I spotted, what was now clearly, a half-hidden wolf that wearily picked up its head and looked at me. A real hateful glare.

“Guess that big ol’ shitty coat of yours isn’t so great now, huh?”

It looked like it understood what I was saying so I walked up to it carefully, my head on a swivel. When I was 5 or 6 feet away, I raised the .38 and pulled the trigger.

The wolf’s head rocked back but it wasn’t dead. I aimed again, ignoring the heat haze and my own dizziness then debated placing the second shot. Would this be the only wolf? I doubted it. It might be a waste of a bullet but I didn’t want to waste more time and I had already potentially blown the mission by giving myself away with the first shot. The second one hit it hard. This time it didn’t move.

Damn, I forgot to bring more ammo with me. Shit, it’s hot. Now, figuring my cover was blown, but unwilling to leave a wolf at my back, I debated going back to my car but the thought of the oven and having to sit in there and rummage through to find ammo was just a bit too much. I wanted my .45, among the other stuff I had left on the hilltop. I approached the edge of my new shade and rolled my shoulder, it was feeling much better. Not perfect, but not as critical as it had been just a… day or two ago?

I crept across the unshaded area and then sprinted as I felt my shoes start to stick, behind me was a small trail of black rubber footsteps. Now, under the canopy at the edge of the treeline, I took in how it had been a dry, shitty little forest before, now it was anything but that. Greenery exploded. Old, near-dead trees towered, seizing new domain. Hardscrabble bushes bloomed and flowered despite the oppressive heat. It looked more like a jungle than a couple of tightly packed, shitty trees.

There could be wolves anywhere.

I adjusted my grip on the blade-knife-hatchet-kukuri and did the same with my pistol, then went in.

----------------------------------------

Ah. So this is where all the humidity was hiding. Here and in my car. I swept my eyes around, keeping them constantly working, expecting wolves at any moment, but I should have been prepared for anything because a field mouse jumped into my pant leg and started SHREDDING. I slapped the wide-flat of the blade on my leg then slammed myself against the ground until I heard a crunch.

I stood up, unsure of whose blood was starting to leak through the side of my pants.

“Give me a fucking break.” I huffed as I stabilized myself and started to pull on the mouthpiece of the water bladder and shook my leg like a dog. The mouse was firmly squished in there, but its corpse stopped hesitating before plunging down the rest of my pant leg.

I didn’t have time to study the tiny body as I heard a growl that devolved into a heavy pant. There, to the left, 10 feet ahead. How’d it get so close? Stupid mouse. It stumbled forward and, in decisive response, I froze. Order of ope- it lunged at me and I twisted away to land painfully into some serious roots that hadn’t been there the day before.

I huffed in deep hot breaths as I scrambled up in a panic, expecting a follow-up pounce that never arrived. The wolf was panting hard, its tongue lolled to the side, eyes manic and wild under the oppressive heat. This is why Humanity was King. Adaptability. In that moment of primitive pride I raised my pistol, but before pulling the trigger, I stopped. Save the bullets.

I moved forward and readied my knife-blade-whatever it was called and got ready to strike.

Mentally preparing myself to settle it ‘up close and personal’, I was kind of excited to grant sweet death to this overgrown dog. I paused. Something felt wrong. I always trusted my gut as I put a tree between myself and the wolf, eyes scanning.

There. A rustle. And another. Sharp porcelain broke up the greenery and, as if acknowledging that it had been spotted, another trudged out from the brush. That would have been bad.

There. I spotted another one. I moved as quickly as I could to make my way back through the trees until I felt the direct sun hit my back. My skin underneath my shirt immediately began to violently protest. I moved a step forward and put myself back under the protection of the new jungle. At least mother nature seemed to be doing alright, that bitch.

There were three wolves but I saw no reason to assume that was all of them. I strafed to the right at a quick walk as I kept sucking down water from the bladder on my back, making sure to keep myself under the shade while trying to group up the beasts to face them in one direction. On a normal day, or even when it was cold, I’d have been food in a shockingly short period of time.

