There was some ground to cover before the wild man made it to the metal steps, but he was covering it way too quickly for Cole’s liking. Taking the steps three at a time, he was up and out of the cramped room before anyone could stop him. He grabbed hold of Cole’s weapon by its thorny handle, gripped it tight and willed even more thorns to sprout from the varnished wood. The thorns that were already in Cole’s palms widened and split apart inside of him, sending a hot wave of pain through his arms and straight into his brain.
Cole felt the Skinner serum as well as Nymar filaments within his body work together to keep him from blacking out. The thorns were still moving in his hands, shifting and twisting as if every one of them had become sadistic little worms intent on chewing up as much of their host as possible. The wild man pulled against the halberd but was unable to take it away from Cole. He followed up by kicking Cole’s shins and snapping his head forward with his mouth opened wide. Less than an inch before he sank his chipped teeth into Cole’s face, he was stopped by a scaly hand grabbing a generous portion of long, greasy hair.
The wild man ripped free of Frank’s grip, leaving several clumps of hair in the Squam’s hand. Cole then pivoted his upper body along with his weapon to force the guy off-balance. After bringing the man down with a simple foot sweep, Cole placed a boot on the guy’s chest, pulled the halberd away and immediately felt the thorns retreat back into the grip. “Who are y—” was all Cole got out before the wild man sank his teeth through the side of his boot and into his foot.
Frank descended on the crazed prisoner with a fist that had been raised above his scaly head. After dropping more than the length of his entire body with a good portion of his Squamatosapien strength behind it, the punch slammed directly into the wild man’s face and knocked the back of his head against the floor. Turning to Cole, Frank asked, “Are you all right?”
Cole peeled one bloody hand from his weapon’s grip and flexed it. He nodded once and then reached for the .45 Glock holstered at his side. The holster itself was designed to chamber the first round into the pistol as it was drawn, which Cole did in a well-practiced downward scooping motion. Suddenly finding himself in Cole’s line of fire, Frank stepped back. The .45 wasn’t aimed at him, however, but at the man who he assumed was unconscious on the floor.
The wild man, or any human, should have been knocked out by the vicious punch. Frank had even dropped a few Half Breeds with that move, but the man who’d been trapped beneath a fallen plane laced with a ridiculous amount of explosives rubbed his cheek while pulling himself to his feet.
“All right, boss,” the wild man said. “You got me. Truce?”
“Truce?” Cole snarled. “We came here to bust you out, and the first thing you do is try to bite me!”
“Right,” the man said. “I was locked up in a soundproof, damn near airproof, box and haven’t seen daylight for…I don’t even know how long. That door barely got opened once every couple of days so yeah, when I saw my chance I took it. I did stop, though.”
“We stopped you,” Frank amended.
The man’s smile was so wide, it created wrinkles in his face that cracked the mask of filth stuck to his skin. “Ok. Let’s go with that.”
Cole studied the wild man carefully. He was wearing tattered jeans and a dark t-shirt with one sleeve ripped off. His skin tone was almost impossible to discern and would stay that way until he was either hosed off or dumped into a river. At first glance, his hair looked like it was styled into dreadlocks. Now, the long, thick strands looked more like clumps that had been twisted together, partially braided and crudely tied off at the ends. His face was covered in a scraggly beard interrupted by scars or old scabs where some of the whiskers had been ripped out.
The prisoner’s scars didn’t stop there. They covered not only the palm he showed when he held out his hand in a placating gesture, but most of his entire arm and even a good portion of his neck. He wore no shoes, which might have accounted for the scar tissue on the bottoms and tops of his feet. The nails on his fingers and toes were scraped down to hard nubs.
“Who are you?” Frank asked.
“I’m the same as you,” the man replied in a voice that somehow managed to be equally parts scratchy and smooth. “Dead if we don’t get the fuck out of here real damn soon. I’m guessing by the bodies laying around and the general dishevelment of this place that you didn’t exactly pop open my box the way it was meant to be popped. That’d make you gen-u-wine saviors.”
