Pack

by Mike Bockoven

  “You were supposed to be honest,” Dave said. “That’s the core of all we do …”

  “Don’t give me that alpha shit,” she said. “My husband decided to kill one of our closest friends and got everyone else to come along.”

  “That’s right, Josie,” Dave said. “Charming, funny, perfect Byron did nothing to bring that on himself. He didn’t sell us out. He didn’t kill that girl. He’s perfectly innocent. He’s a saint, if you think about it.”

  “We’re not in high school anymore and look where your decision got us!” Josie shot back, letting the towel drop and running into the bathroom to grab a purple T-shirt that she flung on with vigorous speed. Even in the heat of battle, Dave couldn’t help notice her nipples straining at the cheap material. “Our house is gone and all our friends are about to die because of you.”

  “Fine, what would you have done?” Dave said, bringing his tone back down. “Send him off with a wave and a smile to go find the nearest place he could sell us out and get someone else killed, send him off to find someone like Stander? Maybe give him one more good fuck for the road?”

  “One, don’t be gross,” Josie spat back. “And two, you promised me, you promised me that had nothing to do with your decision. You said this was about the future, NOT the past.”

  “My decision wasn’t about you sleeping with Byron,” Dave said. “I’ve said this over and over again.”

  “Then how come I don’t believe you?”

  “Because you’re sorry he’s gone,” Dave said, really seeing red now and keeping a close eye for signs of change in his trembling body. “Because you wish he was still here so you could get what you really want instead of what you’re stuck with.”

  Josie’s mouth hung open and her eyes narrowed as the tears came again. She sat hard on the hotel room’s other bed which did not make weird creaks.

  “You never wanted me and you prove that to me every day,” Dave said, now staring at the floor. “You love the kid and I’m thankful for that and you are fine with your life but you aren’t fine with me. You think I don’t see that? You think I don’t know you? I know you and I know you don’t love me.”

  It hurt to say, more than Dave thought it would.

  “I’ve said this a thousand times,” Dave continued, “but Byron had decided to leave. He was out. He had betrayed us and he was going to betray us if he was left alive and that’s the hard truth of the matter. Yes, I might have had a hand in driving him away and yes, I am not blameless and yes, I can be childish sometimes but letting him go gets us right here in this hotel room, just a few weeks earlier. Maybe worse people are after us. Maybe someone gets killed.”

  “Someone did get killed,” Josie said. Dave ignored her.

  “I appreciate your support and I’m going to need it a little longer, but once we’re clear of this thing you’re going to go your own way. I heard you and Conall talking and I think I know what you mean to do. The only question is ‘is Dilly coming with you’ and I guess that’s a decision he’s going to make.”

  The two sat, apart, not looking at each other. After a moment, Josie stood up and sat on the bed next to Dave. She sat, staring at her husband. He had aged well, she thought. His hair was still there, his body was still fairly lean save the love handles. He worked hard and they had years of history gluing them together and yet, he was right. She was mad and resentful and wasn’t sure she loved him. He was good enough and now Conall had promised a world where she could travel, she could meet others beyond their town, she could be the person she always thought she would end up being. And Dave? What of him, she thought. This big bag of daddy issues would get along fine. In the end he’d be miserable with her or without her.

  But in the back of her mind, she felt a twitch.

  This did not happen often. The last time she had this twitch was four months ago and she had gone out, made the transformation and ran through the woods, feeling, thinking, running. The pain was excruciating, paralleled only by childbirth, but once she had done it the vast expanse of woods had been her playground. And she had taken Dilly out with her, talked to him, shown him the woods and what he would be doing when he was ready. She remembered her life as a mother and a wolf and as a member of the pack and as a woman whose house had just burned down.

  Oh yeah, she thought. I’m really, really angry.

