Frostbite

by David Wellington

  That was how you kept yourself from being victimized, Chey realized. It was how you kept from being prey. You found out where the would-be predators were and you dragged them out of their dens when they didn’t expect it. She made a mental note.

  Not all of the men who came to the bar were after violence, of course. Occasionally somebody would grab her ass or make a stupid pass at her. Occasionally, if she was bored, or horny, or she wasn’t ready to go to sleep at closing time, she would go home with one of them. The bouncers wouldn’t let her leave with anybody who might hurt her, so she knew she would be safe. She had a couple of rules to make sure none of the men ever got a second date. Nobody ever came back to her place, and she always drove her own car—no matter what they said. Some of them told her they wanted to be her boyfriend. Some said they wanted to marry her. She never stuck around long enough for them to sober up and decide if they’d meant it or not.

  A lot of the guys asked her about her tattoo, but she just shook her head and smiled in reply. Very rarely somebody would recognize her. Werewolf enthusiasts, she thought of them. Men attracted to the idea that she’d been to the far side of the predator-prey relationship and come back in one piece. These guys were in it for more than just curiosity—they had to be, to know who she was. She didn’t look the same as she had when she was twelve, when she was in the papers. She had no idea how they figured out who she was, but she didn’t bother finding out, either. She had rules for dealing with that kind of guy, as well. They got a drink on the house, and then they got politely told to shut up. If they didn’t shut up they got told to go home. If they didn’t go home, she called in the bouncer.

  Work didn’t end until four or five in the morning, when the cleaners would come in and the bar back would put all the chairs up on the tables. The regulars who stayed that late got to drink for free in exchange for washing glasses. The bartenders left as soon as the doors were locked.

  Most nights Chey drove straight home, but sometimes she knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so she did something else. There’s not a lot to do in western Canada at five in the morning if you’re not a farmer, though. Sometimes she drove around town, looking at the lights with the radio on low and soft. Sometimes she drove out to the edge of town, or beyond. One night she caught herself driving half-asleep as the sun came up, and she pulled over onto the side of a highway. She had no idea how far she was from home. Up ahead she saw a sign saying she was on Highway 16. There was another sign below that showing a man’s head in silhouette, painted a bright yellow. It couldn’t be more literal.

  She was on the Yellowhead Highway. The road that ran from British Columbia all the way to Manitoba. She knew it best for the stretch between Edmonton and Jasper National Park. The stretch where her father had died.

  She breathed a curse and pulled a road map out of the side pocket of her car door. She studied the landscape, looking for clues as to where she was, but she couldn’t figure it out. It looked like there might be a little town ahead of her, so she drove slowly toward the slumbering cottages and convenience stores where the Coke signs were the only lights still on. When she saw the name of the local bar—the Chesterton Arms—she stamped on the brakes and closed her eyes and waited until she could think straight again. Chesterton. That was the town she’d driven into when she was twelve years old, the town where she’d told the local police about what had happened. It was the safe place she’d gone to when she was running away from the wolf.

  She thought about getting out of the car and going into the bakery down the street. That was the first place she’d come to when she arrived, back then. People work at bakeries all night, making bread for the next day, so there had been a light on inside and she had seen people moving around in there. She had walked in, thinking she would ask to use their phone. She hadn’t been able to talk, but they were smart enough in the bakery to sit her down and feed her fresh doughnuts while they called the police. They had been nice people in there.

  She could go in, now, years later, and ask who was working. They might remember her—or they might not; maybe the people there weren’t the same. With a shudder she realized she didn’t know what she would say, if she saw the same bakers, the same night manager. She couldn’t remember their names, anyway.

  She turned around and drove back to Edmonton with the radio turned up. She didn’t want to think about how she’d gotten out there, 150 kilometers from home. She didn’t want to think that her subconscious could control her like that. She drove home, she pulled the heavy drapes closed across her windows, and she swallowed three Ambiens with a can of flat ginger ale.

  27.

  Life changed again on July 25, 2003. Chey was twenty-one years old. Though she’d done nothing in remembrance, nor did she even want to think about it, she was conscious of the fact that it was the ninth anniversary of her father’s death.

  One reason people go to the same bar every night is because every night is exactly the same. That night started like any other. She was pulling Labatt Blues for the workingmen and Alley Kat microbrews for the more discriminating customers. She was laughing and generally having a good time, making jokes with the regulars, eating some fried fish one of them had brought her from the chip shop next door. She had just taken an order for a table full of mixed drinks when Bobby Fenech pushed through the door and the smoke in the air rolled under the lights. Well, it did that when anyone walked in, when the warm air in the bar surged out into the cool night. For whatever reason, she happened to be looking up at that exact moment and she saw him. The swirling smoke seemed to wrap around him like a cape.

  He looked like the kind of person who would work on that effect. The kind of man who liked to make a dramatic entrance, whether or not he could back it up.

