Читать книгу The Wolves of El Diablo - Eric Red - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

The TNT went off the instant the plunger was injected, erasing the tracks from view. The sound of the earth-shaking explosion was a low register sledgehammer thud. The valley shook from the seismic concussion.

Spurs were dug into the flanks of the three gunfighters’ stallions with the horses already at full gallop down the canyon seconds before the explosion. Tucker, Fix, and Bodie knew from experience their horses must be on the move before the dynamite blew or the blast would startle and shy them from being ridden.

Down below the riders, the blast swept two parallel sections of rail and trestle sky high, twisted and corkscrewed, in a mushroom of flying dirt, disintegrating debris and smoke billowing upwards in thick clouds the height of the canyon. The reverberating noise was deafening in the echo chamber of the granite gorge but the outlaws didn’t hear it nor did their horses—the robbers had used wads of cotton to plug their own ears and those of their mounts. Shrapnel, stones, and chunks of burning trestle were falling now in a steady rain from a towering height in a billowing fog of dynamite smoke that crashed in a wave across the floor of the ravine, obscuring the train now violently braking, sparks flying off the slowing wheels, a piercing steel-on-steel screech adding to the cacophonic din. Through the smoke, the slowing railroad’s gargantuan silhouette loomed ever larger, ever nearer to the gaping blasted crater in the earth where the rails had been seconds before. There followed a screeching, banging clamor as the train, with a concertina collisioning of bumpers, began to slow towards a stop. The train, though abruptly decelerating, was closing in on the blasted hole in the tracks.

The sun had just about set, a razor wound on the ridge, the last of the failing light engulfing the whole canyon area in a bloody glow and shadows of deepest amethyst. Through the colored gloom the darker hues of the three gunfighters rode hard down to the bottom of the cliff, rapidly closing the distance between them and the waylaid train.

Chucking away his spent TNT plunger box and coiling wire it trailed, Tucker smoothly drew his Colt Peacemaker revolver from his side holster, leaning back in the saddle to compensate for the declination his stallion took in a cantor, sure in its footing. To his right and left, Fix and Bodie drove their horses down the face of the canyon towards the steam train shuddering to a lurching halt just feet from the smoking hole the explosives disgorged in the El Diablo earth. The galloping hooves of the outlaw’s horses filled their ears as the ground leveled out, the train that was their intended prize dead ahead. The men were grinning. It was payday.

The echo of the blast faded and many voices sounding crisp and disciplined shouted orders. The train robbers knew right away something was wrong. Ghostly figures of many men moved in the hanging smoke, leaping off the train and taking position instead of fleeing for their lives. As Tucker, Fix and Bodie charged the train at full gallop they aimed their pistols skyward and shot into the air to scare the passengers. But when their fire was returned a hundredfold by the hazy coaches and slews of bullets whistled past their ears, the gunfighters knew they had made a big mistake choosing this particular train to rob. They were riding into a meat grinder.

Grey uniforms were now visible everywhere and dozens of gun barrels were all trained their way. Staccato muzzle flashes flared up and down the train as the air crackled with rifle fire.

“Federales!” yelled Tucker. “Shit!”

“It’s a fucking army!” Bodie cried out. “You said this was going to be a passenger train!”

“How the hell was I supposed to know it was an army train? It was supposed to be miners! What the hell are Federales doing in these Godforsaken parts?” Tucker shouted across the horses, firing into the smoke at the silhouetted figures by the railroad coaches. Bullets were coming at them from every direction it seemed.

“I’m already missing them damn werewolves!” Fix snarled.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here! We’re gonna get cut to pieces!” screamed Tucker. “We’re gonna be dead quicker’n a whore gets fucked.”

His words were muffled as a grisly splattering gust of brain, blood, skull and horsehair exploded in his face when his stallion’s head was blown clean off. The decapitated steed fell where it stood, crumpling in a pile of akimbo legs, catapulting Tucker out of the saddle over the ragged stump of neck jetting blood like a fountain. The cowboy hit the ground hard, landing on his back with a bone-crunching impact that smashed the wind out of him. Rolling over and over in the dirt, somehow he kept the grip on his pistol, had drawn his second revolver, and was already shooting at the source of the gunshots before he ended up on his belly. Slugs blew geysers in the dirt near where the cowboy lay. The bullets kept missing and Tucker quickly realized the dense smokescreen from the dynamite blast that hung over the area made it as difficult for the soldiers to see him as it was to see them, and he just might have a chance.

