|
Chapter One (Complete)
The hunter’s moon had just begun cresting Colorado’s Spanish Peaks when a black cloud of ravens lifted into the skies, cawing as they rose.
A thin strip of broken asphalt snaked toward the foot of the eastern peak, hidden beneath a matting of tall grass that forced its way through years ago. They swayed lazily in the night breeze, silver in the half-glow of moonlight. The road arced and disappeared beneath the Pinion Pines that had grown thick around the mountain’s natural irrigation. The aging asphalt fractured in wide bands where old roots had stretched under it and thickened. Patches of juniper thrived in the lines of exposed soil, fighting grass for inches of territory.
The ground lifted skyward, and two concrete escarpments rose on either side of the road to keep the loose earth at bay. Sickly mineral stains spilled over the edges of the damp-darkened concrete as it worked to keep itself a foot higher than the rising terrain. When they threatened to reach a dozen feet, the barriers terminated at a solid wall of steel.
The blast door loomed in the unnatural stillness of the forest, tucked into the foot of the mountain like a sleeping juggernaut. Angry blotches of rust boiled up to the steel’s surface, layers peeling away and sharing the disease with the asphalt below.
Somewhere down slope, the misplaced flock of ravens had taken to the air again. Their voices dimmed into the night as they flew for safer roosts.
A whisper of sound muttered from the door. Three muffled pops resonated from behind the steel. Several more bursts thrummed the backside of the door, growing more agitated. High pings jarred the surface of the steel itself, ringing it like a bell. Chips of rust jumped loose and peppered the juniper with each strike.
And then there was silence.
A moment passed where the quiet night was allowed to ease in. It was immediately cut short by a deep, muffled thunderclap from behind the blast door. The forest shuddered with a collective hiss.
Suddenly the blast door crept into motion, inching jerkily along a set of massive tracks embedded in its steel foundation. What scabs of rust remained were slowly scraped clean as the gate rolled leftward into a recess in the rock face. Undulating crimson light gradually spread onto the abandoned road while acrid black smoke heaved into the canopy of trees. The acrid odor of burning fuel and rubber mingled with musky pine.
A tall silhouette repeatedly broke the sliver of light, drawing an immediate response of gunfire. Voices barked desperate commands to one another, panic having already spread among them. The shadow appeared a second time, testing the growing gap with its arm. Almost immediately, a shot rang out, wetting the door with blood from the figure’s shoulder. He yelled, recoiling his arm and taking temporary shelter.
When the blast door had opened to just over a foot wide, the figure made his final attempt. His arm clutched the outer lip of the door and pulled. His chest ground against the corners of the door. Gunfire erupted behind him as he slid through. Just as he cleared the threshold, he felt a round punch him just below the ribs and throw a thin mist of blood into the moonlight.
His boot snagged on an uprooted piece of asphalt, and fell hard on his shoulder in a mix of stone and plant matter.
A black M9A1 pistol clicked against the road beneath his left hand. As he pushed himself up and moonlight fell around him, several shades of brown fur became visible on his hands and arms. The silver light caught the flicker of his downward-pointing tail, its tip resembling a pen dipped in ink. Blood had soaked his right sleeve and more of it had smeared onto the pistol. Leaf-green eyes stared wide at the expanse of forest before him, his muzzle slackening at the realization of what he had done.
Several black-clad soldiers poured out from the opening, each brandishing fully-automatic MP7s. Heavy boots worked their way into a perimeter, each man putting two pounds of pressure on a trigger that required three to shoot. Several seconds passed.
He was gone.
* * * *
Trinidad, Colorado
5:40am
The darkness of sleep became the darkness behind Vincent Delgado’s eyelids when the phone started to ring.
The irritating beetling repeated a second time, and a third. Vincent grudgingly became aware that it wouldn’t stop until he answered. His left hand groped across the night stand for the phone, his peripheral vision catching a glimpse of the time in the process. He thumbed the “Talk” button and rolled onto his back so he could speak.
He could taste something sour in his mouth as he said, “Hello?”
There was a short pause before a machine at the other end registered a response. An audible click in the headset told him he was likely being transferred to a real person. Solicitors had realized they could save heaps of their time by having a computer dial the numbers and wait for a response, rather than their employees. Vincent stared up at his bedroom ceiling as he waited, feeling just comfortable enough again to fall back asleep.
