Unleashed

by Kristopher Reisz

  Unsure what response she should give, Misty went with, “I’m sorry? About your crab?”

  Daniel soldiered on. “It’s just you act really tough and like nothing bothers you. But I’m scared you’re really delicate inside. Like Herman.”

  Suddenly embarrassed or angry or both, she turned to grab her shirt off the floor. “Jesus. You are soft in the head.”

  “It’s just—”

  “I heard you. You’re clumsy, and I’ve got crabs. How did you ever hook up with Angie always babbling like a retard?”

  A sour laugh escaped Daniel’s throat. “I just tell her whatever she wants to hear. That’s easy. It’s telling the truth that’s hard.”

  Misty buttoned her shirt and turned back around. “I’ve been dropped before. I’m not as delicate as that.”

  “I know, just—”

  “But it’s nice to be treated that way sometimes.”

  Daniel half-smiled and ran his hands through his hair. “Still, maybe I should go.”

  “No. Stay.”

  “Thanks, but I really think—”

  “You promised you’d hang out tonight. Please? I’ll keep my hands to myself. I swear.” Misty held up her hands, showing him she was harmless.

  Daniel needed to tell her who he really was. He hoped they could stay friends, but he needed to get back to his college courses, to Angie, to his real life. He needed to let Misty find a boy who could take her to see the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. But one more night playing a delinquent couldn’t hurt.

  They decided to call Val and get something to eat. This time, Daniel waited in the living room while Misty changed. She came out wearing a snug knit cap and a canvas jacket with a factory logo stitched across the breast. One of the sleeves was held together with rough black stitches. Daniel wondered what they were going to be doing tonight that required an outfit that went past street style and neared postapocalyptic.

  At McDonald’s, Daniel tried to buy Misty’s dinner, but she wouldn’t let him. Even though their mutual self-consciousness eased after Val and Eric showed up, they monitored the space between them constantly, careful not to touch and just as careful to not act like they were avoiding touching.

  They ate their burgers and refilled their drinks. Misty called Marc, who said he’d meet them at the furnace. She and Val went to the restroom together. Daniel didn’t doubt Misty was telling her best friend what had happened earlier.

  They refilled their drinks again and dabbed cold fries in ketchup. Misty and her friends were restless, waiting for something to happen.

  Then Eric pointed at Daniel’s letterman jacket and asked, “You’re not on the basketball team anymore, right? How come you still wear that?”

  “Because it keeps me warm?”

  “Yeah, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s a uniform. It makes you a jock. One of the cool kids.”

  Val nudged Eric in the ribs and told him to play nice. Daniel answered, anyway.

  “The time I scored eighteen points on a fucked-up knee makes me a jock, not my jacket.”

  “Okay, you earned it or whatever. I’m just saying it declares your loyalty to a tribe you’re not really part of anymore.”

  “It doesn’t declare—”

  Eric leaned forward. “You walk up on two guys beating the hell out of each other, right? One of them is wearing a letterman jacket like you, and the other is dressed like me. Now, you don’t have time to figure out what the fight is about; you’e got to rush in and help one of them. Who do you stand with? The guy wearing the jacket or the guy wearing boots?” Eric kicked the plastic seat with his dead brother’s boot, making it shudder under Daniel.

  Daniel forced himself to grin. “It’s just a jacket, man.”

  “All right.” Eric turned to look out the window. “Whatever.”

  Daniel didn’t know if Eric was just screwing around or if he genuinely wanted to get under his skin. Either way, his talk about uniforms and loyalty contained a sliver of truth. Daniel remembered getting his varsity letter, striding through the halls with Bwana and his other teammates. He’d felt lifted up from the crowd, one of the chosen. Wearing that same letter a year after his last game did seem a little pathetic.

  Daniel couldn’t dwell on it long, though. The short winter day slipped away, and it was suddenly time to go. He and Misty climbed into his car. Alone again, they stayed on the absolute surface of things, reading bumper stickers out loud and complaining about the long light at Morris Avenue.

  Misty examined Daniel’s stereo. “This is aftermarket, right?”

  “Yeah. I had it put in about a year ago,” he said, leaving out the part about it being a gift for cheating on the SATs.