He aimed his pistols and fired, hearing the dull click of hammers on spent cartridges.

Out of bullets. It just kept getting worse.

Tucker heard loud hooves pounding by his ears and felt the grip of a huge hand on the scruff of his neck and his grateful eyes met Bodie’s as his friend leaned out of saddle and hauled him off the ground with one powerful sweep of his arm.

The full moon rose.

Atop a cliff high above the skirmish at the train, seven sets of red eyes and a pair of blue ones watched the battle raging by the tracks below.

The hirsute figures were silhouetted against the moon but camouflaged by the rocky promontory of the ridge. Hastily, they tied off their horses so as not to rip them asunder during the change shortly to come. They cared nothing for horses but it was a long walk to the nearest town and they needed healthy beasts of burden to ride after they slaughtered those they came for and everyone else they didn’t. When the sun was up they would be back walking on two legs.

As they all felt the itch, the bandits disrobed, piling their garments beside one another.

The woman underdressed as hungrily as a female in heat desperate for sex but it was blood not intercourse she lusted for. Azul stood brazenly naked in the moonlight, her enormous tits flushed and nipples hard with excitement. She was wet and the untamed black forest of hair between her legs glistened with her juice. Her bandits stood naked, muscles rippling, their hefty cocks engorged in erection. The bandita gazed with lip smacking approval at her gang’s virile tumescence. Azul ran a forefinger up herself and licked it. Once a month, after a good kill, when they changed back from werewolves and resumed human form, she let her men fuck her, taking them three at a time vigorously filling her every opening, and often eagerly on all fours she sucked their cocks at her slightest whim. The gang of lycanthropes were a lusty, uninhibited pack who gave full rein to their unbridled appetites and urges—their sexually insatiable and bloodthirsty bandita leader was all the woman they needed or could handle: Azul had made certain of this for the last three hundred years, for she knew once they wilded as werewolves returning to their human form was to inhabit a puny shell, suffering it for thirty miserable days until they could again flex lycanthrope muscles, bask in their power to rip and tear and be in their true glory. While human, in the house of man, wearing those weak skin suits, Azul made sure they all made the most of the pleasures of the flesh and the joy of unbridled violence. The werewolves loved their lives and for centuries had endured.

The worst part was the changing. The pain of the transformation was unbearable: to feel every bone and joint breaking and reforming, every muscle and tendon shredding apart and knitting back together—every time it was torture. It took the first hundred years to be able not to scream. But in the end, it was a mere minute or two of agony at the beginning and end of the full moon on those three nights, a flagellation demanded by the trickster moon.

The price of the beast.

Tonight was different.

This was more than a wilding—it was a reckoning. Tonight, they would kill and eat the men that murdered Azul’s brother and killed their comrades then shit them out for the flies. This would be a delicious kill. Oh yes. A very good, bad, bad kill.

“They are mine!” Azul hissed, rubbing her own wet crotch with excitement. The bandita stared mad-eyed down into the gorge, her gaze riveted on the garrison of soldiers closing in on the cowboys as steady flashes of gunfire pinpricked across the theater of combat below. It was difficult to discern who was alive and dead in all the smoke but the bandita could count and there were a lot more army men than the three trapped cowboys. A sudden rare panic gripped the bandita—No! Her prey would be killed in battle before she herself could kill them unless she got to them now! Azul shifted her gaze to glare at her weak womanflesh she suddenly so detested, impatiently shooting glances up to mother moon above, so fatally full and immortally bright. Why was her skin not turning to fur? Enraged, Azul bit with her regular teeth into her arms and hands, drawing blood as if by self-mutilation she could hasten the process. The pain each time she changed was far worse than giving birth, this she knew for a fact, but Azul could not wait another second to turn for in moments the men who killed her brother would be dead at the hands of other manflesh, not by her own teeth and claws, and she would never have her revenge. “Turn!” she wailed, and at last the trickster moon granted her wish.

The change came.

Azul suddenly buckled over and threw up, vomiting on the rocks, her bandits puking their guts out near her, for this purging was the first thing that always happened when a man became a wolf because the belly needed to be purified and emptied for the meal of manflesh to come. They were all turning into werewolves now.