“Mister Delgado?” a woman’s voice came over the line, “This is CheckPoint Security calling. We’ve just received an alarm from your business’s front door. We need to verify that you or any of your employees are at the location.”
Vincent sat up and dragged his free hand through the thick of his black hair, “Which alarm is going off?”
“The front entrance, sir,” the woman repeated.
He forced himself to squint at his bedside clock again, straining to cut through the fog of exhaustion. Quarter to six. He racked his thoughts, remembered it was Friday today. The pharmacy opened at seven on weekdays. Trinidad was too small of a town to require early hours like that on its own, but being the only pharmacy within an hour’s drive for many smaller surrounding communities made for very unforgiving customers. Especially when Denver and Colorado Springs had hospitals that were very capable of mailing out prescriptions to anyone unwilling to drive his way. This wasn’t the first time someone on the morning shift had forgotten to disarm the system before unlocking the door.
“Sir,” the woman said, “Do you want me to contact your local police?”
For a moment he entertained the thought of having an officer sent over to scare the life out of his crew, but thought better of it. Going back to sleep was an option that had drifted out of reach once he had gotten his gears spinning.
“No, that’s alright. I’ll take a look,” he said, thanked the woman, and hung up.
He rubbed the grit out of his eyes and slid to his feet, taking stock of his room as he stifled a yawn.
His house was just a simple one-room, one-bath deal. His room sat at the end of a short hallway that branched out into a small kitchen area and a den that doubled as his dining room. He had spent some money painting the walls in each room a rich shade of honey, his bedroom and bathroom several hues lighter than the rest of the house. The carpet was original to the house when he bought it: a deep red shag rug that ran corner to corner. His mother had insisted he have it removed, but backed off when offered to pay the bill. In the end, the shag stayed.
After finishing a quick shower and some essential bodily functions, Vincent pulled on a pair of jeans from his dirty laundry and threw on his favorite “Queen” t-shirt. He unwrapped a Pop-Tart from its foil, jammed one in his mouth and slipped out the service door.
Trinidad was a small town even by rural standards. Main Street was a highway that briefly slowed traffic to less-than-lethal speeds, though it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to pass through town at sixty-plus. It took Vincent less than five minutes to get from his driveway to the empty parking lot he shared with a corner book store he’d never been in.
His flip-flops slapped his heels as he crossed to the front of the pharmacy, its plate-glass windows bearing several ads for over the counter drugs including Tylenol and Zyrtec. He could see from the sidewalk that the lights behind the cashier’s desk weren’t on, which struck him as unusual. He gave the handle on the front door a light shake. The door only resisted slightly, the door’s hydraulic closer hissing as the door moved away from the threshold.
As he pulled the door open, he became vividly aware of something warm and slick between his fingers. He jerked his hand away, his expression registering immediate disgust.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, and looked reluctantly at his hand.
Blood.
His stomach scrambled into his ribs, forcing him to swallow hard. He wiped the lukewarm gore onto the leg of his jeans and looked through the glass doors. He squinted through his own reflection in search of any movement, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he was afraid someone inside would hear it. He saw nothing out of the ordinary except for a now very obvious trail of blood droplets that led into the store, and the fragments of the bolt-lock scattered across the display floor.
Fear turned into worry. The drug problems in Denver and Colorado Springs hadn’t reached Trinidad yet, and even if they had chances were nobody would break into a local pharmacy if they knew how much DNA they were leaking. Someone was hurt.
Vincent pulled the door the rest of the way open with the tip of his flip-flops and let the door hiss shut behind him.
Droplets drew scattered paths between each aisle, growing thicker between their intersections. He looked down each one as he inched past, noticing that very few bottles and boxes had been disturbed. Whatever his burglar had been looking for, he seemed to have had something specific in mind. He hadn’t wasted time, either. The store was dead silent.
He found the mess in the First Aid aisle, closest to the cash registers. The speckles of blood had collected in small puddles near the center of the aisle, among several opened First-Aid kits. Larger pools of hydrogen peroxide and iodine gave off a strong chemical odor that forced several racking coughs from his lungs. He took a few steps back from the fumes.
A medical sewing kit lie open on the floor, the needle and a tendril of black nylon string drifting at the bottom of a bottle of peroxide.
Then something caught his eye. He lowered himself to one knee and squinted down at an expanding pond of peroxide. It was tinted pink with blood, and tiny bubbles were still frothing on the surface.
