Blind Rage - Chapter 18

Wednesday, July 29, 1997, 12:24 pm

Texas (somewhere between Boerne and Comfort)

Rosa’s lips pressed into a tight angry line, and she started to walk faster, using her nose and her ears to find Jobe. Then she drew back her cane to slap Jobe’s thigh.

The fiberglass tube popped his flesh with a meaty sound, and Jobe yelped before he sped up to get out of Rosa’s range.

He wouldn’t argue with her, and his silence was just as infuriating as the forced hike.

But the problem was, once Wagner arrived with equipment loaded in a company van, the rest of the pack started getting their things together, and then Rachel reluctantly packed her new hiking gear too.

Rachel’s absence would have left Rosa alone, and for once in her life, she was ready to admit that she was tired of being lonely. She wanted to avoid it, even if staying with the pack meant venturing into hell.

Going camping was just a step above hell in Rosa’s mind. But she swallowed her pride and asked George to help her pack her supplies.

Jobe hadn’t tried to coax her into a false cheer, and he wasn’t trying to be optimistic and claim that they would be in and out of the area quickly. They had a lot of ground to cover, and until the new moon on Sunday, they would be forced to cover most of the terrain with a slower human pace.

There was a chance that invading the orc’s hunting territory would cause it to come looking for them. But Rosa, ever the cheerless pessimist, felt certain that they would end up camping for two weeks. Then she would be uncomfortable, cranky and stinky.

Which was why, every time she thought about the length of the trip, she would speed up to swat Jobe another time.

She was starting to pick up her pace again when a hand closed over her wrist. Rachel tugged Rosa to a stop, squeezing her wrist.

Her voice was an angry, hissing whisper. “Rosa, I don’t care if you’re alpha or not. If you don’t knock that off, I swear to god I will bend you over my knee and swat your ass with that cane myself.”

Rosa had an angry comment come to mind, but Rachel took off, stomping as she increased her pace to catch up to the guys. Rosa would have liked to turn around and stomp back home to have a proper temper tantrum. But she had no idea which way home was.

She followed the receding stomps, her cane slashing at the ground in a blurring sweep that made the fiberglass hum with every pass.

Her temper boiled over into a full rage, and she threw down her cane before she screamed, “Damn it! This isn’t my fault!” Her voice rose in volume, but she couldn’t burn out the indignant rage.

“Why the fuck should I be punished just because Dave decided to go hunting? Why are we even bothering to look for him or the orc? Why can’t the FBI look for them instead of sending us out?”

No one answered her, but from the silence, she knew they’d stopped walking.

“It’s not my fault,” she muttered, fighting against a lump in her throat. She felt stupid, and the feeling grew stronger when she thought about her cane.

She started crying, which in turn blocked her sinuses and deadened her sense of smell. Gasping in frustration, she sank to the ground on her haunches, patting the dry grass to search for the cane.

The rage started to seep away, but in its place was a dull ache.

“I just want to stay at home and mind my own business,” she whimpered.

The ache in her chest made the lump in her throat stronger. She stopped patting the ground and sat back on her haunches.

“Five years, I’ve been good. I mind my own business, and I’ve been...” She started to sob. Sniffling, she raised her hands to cover her face. “Somebody tell me what I did to deserve this?”

Footsteps approached her. Hands grasped hers and drew them away from her face. One of the hands released hers, and she heard something rustle in the grass before her cane handle was laid in her palm.

Then Jobe spoke in a soft, sad voice. “Life isn’t fair, Rosa. I would have thought you’d learned that by now. It isn’t your fault, but life doesn’t care. I’m sorry, darlin’. I don’t mean to be so blunt, but life isn’t going to play fair just because you fall down and cry over it.”

His words hit her as hard as a slap, but Rosa swallowed to keep down a bitter response.

Jobe moved back a few steps. “We can sit here and let you cry yourself out, but we will have to get up and start hiking again. It’s up to you how long you want to sit here and wallow in self-pity.”

