Wolfkind

by Stephen Melling

  Outside, all of the floodlights were switched on. The whisper of anxious gossip drifted in. Sirens were very close now.

  Joshua trailed his brother through to his windswept room. Nathan stepped over the dead gangster and stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the night. Flashing blue lights illuminated his face. “Nathaniel?” Joshua touched his arm.

  “I said get your stuff.”

  Joshua frowned, staring at the side of his brother’s head. His senses became overwhelmed by a feeling of wrongness. More than ever now he thought himself a stranger in a strange land. “But the renegades…”

  Nathan turned and squared up him, eyes blazing. “Stop using that word. There are no renegades...” He pushed past Joshua and looked out of the window.

  “But I saw renegades tonight,” Joshua insisted as he stuffed clothes into a bag. “Two of them.”

  Nathan, who was peering through the drapes at the arriving cavalry, turned and gave Joshua a stare full of menace. “Did you kill any?”

  Joshua ignored him. “What’s gotten into you-?”

  Nathan abruptly grabbed him. “I asked you a question,” he roared, eyes churning with fire. As his body temperature rose, his clothes released tendrils of steam. His fingers sank into the flesh of Joshua’s arms.

  “I killed no one.” Joshua said. “They got away.”

  Nathan scrutinized Joshua’s face for a moment, then released him, smoothing out the creased material. Outside, car doors opened and closed. He offered a cold, enigmatic smile. “You got wheels?”

  Joshua pointed. “Out on the street, the engine’s probably still running, I-”

  Nathan stepped up to the threshold, grinned over his shoulder, and then vanished into the storm.

  Joshua followed.

  As they broke from the motel they were assaulted by cries of ‘Freeze’ and ‘Hit the ground’ and ‘Don’t move’. Before the police could say or do anything else, Nathan and Joshua were thrashing through the bushes and bursting out onto Santa Monica Boulevard to the waiting Camaro. Nathan jumped behind the wheel like a bank robber in a getaway car, leaving Joshua no option but to ride shotgun.

  Nathan threw the Camaro into gear and screeched away from the curb. He lowered the window and pulled the gun from his waistband. Then he yanked the wheel and tramped the brakes, drawing the Camaro into a ninety-degree skid that left them broadside in the road. Three police cars braked and skidded to similar sideways halts. Nathan poked the P7 out of the window and squeezed off several rounds. One after the other, tires blew on the police cruisers. Before the police returned fire, or even drew their weapons, Nathan punched the gas.

  The Camaro was free-wheeling and away. Nathan glanced back once at the melee. No emotion showed on his face. At last he looked across at Joshua. “So,” he said. “You still have my old Camaro.” He stroked the steering. “Got myself the latest model. Beautiful - a fucking vision.”

  Part of what had happened to his brother became very clear to Joshua. Something had indeed gotten into him. Los Angeles had. The glitz and the glamour, the materialistic outlook of the western way.

  “Nathaniel?” Joshua straightened in his seat. “What have you been doing?”

  “Nathan,” he said. “Call me Nathan.”

  “Last I remember you were hunting Renegades.” Joshua said.

  Nathan shook his head pitifully. “Joshua, you dumb son of a bitch. How long have you been in Los Angeles?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There are no renegades.” He reduced speed and fell in with the flow of traffic. “Remember the Blue flame killer out in Phoenix that Barlow sent me after, the one who raped and mutilated his victims – he was the last of them.”

  “But the atrocities in Los Angeles-” Joshua said.

  “The work of civilians,” Nathan interrupted. “Just your run-of-the-mill regular working-class weasels. The shit we saw on CNN a year ago was a feud between a street gang and that Fox Hills kingpin, Reagan. Taking turns at butchering one another. In my role as ‘Renegade hunter’ I tailed some ghetto kids to the home of one of Regan’s enforcers. Big guy called Garroto.

  “They got him when he was sleeping. Dragged his kids out of bed and hauled them into the room. They shot them all, but only after gang raping his wife. Afterwards they rammed a Remington twelve gauge up her snatch and then fought amongst themselves for the privilege of pulling the trigger.”

  At first Joshua couldn’t speak. “How...how do you know all of this?”