  Misty ticked down the bass, filling the car with gut-quivering thumps. She turned it back to a normal level and said, “Nice. Good speakers.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You like me, right?”

  “What? Yes. Misty, that’s not-”

  “I’m not talking about … about today. I mean in general. You think I’m a pretty good person, right? That I wouldn’t do anything really bad.”

  Daniel stared through the windshield while he spoke. “That first time I went looking for you at the deli. Giving you those notes was just an excuse.”

  “Yeah? An excuse for what?”

  “When you ran out to help that dog. I watched you, and I don’t know … everybody thinks I’m this shooting star.” He found himself wrestling ideas into words again, struggling to say what he meant. He didn’t talk about things like this with his other friends. He didn’t even think about them much. “But if that’s true, I couldn’t figure out why you did the right thing, while I just sat there.”

  Misty smiled. “I’m going to show you why tonight, okay? But you have to promise to remember everything you just said, okay?”

  He was getting nervous. Misty’s abrupt question made him realize that, whatever he was getting into, it was bigger than spray-painting walls. But he’d told Misty he couldn’t imagine her ever doing anything bad, and it was the truth.

  Marc was already at the furnace, and when they arrived, the gate was waiting open. Entering, the city’s clamor sunk away. Without any streetlights to push back the night, it pooled into the furnace grounds like oil.

  Marc crouched in the middle of the casting shed, feeding a fire with smashed pieces of an office chair. He didn’t look up when Eric and Daniel drove in, only after Misty opened the door and yelled, “Marc! Let’s use Daniel’s stereo.”

  “What for?” Daniel asked.

  To dance.

  Marc ran over with a handful of hip-hop CDs. “Hey, Daniel.”

  They bumped knuckles while Misty flipped through the CDs. “They about cooked?” she asked.

  Marc nodded.

  “Cool.” She slid one of the disks into Daniel’s stereo. Far from Pins & Needles’s wistful rock, she picked a track snarling with club bravado, turning the volume up, the bass down, and asking Daniel how to make one song repeat over and over. Daniel showed her, then popped the trunk, where his subwoofers were. Music stripped to a deep, percussive pulse boomed against the shed’s corrugated tin walls.

  Getting out of the car, they walked to where Val was gathering pieces of something like dried fruit from the fire and passing them around. Misty pressed two of them into Daniel’s palm. They were shriveled mushroom caps.

  “Uh …” Daniel drank at parties and smoked pot occasionally, but he’d never done ’shrooms. He glanced around. Val and Eric hugged belly-to-back. She fed him one of the caps, his chin resting on her shoulder. Marc washed his down with gulps of orange juice he’d brought with him. “Uh …”

  Misty stood on her tiptoes, speaking in Daniel’s ear so he could hear her beneath the throbbing beats. “Please? Take them, and I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

  Daniel couldn’t go slumming with her or her friends again or return to this waking-dream furnace. He wanted to devour this last night with Misty, suck the marrow from
its bones.

  The mushrooms tasted horrible. Daniel gagged them down, then grabbed the carton of orange juice Marc offered. Around him, heads bobbed and boots drummed in time with the bass line.

  The music was hypnotic and terrifying at once. It was the relentless sweep and boom of ocean waves. It was the earth’s steady, sleeping heartbeat. Val started stomping around the fire. The others joined her, kicking up dust clouds. Daniel tried to laugh, figuring they were goofing around. But they put total, panting effort into the frantic dance. Their skin glowed like hot metal in the firelight.

  Misty took Daniel’s hand. Being led to the circle felt like being pulled into rushing flood waters. Daniel danced along with the choppy rhythm, his body not entirely under his control. High above, moonbeams slanted through gaps in the roof, interweaving with steel support beams. Daniel couldn’t tell which ones were solid and which ones were ethereal. It wasn’t important either way.

  Misty and her friends started yelling, “Want to be a wolf! Want to be a wolf!” Daniel joined in without wondering what it meant, just relishing the feeling of shouting as loud as he pleased, over and over until his throat burned.

