Page 80 of Feast

“Shut up,” Slaine grunted and thumped the nith on its leathery head.

“Easy,” Gunnar growled. “I still need that bastard conscious to tell me where to go.”

With the vehicle stripped down to its bare bones, they now zipped through the woods at almost double the speed. Trees streaked by in a blur and cold wind whipped around their ears.

Soon the forest opened up onto a snow-covered plane.

“There it is,” the nith said from the back. “The slaughterhouse.”

Gunnar spotted their destination up ahead. At first it was little more than a dark speck on the horizon, but as they got closer, it grew into a bulky black structure with huge buttresses like black ribs and tall smokestacks belching out rancid fumes.

He could smell it now. The stench of death. The air here fairly reeked with it, and it turned his stomach. Gunnar was no stranger to blood and death. He was a hunter and a carnivore after all. But this place was totally out of line with the natural cycle of life and death, and Gunnar could immediately sense that. He shuddered in disgust. He knew his pack brothers sensed it too.

And most of all, he knew that Ika felt it. Gunnar understood that Rolf was an important part of her life. Rolf had been her caretaker for many years, and now he had been brought to this nightmarish place.

Gunnar feared the worst.

But there was still hope.

Young Muk climbed to the front of the vehicle and crouched where the passenger seat had once been. The youngster had the best vision of all the ukkur, and now he squinted ahead through the snow-spattered windshield searching for any sign of another vehicle.

“There!” Muk shouted at last.

He pointed to a position ahead of them and a little to the right.

Sure enough, there was another vehicle out there winking gray sunlight and raising a cloud of snow-dust in its wake.

“Is it Rolf?” Ika cried, clambering in between Gunnar and Muk.

Based on its location and direction, it could very well have been the vehicle that contained Rolf. But it was a different kind of vehicle with an enclosed top, so it was impossible to see if Rolf was in there or not.

“Maybe,” Gunnar shouted over the wind. “I’ll try to catch up to them.”

He still had the throttle pressed all the way to the floor, and the interior of the vehicle had been stripped bare. There was nothing left to do to accelerate more. All Gunnar could do was mentally will the vehicle to go faster.

“You’ll never catch them,” the nith taunted from the back. “They are too far ahead. They have almost reached the slaughterhouse.”

The nith clicked gleefully.

It was unwise for the nith to taunt the ukkur that way now that it had outlived its usefulness as a navigator. It was even more unwise to taunt Ika.

Ika melted from Gunnar’s side. A second later there was a strangled cry from the nith.

“Wait human! What are you doing?”

There was a loud thump, and the vehicle bounced as it shed more weight. Gunnar glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the nith’s body tumbling through the snow behind them. Its elongated head was twisted at a wrong angle, its neck broken by the impact of falling from cargo bed.

At the back of the vehicle, Thusar grunted.

“That was dishonorable, Ika. We told the nith we would let it live if it helped us.”

“Rot honor,” Ika almost snarled. “You ukkur can worry about honor. All I’m worried about is getting Rolf back. And now that we’ve found our destination, that nith was nothing but excess weight.”

Gunnar couldn’t help but grin at Ika’s ruthlessness.

“Every little bit counts.”

And sure enough, they were gaining on the other vehicle. But they were also running out of time. The dark shadow of the nith slaughterhouse was looming in front of them, and the vehicle that they were pursuing had nearly reached its destination. There was a large entryway on the side and that’s where the vehicle was heading.