WolfsZone

The second day in The Zone began with the kind of quiet that presses on your eardrums. No birds. No wind. Just the soft thud of my own pulse against the gauze under my plate carrier.

We’d moved camp before sunrise,a standard offset, no straight lines, no patterns. Boone took point, Imani floated the flank, Vega kept the rear, and Harlow walked inside my shadow with the satcom hugged to her chest like a child with a toy she didn’t trust.

Reyes was gone. The fire ring was gone too. When we’d turned back for a last look, the ashes we’d left had been raked smooth. Nothing left to tell the story that people had been there. Nothing left to prove we still were.

“Compass is drunk,” Boone muttered, turning the baseplate again. “Keeps trying to lick its own elbow.”

“Solar’s still a paperweight,” Harlow said. She tapped the satcom. “Batteries good. Panel good. Antenna good. Sky? A big middle finger.”

“Then we stop fighting the map,” Imani said. “We read the ground.”

The ground said we weren’t alone.

Large arcs in the moss where something heavy had skidded to a stop. Bark scoured in vertical slashes, high, too high for any wolf. And prints. Front paws, hind paws, then a long stretch of nothing, and then the unmistakable gouges of toes digging in upright.

If we’d come for proof, it was all around us, laughing quietly.

“Keep your heads,” I said. “Remember the rules.”

No one moves alone. Eyes never stop scanning. Silence is survival. Strength is shared.

The rules sounded good. They felt like sandbags stacked against a breaking dam.

We cut across an old logging road swallowed by ferns and rotten stumps, and the stench hit us metallic and sweet. Boone lifted a fist and we froze. Twenty feet ahead, a deer hung guts-open from a branch. It had been hoisted cleanly, hung with braided vine as strong as rope. The head was missing. The hooves were notched.

“Who does that?” Harlow whispered.

“Something that wants to mark the line,” Imani said.

We stepped around the line because we weren’t ready to admit we were already on the wrong side.

By midday the heat turned clammy. The canopy trapped our breath. Flies tracked us like we owed them money. We stopped in a pocket of dappled light long enough to do a water check and change my dressing. The claw rakes across my ribs were puffy and hot. The tissue tugged like it was trying to get up and leave. Vega cleaned it with iodine. It felt like he was pouring lightning.

“You’re burning,” he said. “You need a day.”

“We don’t have a day,” I said.

“You don’t have six hours,” he said.

I didn’t argue because he was right. The edges of the world had started to shimmer. And the forest had become...loud. Not sound information. The way a breeze bunched on one side of the leaves a half second before it arrived. The way the soil held the story of a fresh step. The way I could smell the iron in my own blood and separate it from the coppery sweetness of the deer above the road behind us.

“Move,” I said. “Short bursts. Ten on, two off.”

We didn’t get ten.

The whistle came first thin and flirty, then the crash of Boone’s body as the snare yanked him off his feet and dragged him backward into a trench disguised as open ground. I lunged and caught his forearm, felt the fibers cutting into my palm. The line went taut. Something down in that trench pulled like a truck.

Imani fired twice, tight, controlled. The pull stopped. Boone hacked air through a crushed chest rig, his eyes wide.

“Mine line,” Vega said, already working the blade under the fibers. “Tension trap with a bone crank.”

“Bone?” Harlow said.

“A femur,” Vega answered, as casually as if he were identifying a tree.

We got Boone up. He could breathe, but not deeply. His ribs were a glockenspiel of soft notes.

“They’re not just hunting,” Imani said. “They’re learning. Copying.”

She pointed at the knots on the severed line. They were clean, tensioned, finished with a trick I’d learned in Fallujah from an EOD tech who’d lost two fingers to his own curiosity.

“The hell learns that?” Boone rasped.

I didn’t answer because a better question arrived with the smell of oil and old canvas. We weren’t alone in learning from The Zone.

I followed the scent to a scatter of brush and kicked it aside to reveal a rusted trail camera bolted to a sapling. The lens was cracked. The card slot had been jammed with mud. But someone had aimed it at the snare trench like a proud parent at a recital.

“Greyhook,” Harlow said, leaning close. She showed me a faint stenciled logo on the plastic, three parallel claw marks.

“Contractors?” I said.

“Rumor says they lease land out here for ‘behavioral studies’ and ‘wildlife management,’” she said. “Rumor also says their payroll is mostly people who can’t pass a government background check.”

“Rumor says a lot of things,” Boone said. He coughed and spat. “I say we burn it all to the ground and let rumor find the truth in the ashes.”

We moved.

