E. E. Knight - Vampire Earth 1 - Way of the Wolf

WAY OF THE WOLF

BOOK ONE OF

THE VAMPIRE EARTH

E. E. KNIGHT

One

Northern Louisiana, March, the forty-third year of the Kurian Order: The green expanse once known as

theKisatchieForest slowly digests the works of man. A forest in name only, it is a jungle of wet heat and

dead air, a fetid overflowing of swamps, bayous, and backwaters. The canopy of interwoven cypress

branches shrouded in Spanish moss creates a gloom so thick that twilight rules even at midday. In the

muted light, collapsing houses subside every which way as roadside stops decay in vine-choked isolation,

waiting for traffic that will not return.

A long file of people is moving among moss-covered trunks to the piping cries of startled birds. At the

front and rear of the column are men and women in buckskin, their faces tanned to the same

weather-beaten color as their leather garments. They carry sheathed rifles, and all are ready to use their

weapons at the first hint of danger. The guns are for the defense of five clusters of families clad in ill-fitting

lemon-colored overalls at the center of the file. Patches of brighter color under the arms and along the

inner thighs suggest the garments once glowed a vivid optic yellow and are now faded from heavy use. A

string of five pack mules follows behind them under the guidance of teenage versions of the older

warriors.

At the head of the column, well behind a pair of silent scouts, a young man scans the trail. He still has

some of the awkward gangliness of youth, but his dark eyes hold a canny depth. His shoulder-length

black hair, tightly tied at the back of his head, shines like a raven’s feathers even in the half-light. With his

dusky skin and buckskin garb, he could be mistaken for a native resident of this area three centuries

before: perhaps the son of some wandering French trapper and a Choctaw maiden. His long-fingered

hands wander across his heavy belt, from holstered pistol to binoculars, touching the haft of his

broad-bladed parang before moving on to the canteens at his waist. A scratched and battered compass

case dangles from a black nylon cord around his neck, and a stout leather map tube bumps his back from

its slung position. Unlike his men, he is hatless. He turns now and again to check the positions of his

soldiers and to examine the faces of his yellow-clad dependents as if gauging how much distance is left in

their weary bodies. But his restless eyes do not remain off the trail for long.

If they come, they’ll come tonight.Lt. David Valentine returned to that thought again as the sun vanished

below the horizon. He had hoped to get his charges farther north of the old interstate before nightfall, but

progress had slowed on this, their fourth day out from Red River Crossing. He and his Wolves shielded

twenty-seven men, women, and children who had hazarded the run to freedom. The families were now

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adapted to the rigors of the trail, and followed orders well. But they came from a world where

disobedience meant death, so that trait was understandable.

If they had been traveling by themselves, the detachment of Wolves would already be in

theFreeTerritory . But Valentine was responsible for seeing theRed River farmhands brought safely north.

Four hours ago, the yellow-clad group had crossed the final barrier: the road and rail line

connectingDallas with theMississippi atVicksburg . Then Valentine had driven them another two miles.

Now they had little left to give.

It was hard to quiet his mind, with so much to think about on his first independent command in the

Kurian Zone. And quieting his mind, keeping lifesign down, was literally a question of life and death with

night coming on. Being a Wolf wasas much a matter of mental as physical discipline, for the Reapers

sensed the activity of human minds, especially when fearful and tense. Every Wolf had a method of

subsuming consciousness into a simpler, almost feral form. But burdened with new responsibilities and

with night swallowing the forest, Valentine struggled against the worries that shot up like poisonous

weeds in his mind. The Reapers read lifesign better at night. His charges were giving off enough to be

read for miles even in the depths of the Kisatchie. If his Wolves’ minds were added to the total, the

Reapers would home on it like moths drawn to a bonfire.

A trilling call from ahead broke into his anxieties. Valentine raised his arm, halting the column. Garnett,

one of his scouts, gestured to him.

“Water, sir, in that little holler,” the scout reported as Valentine came up. “Looks safe enough.”

“Good. We’ll rest there for an hour,” Valentine said, loudly enough for the column to hear. “No more.

We’re still too close to the road to camp.”