“Come on,” Cole said as he placed his weapon back into its harness. “We can talk as we move.” He led the way toward the end of the cabin connected to the shed, picking up the Brown Precision along the way and slipping its strap over one shoulder.
When they emerged from the wreck, the prisoner shaded his eyes with a quickly raised hand and let out a pained hiss. “Shit, I forgot how hot that damn thing was.”
Frank idly looked up as if to make certain the other man was referring to the sun in such unfamiliar terms.
“It just the two of you here, boss?” the wild man asked.
“Don’t call me that,” Cole said.
“Then what should I call you?”
Having only taken five steps away from the wreck, Cole stopped and turned to face him. “My name’s Cole and this is Frank.”
“Everyone calls me Asher,” the prisoner said as he stuck out his hand.
Cole shook the hand that was offered and wasn’t surprised by the other man’s strong, leathery grip. “Is Asher a first or last name?”
“That’s what these assholes that locked me up call me. Been a while since I met anyone else.”
Frank drew a long breath in through his nose and let it out with a hiss. “Humans are coming,” he said while nodding toward the north. “Some from that way. Others from the east. Those are driving in a vehicle burning diesel fuel.”
“Ol’ Gorn here is pretty damn helpful,” Asher said.
Cole smirked and turned toward the west.
Scowling, Frank asked, “Who is Gorn?”
“A reptile guy from the original Star Trek series,” Cole replied.
Asher started walking in Cole’s footsteps. “Don’t worry, bud,” he said while slapping Frank’s shoulder. “Gorn was an ass kicker.”
Frank slumped down until he dropped to all fours and scampered ahead of both of the other two. Even though Cole and Asher had broken into a quick jog, Frank quickly shot past them and disappeared into the tree line at the base of the canyon wall.
“He’s a Squam, right?” Asher asked.
“That’s right.”
“I used to hunt them bastards down in the bayou. He ever steps out of line, just use some brown sugar to lure him into whatever trap you like. Every Gorn I ever met loves ‘em some brown sugar.”
“So you’ve been a Skinner for a while?” Cole asked.
“Yeah. More recently, I been a rat in a box.”
“How long were you in there?”
As Asher thought about that, the only sounds to be heard were the pounding of his and Cole’s feet against the ground. Soon, the engine that Frank had smelled growled in the distance.
“You got a way out of here?” Asher asked.
“We’ll put some distance between us and this plane, get up and out of this canyon and make our way back to the main road. If we can’t get to the truck we used to get here, we’ll find another one somewhere nearby. Shouldn’t be hard.”
“What about after that? I got some business to tend to in the States. I’ll be lookin’ forward to getting back home.”
Cole glanced over to him and asked, “Back to the States? As in the United States?”
“Best ones there is!”
“We’re in Wyoming.”
Asher’s pace slowed to a trot, then to a walk and finally he came to a stop while placing his hands upon his hips. Turning in place, he looked up at the canyon walls as if they’d just sprouted on either side of him. “Wyoming? Shit! Those motherless fucks had me thinking I was somewhere in Russia!”
Now Cole looked up at the tree-covered terrain. “Russia? Really?”
“Or Yugoslavia. Or…hell I don’t know. Somewhere other than Wy-fuckin’-oming!” Asher started running again with fresh resolve. His eyes were set on the canyon in front of him so intently that he seemed ready to grab onto the closest rock wall and climb all the way to the top without breaking stride. “All the rest is probably bullshit too.”
Cole ran to catch up with him and asked, “What else did they tell you?”
“A while ago, some of ‘em made it sound like the whole world came fallin’ down. Wolves runnin’ all over the place. The Army blowing up cities left ‘n right. Real apocalyptic shit, but I never believed none of that. I know a mind game when I hear one.”
“Hate to break it to you, but that stuff is true.”
“Right. We’ll see about that.”
After several solid minutes of running, they found a spot in the canyon littered with large chunks of twisted metal, broken shards of plastic and electric wiring. Some of the things laying in front of them were more recognizable. Padded seats, a large tire and dozens of pieces of baggage were also scattered on the ground. Everything was covered in mold, mud and other grime that had collected over the course of what could have been anywhere from a few months to a couple of years.
