Weekly Drabble #233: Pack Mentality (Patreon)

Origin point: "wrong turn" from Pethrai D'Arkos

Draft 1: a woman on an infested ship/space station turns the wrong corner
Draft 2: a woman and a man in a labyrinth, hunting each other and/or being hunted by something else turn the wrong corner
Draft 3: a man in some ancient ruins is being hunted, he turns the wrong corner
Draft 4: as below

End point: Pack Mentality

~
Pack Mentality:

Amid the ruins, Sergeant Calvin Baker paused, sniffing at the ground, his ears flattening. The enemy had come this way. He raised his head briefly, scanning the area, ears perked up and attentive, but he neither heard nor saw anything.

From his left, there was a soft rustle of wings and skitter of claws on stone. Calvin looked up as Serafima alighted on a broken column. A four-limbed wyvern, covered in horny scales, her forelimbs doubling as powerful wings, her forward-set eyes gleaming softly in the sparse moonlight. A complete contrast to Baker himself; tall and black-furred in his bestial form, as at ease on four limbs as he was standing upright, something between wolf and man. Unlike him, she was an Aberrant, an anomaly within anomalies. Less than one in ten million humans was a lycanthrope and less than one percent of those was an Aberrant. Aberrants could take many shapes; apes, griffins, bats and more or even, like Serafima, creatures that weren’t even mammals at all.

The moon might not be full, but that made little difference to a trained lycanthrope. While their kind must change on the three days of the fullest moon each month, once they had mastered it, they could do so on any night at all. His earliest changes had been traumatic, as had Serafima’s. Neither of them had understood what was happening to them.

Baker’s companion’s scales rippled with colour, shifting from a dark night sky blue to the brownish mottling of the stone upon which she was resting and in seconds, she was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape.

Calvin raised his forepaws, signing a question. Even if they might have been inclined to speak and risk their prey hearing, neither of them could properly enunciate while they were in their were-forms. American Beast Sign, as it was called, was how lycans communicated. When they were deployed in the field, they carried radio buds to hear incoming orders and head-mounted cameras so that their handlers could track what they were doing. Neither lycan carried those tonight.

Serafima shook her head slowly. No sign of them.

The werewolf nodded. That’s what he’d been afraid of. The ruins and hills provided too much cover from the air. He then signed for her to investigate the left flank. She nodded sharply and with a soft rustle of movement, the wyvern vanished into the darkness. He watched her go. She was the youngest member of his unit, and the one he kept the closest eye on.

She’d been in her mid-teens when the Russkies first scooped her up. She’d only suffered through two changes on her own before they found her. Russia kept a sharp eye out for lycans; they had since WW2 and the Nazis’ ‘werewolf regiments’ had pushed the Third Reich all the way to Moscow. That had been the point where superstition and myth gave way to cold, hard fact and the world could no longer deny or ignore the existence of lycans. Serafima had been put through training, but she’d never served in the field.

With the rise of the Chechnyan ultra-Orthodox sect and its growing influence on the Russian government, the handful of lycans within the country were finding themselves increasingly on the outs with the fundamentalists and the government, particularly if they didn’t match the image that the chechies wanted. As a woman, a lycan andan Aberrant, Serafima wasn’t particularly welcome. She might have been quietly shuffled off to some wasteland posting, well out of sight and mind or disappeared like had become increasingly common for detractors and potential detractors. Instead, the premier had decided on another use her and she’d been all but sold like a prize racing mare to the US, traded for several previous captured agents and a handsome sum.

Once in the US, she’d been transferred to the Biological Anomaly Research Division, a fancy-sounding name for lycanthrope special ops teams and their handlers. The rest of Calvin’s team had kept the young woman at arm’s length. Young, Russian, an Aberrant – and, yes, also a woman – made her the odd one out in ‘the pack’, a unit of a half-dozen all-American male werewolves.

Seeing that, Baker had taken her under his wing, helping to integrate her into the pack, a new command structure and her surroundings. She’d adjusted well to life stateside, but he’d been uncertain about how she’d handle herself in the field. Even before the Chechnyans started putting their hand up Russia’s collective backside, she’d never been deployed. At least, until during the Mojave business. She’d more than proven herself during that campaign and now there were no questions from their handlers or any of his men about their “little dragon’s” capabilities.

Or not so little. Serafima’s alternate form was almost the size of any of the pack’s, though not as bulky. Each of the pack were bulky, fast and capable of crossing a killing field and butchering a squad of men. Sera’s wyvern form didn’t have that same raw strength of a werewolf, but she could move with shocking bursts of speed that even other lycans struggled to react to, her chameleon scales let her blend in to her environment nearly perfectly, her wings let her reach places that only aerial drones could survey and her teeth and claws could slash through the strongest body armour and even other lycans’ flesh like knives through soft steak. She’d been invaluable hunting dissidents and extremists in the Mojave, and even more so here in Africa.

