Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

But it wasn’t. The angry red lines had already begun to knit, almost as if the stitches themselves were nuisances hindering the healing process.

  Glenn stared at his forearm. Well, shit.

  Nauseated, he rose from the bed and shuffled toward the door. He figured once he reached the hallway, there’d be a nurse there to shout him back to his bed. He had a vague recollection of a woman built like a defensive lineman asking him questions he was too dazed to answer. If that behemoth was his nurse, he had even more incentive not to get caught.

  Glenn peered right and left, saw no one. Only the elongated shadow of someone at the nurses’ station down the hallway.

  But where was Savannah? According to Short Pump she was just fine. Her friend, the librarian, was not fine, however, so she would be in intensive care just like Glenn.

  So find the librarian. Savannah might be with her.

  Glenn shuffled forward, aware for the first time of his lack of clothing. Was it really necessary, he wondered, for hospital gowns to flutter open in back? As if an exposed butt helped facilitate the healing process?

  He reached the first door, the one next to his. He opened the door and poked his head inside on the off chance it was the right room.

  It was.

  The librarian was sitting up in bed, watching him.

  “She’s with her son,” the librarian said.

  Of course she is, Glenn thought. He’d been foolish to think she’d be anywhere but with Jake. Sure, she cared about this peculiar friend of hers, but to think the librarian would supersede Savannah’s desire to protect her child? Man, he really was addled from the drugs.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, “I’ll just—”

  “It’s better, isn’t it?” the librarian said.

  He stared at her. “I don’t know what—”

  “Your arm,” she said. “It’s healing already.”

  Glenn opened his mouth, closed it. Then, with a glance down the hallway at the nurses’ station—still no one coming—he stepped inside and pulled shut the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But…”

  “Joyce,” she supplied. “Joyce Pertwee.”

  “That’s an odd name. What is it, French?”

  “Huguenot,” she said. “How did you know that?”

  He gave a little shrug. “Other people read, you know.”

  “Let me guess. Historical fiction?”

  “I’m not in the mood to talk books. Have you heard from Savannah?”

  “She called a few minutes ago. I wouldn’t let them take my cell phone.” She flourished it. “It has my e-reader.”

  “Wouldn’t want to lose that.” He moved closer to where she sat, noticing as he did she looked more like a spa patron than a woman who’d been badly injured. At her bedside, he said, “What you said earlier about…”

  “Healing,” she said.

  “Yeah, healing. Why did you say that?”

  She brought up her arm, which was bandaged about the wrist. She made a fist, rotated it back and forth. “There are a couple of shoulder lacerations that haven’t quite healed, but my wrist bones are already beginning to bind. The doctor scheduled surgery to insert pins, but after the last X-ray, he says that might not be necessary.”

  Glenn realized he’d begun to rub his forearm. He forced himself to stop.

  Joyce noticed it. “So the question is, what does it mean?”

  “It means we got lucky,” Glenn answered. “And a whole lot of our friends didn’t.”

  “I didn’t know any of them.”

  Glenn stiffened. “You don’t care that they’re dead?”

  Joyce didn’t wilt beneath the heat of his glare. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to,” he said. “Which room is Weezer in?”

  “I don’t—” Joyce started to say, then her eyes darted over his shoulder.

  “What are you doing out of your room?” a stern female voice demanded.

  Glenn turned and beheld his nurse, a broad-shouldered woman with black hair so shellacked with hairspray that it looked like Darth Vader’s helmet.

  “I needed to see Joyce,” he explained.

  The nurse strode over to him, her lips going thin when she spotted the needle jutting out of his skin. “This was giving you medication, Mr. Kershaw.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “Dr. Morris says you were attacked by a wild animal, and you need antibiotics to prevent infection.”

  Glenn glanced at his arm. Yes, he decided. Definitely healing.

  “You can keep your antibiotics.”

