El Lobo Blanco

From the journals of alejandro Diego Ometecuhtli


August 12, 1827. I have suffered from a sense of dread for weeks now. Long ago this affliction tormented me, haunted me, and the aftermath of my foreboding was too horrible to relate, even in a private journal such as this. Dreams have come to me again, dark visions of grotesque shadows, faintly outlined by somber, unnatural light, dim and ill-perceived. I struggle to move but cannot. I try to make the vision clear but it dances just out of the reach of clarity, taunting me, mocking the light I crave. A Power is coming. I sense it. I fear it. But I cannot name it. It’s features are forever in motion, blurred at the edges as if out of pace with time, it’s umbra deep in another sphere, one of sinister origins and devilish ambitions. It is not the same as before—this I know. It is ancient, forgotten, lost in the dust and stone of ages, older even than my kind, older than man or even the primeval hominids who roamed the earth before the floods. It has no history and no heart. It is not spirit but is incarnate.
I have denied it, hoping it would vanish as only a dream, but now, even waking I sense it, cringe from it and find myself searching for places to hide, to run to ground and pull the earth, the sweet, loving earth, over me as a blanket. But I cannot. I know this. I am not a coward but I am so very tired.
Has it a purpose? What does it seek? Annihilation? Immolation at the hands of the Source? Or does it seek these things for humankind—for me and those like me? I am morose these days—I know it but am unable to shake the feelings of dread. Now I know that I must wait and let it reveal itself. Only then can it be approached. Only then can it be challenged, if challenge is even possible.
The villagers do not feel it. They go about their daily chores with purpose and light hearts. I cannot tell them. For a generation I have kept myself apart and now they are not comfortable with me around. Eventually I will have to approach them and reveal all but until then I will listen and watch, feed and continue my work. Only the virgin, Maria, still comes to my lair with offerings. She brings the gifts the others are now too timid to present. She seems to have no fear. Often I see her resting on the ledge, her back to the stone, reading or weaving baskets. But even when she knows I am there, deeper in the caverns, she does not approach me or violate my privacy. She bides her time and then returns down the mountain to the village with no stories, no lies or tales of horror or of beauty. At night I hear them talk in their beds and in the sweet darkness of their verandas, honeysuckle and sage making the air a perfume, and I know she has not mislead them. They whisper, wondering if I am still here, or if some disaster has befallen me but Maria bids them have faith. She tells them she knows I am with them. She tells them change is coming with the storms of Autumn, that they should make ready and be watchful. She is their new Chamán but they will not know for another brace of years. Not until the children being born are running along the canyon trails and learning the joy of their lives in the village and of their destinies. Thus it has ever been.
So many times malevolent forces have called me forth and each time I have answered. I will do so again, but one day I will be bested and I fear my ignorant and sweet-tasting brothers will fall to one manifestation or another. What then? What of my race and their collected dreams and destinies—the unique thing that they are?
I will sleep now. The Moon of the Open Eye is coming and I must rest. Maria will bring the offerings and I will feed and they will know that I am still among them, guarding them, watching over them as if a flock of helpless sheep. But I love them! I have always loved them! Soon I will be called upon to find a way to love them all while they revile me in return. I pray that I am up to that thankless task.

October 17, 2008 Montana State Prison


“The volunteers are in the holding cell doctor.” Martia Bennett shuddered as she always did when waiting for her employer to speak. His voice was cruel—she knew the idea was silly but could not explain it better than that. It lacked humanity, compassion. It sidled out like a skulking apparition rather than a normal person’s voice. It was cold and thin and petulant. He had never treated her with anything but genteel grace and still she cringed. If she could have, she would have quit the job and found another but the bills, the ranch, her husbands care—it all cost and there was no one else.
“Thank you Martia. When the guards are finished with the restraints have them brought into the exam room one at a time and alphabetically please.”
“Yes sir.” It was awful. Two years of that insufferable voice and his pretentious airs. If Rance were well he’d have seen to Doctor Maliphant right enough. Her Rance didn’t take to rude men. And he didn’t take to anyone making her unhappy or nervous. Why, he’d take on hell itself for her. She smiled to herself as the image took hold of her. Yessir, hell itself.
