My finest hour thus far. This made the 2006 SFX Pulp Idol book, and a sniff of interest from Gollancz.
It was five days later, five days after we had abandoned Dubrovnik, our posts, our dead comrades, the failed revolution. We’d found an abandoned hunter’s lodge tucked into the scrubby woodland at the foot of the Carpathians. Magda set perimeter defences, and I tended to the stomach wound that was gradually letting the life out of Geric. They were both poor and decidedly temporary measures.
Every sunrise brought hope, every sunset ushered in the dread that it would be our last. As time slipped past, we allowed ourselves to think that maybe we had been classed as small fry, as not worth chasing.
We were wrong.
Five days after we lost the war, a rat found us.
Magda’s defences had been useless, of course. The rat was the size of her thumb, and had glitched out the perimeter scanners with ease. Maybe it had even been the scan grid that had attracted it.
It slipped in through a gap in the insulation. The tiny black pinpricks of its camera array grabbed hi-res stills, linked us via an image recogniser to the database of wanted revolutionaries and attached a GPS tag. Magda spotted it first. She launched herself at the tiny creature. She stomped down hard, crushing the rat to shards under her heavy boots. By then it was far too late. It had deployed every emitter it had, puffing out with a pop like a dandelion clock, and squirted the whole package away through a shriek of tightband transmission. Five seconds had elapsed since Magda had seen it. An eternity to a remote autonomous transmitter that lives nanocycles at a time.
Magda looked up as us, at poor dying Geric and me. She tossed us a grin as she scraped the remains of the rat from her boot heel.
“Well,” she said. “I guess that’s it then. We’d better get ready.”
We knew when they would come. It was their way, to tap into the primitive, superstitious fears that were a prime vulnerability of the human condition. There was no need for disguise, for ambush, for surprise. Their weapons were much more potent than that.
They would come for us just after sunset. The sun would have bled out to black. The air would thicken and chill. The noises of the forest, the sounds of life, would ebb to silence. They would allow us to hear them. The click of their claws at the door would herald their coming.
We prepared, as best we could. Magda dismantled the perimeter traps. They could be put to better use elsewhere. I checked the weapons, and tried for one last time to get Geric to see sense.
“Take the fletch”, I pleaded, holding out the case-modded AK47 to him. It was heavy, the extended banana clip jutting obscenely from the body of the gun. “There’s a full load in there. Fifteen thousand rounds. Enough for days.”
Geric grunted, and squinted down the barrel of his Magnum. His crop was growing out, the gold stubble glowing against his pale scalp. His thick fingers were sure and steady as he slotted the armour-piercing rounds he’d been hoarding into the chambers of the big gun. Each round was as long and fat as a Chanel lipstick.
“I’ll stick with a proper weapon, thank you,” he growled. “Your funny little dart-thrower might be OK against people, but when I hit the dhamphir with one of these, they’ll know they’ve been hit.”
It was an argument we’d had many times, that I could never win. The fletch fired titanium barbettes launched by caseless propellant, and was powerful enough to rip holes in tank armour. Big deal. Geric still saw the fletch, the pachinko, all the improvised weapons that actually did some good against the creatures he called sons of vampires as toys. He was a big man, and he needed a big gun.
He had less than a day left. I couldn’t stop the bleeding, and every time he moved I could see new spots blooming on his dressings. He couldn’t even stand. He had already decided on the way it would end. He would sit in his corner, and try to get off all six rounds before the dhamphir took him.
Magda came in through the back door, shivering. She was thin, pale. The shock of red dye in her choppy bob was the only colour in her, and that was growing out. “Getting colder,” she said. “Won’t be long now.” She looked questioningly at me, at Geric. He scowled at her, and snapped the breech of the Magnum closed.
“No luck, then,” she said. I shook my head, and handed her the pachinko.
“Air-line checked, breech clear. I found that foul on the feed. It’s ready.”
She smiled at me, and something tragic flitted behind her eyes for a moment. Our hands touched as I handed over the pinball gun.
The room was soaked in red light, the sun giving up and going out in a blast of crimson as bright as her hair. Magda winced, and pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger.
“Are you feeling that?” she asked.
Suddenly I had a headache, a sharp spike of pain like a needle digging into my tear ducts. Geric nodded, gritting his teeth. They had triggered the sonic ordnance, cycles of high and low frequency noise designed to disorientate and incapacitate. They sparked migraines, nose-bleeds and worse.
It was the sign. They were here.
Geric hauled back the hammer of his Magnum, brought his knees up and braced the weapon across them in a two-handed grip.
“OK,” he said. “For Free Carpathia.”
“Forget that,” said Magda. “For us.”
“For the next two minutes,” I whispered.
There was a scratching at the door. It creaked on old hinges.
A thump, delivered by something heavy, and low to the ground. Another thud, harder, as something else joined in.
With a crunch, the door gave, dropping inwards and slamming into the shack.
