Walker could still hear the thing behind him. He whirled, ready to defend himself, as he felt something rapidly rushing toward him through the darkness. A pimp in a white Mercedes cruised past him with his headlights off. Looking for one of his whores no doubt. He waved at Walker as he went by. Walker had gone to elementary school with the guy. The neighborhood hadn’t changed much.
A withered young crack whore stumbled out of the alley closest to him with her eyes glazed in a narcotic rapture. She smiled at him revealing prematurely rotten teeth and mechanically pulled up her skirt and shook her still remarkably firm and plump ass at him while licking her full but chapped and cracked lips. For all the deterioration evident in the rest of her body, her ass was still a marvel of nature. A hunger began to rise in Walker and the young streetwalker noticed it and sensed opportunity.
“Want some pussy, Daddy? Give me some money, honey. Mama’ll take care of you.”
She looked like she needed a mama to take care of her. Despite the ravages of drug abuse, which had leeched the youth from her flesh, it was still obvious that she was no older than fifteen.
“You don’t want none of this girl.” He pulled his lips back away from his grotesquely distended saber-like canines and growled low in his throat. She rolled her eyes at him and flipped him her middle finger.
“Well, fuck you too nigga!” She wiggled her strangely appetizing ass at him again and slipped back into the alley.
Walker shook his head and snickered, amazed at her brazenness and absolute lack of fear. He considered following her for a moment and then reminded himself what the rest of her body had looked like, shuddered and continued down the street. It wasn’t disease he was afraid of; it was what he would think of himself when it was over, and how difficult it would be to get the stench of her off of him. Besides, whatever it was that was tailing him was closer now. Walker imagined that he could feel its steaming breath on the back of his neck. Walker buttoned his jacket over his bleeding stomach and sped up again, now running through the night putting more distance between him and whatever dark hairy thing hunted him in the shadows. His breath grew laborious as panic crushed down on him, cramping his lungs. He looked back and caught a brief flash of cold silvery eyes, teeth, and claws glinting in the moonlight.
Walker turned another dark corner and saw the normal gang of hoodlums congregating on the corner outside the liquor store. He recognized several of them from ten years ago. There were some new, younger faces interspersed with the old. The next generation of the lost and desperate. Tank and Boom, two homies he’d grown up with back in the day, recognized him immediately as he emerged from the shadows into the glare of the overhead streetlight. They smiled and walked/staggered toward him. They were drunk and high but Walker knew they were still dangerous . . . to anyone but him.
“Walker? My Brotha! Where the hell have you been? Man, I ain’t seen you since high school!” Tank bellowed as he swaggered his hulking body over to give Walker a big hug and pat him on the back with his big paddle like hands.
“I heard you got shot!” Boom added, as he hung back eyeing him warily with both his hands tucked inside his jacket pockets. He didn’t offer to shake hands or so much as wave. No doubt he had a pistol in one pocket and three or four dozen vials of crack in the other.
“Naw, I heard he was locked down. What did they get you for? Slangin’ or bangin’?” Tank asked.
“They couldn’t catch me if they wanted to. But I gotta keep moving. I’ll peep you brothas later.”
“Yeah, later.” Boom replied, still eyeing him suspiciously. Walker wondered if years of dodging cops and bullets, living on the edge, had honed Boom’s survival skills to the point where he could sense the mortal threat that Walker represented. Either that or it was just paranoia brought on by too much cocaine use.
Walker continued down the street, nervously eyeing every shadow just as he’d done when he’d walked these streets as a teenager. Only now he was not looking out for muggers or rival gang-bangers. He was looking out for a monster. A monster who’d been tracking him for days. Who was very near catching him.
Walker turned as screams echoed from the direction he’d just come from. He heard Boom cry out, a blast of gunfire, followed by the unmistakable sound of tearing flesh and snapping bone.
“Oh, Shit! Hellllp! Oh my God! No! Nooooo!!!” Walker had never heard Tank scream before and he’d seen the tremendous thug take eight rounds from an Uzi. There was a flurry of activity back up on the corner, muzzle flashes as an automatic pistol unloaded an entire clip in every direction, limbs being torn free of torsos and tossed into the air, and blood, blood everywhere. That thing had just torn two of the toughest thugs in the hood apart in a matter of seconds. Walker knew that he had to see his friend before, whatever that thing was, caught up with him. He had to get help.
He sprinted the remaining block to the street he’d grown up on, walked up onto a rickety old porch and knocked on his friend’s door. Then he winced in pain when the door swung open and the wooden stake slammed into his chest.
“Man, what the fuck are you doing? That shit hurt!”
Jerry continued to stab Walker in the heart with the sharpened chair leg over and over again making only minor flesh wounds that just barely punctured the skin and the first few layers of muscle tissue.
