The Other Kind (The Progeny of Evolution Series)

by Arsuaga, Mike

  He already did her once. Under the foul breath and armpit stench he broadcast in almost overwhelming measure, I smelled semen as traces of it leaked from Sam, a heavy and bitter odor like wet chicken feathers. Now he crouched beside her bared and helpless loins. The blade of the knife reflected dull silver from the ceiling light as he moved it from her throat and rested it on the wet tissues of her womanhood.

  “If I plunged this into her I could prick the diaphragm,” he speculated aloud, almost clinically. “She couldn’t breathe and would drown in her own blood.”

  I sat on the couch. “Quit talking,” Sam snapped in a tough authoritative tone I never heard her use, delivered with a strong New York City accent, probably Bronx or Queens, “I liked what you did. Do it to me again. Don’t mind my old man there. He likes to watch.” The statement returned his attention to her. Relegating me to an ignored spectator, presented the best chance to pull off a rescue. Smart girl.

  He took his rigid flesh in hand, still reeking from before. The dark brown shaft glistened like wet leather. He shoved it straight into Sam. It must have hurt by the way she winced each time he moved it in and out, but she kept him occupied, giving me a chance to help her. As quick as I was, I knew he had time to slit her throat before I crossed the room. I needed something to throw. I had nearly the velocity and accuracy of a major league pitcher. I slid open the drawer of the end table and felt around inside. In the bottom my fingers found a small hard spherical object. Silently, I brought it into the light. It was a baseball, one of the old ones made out of real hide and yellowed with age, although the stitching appeared practically new. In fading black ink from a fountain pen a signature and date scrolled across the sweet spot. It read “Babe Ruth. August 21, 1924.” For an instant I wondered if the ball and signature were real or a reproduction from a novelty company and just as quickly put the thought out of mind.

  From the corner of her eye Sam must have spotted me and figured what I was up to, because she kicked her passion to a higher gear to be sure he continued to ignore me. Aiming at the middle of his torso, I reared back and let fly. Because I threw while sitting it did not achieve ninety miles an hour, but it got to sixty or seventy. It hit him squarely between the shoulder blades with a loud crack, forcing the top of him forward and the bottom, in a counter weight sort of move, backward and out of Sam. His dick exited her with a distasteful slurp. He sank to his knees, tried an unsteady rise, and collapsed on the floor. The ball must have broken something inside because blood gushed from his mouth, making a rapidly growing red pool around his head. He tried to cry out only to choke. Then he relaxed and became quiet.

  “Is he dead?” Sam asked from the table.

  “No, but he’s badly hurt. Do you want me to finish him?”

  “No,” she snapped. “Free me. I want to do it myself.”

  As soon as I cut her loose she found the baseball. Picking it up, she examined it carefully. She wet a finger with saliva and rubbed out a scuff mark, replacing it carefully in the drawer from where I took it. She turned toward me and morphed. The rapist gasped at the sight of the broad shouldered creature, covered by hair the color and texture of an Irish setter. With casual and calculating intensity, as if the rape had not happened to her but to someone else, her eyes studied the stirring pouch of flesh on the floor pinned in my grip.

  She killed him the way lycans did in all of the centuries before the modern wonders of the pharmaceutical industry made it neater and, for the most part, bloodless. He watched with horrified eyes as she, in a blur of motion, ripped his throat so he couldn’t cry out. His blood sprayed warm across my face. For the next several minutes he writhed in silent agony as she slowly and methodically slashed and tore in an orgy of blood. Finally, with a last mortal squirm and deep exhale, he gave up the ghost. I took suction on the open neck artery and bled him out. I feasted on my first full meal in two days. The blood and violent death brought on a rush I had not felt in nearly a century. Killing in this manner is an addiction that takes control the way smoking does. Euphoria comes with the first few cigarettes, but the good feeling quickly turns to compulsive monotony. Hooked by the powerful and risky addiction, it’s too late to quit, no matter how much a person desires it. In a takeoff on an old potato chip commercial vampire wags in the seventies used to say, “Bet you can’t bite just one.”

