World of Darkness World of Darkness: Attrition - Last Days and First Nights of Sarah O'Neally [Fin]

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[10:00 AM Mountain Time, 23 June 2005]

"No... no no no no! You fucking shitbox! NO!"

The rattle beneath the hood of the ancient '78 Aspen had started days earlier, back in New Mexico. Whatever it was, Sarah O'Neally had known, it probably wasn't good, but twenty dollars had gone into the pocket of a greasy mechanic with a wandering eye in Tuscon with nothing more to show for it than a new radiator hose and a shrug. Despite the warnings from the old clunker - the best her family would part with for the duration of the hunt - this lesser child of the Wren clan had pushed onward rather than call home with the bad news and face Grandma Wren's legendary wrath.

Now, as the dashboard lights lit up in a Christmas tree of critical failures and the engine made a groaning wheeze that reminded her all too much of a man dying from emphysema, Sarah found herself remembering with black amusement her words the previous day: "I'd rather hike through the desert than face that bitch." In what appeared to be just the latest in a lifelong string of crotch kicks from Mother Luna, it now appeared that she'd get the chance to make good on those words.

Nearly bald tires eased away from the blistering heat of the blacktop and crunched a good fifty feet along the shoulder of Arizona State Route 86 before finally coming to rest beneath ticks and hisses of an engine that hadn't been healthy in at least a decade. Without the "60-4" air-conditioning -- 60 miles per hour, four windows down -- the car's interior began to heat up at an alarming rate.

"Great. Just fucking great." The door gave a rusty protest as she shoved it open - a sound that had been part and parcel with the car as long as she had known it - and Sarah pulled herself off of the cracked vinyl seat and planted her boots with a crunch on the decaying remnants of macadam that qualified as a shoulder. She shoved the door shut behind her with another squeaking groan and a heavy thud, and made her way around to the hood. Steam crept up around the edges and through dent-created gaps; there was no way she was going to touch that thing and burn her hand on it. Only after wrapping a rag around her fingers did she prod for and pop the hood release, receiving a gout of acrid steam in her lungs for her effort.

"Fuck me," she choked out, staggering back from the open maw of her sad ride until breathing stopped being a living hell and starting being a life-sustaining operation once more. As the tears cleared from her eyes, she stepped gingerly forward again to survey the damage.

The rugged old Slant-6 had at least two hundred thousand miles on it before Sarah had set out from the compound outside of Peru, Massachusettes back in February. She'd done everything short of singing it lullabyes since to try to baby the poor thing along. Looking at the jagged crack in the block through which steam continued to wisp and oil was leaking like blood from a stuck pig, it was painfully obvious that nothing short of a tow truck or new engine would ever move this rusted heap of junk again. With money for neither - and no cell phone even if she did - the young woman took the only option available: grabbing a leather pack from the back seat and the half bottle of water she'd picked up a hundred miles ago, she muttered a profane farewell to the defunct Aspen and started westward under the desert sun.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[4:00 PM Mountain Time, 23 June 2005]

Arizona 86 is not the most desolate highway in the country. That said, it certainly ranks in the top ten. Stretching east to west across the wide empty expanse of Pima County, it is a sunbaked and seldom-trod ribbon of asphalt west of Tuscon. Anyone who isn't bound to the desolate desert hell by economics or blood avoids old 86 like a rattlesnake; I-10 is the path of least resistance. As a direct result, those lonely outposts that had sprung up against all chance and hope back in the days before Eisenhower's big Interstate initiative, those little Mom-and-Pop affairs with a gasoline pump and icebox, had long since gone the way of most of man's intrusions into the desert over the ages.

Tired, thirsty and hotter than hell, Sarah stalked up to the porch of one such forlorn establishment, thanking the stars for what little succor could be found in the shade. Not for the first time today, her mind wandered back over the circumstances that had brought her to this point.

After an entire life surrounded by monsters, she was being sent to bring one - or at least, a potential one - home.

Fuck you, Amber. Fuck you right in the goddamned ear.

When Amber Wren, the strong and willful girl who had unspokenly been voted Most Likely To Turn Into An Ungodly Monster, grabbed an old pickup truck and hauled out from the family home through the ice and snow of a February night, it hadn't taken long for the elders to figure out what had happened. It also didn't take them long to realize that someone who have to go after her. Whoever it was would have to have experience in the outside world, at least a decent survival instinct, and most of all be expendable. So it was that James O'Neally had travelled across the country to the strange foreign lands of San Francisco to bring home his pre-med student daughter... to said daughter's utter and complete dismay.

College was, as Sarah figured it, her one ticket away from a third-class life as a human amid wolves and into something resembling independence and success for herself. When the scholarship to the University of California system had come through, she had to use every trick in the book to convince the clan to let her go. And even then, the deal had come with a hitch: "If we need you, you come home." That hitch had been used to haul her away from her one chance at a normal life.

