Ravenous

by Ray Garton

  “But what about Emily?”

  “Look, Mrs. March, are you home alone?”

  “My husband’s here with me, and I have Emily’s kids.” She lowered her voice. “For God’s sake, what’s happened to her?”

  “To be honest, Mrs. March, we’re not quite sure yet. But I’ll know more when I come to see you, and I’ll tell you everything. I have to go now. I’ll see you soon.”

  He turned the phone off and put it back on the nightstand, where it would never be answered again.

  * * * *

  On the way back down the stairs, Hurley said, “Kopechne, I’m putting you in charge. Make sure nobody comes in this house except forensics and the coroner. Call Eureka and get CSU over here to investigate this crime scene.” His voice was still a little shaky from what he’d seen in the master bedroom. What was left of Hugh Crane was scattered all over the king-size bed, some of it dangling from the headboard, the lampshade. Naked bloody ribs sticking up from the stripped-open torso. He took a deep breath and added, “Although that didn’t look like something a criminal would do. It ... it looked like something an animal would do.” At the bottom of the stairs, Hurley stopped and turned to Kopechne. “Chase away any media. Tell them all I’ll talk to them when I know more. Just hold everything together, know what I’m saying?”

  “Yep.”

  Hurley slapped him on the shoulder, then took off the latex gloves and handed them to Kopechne. “Thanks. I’ve got other things to do.”

  He left the house. The ambulance was there and the young man who’d been unconscious on the lawn was gone. The horrific thing on the grass now lay completely still. Hurley headed for Fargo’s car.

  One of the EMTs spotted Hurley crossing the lawn and hurried over to his side. “Sheriff, I, uh, I’ve gotta ask,” he said, walking along with Hurley, “that, uh, that body, that, uh, thing over there on the lawn—”

  When he said nothing for a moment, Hurley said, “Yeah, what about it?”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s a fucking patient, what does it look like? You’re to take it to the hospital with you.”

  “I’m afraid to touch it!”

  Hurley stopped on the sidewalk and faced the young man. He was small and wiry. “Look, I think it’s dead. It’s not going to hurt you in its current condition. And don’t you take universal precautions?” he said, gesturing at the latex gloves the young man wore.

  “But I’ve never seen anything like—”

  “Goddammit, do I have to get somebody else over here to do your job? Don’t you have a partner over there? Get him to do it! But don’t bother me with it, I’ve got more problems than I can handle and I don’t need—”

  “Hey, hey,” the guy said, arms raised in surrender. “Just asking, okay? Just asking.”

  Hurley wanted to pound his fist through a wall. He wanted to take a hammer to something breakable. He clenched and unclenched his fists as he crossed the street to the dark Mercedes he’d seen Fargo get into.

  Fargo’s window descended as Hurley approached.

  “I’d like you to come to my office, Mr. Fargo,” Hurley said. “It’s very important that we talk.”

  “Must we go to your office?” Fargo said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have not eaten since breakfast, Sheriff, and I’m quite hungry. I’d be happy to buy dinner for both of us if you will only recommend a restaurant.”

  Deputy Eddings got out of the car on the other side.

  Hurley leaned a hand on the top edge of the car, elbow locked. He ran his other hand down over his face. He pushed away from the car, reached into his jacket pocket and removed his cell phone. He flipped it open, punched a couple of buttons, and put it to his ear.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not going to make dinner tonight. It’s unavoidable. ... Well, this is a bad time. I’m gonna have to go. Okay? Bye-bye.” He closed the phone and dropped it back in the pocket. He looked down at Fargo and said, “You like Chinese food?”

  26

  Fargo’s Story

  Mrs. Lee greeted Hurley with her usual warmth when he entered the Jade Garden with Fargo in tow at nine minutes past seven that evening.

  “Sheriff, how nice to see you again,” Mrs. Lee said. “You have a companion?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Lee, this is Mr. Fargo. He and I would like a booth in the back.”

  “Certainly, of course, come this way.”

  Hurley had driven over in the SUV while Fargo had followed him in his Mercedes. It had begun to rain again, and Hurley had driven carefully so as not to lose Fargo in the night.

