Wolfkind

by Stephen Melling

  “No!” Joshua tore his gaze away from the city view, the spell broken. “We can’t infect others. It’s not just wrong - it’s rotten. And so long as I live I will never create a renegade.”

  Anger flew wildly out of Nathan. His eyes blazed fiery red, his skin crawled. For a moment Joshua thought Nathan would attack him. “I told you not to use that word.”

  “That’s what they are,” Joshua said. “You’ve given them a new name to hide from yourself. They’re renegades. The downside of Wolfkind nature, savage and uncontrolled. Nathaniel, for God’s sake think about what the hell you’re doing.”

  “Maybe you’d better think about what you’re doing.” He stepped toward him. “All of this will go down with or without you. This game plan was in motion while you were listening to midnight horror stories from Barlow. I run things. Me. If you want in, your seat’s reserved. If you don’t, leave now and stay gone. Don’t be getting hung on the ideas Barlow stuffed your head with.”

  Joshua looked back across the city. Out there, somewhere beneath all of those lights, waited Genna. Warm and caring, beautiful Genna. In Nathan’s world she would become a killer. Or Nathan would kill her.

  “I can’t let you do this.”

  “What?” Nathan spread his hands. “You gonna shoot me with Barlow’s Beretta?” He held out the hand, his eyes dropping to Joshua’s holster. “Give it to me – you no longer need it.”

  Joshua drew the gun. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Well, fuck me.” Nathan said. “Great white hunter going to add my hide to his trophy cabinet? Barlow would slap your back, offer you milk and cookies then blow your head off before you could make crumbs on his carpet.” He reached for the weapon.

  Joshua pulled the trigger. The report was deafening and a thin cloud of smoke rose from the barrel. A side window blew out behind Nathan, showering the patio with glass. A breeze entered the room, lifting the hair from Nathan’s face, where a Mona Lisa smile toyed at his lips. He seemed unfazed by the gunshot, though did not move any closer. His black sweat-top smoked where the Beretta’s venom scraped.

  “Murder is just not in you, Joshua.” Nathan said with pity. “Who knows, maybe it never will be. Barlow was right leaving you until last. The rest of us were born killers, whereas yourself…you were born with a goddamn conscience. I think that scared Barlow more than anything. You were the youngest, and you had a human conscience. That’s why I know you won’t shoot.”

  Joshua slowly holstered the pistol. Nathan was right – he was not about to kill his brother.

  Nathan smiled. Then all at once the bile green odor of his fury spewed forth, alerting Joshua to the imminent danger. In a micro second he discarded all thoughts and regrets, embraced his hair-trigger sense of self-preservation. At the last moment he saw the gleam of a Beretta, a pistol identical to Joshua’s, loaded with similarly doctored rounds. Nathan produced the gun from the back of his waistband, an almost, but not altogether, sad expression on his face.

  As Nathan drew a bead, Joshua deliberately tarried until he heard the trigger-mechanism being activated; only then did he act, when Nathan had fully committed himself to firing. Like a sprinter jumping the gun, Joshua cart-wheeled through the patio doors, falling in a glass rainfall down the steps to the paving below. The slug passed within inches of his head and blew out another window.

  Joshua rolled over twice and came up running. A second shot ricocheted off the brickwork, sending shards of splintered masonry into his face. Before Nathan drew another bead, Joshua turned on the jets and sped around the side of the house.

  Overgrown shrubbery pulled and snagged his clothes, retarding his progress. He burst through the Laurel hedge, breaking off several boughs which he kicked and dragged halfway across the drive. An instant later he leaped over the Camaro’s hood and slid behind the wheel. The engine roared and the car lurched, spitting gravel, fishtailing onto the highway. In the mirror he caught a fleeting glimpse of Nathan leaping down the porch steps, the Beretta held out before him. A succession of bullets pinged into the driver’s door. None found their target.

  When he had put a hundred or so yards between him and the house, Joshua looked over his shoulder. Nathan did not appear at the gate. At the first opportunity Joshua turned off the street and took a series of right and left turns. Finally he joined the northbound lane of the San Diego Freeway.