Blistering heat began to creep up Sarah's leg, waking her from a sort of drifting half-sleep. "Goddamnit. How long have I been here?" Shadows had shifted considerably as the blazing sun made its transit, telling her that she'd been her a lot longer than intended. From the map she had folded up in her back pocket, the territory of the Ajo Runners was still a good fifty miles down the road; she'd never stand a chance of reaching it alive if she didn't keep pushing.

With her body protesting every movement, Sarah pushed herself away from the abandoned store and marched onward.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[6:00 AM Mountain Time, 24 June 2005]

The freshly risen sun blazed upon Sarah's back as she trudged along the desolate highway. An hour before, shivering in the cold desert night, she had all but begged for Sol's return. Now, she regretted it once more in this world of extremes.

Hunger rumbled in her stomach, but it was running a distant second to the thirst that had long since overtaken the lead in her bodily demands. The old woodsman's trick - sucking on a pebble - had only managed to work up spit to a point; beyond that, her body simply didn't have anything left after what emergency maintenance it could do to spare for luxuries such as saliva. Swallowing was nothing short of painful. Which I guess is fine, Sarah rued - nothing to swallow anyway.

A flicker caught her eye, something off to the north on the stony terrain. She didn't have the hunter's instinct of her cousins, but the next best thing had been beaten into her over twenty years; Sarah froze in her tracks and carefully looked from the corner of her eye. Not twenty feet away, a jackrabbit munched contentedly on scrawny weeds in the shadow of a rock.

Oh please oh please oh please... With every bit of caution she could muster, Sarah reached at a snail's pace for the buck knife on her belt, pulling it without a sound from the old leather. Instincts or no, long lessons had taught her how to approach game, and she began to inch toward the hare, step by careful step, stopping on a dime whenever the little creature perked up in sudden alertness. No more than ten minutes could have passed, but it felt as though hours went by under the merciless sun as she crept forward as far as she dared. Finally, with every bit of concentration and strength in her, the young woman lunged at the rabbit, shining steel leading the way.

She wasn't even close.

Tears wouldn't come as Sarah lay there on the harsh baked land, her prey long since disappeared beyond her sight. But more than the hurt of failure, more than the pain and dire needs that wracked her body, hot envy burned within her very soul. If only she'd been gifted like her cousins - like fucking Amber, probably - the game would have ended with a good meal. Four swift legs would have covered the distance as her clumbsy two could never hope to match.

As she had for every day in the past decade and more, Sarah lamented that she was not born to be a wolf.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[12:30 PM Mountain Time, 24 June 2005]

"...any port in a desert...." Sarah's words were tinged with just a touch of crazy as she crawled on hands and knees into the culvert. Over the past eight miles, it was the first thing she'd seen - or rather, stumbled over, as a shuffling boot had caught up on a concrete berm - that could offer protection from the unrelenting, hateful gaze of the daystar above. Skinned hands from the fall or no, she was literally deliriously happy for her find; her sunburns had sunburns, and blisters were starting to rise in places.

In the relative cool of the half-buried concrete hole, exhaustion finally won out over pain. Sarah fell into a fitful sleep, her dreams haunted by the call of distant howls.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[9:50 PM Mountain Time, 24 June 2005]

Howls still echoed in her ears as Sarah managed somehow to pry open eyes that did not, under any circumstances, want to open. It could have been the dried crust, a combination of tears with far too little liquid in them and dried ooze from half a dozen blisters. It could have been that her head felt like someone had been pounding on it with a barn beam all day. But most likely, it was because she was beginning to die.

I'll sure as hell die, she chided herself, if I don't crawl out of here and get to Ajo.

"Crawling out of here" was more involved than she thought. Blisters had popped during the day, and her skin had more or less glued itself to both clothing and the rough cement of the culvert itself. Even after the gut-wrenching pain of tearing free from that, every movement was fresh torture, every touch a new agony. At least half an hour of the blessedly cool night passed by this little corner of hell before the half-dead girl finally pulled herself free from her impromptu crypt.

Another ten minutes were spent re-discovering the marvel of standing. Even then, the world teetered in odd directions, and the memory of those dream howls seemed to mock her from somewhere far, far away and yet all-too near. She probably knows. Grandma probably knows I'm dying out here, and she's laughing. It was an insane thought, but sanity was becoming an increasingly expensive commodity for Sarah.

Her jaw more fell open than anything else, and a parched throat made three distinct and painful tries before finally croaking out, "Fuck you. Fuck you, Grandma. Fuck your water. Fuck your food. And fuck your goddamned sun. Fuck you all very much."