The faces of the farm families brightened in contrast to the deepening night as they drank from the spring

trickling down the side of a shallow ravine. Some removed shoes and rubbed aching feet. Valentine

unscrewed the cap on his plastic canteen, waiting until the families and his men had a chance to drink.

A faint yelping echoed from the south. Wolves dived for cover behind trees and fallen logs. The

yellow-clad families, who lacked the ability to hear the baying, shrank together in alarm at the sudden

movement.

Sergeant Patel, Valentine’s senior noncommissioned officer, appeared at his elbow. “Dogs? Very bad

luck, sir. Or…”

Valentine, careering along in his runaway train of thought, only half heard Patel’s words. The families

broke out in noisy consternation.

“Silence,” Valentine rasped at the civilians, his voice cracking with unaccustomed harshness. “Sergeant,

who knows this area best?”

Patel’s eyes did not leave the woods to the south. “Maybe Lugger, sir. Or the scouts. Lugger pulled a

lot of patrols in this area; I think her people lived westaways.”

“Would you get her, please?”

Patel pointed to and brought up Lugger, a seasoned veteran whose limber, sparse frame belied her

name. She held her rifle in hands with alabaster knuckles.

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“Sir?” she breathed.

“Lugger, we may have to do some shooting soon,” Valentine said in an undertone, trying not to alarm the

unsettled civilians. “Where’s a good spot for it?”

Her eyes wandered skyward in thought. “There’s an old barn we used to use on patrol. West of here,

more like northwest, I reckon. Concrete foundation, and the loft’s in good shape.”

“How long to get there?”

“Under an hour, sir, even with them,” she said, jerking her chin toward the huddled families. Their yellow

overalls now looked bluish in the darkness. Valentine nodded encouragement.

“Solid foundation,” she repeated. “And a big water trough. We used to keep it filled with a rain catcher.”

Make a decision.

“No help in that direction. Mallow’s more to the east, but it will have to do,” Valentine said. Mallow, the

senior lieutenant of Zulu Company, had remained in the borderlands with a cache of supplies to help them

make it the rest of the way to theOzarkFreeTerritory . He considered something else. “Think you could

find the rendezvous at night?”

“God willing, sir,” she responded after a moment’s cogitation.

“Take a spare canteen and run. Ask Mallow to come with everything he can.”

“Yes, sir. But I don’t need my gun to keep me company. I think you’ll need every bullet you got before

morning,” she said, unslinging her rifle.

Valentine nodded. “Let’s not waste time. Tell Patel where to go; then run for our lives.”

Lugger handed her rifle to the senior aspirant, spoke briefly to Patel and the scouts, then disappeared

into the darkness. Valentine listened with hard ears to her fading footfalls, as fast as his beating heart, and

thought,Please, Mallow, for God’s sake forget about the supplies and come quick.

As his men dusted the area around the spring with crushed red pepper, Valentine approached the

frightened families.

“They found us?” asked Fred Brugen, the patriarch of the group. Valentine smiled into their dirty, tired

faces.

“We heard something behind us. Could be they cut our trail—could be a dog got the wrong end of a

skunk. But as I said, we have to play it safe and move to a better place to sleep. Sorry to cut the halt

short.”

The refugees winced and tightened their mouths at the news, but did not complain. Complainers

disappeared in the night in the Kurian Zone.

“The good news is that we’re really close to a place we can rest and get a hot meal or two. Personally,

I’m getting sick of corn bread and jerky.” He squatted down to the kids’ level and forced some extra

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enthusiasm into his voice. “Who wants hot-cakes for breakfast tomorrow morning?”

The kids lit up like fireflies, nodding with renewed energy.

“Okay, then,” he finished as he filled his canteen, forcing himself to go through the motions nonchalantly.

“Everybody take one more drink of water, and let’s go.”

The aspirants somehow got the pack mules moving, and the column trudged forward into the darkness.

With curses matching the number of stumbles brought on by confusion and fatigue in the night, the column

continued north. Valentine led the way. A rope around his waist stretched back to Sergeant Patel at the

tail end of the file. He bade the families to hold on to it to keep everyone together in the dark.