  He wasn’t a big guy, really, but he sort of puffed himself out, the way a cat’s fur will stand on end to make it look bigger. He had on a heavy-duty leather jacket and boots with steel-reinforced laces, as if he’d just hiked down out of the hills. If he was all business on his feet, though, he was ready to party upstairs. His hair glowed with mousse and ended in sharp triangular points that stuck straight up. He was maybe thirty-five years old, though there was a weird boyish air around him. Maybe it was the shit-eating grin on his face. He came up to the bar and leaned up against it, his hands grasping the brass rail around the edge.

  Chey smiled at him—he looked like he might be a big spender—and finished the order she’d been working on. Then she turned and gave him the nod.

  He raised his voice over the general din of conversation and the Aerosmith song on the jukebox. “What do you have that’s Mexican and bottled?” he asked. “I can’t stand domestic beer. I prefer my piss-water imported.”

  Her eyebrows drew together in consternation but his grin didn’t falter. The bouncer by the door, three hundred pounds of Eastern European muscle named Arkady, gave her a glance. But it was a questioning glance, not a warning glance. She shook her head and Arkady relaxed a fractional amount. She was pretty sure this newcomer was just trying to be funny.

  “Corona good enough?” she asked, reaching for the bottle. He nodded and she tapped it down on the bar, flipped off the cap and shoved a lime wedge down the neck in one quick motion. “Three dollars,” she said, holding up three fingers in case he couldn’t hear her over the crowd noise.

  He took out a hundred and draped it across the top of his bottle. “You see me running low, just give’r and don’t ask questions,” he smiled. “Whatever’s left when I leave you keep for yourself.”

  Chey had been tending bar long enough at that point to know how to react. “That’s very generous, thank you,” she said. “I’ll be sure to take care of you tonight.” She grabbed the bill off the top of his bottle. “At least until you leave.”

  He said something low and probably insulting, but she decided not to hear it. It was a busy night and she had orders to fill, so she moved on. He kept an eye on her and she knew he wanted to talk further. She was trying to decid
e whether she wanted to listen when he finished his first beer and she went to replace it with another.

  He grabbed the nearly empty bottle away from her and tilted it to his mouth. As if he was offended she would take away the bottle when there was still one last swig of backwash in it. When she bent to get the next beer she could feel his eyes on her chest. On her breasts. Nothing new or surprising there, except she got the sense he was more interested in her tattoo than her skin.

  That moved him into the category of people she’d rather not talk to. She was about to grab his hundred back out of the till and return it, to tell him his first beer was on the house as long as it was also his last. Before she could, though, he set down his bottle and spoke.

  “They never found it,” he said. His grin was still in place.

  Chey thought about asking him what the hell he was talking about. No point, though. He could only be talking about one thing. She popped open his second beer. She didn’t say a word.

  “They did a pretty thorough search, surprisingly. Most local cop-shops would have written that one off as an act of God. The good people of Chesterton, though, they really tried. They called in the big guns. The Mounties sent helicopters out into the bush and brought in real live bloodhounds when the aerial search turned up nothing. They found a caribou carcass a ways north of there that looked like maybe it was his handiwork. Only two kinds of animals could rip up a buck like that. Either a grizzly or a…werewolf.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. That’s enough.” Arkady the bouncer sat up in his chair. “We have a policy here for people who want to talk about things they don’t understand. I get a free smoke break, and you get a free beer. There’s only one catch. You finish the beer and you leave before I come back.”

  “Alright,” he said. “If that’s what you want. Listen, though, I brought you something. Something I think you might like to have.” He started reaching into his pocket. Arkady grabbed his wrist and pulled it back out, twisted it around behind his back. A slip of paper or maybe an index card fell across the bar and Chey picked it up.

  She flipped it over and saw it was a photograph. It looked like it had been taken from out of the window of an airplane. It showed a patch of waving grass from above. In the middle of the picture was a wolf rearing up on its hind legs, its massive paws batting at the camera. Its eyes were an icy green that made her whole body tense up.

  “Wait,” she said, and looked up.

  Arkady had the weirdo in a neck lock. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t struggling, either, which was strange, but then he’d only had one beer. Maybe he was smart enough to understand what the bouncer could do with just a little pressure. “Wait,” she said again. “This picture looks recent.”

  “It was taken two weeks ago by a bush pilot flying up near the Arctic Circle. A guy who sees real wolves all the time. He knew the difference and so he took that shot and brought it to me, because it’s my job to look at pictures like that. It took me all this time to connect that thing with your daddy. And then to you.”

  Chey flicked the photo back and forth between her hands. Trying to make a decision.

  The weirdo raised his eyebrows, making his face look open and honest. She didn’t trust that face, not one bit. But she trusted the picture. Those eyes. She couldn’t remember her father’s face, but she remembered those eyes.

  Chey nodded at Arkady and the bouncer let go.

  “My name’s Robert Fenech,” the weirdo said, sitting back down on his bar stool. His grin was back. “I’m an intelligence operative with the government. And I’d like my free drink now.”

  28.

  Three days later she woke up and rolled out of a motel room bed in Ottawa. Bobby lay asleep under half of a sheet, one arm slumped off the side of the bed, his knuckles buried in shag carpeting.

