Biker

by Baron, Mike;

  This couldn’t be Ginger’s little boy, stolen at the age of two. This wasn’t even human. The name was all wrong. “Eric” belonged to a clean-cut boy with a crew cut, a ready grin, a grasp on life. Not this, this thing. This was some kind of sick nature joke, like pinheads and Siamese twins.

  Pratt’s eyes swept the room seeking refuge from the sight before him. Dozens of empty cereal boxes: Frosty-Os, Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch. Industrial bags of popcorn and oats. Dozens and dozens of candy bar wrappers—Snickers, Hershey’s, SweeTarts. Frozen-food packages, a microwave sitting on a table made from a telephone company spool. And the creature’s nest—blankets and cushions jumbled into a fur-lined sleeping hole. A dream catcher twisted overhead as an errant breeze wafted through the chemical lodge house.

  Was it house-trained?What was that shit smell?

  The creature scratched its neck, revealing a studded leather collar.

  I’m not equipped to handle this, Pratt thought. It called for child psychologists and animal behaviorists. It called for a pastor, a rabbi and a priest. The creature made no hostile move apart from the omnipresent growling that issued from the back of its throat like surf. Pratt tucked the pistol in his pants and showed his empty palms like you would to a strange dog.

  “I’m Josh Pratt,” he said in a soft, gentle voice. “I’m a private detective. Your mother hired me to find you.”

  “My mother?” the creature snarled. It reached up and switched off the light. Josh was momentarily blinded.

  “I have … no mother.” Consonants stripped of all sharp edges yet Pratt understood him clearly almost as if a tiny voice inside his head was speaking at the same time.

  “Of course you do and she loves you very much.” Pratt groped, caught in a whirlpool, desperately trying to recall the social workers who’d worked so hard to make a difference and never had. Pratt had to go to prison to straighten out his life and find Jesus.

  Where could this thing go?

  Pratt regretted his thinking instantly. It isn’t a thing. It’s a human being.

  Who could do this to their own child?

  “You have a father, don’t you?”

  Emotional confusion overwhelmed Pratt. Duane was in his head. The thin line between love and hate, it was all over him. He started to weep. It wasn’t just the chemicals. He cursed himself for his weakness like some silly bitch on the rag. Why did he suddenly feel this way? In that instant he would have welcomed a joint, a line, a drink, anything to move him off the emotional spot.

  “Daddy,” Eric said with a heartbreaking mixture of love and fear.

  “Where is he?”

  Eric gestured toward his hairy chest. “My job … to guard the lab … until Daddy returns.”

  “Where is Daddy?” Pratt said. A wave of anticipation and dread rocked his ticker, followed by a sense of suicidal dread.

  “Daddy … is here.”

  A massive arm snaked around Pratt’s neck, fingers gripping the back of his shoulder. “Right behind you,” a voice whispered in his ear. The arm clamped tight, shutting off the carotid artery. Pratt reached for the pistol in the small of his back but a hand grasped his wrist and jerked it up between his shoulder blades.

  Pratt’s last thought before he passed out was, “Careless …”

  CHAPTER 25

  The rancid smell of public toilets. Something foul splattered onto Pratt’s face. He opened his eyes. Dark, all dark except for straight up where the sky had been reduced to a deep blue plate. The silhouette of a man standing on the well wall, impossibly foreshortened from Pratt’s angle. Golden droplets falling down.

  The man was pissing on him. Pratt jerked his head aside and found himself sitting on cool, hard-packed earth. He looked around. He was in a hemispherical chamber lined with red bricks, flow holes open at ground level. An empty gallon container made of steel that smelled of chemicals lay on the ground next to a rug segment.

  He was in the well.

  Moon was pissing on him.

  Pratt scrabbled backwards on his ass out of the line of fire.

  “Good morning!” Moon sang in a surprisingly mellifluous and friendly voice. It echoed around Pratt’s head like reverb. “Josh, is it? Wow. I really can’t believe Ginger’s got a bee up her butt after all these years.”

  Pratt choked on his fury, struggling to bring himself under control. “What did you do to him?” he said, voice cracking.

