Wolfkind

by Stephen Melling

  The night was breezy, though thanks to the recent rainstorm, reasonably clear of the nigh on omnipresent Los Angeles pollution. They strolled out of the hospital boundary in the general direction of the San Gabriel foothills, the lights of which gave off star-like twinkles. They turned down a quieter road lined with enormous palm trees. The pavement surrounding the broad trunks was cracked and uneven. A few dead fronds littered the path. The road was free of traffic, lending the night a touch of the surreal.

  It was Joshua who broke the silence. “I see now why you won’t leave Los Angeles.”

  Genna sighed. “What am I to do? Leave her to my father’s two-monthly calls and the brisk visit by nurses who turn her on her side to prevent bed sores, treating her like she wasn’t there?” She sighed again. “I’m in jail. I can’t take her with me; my father would fight me all the way.”

  “You miss her, don’t you?” Joshua said.

  “Suzy was so full of life,” Genna said. “You should’ve seen her at twenty – biggest Tomboy this side of Vegas: five feet ten, a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, short hair, flat-chested, wrangler jeans, and high-arched cowboy boots.” Genna laughed. “She was more a brother than a sister.”

  Twin headlights appeared at the road end. Nearby trees threw undulating shadows across the pavement.

  “It comes to this,” Genna said resolutely. “I’d want someone to pull the plug on that damn machine.” She threw a desperate, helpless look at Joshua, pleading for his approval.

  “It’s a lot to ask of someone,” he said.

  Genna searched his face. “Surely not for someone who loves you.”

  “I’ve never known that kind of love,” he said after a minute.

  She squeezed his hands and leaned into him. He placed his arms tentatively around her shoulders and she sank into his embrace. “I know this sounds,” she said into his shirt. “But I’m sort of glad I knocked you down.”

  Joshua looked over her shoulder. A car was crawling toward them along the curb. Behind it, another car – a Maroon Pontiac that seemed oddly familiar. With a squeal of tires, the vehicle swerved across the carriageway onto the wrong side of the road. Its high beams washed over them.

  Genna turned one way and then the other, the headlights pinning her in the glare. Her look of surprise quickly tightened into a snarl of fury and her sensitivity quickly evaporated. She stepped in front of Joshua, feet apart, like a tennis player receiving a serve. “This is what I tried warning you about,” she said.

  “Friends of your father?”

  “Employees,” she said. “The sonofabitch has no friends.”

  Screeching brakes heralded the arrival of the two cars, angled to the sidewalk. Doors flew open and several men spilled out. Joshua recognized two of them from his visit to Durant’s lair, Oliviera and Rolands. The rest were strangers. By unspoken agreement they moved away from the cars and slowly fanned out.

  Genna stood her ground. “Stay the hell away from me and my friends.”

  Hugh Oliveira pointed at Joshua. “He’s an imposter.”

  “Get lost,” Genna said through gritted teeth. “I’ve already heard this.”

  “Not all of it.” He grabbed a stack of photographs from his buddy and held them up in front of Genna’s face. Left and right on the sidewalk, the other gangsters cut off any escape route.

  Genna glanced at the photograph Oliveira held up. She saw the clear image of Joshua eyeing up her BMW. Oliviera flipped to the next picture, and then the next. They showed Joshua peering through the window, opening the door, fleeing the parking lot after triggering the BMW’s alarm.

  She turned and faced Joshua.

  “I can…explain,” he said.

  Hugh Oliviera stepped closer to Genna. “Come with us, quickly.”

  Genna looked from Joshua to Oliviera, confused and hurt. “I’m going nowhere,” she said.

  Oliviera gave a barely perceptible nod to one of his men. At the same moment he lunged forward and grabbed Genna’s arm, snatched her away from Joshua, using his superior weight to control her. Rolands snagged her other arm and they dragged her toward the nearest car. “What are you…let me go.”

  The men on the sidewalk drew guns and held them on Joshua. Their weapons, Joshua noted, were equipped with noise suppressors; these guys meant business. But, for the moment, they seemed content to hold him.

  Genna’s protesting broke his temporary paralysis.

  He flexed the latent power.