The flagellation had begun beneath the approving eye of the full moon. Azul let out a guttural carnal yell of masochistic pleasure as she felt her supple female skin sprout wiry fur, her bones brutally snap apart and reset beneath her stretching muscles and flesh, teeth popping out of her mouth replaced by jagged tusks of fangs her elongating tongue lapped around already tasting manflesh, raw vengeance boiling her blood like bubbling acid, spine snapping and cracking like a whip, her entire twisted contorted body wracked in throws of ecstatic agony, a long swishing tail growing out of her buttocks like a bristly brush pushed out her asshole. In a final convulsive seizure, Azul looked out through still-blue eyes growing closer together in her collapsing skull as her mouth and nose punched forwards into an elongated snout in a sickening crackle crunch of ripping cartilage and splintering bone. Full lycanthrope now, Azul threw back her head, jaws spread wide, and howled at the moon. Then she was down on all fours, bounding on padded paws on huge talons down the side of the cliff, savage blue gaze fixed the three gunfighters below, her single-minded thirst for vengeance unmuted by her transformation from human to werewolf.

Azul did not need to look to see the other seven wolfmen were with her for she smelled their hot breath at her side and by then the lycanthropes had reached the train and begun to berserk.

The monsters came out of nowhere and right away the Federales forgot about the train robbers.

With his very own eyes, Colonel Higuerra saw his private’s head chewed off his neck like a dog’s tug toy when the first werewolf pounced on the unsuspecting man. The creature’s jaws clamped shut and the man’s skull shattered in a dark carbonated spray of blood, bone, brain, and teeth like a spritzing seltzer bottle. With a toss of its huge canine snout, the wolfman cast aside the headless trunk as the meaty strand of gristle and slimy red spine snapped free. Now the monster was revealed in plain view to the astounded Higuerra, towering eight feet tall, no longer blocked by his dead officer. Reflexively, the Colonel raised both pistols, one in each hand, and squeezed the trigger again and again, aiming at the hairy chest and lupine head of the hideous creature.

In the muzzle flash he saw his slugs punch wet holes in the monster, hammering it back. The staccato strobes of his gunfire revealed the monster in horrific detail: jagged fangs, a slavering maw, red eyes, fist-sized nostrils, massive jagged talons, muscular dog-like haunches supporting an upright human ribcage and titanic swishing tail.

The hammers of the Colonel’s guns clicked on empty chambers soon enough and darkness fell again.

He saw the silhouette of the werewolf still upright, steadying itself, shaking its head to clear its senses. A rumbling growl erupted from its throat. Then those red eyes met his. Higuerra was looking into swirling whirlpools of supernatural madness, whorls of pure bloodthirsty predation. Wounded, but not much, the creature advanced. The curled talons of its paws took a step towards the Colonel. He saw its lean yet muscular body coil and knew it was preparing to pounce at him. The swishing tail went straight and up, like an angry dog.

Out the corner of his eye—he did not avert his own gaze from the beast—the Colonel saw the werewolves were many and everywhere ... the monstrous inhuman shadows were hurtling out of the darkness from the direction of the canyon, emblazoned in nightmarish bas-relief in the strobing gunfire of the Federales who shot back as they were set upon.

But the bullets weren’t working.

The legends were true.

The Wolves of El Diablo were supposed to be a myth, the stuff of local folklore. The comandante had believed all that wild talk to be peasant superstition up until now. But he was a quick study. He believed the evidence of his own eyes. When an officer is outgunned he retreats—all this went through his mind in the space of three seconds before the werewolf leapt at him.

Higuerra’s back was to one of the railroad cargo wagons three feet behind and as the werewolf sprang, the Colonel spun, ducked and dove in one swift motion. Throwing himself completely under the coach, he hit the trestles between the rails with a hard impact. There followed a tremendous concussion of cracking wood and slammed steel as the wolfman hove into the side of the train where his prey had stood a second before with such immense force it shook the whole train car. Next the thing was reaching under the train car for the Colonel making a ferocious scrabbling assault of talons, snout and claws. All raging mindless fury, the beast snatched at air and gravel, straining to push its head and shoulders through the gap between the transom and the ground but the space was too tight and it couldn’t fit. The sight reminded the Colonel sickeningly of the muzzles of his attack dogs biting against the bars of their cages back at the barracks.

