The Witch and the Werewolf (6 page)

Though it broke his heart
he knew there wasn’t anything he could do for them.

He didn’t have long to
make it to the shelter but fortunately it was just a few blocks off
of old downtown. His load was heavy, though, and he wasn’t quite
sure if it was alive or not. The wolf, now completely returned to
his man form, was dead weight. He felt silly pushing through the
streets with a naked man strung across his shoulders, but it was
what it was. His back was aching and having to step around all of
the prone bodies and people screaming was not helping.

“
Just a couple of blocks,
Dutch,” he told himself. “Rio was way worse.”

He was kidding himself, he
knew. He’d been in a lot of bad spots in life, no doubt. He’d been
shot at in the Middle East, blown up in South America. A cartel
warlord wanted is head in Juarez. But he’d never tried to outrun a
tsunami with a presumably dead werewolf across his
shoulder.

The massive waves further
down the coast pushed into the storm drains and sewers, pushing the
waste water back uphill. Manhole covers popped from their
receptacles and geysers of brackish water burst twenty feet in the
air. Houston, a city built on a swamp, was known for its flooding
problems and the water was quickly at Dutch’s knees, making all
that much harder to push through.

“
Help me, please. God help
me. My eyes are are gone,” a man said, kneeling on the pavement. He
reached out and with a lucky grab got hold of Dutch’s leg. “Please
help me. I can’t see.”

Dutch groaned. “I can’t
help you buddy.”

“
My wife. I’ll never see
my wife again.”

Dutch kicked the guy loose
and kept moving forward. When he stepped into the street in front
of the simple, little, old Catholic church, he grinned. What better
place to put a bunker than right under everyone’s nose? The
two-story church blended well with the surrounding, run down part
of Houston. His legs burned as he made the last few steps, dropping
his load on the cement and banging on the door.

The roar grew louder and
he could just see the tops of the massive tsunami to the south. It
would be in the city in minutes. He pounded on the door
again.

“
Come on,” he screamed,
panic building. “I know you’re in there. I’ve got your damn wolf.
Open the damn door.”

He pounded again, the wave
getting closer. Great, he thought. I’m not going to get
in.

The man wolf thing at his
feet stirred.

“
Wow. You are a tough one,
huh?” Dutch asked. “I guess I need to apologize. At least you’d
have gotten laid if I hadn’t dragged you away to here. It doesn’t
look like we’re going to get in, bud.”

The wave pushed closer,
toppling buildings, washing away cars and people like simple
garbage. He was tempted to just eat the barrel of the pistol. At
least it would be quicker than being ripped to shreds by the
oncoming tsunami. But it wasn’t his style. He sat down on the steps
and watched the waves.

The door creaked open
behind him, casting a dim light onto the steps. The old priest
looked at him, the wolf, and then the waves.

“
Well are you gonna be
comin’ to that church or what?” the man said in a thick Irish
accent. “Even a cur dog knows to get out of the rain.”

Dutch grinned. Maybe he
would survive the first night of the end of the world.

Water, Water Everywhere

Cassandra barreled through the streets of La Porte, Texas,
doing her dead level best to avoid parked cars, people, and the
detritus littering the streets. She’d never been much of a driver
to begin with. When she was sixteen her mother had refused to let
her drive. She told Cassandra she was worried she’d wander away.
She just wasn’t that experienced at driving and trying to drive
away from the hundred foot wall of water rushing up from the south
just made her that much more nervous.

The wolves weren’t helping
either, but she’d tried to block those out. The constant howling
was hard to ignore.

Worse, though, was the
thing in her mind. It was a collision of thought and memory, her
own fears mixed with the pain and torment of another being. She
felt the old alpha as if it were a part of her, felt his fear and
hesitation. She felt them torturing him. It burned like a lantern
and the flashing visions, visions from his mind, interrupted her
ability to concentrate on the road. It was like switching real time
from a dream to the waking world.

The pack ran through the
forest at full speed, heedless to the dangers of fallen trees,
bolting through the low hanging branches, baying at the moon full
in the sky. She saw through the eyes
the
pack’s alpha who strode out front, leading his wolves. The pack ran
for non other reason than the moon was full and they could. She
felt the bond they shared as a physical connection. The alpha’s
mind was intune with each other wolf, from the strongest males down
to the youngest cubs. The alpha was intone with his pack on a
primal level, feeling their fears, their hopes… their
hunger.

As they entered a clearing
she jerked in reaction to the pack’s instant fear. A group of women
stood there, all armed with bows.

She shook the vision,
trying to differentiate the panic she felt from the vision from her
own fear, and tried to focus on the task at hand.

The wolves were chasing
her. She knew that. She felt them in the pit of her stomach, a deep
primal dread that made her skin crawl. It was completely different
than the feeling she got from the connection with the old wolf. She
feared them. The beasts ran along the van, howling as they leapt
from telephone pole to telephone pole, leaping over houses and
coming within mere feet of the speeding van. They were toying with
her. They were trying to let her know that they were in control and
she was… well she was nothing but their next meal. Just as her
mother had been.

The water came, though,
and quickly began filling the streets, making it harder for the
wolves to follow her. She knew what was happening, knew a piece of
the radioactive comet must have fallen in the Gulf. She knew she
should find some kind of shelter. But she drove on anyway, driving
until she ran into a patch of water in a suburban neighborhood too
deep for the van. It stopped in the water, the engine died, and she
felt the tires move under her. The van was being carried away in
the current.

The power was off in the
city and it was pitch black. Besides the sound of the rushing water
the city was strangely quiet. She thought she could hear screams
but they were muffled and distant.

