raised by wolves

The first one to get here is Yolita and she’s covered in blood and another black mystery liquid. Those strange eyes are glowing with an emotion that is very unsettling coming from Yolita: fear.

“Did you see it?” she demands frantically. “Did you see it?”

“See what?” I ask and she blows right past me. She slams and locks the heavy porthole behind her. “Hey now,” I say. “How are they going to get in?”

“We aren’t letting anyone in,” she says, very sure of herself.

“Oh really? That sounds perfectly reasonable, Yolita, tell me more.”

“Shut up! You didn’t see it. You didn’t see what they…what those things did to the passengers!”

She says all this through gritted teeth, her expression growing more manic with every passing instant.

Right then, the porthole begins clanking and Yolita’s gun comes up.

“Whoa baby!” I tell her, putting my hands up in front of me. “It’s just the team,” I coo at her, slowly, carefully moving my hand towards the gun, like a man about to snatch a rattle snake up by the ass.

“It’s just the team,” I’m saying again when Yolita emits a sound like a cornered dog and lunges at me with her shoulder, bending under my outstretched arm to hit me in the stomach. I go down. Hard.

“Help me hold the door,” she says, blowing past me like a breeze, me gasping to catch my wind on the ground. “Help me hold the door you idiot! We can’t let them in!”

The funny little wheel on the door begins to spin and I’m pretty sure Yolita’s mismatched eyes are about to bug out of her head. I see her mouth the words “too late” and she runs to the other end of the room. She looks at the big white door of the vault behind the glass and looks at me. She says:

“You have to get it open!”

Right now, I’m making an honest effort not to vomit up what ever’s left in my stomach after the plane incident, probably the only honest thing I’ve done all year.

“You damn right we do,” says a voice with a familiar obnoxious twang. The door’s come open, which I neglected to notice in my slumped-over position, and there stands Weston, cowboy hat back on in place of the helmet he was wearing when we dropped. He unbuttons the gas mask and spits rudely on the floor near me.

“’The hell you doing on the floor, Parks?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him and struggle to my feet.

Yolita is crying big whale-tears of relief. It’s like she’s five years old again and jolly old Saint Nick has shown up at her door when she was expecting the boogie man.

“’The hell’s she crying for?”

I couldn’t answer if I tried.

“You ask her, she’s acting crazy.”

“You didn’t see it!” she yells suddenly, those fucking scary eyes seeming to glow like coals. She says it again and goes back to crying, this time with the helplessness of the damned.

“She hurt?” Weston asks.

“I dunno,” I tell him

“She’s covered in blood. You sure she’s not hurt?”

“For fuck’s sake, I told you I dunno!”

“Well what the fuck do you know aside from that you don’t yet seem to have even considered opening this vault?” he demands, emphatically pointing at the big locked door.

He glares at me a moment longer with Yolita sobbing in the periphery, before I reply:

“Not much.”

He grunts and stomps past me, leaving the door open. Yolita yelps and aims her gun at the opening.

“Close the door!” she shrieks. “Close the door closethedoorclosethedoor!”

Confused but finally able to stand, I close the door. Not because she told me to, but to shut her up.

“Alright!” I holler and almost slam the door on Goober, who grabs it and throws it back at me. Yolita yelps again at the sudden apparition of the giant black man, points her gun and fires POP-p-POP at Goober, who is simultaneously electrocuted and injected with an extremely potent sedative at the same time. He get’s the W in “What?” out before dropping. I roll my eyes and palm my face. Meanwhile, Weston has disarmed and is in the process of restraining Yolita. It’s a pretty drab scuffle, but then Yolita pulls a knife and things get a little more interesting. Then Weston takes the knife from her and shouts as he presses it up to her neck: “God DAMN Yolita if you do not get control of yourself right this instant I swear to GOD ALMIGHTY that I will have Parks slit your throat while you sleep, doyouunderstandme?”

Her eyes flick over at me—still at the door next to slumped-over Goober, smiling a big ol’ smile and giving her the thumbs up—and then she swallows hard and nods a barely visible nod.

“Good!” Weston says and throws up his hands. “Now, little lady, do you mind telling me just what the fuck happened?”

“Give me my knife back,” she replies. Weston raises an eyebrow, a little brown caterpillar peeking up over the top of his sunglasses.

“After you tell us what happened,” he insists. She sighs and sits down next to the toppled desk, hugging her knees to her chest like an egg.

“And,” Weston says right when it looks like she’s about to finally start, “after you help Parks drag Goober the rest of the way in here.”