Protect All Monsters by Alan Spencer

practice on the target range every night? I can hit a target from fifty yards out.”
    Harold insisted, “I’m not going to shoot you.”
    “But you’ve heard of how it goes during these jobs. The manager picks one of us to entrap the other in the holding area, and they shoot the person and leave them to be devoured. I’m scared, is all. I’m practical. Bill Richards got it last week. Shelly Anderson the previous week. And Shelly was my best friend. I could trust her. She was afraid somebody would shoot her in the legs and leave her for the wolves, and they did.”
    “The setup goes both ways, Dawn.” He was growing tired of reassuring his partner she was safe. “I’m in as much danger as you are. You’re being disrespectful. And ridiculous.”
    “Am I?”
    They reached the end of the blank corridor. That’s where Harold opened a steel door. Inside, a kitchen-size room met them, the white paint chipping because of the climate, the area itself eighty degrees with 70 percent humidity. They placed their boxes into a wire basket similar to a mail slot. They shoved it forward, and the items dropped into the arena behind the wall. Moments later, the rage and howl and guttural boiling of beasts battled to claim the items. They were merely toys. Plastic blocks with human heads staked in the middle. Sealed metal tubes stuffed with deer hearts, pig entrails, vulture feet, cow tongues, hooves, dehydrated human flesh and other organs. The contraption was set on a timer. Sometimes the container would hold for fifteen minutes, and other times for many hours. Other items thrown in were rubber balls with frozen eyes stuck in their cores. The wolves also loved rubber balls, rope toys, dehydrated pig ears and pizzles.
    Dawn sensed Harold shift, reaching for his belt. He was too slow, and she was quick. Unlucky bastard. She unholstered her Dolson .28 pistol and fired three times. She caught Harold twice in the stomach. He bled profusely, the smell of sulfur and warm blood tainting the air. He slid down the wall, his mouth gaping open and closed like a suffocating fish. His eyes were unblinking and trained on her, his executioner, and he laughed hysterically, coughing up blood.
    “What’s so fucking funny?”
    He was smiling with heavy blood coloring his lips. “This is the way I wanted to go. It worked out exactly the way they said it would.”
    “You smug bastard. What are you saying? What’s working out? Speak up!”
    “I learned I’m in the fourth stage of pancreatic cancer. Too many Scotch and sodas.”
    She backed up against the wall to firmly root herself in place, or else she’d fall over in anxiety. “Then you were expecting me to shoot you.”
    “I could either die by the wolves, they said, or I could let you kill me, and…and you could die by the wolves instead.”
    The door, the only safe way out of the room, clicked. Locked by itself. Dawn frantically tried to open it.
    The door into the wolf chamber ticked, on a timer.
    Soon it would open.
    Harold glanced up at her one more time. “You have two minutes before the door into the arena opens and they come to eat you.”
    She trained the Dolson to her temple. “Fuck all of you!”
    And she pulled the trigger.

Chapter Twelve
    The knocking drew her from a deep sleep. “Wake up, Ruanova.” She’d achieved good rest because her body was exhausted. Deke’s death, the harrowing interview with Mr. Quinn, and then the long boat ride out to the PAM Complex would have left anybody heavy in the eyes. But she was sluggish rising up from the slumber. She struggled to change into new clothes expediently. She only had half an hour to prepare.
    This is just like normal life. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
    She wore a bra—the equivalent of a sports bra, but the fabric had been reused and washed and was itchy—a white button-up shirt and black khaki pants. She clipped on the holster and immediately felt like a gunslinger during a showdown.
    She