A RIPPLE RAN along David’s spine. The air turned prickly and cold, as if each molecule gained a sudden static charge. A surfeit of gigawatts poised on some precarious electromagnetic precipice, ready to surge out and incinerate its unwitting target with the slightest jostling. David froze to an extent he didn’t know himself capable. Even the flora in his gut seemed to pause, a stasis so absolute his thoughts themselves hung suspended.
The moment didn’t so much pass as get torn to shreds by the shrapnel of lunatic howling. Two dozen fur-clad sojourners writhed in hellish metamorphosis. The clearing crackled with an agony of popping joints and lengthening bones and stretching sinew. Ballaro’s men clutched their MP5s to their chest and watched, transfixed, as a motley mess of savages transformed into shapes their minds could scarcely digest.
Ballaro was the first to break his paralysis. He stepped into the oncoming tsunami of fur and teeth, submachine gun levelled to chest height. Not a speck of fear or uncertainty blemished his face, his cheeks and forehead still and lineless as a warrior’s bronze mask.
“You fucks, you kill my boys, huh? Fuck you!” he bellowed, his finger tight around the trigger.
David dove onto his belly to avoid the crossfire. His elbows sank into river muck. A current-tussled wave splashed his face and he came up sputtering, eyes blinking back the silty water.
The MP7’s muzzle strobed madly, filling the clearing with a percussive roar. Ballaro raked bullets back and forth over the monstrous wolf-people, who absorbed their punishments with shudders and grimaces but kept coming. The others soon joined in to the same pitiful effect.
David rose to his knees, took aim at the nearest creature, and fired. The report of his shot carried no louder than the scores of others—was probably in anything quieter, being lower calibre—but seemed fuller, somehow. It kicked in his chest like a kettle drum. The slug took the wolf-thing in the jaw and exploded in a starburst of silver-white radiance. The wolf-thing’s head vanished from the snout up, replaced by a fountain of blood and brain matter. It toppled into the water, its long limbs withering and shedding clumps of greyish hair.
Two left, he thought, his eyes sweeping the horde. Two to kill two dozen. How’s that add up?
“The silver!” he screamed, his voice a ragged whisper beneath the pounding gunfire. “Use the fucking silver!”
The silver slugs were in separate magazines—they hadn’t been able to mint nearly enough to waste on bursts of full auto. The plan was to thin the herd with a submachine spray of good ol’ fashioned lead, then switch ammo and pick off any changelings with single-shot precision. In his rage, Ballaro seemed to either have forgotten this or decided he didn’t care, the simple act of spewing lead at his children’s killer sufficient to scratch the visceral itch of vengeance plaguing his soul. His men looked less invested, but in their terror they too had forgotten the plan. They worked their MP5s back and forth as if using them to swat at a swarm of hornets, their eyes huge and white. David watched helplessly as the wolf-things closed in, rage and hunger dribbling from their open jaws.