  “Saw it all happen. I got up on the porch roof beneath the window. After killing Garroto they trashed the place, stealing anything not bolted down. My introduction to Los Angeles.”

  They joined the San Diego Freeway and proceeded south. Light drizzle softened the edges of the twilight city, and the wind kept it sweeping in horizontal veils.

  Joshua expression was grim. “Nathaniel, back at the motel – you attacked the girl, but she isn’t a renegade – and if you really believe the renegades are gone you must have known that.”

  Nathan dismissed his words with an impatient flick of his hand. “After the Garroto hit I laid low for a couple of weeks. I ran out of cash and found work with a guy I met in a bar. By then I’d cut myself off from Barlow.”

  “Why?” Joshua asked.

  “I saw through him,” Nathan said gravely. He negotiated a bend too sharply and the tires squealed. “All along the old bastard was lying to us. He wanted rid of us for his own song and dance. I know you thought his kill-all-the-renegades crusade noble and right, but scrape off the poetry and you’re left with an old man who messed up and then found God. Didn’t want to go to Hell so he tried to make amends by killing the people that his error – his fuck-up, infected.” Nathan’s grip tightened on the steering; the column began to groan and buckle. The Speedo needle crept to sixty-five.

  Joshua shook his head vehemently. “Barlow hunted renegades because of the threat they posed. Our being here is – always was – an error. He wanted to save people, not himself.” A voice at the back of Joshua’s mind scoffed. He got the unsettling impression that he was playing Devil’s Advocate.

  “Bullshit.” Nathan said. “The old man’s intentions were selfish. Once all the renegades were gone he’d have killed the rest of us. Did you never wonder what happened to the others, Joshua?”

  “The other Wolfkind?”

  Nathan took his eyes off the road to look at him. “Barlow killed them – killed them all, but only after they’d done his dirty work. You were the last. After I played dead I knew that sooner or later he’d send you. Had you found and killed a renegade, he would’ve welcomed you back into the fold, tucked you up in bed and shot you in your sleep.”

  “I can’t believe any of this,” Joshua said, but something inside him sat up and started to take notice, a part of him that always suspected Barlow was hiding the truth.

  Nathan laughed. “The old man’s dying, terrified of hell, he wants peace with God. Joshua, he’d have killed you. And then the old bastard, with his penance paid in full and his soul smelling sweet, would have died a peaceful man. Welcome to the real world, Joshua.”

  Joshua felt his brother’s eyes on him. He could not look into them. If what Nathaniel said was true then in less than an hour Joshua had gone from being a defender of the faithful, savior of the human race as he knew it, to a fool-hardy pawn carrying out the wishes of a desperate old man. Deep down he felt the crushing logic of his brother’s claims.

  And Genna. Lovely Genna. A twinge of hurt pressed against his chest, the tug of an indefinable emotion. His short acquaintance with the young woman represented the best moments of his life. In New Hampshire his life had amounted to a sterile backwater existence in a nondescript room, gazing through a window at a world in which he had dreamed of living. A world that did not want him.

  For an hour Genna Delucio drove aimlessly through the storm-lashed streets of Santa Monica and West Adams. Turning randomly at junctions and stop lights until she became lost. At
one point she braked late for a red light and overshot the line. A vagrant leaned over the hood, his dirty palm turned up. Genna did not see the vagrant; she saw a grinning monster; nor the grimy palm, but a hooked talon. When the light turned green she revved away, narrowly missing the hobo’s feet.

  She drove west until she hit the Pacific Coast Highway, where she took the southbound carriageway. The storm front barreled in off the ocean armed with squalls of rain and seawater. The car swerved in the gale. Several times Genna nearly lost control of the wheel and clung on tightly. Pain flared in her shoulder and a hiss of breath escaped her. She remembered tumbling across the room and thumping into the wall. Vague recollections of blacking out flitted at the fringes of her memory, teasing her with macabre scenes of a staring monster.

  Tears filled her eyes, doubled and tripled her vision. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. But the tears kept coming so she pulled over to the roadside, flicked on the hazards, and wept. She cried for her comatose sister; she cried for the loss of herself to her father’s world of mayhem and murder, she cried because she was simply frightened and alone and needed comfort. In the absence of a sympathetic shoulder she gripped her sides and hugged herself, crying and rocking gently, most of all mourning her fall from innocence.

