"A little, but here you are in your shirt sleeves."
Stroud seldom wore a coat or jacket even in the worst of weather if he didn't have to. He'd normally leave it tossed in the back of his jeep. Coats made him feel cramped not only physically but mentally; they reminded him of the heavy army issue loaded down with canteen and gun belt and grenades that he wore all through Vietnam. He hated sweating underneath the weight of a parka.
"Yeah, well, April can get nippy, but not for me, Miss Wymes."
"Can't you call me Tammy? Wouldn't you like to?" She came closer as she spoke, her arms opening, inviting him into them. "I could keep us both warm, if you'd let me, and maybe, Dr. Stroud, I could chase that awful nightmare away."
"Christ, has everybody in camp learned of my sleeping disorder?"
"Dr. Stroud, you'll soon learn that everyone in a small camp knows about everyone else's ... ahh ... sleeping arrangements."
"So I've heard, but tell me, Tammy, why're you interested in an old man like me?"
"You're sharp, Dr. Stroud ... really. Everybody says so, and..."
"And what? I remind you of someone? Your father, maybe?"
She laughed at this. "Couldn't be further from the truth, Dr. Stroud." Her honey-blond hair fell over her left eye, and her right took him in again. "My father's a bald, fat man. Look at you. You're trim and tall and powerfully built. No, Dr. Stroud, you'll have to do better than that."
Abraham Stroud's eyes radiated his own desire, reflecting the moonlight in the deep, sincere pupils that were an ice blue in this light. His hair was peppered with silver strands. Stroud was a big man at six four, and his hands were large like the flats of two skillets. She took them in her own, her hands made miniature by his. Stroud had drawn her attention the moment she'd laid eyes on him. "The way you talk, your voice," she said now, "and the way you walk, kind of princely, regal ... like ... like no one I've ever known. That's what first attracted me to you, Stroud."
She reached up on her toes and kissed him full on the lips. Stroud started to resist, but he didn't have enough reason to resist. Her passion was searing through her pores, and her warmth was like a fire of churning embers. In his ear she whispered, "I just like you, Stroud, because you do remind me of someone I loved as a child, a fictional hero."
"Gary Cooper, High Noon, maybe?"
"Try James Bond ... double oh seven, Sean Connery."
Now he laughed, and it felt so good and natural to do so. He'd had little to laugh about lately.
"Some people say your bad dreams are a result of the war ... that you have bad memories. Let me give you some good memories to ... you know"--she dug her hands into his shirt and wound them around his wide shoulders--"chase the pain."
Her next kiss was returned by Stroud forcefully, and then their kisses seemed to transfuse each other with a lust that Stroud hadn't felt in a very long time. It made him think of innocent days in college when he would try to capture the girl's breath by swallowing it, feeling a high from the experience that he learned much later had all to do with a carbon dioxide high.
Tammy was very sensual and Stroud found himself on his knees along with her there below the moonbeams that cast their shadows into the wood and beyond in what seemed an infinity of its own. A jolt of immortality rose in Stroud's veins, and this led him to lift her into his arms. He plucked her from the earth like a prize, carrying her to his tent.
There in the darkness she took her time removing her clothes before coming to him and undoing his clothing. Abe lost himself in her attention, in her caresses and kisses. She treated him with great tenderness which seemed beyond her years. She whispered, "Let me come into where you live, Abraham Stroud."
He knew that was impossible; that no one could ever truly know him, not fully, not without fearing him. Still, he let her believe she could, and he let her continue to touch.
He lay now on his back as she explored him, a scent like magnolias coming off her perfumed body. Stroud lost himself in her corn-silk hair. They made exquisite, exhausting love and the act itself was to Stroud wondrous; each of them found infinite pleasure in the touch and warmth of the other. Stroud found magic in her, and without further words between them she sensed this and delighted in it.
Afterward, exhausted and chilled from the mix of cool air and sweat from his body, Stroud dozed to her final whisper, "Connery's got nothing on you..." Stroud felt replenished, sated, happy and calm.
He fell asleep thinking that in the instant they shared their bodies with one another they had vanquished a terrifying foe; that passionate love somehow kept the darkness and the evil of his dreams at bay.