One scout guided him, and a second brought up the rear, in close contact with two fire teams

shepherding the column’s tail, their phosphorous candles ready. If the enemy was close enough for their

dogs to be heard, the Reapers could be upon them at any moment. Valentine resigned himself to the

orders he would give if they were set upon in the open: he would abandon his charges and flee north.

Even a few Wolves were more valuable to theFreeTerritory than a couple of dozen farmers.

Valentine, continuing on that grim line of thought, decided that if he were a battle-hardened veteran from

the campfire stories, he would stake the farmers out like goats to a prowling tiger, then ambush whatever

took the bait. The death of the defenseless goat was worth getting the tiger. Those win-at-all-costs

leaders from theOld World history books would never be swayed by sleepy voices repeatedly asking,

“Is it much farther, Momma?”

“Close up and move on. Close up and move on,” Valentine said over his shoulder, hurrying the column.

Wolves picked up tired children, carrying them as easily as they bore then-weapons.

They found the farm exactly as Lugger had described. Her Wolf’s eye for terrain and detailed memory

of places and paths would astound anyone who did not know the caste.

The barn was a little bigger than Valentine would have liked with only twenty-two guns.No time to be

picky, not with the Reapers on our trail, he thought. Anyplace with the trees cleared away and walls

would have to do.

Garnett entered with blade unsheathed, covered by his comrades’ hunting bows and rifles. The

parang—a shortened machete used by the Wolves—gleamed in the mist-shrouded moonlight. A few

bats fluttered out, disturbed from their pursuit of insects among the rafters. The scout appeared at the loft

door and waved the rest in. Valentine led the others inside, fighting a disquieting feeling that something

was wrong. Perhaps his Indian blood perceived something tickling below his conscious threshold. He had

spent enough time on the borders of the Kurian Zone to know that his sixth sense was worth paying

attention to, though hard to qualify. The danger was too near somehow, but ill defined. He finally

dismissed it as the product of overwrought nerves.

Valentine inspected the sturdy old barn. The water trough was full, which was good, and there were

shaded lanterns and oil, which was better.

Patel posted the men to the doors and windows. Cracks in the walls of the time-ravaged structure made

handy loopholes. The exhausted families threw themselves down in a high-walled inner corner. Valentine

trotted to the hayloft ladder and began to climb. Someone had repaired a few of the rungs, he noticed as

he went up squeaking wood. The barn’s upper level smelled like bat urine. From the loft he watched his

second scout, Gonzalez, backing into the barn, rifle pointed into the darkness.

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“Gonzo’s got wind of ‘em, sir,” Garnett reported from his perch at the upper door. “He always gets

bug-eyed whenthey’re around.”

Three Wolves from downstairs joined them in the loft and took positions on each side of the barn.

Valentine glanced down through a gap in the loft floor to the lower level, where Patel talked quietly to

Gonzalez in the dim light of a screened lantern. Both glanced up into the loft. Gonzalez nodded and

climbed the ladder.

“Sir, the sarge wanted me to show you this,” he reported, extending a filthy and stinking piece of cloth

drawn from his pocket.

Valentine reached out to take the rag, when a chorus of shrieks sounded from down the hill in the

direction of the old road. He spun and ran to the wide loft door.

Gamett cursed. “Ravies, goddamn Ravies!”

The banshee wailing out of the midnight mists turned the back of his neck into a bristle-brush.They’re

here! He bent to the gap in the floor and called out to the Wolves. “Keep to your posts, look to your

fronts! The Ravies might be a ruse. They could be on top of the hill already.”

He ran to the ladder and clambered down the rungs two at a time, driving a splinter into the flesh

opposite his thumb in his haste. Wincing, he unsnapped the leather strap of his parang sheath and drew

his revolver.

“Uncle, the flares!” he shouted, but Patel knew better than to wait for an order. The veteran sergeant

already stood at the gaping southern door, lighting one. A Wolf opened a lantern door so he could thrust

it in. The high-pitched shrieking grew louder, until it filled the night.

The firework burst into flame, illuminating the barn with blue-white light and sharp black shadows. Patel

wound up and threw the burning flare down the slope they had just traversed. Before it landed, he lit

another and hurled it into the darkness, as well. Other Wolves copied him, tossing phosphorus candles in

each direction.