There was trouble with the Northern Allied African States. Internal political turmoil and factional infighting had spilled out into actual fighting. The NAAS interim council had asked for support from their American allies, but tensions with the EU – spearheaded by France and their colonial aspirations within Africa – had made the US hesitant to commit. Until the American embassy in Libya had been sacked and its diplomatic staff killed. That had been all the impetus the US needed to covertly assign several units in an ‘advisory role’ to NAAS loyalists, including one team of lycanthropes. Their orders had been clear: support the embattled NAAS governments, prevent the scattered violence from congealing into a full-on civil war, and protect American citizens and interests within the region.

Easier said than done, but the pack had been keeping busy. During the day, they worked alongside other American forces and the NAAS regulars, putting their enhanced senses to work; during the night, they shed their human bodies for those of their were-forms and went on seek-and-destroy missions, routing enemy encampments and taking care of whatever the normal soldiers couldn’t.

They’d started to get a reputation. Though the US had not officially announced the deployment of lycanthropes to the NAAS, rumours were spreading. Villagers looked at the American troops in askance, with suspicion or outright terror as if they were going to change on the spot and devour them whole. It was a response Calvin had seen in his own countrymen and fellow soldiers, but it was what it was. He hadn’t asked to be this way. Not a single one of them had, from Tyrone, who’d been mauled by strange dog when he’d been coming home from midnight basketball, to Andrew, who’d been born of two lycans and gone through his first change after he hit puberty to Serafima herself, who... actually, Calvin didn’t know her story. The Russians had heavily redacted her file during the ‘personnel exchange’ and if the higher-ups knew more about her than he did, they hadn’t bothered to share it with him.

Despite all that, Calvin couldn’t have imagined any other partner for this mission. Someone was killing his people. Three of his men had been lost within a month, all of them torn to shreds. Intelligence was on it, but they didn’t have anything. No one was claiming credit and the locals were playing dumb, but Calvin knew something was up. These attacks weren’t coming from any special forces unit or kill team. They were brutal, vicious and took their prey almost entirely by surprise. No ordinary human could have done that. There was another lycan out there and it was killing his men.

Calvin’s ears twitched as he listened to the still desert night. There was no wind and no sound at all. He looked back at the way Serafima had gone. He could smell her, but to his other senses, she might as well have been a ghost. With drifting clouds and a thin crescent moon, there was little light tonight. It put Calvin at a disadvantage, but Serafima didn’t mind. Her wyvern form’s hearing wasn’t as keen as a werewolf’s, but her eyesight was incredible, able to read a book in someone’s hands while soaring high above them, or tracking their body heat through the darkest of nights. Between his ears and her eyes, they’d flush their quarry out.

Command had been keeping Serafima back, away from the public and only deploying her in select circumstances. The only surviving witnesses to her were the pack. He hoped that would be enough. The enemy seemed prepared for wolves, but maybe not a wyvern. If whoever was out here was expecting more dog soldiers, then they were going to get a nasty surprise.

Phil and Andrew had been killed while still human. Brett, mid-change. The motherfucker knew who they needed to gun for first and to hit them before they could change. They wouldn’t have that chance tonight, though.

They’d started to get cocky. Andrew had been the third victim, killed while out on patrol. The squad with him had been taken apart, but one of them had managed a lucky hit. There’d been a blood trail. It hadn’t lasted long, but it had given them a direction. The killer had escaped into the nearby foothills. A lot of the enemy had hid up there. Calvin had thought they’d rooted them all out.

Command had wanted to go in with a full sweep-and-clear, but Calvin knew that they wouldn’t have the time. The killer knew they’d been injured, they knew they’d be tracked. They’d be gone before the cavalry arrived. This was insubordination, but he couldn’t let them get away. Three of his people were dead. Brothers in covenant if not blood. He was their sergeant. They were his responsibility and he’d failed them. It was time to make that right. He’d gone to Serafima. He wouldn’t have ordered her, but he didn’t even need to ask. She saw what he wanted in his eyes. He’d thought she might turn him down; she’d only been with a year and even after the Mojave, she was still somewhat on the outside.

Instead, she’d nodded. “When do we go?” she asked in her soft Russian accent.

“Tonight,” he’d told her. The rest of the boys wanted to come; it had been their brothers that had been killed, too, but he’d told them to stand down. Too many feet could spook their prey and if he and Serafima failed, then they’d need to finish the job. Grudgingly, they’d agreed, covering for Calvin and Serfima.

The trail ended here, in these burnt-out stone ruins. Their injured enemy was waiting for them. Expecting them. Wounded prey was the most dangerous of all, but Calvin was willing to bet that whoever said that hadn’t had an encounter with him. Whoever or whatever was waiting for him in these ruins, whoever it was – they were going to die. One way or another, this was going to end tonight.