"Alpha Charlie" was the soldier's code for stand down, all clear. "Alpha" was the cop's term for all's well. But Stroud wasn't sure there was a lover's term to match, or that there ever could be a word to describe the peace he felt at that moment. All he knew for certain was that tonight he wouldn't be at battle with his own brain which spawned hellish nightmares without apparent reason. Tonight his worst nightmare had been banished by a teenager with the capacity for irreverent and beautiful lust.
Nothing disturbed Stroud and he slept through the night to awake to the morning noises of camp. Tammy Wymes had gone. He breathed a deep sigh of relief for both her discretion and the fact he'd shaken off the nightmare that'd haunted him now for several nights. But his contentment and his thoughts were rudely interrupted by his friend and associate, Dr. Louis Cage. Cage, a burly, lumbering man with spectacles too small for his huge face and a walrus mustache but no hair on his head, burst into Stroud's tent flapping a newspaper.
"Look at this! Abe, look!"
"I came out here to escape newspapers, Lou."
Cage looked momentarily stunned, but then went on. "This is your dream, your nightmare, down to the last detail. It's made page one in USA Today."
"What?" Stroud grabbed the paper from Cage's fumbling fingers. He glanced over the cover story, scanning for details below the photo of a Dr. Harold Perotto and a second man. The two men were wearing the normal look of medical men standing for a photo, but in another picture, there was nothing left of either man, save the bloody torso and a scramble of limbs about the floor. The paper said that a criminally insane man named John Kerac had butchered the men with some unknown weapon, leapt through a glass window and had eluded guards to escape the state facility for the criminally insane near Merimac, Michigan. Kerac remained at large.
"I'm right, aren't I, Abe? Isn't this the nightmare you've been having?"
"Premonition ... the first time and the second. Happened last night."
"You couldn't've known it. Now, don't go blaming yourself. You didn't even know the men were medical men, or that the monster you saw was an insane fiend. You didn't know the time or the place."
"But if I'd let it come, instead of fighting it ... maybe."
"Damn it, Abe, you're not a sorcerer. You're only human."
"Thanks, that's great comfort, Lou."
Cage took in a great breath of air, seeing a familiar look come over his friend's features. "You're going up there, aren't you?"
Some of the guys at the watering hole outside were laughing over something. In a paranoid moment, he wondered if they were discussing Tammy and him. If he knew anything about paranoia, he knew it was quite often an early warning device as accurate as a Timex. His instincts marched along the epidermal layer of his skin to alert the brain that was, like a slow cursor on a computer, half a pulse behind this morning.
"Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea," he said. "Around here, I seem to be stirring up more curiosity than what's out there in the Indian mounds."
"That's nonsense."
"Really?"
"Damned straight it is."
"Damn it, Lou, you're the best detail-man in the pathology business, and you're an excellent paleontologist, but you've got a hell of a lot to learn about the living."
"I take that as a compliment. What the hell do I really want to know about the living?"
"Enough to keep these not so angelic broads out of my tent."
"Hold on there, Abe. What goes on in the tents at night is the business of consenting adults. I'll be damned if I'm going to pat you on the back or send you off for such nonsense."
"I'm going, anyway, Lou."
"Fine, go! Good riddance, as you say. And what'll you do in Michigan once you get there?"
"I'll offer my help."
"And if they refuse it?"
"Then at least I can say I gave it my best."
"To convince whom? Your dead grandfather or yourself?"
"Both, maybe."
"Dead set on this, are you?"
"I have to, Lou ... you know that."
He frowned and slowly nodded. "Get back as quick as you can. Give me a holler if you need me."
"Thanks, and will do."
"Taking your new chopper up?"
"I figure to fly, sure. Sooner I get there, the better. Lou, I think I understand how this madman, Kerac, thinks. It could be helpful to the authorities up there."
"Well, if you should find yourself butting heads with a backwoods geek who thinks he's God, then turn yourself right around and leave them to their own stupidities." Cage stood up and took his hand. "It's been a delight, these past weeks with you here, Abe, you know that."
"All but the past few days and nights, you mean."
"All of it, my friend. We'll be here when you've finished in Michigan."
With that, Cage left abruptly, not a man for lengthy goodbyes.