Valentine stared down the hill, transfixed by a mob emerging into the glare. Running figures with arms

thrashing as. if trying to swim through the air swept up toward the barn. Seemingly endless supplies of

wind powered their screams. Their siren wail was paralyzing. They were human, or what amounted to

human, considering their minds burned with madness, but with the wasted look of corpses and sparse

streams of unkempt hair. Few wore more than tatters of clothing; most ran naked, their skin pale in the

light of burning phosphorus.

“Don’t let ‘em in close enough to bite. Drop ’em, goddammit!” Patel bellowed.

Shots rang out in the enclosed lower level of the bam. Ravies fell, one rising again with blood pouring

from his neck, to stagger a few paces and fall once more, this time for good. Another had a bullet tear

through her shoulder, spinning her around like a puppet with tangled strings. She regained her balance

and came on, screaming all the while. What looked like a scrawny ten-year-old boy stepped on one of

the flaring candles without a glance.

Valentine watched as the human wave approached, dribbling bodies as the Wolves’ bullets struck. He

knew the Ravies served as a distraction for something else lurking in the night. He felt the Reaper stalking

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his mind, approaching from the darkness, even if he could not see its body.

The Reaper came, full of awful speed and power. A cloaked figure charged into the light, seeming to fly

over the ground in a blur of motion.

“Hood!” a Wolf shouted, squeezing off a shot and working the bolt on his rifle. The caped and cowled

figure, still twenty feet from the barn, made a leap and crashed bodily through the old planks and beams

as if they were papier-mache.

The Reaper landed on all fours, arms and legs splayed like a spider. Before a gun could be turned in its

direction, it sprang at the nearest Wolf, a shovel-bearded wedge of a man named Selbey. It was upon

him before he could bring up his gun. The Hood’s satchel-size mouth opened to display pointed ebony

teeth. Large, inhuman jaws sank into Selbey’s arm, thrown up in defense. The Wolf’s scream matched

those from outside as the thing opened its mouth to bite again.

Chaos reigned as the refugees began running. Wolves at the exits had to restrain them, taking up

precious seconds when they should have been employing their guns. One Wolf pumped shot after shot,

working the lever-action rifle from his hip, into the Reaper pressing Selbey to the detritus-covered floor.

The Reaper fed, immune to the bullets hitting its heavy robes.

Valentine grabbed a candle flare from Patel’s two remaining at the south door. He thrust the candle into

the lantern, waiting for it to sputter into life. It caught after an eternity, and he ran toward the Hood.

The thing raised its blood-smeared face from its twitching victim to receive the burning end in its eye. It

howled out its fury and pain and slapped the candle out of Valentine’s hand with the speed of a cougar’s

paw. The flaming wand fell to the ground as the thing rose. Behind it, the Reaper’s menacing black

shadow filled the wall of the barn. Death reached for Valentine, who struggled to draw his blade from its

sheath in time.

A bullet caught the Reaper in the armpit, staggering it. A heavier leather-clad missile hurled itself onto the

Hood’s back. Patel’s body blow brought it down, and using every ounce of his formidable strength, the

sergeant managed to keep it on the floor until Valentine brought his machete onto the back of its neck.

The blade bit deep into flesh and bone, but failed to sever the head. Oily, ink-black ichor poured from

the wound, but still the thing rose, rolling Patel off with a heave. The sergeant fought on and bore down

on one arm, ignoring the deadly teeth opening for him. Valentine lashed out again with his machete,

catching it under the jaw. The Reaper’s head arced off to land with a thud next to Selbey’s lifeless body.

“Jesus, they’re in, they’re in!” someone shouted.

A few Ravies, ghoulishly white in the glare of the candle, clambered through the gap in the wall created

by the decapitated Reaper. Valentine shifted his parang to his left hand and reached for his pistol. The

empty holster turned the movement into comic mime as he realized he had dropped the gun while getting

the candle. But other Wolves drew their pistols, snapping off a shot at the shrieking forms.

The screaming grew into a chorus: a Ravie plunged in among the families. Valentine rushed to the corner

to find the howling lunatic pinned against the wall by a man who’d had the presence of mind to grab an

old pitchfork when the fight started. The Ravie had both hands on the haft of the weapon, trying to

wrench the tines out of her belly, when Valentine came in, swinging his parang to strike and strike and

strike again until she sank lifeless to the floor, at long last silent.