A gust of cold air, a herald to the nightmare.
They came in slowly, watchful of everything in the room. They are something like greyhounds, something like alligators, something like chainsaws. They move on long, many-jointed legs, graceful as ballet dancers. Their slim, compact bodies are made of Kevlar and smart alloy compounds, coated in scuffed camo paint.
Their small, round heads are studded with black, insectile scanner arrays and micro-cameras, clustered around a jaw that is a mass of needles, incisors and fangs. They are slavering, drooling a mixture of toxins and anticoagulants. Their bite will poison and bleed you out before you knew you were dead.
We call them wolves, trying to relate the horror to something familiar. Geric calls them dhamphir, sons of vampires, which is probably more accurate.
They hunt in troupes of three. Standard procedure is for one member to outflank their prey while the main party distracts them. Simple, and devastatingly effective. Unless you know what to expect.
Frantic scrambling behind us. The flanking wolf had been caught in the snares Magda had set. It was tangled in a snarled web of razorwire, sprung monofilament and det cord. It struggled wildly, trying to wrench free. We’d thought of that as well. The one loose component of the whole contraption was the trigger for the explosives. They went off in a series of sharp hard cracks. The wolf blew apart, neatly filleted by the shaped charges.
It’s two companions were impassive witnesses to the end of their comrade. This was simply an inconvenience. They fired data at each other through the spines on their backs that made up their transceiver antennae.
Reconfigure the battle plan. Adopt a new assault profile. Find the weak point.
It was simple. Geric, dying, armed with a prehistoric wheel gun. Vulnerable. Under-equipped. Doomed.
One wolf feinted at us. Magda and I flinched back, and in that moment the other one leapt for Geric. It was on him in an instant, like a lover, like a parasite. It shoved him back, it’s front paws on his shoulders, the claws digging in, and it showed Geric the nightmare snarl of teeth in it’s jaws before they closed on his face.
As he died the warrior instinct came forward. He jammed the barrel of the Magnum up into a gap in the dhamphir’s armour and fired convulsively. The creature jolted, unable to let go, claws and teeth jammed in the meat as Geric pumped all six rounds into it’s belly.
Somehow, horribly, it tore itself free. It whirled, staggering, and tensed to spring at Magda. She smiled, and fired the pachinko. The gun shrieked, high-compression gas hosing titanium micro-pellets through a rotating housing. It hammered the wounded wolf back off it’s feet, and as it twisted and writhed Magda began using the high-output spray to take it apart.
She wasn’t watching her back. The other wolf saw it. I could see as it shifted it’s attention from me to her. It thought in attack vectors, in cover points. It saw that it could use Magda as both shield and prey. All I saw, and too late, was that she had moved between the wolf and me.
I brought my gun up, pointlessly.
The wolf leapt, and thudded into Magda’s back. It knocked the pachinko flying, but somehow she stayed on her feet. It wrapped all four limbs around her in an obscene parody of an embrace, and buried it’s blunt snout in her neck. Her arms pinioned, her eyes wide in a kind of wonder, Magda crumpled under the weight of the wolf as it spat poison into her.
She was dead before she hit the floor.
Someone was screaming. I think it was me.
Maybe thirty seconds had expired since the wolves broke in.
I remember firing the fletch at the wolf’s slender back. It scoured the armour, taking off a couple of the comma spines, but that was all. Geric had been right. The fletch wasn’t powerful enough.
The wolf began unwrapping itself from what remained of Magda, taking it’s time, unthreatened.
I took a step backwards. My foot knocked against something heavy, something that rattled. The pachinko. Without taking my eyes off the creature, I stooped and picked it up. The wolf turned in a fluid movement, and I saw the tensile cords of monofibre that served as it’s leg muscles bunch up, ready to spring.
I thumbed open the pachinko’s ready valve, and levelled it.
******
An hour passes. We stand, the wolf and I, facing each other in the dark across Magda’s torn body. The wolf vibrates slightly, frozen in strike position. It’s attention is absolutely focussed on my right hand, on the trigger finger. It is caught in a reflux loop, a web of variables.
If I fire the pachinko, there is a good chance I can destroy the wolf. There is an equally good chance I could fire and miss. Or that the wolf can move before I fire, and take me before I can get off a second volley. The wolf is fast, but the probability of it being fast enough to outrun me is too low to risk an attack.
It has collapsed the problem down to a single decision vector. It will do nothing until it detects the movement of my hand as it tenses to fire. Then, and only then is it free to act.
We call them wolves, or dhamphir, as if by naming them we can force them to become something we can understand. But they are not animals, or mythical creatures of the night. They are machines, and to survive that’s how we must relate to them.
I understand this now. The device watching me with such intent has given me that clarity, and it has given me something more. I am in control now. The choice as to which of us leaves the ruins of this shack is mine.
The gun is heavy, and I am tired. I’ll make the decision soon.
