by Anna Roberts
“...I don’t like it, Cicero. We was never s’posed to come here, what with the ghosts and all –”
“ – ghosts, my ass,” said Ro. “It’s a fuckin’ baby story. Meant to keep us in our place, prolly...”
Super. Ro was smart enough to think his way around old ghost stories, but not bright enough for empathy.
“...’sides, what kind of alpha am I gonna be if I’m peeing my pants at some kinda Scooby Doo shit, huh? Not gonna impress the locals much, is it?”
“But...” Jared turned away, his voice indistinct. Grayson strained his ears and caught the last of his words. “...he says he won’t assept no swamp wolf alpha –”
“– Big Jim’ll assept what I tell him to assept. Tell him that. Or I’ll cut out his heart and deep fry the fuckin’ thing.” Ro glanced back towards the stairs. “Assuming Jennifer here even has a deep fat fryer.”
“I don’t,” said Grayson. “At my age you have to watch the cholesterol.” And there’s no way in hell I’m pointing you little shits towards my George Foreman grill.
Ro chewed his thin lower lip. “Yeah, well maybe we should pay Big Jim a visit.”
“It’s kinda late...”
“Yeah, I can read a fuckin’ clock, thank you Jared.” Ro scowled. “Goddamn it. I’m all bothered now.”
“Don’t worry about him. He ain’t worth your time.”
“No, we’ll deal with him now,” said Ro. “Jesus, Jared – what y’all thinking? Running a territory ain’t like punching a clock. It’s a twenty-four-seven occupation.”
“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” said Grayson.
Ro nodded. “Exzackly. See? Jennifer knows what’s what. It’s like The Lion King or somethin’.” He prodded Kaiden, who was lounging in the window seat, admiring himself in the darkened glass. “You watch Jennifer. See he writes me something good for when I get back.”
“Yes, boss,” said Kaiden. Yippee. The night just kept on getting better.
“And don’t you go molestering him again,” said Ro. “Waving your ding-dong in his face and all. Jennifer’s an artist – he’s sensitive. Ain’t that so, Jennifer?”
“Absolutely,” said Grayson, who was such a delicate flower that he would have cheerfully bitten off Kaiden’s rotten little cock if he’d only waved it that bit closer to his face.
He wondered what they were going to do to Big Jim, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel too sorry about it. None of Lyle’s old lieutenants had been particularly great people, and while Big Jim had ducked enough statutory rape charges in his time, Grayson felt reasonably sure that at least one of them was true. There was a reason young girls were drawn to Big Jim, who had lost his teeth to speed, his hair to male pattern baldness and was all of five foot three in his cowboy boots; he always had plenty of good drugs and a nose for toxic daddy issues.
Jared and Ro left, leaving Grayson alone with Kaiden. At first Grayson thought Kaiden was going to invent some new kind of indignity for him, but Kaiden had other plans. He switched on the TV and settled down in front of infomercials to do bicep curls with a set of comically oversized dumbbells.
Grayson feigned interest in his notebook and carefully picked out the nail he’d worked loose from the skirting board. He’d cursed the things often enough for falling off every time he vacuumed; whoever had fixed up the house before they flipped it had been a disaster at DIY. And yet they’d done Grayson a huge favor. It had been the work of minutes to wiggle a nail loose. The hard part was using it to open the cuffs.
There was something in there. He could feel it move when he prodded and jiggled the nail in a certain way. He was sure it was a moving part of the lock.
Kaiden grunted. The TV blared on. “...silicone rubber...just five ninety-nine...takes all the nightmare out of tiling...”
Grayson felt something click inside the lock. The tiniest thing, but it made his heart leap and surge. Kaiden set down the weights and Grayson froze, worried he was going to look around, but no. The preening little skidmark was just admiring the way the veins stuck out on his biceps.
“...waterproofing...ten years guaranteed...”