She sat in the van for a
long time, the vehicle inching down the street in the torrent of
water surging up from the sewers, tears streaming down her face. So
much had happened in so little time. There was so much about her
mother she didn’t know, so much the woman had hidden from her. And
now it was too late. Her mother was dead. Her mother hadn’t kept
her hidden because of boys. She’d been trying to keep her from the
werewolves. Cassandra had spent her life acting like a spoiled
little girl, never seeing the signs of what her mother was, never
understand exactly what it was her mother was trying to protect her
from.

And those signs were
there, now that she thought about them. Her mother has always
leaned towards the occult. Cassandra had dismissed it as silly
fantasy leanings and often accused the woman of being a crazy old
cat lady. Worse, she’d been what many called a ‘Prepper’. She’d
always assumed her mother had been preparing for the same sorts of
emergencies everyone else had been… floods, hurricanes, nuclear
wars. She had no idea her mother had been preparing for werewolves.
She needed to go home and look at her mother’s things. She needed
to see if she could learn more about her mother, the
witch.

“
I don’t want to die,” she
said. She’d told Brad she was okay with it. She’d accepted her fate
then. But there was more now. The burning desire for revenge, for
taking her mother before the woman could tell her what she was, was
intense. And then there the thing in her mind. She felt it
constantly, like a burning pain. She had to know more about a
creature that old.

But what to do? The van
picked up speed down the street, flood waters pushing it north.
She, foolishly tried to turn the steering wheel and step on the
brakes. The water was rising rapidly and the wall of water grew in
the south, destroying everything in its path. She could hear the
tsunami blasting through homes and refineries, leaving explosions
and destruction in its wake. She had to find someplace to hide and
quickly.

A werewolf howled at her
from a nearby rooftop, jerking her back to attention. She could
reminisce about her missed chances with her mother later. The
wolves wanted her dead. Another wolf leapt from the roof of a
truck, landing on the hood of the van, driving razor sharp claws
down into the metal. It howled at her and then smashed the front
window in one punch, reaching for her.

Cassandra screamed,
pushing back into the seat as far as she could while reaching for
one of the silver blades in the passenger seat. She’d been trained
to fight, to shoot… but none of that had ever prepared her for
fighting a werewolf as her van floated down a street. The wolf
pushed its head through the glass, snapping its jaws at her. Its
breath stunk of rotting meat.

“
Hello little pretty,” it
growled. “You smell so sweet. So sweet like your mommy.”

The wolves’ voices were
guttural and barely comprehensible, sending chills up and down her
spine.

Cassandra grabbed the hilt
of one of the short swords and haphazardly jabbed it at the wolf.
She just nicked the wolf’s face but it was enough to send it
screaming backwards, the bloody wound sizzling as if burned. She
grabbed the other blade, and then tried to open the door. The
pressure of the water outside the van, still rising, prevented
it.

The wolf lunged back in,
head first, snapping at her. She managed to get the silver sword
between the two of them, impaling the creature on it. Its head
smoked ferociously, as the creature howled in pain, and then
exploded, covering her in blood and brains.

“
Damn it,” she screamed,
clearing the stuff from her eyes. The other half dozen wolves
howled in anger from the surrounding roof tops. She felt their
anger burning like a laser.

Cassandra pushed against
the massive bulk of the dead wolf, crawling on to the hood of the
van that was picking up even more speed in the rising water. The
tsunami was even clearer then, a twenty foot tall wall of
water.

“
You want me?” she
screamed at the wolves, standing on the hood of the van like a
surfboard. “Come and get me!”

A wolf leapt from a roof
top, arching into the air like a comic book hero, but missed the
van, landing in the rushing flood waters. She watched as it flailed
madly, swept away.

“
That’s right, wolf,” she
screamed. She was angry. Angry at the wolves for taking her mother,
angry at the world for taking her life. She jumped off the hood of
the van, into the water, and was swept up in its current. She
barely held onto the swords, rushing down the street, twisting and
turning in the current. The water, pushed out of storm drains and
sewers ahead of the onrushing tsunami, was warm but stank of
garbage and human waste. She righted herself, swimming with the
current, and aimed for a brick house on her right.

She just barely noticed
the boy, standing on the roof, staring out with empty eyes. The
poor kid had looked at the explosions, she thought, just before she
slammed into the brick sides of the house. There were lawn chairs
and an ice chest on the roof. They’d made an event of it. He knelt
and crawled to the edge where she rested, the water slamming her
against the brick.

“
Take my hand,” the boy
said, reaching out for her.

She had no idea how the
eyeless boy could see her. His face was bloody and sticky with the
remains of his eyes and yet he reached right for her. She tossed
the swords onto the roof and took the boy’s hand. He pulled with
all his might and, along with her own scrambling, finally yanked
her up on the roof.

Cassandra didn’t have a
moment to rest. The boy, looking past her, screamed out.

“
Look out behind
you!”

One of the wolves jumped
from another house, twenty feet into the air, and smashed down
through the roof in a shower of wood and shingle.

“
Holy shit,” the little
boy said, inadvertently, and then covered his mouth. If they hadn’t
been staring at death she would have laughed at the boy.

The wall of water was
approaching. Cassandra didn’t think and reacted, scooping up her
two swords and dragging the boy with her, down into the attic
behind the wolv. The creature was flailing in a string of old
Christmas lights, trying to get untangled, back to them. She calmly
stepped across the rafters and drove both silver swords into the
thing’s back. It howled in pain, reaching around to try and grab
her, the wounds smoking. She turned the hilt of the handles,
driving the swords in further. The creature howled in pain again,
and then collapsed to the attic rafters.