrying a Chihuahua everywhere he went.

  As we approached the school, a strange hum filled the air. I glanced at the sky, but the sound was too soft to be a plane or a helicopter, too loud to be nothing. Jimmy either didn’t hear it, or he didn’t care. Maybe he already knew what we’d find.

  Thousands of flies swarmed at the entrance, butti
ng their heads into the glass in an attempt to enter, bouncing back, swarming together and buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.

  “Fuck,” Jimmy said, his tone conversational. Then, ignoring the flies, he yanked open the door.

  The smell hit me right away. Not as bad as 1 expected, really, but not good either. They hadn’t been here very long.

  The brand-new basketball court was ruined. I didn’t think blood came out of wood very well, especially not that much of it.

  Jimmy stood in the doorway and surveyed what appeared to be a mass murder. I got a pretty good idea what Jonestown had looked like. Except there were no remnants of poison Flavor-Aid, just blood on blood and then, hey, more blood.

  “They lured the whole town in here.” Jimmy’s voice was quiet, even though no one in the building was alive to hear. “Then they shut the doors and had some fun.”

  “Why?” I whispered, voice hoarse, eyes burning.

  “Because they could.”

  “You said the Nephilim want humans for food, for slaves.”

  “Or amusement.” His eyes remained on the carnage. “They must have loved this.”

  I gagged. Sure I’d been a cop, and I’d seen bad things, but I’d never seen anything like Hardeyville.

  “Lizzy!” Jimmy snapped. “Pull yourself together. We’re gonna have to check them all.”

  “What?”

  He turned his head. “Someone could still be alive.”

  He was right. I followed him, splitting off when we reached the first row, moving in the opposite direction, feeling each body for a pulse.

  It wasn’t that simple. As I’d already learned with Ruthie, shape-shifters went for the throat. Defensive wounds on the hands and wrists screwed up those pulse points too. In truth, most of the bodies were so mangled, there was no way they were alive. But I checked them anyway.

  Blood crept past my knuckles, washed across my wrists, and started up my forearms. The flies began to dribble inside; I’m not sure how. We had to have only let in a few when we arrived, but somehow they always found their way into a party.

  No one had been spared. Men and women. Young and old. By the time Jimmy and I met again at the entrance, I was shivering and shocky.

  Jimmy took one glance at my face and his hardened. He grabbed me by the shoulders, and I tensed, expecting him to shake me until my brain rattled. Instead, he turned me around and pointed at something that made me flinch. “See it?”

  A baseball cap, the shade of the material unrecognizable as the blood fast turned black in the rising heat, the insignia obscured, but the size revealing it as a Little League cap even before I took in the small, white hand reaching out for it and falling short.

  “The only way to live with this is to suck it up and kill them all.” Now he did shake me. Just once but hard. “Can you do that?”

  I swallowed, tasting things I never wanted to taste again but knowing that I would, and nodded. “I’m okay.”

  He leaned down, peering into my eyes for several seconds, brow creased. He didn’t seem to believe me, but he did let me go. “Good. Now—”

  “Hey! Help! Someone help me!”

  1 whirled toward the roomful of villagers. No one moved among the dead. How could they? So I spun back, just as a man stumbled from the hallway into the gymnasium.

  Tall and thick at the arms and the neck, he had wild eyes. He had blood on him, but then so did we. His salt-and-pepper hair was matted with sweat. His skin was winter pale, his clothes torn and dark in patches. He took one look at the room and stopped, staring, gaping, mouth moving as no sound came out.

  “Touch him,” Jimmy murmured.

  “Wh-what?”

  He jerked his head toward the windows, set high in the walls above the bleachers. Golden light filtered through.

  The sun was up.

  I lowered my gaze. “Hey, mister,” I said softly, and the guy stopped staring at the dead and stared at me.

  His eyes full of fear and grief, he hurried forward. “Thank God you came. I hid and they—” His voice broke.

  I offered my hand, and he went for it gladly, almost desperately. I understood the need to connect with someone, to share horror, to lean and be supported.

  I’d already begun thinking of how we’d find clean clothes, load the guy into the Hummer, take him to a safer place. Then our hands met, and my hair stirred in a sudden, impossible breeze.

  Werewolf, Ruthie whispered.

  I turned to Jimmy and said, “Shoot him.”

  Chapter 15

  The guy disintegrated into ashes at the same time the report of the gun exploded so close I heard nothing but that for several minutes. As I was covered in sweat and blood, the residue stuck to me. I understood how being tarred and feathered had once been a horrible punishment.

  “Lizzy?” Jimmy’s voice came from far away, but it actually sounded concerned. What had happened to the tough love? I must have looked even worse than I felt.

