SHANNA AND THE PERIL OF THE MURDEROUS WOLVES

By Meriades Rai

“He’s not dead.”

Advanced extraterrestrial technology had, for thousands upon thousands of years, maintained the perfectly balanced ecological climate of the hidden tropical jungle known as the Savage Land. This included making provision for the illusory mechanics of the traditional daily cycle of sunrise and sunset, and it was the latter that Shanna the She-Devil now observed with such a detached sense of sorrow that she barely even noticed the glorious colors that stained the skies, nor the steady encroach of darkness as those colors faded from gold to scarlet to indigo. To an outsider the distant panorama of volcanic mountain ranges, almost black against the twilight, and the accompanying swirl of pterosaurs and other avian reptiles above the jungle canopy would have been a marvel; to Shanna it was all just so much ash, the light of this beautiful, secret world she’d once loved having burned out long ago.

Three hundred and eleven days ago, my husband died in my arms… and in that moment my own heart stopped beating.

That was what she’d said. But what if she was wrong? What if, somehow, somehow…

He’s not dead. The words of a stranger, one Madeleine Presley, a prim, well-spoken doctor from London alleged to have traveled half the world simply to deliver a message that couldn’t have been spoken from a ghost who couldn’t have existed. Her husband. Her beloved. It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t possible. And yet, that message, that message! A cryptic conundrum to anyone else, but to her—

“Damn you, woman,” Shanna snarled. “Curse you to hell and back again. I should‘ve let those men from the plane fill your manicured, upper crust little backside with bullets…”

She meant it. An animal lover, the She-Devil had never placed much worth on human life, even before her husband had lost his. But it was too late now. She’d rescued the doctor and crippled her attackers, stringing them up and leaving them for the ever-hungry raptors and their ilk to track them by the intoxicating scent of their blood and devour them alive. Now Doctor Presley was a reluctant guest at Shanna’s jungle home whilst Shanna herself was undertaking a personal quest—one that had brought her up into the mountains in search of… advice.

“Or maybe I’ll get lucky,” she said glumly, glancing out into the hazy distance once more. “Maybe my poise will desert me in the dark and I’ll pitch over the edge of the trailside and—”

Wait.

Shanna’s nose twitched and she turned, suddenly, her gorgeous amber eyes now alert. She scowled, lips parting as if to taste the air. To breathe in the odor of… what? Something familiar…

Three-quarters of the way up a mountain trail that cut into the heart of a volcanic ridge of Basalt and pyroclastic rock, her muscles aching from having tackled such a steep ascent with ill-advised haste and her senses clouded by the shock of recent revelations, Shanna looked down at the jungle valley that now stretched below her and cursed herself for becoming so distracted.

She knew what that scent was now. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to believe it, but there it was.

Dire wolves. And they were almost on top of her.

Surly, Shanna glanced up along the final stretch of trail, squinting into the gathering gloom at her destination some half a mile ahead. She felt a pang of guilt, but it was too late now. What was done was done.

“Sorry, old friend,” she murmured, “but you’re about to have some unexpected guests…”

In memory of Lord Kevin Plunder, Ka-Zar, Son of the Tiger. Forever yours, my lost love.

Doctor Madeleine Presley traced her fingertips over the crude hand-script that was carved into the flat slab of black rock before her, her demeanor weary but still inquisitive despite her recent experiences. “This is awful,” she murmured. “That poor woman, what she must have endured… and what she must be going through now, wondering if she’s been living a lie.”

Someone snorted. Madeleine turned and gazed across a clearing dominated by a collection of hot springs and surrounded on all sides not only by the natural growth of mangroves and ferns but also by a systematic boundary of hand-erected bamboo struts, walls and wooden decking. Shanna’s home. Tightly woven nets hung from the canopy, liberally greased with some herbal concoction that exuded a ripe, penetrating odor designed to deter insects—a necessity in the Savage Land, where mosquitoes were the least of a person’s worries. And there were other… animals too. Relaxing on his wide hindquarters in the far corner of the clearing, burrowing into what looked like an enormous golden melon, a beast-man with a distinctly black-and-white striped hide—and an elongated, buck-toothed maw presently smeared with squishy fruit innards—studied the human stranger with obvious fascination.