The doctor threw on his crisp lab coat and moved like an ill wind through the outer door and into the suite of rooms set aside for his work. Martia remembered when he first arrived, a new defense grant in his pocket and acting as if the warden were merely his gofer. The army must really want this rabies vaccine. Something had to be done about the new bio-weapons—one of which was Synth-Rabies—coming out of the Middle East. She knew that and approved of the research, but having to work with this . . . person . . . was beginning to feel like too much, even for the sake of her country. One injection, before or after being infected, that’s what Maliphant claimed. She was yet to see any results though. Mostly he tinkered around with his equipment, giving her orders in that imperious, whiny voice.
But now he was ready to start human trials. She had the signatures of twenty volunteers, all lifers, all living on Death Row. If the new vaccine worked they might have their sentences commuted. She was one of many who did not approve but the Doctor had powerful friends in Washington and industry. The prisoners were ugly men, inside and out. She had a gift for those kinds of things—seeing into the heart of someone—and only one person in the whole facility was darker than the twenty volunteers—Doctor Maliphant himself. Of course the warden loved him. Money poured in. Prestige followed on its coattails and Warden Lassiter was basking in his new celebrity. He’d been on Twenty-Twenty and The Factor. He’d been to New York to receive an award for his forward-looking policies and innovative programs—all because of Doctor Maliphant. But she knew better. Nothing but trouble would come of this experiment. And the only person she could talk to who would listen was Rance . . . dear, broken Rance in his chair and blanket, with one half of his body lost to him. And to her.
The first of the inmates was escorted into her little office, sullen, one skinny, one larger, with food stains on his shirt, and she motioned the two of them through the same door the doctor had whisked through moments ago. It was her responsibility to monitor each man’s vitals while Maliphant administered the three doses of three new, powerful, synthetic drugs. Two days ago they had been inoculated with a live rabies virus. They had been told that if his concoction didn’t work they would have to go through the two-week cycle of shots like anyone else but that they wouldn’t be in any danger. If it did work, they would then be infected with Synth-Rabies and go through the whole process again.
The first one was large, typically muscled and tattooed, his head freshly shaved, the ubiquitous tear-drop dark against his left eye. He wore a Fu Manchu moustache and was covered with scars. He knew he was never getting out—why not have some fun? The man sat on the exam table and leaned back until his head was resting on the little pillow. They had all been coached. Martia busied herself with the routine of a check-up, the last of several, and waited for Maliphant to finish his preparations. Then she attached the restraints to his arms and legs. The inmate allowed her to buckle him down, his eyes following her, each movement. A guard stood to one side, with another out in the office—just in case, but so far there had been no incidents.
“Everything seems normal Doctor,” she told him. “No changes, no surprises. He has a slight temperature and his heart rate is up as expected.”
“Thank you my dear.” He always called her ‘my dear’. Well she wasn’t his ‘dear’, and she never would be. Her body shivered again. The day could not be over soon enough.
Doctor Maliphant turned and came over to the exam table, holding a stainless steel tray with three large syringes. Martia began looking for a vein in the man’s arm. She had to insert an IV and administer a medium dose of Versaid and Fentynal. The experimental procedure was painful and government protocol required that they reduce pain and discomfort to whatever extent was reasonably possible.
“Comfortable?” the doctor smiled a thin line, lipless and banal, at the inmate.
“Sure. Whatever.”
“Nurse Bennett is going to give you something to relax you and dull the pain. As you recall from the orientation, this is not without its discomforts.” The man barely responded. These people were such dweebs. He’d like to see ‘em join a gang—then they could talk about ‘discomfort’. They’d never get passed the initiation. Martia pushed and the liquid vanished into his vein. It only took a moment before he began to feel—pretty good, really, and then the doc bent over him.
“First dose Mister Ortega.” He always called them Mister. The greenish fluid, thicker than water, flowed into his body. Almost instantly he began to feel his arm getting warm, then hot, but in his current condition he couldn’t build up any anxiety over it. Another minute and his whole body was tingling as if he was wrapped in a heating pad like his mom used to have but as big as a sleeping bag. No one spoke. The doc just watched the second hand on a wall clock.
