You wouldn’t think Droods would go in for fantasy horrors, given the truly weird shit we have to deal with every day . . . but there was a certain comfort to be found in watching Hammer’s old-fashioned morality plays. Where Good and Evil were always so clear-cut . . .
So I just drove along, across the open moor, under the strange stars and the unfeasibly large full moon, listening to the wolves howling in the distance . . . and quite enjoying myself. Until a young woman ran desperately into the glare of my headlights. The mists seemed to curl back, to show her to me more clearly. A young woman, running with all the speed that terror and desperation could lend her. Tall and slender, with long dark hair, wearing a ragged white gown that shimmered in the moonlight. How very traditional, I thought. Until she turned her head to look at me, gazing wide-eyed into the light of my car’s headlights, and I saw how scared she was.
She looked back over her shoulder at what was chasing her. I looked too, and finally I saw what it was that had been howling. A great pack of oversized hounds were chasing the girl, pursuing her across the uneven ground with appalling speed. Closing in on her. The young woman looked at me pleadingly and ran on. I changed direction and sent the Bentley hurtling forward, putting the car between her and the approaching wild things.
The moment the Bentley got between the hounds and their prey, the pack turned on me. They moved quickly to surround the car, running silently alongside, matching the car’s speed effortlessly. Up close I could see they were huge, monstrous things, with taut, veiny skin and bulging muscles, jumping and leaping effortlessly over the mires and the ditches. And because they were so close I was finally able to see what was most monstrous about them. They had no heads. An old joke bubbled up inside me, almost hysterically. How do they smell? Hell, how did they see, to follow their prey?
They surrounded my car in moments, pressing in close from all sides.
The dogs in front looked to be getting too close to the running woman, so I opened fire with the Bentley’s machine guns. The front-mounted cannon hammered deafeningly on the quiet, explosive fléchettes slamming into the hounds over and over. The impacts hit the dogs hard, throwing them this way and that, slowing them down but not stopping them. No blood flew up from any of the hits, and I couldn’t make out any wounds or injuries. At this range the explosive shells should have blown the damned creatures apart. I switched to silver bullets, and then blessed and cursed ammo, all to no effect.
The headless hounds pressed in even closer now, threatening the car from every side. I reminded myself that the Bentley’s chassis was spell-proof. If these things were the magical creatures they seemed, they shouldn’t be able to get inside the car. They must have sensed that, because none of them tried to leap over the low-slung doors. Instead, they threw themselves against the sides of the car, hurling their great bodies into the metalwork with appalling force. The impacts shook me like a rag doll in the driving seat, as the hounds slammed the car back and forth, trying to force the Bentley away from their prey. I heard the sides of the car buckle, and then groan loudly as the metal forced itself back into shape. The Armourer does good work.
I turned on the car’s emergency force shield. Powerful energies sparked and shimmered on the night air all around the car, but they didn’t even slow the hounds down. The creatures just charged in again and again, slipping effortlessly through the force shield. So I turned it off. It used up a lot of power, and I couldn’t risk draining the battery so far from home.
The headless hounds hit me hard, from both sides at once, and I had to fight to control the steering wheel and keep the car on course. I’d almost caught up with the running woman. And so had the first of the hounds. I hit the cigarette lighter, and fierce yellow flames belched out of the front of the car, enveloping the nearest dogs. They fell away, rolling on the soaked ground to put out the flames, and then they were up and running again, entirely unharmed. What kind of creatures were