The Colonel had already pulled himself up under the chassis of the railroad car, hanging to the crossbeams by hand and foot. Inches below him, lethally big and sharp fur-matted claws swiped the air to grab him as foul lickspittle from the beast’s mouth sprayed the gravel below. The officer held on for dear life and prayed. Prayed hard. With a sudden huff and snort of its nostrils, the werewolf withdrew, its attention diverted elsewhere. The subsequent human scream, gurgle, and meaty ripping splatter let Colonel Higuerra know what had attracted its attention.

The officer risked a view from his precarious perch past the underside of the train car to see what was happening outside. Nothing came at him but for a moment he could see little—the darkness under the chassis was total, thick as ink. Beyond the oily rusted wheels, his eyes adjusted to the light of the occluded full moon dimly bathing the desert and the unimaginable slaughter became slowly, horribly visible. Gradually the Colonel could make out the running, falling, shooting figures of his men and leaping, pouncing rearing shapes of the werewolves tearing them apart and eating them alive—monstrous silhouettes in a hellishly monochromatic tableau. Dead, dying or wounded soldiers lay sprawled everywhere in the gloom. Detached limbs, severed heads and piles of steaming disemboweled entrails blotched the landscape in grisly patches of shiny black. The rampaging wolfmen were fickle in their attentions, no sooner killing or maiming or biting a piece out of one Federale before moving on to the next live soldier they saw. In this way, the demoralized Higuerra could already see most of his garrison were down. The terrible screams of the men were a symphony of agony echoing in the reverberating acoustics of the canyon. But the cries were lessening now. The shots had become fewer.

The legends said only silver could kill a werewolf, the officer remembered as he saw his troops’ regular bullets were not harming the monsters.

A cruel irony then occurred to Colonel Jesus Higuerra as he hid under the train car, holding on for dear life, praying that the wolfmen would not spot him and hoping that discretion was the better part of valor ...

How ironic it was he and his troops were defenseless.

They had an entire train full of silver.

Right before the werewolves showed up, The Guns of Santa Sangre had their hands plenty full with fifty pissed-off and heavily armed Federales and things weren’t looking good for them.

Tucker had climbed onto the back of Bodie’s horse when his friend had pulled him off the ground. Galloping for their lives alongside the railroad tracks towards the front of the train, Tucker had clung to Bodie’s thick midriff as the big Swede drove his horse when the next thing he knew they were plunging headlong over the stallion’s head as it fell forward and collapsed beneath the saddle. As Tucker flew from his mount he knew the horse had taken a bullet. The outlaws landed hard, rolling in the dirt beside each other as the animal fell on its side and lay stone dead. Tucker helped Bodie to his feet and luckily saw his massive friend wasn’t hurt.

They both threw an urgent glance to Fix who was already turning his horse around and riding back at full gallop towards them. With a grimly determined expression, the little shootist swung out of his stirrups, dismounted and slapped his horse on the rump, sending it riding off with an empty saddle. Gunshots filled the canyon, rebounding off the rocks and caroming in the dirt all around. The outlaws dug in behind some rocks, taking aim on the soldiers along the train and laying down a volley of suppressing fire with their pistols.

“You lost yer horse!” Tucker shouted.

“One horse ain’t gonna get the three of us out of here!” Fix snarled in retort. “No reason to get a perfectly good horse shot for no damn good reason!” The taut little man reloaded his revolvers and took aim back at the figures darting in the smoke by the misty behemoth of the railroad halted at the blast site.

Tucker desperately scanned the area. The three gunfighters were on foot now and their only chance was to find cover.

“Get in the train!” he yelled at the other two desperados. “It’s the only place to hide and make a stand! It’s the only chance we got! We’re sitting ducks out here! Shake a tail feather!”

PING! PTANG! Two slugs ricocheted off the rocks a foot away in showers of sparks.

Trading fire, Tucker heard the familiar roars first.

He couldn’t believe his ears.

“Something’s wrong boys!”

Suddenly, the bullets were no longer coming in their direction. Now all the soldiers were firing what appeared randomly at all points of the compass. It was full dark and a heavy cloud had passed over the full moon drowning its malignant light. Staccato muzzle-flashes were the only illumination on the shapes that dashed chaotically in the gloom, a rampage of huge shadows. For quick split seconds, strobes of gunfire picked out the terrified masks of Federale soldier faces smeared with gore. The coppery stench of blood, lots and lots of it, now filled the gunfighters’ nostrils—a battlefield smell they knew well from very recently. The Guns of Santa Sangre hunkered in the rocks a hundred yards from the cargo cars at the front of the train with guns at the ready, swinging their gazes all around them to see what the hell was going on.