  She resurfaced several minutes later experiencing peculiar solemnity. Her sense of grief dwindled to a pinpoint until she felt nothing. No longer did the implication of her actions stab her conscience, nor did she attempt to rationalize an explanation of her inhuman attacker. She did not think of Joshua. A different mindset, one that did not insist she adhere to any moral code or practice, was pulling her strings.

  Coldly, she pondered her new title: a murderer. And as a person already condemned to perdition, was prepared to contemplate a particular plan she had long neglected. Killing was no longer taboo.

  She rejoined the highway and drove with purpose and direction.

  And with a promise to keep.

  As he steered the Camaro, Nathan talked feverishly of Barlow’s elaborate deception and ultimate betrayal; the lies they were fed; the truths they were denied. Although Joshua was now aware of Barlow’s hidden agenda, he was not altogether convinced his motives were entirely selfish. Whatever your politics, Wolfkind were a serious risk. If the infection became widespread (here Nathan lost himself to another outburst of anger claiming that the term ‘infection’ implied they were a disease), then any semblance of social order would disintegrate.

  Nathan dismissed Joshua’s pessimism as remnants of Barlow’s indoctrination, fallout from the daily religious ravings, the near brain-washing they had endured through childhood. He assured Joshua that experience would erase Barlow’s imposed ignorance.

  The Camaro finally turned off the road and crunched along an overgrown drive until the headlights splashed the back wall of an empty garage. Instead of drawing the car into shelter, Nathan parked outside, leaving the keys swinging from the ignition. Overhead, hidden in the mist and rain, a plane cut through the sky, engines screaming.

  “You live here?” Joshua craned his neck to look up at the house.

  Nathan ignored him and slipped out of the car.

  The wrongness Joshua detected earlier was in the air again. Every warning receptor in his mind jangled. Inside him a revelation formed, swimming at the fringes of his understanding, answers to what had happened to Nathaniel. He followed his brother up onto the porch.

  Inside the house was cool and smelled of new leather. The art deco was ultra modern, clean, almost bare. A large-screened television played the haunting strains of a U2 ballad to an unoccupied leather sofa. Behind the sofa, a laminated table map stood beneath a suspended brass lamp. While Nathan busied himself at a drinks cabinet, Joshua wandered over to the map.

  Nathan cracked open a bottle of scotch and poured triple measures into a pair of tumblers. He never took his eyes off Joshua for longer than a couple of seconds.

  Joshua inspected the street-level map; the LA boroughs were intricately detailed, much like in the kind of maps police-precincts have pinned up in incident rooms. Joshua leaned close and noticed several locations were ringed with a red magic marker. One of them indicated Fletcher Regan’s Fox Hills mansion. Another marked Delbert Johnson’s warehouse in Inglewood. Joshua’s belly tightened. A dreadful dawning realization came over him.

  Nathan pressed a glass of scotch into Joshua’s palm. He accepted it numbly but did not drink. His gaze wandered from Nathan to the points marked on the street-map. The location of his own motel was circled in red. He dragged his fingers through the marker pen, the tips came away stained red from the still wet ink.

  “We are not abominations,” Nathan said, and downed half of the scotch in one gulp. “In this last year, I stopped hating myself.”

  All pieces of the puzzle slipped into place. He looked up from the map to his brother.

  “I was going to send for you.”

  Joshua’s mouth fell open. “It’s you. You’re the Invisible Assassin.” It made perfect sense. Only Wolfkind could have pulled off the hits. Renegades acting alone would have stumbled by now; their sway over the animal instinct was keen, but limited. Only a pure Wolfkind could be so systematic. “All along, it was you.”

  Nathan sneered. “What are you going to do,” he said. “Shoot me?” He turned his back on Joshua and replenished his glass. “The world isn’t the fairy tale we were led to believe. It’s still a jungle, roads and buildings instead of trees and rivers, but the politics are the same. Natural selection, brother.”