The screaming outside had ceased. The Wolves opened ammunition pouches and took bullets from belts

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and bandoliers. A final bullet or two ended the spasms of the few crawling, crippled targets still living and

therefore still dangerous. The men in the loft called downstairs, in anxiety over their comrades. Valentine

ignored the chatter and saw with a kind of weary grief that one of the wives had been bitten by the

impaled Ravie. He went to check on Patel. The husky sergeant was on his feet, one arm hanging limp and

useless, Valentine’s pistol in his working hand.

Patel handed the pistol back to the lieutenant. “Quiet, up there! And keep your eyes peeled,” the

sergeant shouted at the uncomprehending floorboards above. He held his hurt arm closer to his body,

grimacing.

“Broken collarbone, I think,” he explained. “Could be my shoulder is out, as well. Are you okay, sir?”

“Hell, Patel, enough is enough. Next it’ll be ‘I hope you liked your drink.” Let’s get that arm in a sling,

for a start.“ Valentine motioned an idle Wolf over to help his sergeant. He saw another of his men

bandaging the Ravie bite on the woman as her anxious family crowded around. ”We’ve got a widower

there who doesn’t know it yet,“ he said, sotto voce. His sergeant nodded with sad understanding, and

Valentine thought of Patel’s family. They had been taken by the Raving Madness five years ago.

The lieutenant walked through his shaken command, checking on his men, and came into the corner

sheltering the escapees. He shot a significant glance at his Wolf attending to the woman; the man caught

the hint and nodded. “The bleeding’s stopped already, sir.”

“Quick action, Mosley. Grab someone and get that”—he pointed at the lifeless Ravie—“out of here.”

The candles outside were sputtering out. Valentine walked over to the ladder, intending to check with

Gonzalez upstairs…

… when the floor suddenly tilted beneath his feet. Thrown to the floor, he saw an albino-white arm open

a heavy trapdoor in an explosion of dirt, dried leaves, and twigs.

The barn had a cellar.

The Reaper got halfway out the trapdoor as the bullets zipped over Valentine’s head. His Wolves, still

keyed up from the fight, aimed their guns with lethal accuracy and pumped bullet after bullet into the

yellow-eyed creature. Under the point-blank cross fire from five directions, the black-robed shape

jerked wildly and fell back into the basement.

“Grenades,” Valentine bellowed. Three of his men gathered at the trapdoor, now shooting down with

pistols.

Striking matches or using the lanterns, two Wolves lit fuses on the bombs and hurled them down the

square hole. Valentine grabbed the trapdoor and flung it shut. The rusty hinges squealed their complaints.

The first explosion threw the door forever off its aged fastenings, and the second boomed with an

earsplitting roar. Smoke mushroomed from the square hole.

A Reaper sprang from the gap like something a magician had conjured from the smoke, arms nothing but

two tarry stumps, and head a bony mask of horror. Even with its face blown off, the Reaper was on its

feet and running, seeming to favor them with a splay-toothed grin. The guns rang out again, but the

creature fled through the exit, knocking Patel aside like a bowling pin in the path of a cannonball as the

sergeant attempted another body blow. A tattered and smoldering cape streaming out behind it as it ran,

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the Reaper disappeared into the darkness.

Some of the children had hands over their ears, screaming in pain. Valentine tried to shake the drunken

sensation that had come over him, but it was no use. The acrid air of the barn was too thick to breathe.

He staggered to the doorjamb and vomited.

An hour later, with the barn cleared of bodies except for the unfortunate Selbey, who lay in his poncho

in the empty blackness of the blasted cellar, Gonzalez again shared his discovery with Valentine. His

scout, after asking for permission to speak privately in the loft, presented him with a filthy strip of cloth.

Valentine examined the excrement-stained yellow rag with tired eyes.

“Uncle smelled something, sir, you know? He told me to check the area where we heard the

bloodhounds real careful after everyone pulled out. I found this in the bushes where theRed River

people… er, relieved themselves, sir,” Gonzalez elaborated, half whispering.

