The Uzi clattered, instantly knocking over the three wolves that had followed the leader in through the broken window, while Mildred, standing calm and four-square in the doorway, shot a fifth animal through the head at the very moment it crashed in after the others.
But the giant mutie wolf was still very much alive, heaving itself upright, though the shattered leg made any rapid movement impossible.
Krysty backed slowly away from it, its looming shadow thrown ahead of it by the flickering flames.
The whole pack was coming now, bursting through the remnants of the broken picture window, two and three at a time, seeming to fill the room with their noise and rank stench. Jak managed to shoot another one, but the dying animal knocked him sideways, stumbling as it died, finally falling into the fire. Its bulk practically extinguished the burning logs, and the whole place was plunged into almost total darkness. There was still the filtered silver moonlight from outside, and the snarling, raging animals, filling the room.
The staccato sound of gunfire added to the confusion and carnage.
Krysty had good night sight, second only to Jak, and she could see the grim outline of the leader of the pack, dragging itself toward her as she backed awaybacked away until she felt her shoulders touch the corner of the room and knew there was nowhere else to go.
She could feel the hot carnivorous breath of the wolf, less than a yard away from her. In the chaos, everyone was too busy with their own problems to worry about her. The corpse on the fire was already beginning to burn, filling the cooling air with smoke and the taste of roasted flesh.
Krysty had already decided to try to gouge out the wolf’s eyes when it came at her, and bite it on the ear or the muzzle, though she also knew that the odds lay long and hard against her.
“Come on, then,” she whispered, trying to boost her own failing courage, aware from things that Peter Maritza had told her back in Harmony that a wolf that size could take her arm off at the shoulder in a single crunching bite.
“Aid is at hand, my dear!” Doc yelled, stumbling across the room, tripping over the twitching corpse of one of the animals, holding the Le Mat in his right hand.
“Watch yourself, Doc!”
The mutie leader of the wolves had turned at the interruption, its attention wrenched away from the woman. It opened its great jaws and bayed defiance at the intruding man.
Doc might have been a few cards short of a full deck, but he had never lacked courage.
He stopped a scant yard from the creature and leveled the Le Mat, pointing it so that the railroad-tunnel muzzle was inches from the angular skull.
And pulled the trigger.
The hammer fell on the 18-gauge scattergun chamber, exploding the burst of grapeshot.
At point-blank range it didn’t just kill the wolf, it destroyed it, blowing the head apart, covering Krysty with hot blood, peppering her with fragments of bone.
The animal never moved, simply slumping dead to the carpet.
“Gaia!” Krysty said, as she wiped her sleeve over her face. “God love you, Doc, for that.”
“Courage, mon amie, le diable est mort!”
“What?”
“Means no more Mr. Wolf, little Red Riding Hair. We can all live happily ever after.”
The shooting had stopped.
One of the wolves was whining as it lay beneath the window, but Jak stooped and carefully slit its throat.
The place stank of burned meat, scorched hair, hot blood, cordite and excrement, where a number of the animals had fouled themselves in dying. And the temperature had already dropped twenty degrees.
J.B. went to drag the body off the fire, fanning the air with his hand. “How many came in and how many stayed out?” he asked.
Mildred stepped carefully to the window, reloading the Czech blaster as she did, and peered through the shattered glass at the trampled winter landscape outside.
“All gone,” she reported, turning back to the room. “And it looks like about eight or nine dead ones in here.”
He nodded. “Everyone all right? Good work, my friends. Well, we were going to leave in the morning. I think we might as well go now. Anyone object? No? Then let’s go.”