All at once, the soldiers’ screams began to ring out everywhere, hideous high-pitched cries of unbearable agony made by souls being torn alive limb from limb.

Fix smelled the familiar stench first: a primal reek of lupine perspiration and dead meat breath. “I know that damn stink, compadres, and so the hell do you!”

“It can’t be.”

Bodie recognized the unwelcome sight first and the other two outlaws did an instant later. “Werewolves! Goddamn werewolves!” the Swede spat. The monsters were everywhere, dragging down and feasting on the scattering troops. It was a total bloodbath.

“I thought we killed them sonsofbitches!”

“Reckon not!”

Tucker shoved his friends. “We gotta go for that fucking train and we gotta go right now!”

“Still got that silver bullet, Tuck?” Fix shot Tucker a desperately sardonic glance.

“Right here.”

“Make it count.”

“It won’t.” Tucker chambered the silver round in his open cylinder of his revolver, spinning it shut with a racheting whirr. “Go!”

He heaved himself out of the rocks and sprinted into no-man’s-land. Bodie and Fix broke concealment and came running out into the open, all of them making a mad dash for the stalled steam train across the valley floor. Their cowboy boots kicked up dust as they ran through the hanging smoke. Tucker, running in the lead, kept his Colt Peacemaker barrel up, finger tight on the trigger, loaded with the one silver bullet they had. It was good for one werewolf if he got lucky with a well-placed shot. Fix and Bodie ran behind Tucker across the roaring battlefield using their leader as a shield for he had the only useful weapon to defend themselves with.

All around in the miasma, distorted shapes leapt and reared in the lingering dynamite blast residue in the gorge basin. Men were being torn apart left and right like rag dolls. Soldier silhouettes geysered blood that rained down and splattered in the gore sodden mist. Awful screams and hideous vociferating roars rang out in front and in back and on all sides of the trio of shootists as they ran for the train across terrain festooned with streamers of gritty haze. Tucker held his fire, narrow eyes cutting in every direction, saving the precious bullet. Then, moments later, the rugged massifs of the railroad’s coupled wagons reared over them and the cowboys had reached safety.

It was short-lived.

“Look out!” Tucker barked.

New shapes now reared before them in the lingering smoke, frighteningly unnatural and all too familiar; towering furry beasts who stood eight feet tall with haunches like wolves, man-like chests, distorted canine snouts drooling foul froths of bloody saliva from foaming jaws. Six werewolf silhouettes approached side-by-side in a stalking formation. Five pairs of red eyes glowed in the lupine faces. The wolfmen had spotted the three gunfighters and were closing in for the kill.

In the lead of the lycanthropes was a female, larger than the rest, teats and dugs bulging on her concave chest. Unlike the others, this one’s eyes were an eerie shade of blue, but it was clear she was the alpha even without that distinguishing feature. A palatably human raw hate radiated off her hot enough to spark kindling, and as the wolfwoman’s lips peeled back over her razor rows of blood-dripping fangs her snout leered in what looked unmistakably like a savage triumphal grin.

Cocking the hammer over the silver bullet in his Colt Peacemaker, Tucker clambered up the leading platform of the nearest car and ducked inside with Fix and Bodie.

With the surviving Federales in a disorganized panic, werewolves their real worry now and just one damn silver bullet between them, the gunfighters barricaded themselves inside the door and regrouped, figuring out what the hell was going to be their next move.

Higuerra dropped to the ground under the train with a grunt and dragged himself on his hands and knees across the gravel and trestles towards the hitches between the cars. Everywhere, he heard gunshots, monstrous roars and the pitiful screams of his men. The Colonel could stomach hiding no longer and was crawling for one of the wagons where he could seek cover and add his own bullets to the battle.

Clambering out from under the chassis, Higuerra hauled himself up on the grimy coupling onto the rear platform of a troop car and climbed to the door, throwing it open and ducking inside.

The second he pulled open the door, the Colonel nearly got his head blown clean off.

He found himself face-to-face with five of his desperate soldiers barricaded inside the forward troop wagon. Two had rifles pointed at his nose a foot away, looking at him with terror-wracked sweaty faces, itchy fingers on the triggers.