  This is why I made sure to avoid the near occasion of feeding in the old way.

  By the time I finished, Sam arranged the cutlery tools.

  With both of us working we processed the kill in less than an hour. It took the rest of the night to clean up the new mess, another point to recommend the spiked tea method. I suggested we wait, but Sam insisted we not delay. She determined to eradicate any shred of him outside the freezer. Afterward she showered for the better part of an hour. We curled up in her bed and she asked me to hold her. She lay with her back to me and pressed close, pulling my arm around to the front. We slept until late afternoon, as close as two spoons in a silverware drawer. She must have dreamed because once or twice she fretfully mumbled phrases in French. I understood two words: “No” and “Papa.”

  * * * *

  For a week I stayed with her. I stepped out only long enough to perform absolutely necessary functions at work and to run down to the coast for prey, making quick work of a homeless woman asleep in an alley. I left at sunset and returned before dawn. I kept reminding myself Sam needed me although she seemed to want nothing more than to sleep and be held, or drift around the apartment in a melancholy daze. When I tried to talk about what happened or anything else, she either snapped at me or clammed up.

  Sex remained out of the question and I understood, although being in the presence of a female as sensual as Sam who wanted to sleep naked, pressed hard against me, tended to blur my good intentions. More than once I slapped myself on the back of the neck to remember the priority. We remained like that in silence, maintaining a delicate emotional balance, like two people riding a bicycle in a circus high wire a hundred feet above the audience without a net. Each of us strongly felt the presence of what happened but neither wanted to mention it. Doing so might tip the balance and send the whole contraption crashing to the ground. She drew whatever strength or solace to be had from the act of us being together, and the device we rode kept its tenuous balance on the high wire, more or less.

  Because of the constant close contact, I tuned in to Sam’s personal lycan scents, the ones I missed when we met. Over my lifetime I’d run across that cinnamon aroma three or four times, no doubt a passing lycan, but thought little of it. Discerning the subtle differences required practice, but knowing what to look for I could pick her, and any other lycan, from a banquet hall of humans.

  The fourth or fifth day after the attack I returned from an evening class with a set of quality locks for the doors and windows. Sam watched from the couch as I installed them with only the light of the end table lamp. An incident involving misalignment of the strike plate brought an oath from me and the trace of a grin from Sam. A few minutes later she silently opened the end table drawer.

  Holding up the baseball with the Babe Ruth autograph, she blew a speck of dust off it and offered it to me. “You might be interested in this”

  I joined her on the couch.

  “Is it real?” I asked, turning the ball over in my hand. Outside, a warm moonless night surrounded our small bubble of apartment light. Earlier, I opened the drapes. Moths, drawn by the inside lights, fluttered against the window screen making frantic whispering sounds. In the distance came the squeal of tires and race of an engine. I listened as the noise gradually faded into the night.

  Sam waited until it was only the nattering of the night moths again before answering. “Of course it is.” She snatched it back as if offended by the question. “You’re not supposed to touch it.” She examined it for a few seconds and lamented, “Look, you flattened part of it. It’s ruined,” showing me the dent where it struck the homeless man.

  I decided against men
tioning how my throwing it probably saved her life. “No, it’s not ruined. You can say it’s where The Babe’s bat made contact when he sent it to the upper deck of Yankee Stadium.”

  The faraway expression of a pleasant memory came over her. I felt glad and a bit relieved to see it. Another long silence passed and she said, “He was a wonderful man.”

  “Who? The Babe? You actually met him?”

  “Yes.” She continued examining the ball. “You know 1924 is the year he won his only batting title. Of all the wonderful things he accomplished as a ball player, he cherished that one most of all. We met at a speakeasy in ’22. I lived in Chicago and hunted the petty criminals who hung out in such places. I didn’t know him from The President when he arrived, but everyone else in the place sure did. From crime lord to street hooker, they fell all over themselves, and each other, to offer him drinks or a cigar or something to eat.”

  I regarded the baseball cradled in her hands with new respect.