“Fuck! Man, cut that out Jerry! Damn!” He smacked the stake from his friend’s hand and grabbed his chest, wincing in pain. Walker leaned back against the porch railing and clamped a hand over his friend’s arm preventing him from fleeing
“First off, you can’t just jam a stake through a vampire’s chest with your bare hands you need to hammer it in. There are layers of fat, and muscle, and a goddamned ribcage to get through for Christ’s sake! Second of all, that wouldn’t kill him anyway. That’s movie shit. The whole point of the stake is to nail the vampire to his coffin so he can’t rise at night to hunt and he’ll just starve to death in his grave. Stabbing one with a stake when he’s up and walking around wouldn’t do shit but piss him off! Oh, and third, and most important, I’m not a fucking vampire!”
“Then what the hell are you then? ‘Cause you damn sure ain’t Walker! Walker wouldn’t have tried to eat me!” Jerry was not just afraid he was seething with rage. This man who he had once considered his closest friend, part of the family, had tried to kill him. He wanted to see the man dead.
Jerry had always been the baddest mutherfucker on the streets. It was a title he wore with pride. His body count would have put him up there with Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas if it had been known. But the streets held their secrets well. He’d only had to torture and mutilate the elderly parents of one young homie who’d witnessed him murder a rival drug dealer and was preparing to testify against him, to persuade anyone else from ever stepping forward. On these streets, he was the most dangerous thing alive. He was the boogie-man whose name children woke up screaming at night. He was the reason men and women alike stayed off the streets past midnight. When people in G-town imagined death it didn’t wear a black cowl and carry a sickle. It wore FUBU and Nike and carried a Tech nine-millimeter automatic assault rifle. But, ever since the night when he’d stared down his friend’s throat as he lunged at him with fangs straining for his throat, he’d not felt right carrying the title. He felt like a fake.
Nearly all the violence he’d done in the last decade had been to over-compensate for that one humiliation; that one moment of weakness. There was something out there tougher, meaner, and more terrible than him. Something that had caused him to scream like a bitch and plead for his life. Something that was now standing on his porch wearing the face of his long-time boyhood friend.
“Man, I told you I was sorry about that. That was my bad. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Sorry? My bad? You tried to eat me, bro! You can’t just say sorry for some shit like that!” Jerry’s body was vibrating with fury. He wished he had his gun. He would’ve split Walker’s wig right there on his front porch, parole
or no parole. The man was some type of monster and not the everyday type the violence and hopeless poverty of the ghetto normally produced. He was not the type of monster that Jerry was. He was a real monster.
“So what do you want me to do? Suck your dick? Man, it’s been ten years. Let it go bro.”
Jerry stared at him for a long moment. Then shook his head in incredulous amusement.
“If I shake your hand, you won’t try and eat it will you?”
“Come on, man.” Walker held out his arms with an innocent smile etched onto his hardened features.
The two men embraced and Jerry invited him inside. Walker took one last look around before he stepped into the house. For a second he thought he saw a large shadow moving toward them from down the block. All the lights on this block were out and the entire street was enveloped in a deadly, sinister darkness; the kind that incubated crime. Walker could not see through the gloom but he could hear and he could smell. Heavy, rumbling, breathing, like the contented purr of a full grown lion with its belly full of antelope, and a wild animal musk heavy with the scent of blood, came wafting up the street toward him, drowning his senses with the threat of violence. He had little time. He locked Jerry’s front door behind him, noting its solid steel construction as he slid the deadbolt into place. It was a dope-dealer’s door. No reason to have a door like that in the ghetto unless you had a stash to protect. He saw Jerry glance nervously at him when he slid the chain over the door.
“Relax, bro. I just don’t want us interrupted.”
The two of them sat down on the tattered old sofa and quietly appraised each other. Jerry was tall, lean, and muscular. He looked sort of like a young Muhammed Ali. Walker was slightly smaller with thicker muscles like a bodybuilder. His skin was not just black it was the total absence of light. He seemed to be spawning shadows from his pores as he sat there in the dim light of the coffee table lamp.
“You look good, Jerry.” Walker commented and then he noticed the young girl, naked and bleeding, bound with duck tape, and rolling around on the kitchen floor.
“Who the fuck is that? What are you doing to her?”
“Just some crack whore who owes me money. I’m taking it out on her ass. Got tired of raping her, so now I’m just torturing the bitch.”
Walker stared into the kitchen as the battered and abused girl turned her eyes on him and began to wiggle and squirm energetically. Her eyes were pleading with him. Walker felt his hunger start to rise. The girl looked like she was just barely in her teens.
“You hungry, Bro? Have a bite on me.” Jerry said as he gestured toward his suffering captive. He watched as Walker began to literally drool and his eyes glazed over with a murderous, carnivorous, lust. “What the hell are you man?”
Walker tore his eyes away from the helpless female with a concerted effort. He was hungry; maddeningly hungry. It was getting harder and harder for him to go on without feeding. “I’m a werewolf.” He said.
“Damn! You serious? You just say that like it’s no big deal. Like you just announced you were a dogcatcher or a postman or something. A werewolf? Damn! That’s deep.”
“I need your help, bro.”
“My help? Man, last time I seen you, you had your fangs bared and you were coming for my throat! Now you want me to help you?”
“Something’s after me.”