“Number two.” He said after a few minutes and pushed again. The same thing happened, warm, then hot, then a strange tingling. After four minutes both drugs had had a chance to combine and suddenly a new sensation shot through Mister Ortega’s body. It felt as if he’d been given a good jolt of electricity. His back arched and his face contorted. Even through the potent combination of drugs it hurt like hell. It felt like four billion knives the size of ants or something were digging into each separate nerve ending. And it was getting worse. Ortega gritted his teeth. No way was he going to let them see him lose it.
“Number three Mister Ortega.” Push. Hot, hotter, and he was burning up from the inside out. He thrashed—he could see the fire in his minds eye as it raced through him. It was like something he’d seen on TV. He was being burnt to a crisp! From a distance he heard someone scream, a long, animal sound with no humanity in it at all and he passed out.
The Doctor took a stethoscope and listened to the inmates chest.
“That went well, don’t you think?” He asked and pressed a button on the wall. Two orderlies on loan from the Veterans hospital in town came in with a gurney, undid the restraints and hefted the limp figure onto their cart.
“Send in the next one please.” Maliphant said to their backs.
And so it went, all day long as the sun arced the sky, men coming in, tough, dangerous in ways normal people didn’t understand, lost to hope and reason and any sense of a future. Men who believed only in doing what they pleased. And each of them, when the third push found them, screamed their desire to die, pleaded with God or the devil or someone to end it, and then found relief in whatever world the unconscious mind reveals. Except two never passed out. One just kept screaming until Maliphant told Martia to give him another dose of sleepy juice and the other seemed to experience only a mild irritation. He described it as ‘about a million bees stinging me’ but seemed to not be affected much by the ordeal.
The borrowed orderlies wheeled each man down the silent hall, past two small wards of indolent inmates, the rubber wheels squeaking on the polished floor, and set them in two neat rows on either side of a large, empty room with old, ten-paned windows looking north toward the distant hills. Nurse Martia and her staff took up residence in the hall, down at the far end where a makeshift station had been set up amidst stacks of old journals and mattresses so soiled and infected that the prison was not allowed to dump them. Right there in the room—fifteen old mattresses which had cradled every condition and rampant infection, every disease and unpleasant usurpation the human body could experience. Men had died in them, festering, wallowing, crying like children for their mothers as the medical staff played cards or watched TV and waited for them to die. The prison had a long history of indifference. Maliphant told them it wouldn’t matter, the mattresses had been there so long they were inert by now. The inmates were criminal detritus—how would they know any different?
During the night the condemned men woke to a fevered stupor. One at a time, in no discernable order or perceived pattern. Martia and her nurses, all men, checked on them and found each with symptoms of influenza. Headaches, ‘flu-skin’; that sensitive sensation people often got which made any motion and every touch a burden, fever and cyclic nausea. But it wasn’t the flu. She had expected the symptoms. All the inmates had been briefed on what they could expect based on the primate trials. The ordeal lasted about forty-eight hours and one by one they improved until Maliphant was reasonably confident they could be released back to their miserable lives, back to crazed, incontinent, cellies who either never spoke or never shut up—and all of whom lied constantly. Most states didn’t put lifers together. Usually they at least got their own cell. But in Montana, a state with few people, they had a prison population problem and no one saw any reason to not double them up. If they killed each other so what? They were all sentenced to death anyway, either by lethal injection or one of many horrors that culled the elderly from the herd.
By the end of the week the ground was covered with a thin layer of premature snow and the twenty men were once again ensconced in the folds of their despondent lives.
The two orderlies stayed. Once a day they escorted the volunteers, one at a time, along with armed guards, to Nurse Martia and she gave them each a thorough check-up. Maliphant seemed distracted as those days were crossed off the calendar, as if her were waiting for something, expecting some kind of event only a man like him could welcome. He barely spoke to Martia and not at all to anyone else.
Two weeks went by. The snow melted, mild weather returned. Maliphant became agitated, stopped eating and paced incessantly. If she hadn’t known better she would have suspected him of taking Methamphetamines or some other kind of upper.
At the same time the men began to demand more food. This was not unusual but it seemed more strident than normal. Most of them had accounts at the commissary and they were buying up everything they could find, anything edible. It went on for three days and nights and then seemed to fade as quickly as it had erupted. She estimated they had gone from about two thousand calories a day to somewhere around eight thousand—or more—at lest the ones who could afford it.