Rosa flinched as if she’d been struck. She dropped her head, huffing. “I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you are. Any other time, I’d let you do it. But if we don’t keep moving, Dave is going to kill the orc. Now, you search yourself, and you tell me if you’re really okay with letting someone die just so you can sit safe at home.”

Rosa whimpered. “Jobe, that’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “Come on. When we make camp, we’ll let you have more time to sulk. But we really need to be moving.”

Rosa wanted to be angry. But she wasn’t accomplishing anything with her temper tantrum. Either way, she would still be camping out.

Nodding, she got up to follow Jobe.

***

Dave heard a woman screaming in anger, though there was too much distance for him to make out the words, even with his enhanced senses. He stopped walking and glanced over his shoulder, wondering if his pursuers had already started their hunt for him.

He unbuckled his hiking bag and let it sink to the ground. From the side pouch, he took out his field binoculars and looped the strap around his neck.

He shimmied up the side of a tree, getting as high as he could manage before he tried to find the source of the scream.

The pack didn’t seem like much of a threat once he found them. Dave realized the woman hunching over was Rosa, and he frowned as he thought, Who in their right mind would drag a blind woman into the woods?

He pushed the thought aside. No one in the pack was in their right mind anymore. They were infected, like him. Even Rosa was infected, and now she was part of Jobe’s pack. Even if they’d been friends before, she was an enemy now.

He thought, Oh yeah? So what does that kind of thinking make you? The picture of perfect mental health?

Dave responded back, At least I’m not as crazy as Jobe. Judging from that fight, I think he dragged Rosa out here against her will.

It didn’t matter who they brought. The pack was looking for him, or for the werebear. Maybe both.

In any case, he wanted to find and bag the werebear himself. He would still be looking at a year or two in prison for assaulting Jobe and Gavin, but perhaps if he proved that he was trying to stop a public menace, the judge might shave a few months off of his sentence.

He dropped the field glasses, squinting at the five specks in the distance while he sawed his jaw back and forth in agitation.

He needed more time to find the werebear, and he couldn’t be worrying about the feds climbing up his ass while he concentrated on following cold tracks. He needed to keep the group distracted, or force them into a different search.

Dave’s mouth turned down in a guilty frown as he considered an idea. Whatever the creature was in its untransformed state, it had tried to talk to Rosa. It might trust her, or come to investigate her scent.

He hated the idea of using Rosa as bait, but he reminded himself that she was an enemy, a member of Jobe’s converted pack.

He clambered down the tree and opened his bag to pull out his folding spade. It was intended to dig shallow trenches to relieve himself in, and he was not looking forward to digging a deep hole with the midget shovel.

Still a deep hole was what he needed.

***

Wednesday, 7:10 pm

Jobe finished setting up the blue single-person dome tent for Rosa. He turned to look where she sat against the side of a tree, and her forlorn expression was almost enough to convince him to pack up camp and head home for her sake.

If not for the berserker’s promise to Erick, he would have wished the orc the best of luck in dealing with Dave. But the elf had left Jobe in a precarious position. He could not abandon the orc, and he couldn’t leave Rosa alone either. Not with a new moon coming.

In her transformed state, Rosa might attack one of her neighbors, and then she would be killed by the authorities. It wasn’t better to have her out in the woods, but despite having multiple personalities, Jobe was incapable of being in two places at the same time.

Rosa’s fingers blurred with constant activity as she spun her cane around. She couldn’t see the result of her fidgeting, but she’d drilled a hole into the ground, burying most of the red tip of the cane into the soil.

Jobe didn’t need to read her mind to know that she felt lost. It wasn’t just her present location causing the feeling either. Rosa had probably been lost for a long time, and her recent problems had only compounded her feelings of uncertainty.

He walked across the clearing to kneel in front of Rosa. “I set up your tent. Do you want to rest, or have something to eat first?”

“Food,” Rosa said.

