Free Wolf Running by Toni Boughton Page A

yellow eye. She could feel the bone of the eye socket shatter, and the Rev fell back in a lifeless heap. And then it was over and she stood panting in a pile of broken-limbed bodies, wreathed in the foul smell of the undead.
    Nowen raised her shaking hands before her eyes. They were coated to the wrist in blood and dead flesh. She checked the window again - it was still open and still empty. She moved to the shade of the painter’s van and pulled a bottle of water from the pink backpack. Quickly she cleaned her hands and then ran her wet hands over her face and through her short hair. There was blood on her shoes and splattered across her clothes, but there was nothing she could do about that. She picked up her packs, then paused and looked at the interior of the van. A ladder caught her eye, and she pulled it out.
    At the base of the hospital wall she propped the ladder up and saw with a kind of weary joy that it reached the top of the tier. She climbed up with her packs, pulled the ladder up behind her, and did it all over again until there was only one more floor to go.
    “Hey!”
    Nowen looked up, squinting against the overhead sun. Jamie was leaning out the window, smiling and waving excitedly. “You’re back!”
    Nowen raised her hand in return and felt on her face, for the first time since she woke up in her hospital room, a smile.
     
    Nowen lay on the cool sheets of her bed that night. She and Jamie had splurged a little on the food and spent some of their precious water on sponge baths. Jamie told her that she had watched Nowen’s journey until she got into the station. Then Dr. Westrick had called with questions about the pregnant woman, and Jamie had been stuck on the phone for half an hour. By the time she had returned to the window Nowen was almost back home.
    Across the room Jamie snored lightly from her own bed. Nowen looked up at the dark ceiling and replayed the fight in the parking lot over in her head. She could have easily avoided the Revs, she knew. They were slow and the cars provided obstacles to their movement. And yet, she hadn’t. A primal urge to protect her den? home had taken over everything in that moment. She had relished the violence of her actions, the speed with which she moved and delivered death, had exulted in the slaying of the intruders.
    The words were so much stronger now. They beat against the locked door of her memory, and she wondered what crouched in the shadows behind that door.
    Who am I?
    Now
    Nowen paused at the top of the snow dune and raised her goggles, taking in the view. She stood atop a massive drift that had built up around a wrecked eighteen-wheeler. Her perch was at the edge of a large frozen sea of a parking lot. Wind-sculpted waves of snow rippled around other abandoned vehicles and lapped against the walls of the big-box store that stood like a lonely island below. Overhead the sun rode high in the cloudless sky.
    She stood in the silence, closed her eyes, and breathed deep. For once the wind wasn’t blowing, and for once she wished it was. The wind could carry sounds and smells to her, warning of potential dangers or unseen hazards. She exhaled and breathed deeply again, tasting the purity of snow and the freshness of meltwater. The snap of an icicle breaking free somewhere came to her ears. She opened her eyes, re-adjusted the goggles, and shoved off with her ski poles, leaping the short distance to the ground.
    Nowen sped over the snow-pack, angling for the front of the building. Near the entrance she kicked out of the skis, standing them on end next to a light pole. She approached the sliding doors, where shattered glass gleamed in the entrance. When she had come here two days ago, only one of the doors had been broken. She had smashed the other door and all the windows she could reach, letting the glacial cold in. She stepped through the door, pulling a flashlight from her parka and switching it on. The light beam played over empty registers and