The forest tightened as we pushed deeper, the trees leaning in like they wanted to swap secrets. We spoke in hand signals. I swallowed against a throat that felt full of needles. The fever came like a tide surge, ebb, leave me shaky and hot and alert in ways that felt wrong.

At a creek I could hear, before I could see, the way the water changed around stones two bends downstream. I could feel the slight tremor through the log as a squirrel paused, breath held, then darted again. I could smell rain before the clouds had decided to try.

We crossed at a narrow place where the bank was pocked with old prints. Some wolf. Some deer. Some, God help me, human. Barefoot. Deep. Toes splayed. Claw marks at the ends of the big toe and the smallest.

“Don’t look at them,” Imani said softly, like someone talking to a child edging too close to a cliff. “Look at me.”

I did. For a beat we held that eye contact. I realized she was checking whether my eyes had changed color. I smiled without humor. She didn’t smile back.

On the far bank, we found the second line.

It didn’t look like a trap. It looked like a gift: a rectangle of trampled grass, a neat circle of stones, a pile of birch bark shavings scored into curls as delicate as a ballerina’s hair.

Vega squinted. “Someone wants us to make a fire.”

Harlow stared. “Someone’s hungry?”

I shook my head and pointed. “Someone’s curious.”

I toed one of the shavings aside and revealed a second camera. Newer. Cleaner. No logo this time. A little infrared eye that blinked when it caught my movement.

I smashed it with the heel of my boot. The crack was louder than it should’ve been.

The answering howl was not.

It came quick and close, ricocheting through the trees, and it was answered by two more from our nine and ten o’clock. I’d heard wolves before in Yellowstone, Afghanistan at altitude, the back end of nowhere in Macedonia. This wasn’t the same. This had a human shape. Notes that bent in a way a human mouth understands.

They were speaking.

“Move,” I said, because I didn’t know how to answer in their language yet.

We ran.

Boone’s breath went ragged. Harlow’s pack squeaked with each stride. There is nothing like the sound of your own gear giving you away. I signaled a stop at a poured boulder that had cracked long ago and made a hollow under its belly. We slid inside the wet cool and listened.

Leaves whispered. A branch shifted. The forest breathed out.

A shape flowed past the opening with a silence that wasn’t fair. All ankle and knee and lean waist and shoulders like a question mark. The fur was a deep, wrong black and matte as gunmetal. The head tilted as it sniffed the air, high in the air, standing on two legs. I counted its ribs. They moved like bellows. The eyes were not red or yellow; they were amber, and very, very awake.

It turned its head as if listening to something we couldn’t hear. Then it moved again, away, taking our luck with it.

We waited until our legs trembled from holding still. Then I crawled out first and gave the signal to follow.

“That wasn’t the alpha,” Imani said. “Too sleek. Scouter.”

“How many?” Boone asked.

“Enough,” she said.

By late afternoon we found a ridge site with decent sight lines and wind that wouldn’t betray us to the valley. We dug in, not a real camp, more like a lie we told The Zone to say we were brave. Vega strung line between saplings at knee height, tied with cowbells made from scavenged brass casings. Harlow wrapped the satcom in a foil blanket and whispered to it like flattery might coax a signal from a dead sky. Imani paced the perimeter in overlapping loops, reading sign like a priest reads sins.

I took a knee and closed my eyes and listened.

Here is what the forest told me: the pack we’d glimpsed wasn’t hunting us yet, not directly. It was pushing us. Herding. Cutting off lines of retreat and leaving doors open in places it wanted us to try. It was what a squad does to force a target into a kill box.

We weren’t running from them. We were obeying them.

“Greyhook,” Harlow said, squatting next to me with the satcom in her lap. “Got something. It’s torn up, but it’s a voice.”

She twisted the dial and a man’s voice bled through static. “…confirm enclosure five is compromised. Repeat, compromised. Subject C-Ashford marked. Packs Two and Three converging. Window for retrieval is”

The speaker clicked to empty, like a tongue finding a missing tooth.

Harlow stared at me. “C-Ashford.”

“Coincidence,” Boone said.

Imani didn’t waste breath on that.

“Say it,” I told Harlow, my voice flat.

“They infected you on purpose,” she said. “Or someone did. And they’re tracking you. And they want you alive.”

“I am alive,” I said.

“For now,” Boone muttered.

Vega tightened the last knot. “They want him to lead them,” he said. He said it the way a man mentions rain on the horizon. Not fear. Not comfort. Just weather.

We took watch in turns. Dusk turned the trunks into bars, the sky into a thin gray soup. The first bell chimed just after full dark. Then another. Then another, spaced perfectly, like someone walking the circle and tapping each one with a measured finger.

“Positions,” I said. “No shots unless you’re climbing a throat.”