  Sitting, staring at Dave, she wondered if this was the man who could keep her and Dilly safe. He would die for them, but so would every husband, so he says, and at the end of the day that’s a bunch of bullshit. Would he fight for her, not in the romantic sense but in the practical sense? Was he smart enough to win? Would he lead them all to certain death and dismemberment in a lab?

  She took a deep breath. Time to find out.

  “We’re not done yet,” she said. “You and me. We have a lot to talk about and we’re not done yet but if you think you know me and you think you know my heart, than what do I want to do right now, more than anything else on the planet?”

  A jab about sleeping with Byron flickered across Dave’s brain and prudently got caught in several filters.

  “You’re pissed about your work room,” Dave said.

  “I am pissed about my work room,” she answered, a smile flickering on her lips. “And I need a guy who’s going to make that right.”

  “You’re behind me? For the time being?”

  “I am behind you,” she said.

  “Good enough.”

  Dave stood up and opened the door to the hotel room, exposing the bright sun and activity out in the parking lot.

  “You realize we’re going to need to go to therapy after this, right?” Dave said.

  “One problem at a time, please.”

  •••

  Dave found Conall who asked him to knock on doors and get everyone down to the lobby. A few minutes later most everyone had gathered for a few stale bagels, pre-made pancakes, and rubbery sausage in the hotel’s lobby. Whether they were eating was a different matter.

  JoAnn had plowed through her food but Kenny Kirk hadn’t eaten a thing and his face was drained.

  “He’s been calling me,” Kenny said. “Leaving messages. Stander’s got my number.”

  “He probably has all your numbers,” Conall said, shoveling sausage into his mouth. “He’s calling you for a reason. Probably thinks he can hurt you the most.”

  “Did you listen to any of them?” Ron asked between bites of biscuits and very suspect gravy.

  “Yeah, man, I did,” Kenny said. “Bastard says he’s at my garage in town that’s burning down. He sent a picture. It’s hard to make out, but yeah. It’s gone.”

  In a situation one quarter this exciting Kenny would be running his mouth as fast as he could, but not this morning. His words were exact. One by one everyone gathered around to see the photo on Kenny’s phone and a few profanities and pats on the shoulder later, everyone was back in the seats more demoralized than before.

  Everyone ate in silence for a moment until the real Kenny Kirk returned with a vengeance.

  “What is this bullshit, man,” he started. “What is this sitting around eating shitty food waiting for some Irish weirdo to tell us what to do? That asshole burned down my garage, burned down Dave and Josie’s house, man. That was a nice house!”

  “Your garage wasn’t nice,” Ron said, treading dangerous ground, praying he was on the right side of it. “All the oil on the ground it probably went up fast.”

  “See, now this is your problem, saying shit like that,” Kenny said, a slight twinkle in his eye. “Your brain ain’t got no filter on it, man, and you’re missing my point. My point isn’t whether he’s burning down a garage full of oily rags …”

  “You kept them in a big pile in the corner,” Carl chimed in.

  “OK, OK, let’s all agree that my garage was full of oil and oily rags …”

  “And you kept that nudie calendar on the wall,” Josie chimed in.

  “I kept asking him to take that down,” JoAnn
said and by then, any hope of a Braveheart-style speech was gone. Kenny waved his arms to get everyone’s attention.

  “MY POINT,” he yelled over the chatter, regaining attention momentarily, “is that we need to go back.”

  Everyone fell silent.

  “We need to go back and deal with this.”

  “The hell you do, there Kenneth,” Conall said. “These bastards who work for the biomedical companies, they’re coming at you hard because they’ve never captured one of us before. If they got their hands on just one of you it would be terrible. They could start tracking people like us, profiling people like us. Hunting us if they wanted. I told Dave this earlier but I cannot, under any circumstances, let that happen.”

  “So Cherry burns,” Ron asked.

  “So Cherry burns,” Conall answered. “I wish there was something I could do, sincerely. But it isn’t the first town to burn, as you put it, and likely won’t be the last.”