He read the semiliterate scrawl by lantern light: “N + W, bam, about twenty gun, yrs trly.”

Betrayal. That explains a thing or two. But which one is “yrs trly ” ?Valentine wondered. He

remembered a couple of: the farmhands had hurried to the bushes as they assembled for I the flight to the

barn. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the! time: the fear in the night had turned his own bowels to

water, j as well.

He gathered three Wolves from downstairs and explained j what he wanted to do when the sun came

up.

Mallow and his reserve platoon trotted up to the barn, just beating the sun. He suppressed the urge to

hug the panting Lugger, who looked as tired as Valentine felt.

The senior lieutenant responded to Valentine’s report with a low whistle. “One in the basement, huh?

You had some bad luck, rookie. But it could have been worse. Good thing the was too thick to breathe.

He staggered to the doorjamb and vomited.

An hour later, with the barn cleared of bodies except for the unfortunate Selbey, who lay in his poncho

in the empty blackness of the blasted cellar, Gonzalez again shared his discovery with Valentine. His

scout, after asking for permission to speak privately in the loft, presented him with a filthy strip of cloth.

Valentine examined the excrement-stained yellow rag with tired eyes.

“Uncle smelled something, sir, you know? He told me to check the area where we heard the

bloodhounds real careful after everyone pulled out. I found this in the bushes where theRed River

people… er, relieved themselves, sir,” Gonzalez elaborated, half whispering.

He read the semiliterate scrawl by lantern light: “N + W barn, about twenty gun, yrs trly.”

Betrayal. That explains a thing or two. But which one, “yrs trly”?Valentine wondered. He remembered a

couple o the farmhands had hurried to the bushes as they assembled for the flight to the barn. He hadn’t

thought anything of it at the time: the fear in the night had turned his own bowels to water as well.

He gathered three Wolves from downstairs and explained what he wanted to do when the sun came up.

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Mallow and his reserve platoon trotted up to the bam, jus beating the sun. He suppressed the urge to

hug the panting Lugger, who looked as tired as Valentine felt.

The senior lieutenant responded to Valentine’s report wit a low whistle. “One in the basement, huh? You

had some bad luck, rookie. But it could have been worse. Good thing.

“A kid, whaddaya know,” one of the men sighed. A couple of others swore.

The boy broke down, alternating threats and curses in between sobs. His ashen-faced father held his

distraught wife. She already trembled with the weakness of the first stage of the disease that would claim

her life within two or three more days, when she would have to be shot like a rabid dog. Mallow and

Patel ignored the grieving parents and questioned the boy in time-honored good cop-bad cop fashion.

“Who put you up to this, boy?” Mallow asked, leaning to put his face below the boy’s downcast eyes.

“What did they promise you? If it were up to this guy here, he’d snap your neck with his good arm. I

can’t help you unless you talk to me. Tell you what, you leave another note, only write on it what we tell

you, and you won’t get hanged. Can’t promise anything else, but you won’t hang.”

The boy’s fear exploded into anger. “You don’t get it, do you? They’re in charge, not you. They make

the laws. They run the show. An‘ when they get tired of you, you’ll be emptied an’ the Grogs’ll have the

leftovers! Them that don’t want to die gotta go along with orders.”

Valentine, sick with fatigue, stepped outside to watch the dawn. As the yellow-orange sun burned

through the morning haze, he wondered what doom of fate had selected him to be born into such a

fucked-up time.

Two

Northern Minnesota, the thirty-ninth year of the Kurian Order: He grew up in a pastoral setting among

the lakes of upperMinnesota . David Stuart Valentine was born during one of the interminable winters in

a sturdy brick house onLakeCarver . The scattered settlements of that area owed their survival not so

much to resistance as to inaccessibility. The Kurians dislike cold weather, leaving the periodic sweeps

and patrols of this area to their Quislings. The Reapers come only in the summer in a macabre imitation of

the fishermen and campers who once visited the lakes between May and September.