  Would Nathan come after him? He didn’t think so. Genna Delucio was in the greater danger. She had witnessed Wolfkind first hand. Nathan would not stop until he found her.

  Genna.

  Joshua looked at his reflection – his eyes were wide and haunted. Regardless of what Genna now thought or believed, he had to find her before Nathaniel did.

  The Medical Center parking lot was less than half full when Genna pulled up at ten after midnight. At this hour the hospital functioned with the serenity of a rest home. Inside the building her footsteps echoed eerily. Her heart thumped so heavily she fancied she could hear it pounding against her ribcage. Heading for the elevator she kept her eyes forward, unable to meet the gazes of passing nurses.

  Once inside the carriage, with the doors wheezing across the gap, Genna removed her dark glasses and stared at her reflection in the mirrored walls. Her eyes were puffy and dark, bloodshot and weary; the eyes of a drug abuser. A Gallery of bruises ran from her right cheek to her forehead; flakes of dried blood clung to her chin. Hers was the face of a victim. Oh, but her eyes were the eyes of a culprit, a killer. She could see it.

  She functioned under the influence of that peculiar kind of detachment, not quite in control of her arms and legs, as if her soul was floating away. The upstanding citizen she always strived to be had all but departed. Cruelly detached from the simple righteousness that was the birthright of every man, woman and child. She was an outsider.

  The elevator reached her floor. Two doctors stepped in as she stepped out. Realizing the state of her face she quickly put on her dark glasses and moved past them. Over her shoulder, the doors wheezed together.

  She started down the corridor, her thoughts turning to Suzanne, who was imprisoned within the insensate shell of a redundant body. Helpless in every way. Profoundly alone. Suffering an eternity of silence from which she was powerless to turn her face; which indeed she would if only she were able. The reason Genna knew this was that Suzanne foresaw it after being shot. Genna had been first to her sister’s side and before succumbing to her injuries, Suzanne had spoken.

  From the room came the strident chords of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. She looked once more up and down the corridor and then slipped quietly into the room.

  Suzanne stared sightlessly at the ceiling. A strong, almost sickly fragrance of strawberries circulated in the air. Right now Genna found the aroma cloying and offensive, a poor substitute for the real thing. She rounded the bed and switched off the CD player. Without the music to contend with, the noise from the life support machinery held sway. The ventilator cumbersome and ugly, Victorian, appearing to Genna what it represented to her sister – a manacle, shackling her to a half life she so no longer wanted.

  Suzanne swallowed thickly and her throat clicked. A reflex action. But the remnant of what could be interpreted as a smile stayed on her lips. Genna dragged out the chair and sat down beside her, took her sister’s limp hand, squeezed the cool fingers. The vestige of a smile remained on Suzanne’s lips; as if she knew something Genna didn’t.

  “Oh Suzanne,” Genna said. “Where to begin.” Her eyes wandered to the window, where the lights of the city twinkled beyond the glass. “Something’s happened to me.” She pulled a weary hand along her face. Suzanne’s unseeing gaze remained fixed implacably on the ceiling. Genna kissed her hand. Pressed the palm against her cheek. “…I’m ready now.”

  Suzanne swallowed again. The trace of the enigmatic smile remained. Genna considered telling her sister nothing of what had happened, and instead fill her mind with sweet stories of a content life; but if Suzanne was indeed aware,
as Joshua believed, she would know. Deceit had never been a part of their rapport; to introduce falsity now, with the intent of coloring the gray from Genna’s world, would hit Suzanne harder than a bullet.

  “I killed a man tonight,” Genna whispered.

  After letting the phone ring for over two minutes Joshua hung up. Genna was either not at home or was not answering the phone. He picked up again and started to redial, but then thrust the receiver back into its cradle. Leaving his quarter in the returned coins cup he hurried back to his Camaro.

  He gripped the wheel and stared pensively through the windshield. She would not go home. Nor would she go to the police. And by her own admission she had few friends. Her father’s place was out of the question. She had no relatives to speak of and her only sibling lay in a coma at the-

  “Damn!” he keyed the ignition.