  “And if we try to go back, what you gonna do then, man?” Kenny said.

  “Let’s not go down that road, please,” Conall said. “I don’t mean to get all technical on the lot of you, but I’ve beaten your Alpha.”

  This was the first time it had occurred to anyone in the group that, yes, the Irish Wolf had kicked the Lead Wolf’s ass, hard, the previous evening. While some of the rules were for the good of the pack, the line of leadership succession had been passed down from the very first pack of wolves in Cherry. The rule was the Alpha is the strongest and when someone beats the strongest wolf in the pack, they were the new Alpha. There had only been seven Alphas in the entire history of this pack. Now there were eight.

  “So, yeah,” Conall said, scooping some eggs onto a fork and wolfing them down.

  “Well dammit!” Kenny Kirk said.

  “Wait, Dad’s not in charge anymore?” Dilly asked.

  Everyone around the table braced for the inevitable comment from Willie about how his son had never really been in charge, but it didn’t come. Willie wasn’t there and this was the first time anyone had noticed.

  “Where the hell is Willie?” Dave asked. “Was he staying with anyone?”

  “Like anyone’s going to share a room with Willie,” JoAnn said.

  Conall was riffling through his pockets looking for the receipts. He had paid for the rooms, generously, and was doing a quick count in his head.

  “Oh fuck me,” he said, recounting. “ … two, three four … FUCK!” he slammed his hand down on the table.“I didn’t even get him a fucking room. He could be in Mexico by now for all we know.”

  Murmurs spread around the group and Josie immediately went over to the front desk, which was in earshot of Conall’s language and volume. Ron stood next to Conall, going over the receipts again. Dilly went over to his father, who gave him a hug, which was awkward since he was shorter than the boy. A few feet away, Kenny Kirk was letting out a stream of profanity himself. A few moments later, Josie came back.

  “Someone stole a car from the parking lot early this morning,” she said. “That girl at the front desk, she said it had been a crazy morning.”

  “All right, here’s what’s happening,” Conall said. “I want you all to really think about Willie and use your noses. We have to track him down or at least get some sort of idea where he’s headed.”

  “What if he’s headed back to Cherry?” Carl asked, almost panicked.

  “One problem at a time, brother,” Conall said. “Everyone fan out. Track him if you can. Meet back here in five minutes. Go!”

  Most of the group ran outside, Kenny with his nose literally in the air. Dilly went to his mother who came over, put her arm around Dave and led them down one of the narrow hallways of the hotel.

  “Grandpa went back, didn’t he?” Dilly said.

  “Yes,” Josie said. “He probably did.

  “Are you guys going to go get him?”

  It was one thing to be confronted with the possibility of harm to your family, but quite another to have your hand forced. The pit in Dave’s stomach that had been building for the past couple days was roaring now and every bit of instinct he had was screaming not to put his family in harm’s way, especially not for an asshole like Willie.

  Back when Dave was getting ready for his first scratch, Willie had already made the turn from respected businessman toward town crank and had given Dave very little direction on what to do. When he turned sixteen he asked Willie, over and over, if it was time for him to go out on a run yet and after a few rounds, Willie had been so annoyed he shouted at Dave “if you want to be a man, make decisions like a man.” In what was the boldest move in his life up until that point, Dave showed up the next time he knew Willie was going out and that was his first experience. He was embraced with open arms and still looked up on that victory as one of his greatest achievements. He knew he was ready and he showed up and proved it to everyone.

  While he firmly believed his father had acted like an asshole, Dave now realized that his logic had been sound. This wasn’t something that could be given to him. It was something he had to take.

  “Dilly,” Dave said. “The next few hours are going to be hard. Your mother and I are going to make our own decisions about what to do and I want you to listen to me. You are a part of this pack. In your heart, you know what’s right. I believe that as much as I believe anything. It’s going to be hard, but we’re not going to tell you what to do. Consider the consequences of your actions and make your own choices. Think them over, make sure it’s what your heart says is right and do it. You understand?”