In the first few years after the Overthrow, myriad refugees supported themselves amid the abundant

lakes and woods of what had been known as the Boundary Waters. They exterminated the remaining

disease-infested Ravies hotzones, but the settlers refused aid to would-be guerrilla bands, as most of

them had already tasted Reaper reprisals elsewhere. They wished nothing more than to be left alone. The

Boundary Waters people were ruled only by the weather. A frantic period of food storage marked each

fall, and when snow came, the families settled in for winter, ice-fishing for survival, not sport. In summer

they retreated into the deep woods far from the roads, returning to their houses after the Reapers were

again driven south by the cold.

Young David’s family reflected the diaspora that found refuge in the region. He had a collection of

Scandinavian, American Indian, and even Asian ancestors in a family tree whose roots stretched

fromQuebec toSan Francisco . His mother was a beautiful and athletic Sioux fromManitoba , his father a

former navy pilot.

His father’s stories made the world a bigger place for David than it was for most of the children his age.

He dreamed of flying across the Pacific Ocean the way some boys dream of being a pirate or building a

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raft and drifting down theMississippi .

His early life came to an abrupt stop at the age of eleven, on a cool September day that saw the first

frost of the northern fall. The family had just returned from summer retreat to their home, but a Quisling

patrol or two still lingered. Judging from the tire tracks that David found later, two trucks—probably the

slow, alcohol-burning kind favored by rural patrols —had pulled up to the house. Perhaps the

occupants were also liquor fueled. The patrol emptied the larder and then decided to spend the

rest of the afternoon raping David’s mother. Attracted by the sound of the vehicles, his father had

died in a hail of gunfire as he came up from the lakeshore. David heard the shots while gathering

wild corn. He hurried home, accompanied by a growing fear that the shots had come from his

house.

David explored the too-silent house. The smell of tomatoes, which his mother had been stewing, filled

the four-room cabin. He found his mother first, her body violated, her throat slit. Out of spite or habit, the

intruders had also killed his little brother, who had just learned to write his own name, and then his baby

sister. He did not cry—eleven-year-old men don’t cry, his dad said. He circled the house to find his

father lying dead in the backyard. A crow was perched on the former pilot’s shoulder, pecking at

the brains exposed by a baseball-size hole blown out of the back of his skull.

He walked to the Padre’s. Putting one foot in front of the other came hard; for some reason he just

wanted to lie down and sleep. Then the Padre’s familiar lane appeared. The priest’s home served as

school, church, and public library for the locals. David appeared out of the chilly night air and told the

cleric what he had heard and seen, and then offered to walk with the Padre all the way back to his house.

The saddened priest put the boy to bed in his basement. The room became David’s home for the

remainder of his adolescence.

A common grave received the four victims of old sins loosed by the New Order. David threw the first

soil onto the burial shrouds that masked the violence of their deaths. After the funeral, as little groups of

neighbors broke up, David walked away with the Padre’s hand resting comfortingly on his shoulder.

David looked up at the priest and decided to ask the question that had been troubling him.

“Father Max, did anyone eat their souls?”

Every day at school they had to memorize a Bible verse, proverb, or saying. Often there was a lot of

writing down and not much memorizing. Sometimes the lines had something to do with the day’s lesson,

sometimes not. The quotation prescribed for the rainy last day of classes had an extra significance to the

older students who stayed on for a week after the grade-schoolers escaped the humid classroom for the

summer. Their special lessons might have been called the “Facts of Death.” The Padre hoped to correct

some of the misinformation born of rumor and legend, then fill in the gaps about what had happened since

the Overthrow, whenHomo sapiens lost its position at the top of the food chain. The material was too

grim for some of the younger students, and the parents of others objected, so this final week of class was

sparsely attended.

The Padre pointed to the quotation again as he began the afternoon’s discussion. Father Maximillian

Argent was made to point, with his long graceful arms and still-muscular shoulders. Sixty-three years and

many long miles from the place of his birth inPuerto Rico , the Padre’s hair was only now beginning to

reflect the salt-and-pepper coloring of age. He was the sort of pillar a community could rest on, and

when he spoke at meetings, the residents listened to his rich, melodious, and impeccably enunciated voice

as attentively as his students did.

The classroom blackboard that day had fourteen words written on it. In Father Max’s neat, scripted

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E. E. Knight - Vampire Earth 1 - Way of the Wolf

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