  The two men covering him stood to his left and right. Joshua feigned a lurch forward, deliberately drawing the men toward him. As they moved in, he threw out both hands, grabbed handfuls of their suits and bashed them together like cymbals. Instead of releasing them, he brought them together once again and they collapsed bonelessly.

  Oliviera and Rolands were forcing Genna onto the Pontiac’s back seat. She was not going quietly. Indeed, she fought harder than they had probably anticipated. Kicking, wriggling, and punching, she bopped Rolands with flailing fist and bloodied his nose. He straightened in shock, fingers flying to his leaking nostrils; they came away wet and red. The big man raised his fist, snarling and spitting.

  Joshua got in his way.

  He deflected Rolands’ forearm and grabbed a handful of his shirt. The unfortunate gangster must have thought God Himself had reached down and plucked him from the surface of the earth. Joshua threw him ten feet onto the windscreen of the other car. Rolands landed like a beached fish, squirming in the web of windscreen cracks.

  Oliviera made one last attempt to push Genna onto the Pontiac’s back seat, thrust his hand into his jacket and pulled his gun, drew a lightning bead on Joshua, aiming for his chest, dead center.

  Joshua moved his body left and right and snaked out a hand, snatching the sidearm. Oliveira blinked at his magically empty palms and his dislocated index finger. Joshua disengaged the clip and smashed the weapon against the pavement. Genna, still half in half out the car, kicked out and caught Oliviera squarely in the butt. He stumbled to his knees; Joshua caught him by the throat, lifted him off the floor and slammed him against the roof of the car, denting steel and shattering the smoked-glass sunroof.

  Genna scrambled free, eyes flicking from left to right. Oliviera squirmed in the gutter at her feet. His partner rolled off the hood of the second car and hit his head on the curb, grunting and bleeding from several cuts on his face.

  Joshua remained motionless on the sidewalk, hands by his sides, his expression solemn, like the naughty schoolboy caught playing truant. Less than a minute had elapsed since the cars drew up, yet four men lay incapacitated and moaning on the floor at his feet.

  As the gangsters regrouped, Genna turned on them. “Get out of here.”

  She turned. “Joshua…I’m so sorry.”

  He couldn’t look at her. On the floor at their feet were photographs of him clearly staking out her car.

  “Miss Durant,” Oliviera said, his forehead bleeding and his hair sticking up in an eagle’s crest. He was armed now with a micro Uzi. “Pretty please – get in the fucking car.”

  Genna’s mouth fell open. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  Joshua leaped between her and the Uzi. At that moment Oliviera raised the barrel and started to squeeze the trigger. Joshua pushed Genna one way, and moved the other, drawing the fire away from her. Genna stumbled into the low hedgerow bordering the property overlooking the road. She lost her balance, arms pin-wheeling madly, and went down.

  Fire spat from the Uzi, the noise suppressor damping the otherwise deafening bam-bam of bullets. Intermittent muzzle flash illuminated the immediate vicinity like muted fireworks, reflecting off the Sedan’s paintwork. Several 9mm rounds smashed into Joshua’s chest. The impact shuddered through his body but didn’t knock him down. As Oliveira moved to squeeze off another burst, Joshua grabbed the weapon with both hands, and then twisted violently to the left. Oliviera’s wrists twirled around each other like maypole ribbons, and he performed a half-assed cartwheel. Hands twi
sted and broken, he fell screaming to the floor.

  Joshua spun the Uzi into a firing position and directed a three round burst into the pavement. Sparks flew. Bullets careened into the cars. One of the fleeing men caught a ricocheting round in the leg, and he announced to Jesus Christ Almighty that he had been shot.

  Respectful of Joshua’s superior firepower, the gangsters, tripping over one another, retreated to their cars, leaving Oliveira to crawl back on his knees.

  Joshua loosed another burst of Uzi fire. “Leave, or I’ll shoot you.” His voice deepened and his eyes glimmered. His shoulders strained against the material of his shirt. Two of the seams gave with delicate ripping sounds. His respiration became labored. And his voice was no longer his own. “Go!” he roared.

  One after the other the engines fired up and the vehicles grated against each other as they moved in opposite directions. One of them dragged a loose bumper, trailing a shower of sparks in its wake.