  Fifteen minutes later Joshua pulled onto the Medical Center parking lot. He looked up at the spot-lit building. White-clad figures moved across several of the brightly lit windows. An ambulance, its siren blaring and lights flashing, pulled out of a bay and onto the road. After it passed, Joshua found himself staring at the dented front bumper of Genna’s BMW. She was here.

  He exited his Camaro and hurried over to the BMW, cupped his hands to the windscreen. The car was empty, but he sensed Genna’s presence. His spirits lifted. She was – fifteen minutes ago anyway – alive if not well. He pressed his palms against the BMW’s hood. It was warm.

  In reception Joshua encountered a minor disturbance involving an elderly patient hooked up to a saline suspended from a trolley. Two orderlies and a nurse ushered him away from the exit. “But I’m going fishin’,” the old man insisted.

  Joshua seized the moment and slipped by unchallenged. Alone in the elevator he quickly pressed the button for Suzanne’s floor. The doors closed on reception. For a few moments he was alone. His reflection in the elevator mirrors startled him. Two deep, angry claw marks were slashed across his face where Nathan had caught him. His hair hung in knots over his eyes.

  On a floor somewhere above him an alarm sounded. The elevator bounced to a spongy halt; the doors parted, revealing a line of doctors and nurses hurrying by; two of them wheeling a resuscitation trolley. Joshua left the elevator and tagged on at the end of the bustling entourage, which led right up to Suzanne Durant’s door. At the threshold an obese Mexican nurse stood firmly in his way. On the bed behind her, Suzanne’s emaciated body lay exposed; the sheets flung back; the medical team working frantically to revive her.

  “You can’t come in, sir,” the husky nurse barred his way.

  From the bedside, a woman’s voice. “Charging…charging – clear!” Then the electric thump of the defibrillator.

  “You’re blocking the doorway,” said a doctor as he pushed past. Joshua caught one last glimpse of the resuscitation team hunkered over the bed. They worked well, bristling with business-like vigor, their faces stern and involved. Of all the expressions in the room, Joshua noted, only one remained unaffected and calm, at peace; Suzanne’s. Joshua saw her serene countenance, one somehow more beautiful in death than when she was in coma.

  He turned away and started back up the corridor – his gaze going straight into the second elevator. Standing beyond the doors, head slightly bowed, Genna Delucio was pushing a button on the control panel. Her eyes were dry, bearing no suggestion of sadness or loss; the inanimate expression of a shop-window mannequin.

  “Genna!” he said, almost collided with a nurse who was carrying a tray of pills, nimbly sidestepped her, and ran toward the elevator.

  Only when the doors came silently together did she look up, her face expressionless and bland, her eyes dull and vacant. Flakes of dried blood were on her temple. Briefly their gaze met, though no hint of recognition showed in her eyes, before the closing doors severed the contact. Joshua thumped into them. He ran to the other elevator, but an orderly wheeled in a gurney and blocked his way.

  The fire escape.

  When he burst out onto the parking lot he caught Genna as she was climbing into her car. “Genna please!”

  She gave no sign that she heard him.

  In his blind haste to catch up with her, he stepped into the path of an arriving ambulance, which clipped a glancing blow to his trail leg with its bumper; he stumbled, managing to stay upright by leaning against the BMW. The passenger door was unlocked. He pulled it open and clambered in.

  “Genna,” he began, but said no more. Her signals were dark and inactive; the equivalent of radio silence. In many ways similar to those he had got from her comatose sister.

  His gaze wandered over the deep bruising on her forehead, the swelling at her temple; an angry purple graze stretched from her hair line to her left eyebrow. Nathan’s work.

  “I know you’re a killer.” Genna said without emotion or inflection. She raised her head and stared through the windshield where, in front of the car, moths circled and collided with a low-level bulkhead light. “I saw your scrapbook...the news clippings.”

  Joshua started to drop his gaze, but held it. “I’m not a murderer,” he said. “I came here to stop the killings.”