  The nurse followed his gaze, and her expression clouded. Then she seemed to fight off whatever uneasiness the sight of his nearly healed arm had engendered. “You need bed rest. I’m not going to say it again—get back to your room.”

  “It wasn’t an animal,” Joyce said.

  The nurse glowered at her, placed her hands on her considerable hips. “Now don’t you start in on that again. I wasn’t even supposed to be working tonight, but after what happened…” Her brow knitted, and when she spoke again, her tone was softer. “You both need sleep. Will you please cooperate?”

  Glenn asked, “Which room is Weezer’s?”

  The nurse’s scowl returned. “Now don’t go thinking you’re—”

  “Two down from mine,” Joyce said.

  Glenn frowned. “Who’s next door?”

  “It doesn’t matter who’s next door,” the nurse snapped. “What matters is that you two—”

  “The Bridwell girl,” Joyce said.

  Glenn’s mouth went dry at the memory of her mutilated leg. Poor Melody, he thought.

  The nurse abruptly grabbed him by the flap of his white gown. “To bed, Mr. Kershaw. You won’t do your friends any good by barging into their rooms. They’re both heavily sedated, and both in very serious condition.”

  Glenn felt a lump forming in his throat.

  The nurse’s hand moved to his lower back, and this time her voice was gentler. “I know you’re worried about him, but Mr. Talbot will only get better if he’s kept in a controlled environment. That means constant supervision and no visitors. We need to minimize the chances of infection.”

  Glenn looked at her.

  “His wounds were very deep, Mr. Kershaw,” she explained.

  Glenn frowned, but he had to admit what she was saying made sense. He allowed her to lead him out. The truth was, he did feel utterly exhausted. The nurse helped him onto the stiff hospital bed, reclined the upper half a bit, and drew up the sheet. It took a few minutes to reattach all the tubes and wires to his arms—more tape—but at last she succeeded. Then she extinguished the lights and went out.

  Glenn closed his eyes, settled back into his nest of pillows.

  It’s better, isn’t it? Joyce had asked. She’d known he was healing. How had she known it?

  Because her wounds are healing too.

  The human body was a resilient thing, he knew, but to recover with such startling rapidity from such hideous wounds…

  It wasn’t possible.

  Yet it was happening. Could Weezer and Melody Bridwell also be healing as quickly?

  With a sick jolt, Glenn remembered Weezer’s ruptured eye, popped like an overripe pimple. A wound that grievous would surely never heal.

  God. He couldn’t imagine how Weezer must be feeling, couldn’t imagine how Weezer would feel once the medication wore off and the true state of things revealed itself.

  I’m sorry, Weezer, he thought. I’m sorry.

  Glenn was brooding about his friend’s missing eye when sleep finally took him.

  Bobby Wayne Talbot, otherwise known as Weezer, heard the nurse close the door, and he was left with the horrible, stultifying silence of the intensive care ward. He could make out t
he beeps and blips of the monitors, the occasional click of some machine, but predominant among all sounds was the absence of sound. And that was the worst thing of all.

  Because into it flooded a parade of voices and images that refused to be displaced. And they weren’t good memories—what few he had—they were the embarrassing ones, the remorseful ones, the gut-wrenching ones.

  They’d strapped his fucking hands to the bed because he kept trying to claw off his bandages. But he couldn’t help it. There were live things crawling over his face, or at least that’s how it felt. Centipedes and ants and pill bugs, he imagined them all worming inside the trenches carved into his flesh, licking the coagulated blood, scooping out more of the scarified meat until they teemed through his skull, transforming it into a network of dripping tunnels and scar tissue.

  Jesus, Weezer thought. Jesus, just kill me now. I can’t take this, can’t take the agony of the bugs and the worms and the eggs they’re laying under my skin.

  He bucked on the bed, strained against the leather straps. He remembered the nurse saying something about pain medicine. What a crock of shit. They kept pumping more and more of that stuff into his bloodstream, and all it did was make him itch more severely.