  Dilly’s eyes were wide and his mouth open a bit. He had just been hit with a bomb and knew it. Josie lent her support.

  “Your father and I are proud of the man you’re becoming,” she said. “These decisions are going to shape who you are. I know you’ll make the right ones.”

  “OK,” he said after a few seconds. “I’ll do what I think is right but I’m going to follow your lead.”

  Patting his son’s shoulder, Dave dared a quick glance at his wife. She had an excellent poker face.

  “Good boy,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find your grandpa.”

  •••

  It didn’t take long for Ron to find the note. He figured Willie had never checked in and immediately went to the outskirts of the hotel property and started sniffing around. He picked up Willie’s pungent scent in short order and the path he followed led him to a clearing where he saw a waffle house in the distance. He jogged over and sure enough ,Willie had left a note. A couple minutes after they had split up, the pack was sitting in and around the lifted Pathfinder as Conall read the note, silently.

  “Dammit man, out with it,” Kenny said. “What’d he do?”

  “He went back to your dumpy little town,” Conall said, anger rising. “He went back knowing that you all would chase after him.”

  “Then let’s go,” Dilly said. “Let’s go get him.”

  “No,” Conall said, flatly. His tone was unwavering and had an air of finality to it.

  “Wait a second,” Dave started. “Let’s talk this out a bit …”

  “No,” Conall cut him off. “They’ve already got one of us. I’m not giving him six.”

  “You don’t think we can get him?” Ron asked.

  “Are you joking with me?” Conall said. “You’ll have to pardon me, sometimes American humor goes right over my head.”

  “I think we could get him,” Ron said.

  “And I know you’re wrong, you idiot,” Conall shot back. A few of the pack started to protest the breach of protocol but Conall was off to the races, running his mouth, venting his frustration into the bitter wind. “You have no training, you can barely control yourselves, you treat your women like shite, you’ve never been outside your black hole of a town and you’ve never killed anyone. You’re up against men with guns … lots of them with training and armor. I feel like I’ve been over this. You’re outmatched. You’re outgunned and you’re outsmarted. You have n
o chance of getting that bearded moron back and the sooner we can start the damage control on this giant cluster fuck the better off we’re all going to be.”

  Silence was the only response Conall received to his rant which he had used all his limbs to articulate. He stared from person to person, partly begging for a challenge and partly begging for an idea, any idea, that would make this situation better.

  “I’ve got to make some calls,” Conall said and started walking off.

  “We have home field advantage,” Ron yelled as he started walking away.

  “What are you on about?”

  “You know that term? Home field advantage? It means that you’re right. It means we’ve never left our black hole of a town but it also means we know every paved street, every access road. It means we know where the potholes are and how deep that historic marker is buried. We’ve lived on those roads. It means that we might not be trained but if there’s anywhere we can fight it’s in our town.”

  As he picked up steam Ron grinned at his own tenacity and the fact that he had a killer closing line.

  “And we might not be killers, but I have a guess there are a few of us that wouldn’t mind being killers by the end of the day.”

  “That’s right. That’s goddamn right,” Kenny Kirk said, not one to miss out on a speech. “Home field advantage, man. Ron’s probably got a plan in his head right now.”

  Ron nodded and Kenny walked up to stand next to him, shoulder to shoulder.

  “And we don’t treat our women like shit, which is how it’s pronounced, by the way.”

  “Sometimes you do,” JoAnn said, loud enough to be heard.

  If the group expected Conall to come over to their side, they were very wrong. The Irishman’s eyes, which were always a little sharp, were piercing as he looked over Ron and Kenny. He couldn’t hide his anger in pitch darkness.

  “I’ve got calls to make,” he spit.

  “I think you should hear them out,” Dave said, standing directly in Conall’s path.

  “And I think I’ve already kicked your ass,” Conall said. “Move before I do it again.”