  Trying to set down his drink, Joshua caught the edge of the table, sending the amber fluid to the floor. The tumbler smashed into hundreds of pieces. “You’re the killer,” he said again. “The renegade I saw tonight wasn’t you….”

  Nathan nodded. “I’ve taken steps. Including you, there are four of us. So far three have been sufficient.”

  “Sufficient for what?”

  “For the hits, of course.”

  Joshua raised his hands to his temples as though suffering a migraine. He struggled for the right words. “Nathan, what you’re doing here is…is not right. You can’t kill people like they’re cattle. One thing Barlow taught us that wasn’t a lie is that you cannot kill people. Even before Barlow we lived by certain codes. The cardinal rule - we do not harm humans.” He banged his fist on the table for punctuation. “The rule was broken and now we have renegades.”

  “Humans are far more ruthless.” Nathan started to pace. “They have a scrap-book detailing acts of self-destruction we could never surpass.”

  Joshua started to protest, but Nathan was not listening.

  “Look at the last fifty years: armed conflict, riots, chemical and biological warfare, death camps, genocide, Vietnam and Korea. The world’s regressing, Joshua. Civilization’s peaked. It’s had its shot. Out there on the streets everyone’s at war. Over two hundred thousand gang members roam the boroughs of Los Angeles, every one devoted to killing, robbing and raping. It’s not creation they thrive on it is self destruction.” He said the last two words in Joshua’s face, daring him to disagree.

  Joshua became aware of the Beretta’s weight against his ribcage. He believed now the gun condemned him. Not the renegade.

  “Look me in the eye,” said Nathan, “and tell me I should kill myself to protect this accumulation of human scum.”

  Joshua swallowed thickly. “It’s no justification for what you’re doing – it’s an excuse. You’re Wolfkind and are bound by different rules. Nathan, you know as well as I do: we don’t belong here. This isn’t our place.”

  Nathan searched Joshua’s eyes. “Not our place? Not one of them? Then by that definition you were fucking Durant’s daughter for recreation.”

  “Genna and I are not - we’re friends.” Joshua averted his eyes.

  Nathan laughed. “Do you know why I was at your motel tonight? Your ‘friend’s’ father offered me fifty thousand dollars to rub you out. I was paid to kill you, Joshua.”

&nbs
p; “You work for Durant?”

  “A temporary arrangement. In six months I’ve reduced organized crime to a single family, one that’s paid me to do the people I would have greased anyway. After I’ve made the pick-up for the Johnson hit, Durant and I are through. I’ll take him out. Then I’ll run the whole of the West Coast. I am untouchable.”

  Joshua swiveled his head at his brother. “The government will come down on you with all they’ve got. They’ll crush you.”

  Nathan waved the comment away and beckoned Joshua to follow him to the back room. A picture window offered a stunning panoramic view of the lighted metropolis. The rain had stopped and the city’s structures twinkled like diamonds in Aladdin’s cave. Lights of incoming aircraft blinked over the city, lending the image a hint of the futuristic. “Look at it,” Nathan said. “This is the focal point of the planet. The nucleus of the known universe. It’s like a magnet that draws people from all over the country. It’s all there for the taking, not to the highest bidder, but the strongest arm. We can run it, Joshua, you and I. The others we bring along, they’ll revere you as the only other pure Wolfkind. You’ll be a Prince.”

  His hypnotic voice worked on Joshua, the measured tones a persuasive cadence nudging at his confused mind. Almost against his will, he gazed out over the city sprawl, the criss-cross network of streetlights, the winking of headlamps and slow progress of an incoming airliner. Deep inside him an instinct, born of his primitive origins, tentatively welcomed his brother’s apocalyptic vision. Whether that the only alternative was solitude, he found the notion of embracing his Wolfkind identity darkly attractive. The simplistic mischievousness felt restful and natural. In that moment he empathized with his brother.

  “Yeeeess!” whispered Nathan, reacting to the vibrations that betrayed Joshua’s thoughts. He sidled up to him. “You and me, running the city. Nothing will go down without our approval. We’ll clear out the pitiful street gangs, smash all who stand in our way. It’ll be the ultimate act of tribal cleansing. You like the Durant girl. Make her one of us. She’s already seen what we are now so there’s little choice either way.”