Overwinter Read online

  “Cover me,” Sharon said. “I’m going in for the gray.” With silver bullets you had to get close to be sure of a kill. Normal bullets, lead bullets, spun on their long axis as they flew through the air. It kept them flying straight. Silver bullets were different—they tumbled when they came out of a gun barrel. That meant they weren’t as accurate as lead bullets, so at more than short range they were almost useless. She goosed her throttle and her machine covered the distance easily. Twenty meters away—probably still too far. Fifteen. She had to get as close as she could without actually entering the minefield. Theoretically she knew exactly where each mine was, but it would be far too easy to make a misstep and blow herself up.

  On the other side of the wolves, she saw Varkanin moving in as well. She glanced at his hands and saw he didn’t have his gun out. Instead he was holding a long, thin knife.

  “Boss, what are you doing?” she asked. “You can just shoot the white, right now, and we’re done.”

  “She needs to suffer, first,” Varkanin said.

  Sharon bit back the words that came to her mouth. That was a mistake, and she knew it, but she couldn’t tell him that. Not when he was calling the shots. During a hunt, you never questioned authority. There was no time for thinking.

  At ten meters away she killed her engine and jumped down into the snow. She knew there was a mine a few meters to her left, so she swerved a little out of its way as she closed the rest of the distance on foot. Five meters. Three. That was close enough.

  “Got movement,” Jimmy Etok said. “Something’s coming out of the snow. Might be the male.”

  “I see it,” Leonard replied. “I’m moving.” Behind her Sharon heard the roar of Leonard’s snowmobile. “Got you, dickhead.”

  Sharon lifted her gun and sighted along the barrel. The gray stared back at her with hate-filled eyes. The animal lowered its head and its ears swiveled back. Its paws stretched toward Sharon across the snow. It looked like it wanted to jump but didn’t dare because of the mines.

  Fear, real deep, made Sharon’s head hurt. She knew that feeling, though—she’d felt it when hunting bears and even moose. This was a creature who could hurt you, even kill you, if you didn’t respect it properly. If you didn’t use your human brain to get the better of it. She had a perfect shot, though. This was over. She started to squeeze her trigger.

  Behind her she heard Leonard Opvik scream. She heard it again in her ear, over the radio, and it made her wince. She dropped her arm and turned around to see what was happening.

  She nearly dropped her gun.

  It wasn’t the male wolf. Sharon had no idea what it was, except that it was nine feet tall and covered in white fur. Or it could have been a fur coat. Its head was covered in a carved wooden mask studded with ivory spikes.

  With a roar, it picked up Leonard’s snowmobile with one hand and tossed it end over end.

  46.

  The gray wolf stared up the mouth of the gun. She could smell the silver bullet in the chamber. She knew it was her death. Still her hatred of human beings would not allow her to surrender. She lowered herself into a crouch, the first step in launching a killing pounce. Every muscle in her body tensed, became a tightened spring ready to be loosed.

  The human female started to fire—and then stopped.

  So intent on her pounce, the gray wolf didn’t see the thing that came out of the snow. When the human turned around to look, the gray jumped—all claws and teeth, all concentrated rage. She landed on the human’s back and knocked her forward, sending her flying to the ground. The gray’s claws tore through the human’s parka and the layers of clothing underneath, ripping great gouges through the human’s skin. The hit shattered some of the human’s ribs and dug a deep groove into the pelvis. In time those injuries would be enough to kill any human being. Either the human female would bleed to death on the spot, or chips of bone, knocked loose by the impact, would enter her bloodstream and eventually her heart or lungs.

  The gray was just getting started. She would tear the human female to pieces. She would swallow her flesh whole.

  The blood fury inside her distracted her so much that she was barely aware of everything that was happening around her. It was chaos and fire, but her world had shrunk down to a narrow window. She could see nothing but her prey.

