Endangered Species

Mark and Kelly apologized and left while I was still fuming. After everything I’d done for the women, to have the freaking Council do this? Yes, they would take the change to stay alive, but they would resent us for forcing it on them. They would resent us for forcing them to leave this place and go with people they didn’t know or trust.

A choice of ‘change or die’ is no choice at all.

How many women would tell them to fuck off? A few, I was sure. How much courage must you have to choose that path? How strong a wolf would that person become if we had followed MY plan and slowly turned their minds around?

The tears rolled down my face as I contemplated my failure. They were MY people, and I had failed them.

I felt sorry for myself for some time until my pity party was interrupted by the door opening again. I blinked until my eyes cleared. A young female wolf opened the door, a cart filled with laundry visible behind her. She pulled a bag out from underneath the dirty scrubs and put it on my bed. “You need to get dressed, Alpha. I will be back in five minutes.”

Lois removed the cuffs from my hands and helped me sit up. I didn’t feel good; it was like I was coming down with the flu. “Dinner service just started. We have to sneak out of here without being seen, Alpha. The dirty laundry will help cover our scents as we exit.”

Wonderful. It was like a prison escape.

The clothes weren’t much; cotton underwear, scrubs, and slippers. “You couldn’t find me any jeans?”

“You’ll be delirious with the fever in a few hours, and the change will destroy the clothing. We’ve packed your things and loaded them on the vehicle already.” I took off the hospital gown, glad they had removed and trashed the dress I’d worn. I didn’t need any reminders of my mate’s death. I used the bathroom and changed my clothes before the Omega returned. She and Lois pulled the laundry out, and Lois picked me up and set me inside. She climbed in opposite me as my eyebrow raised. “I’m your guard. If the others see me, they’ll suspect you are there too.”

The cart wasn’t that big, so we had to arrange our legs to get comfy while the omega dumped dirty laundry on top of us. “This stinks,” I said as it reached my chest.

“You don’t have wolf senses yet. She doesn’t mind the smell of her Pack mates, and wolves understand hiding their scent for hunting or evading. It’s why they roll in poop or the forest floor, after all.”

“So I’ve got that to look forward to,” I said as another armful of clothes dumped between us. The pile was overflowing the cart by the time it finished. We started to move; I heard the Omega greet some people as she pushed us through the hallway. The laundry area was near the motor pool, so it wasn’t long before she pulled the clothes off us.

The first person I saw was Oscar, the only single male remaining in my Pack. He was dressed in camouflage utilities and geared up like a Marine, including a vest with a plate and a Kevlar helmet. He grabbed me under my arms as soon as I was exposed and carried me to the back door of the waiting up-armored Humvee. Lois was right behind me and sat in the back seat next to Melanie. They directed me to a little nest in the back, surrounded by luggage, food, and water. “Stay out of sight, my Alpha,” Oscar said as he covered me with a thin blanket. He ran around to the driver’s seat, with Ted riding shotgun. Ted and Melanie were dressed for battle too, and everyone but me had weapons.

I pulled the blanket over my head as we drove off. I figured the escape would be the most dangerous time; the other Alphas had their people here, and Brinnon wouldn’t be able to operate without them watching. “We’re pretending to be a normal perimeter patrol,” Ted said as we exited the tunnel system and drove up the slope to the surface. “Oscar, take a right here, then a left at the bottom just before the fence. Keep it slow and casual. We’ll follow this road until we get to the south gate.”

I could only lie there in the dark, feeling the vibrations of the military vehicle as we drove down towards the water. Eventually, we rolled to a stop, and Oscar honked the horn. I could hear a door opening and someone getting out. “What’s going on,” someone said.

“Fuck if I know,” Oscar replied. “We’re here to take over the gate so you two could get back for some meeting.”

“Nobody told,” and then there was a thump as his body hit the ground.

“You want me to do it, or do you want to inject yourself?” It was Oscar again.

“You do it, but on the other side. It will look better that way,” someone else said.

“You recognized Melanie, and then I hit you with the shot,” he told him. “Get on your knees.” This time there was no thump. I heard the gate opening, and then Oscar got back in. “I took their rifles, pistols, and flashlights,” he said as he put the Humvee in gear. He stopped after passing through, closing the gate again, then we drove off. They waited five minutes before telling me it was all right to get up. “Before all this shit, it would be less than three hours to get to our Pack. We’ve only got forty minutes of darkness left, so how do you want to handle this?”

“We have to get as far away from Bangor as we can,” Ted replied. “We got away clean, but we have no idea how long it will be until they figure it out.”

“Alpha Mark will keep them from doing anything,” I said. “He is the host Alpha, and everyone but me was in his Pack.”

“We assaulted one of Alpha Edward’s men during our escape,” Ted answered. “And we have no idea how they will respond to the deception allowing us to leave. Worst case, they send people after us. We have to get to Renfro before they do.”