  And maybe the constant, deepening itch wouldn’t be so bad if the movie in his mind weren’t so unbearable. At Duane’s urging he’d once watched a movie called Eraserhead. They all dug horror flicks, and Duane kept claiming Eraserhead was a real trip. Surreal, Duane had called it. Well, it had been surreal, Weezer supposed, if surreal meant really goddamned confusing and completely fucked-up.

  What Weezer was seeing in his mind right now was worse than Eraserhead, but the disconnected, grainy quality of the images came closer to Eraserhead than anything.

  He saw his dad—lazy fuckup that he was—allowing Weezer and his younger sister, born only a year apart, to run loose at the town dump, to climb all over immense mounds of sand that had turned out not to be sand mounds at all, but piles of dangerous trash concealed by shallow membranes of sand. So Weezer and his little sister Callie had come away with shards of glass embedded in their feet and their palms, Callie with one gash so deep in her heel it got infected and made her limp ever after, though that hadn’t been long since she’d died when she was eight.

  Which was the next thing he saw, Callie’s funeral, such as it was, conducted in the Talbot home and limited to friends and family. Callie had been placed in an open casket but hadn’t been embalmed or anything, so that the late August heat had baked her corpse in the Talbots’ living room, their house not air-conditioned. And Weezer had kept leaving the house on some pretense until his mom collared him and informed him it was disrespectful to ignore his sister like that. If he’d watched her in the first place, she might still be alive. He supposed that was the truth and he supposed he owed it to Callie to remain in the cramped living room with the crowd and the casket and the putrid fish smell, but try as he might, he couldn’t take it. He imagined every eye was on him, assessing him, deciding it was his fault Callie had been run over like a fucking mongrel, the teenage girl who hit her insisting Callie would be okay, she’d be just fine, the teenager fluttering around Weezer while he touched Callie’s face and whispered to her and begged her not to die. But her neck was all wrong, her hip poking out of her shorts in an unnatural way, and the teenager said, It’s okay, she’ll be okay in a minute, and Weezer thought, It’s my fault this happened. I was looking for cigarette butts with some tobacco in them. It felt grownup to do that, to cough and splutter and make the smoke, and his parents didn’t care, they must not, because they were visiting friends somewhere and had left Weezer to watch Callie for the day. And at the funeral that wasn’t really a funeral because there was no preacher and no real ceremony, the fish smell kept getting worse and worse, and at one point his cousin Ervin had sat down on the couch beside him and asked him what it had sounded like.

  What did what sound like? Weezer asked.

  You know, Ervin said.

  Weezer stared at him.

  It, Ervin said.

  I gotta go, Weezer said, beginning to rise.

  But Ervin, older and stronger than he was, clamped a hand over his leg, pinning him to the couch.

  Her body, Ervin said.

  Weezer shook his head, the tears coming.

  When the car hit her body, Ervin explained.

  Weezer hung his head and shook with sobs.

  Bet it thudded really loud, Ervin said. Hey, did she fly through the air or anything?

  I don’t know, Weezer moaned.

  Shhh, Ervin said, the hand on his leg squeezing. You don’t want to hurt your mama any more than you have already, do you?

  Weezer felt hot acid boiling in his gullet.

  What I was wondering, Ervin whispered, leaning closer. Do you think she coulda got away from that car if she didn’t have such a limp?

  And Weezer had strained against the imprisoning hand hard enough to draw attention, and he’d been dragged into the bathroom and given a hiding with his father’s belt, the buckle and all. So he had bloody trousers the rest of the day and they still made him sit in the living room with the flimsy pine box and the deteriorating body and the fish smell getting more and more fulsome.

  In the hospital bed, Weezer thrashed against the smell, strained against the imprisoning straps, and under his flesh the maggots wriggled and wriggled. He could see them in there, squirming their way deeper. Jesus Christ, why couldn’t it have been him that had gotten run down that sweltering August day. Why couldn’t he have died and not Callie, Callie who went along with whatever dumb scheme he cooked up? Jumping out of trees, sneaking nips of their parents’ cheap liquor, smoking the rank butts of discarded cigarettes.

