Kitty Goes to War

Chapter 19

I COULDN’T BELIEVE it had taken us most of the day to get here.

We went east before turning south, hoping to avoid most of the city and its traffic. Finally, we turned west, picking our way through the various grids and arteries that passed for the Springs’s road network, toward Fort Carson.

After all that—the snow, the traffic, the worry, and arguing with Tyler—we reached Fort Carson and were stopped cold at the gate. When I’d come here last week, the gate was staffed by regular security guards in blue uniforms and safety vests. Now there was a pair of soldiers in army fatigues, bundled up with gloves and parkas, carrying rifles. A siren was wailing in the distance.

“We’re here to see a patient at the hospital,” Ben told the soldier as he offered his ID.

“I’m sorry, sir. The post is under lockdown. I can’t let you through.”

On the roundabout ahead of the gate was a lot of activity: trucks and vehicles in desert beige and a bunch of guys holding rifles. A couple of soldiers were stringing razor wire, creating a serious roadblock. Something was happening. I thought of all that tract housing, the quiet residential neighborhoods with the normal-looking schools and nice playgrounds that made up this part of the base—and then I thought of Walters as a werewolf tearing through those neighborhoods. My heart grew sick.

Tyler opened the back door and started to get out.

“Excuse me, sir—” The guard looked panicked for just a moment, as if he thought he was going to have to tackle Tyler and really didn’t want to. Who would?

Tyler took charge. “I’m Sergeant Tyler, stationed here. What’s happening?”

The guy let his guard down, shaking his head. “They’re not telling me anything. There’s been some kind of hostage situation. Some guy back from Afghanistan snapping—you know how it is.” He glanced over his shoulder at the burgeoning roadblock. That was one hell of a snap, he must have been thinking.

“I know who it is,” Tyler said. “He’s a friend of mine. I’m here to help. Call Colonel Stafford and tell him I’m here.”

The soldier was scared. He didn’t know what was happening, he’d only been told not to let anyone through. I wondered what rumors were flying, what he’d heard. And how bad it really was. In the face of that, Tyler’s solid presence and determination was a calming influence.

“I’ll call. Wait right here,” the soldier said, and went inside the booth.

Tyler waited, resting an arm on the roof of the car and looking ahead, as if expecting an attack.

“I don’t like this,” I said, stating the obvious.

Ben reached over and took my hand. “We can turn around and go home.”

“Tyler won’t leave,” I said. In my gut, Wolf was defiant. This was our mess, we’d clean it up. Protect our own, defend our territory, punish the rogue. I didn’t always understand the Wolf’s black-and-white worldview. I usually didn’t want to. I rubbed my forehead, trying to smooth away the headache I was developing. “How could I have been so wrong about Walters?”

“You want to think the best of people. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“But it gets me into so much trouble. My back’s been stabbed more times than I can count.”

“That just means I ought to do a better job of watching it, right?” His smile was grim.

“It’s not your fault when I keep not listening to you.”

He raised my hand and kissed it, lingering to let his warm breath brush over my skin. The feel of it tingled and flushed all the way up my arm. I squeezed his hand back.

“We do okay,” he said.

The back door opened, and Tyler climbed in. “We’re in. Sort of.”

The guard had returned to standing at attention and seemed relieved to get us off his hands. Whom had he handed us off to?

A beige army Humvee approached down the straightaway, did a turn, and slid to a stop in front of us. Colonel Stafford, wearing a heavy coat over his uniform, climbed out of the passenger side and marched toward us.

I hurried to get out of the car. I wasn’t going to face him sitting down. At least my T-shirt was dry now. Ben and Tyler did likewise, and we moved to intercept him, facing him like a pack: me in front, the two men at my shoulders. Looking very out of place, we were still wearing what we’d gone out in the night before: shirts, sweats, and sneakers. No coats and winter gear. None of us seemed to mind. I was betting it looked pretty impressive, because Colonel Stafford stopped a couple of yards away, well out of reach, when he probably wanted to yell in my face.

