A chorus of scratchy, panting breaths drifted through the air, followed by the crunching of large paws against dried earth. As the pack drew closer, Jessup backed away and prepared to meet it. Soon he would see the faces of the beasts at the front of the group. Squat, long heads were accented by wide brows that looked like shelves made of bark. Their eyes were disturbingly human, with uniformly dark green pupils on fields of white. But what set them apart from any other canine were their short snouts and peculiar teeth. Although there were several smaller molars set along the backs of their jaws, most of the damage was done by two large teeth: one on the upper jaw and another on the lower, angled into a point and curved toward their throats. The shape added a grating sound to their breaths and a rasp to their howl, which Jessup heard when he caught the eye of the pack’s leader.
The wailing howl of the thing that had set his scars to burning snaked across the plains like smoke on a breeze. It was definitely closer.
“Come on,” Jessup said. “Come to me, you ugly bastards.”
There was some debate as to whether Shunkaws could understand human language. Right now, Jessup simply wanted to catch the creatures’ attention before he had an even bigger threat to worry about. When the leader of the closer group of animals nodded toward his followers to get them to back away, Jessup fired a round from his .45 that caught the Shunkaw squarely in the face. Its head snapped to one side as a small amount of blood and flecks of bone sprayed from the wound. Its skeletal structure was too dense to be punctured so easily, but the alpha was definitely put off his game as the others swarmed the Skinner to extract some payback.
The gun in Jessup’s right hand barked again and again while he reached for a finely tooled shoulder harness with his left. A hatchet hung there from a loop of braided leather where it could be drawn with a quick forward swipe. Slightly larger than a tomahawk, the weapon was carved from one piece of wood, stained with several layers of varnish mixed from an old Skinner formula, and adorned with teeth of various sizes that had been embedded into the wood like an insect that had been absorbed into amber. Thorns in its handle bit into Jessup’s palms, starting a trickle of blood that awakened the bond between the weapon and the man who wielded it.
When the next beast reached him, Jessup snarled, “That’s it! Soup’s on.” Sidestepping half a second before the first Shunkaw got a chance to clamp its jaws around his leg, he fired a round into the top of its head that drove its chin into the dirt. He followed that up by burying the hatchet blade into its skull. Crafted from supernatural materials, the hatchet cut a lot deeper than the .45’s bullets. The Shunkaw clawed at the ground and let out a shuddering gasp. Jessup willed the hatchet blade to become thinner so he could more easily pull it from where it had been lodged and swing at the next incoming beast.
One Shunkaw charged at him just ahead of another. Both creatures set their wide, vacant eyes upon him and opened their mouths in preparation for their meal. The first one ducked beneath Jessup’s swing and the second caught three bullets from the .45 in its head and neck. Its head wobbled from the impact of rounds that thumped against dense bone and became lodged in thick, leathery muscle. Even as Jessup kicked at the yelping Shunkaw, he looked around for the other one. Only four of the five were accounted for, which meant the last one could be sneaking around to bring him down from whatever open angle it could find. He fired more shots at the alpha, willed his hatchet blade to form something closer to a pickaxe and then buried it into the chest of the first creature to spring forward in an attempt to bring him down.
Something moved near his leg, and as Jessup turned toward it, he found a Shunkaw with its belly pressed against the ground so it could scurry forward to snap at his ankle. The Skinner was barely quick enough to kick the Shunkaw’s chin before its two angled front teeth were introduced to his flesh. The alpha collected himself enough then