never understood the purpose of the word ‘sorry.’”
I feel just how small a word sorry is and I don’t say it. Instead, I push up my sleeves and dig my fingers deep under the rough edge of a huge stone, ripping it from the dirt. Then I stumble toward the gap and drop it. That’s all the 7th needed to wake them up from the shock, and soon they are all carrying small boulders, looking like the grainy school video of ants moving things many times their weight that I had watched back in the days when I assumed I was human.
As I drop another stone, I catch the Alpha watching us, her eyes glowing between the trees.
Sorry, sorry. Regrets and pity.
Then she turns away. I strain, listening vainly for any sound of her.
“Time to get started,” Ziggy says, clapping the dirt from his hands. He starts barking out orders, making clear that he didn’t become Gamma of the 7th based solely on his expertise in obscure werewolf movies.
We start with the pickaxes, digging a groove around the culvert so the claws of the excavator’s bucket will be able to get a grip. I’d forgotten that we’d run out of the corrugated galvanized steel and been forced to use the much thicker steel gas pipes. I clamber into the excavator.
The cab has been sealed tight for weeks now and stinks of stale corn chips. In the storage box is a handful of beef sticks, grease seeping to the bottoms of their packages. A bottle in the door drink holder says Sprite but smells of cheap vodka. The key is under the safety beacon.
Turning it on, I dig around until the teeth of the bucket hit the culvert and the cab shimmies. Something bangs against the side window. At first I think it’s a tree limb, but then it happens again, and when I stop, Ziggy opens the door and pulls himself up.
“They’re coming.”
“Who?”
“Listen,” he says, hunched over. “Where’s the passenger seat on this thing?”
“It’s an excavator, Ziggy, not an Uber.”
He folds his big body, filling up whatever airspace is in the cab, his ass jammed halfway out the window.
“Go. Go. Go!” he yells, gesturing down the access road.
I’m about to ask Who? again but then I hear it, the unmistakable roar of ATVs in the night. Not just one either. I twirl the seat around, lock it in, and bounce down the dirt road.
Three sets of lights bounce around wildly, the beams painfully bright in my eyes. Only when I see how fast they’re coming do I turn on the forgotten twenty-inch light bar stretched along the top of the cab. How is it that I’d been working all this time in the dark and hadn’t noticed?
With the light bar on, they see me. One ATV blasts on a custom horn that sounds like a fake siren. “I’ll deal with this,” Ziggy says.
“You?”
“I’m the Gamma. It’s my responsibility,” he says and he throws himself against the door. Something pops, metal clangs against metal, and his body falls to the ground, the door swinging drunkenly on its one remaining hinge.
“Turn around!” Ziggy shouts, waving his arms over his head while jogging toward the lights. “There are no humans allowed.”
Ah, shit, Ziggy. I kill the engine.
“What do you mean ‘humans’?” says a man in a red-and-black pleather jacket and a helmet with an ogre’s face that says Gremlin.
I reach for the beef stick and jump down.
“I mean no other humans.” I can almost hear a stack of mimeographed printouts from some ancient human behaviors class blowing off the desk of Ziggy’s brain.
“What my brother is trying to convey in his own inimitable way”—I start to peel the greasy plastic wrap from the shriveled brown rod—“is get the fuck off our property.”
“This is your property?”
I take a bite from the stick, chewing slowly. I’ve eaten these before. Have they always tasted like aluminum? “I represent the owner.”
“The owner’s dead,” says Gremlin, taking off his helmet. He pushes his hand through thinning blond hair stuck to his scalp.
“And Canadian,” says a younger, watery-eyed version of Gremlin, as though being Canadian made August even less of a threat than death.
The third man takes off his helmet with red devil horns painted along the sides. He’s about Gremlin’s age but stockier. His face is a mask of broken blood vessels and there’s a bruise across his cheekbone. All signs of the kind of man who indulges in macho posturing at bars in the minutes before last