  “The night we met, he celebrated something. He hit three homeruns in a game, I think. He couldn’t understand why I hung out in clubs but never drank. He ragged on me, but in a charming way. Soon, I laughed along with him about it. We got together whenever he came to town until he met his second wife. Meeting her worked out all around. The time came to give him up. After four years he noticed I didn’t age. I’ve been a Yankees fan ever since.”

  Sam still held the baseball cupped in two hands, studying it as if it had something to tell her. Eventually she said, “He gave me this on his last trip west in 1924.” She placed the ball on a folded linen handkerchief in the bottom of the same end table drawer she took it from.

  Her head snapped around and faced me. Tears welled in her eyes. “Do you know what the hardest part of being a lycan is?” Her voice sounded weak. “It’s watching the people you love or care for pass through your life and knowing they will grow old and die while you never age.”

  I didn’t think she referred to “The Babe.” Did she have a Lois Sutter in her past? Did she still think about him? Most important, how well was I doing by comparison?

  Sam appeared to be waiting for me to respond. I took her small and soft hand with the firm structure underneath and told her what she meant to me. First, I told her about Lois. How our inability to overcome the differences between our kinds doomed our love and this was the tragedy of loving humans. Decades later, how a kind Providence put Sam and I together in the library, giving us a chance for companionship and love. We never needed to hide our true selves.

  Last of all, I told her no matter what happened or how bad it was, the future remained always out there, offering a chance to heal or set things right. Later, I wondered how much of what I said applied to me as well.

  When I finished her eyes glittered as a single tear rolled down each cheek. When she spoke her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the silent room, surrounded by the whispering darkness outside. “I believe finding a human to love is a perilous enterprise. I’m sorry it didn’t work for you. I was luckier. We stayed together over forty years, and still he left me too soon.” She paused. “You give me hope a better life lies ahead.”

  We sat side by side on the couch for a long time, holding hands in the silence and listening to moths nattering against the window screens in the pleasant spring night. On one hand I believed she turned an important corner on the way to recovery while a second, less attractive conclusion, for me anyway, implied memories of a past lover continued to roam around in her mind.

  We spent a couple of more days mostly sitting quietly on the couch. Gradually conversation crept back into our life along with glimmers of Sam’s former self.

  Then, one evening, with the lithe explosive way she has, she sprung to her feet and peddled off to the bedroom saying, “Wait here. I’ll only be a moment.” She seemed to have decided something. A minute later she called me. I sauntered toward her voice, thinking she pulled out more baseball memorabilia or perhaps objects from her past. In the doorway I froze absolutely still.

  There were images a person kept for the rest of their life. My first memory of Carole, as she rode alongside Father on a golden fall afternoon, sidesaddle, dressed in a prim Lincoln green shirtwaist. I remember a blonde girl in a blue cotton dress with puffy sleeves from the 1900s. She leaned from a balcony in Baltimore waving to my fire fighter company as we passed on a horse drawn hook and ladder water pump wagon. I never saw her again, but to this day the face is clear and sharp in my memory. I couldn’t forget meeting Lois on a beach in Cape Cod, or the memory of a Vegas showgirl sitting across from me at a Blackjack table in 1990. Or Sam stretched to her full height on the library book ladder. I have more, but not many. Each is permanently enshrined in a pantheon located in the private part of my mind. Sam was about to place another there.

  Sam sat on the bed. The only light in the room, from the lamp on the adjacent night table, illuminated one side of her vertically from the hips up. She pulled back and tied off her hair in a ponytail, which snaked its way over and down her shoulder. The stretched hair framed the illuminated half of her face like a bronze tiara. Lycan nostrils flared, sampling the air for signs of my reaction.

  Her eyes locked on me as she arched her back to present one uplifted flawless breast with erect rose colored nipple, and half a flat stomach with fine blonde hairs. They sparkled on her like tiny gold threads. A crystalline jewel glittered in the navel, and one pelvic bone defined the perfect curve of a hip. She placed one leg over the lit side of the bed. Her foot extended fully and barely touched the floor. Through the transparency of her silk panties I made out the impression of petal soft folds.