  Chey showered as quietly as she could and then got dressed. Bobby didn’t stir. She went to the drapes across the window of their room and pulled them open a little. Across the street she saw a convenience store, a chemist’s, the parking lot for the local Canadian Tire. Everything had the same muted, grayish colors that blended together. Bilingual signs crowded the sidewalks. She was back in Ontario, alright.

  It had been so many years. Her mother still lived in Kitchener. A couple hundred kilometers away, but in the same province at least. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in six months and she wondered if she ought to call her—but it was still too early.

  Chey and Bobby had flown in the night before and taken the little room because they were too tired to find anything better. Then Bobby had wanted to fool around, and she’d been too tired to put him off.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. As much as she wanted to pretend that she wasn’t attracted to Bobby, she couldn’t convince herself. He was a little daft looking and a little obnoxious, sure. But he got her. When she’d told him about sleep-driving to Chesterton he’d just nodded and held her hand. When she told him about how ashamed she’d been when Uncle Bannerman saw her tattoo he had showed her his own tattoo, a sloppy black Molson logo on his bicep that a high school friend had done with a hot sewing needle. And when she told him she was still afraid of dogs he hadn’t laughed.

  Then there was the fact that he knew more about lycanthropes than she did. He could teach her things. That was his ultimate turn-on.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, his head still buried in a pillow. He brought up his dangling hand and ran it through the spikes of his hair. They were crusty with old mousse and he scratched at the scalp underneath.

  “I’m too excited,” she confessed.

  He turned his head enough to smile at her. “You’re doing a good thing,” he said. He pushed his butt up in the air, getting his knees up underneath him, then sprang out of bed and whooped as he jumped into the shower. “Today’s going to be a good day.”

  A car came for them promptly at nine, a white sedan with a government seal on the driver’s side door. They drove along the St. Lawrence River to spy headquarters, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building. The building was a three-sided monolith with big mirrored windows surrounded by a miniature park. It looked pretty impressive from the highway.

  Maybe Bobby had seen it one too many times. “You know, America’s got the Pentagon. That’s got five sides. Even the CIA building in Virginia has four.”

  Inside they passed through a metal detector and were fitted for security cards. Chey had worn her best outfit, a black velvet skirt and a purple blazer. When they clipped the VISITOR pass on her she felt like Gillian Anderson in The X-Files. It was all she could do not to giggle.

  A woman with permed hair and thick glasses led them down a long corridor and then they went inside a conference room where a lot of men and women in suits waited to shake Chey’s hand. They seemed really happy to meet her. She forgot all of their names as soon as she heard them. Once everybody was seated another man came in and put a tape recorder on the wood-grain table. He explained that everything she said was going to be recorded for later use and she agreed that was okay with her.

  The newcomer, who had not been introduced to her, started asking her questions then. Most of them were pretty basic. He wanted to know the date and the time of the attack. He apologized before he asked her a series of simple questions about how, exactly, her father had died. She didn’t mind answering.

  “It went right for his throat, for—” she couldn’t remember the word. “For the artery here,” she said, and drew a finger across her neck.

  “That’s the jugular vein,” one of the other men offered. Chey smiled her thanks.

  The next bunch of questions surprised her: questions about her life since the attack. A woman dressed like a doctor asked her if she’d ever grown any hair in unnatural places. She did laugh, then. They asked her if she had ever experienced an occurrence of unusual strength or fast reflexes.

  “Well, I exercise a lot,” she told them, looking around to see their reaction. A couple of them frowned. “I don’t sleep very
well, you see. So I need something to do with all that extra time.”

  The man with the recorder suggested that they move on. It turned out he only had one more question. “At any time since the attack have you been contacted by the lycanthrope? In any way? I want you to take time and think about this. There’s the possibility of what we call subtle communication.”

  “Subtle?” she asked.

  The man with the recorder shrugged. “For instance, telepathy. Or maybe a telehypnotic suggestion. Have you ever done something, especially when you were tired or in a trancelike state, that you can’t explain?”

  She looked over at Bobby, excited. “Yes,” she said, her hands grabbing at the table edge. “Yes.” And she told them everything about her sleep-driving.

  Some of the men glanced at each other and her heart sank, because she thought she knew what they were thinking. That doesn’t sound like telepathy. That sounds like crazy.

  They had a lot more questions after that, but she couldn’t help but think she’d blown her big chance. Whenever she glanced at Bobby, though, he nodded confidently. Encouragingly. It helped her get through the endless session.

  When she was done the men all stood up. She didn’t understand what they were doing. Then she stood up and they all started shaking her hand. “The CSIS is extremely grateful for your help,” one of them said. Another repeated the same message in French. She started shaking their hands.

  “Wait,” she chirped. She couldn’t believe that was all they wanted. “Wait, I’d like to ask you something. If I may.”

  They had already started filing out of the conference room. Now they stopped and looked at her patiently.

  “If you catch him.” She swallowed painfully. “If you catch it. The lycanthrope, I mean. Is there any way you could let me talk to it? I don’t mean privately. You can have anyone there you think should be there, or just listen in if you want. I want to ask it a question, you see. I want to know if it hated my father or if it was just hungry.”