CHAPTER EIGHT

FERAL AUX

 

 

LED BY EZRA Pound, eight males and dams made their way out of Zoologischer Garten station early the following day.

It had been a long night. Pound had spent most of it sleeping, retiring after a brief conversation with Leer and ordering the expedition to the Warschauer Pack for the following morning.

His lieutenants had spent hours comparing notes on the tale, talking in hushed whispers in Pound’s den and adjoining passages.

Double sentries had been posted at all points on the perimeter of their territory.

They had talked of the sounds that had been heard and of the missing sentry, and they had examined the nicks and dents in Ward Cleaver’s weapon to try to discover what must have made them. They’d had no answers that they liked.

Leer had stayed for an hour after Pound retired, listening to the other Aux. When he left, Evelyn had gone with him.

The sea of waiting Aux had parted for them both. No one had touched Evelyn as she left the chamber, and no one had attacked her in the passage outside. They had not spoken to her or made eye contact, but they had looked at her with something a little closer to respect. She was no longer ‘the useless omega bitch’. She was something far more frightening.

Evelyn had never been so far from Old Zoo before. She had never been chosen for a major foray into Berlin, never outside, not like this.

She hadn’t had to ask to be part of the war band that made the long walk around to visit the Warschauer Pack. Ezra Pound had insisted on it.

She was determined not to be afraid of him, or of his motivation in adding her to the war band. Zoo Pack made regular visits to trade and barter with the Warschauer Pack. One of the female scrappers was out injured, Evelyn was a good fit and Leer had advocated for her.

That should have been enough for her, but Pound didn’t like Hearers and he liked Believers even less. Perhaps it was a simple case of ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. Pound was a pragmatic leader, after all, even if he wasn’t a great thinker.

Evelyn War would be safe enough with Ezra Pound and the war band, assuming she could keep her mouth shut. She was eager to learn whatever she could about the change being wrought in the world. And, most importantly, she trusted Leer. She could tell him what she found on her return to Old Zoo. He would have a story to tell. He would always have a tale to tell.

Evelyn was dressed in borrowed clothes. All the outdoor clothes were shared; they were in limited supply. No one could survive in the sub-zero temperatures for long without layers of felt and fur, and both were hard to come by.

The felt great coat she had been given came below her knees, but should have been longer. It fit snugly over her jacket, however, adding warmth, and the funnel-shaped collar covered her face up to her eyes. She could smell the breath of a dozen other Aux in the dense wool of the collar, but it had been worn exclusively by dams and the smell was sweet.

The fur cap was rank, worn by too many terrified young beta dogs, and she was glad that she was able to squeeze it on over her own head cloth.

The pelt she wore around her shoulders, covering much of her chest and back, was also old and greasy, but the cold air kept most of its stench away from her nose, and the collar did the rest.

The entire Zoo Pack had gathered to see them off. Evelyn glanced over her shoulder at the crowded platform as she walked away with the war band. She saw troubled faces. Edward Leer stood prominently among the Pack. He nodded to Evelyn.

Evelyn caught sight of Ben Gun among the onlookers. She thought about how worried she’d been for him that night, worried enough to go looking for him. But she’d found other things instead. Ben Gun, it turned out, had snuck into a service tunnel and been perfectly safe.

Evelyn had wanted to beat him for causing her so much aggravation, but there was something disarmingly spirited about him that stayed her hand.

She knew that the pup had made a new slingshot for himself, because she’d heard him practising with it, although he’d stopped aiming at the tiles on the station walls. He hadn’t stopped following her around, though.

Now he would have to. He wasn’t part of the war band. He had to stay at Old Zoo.

The war band travelled along Track Two underground as far as Wittenbergplatz, and out over the wet lip of the opening where Evelyn had sat for so long. It seemed like an age since she had been there, though it was barely a couple of days.

She could hear nothing, except for the sounds the Pack made in their soft boots. Then she heard the intermittent ping of dripping water outside.

It was still cold, but the sun was bright, brighter than it had ever been, and the street surface was slick.

The rabble of Aux was constantly on guard, moving and covering each other in the open areas, and sidling along the narrowest streets. They hugged the buildings and kept to the shadows, following the course of Track Two as it wended its way across the city above ground. The track was invisible beneath its thick layer of black ice, but its route was clear from the shape the ice made over and around it.

There were no signs of habitation, and no trace of other pack activity nearby.

The slick streets were treacherous, the ice slippery beneath the soles of their boots, and the Aux cursed under their breath as they slipped and slid. This new form of ice was unfamiliar to them, and unwelcome.