  Mrs. Lee led them to a booth where the men removed their hats and coats, tossed them onto the benches ahead of them, and seated themselves.

  Mrs. Lee brought them a pot of hot tea and two jade-green menus. Plates were already on the table, along with chopsticks wrapped in red linen napkins.

  “I already know what I want,” Hurley said. He turned to Fargo and said, “I’ll order for both of us to save time.”

  Fargo scanned the menu briefly but chose to submit to Hurley’s play to take control. “Go ahead, Sheriff,” he said.

  Hurley ordered. Mrs. Lee jotted the order down and gave them a little bow before leaving the table.

  “Now,” Hurley said, leaning forward a bit with arms folded on the table. “I want you to start talking. You mentioned a wolf. What do wolves have to do with what’s happening in this town?”

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Did the lab find something—blood? Hair? Saliva?”

  Hurley debated with himself over how much to tell Fargo. He still had no idea who this man was, from where he’d come.

  “First, you tell me something,” Hurley said. “You said you came here looking for someone. Who? And why?”

  “I was searching for a man named Irving Taggart. Know the name?”

  Frowning, Hurley shook his head. He turned the small teacup right-side-up and poured some steaming tea into it.

  “I believe he’s your missing John Doe,” Fargo said.

  Hurley thought about that a moment. Do I have a missing John Doe? he wondered. Then he remembered the empty table in the morgue and thought, Oh, yes, of course I do. It was the John Doe who’d attacked Emily Crane on the road—the one she’d allegedly killed with the corkscrew—the one who’d walked out of the morgue not behaving very dead.

  Fargo said, “I have been reading the local paper, watching the local news broadcasts in my motel room since arriving. Which was not long ago. I’ve kept up. I know what is going on in your town, Sheriff Hurley. I know what the problem is, and I can help you to keep it from getting worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Yes, worse. Sheriff Hurley, you have an infestation of werewolves.”

  Hurley stared at him for a long time, his face blank. He had no idea how to respond. Clearly, he was dining with a lunatic.

  “Mr. Fargo,” Hurley said, and then he left it hanging there. He bowed his head a moment, thinking, wondering how to approach this. His shoulders sagged as he sighed heavily. “I thought you knew something. Something helpful. I really did. For a moment there, I let my hopes get high.”

  “I do know something. I’m telling you. Your town has an infestation of werewolves that will soon become a full-blown outbreak if it is not contained immediately. Taggart is the source of this infestation, which means he will be able to communicate telepathically with the others—his descendants, so to speak. This telepathic contact will strengthen them, give them drive, purpose. Once he has successfully linked them all together and starts giving them commands—believe me, Sheriff, you have to keep that from happening, because once that happens ... well, it’s all over for Big Rock. Then the next town. And the next. You have to stop them here, Sheriff Hurley. While you still can.”

  “And how do you, uh—” An abrupt, breathy chuckle escaped Hurley. “—how do you propose I do that?”

  “Find Irving Taggart. Learn who he’s infected,
then—”

  “Infected?”

  “Oh, yes, infected. Then we find those people, and learn who they have infected.” With a shrug, Fargo added, “And, of course, we’ll have to kill them all.”

  Hurley’s mouth fell open. He frowned as he leaned even farther forward, his eyes wide. “Kill them?”

  Fargo nodded. “They are no longer the people they once were, Sheriff Hurley. They are no longer human. If they are not killed, they will continue to kill people and eat them, as well as rape and spread the virus.”

  “Virus?”

  “It is a virus, yes.”

  Hurley squinted at him. “A virus? Should you be talking to me, or the CDC?”

  “Lupus verenus, it’s called,” Fargo said. “Well ... that’s what I call it. And I’m the one who funded the research that discovered it, and paid the scientists who worked on it, and coordinated the construction of the small lab where all this was done.”

  Mrs. Lee returned with their food on a tray. “Here you are, gentlemen,” she said as she put the three dishes on the table. “Enjoy.” She smiled as she turned and walked away.