“What? What’s after you?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Something. Something bigger than a werewolf. Bigger and meaner. It attacked me in the dark three nights ago when I was . . . uh . . . eating. It jumped out at me and slashed me across the stomach. I thought it was just another werewolf trying to steal my kill. But then, when I looked at the wound it left . . .” Walker opened his jacket and raised his shirt revealing his ruined torso where nearly all the flesh had been torn off. You could see his lower intestines through the gaping holes in his skin.
“Jesus Christ! Man, how can you walk around like that?”
“It hurts like hell, trust. Damn thing almost ripped me in two with one swipe from its paw! I ain’t never seen a werewolf that could do that. Besides, the thing was like twice my size and I ain’t no little dude. I ran out of there as fast as I could and I thought that was it. But then the thing just kept following me. So I thought maybe I should get someone to help watch my back and you’re the only friend I’ve got. I can never see it, but I can smell it. I haven’t been able to hunt or nothing. I can’t let my guard down.”
“You have no idea what this thing is?”
“I think it’s an Isawiyya.”
“A what?!”
“An Isawiyya. It’s this sect of Moslems from North Africa called the Isawiyya. They worship this prophet from the sixteenth century named Ibn Isa. He was a fanatically devout Moslem who was supposed to have been given the ability by Allah to take on the forms of animals. He could become anything from a bull to a snake and even combinations of animal forms. He did this by consuming them during a frenzied prayer ritual. He used his powers to fight enemies of Allah. His followers tried to continue in his footsteps, but couldn’t mimic his abilities, despite all their prayers and sacrificing and shit. Until they discovered us . . . werewolves. They began hunting us and consuming us to acquire our abilities. Nearly wiped us all out.”
“And that’s what you think is after you? One of these Isawiyya dudes?”
“It’s the only thing I can think of.”
Jerry stood up and paced back and forth. He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and shook his head, staring at Walker. Then he started to pace again.
“Bro, I’m sorry, but this is all too deep for me. How the hell did you become a damn werewolf anyway? Did you get bit or something?”
“You don’t become a werewolf. You’re born that way. See, we ain’t really human. Not completely. We’ve just evolved to mimic our prey. The smarter man got the smarter and more human we became in order to fool him. To allow us to get close enough to strike. What? You think that every creature on this planet has a predator except man? That’s the kind of arrogance and skepticism that’s made it easier for us to walk among you.”
“Then, if you ain’t human, how can you call yourself my friend? What am I like a pet pig? You play with it for years, but if you ever get hungry . . . my ass is pork chops! Is that it, bro?”
“Naw, man. It ain’t like that. I’d never eat you. Werewolves have evolved to resemble humans so closely that it’s hard not to almost relate to you like we were the same species. Man, that shit that happened between us . . . I was all messed up. You don’t know what puberty is like for a werewolf. I was having a hard time controlling the hunger. Then that idiot Boom gave me some weed with some angel dust in it. That shit had me trippin’. That’s the only reason I attacked you back then. I was just trippin’! So, is you gonna help me or what?”
“So, you tellin’ me that there’s something out there, an Isawiyya or whatever, that’s got your big, bad, werewolf ass so scared that you come to me for help? And what the hell do you think I can do for you?”
“I may be a werewolf but you’re a stone-cold killer! You’ve been in and out of jail since I’ve known you. You probably killed more people than any brotha on the streets besides me.”
“Never convicted though. So what you gettin’ at?”
“I want you to take all those guns I know you got piled up in your closet and go out there and smoke that damn thing!”
Something heavy struck the steel door and almost took the entire thing out of the frame. There was a snarling and growling that sounded as if all the hordes of hell were amassed on Jerry’s front porch. Jerry leaped from the couch and stared at the front door with his eyes wild with fear.
“Naw. Hell naw! I ain’t going out there!”
“Well bro,” Walker’s entire body began to undulate as his muscles reshaped themselves and bones shifted around beneath his skin. There was a wet crackling and popping as his body metamorphosed. “It’s either go out there with that thing . . .” His nose and jaw
elongated into a snout and his already distended canines grew to grotesquely exaggerated proportion. His body was now that of an enormous wolf, with six inch fangs that looked almost pre-historic, and strangely anthropoid hands with opposable thumbs and all. It was a monster. “. . . or you can stay in here with me!”
Jerry turned and ran for the closet, for his guns. Walker turned and charged after him. That’s when the door exploded and a beast the size of a small car roared into the house. It caught Walker in its slavering jaws just as he’d sprung forward to attack Jerry. Jerry turned and stared in horror as this terrible creature, which looked like some horrible combination of a bear, a lion, and a man, tore into Walker.
Walker fought back, but there was no chance. The beast’s fangs ripped into him, tearing out huge chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole. There was a loud “Crack!” as the thing’s massive jaws and tusk-like canines clamped down on Walker’s arms, grinding them to mulch and preventing further resistance. Its claws rent through his skin and muscle tissue, slicing Walker to vibrant red ribbons. Walker was still futilely struggling as the monster burrowed its snout into his abdomen and disemboweled him; tearing out his stomach and intestines and greedily consuming them. Then it used its monstrous claws to crack open his ribcage and devour Walker’s still beating heart. While the thing was still distracted by its meal, Jerry opened his closet and pulled out his Mac-10 automatic rifle.
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 15