The buildings looked different, too. They were patchy, showing too much of their own skins when they had previously always been covered in hard, dry frost. The areas most exposed to the bright new light of the sun were beginning to thaw.

Evelyn had been on the streets of Berlin for several minutes, but her head cloth and the collar of her great coat were still damp with her breath. They weighed heavy around her neck, pulling her head into an unnatural stoop. The moisture should have frozen by now, should have stiffened the felt, but it showed no signs of happening any time soon.

There was a sound. The eight Aux threw their backs against the wall of a high building on the shaded side of the narrow street.

The sound echoing around the empty city streets was more a boom than a moan, and it was followed by a creak that seemed to last for several seconds.

Something was moving. The ice was adjusting. Only Evelyn and one other member of the war band, who’d been in Wittenbergplatz with her a couple of days earlier, had ever heard anything like it before.

Two or three of the other packers looked to Evelyn, who nodded soberly, reassuring them that she knew what the sound was and that it couldn’t hurt them. Not directly, at least.

Ezra Pound did not look in her direction, but as the sound diminished, he gestured for them to move on. He relinquished point to Thomas Meltdown, his second in command, and moved back through the advancing troop to make sure each member of his war band was in good cheer.

When he reached Evelyn, he seemed at a loss for something to say. Then the moment was gone. Ezra Pound’s ears flattened and he turned warily.

This moan was feral.

This moan was Aux.

The creatures were stooped and ragged. Their clothes, if they could be called clothes, hung from their bodies in rags, stripped from their limbs, torn and bloody.

The feral Aux were on all fours like beasts, not like scrappers, not like Aux at all. They stalked at the edges of Track Two where it ran above ground through Kreuzberg. The creatures were skin and bone, starved and fierce with fright.

Ezra Pound stepped out of formation when he saw the wild dogs, a double-blade in each hand. He filled his chest, threw out his arms and bellowed a great roar.

“Get whet!”

It was a threat as much as an instruction to his war band, and one that would have dispersed most attacking forces.

But these Aux were too afraid to quit, too wild to surrender. These Aux were so terrified they had only two things on their minds: to kill or to die trying.

The first of the beasts threw itself forwards, lunging from the chest, using its arms as forelegs, a single blade strapped to its back.

The blade did not glint in the overpowering brightness of the sun, as a clean blade should. This weapon had not been tended to for far too long. It was dull and old, and had not been cleaned or oiled in days or weeks.

These Aux had lost their discipline.

These Aux were feral, and very dangerous.

As the lunging beast flexed its right arm, reaching back for its weapon, Ezra Pound took three long, bounding steps towards it.

He leapt, two double blades swinging, severing the shoulder joint across the beast’s right armpit and the artery in its neck to the left. The Aux howled and died, falling limp onto the ice.

Another followed, and another, and then three more. Soon, the Zoo Pack war band was deep in the scrapping, swinging blades at close quarters.

The skirmish was all confusion as the feral Aux fought low, on all fours, slicing as often into legs as they did into guts.

Evelyn’s stilettos were tucked into her boots, and, for the first time, she was glad that the great coat was short. A blade in each hand, she crossed her wrists as a small, wiry beta dog found his way under her neighbour’s guard and brought a blade up towards her.

She uncrossed her hands in one swift, decisive move, throwing her arms out wide. She made two diagonal cuts across the youth’s throat, very nearly decapitating him. Hot blood flowed onto the ice at her feet, and spread alarmingly.

Evelyn stepped back as the blood made a rush for her boots. She had never seen blood flow like that before. Blood cooled fast outside. It congealed and the flow became sluggish. Pools of blood should be thick and dense and slow moving. Blood should not spread so fast, nor move so freely; it disgusted her.

The six feral Aux were killed in no more than a couple of minutes. Ezra Pound disposed of one more after the first, and Thomas Meltdown took two also.

The highest ranking dam made a messy kill, injuring her attacker, half-disembowelling him with a clumsy blade defence before finishing him off. There was too much viscera and a lot of blood and bile spreading together on the slippery ice.

The dam almost retched when she was done, splashed with a great wad of the muck from her opponent’s stomach.

Evelyn had made the final kill.

Ezra Pound looked at her, but said nothing. One or two of the other packers nodded at her, and the oldest bared his teeth in a sort of smile, before fist bumping her upper arm a little too hard.

Far from a ‘useless omega bitch’, she’d become useful. Evelyn War had won her place in the pack. Evelyn War could scrap. Tougher and tough.

The war band moved on and descended into the tunnels of Track Twelve. They were all relieved to be below ground again, even though this was no man’s land territory.

Built last, Track Twelve was among the smallest, deepest and darkest in the U-Bahn systems. There were no escape routes, as the unmanned service tunnels required only the space for small-scale machinery. They were useless for the Aux.