  “You stop killers?” Genna pinned him with a speculative expression. “So you’ve come back for me, then?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Her eyes drifted away from his. “I’m a murderer, too.”

  Joshua remembered the crash team’s fight to revive her sister.

  Genna’s face started to crumple, but she held on doggedly to her composure, wrestling her demons. “Suzy was never going to wake.” She took a deep, shaky breath.

  Dressed in her jeans and scuffed boots, her face cut and bruised, her long hair unkempt and hanging over her troubled expression, she looked hopelessly lost. Joshua longed to reach out for her, to pull her to his chest and protect her, to comfort her and…and just hold her.

  “You let her go,” he said.

  At last she lifted her head to look at him. Searched his eyes. For the briefest moment, they found a connection, a common level of understanding on which they both dwelled. Genna was no killer, and Joshua knew it.

  Genna drew her arms around herself. “I swear to God she was waiting for me. I told her I was ready to keep my promise...” She fell silent for two full minutes while the incident replayed in her mind, her face twitching and working.

  “You switched off the machine?” Joshua asked.

  Genna’s arms snaked around each other. “She was expecting me. Knew why I was there; I don’t know how I know – I just do. I took a bunch of wires from the machine.” Her fist closed on imaginary wires. “While I was leaning over her, I think she looked at me. For a moment, she was there, at the surface.”

  Joshua wanted to reach for her. He didn’t.

  Genna stared into space. “And then she died. I didn’t pull the plug – I did nothing, yet she died anyway. As if all this time she clung to a life she hated because I needed her, not the other way round.”

  Joshua captured the outpouring of helplessness and of loss, absorbed them, and responded to them. With tentative moves, he reached out and touched her shoulder. At first she flinched, then allowed herself to be eased into his embrace.

  Warm, salty tears fell onto the back of his hands. He looked upon them with fascination. With thumb and forefinger he touched them, tasted them, wiped them on the skin below his eyes, as if he might somehow experience, and therefore understand, the turmoil occurring within Genna.

  Gradually the sobs finally faded into hitches, hitches into sniffs. Soon Genna regained a delicate composure and pulled away from him. She dabbed her cheeks with a Kleenex from a box on the dashboard. The tissue came away tinged red from the dried blood.

  Joshua saw the stained tissue and thought about what he was: a trespasser in the human race, in the human condition; his once fabulous disguise had begun to peel and flake away, revealing the monster beneath.

  “What’s happening, Joshua?” she asked. “Who are you? Who was a
t your motel?”

  He almost flinched.

  Genna half turned in her seat, the leather squeaking. “I know this involves the Invisible Assassin, and my father. What I don’t understand is your place in all of this. Or how a man can take a point blank shot at his heart and walk away.”

  Joshua could not meet her gaze.

  “Whoever attacked me…” She said, briefly narrowing her eyes. “Didn’t look human.”

  “He wasn’t,” Joshua said. “He survived the gunshots because he was not human. Not like you, your father – nor anyone you’ve ever met…he’s like me.”

  Genna sank back in her seat and held still. Only her eyes moved; they dropped to the place on his chest where the Uzi’s poison had struck, lingered there a moment before returning to his face. “You were hit.”

  “The one who attacked you is my brother.”

  Genna gaped at his unwounded torso, her mouth falling open. Her gaze traveled from his head to his feet. She did not look particularly abhorred by this shocking revelation, which was reflected in the steady waves of curiosity she emitted.

  “Not human,” said Genna thoughtfully. “How the hell can you not be human?”

  At last he looked at her, his eyes darted in their sockets, uncomfortable wherever they rested. He looked at her throat. A pulse beat there; he watched her skin move under the systolic pressure, beating almost in harmony with his own heart. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “But not here; Nathanial will be looking for you.”

  She didn’t move.

  Joshua angled his head. “If you’re still unsure about me…”

  Genna keyed the ignition. “If you wanted me dead,” she said. “You wouldn’t have saved my life.” She drew out of the lot and joined the highway.

  Joshua stared at the dark road ahead.