Laws of Nature -2

by Christopher Golden

  The girl gaped at him for a minute, then glowered as she turned and moved away from the bar.

  "Damn, she was cute," muttered a customer in an expensive suit. "I'd have just given her the drink."

  "She's a child," Bill remonstrated him.

  "But a cute one," the suit replied.

  Bill bristled, aching to slap the guy down, to hurt him, or at least to throw him out on his ass. The girl could not have been more than seventeen. It was monstrous for an adult to think about her in those terms. But they had had some odd incidents at Bridget's in the past few months, and the last thing Courtney needed was for her bartender to start slapping patrons around for having bad taste.

  Bill poured three beers off the tap and slid them onto the bar. As he collected the money, he took orders for mixed drinks from a pair of fortyish women who had apparently escaped their husbands and children for the night. Old friends, by the intimate way they sat together. Bill could tell a lot about people just by the way they related to one another. And by scent. Scent told him a lot.

  When Matt Brocklebank appeared at his side with an order for one of the tables he was waiting on, Bill sensed his distress immediately.

  "What's up?" he asked the kid, brow furrowed with concern.

  "Dunphy wanted me to tell you there was some guy out back asking about you," Matt said. He shrugged to punctuate his lack of further information.

  "Out back meaning in the kitchen, or in the alley?"

  Matt blinked. "Well, in the alley, right? I mean, nobody's gonna get in the kitchen doesn't belong there without Dunphy noticing him."

  Bill nodded, heart quickening with anxiety. He had caught a familiar scent out the window early that morning - an animal scent - but had convinced himself it was not what he had thought it was. Now, though . . .

  Nights as busy as this one, he always had a second bartender on. Bill strode over to Steve Meaney, who was drawing a fresh Bass from the tap, and threw his counter rag onto the bar.

  "Cover for me a minute, will you?"

  "Got it," Steve replied.

  Bill went out of the bar and across the restaurant. He pushed through the doors into the kitchen and found himself in the center of a scene of such anarchy that it made the dining room and bar look downright orderly. In the midst of the cooks on the other side of the pickup counter, he spotted Tim Dunphy. One of the other cooks noticed Bill and tapped Dunphy on the shoulder. Tim glanced up, then pointed off to the side. Bill met him at the far side of the kitchen, near the door that led into the alley.

  "What's this about a guy?" Bill asked.

  Tim scratched at the back of his neck, then shook his head. "It was weird, Bill. I'm out there havin' a cigarette, takin' a break, y'know? This stocky little guy with a shaved head comes up, reels off this line how he's an old bud of yours, and wonderin' if you're livin' here now, like shackin' up with Courtney."

  A chill ran through Bill. Tim shrugged, twisted his face up into a dismissive expression that had been mastered by Irish toughs from South Boston a hundred years earlier.

  "Damn, y'know, that's not any of my business, and it sure isn't this guy's. I told him that, too. Asked him if he was such a good bud of yours why didn't he just go on in the front door. You're in there tendin' bar, right? I mean, what? He takes a look at me and thinks 'here's some bum from Southie with a peanut brain'? I'm not stupid, right? Guy's nosin' around about you. Thought you'd want to know."

  "How long ago?"

  Tim shrugged. "Five minutes, maybe."

  With a frown, Bill glanced at the door to the alley. "Thanks, Tim. Don't mention this to Courtney, all right?"

  "Yeah, all right. What are you gonna do?" Bill blinked in surprise and looked at him. "If the guy's still out there, I'm gonna toss his salad."

  The cook rotated his head around a bit, stretching and popping the muscles in his neck and shoulders. "You want me to watch your back?"

  "Thanks," Bill told him. "But I got it." He held out a hand to Tim. "I owe you, kid."

  Tim shook his hand once, firmly, then let it go. "Naw, man. That's how we operate, that's all." Then he turned and forged his way back into the cooking area, shouting instructions, snapping at cooks who had slowed.

  Bill strode to the back door, hesitated only a heartbeat, then slammed it open. It clanged against the brick wall and the sound echoed out into the darkened alley. There was a commotion off to his left. Grunting, someone hustled up a fire escape a couple of buildings down and across the alley.