Somehow shoving one foot out in front of the other, Sarah began to slowly drag herself back up to the roadside and off toward the west, wrapped in the cool of the night.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[4:30 AM Mountain Time, 25 June 2005]

Drag the left foot forward.

Lock the left ankle.

Straighten the left leg.

Lock the left knee.

Drag the right foot forward.

Lock the right ankle.

Straighten the right leg.

Lock the right knee.

Repeat a hundred thousand more times to Ajo.

Giggles welled up from someplace twisted and crazy in her soul, a creaking thing that fluttered as it passed from her throat to be carried away on the cold desert night wind. Howls answered, echoing in her ears and mind as a now familiar companion on her doomed trek.

And it was doomed. She knew it. Even if she was lucky enough to find shelter again, there was no way she'd make it through another blistering day.

As if in answer, a pebble reached out and grabbed her boot. The world went into a crazy spin, and Sarah O'Neally fell for the last time, tumbling to lay on her back, eyes staring up into the star-filled sky.

Far above, Luna smiled upon this last effort of her distant daughter, a thin and somehow loving grin amid the myriad constellations. For the first time in her life - and the last - Sarah felt as though Mother Moon still had some place for her, if only to die in a worthy effort.

Light faded as vision failed, and the night sounds drifted away as well until all that was left was the beat of her own heart, slower and slower. Even that finally ended with one last quiet murmer, and the last thing Sarah knew before she died was one last echo of the howl of a wolf.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

[4:32 AM Mountain Time, 25 June 2005]

burning searing oh spirits good hurts it hurts it hurts it HURTS

Neurons fired in desperate efforts to respond to what was happening to her, as a searing hot liquid poured down her breathless throat, flooding dying cells with something far, far more potent than mere oxygen. Whatever this was, it felt incredible and terrible, a moment caught in the extremes, soaring above clouds and burning in an angry god's fires all jumbled together as an impossible, unknowable experience from beyond the grave.

Her eyes didn't flutter open; they had never closed. But vision did return nonetheless -- and what had been Sarah immediately wished it hadn't. Looming over her was a mouthful of teeth and fangs stained crimson, glowing eyes set above in a face as pale as death. And yet, Luna still shown above, wreathing the top of the monster's head like a silvery crown. Somehow, as her organs finally gave up any effort at useful function even as an unholy strength burned through her muscles, she knew that this was Her doing, that somehow this would be right.

As the face pulled away, a cold hand with a grip like iron grabbed her own, and for the first time in her unlife, Sarah O'Neally stood and felt true hunger.

[Sarah Dead-Wolf]

Over the next few nights, Sarah became acquainted with her new circumstances. The pains that had tormented her in her final days were gone, the skin on her body smooth, whole, unblemished... and dead. But within her, the hunger of those final hours of life never did disappear; instead, it transformed into the twin companions of Hunger and Beast.

The former was simple enough to sate, at least briefly. She had already possessed the skill of a hunter; now, the creature that had brought her back from death - a long-dead thing that went by the name of Juan Garcia - helped her to hone those skills with her new talents. Flesh had once been sweet upon her tongue, but never as this new sensation, this rich gift of life that flowed crimson and roses past bright fangs and throughout her needy body. Feeding wasn't a task, not in those early nights. It was rapture. Her memory, preserved beyond death of the tissue that contained it, remembered with ironic glee words that had been drilled into her cousins for ages untold: "The Wolf Must Hunt". She was, Sarah reflected, that promise made mandate now.

The later however was an endless battle with an undefeatable enemy. It was a primal thing had been awakened in her that first night, a dark pairing to her mortal soul. And whatever the thing was - a curse by some god, a dark reflection of herself, a Jungian archtype taken form, a warped kindling of the wolf that lay dormant within her genes - it served as a constant urge to the most basic purposes of her kind: to hunt, to feed, to sleep. Months of long and painful effort by both herself and Old Juan were needed to obtain any sort of real control over the thing... and even then, it was an imperfect truce, one always on the verge of collapse in the face of hunger, of an enemy, of fire, and most of all of the forbidden and hated sun.

If those two things had remained unchecked, Sarah realized, she may well have fallen to the Beast. Only the promise of Luna kept her fighting. For that first night and every one that followed, the Mother had shown upon her with new meaning, new understanding. It was why he had followed her, Juan explained. It was why, when she finally fell, he had howled one last time before changing again to a man to come to her, to hold her, to take her as his childe. Despite all of Sarah's bitter resentment, her connection to the People was forged in stuff stronger than any mere ability to change one's skin. And now, with his vital essence within her, the legacy of an accord between brothers long ago, it was a promise to be fulfilled by her blood.

Human no longer, Sarah was now one of the Wolves of Blood: a Dead Wolf. And her road had only just begun.