  “What’s a virus?” Hurley said as if Mrs. Lee had not been there.

  “The lycanthropy. It’s rare, and we can thank God for that, but it does indeed exist. And it is quite contagious.”

  Hurley leaned back on the padded seat and began to dish up his dinner. “Look, Mr. Fargo, I don’t think you’re going to help by hanging around and insisting we have an outbreak of contagious werewolves in Big Rock.” He tried to speak with a level voice, but it quavered a little. Crackpots infuriated him. Alien abductees, Bigfoot hunters, conspiracy theorists, Scientologists, UFO “experts”—they all annoyed the hell out of him. They were such a waste of ... thought, of brain power.

  Fargo smiled under his thick mustache. “I think you know I’m right. You are simply too afraid to admit it. You grasp for other answers, don’t you? Other explanations. But none works. This one, however, does. And it scares the hell out of you, as it should. I am not crazy, Sheriff Hurley. Am I behaving like a mentally disturbed person? No. Maybe you have been trying to tell yourself I’m crazy, but you know better. Don’t you, Sheriff Hurley? You know something very strange is going on in your town, don’t you? The killings, the eviscerations. You can feel it in your gut that something is very wrong. Have you heard any odd sounds? Howling, perhaps? What about that thing on the lawn in front of the house tonight, Sheriff? You saw it. Half human, half wolf. You saw her in mid-transformation. She was shot with shells loaded with silver buckshot. That’s why she died. Werewolves have a—”

  “Shot?” Hurley said, his eyes widening. “Who shot her?”

  Fargo stared at him levelly with one good eye and the other, larger prosthetic eye, his food untouched, but he said nothing.

  “You say she was shot, yes?” Hurley said.

  “With silver buckshot. Werewolves have a violent, traumatic allergic reaction to silver that is always fatal, even if it takes a little time to kill them. It disables them immediately and makes them—”

  “I need real solutions, Fargo,” Hurley said as he ate. “Not legends, not superstitions. And certainly not stories of a werewolf virus. And now, you tell me you’ve killed someone. Mr. Fargo, I’m the sheriff, I can’t just sit here and—”

  “What did you find in that house, Sheriff? How many had she killed? The entire family?”

  Lips parted, Hurley stared at the man. He suddenly felt cold. An inner chill passed through him.

  “Whoever you found, whatever was left—the remains were partially eaten, weren’t they?”

  After a moment, Fargo nodded once, then began to eat. “Who shot her, Fargo? You?”

  He ignored the question. “You’ll find more. Quickly. It’s already happened to one of your deputies. It will start happening all over town. Then it will spread beyond this town. Your bullets will not stop these creatures. Your weapons are useless without silver ammunition. You are helpless. Without me, anyway. That is why I’ve come. To help you fight this, to save lives. You need me, Sheriff.”

  They ate together in silence for awhile. Fargo was the first to speak.

  “What do you think is happening in your town, Sheriff Hurley?” he said.

  “I think I’ve got a psycho on my hands. No, two. A couple real freaks—one who rapes, one who kills.”

  “You think a person did all that damage to those victims?”

  Hurley rolled his eyes and sighed. “Fargo, you must know how crazy your story is.”

  “Yes, I do know. Of course I do. But I also know what I’ve seen and touched and—See these scars on my face?”

  Hurley nodded.

  “I did not get them in a barroom brawl, I can assure you. I got them on Thanksgiving Day, sixteen years ago. I lost the eye later. Just a year and a half ago, to be precise. Would you like to hear about it?”

  Hurley shrugged. “Frankly, I’d rather hear that than more stories about werewolves.”

  Fargo smiled and chuckled a little. He ate a short while longer, then took the napkin from his lap and dabbed his mouth as he leaned back in the seat. He pushed the plate away, tossed the napkin onto it, then he began to tell his story. ...

  * * * *

  It was to be a quiet Thanksgiving. Just my wife Debra and myself, and our daughter Rose and her husband of one year, Jeffrey. Rose was quite pregnant with their first child. She was seven months along. She was a small woman, quite petite, like her mother, making her enormous belly look almost as big as she was. She was so happy. You hear people talk of pregnant women having a glow—well, she did, she truly did. I don’t think the smile ever left her face the whole day. Until ... until it happened.