  “What, my boy Eric? He’s a good’n, ain’t he? He’s my faithful pal, isn’t that right, Eric?” Moon’s voice drifted in another direction. “Who’s Daddy’s good little boy?” he cooed.

  Pratt retched. His stomach heaved a whiffle ball. There was nothing to throw up. He was thirsty and needed to piss. He needed something to wash the sour taste from his mouth. Something hit the ground with a dull thump. A bottle of water. Pratt twisted off the cap and drank gratefully.

  “Don’t want you to think I’m inhospitable,” Moon said. “I’m damned proud to know you. Was that you broke into the LaFarge, beat the crap out of Ringo and took our stash?”

  “Yeah,” Pratt gasped between gulps.

  “That took balls. All kinds of balls. Balls to the wall! And then you followed Grundy. Hell of a thing, hitting a deer like that. You know his brother died the same way. Must run in the family.”

  Moon had to have gone back down the canyon to know about Grundy. Pratt felt outsmarted.

  “Tell me where my shit is, I’ll make it easy for you.”

  “I flushed it down a toilet.”

  Moon sighed dramatically. “Pratt, you’re not helping yourself.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Who?”

  “Your son.”

  “I raised him as a dog boy. It’s an ancient Chinese custom. ‘Every day, starting with the back, the captors would remove a bit of the unfortunate child’s skin and transplant pieces of the hide of a bear or dog in its place. The process was tedious, for the hide adhered only in spots and the children had a habit of dying in the midst of treatment.’ Of course having my genes, my boy survived.” Moon’s voice turned indulgent. “He not only survived, but thrived! And now he helps his Daddy, doesn’t he?”

  Pratt felt rather than heard a faint whimper. His gut did dry belly flops. He retched again and reached for the water. He drained the bottle.

  “He’s a tracker, Pratt! This boy could track a fart in a hurricane!”

  “Can I have another water?”

  “Well I don’t know. You drank that already? It’s not like you’re going to be around much longer.”

  “People know where I am, Moon.”

  Moon hunkered down on the well’s rim like a big frog. “I checked your cell phone. You’re talking about an old friend of mine. I guess Cass is your friend now, huh? Well I’m just going to have to pay her and Ginger a courtesy call after all these years. Yes sir, I just may have to do that.”

  Pratt’s breath came shallow and fast and he felt lightheaded like the first time he’d found himself in jail. Recognizing the signs of a panic attack, Pratt scooted to one side of the oubliette from where he was invisible to Moon and leaned back against the inward curving wall. He watched the disc of sunlight in the middle of the floor. How long had he been out? He put his head between his knees and practiced square breathing. Inhale—one, two, three, four—hold it—one, two, three, four—exhale—one, two, three, four—hold it.

  Not working. Pratt’s heart sounded like a bass drum. The tach needle was way past red.

  All Moon had to do was walk away. Pratt would die of thirst. Like the dog in the crate.

  “You know Cass is short for Cassandra, ‘She who entangles men.’ I’m doing you a favor, Pratt. You’d just get sick of her and not be able to get rid of her. ’Course either way I’m doing you the favor.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Well I was wondering what to do with this mangy old mountain lion I trapped and you come along. You ever see that film, orca versus great white shark
? It’s a classic. You can find it on YouTube. Guy got lucky in the North Pacific. I mean the guy with the camera. It’s not much of a battle. That orca kicked major shark butt. We don’t get to see that kind of thing too often. I wish there were more of that kind of thing. A reality show, y’know? Thing versus thing.”

  Feeling queasy and thirsty, Pratt said, “Did you say mountain lion?”

  “Yes that’s right. I hope you’re as excited as I am.”

  Pratt patted down his pockets. His gun, wallet and cell phone were gone. For some reason he still had his buck knife and the bottle of ibuprofen. He looked around for other potential weapons. Some rocks. A brick. When he stuck his fingers into the groove next to the wall they came away wet. White spots appeared before his eyes.

  “Bullshit,” Pratt said.

  Moon giggled girlishly. “You may very well think so but I’m not fuckin’ around.” His voice segued from flirtatious to ominous rasp in the same sentence. A headache launched a stabbing attack behind Pratt’s left eye. Death by dehydration was awful. Maybe being killed by a mountain lion wasn’t as bad.

