THE MAN CRAWLED across the forest floor. A susurrus of crunching leaves marked his progress, punctuated by the crisp snap of twigs and the soft moans issuing from his throat. An accretion of dirt and dried blood covered the right half of his face and stained his bear-pelt coat in grim motley. His legs and belly gasped with welts where they dragged over the rocky earth, and blood trickled from beneath his fingernails. He clawed his way across the small clearing, his left leg working like an inchworm while his right hung useless, its dead and frozen flesh already turning an ugly shade of grey. A few metres away stood a dry culvert curtained with holly and bristly underbrush—a good place to rest, out of the wind and hidden from predators.
Derek waited until the man had almost made it before stepping out from behind the tree. The man looked up at him, confusion blurring his broken face. Derek smiled. He hefted the barrel of the MP5 he’d pilfered from one of Ballaro’s boys. On his back hung a rucksack bulging with food and ammo, though mostly food. There’d been enough standard rounds to supply a small army, but Derek mostly ignored these, favoring the dearer slugs of silver.
“Hey there, buddy,” he said. “Where you goin’? Crawlin’ back to the Kremlin?”
Derek expected panic, but as the man grasped the situation, his face settled into sullen truculence. He’d lost several teeth, which gave his pursed lips a caved-in look.
“Ah, you’re no fun.” He raised the MP5 and fired a single shot. The man’s head evaporated. Derek spat through clenched teeth, regretting his action. He should’ve tried plain old lead first. It would behoove him to learn whether normal bullets sufficed when they weren’t transformed. Oh well. Next time.
He paced the woods to either side of the creek until mid-afternoon, when heavy snowfall drove him to seek cover beneath a limestone outcrop. He encountered no one else in that time, only footprints and bodies half-buried by drifting snow. Most of the latter belonged to Luka’s ill-fated pack, of whom Derek appeared to be the sole surviving member. He didn’t notice Sarah’s body among the corpses, but that hardly said much in this forest primeval. It could’ve been five feet away from him at some point and he’d never know it.
The forest folk had their losses, too, but they were relatively few considering the numbers they’d started with. Most had made their way deeper into the woods, following their grievously wounded Majka. Ballaro’s bullets should’ve been fatal, but from the last Derek saw of the old bitch, she still had some fight left in her.
Rubbing his frigid hands together for warmth, Derek gathered an armful of deadwood and lit a fire. He cupped the warm air rising from the flames, sighing as the heat breathed fresh life into his cold-stiffened fingers. Once the weather calmed down, he’d best move south. The forest was in a state of slow lockdown. A couple more snowfalls, and the roads would be all but impassable. In a few more days he’d be stuck up here, left to freeze or starve as the caprices of circumstance dictated. But that was okay. He needed time to think. To equip himself. To plan. To atone.
He’d stood apart from his species, and in so doing felt a shame he’d never felt before. The few drops of silver water he’d swallowed sizzled on the root of his tongue. He was unclean, but he was still a man, and one man really shouldn’t kill another. Not when beasts still roamed the plains beyond the safety of firelight.
Spring would come again soon enough, and the woods were far from empty.
He had a lot of work to do.