“He’s not dead,” Madeleine stated resolutely, not for the first time in the past ten hours she’d been present in the Savage Land. Martyllr’kaedr the equ’quagga—Marty for short—snorted again, spraying pips in the process.

“He dead,” he said, disagreeing. “I see body.”

“Almost a year ago, yes? But I’m telling you, I saw him four nights past in London, and—”

She sighed and threw up her hands. “Oh, what’s the use? You don’t believe me, she doesn’t believe me… but consider this. That stone over there, it’s just a marker. A memorial. He’s not buried there, is he? Shanna said she hurled his body over a cliff, for goodness’ sake…”

“It big cliff. Long drop. Even if not dead at top, he dead at bottom.”

Marty buried his snout in his fruit. Madeleine regarded him crossly for a minute or two but then her academic curiosity got the better of her. “You speak good English,” she said. “And you haven’t taken your eyes off me since we met. I bet you’ve got some questions for me. I know I’ve got some for you. So, what do you say? I ask you, you ask me, fair trade?”

Marty flicked his ears and palmed his melon nervously. His tail swished. Madeleine smiled in satisfaction.

“I’ll start,” she said. “How long have you known Shanna?”

Marty cocked his head. He hesitated a moment more, but then seemed to make up his mind. “Shanna save I from velociraptors down in low plains when I young. Raptors hunt quagga. I lose family. All. I almost dead. But Shanna, she violent. And lovely-lovely. But violent most. Kick raptor faces until go crack. Then kick some more. Good noise. For my family, good noise. I stick close since. Feel safe. Shanna friend. I help hunt. Try make her forget she sad.” The quagga shrugged. “But easier hunt tyrannosaur than make lovely woman happy again,” he said, quietly.

Madeleine’s gaze softened. “You have feelings for her, don’t you? You’re not just genetically developed in physical terms or in your ability to process language and cogitate, there’s emotional intelligence there too. You—”

“That two questions,” Marty snapped, his ears flattening angrily. “And I not it or thing. I quagga. Only different to you is I striped. So, I turn now, yes?”

“Yes. Sorry. Okay.”

Marty sniffed. “You name Presley?” he asked, eventually.

“Yes.”

Marty suddenly looked excited. “So, you family of Elvis…?”

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, an otherdimensional race known as the Nuwali constructed the Savage Land in a sheltered plateau at the heart of the Antarctic continent, utilizing the incredible and inexhaustible heat of a ring of volcanoes to power their magnificent array of underground machines. These machines terraformed the enclosed area into a tropical jungle paradise, maintaining the interior ecology of what was thereafter designated a nature reserve for the flora and fauna of the periods in Earth’s history that would later come to be known as the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.

Whether the Nuwali—or, more precisely, the never-revealed race that had contracted this basic, ant-like worker class for their project—had anticipated the devastating extinction event that would exterminate the majority of the species catered for by the Savage Land was a conjectural theory. Perhaps, at the time, they’d predicted the eventuality of an asteroid strike at some point in Earth’s near future in geological terms through advanced cosmic mathematics the human brain cannot comprehend, but whatever the level of their prescience their actions had resulted in the survival—and continued evolution—of hundreds of thousands of organisms that otherwise would have perished.

If there was a God of any form, Shanna believed, then the Savage Land was His work, via the Nuwali. The desecrations of the natural order had occurred later—and, of course, it had been man who made those transgressions.