“Halto!” yelled Higuerra, putting up his hands.

The ragged men half-saluted deferentially, mumbling apologies. “Sorry, sir, we thought you were one of—”

“I know! Shut up and keep shooting!” the comandante barked. “If those monsters get in here, none of our lives is worth a burnt-out match!”

The other Federales were kneeling on the seats at the broken windows of the passenger car, aiming rifles and pistols through the shattered frames and firing at the werewolves outside in the bloody night.

“Our bullets do no good against these monsters, Colonel!” one despairing soldier cried.

“Give me a rifle!” shouted Higuerra. He spotted the mauled corpse of a Federale sprawled on the seats, uniform soaked in blood, jagged raking claw marks peeling his chest open to the white ribcage in the meat, ending at the socket of his shoulder where the arm had been. A repeater rifle dangled uselessly from the gore-soaked strap on his chest, and sopping red bandoleer belts crisscrossed his torso except where the canvas and been torn by the strike of the claws. Wincing, the Colonel tore the rifle off the strap and wiped the blood off the weapon as best he could, while ripping the bandoleer belts off the mangled corpse.

“Aim for their heads! Head shots kill all animals!” the comandante yelled, taking a battle stance at the window beside the row of Federales blasting away at the creatures outside. Jerking back the slippery blood-slick bolt of the rifle and injecting a shell into the breech, Higuerra socked the stock against his shoulder and directly began shooting.

The entrenched garrison heard scattered gunshots coming from wagons up and down the train and glimpsed the sporadic tongues of fire lapping out of the other coaches into the night where the beasts massed. The few remaining surviving soldiers had bunkered themselves inside the fortifications of the railroad itself, taking cover and shooting through the windows at the attacking creatures.

Sighting down his rifle as he uselessly pumped round after round into the hulking wolfmen running rampant around the train, Higuerra saw to his dismay the ground outside was piled with bodies or shorn off pieces of them. It looked like his soldiers’ decimated bodies had been hit by cannon blasts or artillery fire—a ghastly tableau pitilessly revealed in the cold stark moonlight. Most of his garrison was dead or badly wounded, he could clearly see. The werewolves looked unstoppable.

The Colonel jacked another shell into his rifle. Kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder with his five troops in the foxhole of the train car, Higuerra loosed off shots into beasts immune to their lead slugs. The inside of the coach was a din of cocking and firing, muffled lycanthrope roars, deafening close proximity gunblasts and the chink of ejected empty casings hitting the floor. The soldiers were running out of bullets fast. All of them realized soon they would have to make a suicidal run for the armory car to get fresh ammo that would do them little good and merely forestall the inevitable bloody end. For the moment, the Federales stayed put trapped in the wagon they were holed up in, desperately defending their position.

Sudden cries of alarm went up in the coach. A hairy talon punched through the opposite door to the train car and two Federales leapt up, heaving their entire body weight against the door to keep it closed. One soldier blasted the huge paw with his pistol, which only enraged the creature outside, who now forced its entire furred arm in.

Tucker, Fix, and Bodie sealed the door and locked it, knowing where they were by the pungent smell of hay and dung.

It was a horse wagon packed with twenty big cavalry quarter horses in their stalls. The unnerved animals were highly agitated by the chaos outside. The cowboys watched their step and trod carefully between the alarmed horses so not to get trampled.

It seemed like the safest place to be.

The gunslingers braced as they heard an enormous crash and thud of muffled weighty footfalls on the roof of the car above their heads and all three looked up. The boards of the ceiling of the wagon began to split asunder. Fangs and claws showed through wood splintering and shattering apart. Seconds later, a werewolf got in by tearing through the roof. Wood boards showered down. A huge hairy shape fell though the opening with a raging roar. The wolfman dropped into the car and all hell broke loose.

With the monster in their midst, the army stallions flew into a panicked frenzy, trying to bolt but trapped tightly packed together in the enclosed wagon. The entire compartment erupted in a chaotic stampede of bumping, slamming horses as they reared and pawed the air, colliding together, bellowing in pain and terror. The howling vociferations of a stalking lycanthrope amongst them drowned out all those sounds. It was a dangerous place to be for the outlaws, the three quickly realized, with death by werewolf competing with death by horse trampling. It was even odds.