A creature like Kaiden couldn’t possibly know that his choice of home shopping channel was like lemon in a papercut to Grayson. Poor Joe – what had happened to him? And how many more people had Charlie poisoned down there in Islamorada?
“You writing back there, Jennifer?”
At the same moment Kaiden spoke, Grayson felt a tiny rasp of metal on metal that felt final. Like something breaking beyond repair. And it could either mean he’d opened the cuffs or fucked them to the point where he was never getting out of here without a pair of bolt cutters. They might decide to just leave him here, pissing and shitting where he sat. The only consoling thing Grayson could see in that scenario was that the heat might hasten his end from dehydration.
Kaiden’s head started to turn once more. Grayson dropped the nail and for a panicked second thought he’d lost it, but he caught it between the first two toes of his wretched, swollen foot. He quickly picked up the notebook and as he did so his hand twisted with a great, groaning cramp. His fingertips tingled with pins and needles.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m writing.”
He clenched and unclenched his fingers, cursing arthritis and osteoporosis and all the thousand unnatural shocks that werewolf flesh was heir to. He’d laugh about this later; the irony of only wanting to live when people were trying to kill him had not been lost on him.
Kaiden stirred once more and Grayson picked up the pen, feigning work. Time and time again he’d faced the blank page and pictured tumbleweeds blowing across the landscape of his mind, but he’d never experienced this kind of writers’ block before. The kind when your mind was running at a million miles an hour with thoughts you didn’t dare set down on paper. How many steps to the door? Will my crappy, crumbling hands let me open it when I get there? How fast can I run?
He knew he had to write something in order to keep the pen moving convincingly, so he started to write – from memory – the most famous words of indecision ever set down in the English language. To be, or not to be. That is the question...
If you chained an infinite number of werewolves to an infinite number of banisters, would they eventually come up with the script for Hamlet?
He scribbled away, unsure if the proud man’s contumely or his quietus make with a bare bodkin came first. Kaiden was moving around and Grayson was once again back in school, scratching away with a ballpoint pen, hoping against hope that he could somehow disappear into his notebook and that today might finally be the day when its contents remained private and unmocked.
When he forced himself to look up there was a dick in his face.
Kaiden was waving it at him again.
“Ah. I thought we’d had words about that?” said Grayson.
Kaiden jiggled his balls in one hand and grinned. “I know,” he said. “But I thought you might wanna see it again. I know y’all like that kind of thing.”
“Thank you, Kaiden,” said Grayson. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”
He could smell the ball-sweat from here and his stomach churned at the thought that Kaiden might decide to add sexual assault to his repertoire, but then Kaiden tucked himself away and peered down with narrowed eyes.
“I found one o’ your gay books,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Yeah. Naked something. All about hanging boys up and snapping their necks so they get boners. It was disgusting.”
“Naked Lunch,” said Grayson. “And it’s supposed to be.”
“You into that?” said Kaiden. “Hanging little boys?”
“No,” said Grayson, although his continued acquaintance with Cicero and friends had provided some insight as to what kind of person might have inspired Burroughs when he wrote the talking asshole segment of the book.
“You touch ‘em, though, right?”
“No.”
“Liar. We had a gym teac
her like you.”
Grayson swallowed. There was a malevolence in Kaiden’s eyes that he’d never seen before, and he knew from bitter experience that there was no point in arguing with stupid.
Then something went crash.
It sounded like something had knocked over a bin outside. Kaiden’s head snapped up. “Shit,” he said. “Stay there.”
Like he had a choice.
The second Kaiden was out of sight, Grayson dropped the notebook and rummaged between his puffed toes for the nail. He jabbed it into the lock.
The cuffs opened.
“Oh my God, thank you, thank you...” Grayson muttered. But the miracle was short-lived. Even as he pulled himself up on the railings he could feel the blood flooding back into his squeezed, swollen foot, turning it into a lump of painful, useless putty. When he tried to lean his weight on it the sensation was awful enough to make him gag.
