Trepidation | Trepidation Trilogy | The Empty World Sequence

Fourteen

There had been animals crying and howling all through the night and few of the tribe, or the campers about the area, had slept peacefully. Danjel had sat up, half-asleep, in a folding chair beside the trailer's door, with rifle in hand, wrapped in his long gray suede cloak over wool and leather jacket because the nights were still quite cold.

      The howling was driving him mad, or nearly so. Wolves made him particularly nervous. When he had moved to Varna and driven taxis, there had been many trips in the area of the Carpathians, and that area was, to this day, known to be heavily populated by the Wolfbreed. You could not tell them from real wolves when in wolven form, unless very sharp-sighted and trained to know the subtle signs. Danjel did not know which he feared more, the feral wolves or the more intelligent ones that could spring up onto two legs. The really scary thing was that, in the Carpathians, people told tales of finding stranded young men or women in the woods, who later shifted into wolven form and ate people alive.

      It was a dark night and the moon was full, which made the fear worse. The Germans, Alaric, Merideth, Claudia all of these new BCG crew, they seemed to sleep well, but for the waking with the occasional loudness of the cries. They did not have large packs of Breed in Germany, only the most civilized families, who had long ago taken to cities and passed for human. Leonore had grown up close enough to the mountains, in Krakow. She spent the night awake near the fire, scanning the trees.  Robbie tried to sleep, but every few hours wandered from the trailer to see that Leonore was well.

      Twice, the cries of baby Maureen joined the howls, and Adelle would walk her back and forth over the site saying, "Poor things."

      When he couldn't sleep at all, Danjel took up the ring of thorns he had been crafting and carved individual thorns from the twisting branches where he wanted smoothness.

      Close to dawn, the inhuman cries grew louder, as if directly outside their ring of firelight. Danjel balanced the ring of thorns on his head and took up his rifle. Leonore pulled a knife from somewhere along her leg. "What's gotten into them?" Leonore asked.

      Danjel shook his head. He didn't know. Just as the sun was rising, he saw the first of them. Leonore had to see the same thing, for she screamed aloud, which brought Patrick and Robbie both running outside half-dressed. The woods were littered with corpses, all seemingly human. Screams sounded from other campsites throughout the woods.

      Danjel beat on the side of the trailer to wake the others. As soon as there was a noise of waking he left to look more closely at the bodies. And yet still, there were howls and cries from a slight distance west. Danjel came to a clearing on the water. Many of the bodies were naked, as if they had once been clothed in fur. Some wore a type of fatigues, camouflaged for the season and mix of trees. Fallen about them were various tools and weapons.

      Danjel bent to one of the clothed bodies. It had bites torn from its flesh. It had been a real man, a man with a name and maybe a family. Good or evil, he had been a man. And the man had chunks of flesh missing from his gut and thighs, long parallel lines of blood along the back of one arm. Danjel dug carefully into the clothing. He felt a presence behind him.

      It was only Leonore. "Vulkodlak," she said, "I have met a few before, not these personally, I mean..."

      "But you know what they look like," Danjel finished. He took some ammunition, bullets made of silver, from the man's pocket. He reached toward the head then and removed the goggles. Night vision certainly, maybe infrared. There was another sort of gasp behind him.

      "Claudia," Leonore said.

      Danjel stood slowly and turned. Claudia looked hurt. "Are you wounded?" he asked as he moved toward her. She did not answer immediately but looked toward the clothed corpses. "Claudia!"