  Get off it, Pratt. He’s full of shit. He’s playing you.

  “Eric, you make sure you water the lion after it eats this motherfucker,” Moon said, his voice echoing eerily down the sides of the well. “I don’t want to be accused of mistreating an animal.”

  The outline of Moon’s head and shoulders appeared in the sun disc on the ground. “Well I hate to bug out on you and all but I got some deliveries to make. Let me just leave you with this thought: Joker in the well. Mountain lion chowing down. Soon joker is gone.”

  The silhouette withdrew. Pratt heard Moon speaking to someone but couldn’t make out the words. He couldn’t stop shaking. The disc of light on the floor squeezed into a crescent.

  “It’s in God’s hands,” Pratt whispered.

  A terrible silence descended.

  CHAPTER 26

  It was cool in the well. It would be cold at night. Anxiety added to Pratt’s thirst. He looked at the empty plastic bottle. He jammed his fingers into the slot at the base and they came away damp. There was no water. Pratt could last three, maybe four days before delirium set in.

  He dismissed the mountain lion. That Moon was a master of psychological warfare was a given. But the threat against Cass and Ginger was real. Pratt had to get out of there. For the nth time he surveyed his prison. It was lined with bricks. There was the gallon tin. It had been an artesian well. Pratt felt the bricks. Some were loose, the mortar worn away by decades of water. The aquifer had long since drained, leaving nothing but a wet spot.

  Where did the facility draw water? Was there a tank on the property? The ground pump had to be connected to a deeper well. Electricity? You could cook meth over a Sterno flame. Why the one empty can? Why didn’t Moon dump all his empties in the well? Maybe he’d discovered Gaia. Maybe the boy threw it in.

  The boy.

  If indeed he was the boy. It was impossible to tell the creature’s age. Pratt had deliberately steered clear of that mental black hole but if he had understood Moon correctly, Eric had stayed behind. To deliver the puma.

  Yeah, right.

  Pratt was in solitary again. Been there, done that. He pissed carefully against the wall opposite where he’d been sitting.

  “Eric?” Pratt called.

  Silence. Utter silence save the faint susurrus of the wind blowing across the well’s lip like breath on a bottle.

  Pratt got to his feet, cupped his hands to his mouth, aimed straight up and wound it up from the gut. “ERIC!”

  His words shot out of the bottle like a spitwad and whisked away in the wind. Pratt eyed the top. Had to be thirty feet. Pratt worked a brick loose. It fell to the ground with a moist thump. Eyeing the aperture, he heaved it underhand with his best fast-pitch softball arm. It scraped the inside of the well two feet below the lip.

  “ERIC!”

  Pratt caught himself hyperventilating again. Square breathing. Think about the boy.

  No, it was better not to think about the boy. Pratt was torn between existential anxiety and horror. He stared at the ground and balled his fists.

  The back of his neck tingled as if he were being watched. Anxiety and anticipation nibbled at his gut and somehow it was not his own, but an alien presence in his mind.

  “Shut … up,” fell into the well like a feather. Pratt looked up. A shaggy silhouette disturbed the gibbous outline.

  “Eric.” Pratt heard himself sob in relief. “Thank Christ. Eric, you’ve got to help me out of here.”

  “Just shut … the fuck up. I’m not helping … you. Gene told me … what to do. I have … my orders.” There was an undertone of desperation to the barely human speech. Although the creature’s—the boy’s—speech lacked sibilants and all hard-edged consonants, Pratt had no trouble understanding him. Again, that sense that someone was talking to him in his head.

  Pratt consciously relaxed his gut as he arched his back. “Eric, your mother sent me to bring you back. She loves you very much.”

  “I have … no mother. My mother … was a wolf.”

  “Eric. Think about this. You have a mother who loves you. You hurt all the time. She can help you get better. Think about this, Eric. What if Gene is lying?”

  A hissing gasp. “Gene … does … not … lie!” Eric rasped. “You are … a bad man! You came … to hurt me!”

  “Eric! How could I possibly hurt you any more than you’ve already been hurt?”

  Pratt heard Eric’s labored breathing as he leaned over the well.