The bells stopped. A new sound crawled under the canopy: a wet dragging. Something big being hauled through leaves. Then a thump as it was dropped ten paces outside our line.

Imani’s whisper was thinner than I’d ever heard it. “Reyes.”

I moved first because I couldn’t not. The light from my headlamp made a narrow white tunnel. At the end of it lay Reyes’s pack, and inside it, Reyes’s head. Not fresh. Not old. Cleaned in places, ragged in others. Her dog tag was looped through one ear, the metal bright against dark, drying blood.

I heard the breath before I felt the presence. Warm and animal. Standing in the dark just out of the light cone, close enough that I could see the fog of it when it exhaled.

“Back,” I said to the others without turning. I bent and took the tag. It was cold. It knew nothing of mercy.

Then I took two steps forward, breaking my own rules, and held the tag up and bared my teeth and let a sound out of my chest that I didn’t know I had. It was not human. It was not purely of the forest either. It was somewhere in between. The trees accepted it like an old password.

Silence answered. Then a low reply, not mocking, not angry, not quite welcome. It vibrated the air.

“You’re out of your mind,” Boone whispered.

“No,” I said. “I’m in theirs.”

At midnight the fever peaked. I sweated until my shirt clung cold and then hot. The world blurred at the edges and sharpened in the middle. Every scent veined the air like marbled fat.

I dreamed without sleeping: a hill of bones under a moon that swelled and swelled until it was a white sun; a circle of wolves sitting like soldiers at parade rest; eyes that were candles; a woman with gray streaks in her fur and scars across her muzzle who looked at me like you look at a map you’ve been waiting to read.

When I woke my teeth hurt. My nails had split the skin of my palms. My teammates were shadows around me: Imani a relaxed geometry of calm violence; Boone a stack of pain with a rifle on top; Vega a patient knot; Harlow a flame of anger burning tiny and bright.

“Drink,” Imani said, handing me a canteen. I obeyed because there was too much fluid leaving my body for me to risk losing more.

“Explain,” Boone said.

“Later,” I said.

“Now.”

“They’re not just animals,” I said. “They’re training. Herding. Testing. And we’re not just targets. We’re a curriculum. Greyhook’s running a class, and I’m the guest lecturer.”

“You’re not making sense,” Harlow said.

“Neither does a tide when you’re bleeding,” I said. “But it still pulls.”

Imani touched my wrist. “What do you need?”

The answer rose in me as if it had been waiting: “To see the eyes that call the run.”

“Alpha,” she said.

I nodded. “Or whatever they are.”

Vega rolled his shoulders like a boxer. “Then we go hunting.”

“No,” I said. “We go speaking.”

Boone snorted. “What, you want to send a strongly worded letter?”

“I want to answer the lesson,” I said. “They push. We pivot. They herd. We scatter. They lock us into a box. We find the hinge.”

Harlow pointed at Reyes’s pack. “And that?”

I pocketed the tag. “That was a boundary marker and a mercy, a piece returned. We will answer it.”

“How?” Imani asked.

“By giving something back.”

I took off my own dog tag and wrapped it around Reyes’s. Then I set them both on the ground just inside our line our side. The message wasn’t much. It didn’t need to be. We’d acknowledged the boundary. We’d made one of our own.

Then I cut a piece of my shirt and tied it to a branch at shoulder height where the wind would carry my scent downhill.

Boone stared. “You offering yourself up?”

“I’m sending an invitation,” I said. “If the alpha wants a word, they know where to find me.”

“And if they want your throat?” he asked.

“Then they’ll find it,” I said, because this wasn’t a day for lies.

We didn’t sleep. The bells shook twice more. The dragging sound returned once, smaller, a decoy we didn’t follow. At three in the morning, rain began, soft at first, then hard enough to make talking useless. The world became shiver and rhythm and steam off our backs.

At four, the rain stopped as if a valve had closed. The trees shed what they could. A hush fell, heavy and alert.

I smelled the alpha before I saw her.

The scent came like the taste of a dark fruit rich, old, edged with iron and smoke. It carried memory in it, and something like intelligence that made the hair on my arms rise.

She appeared on the ridge line beyond our trip line and did not come closer. She was bigger than the scout, scarred across the cheek, one ear torn down to a ragged triangle. She stood upright, sheathed in a fur that drank light, and her eyes were the color of torched honey.

Imani lifted her rifle. I touched the barrel and eased it down. The alpha watched my hand. She lowered her head slightly, as if nodding at a student who’d finally solved the easy part.

