“Said the things came out of nowhere and ran that way,” I said, pointing west. “Gutierrez and the rest of them went chasing after them.” It hit me. “They’re running into an ambush,” I said.
“Come on,” Jane said, and pointed to Flores’s rifle. “Take that,” she said, and ran. I took Flores’s rifle, checked the load and once again started after my wife.
There was another rifle shot, followed by the sound of men yelling. I put on a burst of speed and came up a rise to find Jane in a broken grove of Roanoke trees, kneeling on the back of one of the men, who was yelling in pain. Paulo Gutierrez was pointing his rifle at Jane and ordering her off the man. Jane wasn’t budging. A third man stood to the side, looking like he was about to wet his pants.
I leveled my rifle at Gutierrez. “Drop your rifle, Paulo,” I said. “Drop it or I’m going to drop you.”
“Tell your wife to get off Deit,” Gutierrez said.
“No,” I said. “Now drop your weapon.”
“She’s breaking his goddamn arm!” Gutierrez said.
“If she wanted to break his arm, it’d be broken by now,” I said. “And if she wanted to kill every one of you, you’d already be dead. Paulo, I’m not going to tell you again. Drop your rifle.”
Paulo dropped his rifle. I glanced over at the third man, who would be Juan. He dropped his, too. “Down,” I said to the both of them. “Knees and palms on the ground.” They went down.
“Jane,” I said.
“This one took a shot at me,” Jane said.
“I didn’t know it was you!” Diet said.
“Shut up,” Jane said. He shut up.
I walked over to Juan and Gutierrez’s rifles and picked them up. “Paulo, where are your other men?” I asked.
“They’re behind us somewhere,” Gutierrez said. “These things popped out of nowhere and started running this way, and we came after them. Marco and Galen probably went off in another direction.”
“Marco is dead,” I said.
“Those fuckers got him,” Deit said.
“No,” I said. “Galen shot him. Just like you almost shot her.”
“Holy Christ,” Gutierrez said. “Marco.”
“This is exactly why I wanted to keep this quiet,” I said to Gutierrez. “To keep some idiot from doing this. You dumbfucks haven’t got the first clue what you’re doing, and now one of you is dead, one of you killed him, and the rest of you are running into an ambush.”
“Oh God,” Gutierrez said. He tried to sit up from his four-on-the-floor position but lost his balance, and collapsed in a pile of grief.
“We’re going to walk out of here now, all of us,” I said, walking over to Gutierrez. “We’re going to go back the way we came in, and along the way we’re going to pick up Galen and Marco. Paulo, I’m sorry—” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye; it was Jane, telling me to cut it off. She was listening for something. I looked over at her. What is it? I mouthed.
Jane looked down at Deit. “What direction did those things you were chasing run off in?”
Deit pointed west. “That way. We were chasing them, and then they disappeared, and then you came running up.”
“What do you mean they disappeared?” Jane said.
“One minute we saw them and the next we didn’t,” Deit said. “Those fuckers are fast.”
Jane got off Deit. “Get up. Now,” she said. She looked over to me. “They weren’t running into an ambush. This is the ambush.”
Then I heard what Jane had been hearing: a soft mass of clicks, coming from the trees. Coming from directly above us.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“What the hell is that?” Gutierrez said, and looked up as the spear came down, exposing his neck to its tip, which slid into that soft space at the top of the sternum and drove itself into his viscera. I rolled, avoiding a spear of my own, and looked up as I did.
It was raining werewolves.
Two fell near me and Gutierrez, who was still alive, trying to pull out the spear. One grabbed the spear near the end and drove it down farther into Gutierrez’s chest and shook it violently. Gutierrez spat up blood and died. The second slashed at me with claws as I rolled, ripping my jacket but missing flesh. I had kept my rifle and drew it up with one hand; the thing grabbed the barrel with both of its paws or claws or hands and prepared to pull it out of my grip. It didn’t seem to know that a projectile could come out of the end; I educated it on the subject. The creature brutalizing Gutierrez uttered a sharp click of what I hoped was terror and sprinted east, getting a running start at a tree, which it scaled and then hurled itself from, landing on another tree. It disappeared into the foliage.
I looked around. They were gone. They were all gone.
Something moved; I trained the rifle on it. It was Jane. She was pulling a knife out of one of the werewolves. Another werewolf lay nearby. I looked for Juan and Deit and found them on the ground, lifeless.
“Okay?” Jane said to me. I nodded. Jane stood, holding her side; blood slipped between her fingers.
“You’re hurt,” I said.
“I’m fine,” she said. “It looks worse than it is.”