Misery County

Chapter 13 - Part 3

"Fuck! Cassie, if you can get in quietly, do so now. It's not looking good."

Eric couldn't see Cassie, but he could see the inside of the door that she was on the other side of, and much to his chagrin, it wasn't budging.

"Jerry, abort, all right? This isn't looking good. Just get outta there," he said, the desperation evident in his voice.

"S-sorry, gentlemen. I just got a call. We'll have to – uh, we'll have to pick this up another time." Jerry's voice was trembling.

"I don't think so, old man," Eric heard a voice over his earpiece.

"In fact," started another voice, "we don't think you're a cop at all."

"Cassie, go in now!" Eric yelled, but once again there was no response and no reaction. "Fuck!" he shouted out. He felts so helpless. What could he do from up where he was perched? In the time it would take him to run down the nearby fire escape, across the road, and down the side of the offending building to get to the entrance, anything that could have happened would have already happened. At the same time, all the action was happening out of sight from where he was at that moment, and no amount of repositioning would change that. And where in the hell was Cassie?

"Stall 'em, Jer. I'm coming. Just stall 'em, all right?" Eric said, taking the split-second decision. He gathered his rifle and his backpack full of silver-loaded magazines and took off down the fire escape, all five floors of it. Skipping every other step, then skipping two out of every three steps, he ran down it as fast as humanly possible. In the meantime, he could hear Jerry's painful negotiations with the men in the building.

"Now, just step back. No one has to get hurt," Jerry was saying, but Eric feared that all parties involved were perfectly aware that Jerry was the only one in danger of harm.

"Jer... hold... on..." Eric huffed as he sprinted down the road, but it was no good; the sounds that were coming through his earpiece told a gruesome story. They hadn't had the sense to arm Jerry with silver bullets, but it would hardly have made a difference – he was alone and cornered by a large enough group that, from where he was standing, he would only have gotten through two or three of them before the rest tore him to shreds.

By the time Eric reached the still-open doorway, the screams from inside were beginning to fade. He bust on through, rifle at the ready, and saw what he feared most. A large werewolf – evidently an alpha considering the full moon had come and gone – had his jaws wrapped around Jerry's neck, while the rest of the men stood around, watching.

The time for diplomacy and subterfuge was over. Eric took a shot at the alpha, hitting him in the center of mass with a silver bullet. The creature crumpled onto the ground, Jerry along with it.

The other men turned to look at Eric.

They may be "stuck" in their human forms, but they were werewolves nonetheless, or so Eric assumed. Their type wasn't one to buddy up with other monsters, even when they had the same strategic goals. The lone wolf, as the story goes, keeps others at a distance, and that goes doubly, triply or infinitely more so for non-werewolves.

Eric only had silver bullets, so he hoped, at the very least, if they were something else, a lump of metal to the chest would bring them down regardless. His rifle let off pop after pop as he fired at the men in rapid succession and before they could properly react. If Jerry's sacrifice had earned them nothing else, it had at least moved all of the monsters a good distance away from Eric, allowing him the time to take them all out before they could reach him.

As the last of the wolves fell, the far-side door burst open and Cassie stumbled in. Their eyes met for a moment, and Eric's blood froze as Cassie raised her pistol up, aiming right at him. A gunshot rang up and down the building as Eric involuntarily let a few drops of waste leave his bladder. Coming to his senses, he looked down at his torso. No bullet holes. A labored exhale from behind pulled his attention. Looking around, it was coming from an alpha slowly transitioning from his werewolf form to his human form, no doubt owing to the bullet hole in his chest.

"Great shot," Eric called out, turning around to face Cassie again. "Now maybe you can tell me where the fuck you were."