He forced his foot forwards, dizzy with panic and triumph. He had always thought that the first thing he would grab from his burning house would be his laptop and USB sticks, but he no longer cared. So he might lose six months of work, but there was always more work. Always more ideas. Just so long as he got out of this alive.
Grayson glanced through the kitchen doorway and saw the back door ajar. He stumbled towards it, every step on that soft, tingling foot pushing him closer towards collapse. A little part of him knew this was crazy; he couldn’t outrun a blind, three-legged sloth in this state, but if it ended with a bullet then he was okay with that. Better than starving to death while chained to the stairs.
He was out of the door before he realized he had nowhere to go and no idea how to get there, but it didn’t matter. He was loose. He was moving. He was free.
Click.
Oh, there it was.
Grayson turned. Kaiden stood maybe three feet from the kitchen door, gun in his hand.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he said.
The first word that sprung to Grayson’s mind was ‘home’, but that was gone now. The one small piece of comfort he had in the world and these vicious, greedy pieces of shit had swarmed in and poisoned it and spoiled it. Home was now a prison, made all the more painful by the familiar things and memories that filled it - the Italian leather couch he’d bought with some of the proceeds of one particularly successful novel, the books with notes from old friends still scrawled on the flyleaves, the sledgehammer that Joe kept threatening to take to his shower floor...
The hammer was behind Kaiden, leaning against the outside of the back door in a place where only an idiot would have left it; swamp wolves weren’t exactly famous for their brains. And for all he tried not to look at it, Grayson couldn’t help his gaze wandering to it. A weapon. A way out.
Kaiden turned to see what he was looking at and laughed. “Yeah, don’t even think about it,” he said, but in the brief time it took him to turn back, Grayson saw something else.
Eyes.
Not human. Only animal eyes had that eerie night shine when artificial light shone across. It was just a flash from somewhere inside a rhododendron bush, but the leaves shivered as if a breeze had touched them, and there was enough moon lingering in the month for the faint whiff of wolf to set the hairs on the back of Grayson’s neck on end.
Kaiden smelled it, too. “What the...” and that was as far as he got.
A huge pale wolf erupted out of the bush. Hackles up, nose creased in a snarl, pink gums and white teeth. It leapt with such power that Grayson could almost feel the ground shake beneath his feet. There was a tiny, frozen millisecond in which the usual questions filled his mind - who, how, what - but by then the screaming had already started.
There was a gunshot behind him but Grayson was already running towards the nearest tree. He grasped the lowest branch he could reach and tried to get a foothold on the bark, but that dead, fucked-up foot was determined to be the death of him one way or the other. Another shot rang in his ears and he felt sure he’d been hit; you couldn’t be this lucky twice. But then he somehow gained some purchase on the tree and swung himself up, panting and with every muscle in his body singing a wild chorus of pain. He could smell gunpowder and his ears still buzzed faintly, but through it he could still hear Kaiden’s screams.
Inch by inch, Grayson turned himself around on the branch, knowing he needed to get higher.
“...get it off me! GET IT OFF MEEEE!...”
He saw Kaiden’s hand reaching out for the gun just a foot away on the ground, then there was a snap of jaws and a short, canine whuf of breath and then there wasn’t a hand there anymore. Just a spurting stump.
Kaiden went quiet. Maybe he’d passed out, but he was done for anyway. When Grayson forced himself to look again the wolf had its teeth in Kaiden’s throat. Something went crunch.
“Oh fuck,” said Grayson, under his breath, and the wolf looked right up at him.
Jesus, it was huge. Easily two hundred and fifty pounds. Its pale fur - not quite white, not quite brown - was flecked with bits of Kaiden. The stump of Kaiden’s hand slowly stopped spurting, so much like a hose being shut off that Grayson had the bizarre desire to laugh; he was halfway up a tree watching a werewolf attack and he was still thinking in terms of similes. Now that was dedication.