  Had she been more aware of her surroundings, she might have seen the giant figure striding across the minefield, setting off explosions everywhere it walked. Smoke wreathed in the air; shrapnel cascaded down like vicious rain. One of the human males, the one who had been thrown off his machine in the moment the giant appeared, staggered up to his feet and fired his weapon again and again into the giant’s face and chest. The silver bullets bounced off the white furs, the wooden mask. The giant didn’t even seem to feel them.

  Meanwhile the male wolf had struggled up out of the snow, lost in his own bloodlust. His body was ravaged, torn apart. One of his legs hung off his frame by tatters of skin. His viscera dragged steaming on the ground and all the fur had been scorched off his face. A piece of jagged metal protruded from his left eye.

  It was enough to make him very, very angry.

  Even on three legs the male wolf streaked through the minefield like a horizontal bolt of lightning. He intersected with one of the moving machines with enough force and speed to send it rolling across the snow while its human driver crashed with a thud to the ground. The driver tried to get up, but the male wolf tore him to pieces without wasting time to breathe. One of his arms came off—then part of his face. His hot blood hit the snow like acid, melting a great pool of it. The male wolf found his prey’s heart and tore it loose, then gulped it down without chewing.

  The white wolf had circled back along her own tracks—the only safe path, where there could be no mines—and had doubled around to where the giant had emerged. The sound of her footfalls was lost in the general din, so she was able to sneak up behind the other male human, the one who had tried to shoot the giant. She moved forward and nuzzled his calf, almost gently. He spun around and tried to shoot her, but by then his gun was empty.

  The white female licked her lips.

  Her prey threw down his gun, then raised his hands in surrender. Wolves cannot laugh. But they can smile. The white female took a step forward. Her prey took a step backward.

  Right onto a concealed mine.

  The explosion was loud enough to deafen the gray, but she was too fixed on her kill to care. She didn’t need to hear her prey moaning for help or mercy. She wouldn’t have understood the words it spoke, anyway. She padded closer and licked blood from the human female’s back. She thought she would flip the prey over and tear its throat out. That would be enough to show her anger, wouldn’t it? Perhaps she would urinate on the corpse afterwards.

  She heard a buzzing sound behind her and for once it got through the red mist in her head. There was a machine behind her, and a human riding it. A human who smelled—wrong, somehow. Well, no matter. The human female on the ground before her wasn’t going anywhere. She could be finished off at the gray wolf’s leisure. First she would take care of this new threat. She whirled around and found herself face to face with another human.

  A male. With blue skin. Her color vision was not as acute as that of a human being, but she knew that humans didn’t normally come in that color. No matter. She reared up and lunged forward to bite his face off. He shoved a forearm into her mouth, as if he wanted her to tear him apart. Obligingly, the gray wolf bit down with all her bone-crunching strength. The muscles in her jaws and neck were capable of snapping through the femur of a caribou. One human arm would be nothing to even slow her down. Her enormous teeth sank effortlessly through the padded parka sleeve, the layers of flannel and thermal underwear beneath, even the plastic and metal of his wristwatch.

  But when they touched his skin her teeth—shattered. She felt them collapse inside her mouth as if they’d been rotted through by decay. Where her gums and lips touched his skin they burned and shriveled
away.

  Gasping for air, the gray wolf pulled back, her mouth wide, her tongue lolling. She felt dizzy and sore and she could barely stand up. She could do nothing as she watched the blue human load the dying female human onto his machine and roar away.

  47.

  “I’m going to die,” Sharon Minik whispered to herself. She was bouncing along on the back of a snowmobile racing over the tundra, its suspension lurching every time it hit a buried rock or thick patch of snow. Her head kept colliding with one of the side panniers. It hurt, a lot.

  But nothing could compare to the pain in her back. Her flesh there felt raw and hot and agony seared through her every time the wind touched her exposed wounds. She could feel sticky blood pooling under her clothes, could feel things tearing open inside her guts. “I’m going to die,” she said again, because it didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem right. But she knew it was true. Nobody could survive what the wolf had done to her.