  Joshua lowered the weapon. The glow in his eyes faded.

  With leaves in her hair and dirt on her knees, Genna clambered to her feet and hurried to Joshua. Up at the nearest house a porch light flickered on. She stopped in front of him. “Oh my God,” she sobbed. “I never believed they’d try this.”

  Joshua fell back a step. His hand crept to his chest to cover the gunshot wounds. Blood seeped through his fingers, staining them red-black in the shade of the palm trees. With the weapon still in his hands, he crossed his arms over his chest, as though lying in state. He could not hide this. The Uzi had unveiled his secret. By all rights of the human world he should be dead now.

  And then she did see the blood. “You’ve been shot.”

  He retreated farther. “No. Don’t…touch me.”

  “Oh, Joshua. Joshua …you’re bleeding.”

  Genna became aware of his apparent indifference to the trauma. She cocked her head; the look in her eye changed, and she withdrew her hands. Perhaps she realized the sequence of events was not unraveling as it should. Joshua had been shot at close range with an automatic weapon, but he was still on his feet. Tradition was being ignored.

  A new look, one of damning revelation, formed on her face. And with it, his connection with Genna Delucio started to crumble. She drew away from him. “Joshua?” Each syllable carried its own damning emphasis.

  The gulf separating them sprang wildly apart. The time they had spent, the special moments they had shared in the hospital and on the beach, curled up and died. Joshua felt stung by an over-bright moment of clarity. Lost and abandoned in the profound loneliness of his identity, he saw himself as the quasi-lupine creature he was, masquerading as a human in order to taste their sweet life. A liar; a cheat; a freak. All the lectures given by Barlow reared their heads and roared in his face.

  Up at the houses more porch lights came on. Several people stood at their doors, shielding their eyes from the lights, looking over, all of them pointing, pointing at him. Joshua’s eyes flitted left and right. All of a sudden it seemed the land itself had been alerted to his trespass.

  Worst of all was Genna’s expression. A look he had seen a thousand times in the darkest recesses of his mind, formed over the years by the steady influence of Barlow’s systematic condemnation of Joshua’s kind; a look of fear, of disbelief, of denial, and ultimately of revulsion. Seeing that look of horror he had nurtured like a dirty secret in the back of his mind finally find form in Genna’s eyes was too much for him to take.

  He dragged his gaze away from her face and looked down at the space between them, which widened as he took three lumbering backward steps, turned and almost tripped, and then fled. The wind roaring past his ears could not drown the whispers of the emerging residents. Their many voices melded into a single voice, branding him the outsider. Above this communal accusation rose Genna’s voice, pleading for him to come back, but he paid it no heed.

  Along the sidewalk he fled, his motion whipping up dust devils, his shadow growing and shrinking beneath the streetlights. Dimly he realized he still carried the Uzi, the very weapon that had exposed him. He drew back his arm, and in his stride, smashed the weapon into the trunk of a massive palm tree. Several strands of dead fronds sifted down in his wake.

  The damning voices persisted, deep inside his head now. He was a liar, a cheat, a freak!

  In the dimness of his motel room, with blood drying on his skin, Joshua tore off his shirt and dumped it in the waste-paper basket. Beneath the gold amulet, three partially healed bullet wounds described a diagonal slash across his chest. He examined them in the bathroom mirror, traced a path with his finger around the wound puckered edges – he felt the foreign objects inside him, shifting under peristaltic control. The flesh contracted, constricting the bullets, forcing them to the surface. His eyes became scarlet. He inhaled deeply, and on the exhale, each of the bullet wounds puckered, the flesh writhed, gave birth to the piece of lead that made it. Once the rounds were purged, the flesh pulsated, the wounds shrank and closed.

  After rinsing his hands under the cold tap, he pulled on a fresh shirt and paced the room. He held the amulet tightly in his fist, drawing direction from it, a sense of purpose. Events of the last hour replayed in his mind. Finally he let go of the amulet and telephoned Barlow.