  Marc’s words broke into a howl. Daniel watched him stumble, then fall forward and change into a wolf. The transformation was beautiful and not particularly strange. Somehow, Marc had always been a wolf. Daniel just hadn’t noticed before.

  Misty escaped her human shape too. Then Eric, then Val. Eric chased Marc into the shadows past the fire. Daniel wished he could become a wolf too, and as soon as he wished, saw that he clung to humanity, not the other way around. It was as easy as letting go. Daniel sank into dense fur. The shed’s musty smell blossomed open, unfolding into countless distinct scents—the other wolves, smoke, rust, dew gathering on grass.

  He ran his tongue across long fangs and took a few careful steps on lanky legs. Distant fires filled the furnace complex with light, but only the palest colors. Daniel looked up and realized the fires were the moon and stars burning overhead.

  A wolf grappled his neck with her forepaw and nipped Daniel’s ear. He connected her with cocoa butter conditioner, a girl with a beautiful scowl. Her name was gone, though. He groped for it, finally garbling, “Mis—Misty!” The starlight faded to sparks as his human eyes returned.

  Kneeling in the darkness and cold, Daniel was suddenly afraid. “Misty!”

  He was knocked onto his back. Misty, normal again, straddled his hips. “Misty doesn’t mean anything. A sound. Misty just a sound.” The words were strained with effort and kinked by wrong inflections. “Don’t talk. Or think. Just …”

  Daniel didn’t understand until she kissed him. He smelled her and tasted her. Raw sensation flooded him, unfiltered by thoughts of what they meant, what to do next, or even names for them.

  “Just …” Misty turned back into a wolf. She bounded off him, then turned, watching Daniel, her ears cocked toward him.

  What was happening didn’t matter; it just was. Daniel forgot Misty’s name, then his own. He let his confusion fade away and felt his body shifting around him.

  Eric howled. Instinct told Daniel it was a mustering call. He followed the pack out of the shed, across the furnace grounds. Cold mud squelched between his toes. Brambles slashed harmlessly at his pelt.

  People hid behind locked doors or huddled together below the brightest lights, abandoning vast, dark swaths of the city to the wolves. Daniel could only keep his mind primal for a few seconds at a time, making it hard to stay in wolf shape. Sometimes on four legs, usually lagging behind on two, he prowled alleys and chased sway-bellied opossums through storm culverts.

  He helped Eric smash open a restaurant’s Dumpster with a chunk of cinder block. In human skin and his letterman jacket, but crouched like an animal, Daniel ripped open garbage bags for bread dough, burnt beef tips, and handfuls of cake, shoving anything that smelled like food into his mouth. He refused to consider what he was doing, only how pungent and delicious it all was.

  They roamed for hours, until the mushrooms’ potency started to fade. Returning to the furnace, they followed the sound of Daniel’s still-playing stereo to the shed. Even after Marc shut the engine off, a ghostly rhythm beat inside Daniel’s skull. His muscles burned. Grime caked his jeans and crisp white sneakers.

  Eric and Val were having sex in Eric’s car. Daniel had cut his hand crawling under a chain-link fence. Pulling gauze and antibiotic ointment out of Marc’s backpack, Misty gently bandaged his hand. Apparently cuts and scrapes were fairly common. Neither of them spoke or felt any need to.

  Afterward, they hunched together, Daniel’s hand resting in Misty’s lap. Marc stretched out on the other side of the fire. A full stomach and the wavering heat of the dying embers lulled Daniel to sleep.

  While his body rested, the wolf continued to stalk through the city in his subconscious, id and ego transformed into glass and concrete. The mushroom’s strange drugs filtered out of his system, magic breaking down into simple amino acids and nitrogen. The wolf grew weaker, becoming aware that the fire had died and Misty’s cheek nuzzled against his shoulder. Finally, reality pounced.

  “Fu—” Daniel’s head snapped up, startling Misty awake too. He’d been a werewolf. “Fuck. Holy, holy fuck.”

  “It’s okay,” Misty said. “It’s weird. I mean, it’s really weird, but it’s okay.” She touched him, and Daniel threw himself to the dirt to get away from her. He scrambled backward like a crab, then jumped to his feet.

  Marc had woken up. Eric and Val opened the car door and peered out.