Jobe got her a pouch of beef jerky, and another of dried fruit. He didn’t try to talk her out of being upset. For the time being, he was the last person that she would want to seek comfort from. To her mind, Jobe was the reason that she was stuck outside indefinitely.

He moved to sit with Gavin and George by the campfire.

Jobe didn’t care for sending a signal to Dave of their location, but once Gavin and Rachel started gathering limbs and branches, he kept the thought to himself.

Making the fire and tending to it were both attempts to make work for themselves.  Then, they didn’t have to worry about Rosa, or about the coming hunt. All they had to focus on was finding dry wood to keep the fire going.

Besides, there was the chance that the fire might also draw in the orc. It didn’t seem likely, but Jobe was trying to be optimistic.

Rachel was still hiding in the woods. On each return trip with an armload of timber, she would glance at Jobe with a troubled expression. But if she had something on her mind, she wasn’t ready to share it with him yet. She set down her bundles of wood by the fire, checking her progress before she wandered away again.

Jobe had been trying to keep himself busy to avoid talking too, but all of the work was done. The only options were to talk, or sit quietly and try to avoid upsetting anyone else. So he sat and stared at the fire.

When Jobe sighed, George smacked his lips in a tsk-like sound and said, “Yep.” He thought, Man, I could sure use a beer.

Gavin nodded, his expression slack. “Yeah, me too.”

George glanced over at him with a stunned expression. “But you...you don’t drink.”

“I would now,” Gavin said.

“Yeah, me too,” Rosa muttered.

And with that, the conversation died.

***

Wednesday, 7:18 pm

Rachel raised her head, appraising the dying light while she tried to figure out how much time was left before the sun set. She was just guessing, though. She was never outside long enough to understand something as simple as the solar cycle.

With a computer, she was a wizard trained in sixteen programming languages, twenty-five operating systems, and five networking protocols. She was a genius with a computer. But in the forest, she was a complete doofus who couldn’t find her ass with both hands, a map and a neon sign.

The closest Rachel had ever come to camping in her life was a computer camp that she’d attended in high school, and then she’d been a camp counselor. The rented cabins were filled with old computers and ice chests. Aside from the time she’d spent walking to the lunch line or her sleeping quarters, Rachel hadn’t even been outdoors at the camp more than five minutes at a time. It wasn’t really “roughing it.”

As a self-professed nerd, she was way out of her element. She felt just as angry as Rosa over her circumstances, but she could understand why Jobe wouldn’t leave Rosa behind at the house.

It wasn’t the same thing as leaving a pet behind, and Jobe couldn’t call up the neighbors to ask, “Oh, on the new moon, can you run by to feed my werepanther and make sure she doesn’t kill or curse anyone?”

Jobe was their handler, and since he had to be out of town to look for Dave and the orc, the pack had to come with him. Rachel understood his dilemma, and she could forgive him.

Instead, she was angry at Wagner for sending her to Rosa’s house without any warning about the risks she was facing. It was Wagner’s fault that she’d become cursed, and it was his fault that she no longer had her safe daily routines.

She thought, This isn’t helping. This is just crying that life isn’t fair, like Rosa. Think of something else and let it go.

She started to recount her morning routine, trying to draw some comfort from it. At seven she got up and fed her dog, a silver Husky named AJ.

Rachel hadn’t been able to think of a proper name that her new puppy would respond to. She’d started snapping “asshole jerk” every time she caught the puppy chewing her shoes, or the furniture, or the doors, or anything else the demonically possessed canine could fit in his little mouth.

At times, he’d even tried chewing on Rachel. She still had the needle sized scars on her wrist to prove it.

The puppy didn’t actually respond to Asshole Jerk, but Rachel felt better by hurling the slur at the puppy.

However, during the first visit to her house by her parents, Rachel’s mother had asked what the dog’s name was. Floundering, Rachel’s said, “He’s just AJ.” The dog looked up at her and barked in response. So he was AJ from then on.

After feeding AJ, Rachel got in the tub and started a hot shower. She put the stopper in the drain, letting the tub fill while she rinsed herself off. Then she would shut off the shower and lounge in the tub for a few minutes.