  I married into money, Sheriff Hurley. That was not my reason for marrying Debra, it had nothing to do with it. But that did not change the fact that my wife was very rich when I married her. I fell in love with her, not her money, and I remained in love with her until her death. You see, her father had invented a particular kind of glue that revolutionized the production of envelopes and stamps and other adhesive products. He and Debra’s mother had died years before, and being the only child, she had inherited their entire fortune. We lived very well in our mansion in New Haven, and our Thanksgiving dinner was cooked and served by servants. We had everything we needed and wanted. And yet, all that was taken away that day, in a matter of minutes.

  They walked right in through our front door. I have no idea how they got past the front gate, which was kept locked, but they did. They came into the house as if they lived there, as if they owned the place. Two men and a woman. They wore filthy clothes that hung on them in tatters. They smelled like ... like animals, a foul, gamey smell. They were laughing as they made their way into the dining room.

  It was our custom to eat our Thanksgiving dinner early, so we could go for a walk afterward and work it off, or something. It was simply too heavy a meal to eat late. So we ate around five. It was just getting dark outside.

  When I heard them, I frowned because I knew no one else was expected. I looked at Debra, puzzled, and she said, “I wonder who that could be.” Maynard, our butler, cried out somewhere in the house and I heard him fall to the floor. I quickly pushed my chair back and stood. As I turned to go see what was happening, they entered the dining room, and after that, everything was chaos.

  The woman was tall and big-boned, with long red hair. The men were both dark. Their ages—probably somewhere in their twenties. First, they attacked our dinner table. They threw plates against the wall, played catch with the ham, threw food all over my family.

  “Get security!” I shouted.

  They simply laughed. One of the men pulled Rose’s chair back away from the table and hooked his arms under hers, and dragged her from her chair. Rose screamed and Jeffrey and I immediately went to her aid, but the other man grabbed us both and pulled us back. I jerked from his grasp and turned around to face him, to punch him right in the face. But I froze.

  He op
ened his mouth to reveal large fangs. And then, with ... popping and ... and crunching sounds, his face ... it elongated. The lower half of his face jutted outward. His nose became two twitching, glistening black nostrils at the end of a snout.

  Debra and Rose kept screaming.

  The man’s face darkened, and I realized that was because he was very rapidly growing hair all over it. His height suddenly increased, right before my eyes. The tattered clothes that once hung off his body in loose strips were now tight because his body had thickened and become quite muscular.

  The screams were awful. Now, along with Debra and Rose, the maid, Mrs. Blevins, screamed, too, and there were more screams coming from the other servants.

  The man slapped my face. That was what it felt like at first, a simple but very hard slap. And then my slapped face began to bleed, and blood ran into my eyes and mouth. He slapped me again and again, all the while his thin, black lips grinning around all those sharp teeth. All I knew was that I was in terrible pain and bleeding badly. But I had to do something, I had to. Something irritating seemed to be attached to my face—several small hanging objects clung to my cheeks and forehead, dangling annoyingly. I did not realize at the time that it was torn skin dangling from my skull.

  I do not remember much from that point onward. Mostly flashes of things. Blood splattering the walls. The sight of my wife’s throat torn out and gushing and spurting blood. My daughter’s clothes torn, her bare pregnant belly sliced open. I remember seeing them play catch with the bloody infant, then they took it apart and ate it, all three of them, sharing it among themselves.

  I do not remember much. But I remember that.

  I remember enough. More than enough.

  And who was causing all this bloodshed? Was it two strange men and a strange woman? No, not anymore. They were no longer human. They were three monsters. Three tall, hairy, fanged, clawed monsters.

  I woke up in a hospital, raving about werewolves. They drugged me, I went under, and slept for a few more days. When I came to again, I knew better than to tell the truth. If I did, they would most likely put me away. Instead, I described the two men and one woman who initially came into the house. They had me look at some mug shots, and I identified all three of them. Common criminals.