  Daniel flexed his fingers and touched his chest. The muscles and ribs felt solid, but he didn’t trust them. He’d been a werewolf. “What are you? What the hell did you give me?”

  “Amanita muscaria” Misty said. “It’s a mushroom that … it’s kind of a long story. Actually there’s this website. I should have printed all that out before tonight, but I’ll get it to you, okay? The main thing is…”

  Daniel ignored her. Staring around, he noticed wolf tracks around the fire. He remembered seeing them the first time he’d come to the furnace.

  Better be careful Some dogs have been living here.

  Why should I be scared? Yve got a big jock to protect me.

  “Daniel,” Misty tried to get his attention again. “The main thing is this is why I saved that dog. This is why a lot of things. Calm down, okay? Please?”

  Daniel looked at her. “I think I better go.”

  “No, Daniel, just calm down.”

  “It’s really late, or early, or … I better go.”

  Misty and her friends—Misty and her pack—started talking all at once. Shaking his head, insisting it was very late, Daniel climbed into his car and found his keys in the ignition. When he cranked the engine, a blast of noise made him scream. The stereo’s volume was still turned to maximum. Jabbing the mute button with a shaking hand, he backed out of the shed, leaving the werewolves behind.

  Pale morning broke overhead. Crossing the furnace complex, Daniel finally saw it for what it was, a crack in the world. The brambles hid clearings where the Cherokee had danced and summoned spirits. The dank coal tunnels led to caves where Stone Age hunters had painted beasts from their dreams.

  Somehow, Daniel made it home. Coming up the flagstone walk, his dad jerked the door open. “Where have you been?”

  “Uh, out. Out with Angie.” Daniel tried to squeeze past him, but his dad grabbed his arm.

  “We called Angie. She never saw you.”

  “Okay. Yeah.” Panic had dulled to a numb stupor and jumbled half-thoughts. He just wanted to go to bed. But then his mom came out of the kitchen with her Bible in her hand and her eyes rimmed red from tears.

  “Daniel, where were you? You’re filthy. I called your cell phone a dozen times. I thought you’d been in a car wreck or—” She couldn’t make herself finish the sentence.

  “Okay.” He remembered something else he should say. “Sorry.”

  “I’ve been reading Psalm Twe
nty-three for hours, asking God to look over you. I called the hospitals. Your dad called Bwana at two in the …” His mom kept talking. Daniel’s gaze drifted to the family photos hanging on the living room wall. His mom’s framed Nurse Corps insignia and Soldier’s Medal. One Xbox controller snaked from the entertainment center and across the carpet.

  This house, his parents, all of this felt like it had been ten years ago. Daniel had plunged past everything he thought was real, then landed back where he’d started. It was confusing.

  “Daniel!” Grabbing his chin, his mom jerked his eyes back to meet hers. She squinted at his pupils. “What have you taken?”

  “Nothing.” Daniel pulled away. He mumbled out a story about drinking a few beers last night and falling asleep. He hadn’t taken any drugs. He was acting strange because he hadn’t realized how late it was. He wasn’t sure how his clothes had gotten so dirty. He remembered to apologize a few more times. Angry at the sight of him, his parents let him go to his room at last.

  CHAPTER 7

  Beep. “Where are you, Daniel?” Angie’s recorded voice lashed out at him. “Why did you tell your parents you were out with me last night? What happened to that big essay you had to finish? Call me as soon as you get this.”

  Beep.

  “I’m at the hotel, where are you? Look, people are talking shit, and we need to get some things straight. Call me, okay? I love you.”

  Beep.

  “Hey. It’s Misty. Look, I’m really sorry. I didn’t want to scare you. I mean, I guess I probably figured you’d be scared. Just, I couldn’t just tell you and make you think I wasn’t crazy. Maybe now you think I’m something worse than crazy, I don’t know, but… Jesus, now I’m babbling.” She tried to laugh. “I had this whole thing ready to say, and I’m getting totally off track, but… I’m not working tonight, for once, so if you want to talk or whatever. Or maybe you don’t want anything to do with me ever again. I don’t know. Just whatever, okay? Bye.”