Once she was cleaned and dressed for work, AJ had to be walked. Or, more truthfully, Rachel had to be dragged behind the dog as it raced around the block. Once he’d “done his business” and she had cleaned up after him, it was time to race back to the house and make coffee.

Rachel sighed at that thought, and she repeated it, Make coffee.

At her apartment, she had a proper French press, and her own grinder. She had bags of whole beans from all over the world, and she made her own blends. If she had any habit that counted as an addiction, it was her coffee.

And while she adored Rosa, she wanted to scream every time she saw the stale, generic store-bought coffee being shoveled into an electric drip machine. It wouldn’t be bad if Rosa put in enough grounds for a decent brew, but Rosa’s house blend was weaker than mouse farts.

Rosa compounded insult with injury by dumping non-dairy creamer and saccharin sweetener into her coffee, until it no longer tasted like coffee at all.

Hell, it wasn’t coffee. It was a warm brown liquid with an atavistic resemblance to coffee. Just watching Rosa drink it made Rachel feel ill.

Rachel shuddered and pushed the nightmarish memory away. She wanted to remember something happier, to make the thought of being in the woods go away.

After she’d made her coffee and poured it into her thermos for the trip to work, Rachel drove to Chacho’s, where she usually ordered four to six breakfast tacos. Her favorites were potato and egg, and bean and cheese. But when those got old, she ordered sausage, egg and cheese, or something fancy, like chorizo, potato, and pico de gallo.

Half of her breakfast would be inhaled during the drive to the office, and the other would be portioned out as snacks to keep her going until lunch.

Rachel sighed, pouting when her mouth started to water. She tried to move on to thinking of something else, but once she thought of breakfast, her mind became filled with a parade of foods.

Her memory was sharp and cruel, so that she could remember everything. The flavor of the salted eggs was just as vivid as the fluffy, dry texture she felt when she’d just bitten into a taco. She could feel the warm heat in her mouth, and she almost started chewing.

She stopped walking, gripped in a daydream so powerful that at first, she took the rising heat on her body as just another part of the memory.

But a moment later, her real sense of smell cut in over the imagined scents of food, and the werecat approaching her wasn’t one of the pack.

Rachel’s eyes unglazed, and she realized that she’d lost track of time so completely that she didn’t notice the sunset. Worse, she’d been wandering for some time, and she’d lost her bearings.

The campfire, she thought, spinning in a circle to look for some source of light. She found none, and panic sank cold, boney fingers under her skin.

Rachel turned another circle, this time searching for the approaching werekin. It had to be Dave. The orc smelled like a bear, though not the same breed as Gavin.

The wind shifted, and with it, the scent of the werecat evaporated. Rachel panicked, and she started running in what she hoped was the right direction to get back to camp. None of the trees were familiar, and she couldn’t pick up her own lingering scent either. She had to be going the wrong way.

She veered right, running a few minutes before she doubted herself again and veered left. She ran faster and faster, desperate to find anything that looked familiar. Nothing was, and between each of her gasping pants for air, she whimpered.

She looked left when something popped, like a rock hitting the ground. She was still searching for the source of the sound when Dave slammed a tree branch into the side of her head.

***

Wednesday, 7:40 pm

Gavin glanced up from the fire when Jobe tapped his shoulder. “What’s up?”

“Rachel isn’t back from her walk yet,” Jobe said. “I’m going to look for her, and George is taking a different route. You should stay with Rosa and keep the radio turned on. If you hear screaming, call for backup.”

Gavin wasn’t sure if Jobe was joking or not, but he chose to grab the radio from Jobe’s bag anyway. Then he returned to the fire and continued to stare at it.

Staying with Rosa wasn’t hard. She was cat napping inside her tent, and she had been ever since she’d finished eating. Gavin doubted she would come out of her funk until much later in the trip.

There wasn’t much to do to pass the time. There was sleeping, but Gavin was still too wound up to lay down, let alone close his eyes.