“This must be where that plane first hit,” Cole said as he looked up to a large gouge that had been taken out of the side of the canyon.
Asher’s eyes were fixed on the ground as he waded through an area covered by destroyed suitcases and shredded seats. “Surprised there ain’t any bodies lying around. Probably went down a while ago.”
“Not necessarily,” Cole said. “The bodies would have been found and dragged off to a den somewhere.”
“Right,” Asher chuckled. “Werewolf apocalypse.”
Cole had to kick over only a few of the dislodged aircraft seats to find what he was looking for. He stooped down, picked up what he’d uncovered and showed it. The bone was long and curved, obviously a rib, and was gouged along every inch of its length. He tossed it to Asher who quickly examined it.
“Something chewed the hell out of this,” Asher said.
“And this one too,” Cole said as he found a larger bone that had been snapped in half. “One pack came through and had a feast. If there were more than that, we would have found a few Half Breed skulls laying around.”
“There isn’t time to scavenge,” Frank said from above them. He crouched on one of the many shallow ledges that had been formed when the tail section of the plane had scraped against the rock. From a distance, that part of the canyon looked as if it had been slashed by a giant claw. “This is a good place to climb. I can help you one at a time to make it to the top even faster.”
“You go first,” Asher said. “I need to catch my breath.”
Even though the prisoner didn’t seem to be breathing especially hard, Cole nodded and walked over to the charred section of the canyon wall. He found several foot and handholds near the base. There were even lengths of wire snagged in some of the rougher sections, which could have been put there by any survivors from the crash who’d made their way out. When there wasn’t much of anything to grab on to, Frank crawled down to lend him a hand.
“He seems…unstable,” the Squam said as he lifted Cole to the next ledge.
Once he was there, Cole stood on the rock jutting from the wall and looked down to find Asher digging through one of the many piles of luggage beneath a wide section of bent, rusted metal. From higher ground, that piece looked like it had once been part of a wing. “He’s been locked in a box for a long time,” Cole said. “I was locked up for a while in a regular cell and felt like I was starting to come unglued. Unstable might not quite cover what that guy is. Let’s give him a little space for a while.”
“Is he what you were expecting to find?”
Cole sighed and looked all the way up to the wall stretching above him. “I don’t know yet. He’s a Skinner, though, and we need all of those we can get. Do me a favor and keep an eye on him, though. Between the two of us we should be able to watch him pretty good.”
“Watch for what, exactly?”
“Who the hell knows?”
After that, Cole devoted all of his strength and breath to getting to the top of that canyon. With Frank’s help, it took about half the time it would have if he’d been on his own. Once he’d completed the ascent, he could see a wide, charred path leading to the edge. Bits of wreckage were strewn about, but only scraps compared to what lay at the bottom of Tensleep. Cole followed the wide gouge that had been cut into the ground, trying to imagine how the plane had skidded along that trail, falling apart along the way, to wind up even further down where the fuselage now rested.
Frank made his way back down again, leaving Cole to scan the surrounding area using his rifle’s scope. There was some movement in the direction of the main wreck but not enough for Cole to signal down for the other two to pick up their pace. Surely, Frank and Asher were going as quickly as they dared. To the southwest, Cole heard an occasional engine, but that didn’t mean a whole lot. Highway 16 was fairly well traveled since there was currently a lull in pack traffic through that part of the state. More than likely, The Vigilant had taken precautions to steer Half Breeds away from their little hideaway.
“Drop it,” Frank snarled from below Cole’s position.
Picturing the other Skinner pointing a gun at Frank’s head, Cole swung the barrel of his rifle over the side and pointed it down to find Frank clinging to the rock wall like something from the pages of a comic book. Instead of a weapon, Asher held on to a pink and purple carryon bag by its collapsible handle.
“It ain’t that heavy,” Asher insisted. “You can lift us both.”
“We can move faster without it.”