  Behind them, as if in a dream, the giant was still chasing them. They were kilometers away from the minefield by that point, but still it kept after them. It ran on all fours, though she could see that its front limbs ended in hands, not paws. Its wooden mask was carved in the shape of a horribly grimacing human face. She had a pretty good idea what it was—who it was—but she didn’t want to believe it. Like the mayor of the town of Umiaq, she believed wholeheartedly that such things existed. But you never actually saw one, not if you lived to be a hundred years old. And definitely none of them ever chased your snowmobile, clearly intending to kill you.

  Perhaps it would be a mercy if it did, she thought. If it caught up to them and ripped them up like tissue paper, at least she would really be dead. She could stop waiting for it to happen. She could stop hurting so much.

  Even that mercy was to be denied her, however. The snowmobile sped up and pulled away from the big thing’s pursuit. It didn’t stop chasing them, but little by little they gained ground until it shrank in the distance, still running toward them but barely visible.

  Eventually she couldn’t see it at all.

  Sharon closed her eyes. She was crying, which was always a bad idea in the Arctic during the winter months. No matter how salty your tears were, when it was twenty below outside they could still freeze to your cheeks. She couldn’t help it, though. As strong as she liked to think she was, as tough—and life had given her plenty of chances to prove that—knowledge of her impending death was the thing that had cracked her open like an egg and let all the insecurities and vulnerabilities come bubbling out.

  “I’m going to die,” she wept.

  She felt one of Varkanin’s hands reach for hers. He twined his gloved fingers through her own. “No,” he said. “You’re not. That’s the problem.”

  48.

  Chey felt as if she were buried in layer after layer of gauzy cloth. She could almost see through it—though she couldn’t make out any details she could sense light and shadows all around her. She tried to scrub at her eyes with her hands, thinking maybe she was just still bleary from sleep. She quickly realized that she couldn’t feel her hands, or any other part of her body.

  It was then she heard her wolf panting. The noise of it filled her head and made her want to scream.

  That was when she realized she didn’t have a voice, either. It wasn’t her head she was in. It was the wolf’s—she was just a passenger inside it.

  There followed a long, confusing period where she tried to fight and break her way out of the wolf’s head, a futile combat she would later be unable to explain in any detail. How did you smash at the walls when there were no walls, and nothing to smash against them with? No shoulders, no hips, nor arms or legs? How did you scream dire threats or shout commands when you could not speak? How did you struggle to maintain control when you had none to begin with?

  When she realized she was having no effect she stopped fighting. It made a world of difference. The wolf didn’t seem to mind her being inside its head, not when she couldn’t do anything there. It let her be, and gave her a certain degree of freedom. It let her use its senses as long as she didn’t try to direct them.

  Slowly her eyesight sharpened, though still she couldn’t make out many colors and details still eluded her. She was seeing things as the wolf did, through the wolf’s eyes. She could not control where it turned its gaze, so she could only study the wall next to her, a massive construction of layered sod reinforced with giant bones. She wasn’t sure if she was in a real place or some fantasy world concocted by the wolf—though she didn’t know how a creature of such limited imagination could come up with that wall.

  She could hear what the wolf heard, as well, though it was a maddening experience because the wolf’s hearing was so much more directional than a human’s. There were faint mutterings just on the edge of sensation that she would really have liked to explore. They sounded like human voices. But unless the wolf turned its ears around to specifically listen to those voices, she couldn’t be sure.

  She could taste what the wolf tasted, but this she did her best to ignore. The wolf’s mouth hurt, a lot, and something was wrong with its teeth—they felt like they’d all been smashed in with a hammer. The pain was unbelievable, so she tried to distance herself from it, which kind of worked.