He’d passed close to fifteen minutes just staring at the flames when Dave approached the camp. Gavin was staring at the base of the fire with glazed, unfocused eyes. He didn’t see the thing that Dave tossed over Gavin shoulder and into the fire until the rumpled ball of facial tissue dropped between two thick logs.

Frowning, Gavin looked up to see who had thrown the trash into the fire, and he saw no one. He spun his head over his shoulder and sniffed the air, only catching a lingering trace of...wet mud? His gaze returned to the napkin, and he wondered why it didn’t ignite in the fire.

He had no way of knowing that Dave poured water on the tissue to give the package more heft, and to ensure that the paper didn’t catch fire immediately. It sizzled and steamed, but the paper didn’t ignite

The last of the water boiled away, and once the paper ignited, the magnesium shavings from Dave’s fire starting kit burst into a white hot fire.

Gavin was looking directly at the package, and he was blinded by the sudden flare of light.

Stumbling back, he started to shout, “Ros—”

He was struck on the back of the head, and he dropped to the ground in a crumpled heap.

***

Rosa woke up groggy, uncertain of what had pulled her back to her senses. Yawning, she patted her way to the zippered entrance of the tent.

“Jobe?”

No answer.

Frowning, she unzipped the entrance and crawled outside. “Rachel? Gavin? Is anybody there?”

Rosa started to pant, but she couldn’t smell anyone in the camp. There was a lingering aroma of burnt metal, but nothing of Jobe or her packmates. She got to her feet and raised her hands out in front of her. “Anybody? Hello!”

Her berserker said, You’re dreaming. This is just a dream, and you need to wake up now, Rosa. Don’t wander around. Wake up!

She stumbled over a branch and pitched into the fire pit. Her right hand closed over a smoldering log, and she screeched as she rolled onto her back and drew the burnt hand up to her chest.

She smelled wet mud, and she patted the ground with her left hand, trying to find the source of the scent. It had to be close, and if it was wet enough, she would push her burnt hand into the puddle to relieve the sting. She couldn’t find the puddle, but the scent still seemed to be getting stronger.

A mud-covered hand clamped over her mouth while a thick, wet arm closed around her arms and chest. Rosa screamed through her nose, her feet flailing as she tried to kick at Dave’s legs.

He drew her up from the ground easily in spite of her efforts, and when he held her upright, his chin settled on her shoulder.

Dave whispered, “Rosa, if you keep struggling, I’m gonna hafta hurt you.”

It was all he needed to say to make her fall limp in his arms.

***

Jobe heard Rosa scream, and his heart skipped a beat. He spun his head, trying to look for the campfire. But he’d wandered too far away to even see a dim glow, and Rosa’s cry was faint.

Jobe cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Rosa?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before he started running.

He arrived to an empty camp. There were signs of a struggle near the fire, but only a few paces out, Jobe lost the tracks in the darkness.

George crashed through the underbrush on the other side of the camp, his heavy brow hunched down over his eyes in a look of anger.

Gavin was gone. Rosa’s tent was open, and she was missing too.

George crossed the camp, his angry look fading into uncertainty. “What do we do?”

“Not a damn thing,” Jobe waved down at a set of tracks. “I can’t track those until tomorrow, and if we split up to look for Dave, he’ll pick us off.”

He spun away from George to bellow, “You’re starting to piss me off, Dave!  We just wanted to talk to you, and you keep fucking with us! For what? What is your fucking malfunction?”

He started to pant faster, and then his voice deepened, increasing in volume as the berserker took over. “If you harm her...”

But he couldn’t finish. There was nothing he could come up with, because the thought of Rosa being hurt again filled the berserker with a dread so overwhelming that it sapped his rage. He sank to his knees, closing his eyes.

The berserker drew in a breath and whispered, “Please, don’t hurt her again.”