I stepped forward alone. The team hissed my name. I didn’t turn. The alpha’s gaze softened, if such a thing can happen in a face like a monster’s. I stopped at the line where we’d placed the tags, both metallic ovals glinting like small, obedient moons.

I bent, lifted them, and held them both up.

The alpha made a sound from deep in her chest. It was not a growl. It was closer to the way a story starts when it lives in a long memory.

Something moved at her side and a second figure emerged lithe, with fur so pale it was almost silver, eyes curious and bright. A juvenile. It sniffed the air like it was learning the alphabet. The alpha extended one long-fingered hand and touched the smaller creature’s shoulder. They both looked at me.

I didn’t have words. I had breath and an old voice I’d borrowed.

I let it out.

The sound that left me rolled low across the ridge, climbed the trunks, and slipped through the leaves. It wasn’t volume that made it big. It was age, pulled up from a well I hadn’t known I carried.

The juvenile answered too soon, high and eager. The alpha snapped her head and the little one flinched and shut up instantly, chastened. Then the alpha answered, a line of notes that bent in a pattern: call, response, challenge, return. It felt like a cadence stomped on a drill pad; it felt like a radio check; it felt like the first time in a firefight that you realize you’re part of a pattern older than you.

She stepped closer. Two paces. Three. The bells at our knees chimed softly with her footfall; she ignored them. I caught the wet-leather smell of her hide, the mineral scent of old blood, the sharp pine of the needles clinging to her fur.

She stopped at the edge of my reach and looked past me at the three shapes crouched behind me with guns that had stopped being weapons and started being prayers.

She lifted her chin. I understood. She wanted to see them. All of them.

I held a palm out behind me without looking. “Stand up,” I said. “Slow.”

Boone made a noise like a man asked to kneel on broken glass. Imani rose first, because of course she did. Vega next, a shadow uncoiling. Harlow last, eyes hot, jaw set hard enough to chip.

The alpha considered us all. Then she looked down at the tags in my hand and made one final sound. It was three notes, the last of which fell like a gavel.

I knew what it meant. I don’t know how I knew, only that the knowledge fit like a key: A debt acknowledged. A path offered. A time set.

She turned, gathered the juvenile with a nudge, and melted back into the trees.

I stood there until the forest started breathing again.

“You want to translate that for the class?” Boone asked hoarsely.

“She’s invited us,” I said.

“Invited us where?” Harlow asked.

“To stop running and start following,” I said. “Nightfall. Ridge line to the west. If we’re brave enough to accept it.”

“Or stupid,” Boone said.

Imani’s mouth tightened. “Brave can be stupid. Stupid can be brave. Both can get you killed.”

Vega cracked his neck. “But only one gets you answers.”

I turned the tags over in my palm. The metal was already warm from my skin. Reyes was quiet inside the shape of them. I slipped the chain over my head and let the weight settle under my shirt like a promise I couldn’t break.

“We go,” I said. “We go light. We go fast. And if this is a kill box, we break the box.”

“Cole,” Harlow said softly. “What if they’re not the only ones waiting?”

I didn’t have to answer. The forest did it for me.

From far to the north it was flat, mechanical, ugly, came the crackle of a loudspeaker cutting the hush. A male voice rolled over the ridges, official and bored:

“Attention, research teams. Enclosures Seven through Ten are now active. Retrieval teams should proceed to corridor Delta, maintain radio blackout until checkpoint Two. Greyhook Protocol Red in effect.”

Boone swore quietly. “We’re the rats. They’re the lab coats. The wolves are the knives.”

I shook my head. “No. We’re all knives. They just forgot knives cut both ways.”

Imani smiled without humor. “There he is,” she said. “The man who tells the moon when to rise.”

I didn’t feel like a man. I felt like an edge.

“Pack up,” I said. “The class has moved to the advanced course.”

As we broke camp, the wind swung west. It carried the smell of rain, the crack of electricity building somewhere beyond the ridge, and the faintest trace of a scent that was all wrong in a forest: disinfectant, hot rubber, the cagey reek of generators.

Greyhook had brought the laboratory to the woods.

The moon was not full yet. It didn’t matter. There are nights where the sky doesn’t need to be fat and white to make beasts of men. Sometimes it only needs a line drawn in the needles and a voice on a loudspeaker telling you where to die.

We went west, toward the place the alpha had pointed us, following a trail only my sick body could read. The twilight took the color out of everything. The trees became an army of gray soldiers who would never raise a hand to help. The bells on our lines were not ours anymore, we were past the perimeter and into whatever waited and began to ring behind us as something else took our place.

“The Pack Circles,” Imani said under her breath.

“No,” I said. “The pack closes.”

And for the first time since Reyes screamed, I wasn’t certain which pack I meant.