Even from a distance, the almost feral rage on Asher’s face was easy enough to see as he snarled, “We’re almost there, goddammit!”
“Can you toss it up here?” Cole asked.
Both of the other two looked up at him. Asher smiled, and Frank shook his head while muttering to himself as he stretched out his free hand. With a heave, Asher tossed the bag up into Frank’s waiting hand. With an even stronger heave, Frank tossed the carryon up toward the ledge.
Cole’s intention had been to make a convincing effort before ultimately missing the bag and letting it fall. Instead, he managed to grab it by the extended handle. He was so surprised to have caught the damn thing, that he held on to it for a couple of seconds. Dropping it after that would have been an obvious move on his part. Although he didn’t care about upsetting the feelings of a cracked prisoner, it was simply easier at that point for Cole to pull the bag the rest of the way up and set it aside. By the time he’d done so, Frank was up there with him.
Perching at the top of the canyon like a gothic statue, Frank reached down to grab Asher by the arm and drag him up. As soon as he was on solid ground, Asher hurried over to the carryon and patted it. “This was the best one I could find,” he said. “Real pretty and damn durable to have made it through that crash!”
Frank walked over to him and unzipped the carryon to sift through its contents. “Was this really necessary?” he asked.
“I been wearin’ the same clothes since I was caught,” Asher said. “Hell yeah, it’s necessary! Not like those passengers are gonna need any of this stuff.”
“Let’s just get moving,” Cole said. “You want to bring a suitcase?” he told Asher. “Then you’re the one carrying it.”
“Fine by me,” Asher replied. He then set the pastel carryon down onto the little wheels at its base and pulled it along behind him as if he was walking across an airport to make a connecting flight.
They walked in relative silence for a few miles. Cole watched the road while Frank scouted ahead and Asher dragged his bag. Every so often, they could hear a car coming. When that happened, Cole and Asher hurried to the trees growing alongside the road and hunkered down. They were crouching behind some bushes after hearing what sounded like a semi approaching from the east when Asher asked, “You think Gorn is comin’ back?”
“If he wanted to ditch me, he could have done it way before now,” Cole replied.
“They eat their young, you know.”
“What?”
“The Squams. They eat their young. I’ve seen it.” Asher shrugged before adding, “’Course, could have been that the ones I was tracking at the time were just crazy. They also ate a few dogs, part of a tree stump and most of an old Frigidaire.” When Cole looked over at him, Asher nodded and laughed. “Swear to Christ. It was the big part too. The fridge. Not the freezer.”
“Weird.”
“That’s one word for it.”
The semi they’d heard rounded a bend and rumbled past them without slowing. The trailer bore the name of an auto parts manufacturer and was open at the back. Cole spotted two people sitting at the rear of the trailer, looking out at the road behind them over the top of assault rifles held to their shoulders.
Once they were gone, Cole said, “Looks clear.” He stood up, worked a kink from his back and started walking around the bushes.
Asher stayed put, hugging his pink and purple carryon. “You weren’t shitting me,” he said. “About the whole apocalypse thing.”
“Everyone likes to call it the apocalypse, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Not yet, anyway.”
“But the shifters are running loose. The air reeks of them!” Asher’s eyes bounced from point to point, faster and faster until they were rattling in their sockets. “It just don’t feel right out here. Feels…empty. Are we the only ones left? Us and those pieces of shit who kept me in that box?”
“No. We’re not the only ones.”
“Who could survive if those things cut loose? I mean…that’s always been the big scare. Every Skinner fights to keep that from happening.”
“Things could have been a lot worse,” Cole said as the all-too-familiar ghosts reached out to rake icy fingers through his chest.
“Where’s the military? Did they get wiped out too?”
“They took a hit, but they’re still pulling something together. I’ll get into it later, once we’re farther from here.”
But Asher was too distracted by his thoughts as he took in the world around him. “They should just nuke this whole fucking place.”