***

Wednesday, 8:13 pm

Rosa had no idea how long she’d been carried before Dave stopped walking. He whispered in her ear, “I’m going to let go of your mouth now. If you scream, I’ll hit you. Do you understand?”

Rosa nodded, and the moment he let go of her mouth, she started to whimper again. Then she heard the click of a folding knife, and her lungs seized. She couldn’t draw in a breath, even when he began to slit the front of her T-shirt.

He put away the knife and gripped the back of her collar before he pushed her to walk forward.

Rosa took a step, and then her arms flew up as her weight pulled her away from the slashed shirt. Her arms dropped out of the sleeves as she continued to fall, and she flailed to find something to grab onto.

Her hands scraped against a wall of dirt and exposed root, and her burnt hand blazed with new pains. Rosa opened her mouth to scream, and then her limp legs hit the bottom of the hole.

Her body folded over her knees, knocking the wind from her lungs and cracking three of her ribs under her armpit on the right side.

Rosa’s wounded hand spasmed on the wall of the hole while her left hand clutched at her fractured ribs. Her head tilted back, and she was still trying to draw in a breath when she passed out.

***

Dave hunched over, cringing as he watched Rosa collapse.

He wiped the drying mud from his face and flicked it away, sighing as he thought, Now I’ll probably find out what Jobe was going to finish that sentence with.

He felt bad about having to use Rosa as bait, or as a distraction, but she had talked to the creature, and she was the easiest member of the pack to trap without resorting to injuring her.

Dave grimaced as he corrected himself, I think the fall injured her, moron.

And of course, he hadn’t really thought much about how a blind woman would react to falling into a hole. She couldn’t see the bottom, and thus, she couldn’t tense up in expectation of the landing.

In admitting this, Dave had a brilliant thought: Duh, I could have used the rope to lower her into the hole.

He looked away from Rosa’s exposed back. Only a few years before, he’d seen the same back nude and free of scars. Now she was hard to look at.

He wondered why the men had spared so much of her face and neck, when they had seemingly cut her everywhere else.

Then she was cursed by the werebear, and now you dropped her in a hole. Dave’s conscience took on a colder voice. You cut off her shirt, and you pushed her into the hole. She was your best friend.

Dave shut his eye, forcing his conscience to be quiet. It had been a long time since Rosa got tired of his bullshit and walked away. Now they were on opposite sides of a fight, and he couldn’t let the pack take the werebear. They would protect it, probably letting it curse other people.

Dave unrolled the tarp he’d intended to use as a lean-to shelter, and through each of the eyeholes, he sank a twig as an anchor. He scattered soil and leaves over the camouflage tarp, and he gathered twigs and pinecones to toss them around. Unless someone walked directly onto the tarp, they would never find the pit.

When Rosa recovered, she would start screaming for her pack to find her. If he could lure the werebear into the area using Rosa’s shirt to make a scent trail, her screams could also attract him into the clearing.

Dave would be a few hundred yards away with the rifle, and he would find out if the werebear could survive with half a skull.

On the other hand, Jobe and the other members of the pack might show up first. In which case, the distance between himself and the trap would theoretically be enough to ensure that the pack couldn’t pick up his scent. He would be able to escape and move farther north before he started his hunt again.

By the time he’d finished hiding the pit, the mud he wore was dry and flaking away from his body. He’d decided to pull on the mud after taking out the Asian woman. He’d tracked her by scent, but then the wind shifted, and she caught scent of him and ran.

It had worked out in his favor. In her panicked state, she fled farther away from the camp. He just hadn’t thought of it as an advantage at the time because he’d had to run to get around in front of her. Once he’d knocked her out, he didn’t need to move her very far to ensure that she would be completely lost.

By comparison, he’d had to carry Gavin away from the camp, and the agent wasn’t that far away. Either Jobe would stumble over the agent, or Gavin would wake up and make his way back to camp. But once the men were reunited, they’d have to worry more about finding their women than they did about Dave.

If he was lucky, it might take the men a few days to find Rachel. That left Dave free to hunt down the werebear using Rosa as bait.