CHAPTER 31

Rakkim got back into the car, soaked, water dripping off his goatee. “You have a choice.”

Sarah looked out through the windows. The men surrounded the car, axes and clubs resting on their shoulders.

“You can stay here with the squatters-”

“No.”

Rakkim held up a hand. “They owe me a debt. You’ll be safe. If my plan for the assassin works out, I’ll come back for you. If it doesn’t…they’ll get you back to the city.”

“Why not have them help you kill him?”

“It’s my responsibility.”

Sarah’s eyes glinted in the red lights of the instrument panel. “Mine too.”

Rakkim started the car. Switched on the lights. The men had disappeared back into the darkness.

“What have you got planned?”

Rakkim kept his eyes on the road. It was raining harder now, and he had to keep his speed to thirty-five. He took an abrupt right turn onto a single-lane cutoff, one of the many unmarked roads. Lightning flashed at the base of the nearby mountains, a photo flash of the bad road. “You ever heard of the term werewolves?”

“Horror movies from before the transition. Full moon, hair and fangs-”

“Not that kind. Those werewolves are made up. The ones I’m talking about are real.” The headlights barely illuminated the darkness, the wipers making little headway. “Werewolves…that’s what the squatters call the ultraviolent predators who live out here. Packs of drug maniacs, rapists, and thrill killers-”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of them?”

“There’s plenty you haven’t heard of. A week ago I thought the Zionist Betrayal was a historical fact.”

“Why doesn’t the government send the army in to wipe them out? The squatters aren’t a danger to the public, but these werewolves sound-”

“The government uses the werewolves. Look around. You think any good Muslims are on this road? Any good Catholics? This is a free-fire zone. The only people passing through are smugglers on their way into the capital, and Jews and apostates on their way out. The werewolves intercept them and loot the vehicles. They ransom the survivors or turn them over to the Black Robes.” His fingers tightened on the wheel. “Sometimes they don’t bother.”

“So what are we doing here?”

“The werewolves move around so their presence doesn’t become well-known. The squatters told me there’s a nest of them about ten miles down this road.”

The wind whipped tree branches overhead, scraping the roof and sides of the car. “You expect the werewolves to kill the assassin?”

“Something like that.”

“They won’t kill us? You can talk to them?”

Rakkim laughed. “No, I can’t talk to them. I know how to use them though.” His hair was still dripping. He wiped his face with his forearm. “Last year I was doing a run. Family needed to flee to Canada. Muslim family, two kids, an eight-year-old daughter and a fifteen-year-old boy. The son was gay. Nobody’s business, but they had a neighbor…Maybe they didn’t cut the grass short enough, or maybe the daughter listened to music. For whatever reason, the neighbor went to the local imam. The family didn’t wait for the edict.” Rakkim steered to the left, one tire bouncing in a pothole, jarring his teeth. He slowed. A flat tire now…He felt Sarah watching him. “I drove their car. It was fall, the roads not snowed in. Three nights should have done it. Three nights to get us down through Washington and then up into Canada. There’s a border crossing where the guards go home for dinner every evening. Weather was perfect when we left. Clear night, quarter moon. I didn’t even need to use my headlights most of the time. There was an accident on a logging road I usually use, police cars and ambulances with lights flashing, and I got worried. The police sometimes set up a fake accident to catch smugglers…so I took another route.” He wiped his face again. “We hit a werewolf trap.”

“You never told me.”

“Werewolves had dug out the roadbed. Covered it with a thin sheet of plastic and sprinkled gravel over the top. I was driving faster than I should have…carried away by the moonlight, trying to make up the time we had lost.” Rakkim checked the odometer. The squatters had given him an estimate of where the werewolves were camped, but he didn’t know how accurate it was. “The car hit the trap going about forty-five, snapped an axle, and started rolling. Ended upside down in a ditch. Everyone screaming. We were all hurt…the eight-year-old daughter was unconscious. By the time I got everyone out, the werewolves were all over us.”

Sarah caressed his neck. “What happened?”

Rakkim cleared the condensation on the windshield with a sweep of his hand. “Hard to talk about.”

“Try.”

“I had hit my head when the car rolled over, and my knee was banged up, but I had my knife.” Rakkim could barely hear his own voice. “They had torches, and bats wrapped in barbed wire, and crowbars, and this one guy, this big, fat, hairy bastard, he had a golf club. What do they call those ones…? A driver. He had a titanium driver. Expensive club. Must have taken it off some rich tourist who got lost, taken it off him and beaten him to death with it probably. He swung at my head, grinning, just missed me. Had to be at least twenty of them, screaming and singing, so happy, like they had been waiting for us and now the party could begin.” He swept the windshield again. It didn’t need it, but he did it anyway. “I killed a couple of them fast, slashed their throats so they’d make a mess and maybe make the others back off.” He shook his head. “It only excited them more. I kept backing the family into the woods, trying to protect our flanks, but the father was carrying the eight-year-old, and he kept tripping in the underbrush. It was dark in the woods, and he had city eyes. Every time the werewolves made a rush at us, I would kill a few more, but there was so many of them. They didn’t have training, but they knew the terrain, and they were maniacs, painted up and howling. I half expected them to lope on all fours. I was scared. I had it under control, but I could taste it.”

Sarah rested her hand on his neck, kneading out the knots.

Rakkim smiled, but there was no joy in it. “You should have seen the mother, this good Muslim woman who prayed five times a day and had been putting aside quarters for her hajj since she was five. This good mother killed one of the werewolves, a skinny little psycho with his hair in braids-she split his head open with a rock and she never even blinked. Allah be praised, right?”

“Without the assistance of Allah, we cannot save ourselves from any evil,” Sarah recited.

Rakkim shook his head. “I found an animal path, a path so faint even I could barely see it, but it was all we had. I told the father to take his family and not look back. Said I’d stay behind and pick them off as they followed. I told him to run, but he was gasping, and there was blood running from his nose and into his little girl’s hair. The blood was black as oil in the moonlight.” He could feel Sarah’s touch. It felt as if she were inside him. “I kept telling him to go, but he handed me his little girl and darted off into the brush. Deliberately making noise, crashing and thrashing, and the werewolves…they went after him. He saved us. Nervous man with a potbelly and glasses, he lured them away. I took his little girl, and I carried her against my chest, and I led her mother and brother down the path, all of us running, and when we heard the father screaming in the distance…we kept running.” He looked at Sarah. “That’s what happened.”

Sarah kissed his cheek. “I love you.”

“I told them I would get them to Canada. I said I would protect them.”

“Where are they now?”

“The little girl…she died in my arms. I took the mother and son to Green Briar and left her with the squatters. I came back a week later, but they didn’t want to leave. The squatters had accepted them. Made them welcome. Both of them, and the daughter was buried there…”