Long after the Nuwali had abandoned their project, allowing the Savage Land to exist in its own evolutionary bubble, man had happened upon this hidden world in the form of explorers from the empire of Atlantis, in a time before their own great nation was sundered by a violent environmental catastrophe that consigned their cities to the bottom of the ocean. Atlantean scientists gloried in the wonders of a realm they called Pangea, and almost instantly set about corrupting it, as per the human fashion. They implemented a program of genetic experiments upon the denizens of the Savage Land, splicing human hosts with the DNA of other creatures, and in doing so created numerous hybrid races—Godless races—that went on to dominate much of the paradise that had previously existed just fine without them.

The equ’quagga—the zebra-people—were one such tribe borne from these dark ages, but there were many others: the lizard-like saithaahd, the avian ad’aeraie, the amphibious meirynei, and dozens more. And then there were the drachlu’pa.

The dire wolves.

The drach clans were few and far between, thankfully, and Shanna had personally only encountered them twice in the past decade of her residence in the Savage Land. But twice was enough. On both occasions she’d almost died. Now, as she scurried along the perilous mountain trail to a cave that rose like a screaming mouth at its summit, and as the darkness of night fell all about her, she knew that a third confrontation was imminent, and unavoidable. The scent of the wolves was thick in the twilight, the stench of blood and fur and spoor, and she could hear the heavy skrak-a-skrak-a-skrak of their hooked claws skittering over the stony scree in her wake. It was a pack, a half-dozen strong. They all but had the taste of her.

And they were faster than her. Shanna realized this with a sinking thrill of horror as she hurtled around a jutting rock at full pelt and became aware of a dark presence above her, just a split second before a mass of black and silver pelt stretched over powerful slabs of muscle slithered down from a hidden overhang, all cadaverous belly and blood red eyes and a distended snout crammed with a full set of knife-blade fangs.

There was barely any time to react. The drach was upon her, frighteningly quick, its jaw already stretching to snap about her throat with a ring like steel on steel, its claws clutching wickedly at the exposed flesh of her shoulders. It would kill her in a heartbeat.

Fortunate, then, that Shanna was a woman of exquisitely honed balance and shrewdness of mind, for with a weapon at hand that heartbeat was all that was needed.

A dire wolf’s head, haunches and back were protected by a muscular hide so thick it was almost armor-plated, and its bones were harder still; there was one weak area, however, in its softer underside, and with her overconfident enemy dropping from above Shanna was gifted with a perfect opportunity to stab upwards with her blade and puncture the creature’s heart beyond its ribcage. The drach’s body bucked, but its jaw still sought to close on instinct. Anticipating this, Shanna shifted her weight and pulled her blade free with a grunt of pure brute strength, ripping the wolf’s chest apart and most of its throat into the bargain, forcing its bite away from her own neck.

The night was slick with blood and flesh and Shanna recoiled, not from disgust but through an intuitive need to prevent herself from behind momentarily blinded. She hurled the quivering carcass of her kill to one side and whirled to face the next attack that, as expected, was already upon her.

A second dire wolf bit down and its foremost fangs sank into succulent flesh—but just barely, certainly not the full mouthful it was aiming for. Shanna glanced down at her left leg, and at the savage beast attempting to clamp onto her at mid-thigh with a second bite. She scowled.

“Why grandma, what big teeth you have,” she snarled, reaching down and grabbing the drach at the bridge of its snout. She placed her thumb over one of its red eyes and her first two fingers over the other, then drove her hand down, pushing the wolf’s eyeballs back into its brain. She then gripped hard and flexed her wrist, twisting the beast’s skull at a ninety-degree swivel on its neck until some part of its dislocated with a wet crack. The drach’s clutch on her thigh loosened. Shanna pulled clear and then thrust her knee back into the blinded wolf’s gut, once and then again, and then again, causing its ribs to splinter like shattered china inside a cloth bag.

The broken wolf fell, screaming. Shanna kicked it aside and then set herself in the middle of the path, spine straight, spread wide at the hips and shoulders, staring back down the mountain trail at four pairs of red eyes burning bright in the gathering shadows.

