His heart pounded.
“Teacher, did you hear it?”
“Just a moment, Mr. Green. I’m listening for burrow echo.”
“No! Listen! The growling!”
Valentina sat up.
“What growling?”
The growl came again. It felt like it was ringing Green’s rib cage like a church bell.
He staggered and held up a finger.
“Thatgrowling.”
Valentina narrowed her eyes and surveyed the tree line.
“I don’t hear any growling.”
The growl came a third time and this time there was a single command in the sound.
Run.
Green spoke that command aloud as it tumbled through his skull on the back of that primal threat.
Valentina stood up calmly. She shouldered her pack and tilted her head in assent.
“Toward the truck, then,” she said, and moved in a jog toward the woods.
The jog quickened to a run as he joined her.
Branches whipped.
Twigs cracked underfoot.
Green’s chest ached and his legs were on fire.
He looked over his shoulder and hated that he could still see the roofs of the cabins. They were too slow. They couldn’t escape.
He slammed into a dogwood sapling that sprang back and shoved him off his feet. He got up running and risked another look behind.
The wolf was there.
Standing motionless forty feet off.
The monster.
A horror desecrating the fading light of evening.
Its skeletal legs were exposed, birdlike, too narrow for the massive body they supported. The skull was bare, eyes fixed on Green’s back. The dark flesh collected above the shoulder, rising up in jagged points like a young mountain range. The whole of the creature stood in a great pulsing shadow, an inverse fire. It was an outrider of night, a trespasser in the waking world of birdsong and golden sun. It stood statue-still, watching their desperate flight.
Green could do nothing but turn his attention back to Valentina before he lost her in the woods or crashed into another tree.
He hadn’t heard the wolf approach, not until it growled, not until it wanted him to hear.
He wouldn’t hear when it decided to close the distance and clamp his spine in those white gravestone jaws.