  I met Jimmy’s eyes, and he frowned at whatever he saw in them. “You okay?”

  I blinked. Ash cascaded off my eyelashes like snow falling from the trees. “Dandy.” I sneezed. “What now?”

  “We had to—” he began, and I held up my hand, startled in spite of myself at how bloody it was.

  Lowering the gory appendage, I said, “You won’t get any argument from me, Sanducci. Let’s move on.”

  I was starting to catch the nuances in Ruthie’s whispers, the subtle differences between a warning for a Nephilim and a breed or even a hell-sent vengeance demon.

  Just now there’d been an increase in volume and intensity that created a hum at the edges of my brain, a hum that hadn’t been there when she’d told me about Jimmy.

  Of course the word werewolf was probably a good clue. They kind of had a reputation for being bad-ass, one I’d been aware of even before I’d known they were real.

  Jimmy stared at me for a few seconds, then gave one sharp nod. “We have to torch this place.”

  “It’s brand-new.”

  “A terrible accident while the entire town is at a community event is a lot more palatable than mass murder by shape-shifters.”

  He stepped out of the gymnasium and I followed. “The building is brick, how you gonna burn it?”

  “Don’t worry; I’ve done it before.”

  A quick trip to the Hummer produced gasoline and a few sticks of dynamite.

  “Isn’t that going to seem suspicious?”

  “People see what they want to see. No one left in town to say otherwise, it’ll look like an accident. I’ll make it look like one.”

  Ten minutes later, flames shot toward the neon-blue sky. Jimmy turned, but instead of heading toward the car, he went toward town. “We need to make sure there isn’t anyone left.”

  “You think there might be?”

  “No. Werewolves are pretty thorough. But we’ll look.”

  He didn’t have to say we were searching for both human and non. When we’d returned to the Hummer for the gas, we’d also restocked our supply of silver bullets.

  Noon had come and gone before we’d searched every house and business. We didn’t find anyone else, dead, alive, or anything in between. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I decided not to think about it at all. Yep. I was definitely starting to catch on to this job.

  “We’ll clean up, grab some fresh clothes and food, then get on the road,” Jimmy said.

  I didn’t like the idea of using dead people’s things, but what choice did we have? We couldn’t ride around Kansas, or any other state for that matter, covered in blood and ashes. That was bound to raise some eyebrows.

  “This one.” Jimmy flicked a finger at a three-story clapboard, painted a soothing robin’s-egg blue. The shutters were white; spring flowers sprouted all over the yard, mocking the scent of death and smoke that hung over Hardeyville.

  He climbed the porch steps and walked right in. No one locked their doors here. I’d discovered that for myself as we’d meandered through the t
own searching for survivors and werewolves.

  The house was shadowed and cool, all the shades still drawn. The inhabitants hadn’t woken up this morning. They’d been a little dead.

  I rubbed my forehead, wishing my mind would stop talking.

  “Why this one?” I asked.

  “Young couple, near our age and size,” he answered shortly. “I’m gonna shower first.” He started upstairs.

  I opened my mouth to argue, then snapped it shut as a picture in the living room caught my gaze. I forgot all about Jimmy and his selfish, rude, typical behavior, drawn inexorably toward the photograph.

  They could have been us. Or the us Jimmy and I might have become if we were different people. Hell—

  “If one of us was people,” I muttered.

  In a different world.

  The husband was dark-haired, but the wife was blond. From the photo, they’d been married in springtime, perhaps only the last one, perhaps this one. Hard to say.

  He was tall and rangy, his dark tux a perfect accent for his coloring. She shone with joy in an ivory sheath. No veil, her hair tumbling in curls around her bare shoulders. They’d had their whole lives ahead of them.

  And now they didn’t.

  I wandered around the room, peering at other pictures. The happy couple skiing. Dancing. The wife and her parents. The husband and his. They’d both had siblings. I thought I recognized a few from the gymnasium. By the time I’d made the circuit, I was shivering again.

  The water still ran upstairs. I hunted around for a second bathroom, found one on the first floor that only housed a sink and toilet, then stomped upward, intent on kicking Jimmy out before all the hot water disappeared.

  Not that I couldn’t just stroll to the next house on the block and use their hot water, but right now I wanted to argue. I needed to. I was mad. I was scared. I wanted to punch someone. Jimmy would let me punch him.

  On the second floor, I took inventory—master bedroom, guest room, office—

  “Son of a—” I muttered, staling at the pastel green walls with a border of giraffes and elephants. There wasn’t any furniture. Yet.

  Had she been pregnant, or just hoping?