  She sat before me, healed and rejuvenated, as fresh as Venus stepping newborn and full grown from the sea foam.

  Although we never discussed the subject, she frequently demonstrated her senses to be as proficient as mine. She took note of the erection rising under my slacks and of the chemical changes taking place in me. Observing my interest on the scent emanating from the small but growing dampness in the nethermost reaches of her panties, she uttered slyly. “See anything you like?”

  Chapter Four

  The Support Group Known as Critters of the Night

  Spring ripened into summer. From my office window I watched the wispy pale green of new shoots on the willows lining the retention pond darken and grow into massive canopies. When the wind blew they dragged ponderously across the ground. Beyond the willows a grove of live oaks dripped Spanish Moss like the beards of old hermits. In the glen of maple and sycamores beyond that, one of a pair of hawks usually hovered or circled above. They took turns floating on the air currents, scanning the terrain for prey while the other tended a nest of clamoring young somewhere in the high part of a tree. I envied the fecundity of their kind as it reminded me of the barrenness of mine. The days became longer and hotter as the earth turned more of her northern face toward the sun with each diurnal revolution.

  We organized a support group, calling ourselves Critters of the Night. Sam thought of the name. She believed it allowed us to hide in plain sight. On the application we listed ourselves as a “study and discussion group for matters of the occult.” Among ourselves we were The Coven. We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the cafeteria of the elementary school near our apartment. Besides me, the group had one other vampire, an old male, well past two centuries named Ed Myers. Tightly curled sandy hair crowned a thin weathered face. At one time he stood well over six feet, but now one of the bone maladies affecting older vampires when they couldn’t properly feed kept him in a permanent stoop. Only a quality back brace provided meaningful relief. Until recently he hunted in the old way, commonly called “Blooding,” but because of his worsening health and a couple of close calls he hit what Twelve Step Programs refer to as “A Bottom.” He sought rehabilitation and help with learning the Kutzu method. Sam recruited the other two lycans from her blog.

  The female, Cynthia, was the headstrong teenager Sam told me about. She towered above Sam, close to si
x feet tall, and skinny to the point of anorexia. From her appearance, she came across more like a vampire bride from central casting than a lycan, with straight jet black hair and eyes, a wide skeletal face, and faded white skin like watered down milk. She wore heavy black eye makeup, giving her eye sockets a cavernous appearance, and black or red lipstick with matching nail polish according to her mood. Sam attributed much of Cynthia’s mercurial temperament to her stalled emergence. Silly me, she came across as a typical bratty and confused teenager with raging hormones.

  Jethro Lee, a slight Asian lycan, rounded out the group. He completed emergence. A bright young man, who didn’t meet another of his kind until Sam found him on the Internet, he had the good sense to satisfy his unique appetites with fresh meat and small animals. He stood about three inches taller than Sam with yellow-tan skin, a shaved head, and yellow-flecked brown eyes. At meetings, he sat with remarkably erect posture, suggestive of time spent at military school. From his first meeting his eyes never left Cynthia. Unfortunately for him, she didn’t return his feelings.

  We increased our search effort for others like us and found over a hundred worldwide. A medical doctor stood out among them. Benefacio Ortiz, a lycan, hadn’t practiced medicine since 1958 after he staged his death and changed identity because of an unfortunate incident involving the daughter of an influential Argentinean government official. He lived in Rio de Janeiro, working in a dental office. Sam talked to him. I stuck with the vampires.

  The community recognized Critters of the Night as the first support group for our kind.

  * * * *

  The man in the coin laundry returned to complicate our lives during a Tuesday night meeting. The school year ended two weeks earlier and the staff turned off the air conditioning unit. We sat around a lunch table surrounded by the vastness of the cafeteria with its blue laminate covered tables each holding six kid-sized chairs stacked upside down on the top. We borrowed adult seats from the teacher’s table. All around us lingered faint smells of old milk and greasy fried food, invisible to humans, resistant to all efforts at removal during the school year recently ended.