She’d been right. An even half-dozen. Just four left now.

“That makes it a bit fairer, don’t you think?” she asked, wetting back her hair with her enemies’ blood and taking a deep breath.

“Now then. Let’s finish this, you lousy mongrels…”

Forty years as a bush shark had taught the man named Drewitt everything he needed to know about survival. A bloke didn’t endure that long in the Outback without being as tough as a ten-inch iron spike; he also wasn’t the kind who’d be shy about using that self-same tool to split open some poor sap’s skull if there was money in it. Drewitt had piloted Madeleine Presley out to the Savage Land and had been fully prepared to fleece her for all the cash in her bank account before putting a bullet in her brain and leaving her corpse for the raptors to chew on.

The irony of his present situation therefore didn’t escape him.

The jungle woman had crippled Drewitt and his two accomplices and then strung them up with vines from the nearest cypress and abandoned them to their fate—devoured alive by carnivorous dinosaurs or gigantic bugs or whatever happened along, certainly nothing that would include a long, lingering death. Considering this, perhaps the leopardskin-clad witch had thought she was being merciful. Drewitt, predictably, didn’t feel the least beholden. All he knew was anger, the desire to get even. To visit suffering upon her more than equal to his own.

That, ultimately, was where a man’s survival instinct kicked in. The need for retribution. And that was what drove Drewitt when a pair of olive-skinned raptors finally arrived with the deepening of dusk, a good four or five hours after the She-Devil had left her three victims dangling by the ankles some six feet above the ground. Aroused to distraction by the scent of fresh blood, coldly evaluating their prey’s level of helplessness and believing it to be absolute, the two raptors advanced swiftly, long necks darting and outstretched claws ripping and wide jaws snapping. Drewitt’s colleagues, a tattooed white man and a slender aborigine, barely possessed the strength to scream as they were torn savagely from the tree, leaving portions of limb behind in both cases. Drewitt didn’t scream either—but that was because he was focusing on his one and only chance of escape.

Aa a raptor twisted and lunged at him in one movement, Drewitt rolled, shielding his face but also setting his shoulders. The raptor tore at him but also pushed him, sending the heavy-set man swinging on his vine—the vine that Drewitt had been loosening with steady, determined leg movements since well before the sun had begun to set. That vine now snapped as Drewitt wriggled and jack-knifed, causing him to fly sideways on the outward curve of his swing and vanish into the nearby undergrowth with a bodily crunch.

The raptors shrieked, turning together, and instantly the began moving in the direction of their lost meat. If Drewitt had run they’d have outpaced him and torn him to shreds inside ten seconds—but Drewitt wasn’t running. He’d noted earlier that the jungle woman, displaying a haughty disdain of guns, hadn’t been inclined to confiscate her enemy’s firearms, instead discarding them in the bushes. Drewitt arose now with his rifle set, bearing its weight on his good arm, his other hand having been ruptured to the wrist by one of the She-Devil’s knives.

The raptors hesitated, confused not by the gun but by the unexpected defiance their prey was showing. Drewitt grinned. He’d lost his cud of tobacco long before but still his jaw chewed out of habit.

“Get some, ladies,” he said.

And then he shot both raptors down without flinching, the various aches and pains of his body having bled numb.

That was how the man named Drewitt survived.

And when he staggered off into the jungle, his understandably addled mind concentrated on one thing and one thing only, he was still grinning and crooning some sweet, comforting billabong song under his breath.

He couldn’t wait to see the surprise on that harridan’s face when he confronted her beneath the pearly moon and detonated her pretty little red-haired skull like a coconut on a carnival shy…

The drachlu’pa were pack animals to the blood, the worst kind of predator. Once the decision was made to engage in conflict, each individual was prepared to die for the benefit of its family; honor and dignity were hardwired into the dire wolves’ genetic code—literally, considering their evolution as products of Atlantean experimentation—and there was also the knowledge that any member of the group that lost heart and fled from battle would forever be marked as a pariah among their kind. For a drach, the loneliness of exile was a fate far worse than death.