They disliked using the newest tracks, Twelve through Sixteen, which is why no packs had ever made their homes in them. All the packs travelled in them, however, when they had to.

Several of the war band loosened fastenings in the layers of their clothes to let the air circulate, unused to the warmth of the sun and the wet of their own breath and sweat. Evelyn’s head cloth and collar were still heavy with moisture, but she preferred to leave them in place.

She welcomed the darkness, though, and the familiar echo of kilometres of empty tunnels threading away into the distance. She welcomed the layered tones of grey all around her, and she breathed more easily in the confined spaces below ground.

Threat could come from only two directions: ahead and behind. The ping of falling water droplets echoed as much as every sound they made. When Pound gave his orders – in the stentorian tones that he never wavered from – those, too, reverberated in the cramped space. The solid, curving walls clung almost too closely around the small group of Aux, as they walked two abreast down the track.

Pound’s confidence grew quickly. He was Alpha, he was top dog, and soon the war band was jogging down the narrow tunnel, making good time on the journey to Warschauer. He never conjectured about the future. He never slowed his pace. As far as Ezra Pound, leader of the Zoo Pack, was concerned, every threat was behind them. That was the confidence of the Alpha dog.

Evelyn kept to the rear of the pack. She was exposed to any threat from behind, but they were moving quickly. It was what they were running towards that alarmed her.

Dorothy Barker called out and stopped. She had seen something.

The war band halted.

Ezra Pound and Thomas Meltdown came back to see what she’d found: a mangled Aux crossbow.

The lathes were bent double and the stirrup was buckled. Dorothy Barker held it in her hands, saying nothing, her mouth open, her face, free of its head cloth, pale.

“How?” she finally asked.

There was no answer.

The crossbows were virtually indestructible, handed down from one scrapper to another through the generations. It took great skill to forge new ones, and they were seldom made, not least because they rarely needed to be made. They needed to be looked after and strings had to be replaced from time to time, but the crossbow itself did not wear out and could not be destroyed.

This crossbow was warped and broken, and utterly useless.

“Not how... what?” said Evelyn, eventually. It was the only answer.

Eight heads rose as one as they all heard the whistle echo down the tunnel. It was a long way off, but no less threatening for that.

Evelyn looked to Pound.

“How far?” she asked.

“How far what?”

“To Warschauer Pack?”

“The tunnels take us –” began Pound.

“Outside,” said Evelyn. “You heard it. We all heard it.”

“How is the bow, him broken?” asked Dorothy, still holding the crossbow.

Ezra Pound took the bow roughly from the scrapper and turned it over in his hands for several seconds while Evelyn looked on. She could not keep the pleading out of her eyes.

“How far?” she asked.

“The tunnels,” said Pound, his eyes still firmly on the weapon.

“It’s warm,” said Evelyn.

She did not expect Pound to hear her or listen to her. The other six Aux in the war band said nothing, either too stunned by the sight of the mangled crossbow or too in awe of their leader. Evelyn didn’t know and didn’t care which.

“How far?” she asked once more.

The whistle echoed again through the tunnels. It did not sound any closer, but the sound alone was enough to make the hairs rise on the backs of eight sturdy necks, despite head cloths, collars and pelts.

“It’s warm,” said Evelyn.

“We fought feral Aux,” said Pound. “We fought our own.”

“That’s what you do,” said Evelyn, unflinching. “You’re Alpha.”

She hated reminding Pound of his status in the Zoo Pack. She didn’t believe in him, and she hated manipulating him, but she’d do it if she had to.

She had to. Track Twelve was narrow and there was no escape into service tunnels. There was only behind and ahead. Behind would lose them ground. Ahead... That was where the whistling sounds were coming from.

They had to make alliances. There was strength in numbers.

Zoo Pack had always traded with Warschauer Pack. It was the nearest thing they had to an alliance. It was the first connection that Evelyn had a chance to exploit.

“Look at the crossbow. Be our leader, Alpha dog,” she said.

Evelyn couldn’t believe that she was flattering this slab of meat that the Zoo Pack followed. She couldn’t believe that she was betraying her father and herself to further their cause. She wondered whether the ends could justify the means. She wondered whether it was clever or foolish. It felt foolish.

Ezra Pound looked down at the crossbow for two or three more seconds that felt to Evelyn like an eternity. Then he threw the Aux weapon aside with an echoing clang.

“Up,” said Pound, and the single word echoed around the tunnel.

Evelyn War wished that he hadn’t spoken so vehemently, so loudly, in such a firm tone. She hoped Them hadn’t heard him.