  The hot summer breeze brought the scent to him, the same one he had caught that morning. The narrow slice of sky visible between the buildings was filled with stars, but not enough to more than dimly illuminate the dark alley. All three of the lights that normally burned back there among the Dumpsters and garbage cans had burned out. Or been shattered.

  Bill sprinted soundlessly down the alley. He reached the fire escape in seconds and leaped to grab hold of the iron grate of the first-floor landing. Effortlessly, he scrambled up onto the web of black iron. Bill did not bother with the stairs, but climbed hand over hand, scaling the outside of the three-story metal structure in seconds.

  He leaped to the roof and landed in a crouch, sniffing the air. His heart pounded in his chest, eyes darting about for any sign of his prey in the deep shadows of the night.

  His prey.

  A tiny smile flickered at the edges of Bill's mouth and he began to change. The flesh all over his massive body rippled and stretched as hair spiked through it from beneath. He stretched with it, as though he had been cramped in his human skin, and at last Bill stood on the rooftop in his true form. A snarl escaped from him, and his black lips curled back from a snoutful of needle teeth. As a human, Bill was a big man, broad-shouldered and imposing.

  As a Prowler, he knew he was monstrous.

  The entire roof was drenched in the scent of the Prowlers who had been hanging around, watching for him, asking about him. Him and Courtney. The thought of her in danger galvanized him into action. His ears perked, and he heard movement off to the right, a couple of rooftops away.

  He rushed across the roof, silent as a whisper.

  Hunting. It felt good.

  But at the end of the block, when he ran out of rooftop, he realized that they had eluded him. Quickly, he backtracked to the nearest fire escape and found the scent heavy there as well. They were gone. He could track them by their scent. Could change back and pursue them almost anywhere in the city.

  He trotted back to the fire escape he had originally come up. There would be a confrontation soon enough. For now, Courtney was his first and only priority. If they wanted her, they might try to draw him away like this to get at her. Bill was not going to allow that.

  Dubrowski sat in the driver's seat of the ancient Mercedes and ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved hand. Beside him, Braun kept trying to lean over and look out Dubrowski's window to get a view of the roof. Dubrowski smacked Braun for the fifth time, but knew the moron wouldn't get the message.

  "Aw, Doobie, what the hell'd you do that for?"

  Braun rubbed his cheek where Dubrowski had struck him and glared. But Dubrowski knew he would do nothing. Though the two of them were among a small handful of survivors from Tanzer's pack, Braun had been very low in the hierarchy - Dubrowski much higher. Braun knew who among them was the superior warrior.

  But that knowledge did not make Braun any smarter. Once again, he leaned over. Dubrowski sighed and rolled his eyes, a low growl building in his throat. This time, that warning was enough to get Braun's attention.

  "Did you see him up there, Doobie?" Braun asked. "I mean, I'm glad we got to the car before he hit the edge of the roof. If he'd seen us, I think he woulda just jumped on us. Cantwell's pretty pissed off, huh? He's a big one, too."

  Dubrowski laughed. "He's rather large, yes, but don't concern yourself, Braun. Cantwell's a lap dog. Little more than a house pet. Dwyer and his sister probably paper-trained him. Whatever wild Cantwell had in him, I'd say it's
been bred out. He's big, but he'll fall easy enough. We'll destroy him."

  Braun laughed. "Exactly. That's exactly right, Doobie. Destroy him."

  With a growl, Dubrowski backhanded Braun hard enough so that his head cracked the side window.

  "Don't call me that."

  CHAPTER 7

  Saturday mornings at Travis Drug were usually pretty quiet. Truth be told, most mornings were pretty quiet. It was afternoons when Aaron Travis did most of his business.

  Every Saturday morning he spent a couple of hours straightening up and putting his new shipment of periodicals on display. Usually he did so with constant chatter from Kenny Oberst as background noise. Most mornings, Aaron griped about Kenny's incessant talk; the man had an opinion about everything.