  “You don’t have to grieve for her anymore, Bobby,” a voice said.

  Weezer froze. The voice had been in his head. More surreal shit.

  He exhaled shuddering breath. Maybe if the nurse gave him one more dose of the drugs, he’d actually go under, rather than perpetually dwelling in this fever dream of memories.

  “Now that you’re an initiate, you share a telepathic link with our species.”

  Weezer began to moan.

  “Accept it, Bobby.”

  This time Weezer lifted his head, opened the eye that didn’t feel like a glass-choked garbage dump. It took several moments for his eye to adjust, and even when it did, the room was so dim he could scarcely make out the figure seated in the corner.

  Weezer opened his mouth to cry out, but no sound escaped.

  “I made a mistake,” the man said. “I let passion govern me.”

  Weezer squinted into the gloom, but only the man’s icy blue eyes were visible.

  “You a doctor?” Weezer heard himself croak.

  The man laughed, but it was a bitter, haunted sound. “I’d only planned on killing one, but I lost control. The hunger mastered me. And now the master must control the population.”

  Weezer didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Will the master kill me too?” he asked.

  The man glanced at him. “Almost certainly. But even if you were spared, the suicide rate is very high. Many never adjust.”

  “Who is the—”

  “Silence!” the man shouted.

  Weezer recoiled.

  “When you become something beyond the pale of the natural world, you attract attention. We don’t want attention. We survive by lurking in the shadows.”

  Weezer swallowed. “Why’d you come to the party then?”

  “I abandoned myself to bloodlust, it is true,” the man said. “With much luck I shall be permitted to live.” The man smiled. “But you…the others who were wounded…the master will come for you by week’s end. In the past, they would have waited a fortnight, but not this time.”

  “What’s a fortnight?”

  “Gilles Garnier, they o
nce called me,” the man said. “Then David Gilles. I have survived longer than most. Until my unconscionable lapse in judgment.”

  Weezer’s eye must have indicated his puzzlement, because the man went on. “I must go. But I will tell you this…”

  The man rose, strode forward through the murk. Weezer began trembling.

  The man leaned forward, his rough-hewn, animalistic features totally bereft of mercy.

  “If you feel the urge to resist.”

  Weezer stared helplessly up at him.

  “Give in,” the man said.

  And before Weezer could comprehend the meaning of these words, the man turned and exited.

  Part Two

  Changes

  Chapter Eleven

  The next morning Joyce opened the library, stepped inside, and inhaled deeply. She’d suspected it before, but the transformation of her olfactory sense was now so obvious that she couldn’t ignore it.

  For the past six years she’d been entering this old building at 7:00 a.m., a full hour before the library officially opened. And for six years she’d been locking the door behind her, stepping a few feet to the left so anyone passing on the street wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her, and drawing in a long, luxuriant breath of the more than fifty thousand books that populated the three stories of the Lakeview Public Library. It gave her great pride to note—privately, of course; she’d never brag to anyone about her exploits, not even Savannah—that she’d increased the number of books by more than 30 percent since taking the job. And she hadn’t done it by dumping a lot of crappy promotional copies or tattered old math textbooks into circulation; she’d been patient, strategic. Every new addition to the LPL was a worthwhile book. The library now boasted an impressive speculative fiction section, a more thorough representation of the classics. Even a strong foreign language area for those who wanted to improve themselves.

  But now…but now…

  Now it wasn’t just books she smelled. Now the undercurrent of mildew that never seemed to go away, no matter how many dehumidifiers she ran, was a full-blown riot. The aroma of aged wood, pleasant in small doses, now carried with it the stench of rot, of disease, of termites. She’d have to call an exterminator, though she couldn’t imagine how offensive the poisons would be to her hypersensitive nostrils.