“Already tried that,” Cole said. “Melted a bunch of Half Breeds and burned a bunch of cities, but the Full Bloods lived. Spotters saw them bolt from the spots targeted by the nukes seconds before impact. Must have heard the missiles coming or smelled them. Who the hell knows? Some say one or two Full Bloods killed each other in the last year, but there’s more.”
“Full Bloods,” Asher snarled as his eyes narrowed into fiery slits. “Those shit bags who locked me up were real interested in them. Every so often, they’d crank open the door to that hole in the ground and question me about Full Bloods.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Not a goddamn thing. That’s how I lived this long.”
“Those shit bags are called Vigilant,” Cole said. “They’re disciples of Jonah Lancroft.”
“Yeah, they talked about him a lot. Kept tellin’ me I owed Lancroft my life just because I’m a Skinner. I even met the old prick once. At least, I met some dude who claimed to be Lancroft.”
“What did he want from you?”
Asher glanced over to him and then looked back down at his bag. He unzipped it, peeled off his t-shirt and stuck it into the carryon before pulling out another one. The new shirt was dark brown with horizontal green stripes and fit him like a pup tent. “He wanted the same thing the rest of ‘em wanted.”
“To track Full Bloods?”
Snapping his eyes up to glare at Cole, Asher seemed prepared to jump at him again. Instead, he zipped the carryon shut and swept some of the greasy braids away from his face. “Yeah,” he said. “That.”
Another vehicle was coming down the road from the direction the semi had just gone. Cole recognized the sputtering roar of his Ford pickup and brought his rifle to his shoulder in case anyone else was trying to run it off the road.
“That’s why you came, right?” Asher asked. “To get me to work for you? Maybe teach you what I know?”
“Partly,” Cole admitted. “I’ve been trying to find a way to get to one specific Full Blood ever since the day the world was flushed down the toilet.”
“Which was…how long ago?”
Cole had to think about that. The first several months after losing Paige were a blur of terrible memories and agony, blended together like watercolors smeared by pain. His time in Cody was necessary and allowed him to pull himself together somewhat, but those days formed a straight, uneventful line fading into one long, dry routine. Sick of thinking about both ends of that spectrum, he said, “Right around two and a half years. Give or take.”
“Christ.” Shaking himself out of his thoughts, Asher said, “Finding me was only part of your reason for coming here?”
The Ford had pulled over to the side of the road and was waiting there. When Cole looked through his scope, he could see Frank hunched over the wheel, glancing up at the rearview mirror. There was still nobody else on the road.
“All I knew at first was that there was a way to track Full Bloods that was better than anything any other Skinner has done before,” Cole explained. “Then I heard there was only one person who knew about all the specifics. Later, I found out that person was being held by The Vigilant. I was held by The Vigilant too.”
“No shit?”
Cole nodded. “They wanted something I had and put me through hell to get it.”
“Something you had or something you have?”
“Something they never got,” Cole replied as though he was spitting every word into someone’s face. “They were holding me in an old prison. Me, Frank and a few others. After we got away from there, I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open for any word about other places like that. When I heard about this one, I stepped up my effort to find it so I could hit these pricks where they live, get what I need as far as finding that Full Blood and blow another Vigilant hellhole to pieces.”
“I like the blowing up part,” Asher said. “Should we go back and light a fuse?”
“Nah. That place is already done. There’s no way The Vigilant will keep it running now that it’s been found. The location was pretty much all it had going for it.”
“I thought it was done when the plane crashed.”
“What?”
“The plane. The one on top of my hole in the ground. Didn’t you see it?”
“Yeah, I saw it. I just…” Cole thought about it for a second and then felt like an idiot. All the evidence he’d seen made it look as if the crash had happened after the packs took over. Plenty of planes were downed once the Full Bloods found a way to spark the change in humans from a distance. Pilots shifted or were killed by passengers who’d turned, and the planes started to fall. If Asher didn’t know about all of that, then he must have been underground for a while before the plane had crashed.
“I heard the crash a while back and thought the shit bags had finally given up on me and decided to blow the place up. Then I heard scraping, machines, workers. Every so often, a bunch of ‘em would show up and stomp around over me. I think they were meeting about something. I tried to listen, but some of the other voices drowned them out.”