  Eventually she was allowed to smell what the wolf smelled. And while that was the most beguiling of all its senses—her human knowledge of smells was so limited, so narrow, that she could identify only a tiny fraction of what she was receiving—it was also the most reassuring. She could smell the wall before her, smell the dirt and withered grass roots that comprised the sod, smell the ancient dry smell of the bones. She could smell dirty bed linen underneath her. This at least made her think she was in a real place, since she couldn’t imagine the wolf dreaming of lying on a human bed.

  Far more exciting to her were other smells. The smell of Dzo’s wet furs. The smell of Lucie’s clean hair. And the smell of Powell’s skin, the musky scent of him, the smell of his flannel shirt and of his sweat, the smell of campfires they’d shared, the smell of his excitement the last time she’d seen him, when they’d kissed.

  She could smell him coming closer to her. The smell of him grew more intense, and suddenly it was all around her. She heard him speak, and though the wolf couldn’t understand the words, she got them just fine.

  “You’re awake, finally,” he said, sounding a little peeved, but a lot more relieved. “I was starting to worry about you.”

  The wolf whimpered as he reached down to touch her. The wolf cringed away from him.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Are you—”

  She felt the wolf’s anger explode all around her. Her vision went red and her consciousness was dragged around as the wolf flipped over, bringing its claws around to attack Powell. No! she thought, knowing no one would ever hear her. No! Please! Don’t!

  He grabbed at the wolf’s forelegs and held them back. The wolf growled in frustration and rage, not just because it was pinned down but also because this forced it to acknowledge that its forelegs had been replaced by human arms.

  The damn thing was taking over her body, Chey thought. Those were her arms. This was her time, the time when the moon was down—

  “Chey,” Powell said, in a firm voice. “Chey, come back to me. Chey—if you’re in there, come back.”

  She fought the wolf again, giving it everything she had, and this time she was almost successful. Knowing that she was fighting for her own body helped. She couldn’t stop the wolf from struggling against Powell’s grip, but she was able to gain control of her voice.

  “Powell,” she gasped. “Powell, I’m not doing this!”

  “I know,” he told her. “Fight it. Fight it.” He climbed into the bed with her and wrapped his arms around her, holding the wolf still. His scent made the wolf crazy, but it gave Chey strength. “Come on,” he said. “You can do this.”

  She called his name, again and again. He whispered in her ear, talking her through it. Helping
her come back. It was a long fight.

  And while it was happening she saw Lucie, standing a few meters off. The redhead was watching her with a cool, analytical gaze.

  After a while a sly little smile crossed Lucie’s face. It flickered away almost as fast as it had come, but there was no mistaking this.

  Lucie enjoyed watching Chey squirm.

  49.

  The moon rose again before Chey had fully regained control of her body. She fought against the flash of silver light, but nothing could stop the transformation. When she woke again, many hours later, she remembered nothing of the intervening time, but at least this time she woke up human, fully human. She couldn’t even feel the wolf hiding inside her head. Her mouth still hurt but she didn’t care—she was just glad to be alone in her own body.

  She finally had a chance to take a good look at her surroundings. The place where she’d woken up was a spacious dome. The walls were made of sod, with great arches of whale bones for support. The bones met near the ceiling and formed a ring around a narrow hole that let in light and air. It was cold in the dome, below freezing, but nothing like as cold as it had been outside. The dome was sparsely but comfortably furnished, with lots of shelves to hold supplies and woven grass mats covering the floor. There were a couple of beds, each big enough to sleep four people comfortably. There was a portable generator chugging away—its smoke wafted up toward the hole and away—and it was hooked up to a very large, very old television set. She remembered hearing muttering human voices when she woke up and she realized now that she’d been hearing the TV. Currently it was showing an episode of Coronation Street—the same soap opera Chey’s mother had watched, when she was a kid. In the center of the dome, under the skylight, sat a single massive armchair, its considerable mass shored up by more whale bones. Slumped on top of the chair was the creature she assumed had to be the owner of the dome.