Now? While we were walking on the surface of the sun? I really did have an advantage, in endurance and adaptability, Humanity was king. Although not as much as I was before, I still felt myself sweating, which was a good sign. When that stopped I’d start to be in as much trouble as the wolves. My best guess was that I still had some time to wear out the wolves. If they had to recover from every leap then I was going to bait out one of them instead of getting jumped as soon as I turned my back. I didn’t trust that they wouldn’t be suicidally malicious.

I approached the group of three heavily panting beasts but kept some distance, trying to bait out their leaps. I couldn’t explain it, but I had the sinking feeling that they could tell what I was trying to do.

I pulled up Duck’s pistol toward the closest and biggest one’s face, and in the same motion, I pulled the trigger. The sharp pop hurt my ears, I wasn’t alone. I also possessed the benefit of not being on the loud hurty-end of it, which was nice. The two wolves on either side leapt at me and I dodged… actively stumbled out of the way.

Both wolves on either side of the big one sent deep growls into the surroundings before one of them managed to bring itself to make a second leap that caught me off guard as its jaw clamped weakly around my left forearm, binding my shooting hand along with it. I was surprised that the wolf’s teeth barely managed to draw blood, but it still held on enough to bring me down to the ground with it on top of me. I tried to jerk my arm free to blast it in the head but the intelligence in its eyes told me that it knew what the strange metal in my hand could do and that it would be more than comfortable waiting for its friend to arrive. I felt its hot, ragged breath on my skin. Nope.

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I swung my machete-whatever into the front of its face, splitting its nose. Bad angle, but a dog’s nose, even a shaggy, overgrown one like this, had a sensitive one. It yelped and the pain apparently helped it bite down harder, which made me swing harder, and again.

Then I stopped swinging as my right forearm was caught by the second wolf and not nearly as gently this time. There was a strange moment before the pain swept through where I clearly felt both of their hot breaths against the parts of my arms that were inside its mouth. Shit, maybe my stuff still on the hill wasn’t that important. It certainly wasn’t worth more than my life.

Mortal fear, and the now, steadily increasing strength of the wolves’ bites, drove desperate strength into my limbs and in the speed of my thoughts. I pulled my right arm back and shoved my left back with my still-clutched revolver now lined up with a wolf’s skull. I pulled the trigger as fast as I could in quick succession, the last bullet missed completely and sailed off into the forest as the beast dropped lifeless next to me. My left hand spasmed as the final wolf bit down harder, and this time I felt my bones creak. I pulled my arm out of the dead wolf’s mouth and slammed the blade down again and again into its face. It squeezed its mouth shut as it raced to shatter my arm, well within its capabilities, and I raced to turn its face into something that couldn’t achieve its goal of shattering my cherished forearm bones.

I won. Barely. Between the shaking adrenaline and the brutal exhaustive heat, I could hardly hold my own pistol at this point and didn’t bother pulling my somewhat trapped arm out of its maw as I tried to force big gulps of air into my lungs. I was drenched and there wasn’t more coming out of me. Early stages of heat stroke and fairly painful bites on my forearms, but at least I was still alive.

“Haaaa haaaa haaaaa haaaaaaaaaaa,” I let out the last breath and released my blade before trying to wedge the dying wolf’s mouth off of my arm. I took the gun from my fingers and pulled the trigger at its head. Click. The chamber cycled but no shot came out. Shit. I bashed it against its head until it was finally escorted the last little bit to whatever hell it had come from. I pulled my arm and yelped before wedging the pistol in its mouth and turning it, prying its jaw open. The effort sent me panting and huffing on my back.

Somewhere beyond my feet I could scarcely hear the underbrush rustle. What really gave it away was the deep thrumming growl. I sat up and sent my head spinning. I could see the biggest of the three, a panting wolf now missing an eye, setting itself into a leap. I rolled, or tried to. My body hit the wolves’ large bodies to either side and I was sent back into the center. I barely had time to bring up my wounded arms and pull my legs in before the gray mass drove its mass onto me and pushed the last, desperately gathered breath from my lungs. Its claws drove into my flesh, more from mass than inherent sharpness and I grabbed onto the scruff of its neck and pulled back as it used its own weight, aggression, and gravity to bring its teeth into my face’s personal space. I pushed it back and managed to flail my own legs enough to keep its back claws from tearing out my stomach, though I hardly noticed that. I pulled at handfuls of fur, trying to get the leaking teeth away.

