Where Dead Wolves Fly

A Tale of Desert Horror...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Couldn’t let the day pass without sharing something delightfully ghoulish for the occasion. In lieu of checking up on old Jon Aegel trapped in the world of cyberspace, I elected to grab a few old favorites and dropped them into a peculiar encounter that even I myself wasn’t sure about until the very end. Do enjoy, boys and ghouls!

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For the first time in a long time, Lita was terrified. Bone-stick-stone cold, locked in absolute fright. For all the chutzpah and gumption in that fiendish mind of hers, for all the blood spilled on the streets of Haven, the dark gray punk had never before seen such a wretched sight.

She had made another pilgrimage to the desert, to see her beloved Nicky and fall in love all over again with the black-furred cowboy she so dearly cherished. It was while searching for a drink that she saw the terrible sight through the window. Shambling from out the midnight dust, a wolf glowing green with light marched itself slowly towards Ridgefield’s trailer home. From out that sandy cloud came more and more, with gaunt faces and molting fur. None bore eyes in their glowing green heads, just sockets of black, as if the vomitus glowing fur wrapped only the wolves’ bones.

The scruffy punk stood, jaw slacked with shell shock, unable to pull herself away from the macabre funeral march. It was only upon the grizzly sound they made, the grotesque cackle of a shredded throat, that she wheeled around and shook Nic down like he owed her money. After a half-dozen “c’mons” and a couple of supplications to God, she went hellbent for leather on him.

“BABE! WAKE THE HELL UP!” she bellowed feverishly, shaking him ever more frantically. For a moment, it looked like he was deep in sleep, the kind she knew only a nuke would wake him from. But after a few more wild rolls, and the realization his girl wasn’t acting like her usual self, Nic leapt up and wrapped her in his arms.

“Whoa-whoa-whoawhoawhoa.” he started, “The hell’s wrong, baby? The hell’s going on?” When the frightened city girl pointed to the window, a mix of grim amusement and genuine concern fell upon the black cowboy’s face. “Well,” the tall wolf curtly sighed, “that’s a new one.”

“Ah new WHAT!?” Lita exclaimed.

“A new stage of addiction,” Nic answered. “Remember all the jive I told you ‘bout radium? The desert’s new flavor of glowing-green crack-rock?” His lover nodded. “We’d only ever fought the worst of these junkies during the day.”

She thought back to the one guy she had splattered with him, and it all clicked. “Good God, they looked like they shot straight outta atomic Hell.” the punk gasped. “The hell we supposed to do?”

“When they’re this far gone?” Nic nodded. “Same thing you did to Deere, and the same thing I do to these scum-buckets every other week. Get your things on.”

She did so without hesitation while Nic got his cowboy garb on him. The duo now dressed, they bolted for Nic’s scrappy little pickup. Lita took to the driver’s seat while Nic queued up the radio to pickup someone at the Central Region HQ for Hell Patrol. With a fire lit in her blood-red eyes, the mohawked punk slapped her sandaled paw on the gas and bolted for the borderline sea of neon green she and her lover were about to wage war on. She didn’t waver an inch from the ghastly sight, braced for the usual mess she made of anyone fool enough to go under her wheels. In a macabre way, she actually welcomed the action, her stay having been such a comparatively peaceful (i.e. boring) one.

And in the end, she got her wish.

The Hilux bucketed along, fat tires pounding the desert sand, thirsting for addicts’ destruction, the towering hound beside her having finally reached someone on the signal. But with a final feral cry, and a final stomp on the throttle, Lita rammed the truck into the first bastard she saw.

He didn’t evaporate against the grill, nor snap to pieces beneath the pickup’s mighty wheels. The irradiated hound shot into the air…and vanished into the nothing. One by one, more vanished in that same single bound. For every one Lita hit, a dozen shot into the air, gone with the evening’s wind, nowhere to be found. And each one she struck, sounded off like a stick of dynamite, echoing into the hills. When she slammed the brakes down, and brought the truck to a stop, Nic and Lita got their bearings. And without the world blurring past them, both the black-furred cowboy and his tenacious gray hippie-punk realized that there was no one there.

They did a double-take before Nic called off his request, thanking them regardless. For a moment, there was only silence. After all, what the hell else could you say? But in his playful, smoky baritone, Nic laughed and pulled his punk close. “Only us loonies could have a shared sight like that, huh?”

At first Lita didn’t know what to say. The sight’s terror still shook her, but the preposterousness of it all seemed like some cruel practical joke played by someone with a hell of a hologram set. Still shivering, she was pulled in tighter still, and sat upon Nic’s lap. His weather-beaten black hands lifted her muzzle towards his as the two shared a few nipping kisses. It was the only way Nic could think of to calm her down. “I’m sure we can figure out what the hell all this was in the morning.” he smiled. “Let’s get on back to bed.”

Nic swapped seats and drove them back to his trailer. It wasn’t long before a little more lovemaking took Lita’s mind off the affair, and she drifted away into a deep sleep. In the morning, while they were having their usual coffee clutch, teasing each other and nipping at each other’s necks, a radio message played out from the local station.

“And for those living in the trailers near Blackmore Hills, you will be surprised and fascinated to hear that historians have confirmed your patch of land as one of the Hallowed Valleys. This is the Southwestern Heritage Association’s designation for all sights impacted by the Big Day back in 2200, when all that fire and fury was raining down all over the world. The sight will be marked with a special blue plaque noting certain monuments and fixtures of the area during the Old World days. Death toll estimates are still being debated, though likely sit within the 100K range. One thing’s for certain though, it was one of the locations impacted by the nuclear warheads.”

For a solid minute, mid-nip and mid-sip, the two wolves stared blankly at the radio, Nic now joining his lover in shell-shocked astonishment.

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