And so, the four of them lunged forward as one to meet Shanna The She-Devil’s murderous intent, just as she knew they must. Deep in her soul she understood the wolves—understood all animals—more keenly than any other denizen of the Savage Land, even her late husband. That was why she engaged the beasts not with relish but with sorrow. The drachs were only hungry, after all.

But she had no intention of letting them feast upon her.

In her left hand Shanna wielded a normal hunting knife with a twelve-inch blade of serrated bone, but in her right she cradled the weapon that had earlier accounted for her first attacker. It was a double-bladed dagger, each sharpened greenish-black stalk extending from a central grip and cut from the armor-plated horn-crest of an avaceratops, a lightweight yet remarkably durable material that fashioned the perfect knife for close combat. As one dire wolf lurched towards Shanna at chest-height from her right side just as another dived for her legs from her other flank she didn’t have to compensate for the need of any elaborate slashing motion—she simply angled her right wrist and locked her arm and thereafter merely had to cut from side to side to slice across the drach’s momentarily exposed throat, missing with the first blade but automatically striking home with the other. This conservation of effort also allowed her to roll with the lower attack, shifting her weight into her hips as the wolf struck and curling her body over its shoulders.

The dire wolf skidded, bewildered, but then it screamed as Shanna’s other knife plunged into the crease of haunch and rib. The blade barely penetrated its thick hide in honesty, but the sudden pain was enough to send it skittering, its head bending backwards and its maw snapping. Anticipating this, Shanna shoved her other dagger towards the beast’s throat and pulled at the point of contact, again with very little extra effort required, carving away a goodly portion of the drach’s snout and upper jaw.

The dire wolf howled and thrashed, dark blood spurting from its ruined face. Shanna leaned in and slit its throat, like its fellow. Two more down, four in total. That left two.

Two too many. In reality, she’d been lucky to survive this long.

Shanna had left herself open and she knew it. She rolled instinctively, hoping to regain enough balance to push the next inevitable attack aside and parry, but jaws too swift to counter now closed hard and sharp about her upper left arm and she screamed as the cooling night air misted with her own blood. She fell to her knees, the weight of the dire wolf upon her. She tried to pull her double-bladed weapon up but, in this instance, there wasn’t even the barest angle.

It was over.

Jaws snapped shut, crunching through bone…

…but not Shanna’s bone.

The drach that had bitten her fell away, inexplicably, its lithe body all but severed in half at the midriff. It had been attacked on its blind side. The last dire wolf hesitated, whirling left and right in the dark, one red eye on Shanna and the other seeking its second, unknown assailant.

There came a growl from the shadows. Two more eyes loomed—golden eyes, like huge coins in the black.

The dire wolf paused a moment more. Evaluating. To abandon the pack was wrong… but there no longer was a pack. Its five fellows were dead, and only it remained. Those golden eyes were burning. Another second and they’d catch fire. The wolf made its choice.

With a mournful whine, the last of the drachul’pa turned tail and ran, almost slithering back along the mountain trail its belly was slung so low. In its wake, Shanna The She-Devil rolled onto her back, gasping, her hair dark with blood and sweat, her upper body soaked black with the wound she’d received to her left arm, just below the shoulder.

A face loomed above her. So familiar, with its proudly regal maw and its magisterially curved tusks, and those deep, beautiful golden eyes with their disarming intelligence. An old friend. The sabertooth.

“Hello, Zabu,” Shanna said, with a weak smile. “I was just on my way to see you. There’s been a… development.”

But that was all she said, because then her eyes rolled into the back of her skull and her head lolled, and thereafter there was only darkness.

NEXT: Be here next month to learn the answer to a very important question—exactly how is Ka-Zar supposed to have died? Also, where’s Zabu been for the past ten months? And who is Ezlenza, the Red Priestess…?