“They were setting up a base,” Cole said. “I bet that’s it! The plane crashed pretty close to your prison, and they decided to fortify that spot and grow it into a full base. That way they got a nice, strong structure in a defensible spot, and from the air or anywhere else, it would just look like a wreck. Not too shabby.”
Asher shrugged. “Or they could’ve been building a bigger prison. This one’s been here for decades.”
Turning to him, Cole asked, “Decades?”
“At least. Some of the markings inside my box went all the way back to April eleventh of seventy-three.”
“That far back? You’re sure?”
“It ain’t like I had much more to read. The last time they let me have my own light down there was a while back, though. At least a few months.”
Cole looked through his scope once again. Frank’s expression seemed less anxious than before, but wasn’t exactly easy to read. “Doesn’t matter now. This place is still done.”
“Not necessarily,” Asher said. “Looks like they’re still bringing in truckloads of men and guns.”
“Those are just the reinforcements that were called in when we busted you out of there.”
“What happened today may have been enough to shut this place down before. Now, though, it seems they can get away with a whole lot more. I mean, it ain’t like the Highway Patrol is making regular stops around here. Even the military must have better things to do than worry about some bunch of crazies keeping a few people locked up, especially if they’re only human crazies.”
“You sure you couldn’t hear much while you were locked up?” Cole asked.
“I heard some things, but I was on my own a lot longer than I was locked up here.”
At the first sign of movement further down the road, Cole took a quick look and said, “Frank’s bringing the truck this way. Get ready to jump on.”
“Them shit bags had plenty of time to drag a goddamn passenger plane to where they wanted without bein’ noticed. They’re drivin’ around like they’re the goddamn Army! You think losing me will really be enough for them to pack up their stuff and leave?”
“We know where this place is,” Cole said while standing up to signal Frank. “We hit them pretty hard. That’ll have to be enough for now.”
Asher stood up as well. “Eh, you’re just like all the others. You ain’t got the stomach to do what needs to be done.”
“We came and got you! What the hell else do you want?”
“How many of them shit bags did you kill? I saw ‘em laying on the floor, but they were still breathin’! What were you keeping them alive for? You figured on feeding ‘em to the Half Breeds? Damn! That would have been great!”
As the Ford rolled to a stop near them, Cole said, “Shut up, and get in.”
After taking a moment to think about it, Asher shook his head hard enough to get all of his braids swinging back and forth. “Nah. I prefer to be on my own.”
“How about this?” Cole added while pointing the Brown Precision at him. “Please.”
“You got food? Something good like pancakes or waffles or corned beef hash?”
“We should be able to scrape something up.”
“Why are you waiting?” Frank called out from the truck. “We need to go before more of them drive down this road!”
Asher looked at the truck and then looked down the road toward Tensleep Canyon. Next, his eyes wandered in the opposite direction without once giving the slightest bit of attention to the large rifle in Cole’s hands. “You think we could burn these guys some other time?”
“Trust me,” Cole replied. “All three of us want to burn them. We’ll have to wait for another good chance, but we’ll have plenty to keep us busy in the meantime.”
Now Asher looked at Cole, studying him with eyes that were a milky shade of green. Finally, he smiled and said, “The two of you seem like a couple of real prime specimens.”
“I know where to find a large pancake breakfast,” Frank said.
Asher clapped his hands together and shoved Cole’s rifle aside so he could climb into the truck. “Me and Gorn out for flapjacks! This apocalypse ain’t so bad.”
Cole climbed in after him and shut the door.
“Sorry it took so long,” Frank said. “There were other trucks filled with armed men heading for the canyon. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.”
Suddenly, Asher snapped his head up and clambered over Cole to force his way out through the passenger door. By the time Cole had jumped out after him, Asher had disappeared into the bushes. Almost immediately, Asher returned dragging his pink and purple carryon behind him.
“Can’t forget my new threads!” Asher said before tossing the case into the back.