Sudden pain erupted between his shoulder blades. An instant later he was lying face-down on the floor with his attacker’s hand pressing down on his neck. The open bottle of peroxide had tipped over, its contents sloshing out in a growing pool that spread beneath his face and began to soak the front of his favorite shirt. The biting odor of the antiseptic mixed with the metallic stink of blood, teasing out another series of ragged coughs that sprayed the pink cocktail across the bottom shelf like a paint gun. The intruder pulled Vincent’s right hand to the small of his back, pinning it in place with his knee. His left arm was crushed beneath his own chest.
His attacker’s voice came in a bubbling growl, “How many are with you?”
Vince’s heart was pounding through his ribs. “I-I’m alone, I came alone!”
Several seconds ticked by, punctuated only by heavy breathing that came from somewhere above him. Adrenaline had flooded Vince’s bloodstream and his brain was already straining to take in as much information as it could.
Whoever this guy was, he had broken into a pharmacy for the same first-aid he could have gotten for free at the volunteer hospital the next town over. Then again, considering the amount of blood on the floor it made sense that he might have been in a hurry. But why shoot out the deadbolt when you could break the plate glass? Assuming that was how he had broken the lock, did the guy have a gun on him right now?
The sudden terror he felt eclipsed any fears he had of being robbed, and with it came the anger of knowing he wasn’t being given a fair choice.
If I’m going to die, I want to see it coming.
He drew the muscles in his neck together and jerked his head around hard enough that he could see as far as the tile ceiling in the corner of his eye. The creature above him came into even sharper focus.
Vince’s eyes flew open. Every muscle in his body went rigid.
Glaring back at him was the unmistakable face of a canine. Short, desert-colored fur covered a protruding muzzle capped by a black nose. Black lips only accented its set of very white and very prominent teeth. Its ears were pointed at him, only jerking away for a split second in response to the various noises the store made when it was this quiet. And its eyes, an unusual leaf-green. A color he had never known canines to have. Sandy fur covered what would have otherwise been a normal human torso. He noted two thick swaths of rusty bloodstains that had welled up from an injury in the canine’s right shoulder and a gash in his right side. The dark, matted fur trailed down under the waistline of black, military BDUs.
Werewolf, his brain supplied, but then, No, not wolf. Coyote.
The coyote’s not-quite-hand lifted and readjusted its grip around Vince’s neck, pressing his head back down into the puddle of antiseptic hard enough to make him see spots. The presence of claws against his skin was evident.
“What the hell are you?” Vince managed.
Calloused black pads at the tips of the coyote’s fingers flexed against Vince’s throat. “How did you know I was here?”
Vince hesitated.
The canine leaned down close enough for Vince to feel its breath. His voice was accented again by that guttural growl, “Tell me or I will kill you.”
The coyote produced a black semiautomatic from a holster on his belt and pressed it against the side of Vince’s head.
“You tripped the alarm-oh-God-I’m-sorry!” he sputtered.
Another moment of silence drifted between the two.
“I own this store,” Vince added, “People… the security company calls me if anything—“
The coyote drew the pistol away, and Vince fell silent when he heard it being reholstered. Before he could register what was happening, the coyote had already gotten to his feet and was walking toward the far end of the aisle. It picked up the black bundle of clothes Vince had seen lying there moments earlier, and draped himself in the smaller of the two. A black t-shirt that was torn in the two same places that its owner had been injured.
“You need to forget you ever saw me,” the coyote said as it carefully drew its injured arm through the shirt.
Vince rose slowly from the floor, half the effort it took went to keeping his knees from buckling.
The canine drew the outer half of his uniform over his shoulders. Bits of dirt and pine sprinkled onto the linoleum floor as he worked his arms through the long sleeves.
“Tell them you were robbed, or a homeless person forced their way in. Make something up. Empty the safe yourself if you have to,” the coyote continued, his eyes darting to the windows and the empty street outside.
“Tell who?” Vince said, and then paused. As the coyote adjusted his uniform, a silver name patch straightened into view. He whispered the name as he read it, “Sebastian.”
The canine’s green eyes flicked to him and stayed there. Vince looked back at him, the name stamping the creature’s existence into firm reality.
“Forget I was here,” Sebastian repeated, and walked behind the pharmacy counter and into the dimness of the back room.
A door further back in the store whined open, drawing cool air through the deadbolt-sized hole in the front before slamming shut.
|
Login
FAQ
Search