The wolf licked its gore-stained chops, teeth still almost as pink as its tongue. Its gaze was steady but somehow puzzled, like it didn’t understand why it was still a wolf; it wasn’t the full moon, after all. It must have been someone who hadn’t gone back at the last moon. It pricked up its ears at something and looked around, and for an instant Grayson could have sworn it was looking at the sledgehammer.
Oh my God. “Joe?” he said.
Joe had been stuck before, when he’d turned to repair himself from the beating delivered by Lyle. But why had he done it again? And what the hell was he doing here?
He heard voices. The wolf took hold of what he could grasp in his mouth and dragged Kaiden off into the bushes, leaving a gun, an empty hand and a patch of red-black blood soaking into the dirt. Grayson stared down at the gun, wondering if he could make it, but then the back door opened and Jared and Ro reappeared.
“Kaiden?”
“What the fuck happened here?”
Ro looked up and spotted Grayson in the tree. “Where’s Kaiden?”
“Gone.”
“Gone?”
“I don’t know. I...I tried to run. He came out to bring me back and then he...he just disappeared.”
“And left his hand behind?”
“Motherfucker,” said Jared, spotting the severed hand. He retched loudly.
Ro’s mouth was a thin line. “Geddown,” he said, pointing to the ground.
Grayson slowly climbed down from the tree. If they were going to kill him for this, wouldn’t they have done it already? Just shot him out of the tree?
“It’s like a wolf done this,” said Jared.
“Wolf?” said Ro. “Ain’t no full moon, dumbass.” He glared back at Grayson. “You see what done this?”
He’d left Joe in danger before. He wasn’t about to do it again. “No,” said Grayson.
“You sure?”
“Very.”
Ro sighed and reached for the sledgehammer. “Hold him,” he said to Jared.
13
Blue opened the door on a bathroom far worse than anything she had ever cleaned before. The tiles were splattered with red and brown – the kind of thing where you could scrub forever but you’d never get the stain right out without replacing the grouting. The sides of the bath were filthy, and although the shower curtain was pulled across it only added to the horror; she was sure that was a handprint in the semi-translucent plastic. Happy fish swam in and out of a stylized seaweed pattern that was flecked and spattered with blood or shit or both. It looked as though someone had exploded in here.
In front of her was the toilet, the bowl overflowing and streaming with some kind of yellow-green fluid. She smelled licorice, which was so much the
wrong thing to be smelling in a room like this that she knew she was dreaming.
Only that knowledge didn’t bring any comfort either.
And somehow she kept walking forward.
The toilet was full of something black. She didn’t want to look but neither did she want to risk turning her head and seeing what was in the tub behind that shower curtain. She nearly jumped out of her skin when the substance in the toilet began to move.
Flies.
The entire bowl was shimmering and squirming with flies.
They started to rise in a huge, black cloud, their buzzing rising to a near impossible volume. She didn’t want to scream, didn’t want to open her mouth, but it was like someone else was forcing her jaw open. The flies flew in and the feeling of them moving around inside her mouth was so horrible that she wondered if she’d ever be right again when she woke up. And in the middle of her head was that sticky-tar voice...
...flies are a nuisance, bugs are worse, I saw a werewolf eating up a nurse...
Get out, get out, get out...
...not this time. It’s time Baby Blue.
And then it was over. She was standing outside the bathroom door this time, and the man was there again, the one from her mother’s house, the one with the blue eyes. He wore alligator boots, a red satin shirt that gleamed like blood, and black jeans of a flared cut that had gone out of style maybe ten years ago. When he smiled at her there was something infuriatingly familiar about his face – just out of reach.
“What time is it?” she said, and her tongue felt thick and dry in her mouth in a way she knew meant she was talking in her sleep.
“Time to see the writing on the wall,” he said, and took hold of her shoulders. He turned her around to see, and this time she could read it, even though it still made no sense.
WEST LAFAYETTE
She knew without asking what the words had been written in. On a nearby table was a fruit bowl, its contents clotted nearly to black. Something floated in the middle – not fruit.