We started just as we had many times before. I was bait. Just a hurt little girl, smeared with rabbit blood and leaning up against a burned out car, crying and apparently alone. The travelers we had been stalking were not far down the road, and before long, they appeared out of the heat haze, walking steadily down the road bearing packs loaded with who-knew-what. It looked like they were a small family. Hah. Easy pickings. Couples always fell for the “lost little lamb” act. The only rubes who could give them a run for their money were “lone-wolf” guys- especially since I was thirteen, and I was starting to look less like a little girl every day. I snickered to myself, then quickly suppressed it and let out another loud, melodramatic sob. Somewhere off nearby, I could practically hear Boone rolling his single eye at my theatrics, but I ignored him. It really was funny, that “lone-wolf” thing. A lone-wolf wasn’t badass. A lone-wolf was a shitty wolf. A wolf without a pack was a dead wolf. Fuckin’ morons.

The travelers drew closer, and I saw that I was right. Two men, probably brothers, one woman, a kid in the middle, maybe my age. Everyone looked related, with the same tawny skin and mouse-brown hair. The kid hadn’t gotten his size yet, and he still looked a little like a puppy with his oversized feet and hands and his scrawny frame. But his eyes were something else. They were beautiful, colored a blue so pale that they seemed almost white when the light hit them. They seemed fairly well-fed and fairly sure of themselves, and every one of them was armed with higher-end hardware, all except the boy. Not the best sign, but we could take them. All I had to do was sell the part.

I shook with feeble sobs as they approached, clutching at my belly, where I had stained my ragged shirt with most of the rabbit's blood. I reached out a trembling, bloody hand and cried, managing somehow to squeeze the word "help" out between my wracking sobs. The two men in the lead immediately took an interest, and they raised their guns reflexively, but immediately lowered them when they saw me. Excellent. They were gonna be easy marks. I wondered how they had gotten so well armed and supplied if they were so damn gullible. Most people at least hesitated to approach, but one of the guys was already walking towards me, fishing what looked like bandages out of a pocket. I opened my mouth to give the signal- the three words that would end these four lives. It wasn’t really their fault, but they were deer, and Boone, Pat and I? We were wolves.

"Help me, please," I said- or at least I tried to say that. Instead, my words died on my lips as the boy looked right at me with those bright, piercing eyes, and said, almost conversationally, "Trap." And everything fell apart.

Pat and Boone attacked, bursting out of their hiding places in the grass by the sides of the road. We had had some luck, and we had guns of our own- though they weren't nearly as nice as the traveler's armaments. Gunfire erupted in all directions. Boone and Pat had the advantage of the flank, and relative surprise, but these men- these men were playing in a different league than my "subjects." We were wolves. But they weren't deer. They were moose.

The fight was brief and intense. Everyone but the boy and I got shot, but the adult travelers didn’t die when they were hit. They fell, they bled, but they seemed more pained and angry than they were mortally wounded. The boy had prudently dropped flat to the pavement, and now he was climbing to his feet, slowly, grinning a little. Of course he was pleased with himself, the little shithead. He had just saved the day by giving his people an extra second to react. The woman was smiling, and she nodded over at the kid. “Good eye, Pim. You just saved all our lives.”

There was no more gunfire, and I knew what that meant for Pat and Boone. But this pack wasn’t done. Oh, I was hurt, I was mad- but I wasn’t a lone-wolf. Oh no. These smug people were tough, and they had stopped the ambush, surviving the bullets that should have put them down because the armor I now saw peeking out from beneath the collars of their shirts. But they had made the same mistake that those raiders had made so long ago, and the same one that every mark before this had made in the last year. They thought I was a little, lost girl. They thought I was just the bait, just some little lost lamb being used by the wolves. They probably thought I was confused. They had taken the bait, even if everything else had gone so horribly wrong. But I wasn’t a lost lamb. Oh no. I was a tigress.

I couldn’t hear a thing. Just ringing. Just that damned dial tone. I drew it out from beneath the car and sighted, just as Boone had shown me. The adults hadn’t been paying attention to me, distracted by checking their wounds. They had only just started to get to their feet. It was in my hands. Comfortable. Familiar. My fellow wolves had always saved the best stuff for me, even this beautiful gauss. Breathe out. Squeeze. Crack. A splash of red. Again. Crack. Again. Crack. And then it was just me, staring across corpses at those wide, pale, terrified eyes.

We just sat there on the road for a while, just staring at each other. I cleared my throat awkwardly in the silence. “Pim, is it?”

The boy’s mouth was hanging open, his eyes just as wide. It didn’t look like he was breathing. “You…” he croaked hoarsely. “You killed them. You killed them!” His voice broke and spiraled up into a brief falsetto; taking the intensity out of the accusation and making me chuckle, despite myself. It wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny. My friends were dead. The marks were dead. It was just me and this kid on a road streaked in blood and smelling of fresh death. The flies had already started to gather.

Pim regained control of his voice. “You’re a fucking monster.” I could not have told you what name he actually said. But I knew that it was my old name. That long-lost name, gone to oblivion, pushed down into the scar tissue of trauma along with that face- the one that had belonged to that wise, leathery-faced old man. But the boy wasn’t done. His eyes shone with a vicious light, a hard, ice-crystal hate freezing over those eyes as he spat the words that he knew would cut me the deepest. “Do you think your daddy is proud of his little fucking monster?”

I reeled back as if he had just punched me in the face. I didn’t know how he had done all of that, how he had known where the cracks in my wall had been, but the strike had been surgical in its precision. I don’t remember raising the gun. I don’t remember pulling the trigger. I dropped the gun and lay down on the bloody concrete, staring up at the shattered sky. “Do you think your daddy is proud of his little fucking monster?” I could no longer see that face in my mind, the leathery-faced, wise, smiling face of a man long gone. He had left me. I disgusted him. I was a monster. I closed my eyes and waited to die. It would happen eventually.