“This is your fault!” he said.

“I won’t argue with that,” I said.

He seemed surprised, as if he’d been bracing for a dress down that he wasn’t going to get to give.

“I’ll have you all up on charges. Aiding and abetting, negligence—”

“Sir, this was an accident,” Tyler said.

Again, Stafford was taken aback, and seemed to need a moment to remember himself. “You’re out of line, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” Tyler said, sounding tired.

“What’s going on?” I asked, pointing to the roadblock with its armed guards.

“You think Walters is going to come back here—so do I. When he does, we’ll stop him.”

I stared. “You think he’s going to just come marching through the front gate? That he’s going to drive up in a taxi?”

He glared at me, mouth pursed like he was chewing lemons.

I ranted on. “This guy’s a trained soldier and a werewolf; he can sneak in here from anywhere and he may not even be human when he does it.”

“We’ll have plenty of time to track him,” Stafford argued. “He started out a hundred miles north of here, without any resources—”

“Sir,” Tyler said. “As far as Walters is concerned, he’s on a mission. This is the kind of thing we trained for. A hundred miles in a day—we did it, over worse terrain than this.” He kept his expression cold. Official.

Whatever Stafford thought, I knew we were right: Walters was already here. He would have gone top speed the whole time. Which meant he’d be exhausted, panicked, even more dangerous.

“We can find him,” I said. “We can track him. We think he’s going to the hospital to find Vanderman. That’s where you need to have your people set up.”

Stafford shook his head. “I’ve got men stationed at every entrance to this base and on patrol at the borders. He’s not here yet, and we’ll find him when he gets here.”

This was a man whose job was being right. Or at least acting like he was right. I wasn’t going to change his mind just by asking him to. And you know, maybe he even was right. Maybe Walters wasn’t here yet. Maybe he’d gotten stuck in some pileup outside of Castle Rock.

I still wanted a backup plan.

“Then you won’t mind if we head over to the hospital and check on Vanderman,” I said. “We won’t get in your way, I promise.”

He blinked. He probably wasn’t used to people talking back at him. “Fine. But with an escort. You step out of line I won’t hesitate to shoot,” he said by way of encouragement. He pointed at Tyler. “And you—you’re still active duty and under orders. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Stafford returned to his Humvee, we returned to Ben’s sedan and followed the colonel’s vehicle up the straightaway. After some shouted orders and a rush of activity at the roundabout, a space was cleared, just wide enough for the car to pull through. Ben did so, very slowly, both hands on the wheel. A different Humvee with a couple of men in fatigues sitting in it followed us. I was betting they had silver bullets in their rifles.

“All this for one guy?” I said in awe.

“I’m guessing they’re a little freaked out,” Ben said.

Tyler shook his head. “Stafford never understood us. He thought this was just like any other training—that we can turn it on and off, that we can control it, when it’s really the other way around, isn’t it?”

All the men in Gordon’s unit ever wanted to do was their job. Serve their country the army way, and all that. Now look where they’d ended up.

Then we were through and making our way along the road to the hospital. The escort Humvee swerved past us and led the way. Other than that, we didn’t see any other cars or people. No sign of life, whether because of the blizzard or the lockdown.

“Sir,” Tyler said to Ben, which was kind of odd. “You said you had a weapon?”

“Yeah, in the glove box.”

“May I?” Tyler asked.

He would make better use of it than either of us, assuming Walters showed up in a murderous rage and wouldn’t listen to us. Which was what everyone was apparently assuming would happen. I handed the weapon, a matte-black semiautomatic pistol, to him grip first, along with the box of ammo.

“Be careful,” I said. “Silver bullets.”