  While waiting for an answer he listened to the sound of people frolicking by the pool beyond his window. A girl squealed; there was a splash, followed shortly by laughter. Their sounds of play a cruel reminder of the canyon separating his kind and…and their kind. Barlow trashed the concept of love, branding it a man-made emotion that defied logic and reason; when a man ventured into the realms of love, he placed himself at the mercy of another’s whim.

  Right now, those definitions made painful sense to Joshua. Could he have been falling in love with Genna Delucio? Is that why he was hurting so much?

  Barlow finally answered, his voice frail. “Hello?”

  Joshua found he could not speak.

  “Who is this?”

  Good question.

  “Joshua?”

  Joshua slapped the phone down and rose in front of mirror. He no longer needed Barlow to remind him who he was. He knew who he was; he knew what he was. And he had learned the hard way. Perhaps in the end the only way. A steely resolution came over him.

  He stared unflinching at his reflection. In the light of new experience the truth about who he was showed plainly in his eyes. His distraction with the girl, though short and bittersweet, was over. Maybe the brief affair had acted as a catalyst, forcing him to finally accept his identity. For the moment, he forgot about the girl.

  He was not the same as the girl.

  He was the last vigilante.

  He was Joshua Grenire.

  He was Wolfkind.

  Delbert Johnson

  Joshua drove across the city with an air of calm totally new to him. He found that when he discarded his doubts and embraced his instinct – to hunt and kill – all at once his life became simple, uncomplicated, black and white. As Nathanial always saw it.

  He parked the Camaro two blocks from the Inglewood warehouse and waited a moment in the stillness of the car. He pressed a hand lightly against the shoulder holster. The Beretta’s cold metal was warming against his skin. This was too easy. Hunting and tracking was proving significantly easier than masquerading as human.

  This after all was the reason he came west. Like or not, he was in his niche. Somewhere along the way his brother had unfortunately failed. Now it was his turn. And it was imperative that he succeed. If he failed, there would be no one and nothing left to stop the assassin.

  A sudden flicker of light somewhere amongst the buildings ahead caught his eye. He leaned forward and scanned the ranks of shadowy structures beyond the alleyway. There. Straight ahead – a flare of orange light, brief but bright, followed by quick bursts of automatic fire. A short, terrified scream rose distantly, as though the doors of Hell briefly opened.

  It came from the warehouse.

  Johnson was being h
it.

  Still buoyed by the hunter mindset, Joshua quickly abandoned the Camaro and ran alongside dilapidated buildings and onto the broad concrete forecourt. The smell of urban decay, old bricks, plaster, debris from falling-down buildings, assailed his nostrils. Johnson’s warehouse loomed over him, in complete darkness except for the intermittent flash of muzzle-fire illuminating what looked like sniper slits in the brickwork.

  The entrance, a denser wall of blackness, lay ahead of him. With the wind rushing by his ears, the sound of gunfire growing louder, Joshua angled his run across the forecourt. His movement was slick, sure-footed and silent. A burst of adrenaline heightened his animalistic senses. At the doorway he caught the smell of blood and cordite.

  A twenty-five or- six-year-old Jamaican was slumped in the doorway, a micro Uzi still in his severed hand. It lay by the eviscerated body in a pile of steaming entrails. The weapon was unfired. The hand still twitched.

  Joshua drew the Beretta, leaped over the corpse and was enveloped by the gloom. The only light reaching into the corridors came from the sniper slits, yet Joshua’s vision of the interior was of almost daylight quality. His monochrome view of the floor revealed three more bodies. Throats steaming tangles of ripped flesh and cartilage. Arterial spray stained the floor, oozed down the walls.

  Joshua felt no fear, only mounting anger. These murderers represented the side of him that alienated him from humankind; that forbade his living among the masses. He thought fleetingly of the stuffed Timber wolf in the glass case.

  Confused by the building’s acoustics, Joshua could not pin-point the source of shooting and screaming. Each scream, each shout, each volley of gunfire echoed repeatedly off the walls, creating a miss-matched cacophony of noises, like a hellish carnival. As though the warehouse had found a voice for the terror, screaming through its walls and floors and ceilings.

  A man’s voice that sounded near, though was perhaps many rooms distant: “Pleeeeaaaasssee, no-” ending with crunching suddenness and the deepest of growls.