Then, one evening when he should have been long gone to his home and mysterious wife, Maliphant walked into the infirmary and smiled at his nurse.
“There’s a full moon tonight Mrs. Bennett.” He announced. She looked at the wall behind him, the drab green, out of style forty years ago, the barred window and ancient hat stand. She kept a calendar there from 1957—Andrew Wyeth. She loved it despite the revelations in recent years of his affair. The current calendar said it was October 14th.
“I hadn’t noticed doctor,” she replied, hoping he was not leading up to some kind of celebration or ritual or worse.
“Things might get interesting tonight,” he confided, “please call me if anything untoward takes place. Whatever the time.” He smiled again and a vision of desolation swept through her.
“Like what doctor?” She didn’t like this posturing one bit. He was scaring her.
“Oh, I’m not expecting anything—not specific anyway—but if something does happen, I need to be informed immediately. Do you understand?”
She nodded, a little too quickly, cowed by his tone. “It would help if I knew what to look for,” she tried again, losing her resolve to stand up to him
“You’ll know it when you see it.” He turned and left, his heels softly padding down the empty hall in the poor light of too few bulbs of too low wattage.

* * *

It was late when she remembered what he’d said. The prison had been unusually quiet all evening. The guards had not been called out once and Death Row was like a mausoleum. Her infirmary was one of two—this small one for Death Row and another across the quad for the rest of the prison population, so she didn’t always know when something was happening.
She had taken the last reports of the orderlies an hour before and written up her nightly. This part of the shift was often pleasant. She was free to read or knit or watch television. Only an emergency would break that routine until her replacement arrived at six o’clock.
She enjoyed Tom Clancy books and was half-way through Rainbow Six when the alarms began. At first they were far away, well on the other side of the complex but almost immediately her own building was wailing and screeching—begging someone to find a problem and fix it.
One of the orderlies came in with a question on his face. “I haven’t heard anything”, she told him. “It just started to ring.” He frowned and looked back out the door, down the hall, trying to think what to do first.
“Should I go check on them?”
“We can do it here,” she reminded him and pointed to the bank of monitors along the back of her station. He rolled his eyes and stepped in, letting the door close behind him. The other orderly was down on the wing with the sergeant, playing cards.
Martia looked at the clock and noted the time on her log, wrote ‘alarms sounding’ and told the computer where to look first with a deft twitch of the mouse. It was ten fifty-three, P.M.
Through the brick and stone, the old pipes and concrete floors, they heard a muffled boom, then another and then another alarm, different. Clanking, yelling, all distant, as if they were listening to bad speakers broadcasting something happening in the recent past. Another boom, the sound of men shouting and then another sound—one to chill the blood and make the moon want to pull itself behind thick clouds and hide. It was an animal sound Martia thought . . . but not. She looked at the orderly, a large man, young and in good shape, and he was staring back at her.
“You ever heard that before?” He asked and she shook her head.
“Now that I have I wish I hadn’t.” She tried a smile but could feel it fade before it had time to mature. Martia was a ranchers daughter and wife. She’d lived in Montana all her life and she didn’t scare easily. She’d heard a lot of different sounds before, animals and humans at their best and worst, but nothing like this—it was . . . terrifying, visceral, as if affecting them on some level they hadn’t even know existed.
Ron, the orderly, reached over and turned the office lights off, leaving only the glow of the monitor. Martia silently pushed the button to it and waited while that light faded as well. In the dark they could see the quad, the yards and other buildings. The lights were all on, guards at their posts—nothing was obviously wrong. She could see no smoke or fire, no prisoners running free.
She stepped over to the radio on Maliphant’s desk and picked it up, depressed the pad and spoke into it.
“One, this is Ten. You there?” She waited a moment while Ron kept watching out the window.
“Ten, One here. Go ahead.” Each time one of them lifted off the pad there was a static click, like a brief and weak bolt of lightening had flashed.
“What’s going on? We can’t see anything.”
“Not sure Ten. We’re looking into it. All the boards are green but we can’t raise Eight.”
“At all?” Eight was the Sergeant’s station downstairs. In her building.