“Fuck you dog!”

I heard it growl something in reply, probably the animal equivalent of my own words as it continued to close the distance between its teeth and my face.

I felt its hot breath against my face as my own muscles shivered and a wave of cold moved through me. My body was acting strange in the throws of heat exhaustion, wires crossed somewhere along the line and it was unsure of how to respond to it slowly shutting down. I felt my hands steadily growing number and weaker as the seconds ticked by. Its jaw snapped once and I twisted my face away, driving my head back and deeper into the brush. Its attempt seemed to drain it a bit and I was able to push back its maw a few inches for a small respite. Inevitably, over longer seconds, patiently, it drew closer again.

Your life really does flash in front of your eyes, though it was a muddled experience, maybe heat exhaustion made my final moments more blurry than they ought to be. Its breath felt like it was burning my face now, another inch and it’d be close enough to rip off my face and then it’d really be over. Memories flashed through, of my childhood, few of them clear as they blurred by time and heat. Of life, dully passing by. Sitting on my couch, Duck wasn’t even there.

I thought these were supposed to be significant memories. The mundaneness of them made me angry. This was it? I was spun back into one lunch and where I saw Duck for the first time. As she sat across from me, I was reading and drinking coffee and then I noticed the foot underneath the table next to me move. A pair of small converses. The small foot was pointed toward me. I casually flipped through the body-language book in my hand and found what her foot movement meant. That she was interested in me. I peered over the top of my book and could tell that she was looking back at me through her peripheral sight. She could watch a movie out of the corner of her eyes. Still, I could tell that she was looking at me and how I finally looked at the man seated across from her, next to me. An older man whose face was blurry now. I eventually learned that had been her father.

We hadn’t said a word to each other or even officially met until I tried a new coffee shop a week or so later. That memory came in too, but it was shorter and more clear. She had been behind the counter. We locked eyes this time and time slowed. I’d known it then.

More memories blurred and whipped by as I continued to bounce between the present situation and scattered heat-hazed memories. I felt it coming on. Death. The chill of the grave, coming in hot and steady. Terrifying and heavy and far too close.

“No,” I whispered. It didn’t change anything, the teeth kept pressing downward, like the beast hadn’t heard me at all.

“No!” I screamed, combining the sadness, anger, fear, and surety that I was not going to die here. The wolf’s head marginally moved back then, in my head, an entire office's supply of rubber-bands snapped all at once. The air rippled and the wolf launched off me and back into the trunk of a tree in a violent blur. I heard something snap, this time I hazily recognized it as the sound of a bone breaking. At least it wasn’t mine, at least, I didn’t think so. My lifeless arms dropped to my sides to rest on the rough coats of the dead beasts on either side.

A migraine wormed and, instead of creeping, sprinted through my head, but it was a distant thing that barely registered as happening to my head. Everything felt… distant. Like it was all happening to someone else. A deep-boned sense of weakness definitely belonged to me as it settled closer than the distant pain.

I was tired, I knew that, so much that the heat and my lack of sweating barely registered as concerns. The unyielding sense of ‘I will not die’ had burned out and settled into a dull sense of resignation. I heard the wolf yelp and whine and scratch at the ground, but I couldn’t quite figure out how that concerned me.

Eventually, I turned over and pushed myself up. As if I was an actor that was following some sort of loose instinct of a script I had read once years ago, I placed my pistol back in the holster and grabbed my blade. I looked deeper into the brush but I didn’t care to hike up the hill anymore. At this point, it seemed like too much work to bother doing.

I looked at the wolf, its lower spine looked like it was bent the wrong way. Disregarding the thought, I walked back to my car and then stopped. I should probably kill that wolf. The thought of turning back to do so sounded like a terrible chore. I just didn’t care enough at the moment, it didn’t seem important. I walked back to it, but as I looked at it in its pitiful state? It just wasn’t worth it.

I felt the heat as I walked back to my car but that didn’t bother me much either. Well, it did, but I was tired. There were probably more insane animals out here but what was I supposed to do about that? Run back to my car? Pass.