  Wendigo. An American werewolf in the Old West. Pratt had read about them in a book about old legends he’d taken out of the Mayville, Iowa library once when they were stopped for a few days, Duane working at a grain elevator. Young Pratt had gravitated toward monsters like iron filings to a magnet. He sought reassurance in a world more sinister than his own.

  That world never existed.

  Until now.

  The boy was a mental black hole. Pratt would have preferred not to think about him but that was impossible. No longer an “it.” Only the boy could help him now. Thinking about how the boy got that way accomplished nothing. Pratt was forced to compartmentalize, furiously hurrying down a mental corridor slamming doors. He had no use for the strangely intense emotions assaulting him.

  The entity leaning over the well was unknown but human. Certainly the boy would respond to any sincere and meaningful overture. That was only natural. He remembered a Fantastic Four comic book he’d read in prison wherein Sue Richards extends the hands of kindness to some Kirbyesque monster, saying all living things responded to kindness. He’d dated a hippie once who believed all men were basically good.

  What was her name? Dar something. Darryl.

  Darlene. She talked a good game but when push came to shove, she folded like a cheap tent. She was proud of her “progressivism.” She made Pratt her project. When he failed to respond to her unselfish love and devotion, she waited until he was at work one day, cleaned out the apartment, sold his stereo, microwave oven and TV to a pawn shop and disappeared.

  Pratt learned years later she’d died of AIDS in Mexico.

  Get him talking. The more the boy talked, the more human he became.

  “What do you eat?” Pratt forced a conversational tone.

  “What?”

  “What do you eat out here? What does Gene feed you?”

  “I eat … apples … protein bars … venison … peanut butter … Red Vines.”

  “You ever had a thick, juicy steak? How’d you like a thick, juicy steak?” His own stomach rumbled like a Panzer Division. He could see the steak. He could practically taste it. Medium rare with grilled mushroom topping. The boy’s teeth had to be a disaster. He’d never seen a dentist. Pratt wondered if Moon had fed him lots of sweets.

  “Do you like candy?” Pratt called.

  “Yeah …”

  So the boy’s teeth were shot.

  “How ’bout tossing down
another bottle of water?”

  Silence. Pratt gazed up. The shaggy outline withdrew. A sense of calm settled on Pratt like a shroud. He zoned out, momentarily unaware of his surroundings and condition. The sound of a twelve-ounce bottle of water thwacking the floor snapped his head off his chest. Pratt scooped it up gratefully and chugged it down. He looked up. No outline.

  “Eric!” he called.

  No answer. Was the boy even within earshot? Where had he gone? Pratt sat down Indian style. All things being relative Duane didn’t seem quite so bad by comparison. Sure there’d been physical abuse—the drunken beatings, that time Duane kicked Pratt, age nine, out of the car five miles from home in the middle of a blizzard and told him to walk.

  At least Duane hadn’t engaged in systematic crippling torture. Yeah, Duane was a real prize. He failed the Dr. Mengele test. Pratt still had Duane’s cheap digital watch. Fucking thing had been keeping time for twenty years. Go figure. An hour passed as Pratt considered his options. It was possible that all his clothes, torn into strips, might make a twenty foot rope. He had an idea regarding the discarded gallon tin.

  Pratt wondered how long he should wait. It was possible Eric had deserted him, left him to die on Moon’s orders. The anxiety made him thirsty. He stood, looked up, cupped his mouth.

  “Eric!”

  Nada.

  “ERIC!”

  No response. Well there you have it. He was on his own. He reached for his belt buckle.

  He heard a grunt.

  “Eric, is that you?”

  Another grunt, imperceptibly louder as something approached the well, someone struggling with a bulky or heavy object.

  “Eric, I need a rope!”

  The shaggy outline appeared briefly.

  “Eric?”

  More grunting. A large, rectangular box hove into view as Eric rested one end atop the low well rim. The box had rounded corners. It was an animal container similar to those Pratt had seen outside the hut.

  A wild feline snarl shot the tube.

  Pratt watched petrified as a shaggy arm reached around to the door, which hung over the well. The arm released the latch and opened the door. An instant later Eric tilted the other end of the box up, emptying the mountain lion into the well.