Legacy of the Wolf

The Cabin

Sam hurried over, planted her hip against the arm of the couch in attempt to stop its movement and raised her shotgun—a single-barrel Mossberg—toward the shelving unit. She could feel the force of repeated attacks, sending electrical arcs of pain through her injured ankle. Finally the wooden back of the unit snapped and stove in; shelves collapsed and claws appeared in the widening cracks. A snout pushed through and Sam unloaded a shotgun blast directly into it. The muzzle disappeared.

Then a loud crack to her left broke through the ringing in her ears. Spinning, she saw fractures in the window; there was a second hit and the glass came apart. Sam swung the shotgun up, pumped the forestock and blasted the wolf that hurtled through. The furry black mass fell heavily to the floor and moved no more... but clawed hands reached through the opening where it had broken in. Sam darted to a spot just a few feet from the window and began a pattern of racking the shotgun, blasting, racking, blasting, as ejected casings peppered the floor...

Sam had gotten so caught up that she almost didn't hear the shattering of glass behind her. The window on the other side of the room had given way and the cabinet, made of thinner wood than the shelves, came apart easily. Sam drew one of the semi-automatic pistols, already locked and loaded, and fired at the leering wolf head that shoved itself through the breach. The first shot missed; the second was a perfect hit dead center in the beast's forehead. That wolf corpse was suddenly, viciously ripped aside as another, larger wolf took its place.

On the other side, a brown-furred hellhound was pushing its way in. In front and to her left, clawed hands were thrashing the bookcase to splinters. Muffled sounds of glass breaking behind the second bookcase at the other front window preceded that unit's thunderous crash to the wooden floor.

Too many; way too many all at once. Sam slung the shotgun and drew a second handgun, firing with both hands, barely taking time to aim. Some bullets reached their marks, others did not; if Sam didn't retreat to the bedroom now the hounds would be inside and on her before she had time to deploy her next counter measure.

She holstered the handguns, snatched up the pack, axe and lantern and bolted for the bedroom. Once inside she dropped her gear, dug into the pack and removed the claymore mine.

It had taken some internet searching, done by her phone before leaving Blackrock, to figure out exactly how the mine worked. Even after the considerable time she had spent and the practice runs she had done in her head, Sam wasn't a hundred percent confident.

But there was no time now to second-guess.

She removed the thin, curved mine from its bag, unfolded the scissor legs and with shaky hands placed the mine at the bedroom door threshold, pointing the side that said "front toward enemy" out into the main room... where beasts were crawling through every single window.

Sam unrolled the firing wire, quickly made the necessary preparations and finished by screwing the adapter with the blasting cap into the detonator. In the main room, the hounds were closing in.

Her heart hammering against her chest, Sam dove to the side, just in front of the closet. She connected the firing device to the firing wire, flipped the safety bail and gave the plastic "clacker" a quick squeeze just as the first wolf reached the threshhold.

The mine detonated with devastating force as seven hundred silver balls blasted outward, shredding anything and everything in their path.

Sam felt the blast all the way to her bones. Forcing herself to move, ignoring the pain in her ankle, she crawled over to retrieve the lantern. Glancing through the doorway, all she saw at first was smoke. As it began to clear, the lamplight revealed a decimated ruin populated with wolf bodies and pieces of wolf bodies. And then, amazingly, the figures—even the pieces—began to shift right before her eyes, back into human form.

There was little time to gawk, however: more hounds were entering through the access points. Cursing, Sam got to her feet and shut the bedroom door. She picked up the axe, limped into the closet, and set to work.

The claymore must have scared the beasts somewhat; it took a good thirty seconds or so before they began bashing the bedroom door.

Her work done, Sam shut herself inside the closet, just as the bedroom door splintered to pieces.

In the closet's cramped, dark space, as its small door began to shudder from repeated blows, Sam reached into her jacket pocket... and pulled out the grenade.

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I had a chance to mess around with claymore mines in the Army. Fun stuff, let me tell you. Thanks for reading, and if you love werewolf stories, do check out my first self-pubbed horror novel, The Turning: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01I7JX7Q4

This chapter is dedicated to @Strowberry_22, who read the entire story in just a couple days!