  That morning, however, when Kenny had not appeared by eight o'clock, Aaron grew concerned. The two old men had been knocking about together since the second grade. Kenny never showed up at the drugstore unless he was expected, and he never failed to show up when he was. Not without calling to let Aaron know.

  Not ever.

  Aaron phoned Kenny three times that morning, before, during, and after his racking of the periodicals. There was no answer at the Oberst residence. As ten o'clock came and went, he waited on a handful of customers, and in between he read the new National Enquirer cover to cover. He scratched at his scalp, where his white hair was thinnest, and cleared his throat. The sound echoed hauntingly in the empty store.

  About ten-thirty, Aaron walked back to the magazine rack, convinced he had arranged the new shipment incorrectly. He favored his right leg, unwilling to rest too much weight on the left knee he had popped playing basketball in 1964. It only bothered him when he was trying to pretend nothing else was on his mind.

  When he found himself reading the covers of women's magazines, he knew he had put it off long enough. Maybe too long. Anxiety simmering in the back of his mind, he swallowed hard and pulled the keys out of his pocket. They jangled as he went to the front, turned the sign around to CLOSED. He locked the door behind him and headed for the antique Dodge Dart he still drove.

  Only minutes later he rolled the Dart slowly to a stop in front of Kenny's faded house. There wasn't any yard to speak of, but it still sorely needed attention.

  Aaron studied the yard in order to avoid consciously thinking about the house itself, and how quiet it all seemed.

  Something itched inside his ear, and he stuck a finger into it and twisted it around. His knee ached the way it did before a heavy rain, though the weather report had said nothing about precipitation. After a moment's pause Aaron swallowed, his throat dry, then walked up to the front door.

  It was open just a crack.

  He rapped on the wood. "Kenny? You down with the flu or something?"

  The words sounded downright foolish coming out of his mouth. He knew full well Kenny was not down with the flu. The old man could still answer the phone, couldn't he?

  Aaron pushed the door open.

  For a moment he only stared with wide eyes at what he saw within. Books were strewn all over the house, pages torn out, piled in stacks that reeked of urine.

  Furniture was shattered into kindling, the television had a hole the size of a basketball in it, the walls were spattered with blood. On the floor, near a pile of old videotapes, Aaron saw what he thought was a ruined eyeball, still trailing a piece of optic nerve behind it.

  In the midst of the wreckage lay what remained of Kenny Oberst, who had been his best friend since before either of them could read.

  During the time he'd served in the Korean War, Aaron Travis had seen a mother and child blown apart by a land mine; he'd seen soldiers cut each other down; he'd had to gut a man with a knife to save his own life outside a bar in Seoul. But he had never seen anything as savage and horrible as what had been done to Kenny.

  "Oh, dear Jesus," Aaron whispered.

  He put a hand up to cover his eyes and turned to walk out of the house, tears flowing freely down his cheeks. He limped to his Dart and climbed in, shuddering with the effort. Gravity dragged more heavily upon him now.

  For the first time in his life, Aaron Travis felt truly old.

  Molly sat exhausted on the floor of the forest, leaning against a tree, and closed her eyes. They had spent most of the previous day trekking along old hiking trails with bottles of water, chocolate-chip cookies, and a compass as the sum total of their supplies.

  If she didn't count the guns.

  At first, Molly had been sure they would get lost. Soon, though, she came to realize that as long as she was with Jack, she could never be lost for long. Not when he was constantly conversing with the lost souls who wandered the forests around Buckton. Many of those spirits who still lingered in the area had been victims of the Prowlers, and as the day had worn on, their sheer number had cast a pall over both Molly and Jack, a grim yet silent acknowledgement of the grisly murders that had occurred in the vicinity over the years.

  Given what they had learned by Jack's contact with the dead, the pack had been hunting these mountains and the surrounding towns for decades. And yet, given that time frame, the unsettling numbers began to seem less outrageous, even modest. It chilled Molly to think in those terms, but the pack had been hunting here so long that it was amazing the death toll was not higher and that - as far as they knew - the Prowlers had never killed within Buckton until recently. They had clearly curtailed their activities in order to attract as little attention as possible.