“Everything’s working—it’s not the equipment. Nobody’s answering.”
Martia liked the staff—especially the guards. She couldn’t understand where all the negative press came from. These guys were all professional and friendly and unfailingly courteous. And they were all experienced at handling emergencies—which were regular events at a prison. But Bill, the shift Lieutenant, sounded nervous.
“Should we go check it out?” She dreaded the answer.
“Absolutely not!” He put all the firmness he could into his answer. “Stay put. I’m inserting a Search team. We’ll let them figure it out okay?”
“No argument here,” she told him gratefully. Ron was looking at her as if she were crazy.
“Would you really go down there?” He asked in a way that made her think if she had, it would probably have been alone.
“I don’t know . . .” What else could she say?
The . . . sound . . . came again. This time closer and was followed by awful clanging, as if someone were throwing cell doors down the tier. She raised the radio again.
“Don’t you leave us Bill,” she told the Lieutenant. “And keep talking, please!”
“You got it Martia—not going anywhere.”
Silence settle over the yard again. Ron, still peering out the window, motioned her over, pointing. She looked and could see the Team advancing on the main door, their shields and armor reflecting sparks from the security lights around the grounds.
She looked up and past the facility and saw the moon, bright, pale and white as a bride’s dress, throwing it’s reflected light down on the hills beyond the prison. It seemed harsh to her, different, as if it were prophesying, or involved in it’s own mad vision. She could envision it as a huge pallid eye, a witness to all things nocturnal.
The team was gone, inside the building she assumed. Ron went back to the door and locked it then began to pull the old-fashioned shades down on the windows looking out on the hall.
They heard shots and men shouting and Ron let slip the chord he was pulling. The shade slapped up and made a flapping sound. He pulled it down again and hurried over to the window while more shots were fired, this time full-automatic.
The sound roared again but this time it came from several sources and then men screaming, the shouting gone, replaced by nearly inhuman, inarticulate pleas for life . . . or something, they couldn’t be sure.
Martia remembered she was supposed to call Maliphant if anything ‘untoward’ happened. She let a cough burst from her, half-laugh, half-frantic breath.
Quiet again. No guns, no men shouting or screaming, no monstrous wailing. Someone had turned the alarms off and she hadn’t even noticed.
The main doors burst—they could hear the hinges tear loose and glass flying—and both of them looked down, trying to keep their own profiles to a minimum.
A clutch of figures ran out into the moonlight, stooped, wrongly shaped and moving too fast for men, even though they were on two feet. The light was good but the distance long and Martia’s brain refused to accept the impulses her eyes were sending. Gunfire broke out again, this time the towers firing down into the quad. Now prisoners were yelling from their cells, screaming, banging whatever they could find against the walls and doors, demanding someone let them out, shouts of what’s going on? And lemme outa here! Ringing across the yard.
Bullets ripped the hard ground like gravel being thrown at crepe paper. The running figures didn’t slow. When they got to the first fence two of them stopped and tore it open with their bare hands, holding the pieces back while the others ran through. Bullets followed them. Martia could see them impact the running—things. One of them faltered, fell and rose again. A hail of rounds pounded into it while it staggered forward and then it fell again and stopped moving.
The others never looked back. They went through three more fences and then—it was a long way away and the light back there wasn’t as good—it looked as if they jumped over the stone wall that marked the prisons boundary. She raised her hand, started to point and mumble numbers.
“Seventeen,” Ron told her quietly, as if he were afraid something would hear.
She stopped, taking his word.
“Ten? One.” Her radio said.
Startled, she raised the box and spoke into it, her voice cracking.
“Ten. Go.”
“Stay put. Who’s with you?”
“Ron.”
“Okay. Don’t leave the office. Are either of you armed?” She looked at Ron, he shook his head.
“No.”
“Can you barricade the door?”
She looked around then her gaze fell on the windows covered by blinds.
“We have a whole bank of windows Bill.”
“Oh, right. Damn.” He barked.
“We’re coming but it will take a few minutes. Do what you can to stay safe.”
“From what?” She asked, not wanting to know.
Bill hesitated, she could sense it in the delay of the radio. “Wish I knew.” The radio hissed. “Hang tight,” it said and fell silent.