The People's Alpha ✔

21: Coming To Grips

Outside a cool breeze had blown over around midday, but the inside of the office was still stuffy. The open windows and the single fan didn't seem to be doing much to move the heat. 

An unseen fly buzzed somewhere. It wasn't the excited buzz of a fly that had just flown in. It was the sluggish drone of one which was tired after a long day of trying to escape from a foodless room.

The rains were still yet to come. The windows were coated in dust. The sliding window tracks were filled with the desiccated bodies of the fly's compatriots.

There were two printouts of paw prints in front of me. One had been collected at my own pack, the morning after we had sighted the rogues. The other had been taken from ground zero of the attack at Granite Peak.

These were not like animal prints. They were almost like a clenched human fist that had been distorted almost past the point of recognition, with claw imprints where the fingernails had been. There was a scar where some type of injury had occurred before, on what would have been the left side of the palm of the hand.

The exact same scar was on both of the prints.

It had taken a few minutes for it to sink in. They, or at least one of the attackers, had been there that night near the lake. They were definitely only scouting; they had nowhere enough manpower to take us on. But they . How many were there? There were many parts of the Territories that were impossible to police, where it was thick forest and there were no roads. There could be hundreds, even thousands out there, and we could never know. I felt a pit in my stomach expand.

In the old days they had only come in desperation, to look for food. These wolves had had no fear, which was even more worrying. They had been confident.

Did it mean we were next? The Stone River people definitely thought so. They were stepping up patrols.

The attackers had been confident, too. It had been very methodical, almost clinical. It was more like a mass execution than a rogue attack. There had been no ransacking; the place had been left spotless. The wounds on the victims barely looked like an animal had made them.

And they had chosen the pack with the best position, the best technology, the tightest run ship, the hardest to invade. They could have chosen any number of packs with weaker defenses, but they had not.

They were sending us a message. This is what happened to Granite Peak, the strongest pack, arguably, in the world. Imagine what we will do to you.

Thurgood shuffling some papers brought me out of my train of thought. He added the pile to the clutter on his already overloaded desk. The system was supposedly in the process of being computerized, but there was scant evidence of that on the ground.

Contrary to us, the Granite Peak people had long had everything computerised, hence the incredible amount of printouts, from the records they had stored in their underground bunker. They'd hidden everything under two metres of concrete. These people had been paranoid. It had taken Thurgood and his team almost a day to work out where they'd hidden it, and another day to break it out.

In the other portables, his other personnel were also working flat out trying to collate everything into some kind of usable timeline. The idea was that they were going to gather here later and try and collate what they had found out.

I felt kind of naked sitting in a chair with nothing in front of me."You've been working on this all day?"

"It would have been worse than this. But Thunder Falls are doing a big part of the work."

"Couldn't we have handled it ourselves?" I knew the answer to the question already, but couldn't help asking. Resources were limited. Budgeting and handouts had never been the OPLU's strong points. Blah blah blah.

Thurgood shrugged. "They've taken a great weight off our shoulders. They're handling all the repetitive stuff. Reports, stupid paperwork administrivia stuff. They're coming to the re-enactment tonight. Once we've finished they're organising an emergency congress at their territory."

"Emergency congress meeting?"

"It was their idea. They are very organised. We could learn from them."

We'd never heard of them... now they're everywhere. How did they-"

"They've always been around. On the periphery. I think they pulled some strings with Wethermore. That's the most plausible reason. I mean, I don't mind Adlai. I'm not sold on him but I don't see him as any kind of threat. He seems pretty stable. But that other guy... I don't like him."

"Stevenson?"

"He scares me." He picked at his sandwich. "There's something about his eyes. You learn to see it in people when you've been in the business as long as I have. Anyway, I better get back to this. Lucky you. Just faff around the pack house all day and watch the bus fares roll in."

"Actually, I had to show Catriona around."

"She still remembers me?"

"Why would I ask her that?

"I was hoping...actually, never mind." Thurgood swallowed his words. 

"Oh well. Maybe she'll interview you at some point. You made any progress on that disappeared guy?"

Thurgood sighed. "Firstly, this-" he gestured to the mess around him- "has completely taken over. Secondly, fuck that idiot. Natural selection doing its job." He returned his attention to the his almost entirely papered-over desk.

So far the progress had been slow going, according to Thurgood's debrief he had given me on my arrival half an hour ago. They had established that all the security systems had worked the way they were designed to, and that . Alarms had sounded. and the pack members had gathered in the pack house. They also knew that all sentries were at their positions, and that the attackers seemed to have come from the northwestern side of the pack territory.

I sat back in my chair. I stared at the fan, and tried to figure out where the still-droning away fly was.

It didn't add up. So what the hell had happened? Maybe really did need the re-enactment to work out what was going on. Maybe sooner was better, despite my instincts.

I wondered if I had overlooked something. Something I'd heard before. Something I hadn't understood fully. Something everybody had missed. But I couldn't put my finger on it.

A thought crossed my mind. "Shouldn't we delay the re-enactment a bit, until we have all the information?"

Thurgood flipped through a sheaf and jotted down something on another piece of paper. "They've already scheduled the emergency congress for tomorrow. So we don't really have a choice."

"Can't they reschedule it?"

"I've already asked them. No can do. As I said, They are very organised. We've got most of the important stuff down pat, anyway."

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was well past noon. "Shouldn't we eat lunch?"

"Therese packed one for me." Thurgood rarely ever spoke about his mate. She stayed home and looked after the pack, from what I knew.

He produced a large brown paper bag from under the table. It was crammed to nearly bursting. "Want a sandwich? Take your pick. There's about three whole meals in this thing.She always packs too much. I tell her again and again. But she never listens."

I picked up a sandwich. I barely tasted the food. All I knew was that it was some kind of beef. 

My attention was suddenly drawn to a map of the pack territory which Thurgood had tacked to the wall, which I had only peripherally noticed before. What was in that northwestern angle where the attackers seemed to have come from? It looked like the most heavily wooded part of the pack territory, but it was also the one with the most sentry posts. They could not have gone through without been spotted, or scented by pack patrol.

What else was there? I looked closely at the map. Dotted lines. The site of a long-demolished old pack house.

Down in the courtyard, where the cars had made tracks in the waist-high grass, Tim was throwing something into a skip.