  Until now.

  Molly figured that once they worked out why those patterns had been broken, it would not be too difficult to figure out who the Prowlers were. They had spent six hours the previous day putting together what she had come to think of as the ghost-map. After another dinner at the Jukebox Restaurant, they had both slept soundly, dreamlessly. This morning, after a quick breakfast, they had set out just after seven o'clock.

  Now it was going on ten, and she needed a rest. Boston was a walking city, and she'd spent most of her life discovering it, but she now realized there was a significant difference between city miles and hiking miles, particularly in the ache that now throbbed in her legs.

  It was cooler than it had been the day before, and she wore a light sweatshirt with a zipper up the front, mainly to cover up the gun that rested against the small of her back. Still, though, when the sun shone through the trees, it grew quite warm.

  Molly heard Jack's voice. With her eyes closed, in that sliver of a moment, she was almost certain she heard another as well. Her eyes fluttered open and she saw Jack standing in a clearing where a ring of stones had once been used as a makeshift fireplace. A shaft of sunlight illuminated him as he stood there talking to the air around him, talking to nothing at all, talking to phantoms of people murdered horribly in these woods.

  After a moment he sensed her eyes on him and turned toward her. A sweet, lopsided smile appeared on his face, and he muttered something to the spirits before striding through the trees toward her.

  "How far do you think we are from the Jeep?" Molly asked.

  "Maybe half a mile. Probably less," Jack replied.

  "Want to carry me?" She massaged her calves.

  "Be glad to," he said.

  Molly unfolded the map in her hands and studied the red marks they'd made to indicate the locations of the murders of the ghosts Jack had spoken to. Though the spirits wandered the area, they did not stray too far from the places where their deaths had occurred. So far they - or, actually, Jack - had spoken to fifteen of them, not counting Phil Garraty, who had apparently paved the way with the other ghosts for Jack. The murders stretched back nearly seventy years, and all of them were in the surrounding area, but not in Buckton.

  Though Jack was still communicating with various ghosts he encountered as they hiked around the area, they had begun to visit the actual murder sites marked on the map. Now Jack crouched down to look at the map with her. He pulled the red felt-tip pen from his pocket and marked a spot on the map, right
in the middle of the most densely forested part of Pine Hill, not far from two other red marks. Molly frowned as she studied the map.

  "Weird. That's the only cluster we've come across, those three."

  "I noticed that, too," Jack replied. "Don't know if it means anything, but we should check it out. Two of the three who were killed there said they saw ruins, a chimney and stuff, like there'd been a house there once. That should make it easier to find."

  Molly gazed up at him, putting on her most pitiful expression. "Today? I have to confess I was wondering if we could quit early, have a relaxing afternoon, maybe go to the movies tonight, if that place even shows anything that isn't in black and white."

  "Hey," Jack protested. "There are a lot of good movies that were made in black and white."

  "So, we're going to the movies?" Molly asked.

  He laughed. "Sounds good. And I wasn't talking about today anyway. If there used to be a home there, it would have to be on surveyors' maps. That should make it a lot easier to find the exact spot. And it might be interesting to find out who owned that property."

  Suddenly chilled, Molly stood and zipped her sweatshirt all the way to her throat.

  "Let's get back."

  A little past eleven o'clock they drove back into town, intent upon a trip to the town surveyor's office. Jack felt his stomach rumbling and regretted not having eaten something more substantial at breakfast.

  "You up for an early lunch first?" he asked.

  In the passenger seat, Molly had her eyes closed, a content expression on her face as the sun shone through the window, warming her.

  Is she sleeping? Jack thought. "Don't tell me I got you that tired out?" he ventured uncertainly.

  "Hmm?" she moaned lazily. Her eyes fluttered open and she let her head loll against the seat as she looked at him. "Sorry, were you talking to me?"

  "Who else would I be talking to?" Jack teased.

  Molly raised an eyebrow. "Well, you never know, do you?"

  Jack started to respond, then just laughed. "Touché."