“We’ve got another problem,” I said. I talked about the orders I’d received from the Commanding Officer of the USS Maine before coming ashore. “I have a mission to complete, even at the cost of my life. I must get a message to the National Command Authority, which means finding an operational military base.”

Melanie whistled. “That won’t be easy.”

“Why not? If Brinnon hadn’t overrun the Kitsap base, most of the defenders would still be alive. If they can survive there, other bases might also survive.”

“We can’t take the time, and you’re not going to be able to do anything in a few hours, Alpha,” Lois answered. “Our priority has to be the wolves at Renfro.”

“What bases are near the path we’re driving?”

“Bremerton still has a naval hospital and shipyard. It’s the closest,” Melanie said.

“Yeah, but Silverdale is a mess, and Bremerton is bound to be worse with the refugees from Seattle flooding in,” Ted replied. “The only shelter is the hospital basement. They won’t have power or food. They won’t have command posts and communications even if you find them.”

“Joint Base McChord-Lewis, then,” Oscar said. “It’s the biggest base in the Puget Sound area, on the south end of Tacoma.”

That sounded better. “What is there?”

“The Air Force has a shitload of cargo planes on the airfield, and it’s a big base for staging overseas missions. The Army keeps a division there.”

Ted chuckled. “A bunch of bricks stuck on the tarmac,” he replied. “This isn’t like a nuclear bomber base where they keep the birds and vehicles in underground bunkers. It’s lots of concrete pads and steel hangars. The solar storm would wipe everything out.”

Oscar nodded. “There are two major commands, along with Air Force Special Operations. If there is any place with an underground command center nearby, that would be it.”

That sounded good to me. “How long to get there?”

Ted was looking at an old road map of Washington they’d found somewhere since you couldn’t use Google Maps anymore. “Two hours if we could do highway speed, but we can’t. It’s too dangerous to drive fast. We might get ambushed, or the road might be blocked. Plus, I hate the idea of going through the larger cities. The direct route is through Bremerton and south to Tacoma over the Narrows Bridge, but then you’re going through the heart of that city. It could be as bad as Seattle.”

“What is the other option,” I asked.

“Take the long way around. We go southwest to Shelton, then southeast to Olympia. Pick up the freeway and head to the base from the west. It’s almost twice as long a drive, but you avoid Tacoma.”

I thought about what they had said and the timing involved. “We can’t make either route before sunrise.”

Oscar nodded. “I know. We’re going to have to keep driving into the day.”

My eyes bugged out at that. “The sun is a killer!”

Melanie reached back and put a hand on my arm. “It’s less than half the radiation you found when you arrived, Angela. We’ve been watching the levels with your radiation detector the whole time. The ozone layer is coming back, and the solar storms are diminishing. The armor will help a little too. It’s a chance I think we have to take if we want to be first to the Pack.”

“How much of a dose are we talking?”

“Mid-day, we were seeing twenty-one millirem an hour.”

That was half of what we found when we came ashore. If we were out all day, we’d get less than two hundred and fifty millirem, maybe much less with the shielding of the heavy vehicle. The Federal Government limits for occupational dose were five thousand millirem a year. It was doable. “Take the direct route,” I told them. “We have a head start, and we need to maintain it. We stop at McChord-Lewis on the way.”

Ted didn’t look convinced. “Alpha, you’ll be completely out of it, and you’re the only one who’s military. If the base remains operational, they’ll never let us in.”

“They will let ME in,” I said. “Give me something to write on.” They dug around, finally finding a small notebook and a pen in the glove compartment. I wrote a note for the gate guards; digging through my bag, I found my military ID and dog tags along with my ballcap from the submarine. The letter said I had top-secret flash-level communications from the USS Maine to the National Command Authority, and I needed an escort to the senior officer present to deliver it face to face. I requested the guards admit the others as my civilian guards, but I didn’t know if that would work. I put it all in my hat and handed it forward. “If you get challenged on the way to the base, show them this. They’ll take me in, fevers or no.”

Ted read the note. “And if they don’t let us in?”

“Then you continue to the Pack without me. There’s enough detail in the note to make them keep me until I’m awake again. Melanie can be acting Alpha until I finish my shift. You need to find a new Pack House, someplace safer where the Council can’t find you. Focus on supplies for the long-term, as we’ve done here.”

“How will you find us?”

“I won’t,” I said. “I’ll shift before I can pass on the message, and God knows what happens next. When the Pack is safe, send someone back to McChord and ask for me. It’s the best I can do.”

Melanie wasn’t convinced. “You’re talking about having your first shift around humans, with no Alpha there to pull you through! If the shift doesn’t kill you, the military might!”

I nodded. “The Generals will have to listen to me, Melanie. They will want to hear my story.”

No one said more as we sped southward. My fever started to spike, and I started alternating between burning up and the chills. I don’t remember much of the trip, as I was in and out of lucidity. I remember lots of stops and at least one gun battle. Soon enough, my mind couldn’t think of anything but the pain before it all went black again.