The box felt warm, as if the silver was burning me through the plastic case. Tyler took the gun, ejected the magazine, and started inserting bullets into it—after wrapping his hand in a corner of his T-shirt. Even encumbered by the shirt, he loaded the gun with expert skill and speed. After he’d finished, he returned the box of remaining bullets to me, tucked the gun into the back of his waistband, and let his T-shirt fall over it. He gave a nod as if saying, now I’m ready.

“Can you really shoot your teammate if you have to?” I asked.

Tyler wouldn’t look at me. “We take care of our own. Last thing any of us want is to hurt anyone. What did you say at the start of all this—that if we couldn’t shape up then you’d pull the trigger on us?”

“That was a metaphor,” I said, frowning.

“I’m just taking responsibility,” he said, his voice flat.

We arrived at the hospital behind our escort. A dozen or so cars were parked in the lot—people who’d arrived before the lockdown and now were stuck. I was thinking worst-case scenario.

“Any ideas?” Ben said as we climbed out of the car. We had to squint into the wind blowing at us. Driving snow stuck my arms like needles. The two soldiers climbed out of their Humvee and took up positions on the sidewalk outside the hospital’s main entrance, looking outward, rifles at the ready. I wondered how much Stafford had really told them about what to expect.

Tyler looked around. “We secure the perimeter—take a walk around the building and figure out if he’s been here yet. If he hasn’t, we go in and wait for him to show up. And if he has—we go in after him. How does that sound?”

My grin felt wry and stiff. “Sounds like a real military operation, sir.”

He glanced at our escorts, who nodded. I wondered if they’d done time overseas, they seemed so wary.

We moved forward at a careful pace—a hunting pace. Our chins up to take in the air, nostrils widening, we breathed. Mostly, the area smelled like exhaust, gun oil, and anxiety. Cold air stung my lungs. A sheen of icy mist covered my face, making my hair stick to my cheeks.

I caught the tang of blood, sharp, incongruous against the clean chill of the winter wind. Rich, heady—a treasure in this landscape, a promise of injured prey in hard times. Or so the Wolf thought. But I smelled a dead body. I bit my tongue to keep my mouth from watering and trotted ahead to the front door of the hospital. Ben and Tyler were right with me.

At some point this morning someone had tried to shovel the walks, leaving snow piled along the path. Since then, the storm had gotten the upper hand, sending drifts of snow sloping along the building. Recently, there had been a fight in front of the front door. Instead of a smooth plane of snow, there were trenches, rifts, snow kicked and swept aside. Not footprints as much as body prints, as though someone had charged through.

We found him a few feet off the sidewalk, facedown in a mound of snow that had been shoveled off the walk. Spatters of blood had sunk into the snow around him. They weren’t visible from the surface, which still looked clean, as if he’d just slipped and fallen. The guy couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. His black beret had been knocked off; his scalp showed through a pale crew cut.

I could smell that he was dead and quickly cooling. Putting a hand on his shoulder, I intended to turn him to see how he’d died, but I didn’t have to. His throat had been torn by something sharp and not very precise. Claws, teeth.

“What the—” one of Stafford’s soldiers exclaimed, peering over our shoulders.

Tyler stared down at him, lips pursed. Ben let out a sigh. I looked around. Wind had altered the tracks, making it harder to decipher what had happened. But I didn’t smell Vanderman. And the snow was only disturbed in one direction. I could almost see it: this poor guy had been walking by on some other duty. He spotted a crazed maniac, probably naked in freezing weather, running across the sidewalk. He’d yelled at the guy to stop. Threatened, his target had run at him. The soldier may not even have had time to fire the handgun now lying in its own bed of snow nearby.

Tyler retrieved the pistol, slid back the chamber, then threw the gun away.

“He got shots off,” Tyler said. “But the bullets aren’t silver.”

I crouched in the snow and rested my hand gently on the soldier’s body, as if it mattered. Taking a careful, searching breath, I learned what I needed to and quickly moved away.

“It was him?” Tyler said. He must have been hoping for a different outcome.

I nodded. Walters’s scent was all over the body.