-2-
Kerac awoke naked and bloody, the pain in his penis shooting a searing rod of fire through him. He had blood encrusted over his lips and chin. He had a foul taste in his mouth, coppery and greasy. He felt he might wretch at any moment. He crawled about in the cold, high, dead reeds and grass all around him, trying to determine where he was and how he'd gotten here. He felt numb from the cold, so numb he could hardly think to recall anything. Then he crawled up toward a bone from which some fleshy strings clung; it was all cushioned in a nestlike place in the high thatch. He realized he'd stumbled onto the lair or sleeping place of some sort of animal that had been feeding on the large bone. He looked around instinctively for whatever it might be. When he saw nothing, he calmed a bit, going closer to the bone and lifting it as much from curiosity as anything, and yet ... something about the bone and its smell, and the smell of the flesh clinging there like a wet noodle brought on images that made little sense to John Kerac.
He saw himself at a hunting camp, sitting by a warm fire, a few friends without names or faces with him. He saw the flames blind out the image and replace it with his running madly through the woods. He tried desperately to remember, fighting with his mind for the right to his past, to access more than mere images flashing on and off in the manner of a wino. There was more ... much more, he knew. If only he could tap into it.
Then he saw the doctor's face at Merimac; he saw it torn from the man, reduced to a gelatinous mass. He saw it being done by a creature of immense power, and as he watched he saw the creature's eyes, and in the eyes he recognized something else. He saw that the eyes of the monster were his eyes.
He found himself cradling the bone again, realizing now what sort of bone it was and where it had come from. He also realized that the nesting animal had been him and that it was he who had fed on the flesh of the bone.
He trembled at the cold around him, and he trembled at the power of the other within him.
They must be scouring the countryside for him this instant. There must be an APB out on him. He must run and he must hide. But which way? Indecision and fear could get him captured or killed. He'd be crucified for killing the doctor and his orderly. What had he done before this to warrant his being locked up at Merimac? he again wondered. Then he saw the fire and the camp once more, and he saw the dark shape in the nearby trees leap down and run ahead of him, as he and his friends chased after it with guns.
Something had happened out there ... but what?
Something was drawing him back, too ... back to where this all started, to where his nameless, faceless friends had ... had all ... all dead ... they were all mutilated by some thing. He saw the bone in his lap, and he wondered if it had been he who killed the others in a brutal spree of madness. He thought he recalled feeding on them as he had on the doctor's arm last night.
He dropped the bone and bent over, vomiting up chunks of the doctor's flesh, crawling to escape the sight and the smell and himself, but he could do none of these things.
Kerac heard a dog's braying. Alert to the danger, he raced away from the thatch lair, searching for something safer. In another direction he heard the call of a cock and he went instinctively for what he prayed would be a farm with an automobile somewhere on the premises.
Something told him he had to go back, back to the area outside Grand Rapids where it had all begun, but he feared it terribly. He had friends in Chicago and he knew the city like the back of his hand. Maybe there he could get straight somehow. Maybe there he could beat this insanity thing.
He fought back the pain in his lower parts, rushing wildly toward his future.
-3-
Stroud stepped out of his helicopter to a waiting patrol car driven by Merimac's own sheriff, a lady sheriff named Chief Anna Laughing More. The name alone had intrigued Abe, and he had wondered about its history during his flight to Michigan via his newly acquired Mooney XE6000 chopper. He'd had breakfast in the Cahokia archeological camp, and he was in Merimac, some fifty miles southeast of Grand Rapids, for lunch. But the reception he got from the lady cop was as cutting as the cold wind that rippled across the small airstrip in Merimac, a town founded, it seemed, on the economy created by the state facility from which John Kerac had successfully escaped.
Before the rotor blades on his shiny new helicopter had slowed to a stop, Chief Laughing More indicated with a gesture that he was to get into her patrol car. She was dressed in a tight-fitting, strangely seductive brown and beige uniform that showed off her tall, elegant figure. Her hair was a jet black, severely cut like a man's, perhaps to fit beneath the Chief's cap, perhaps to gain acceptance and respect? But this was the only feature that detracted from her femininity, he thought as he got into the vehicle. Without a word, she tore off the tarmac, using no siren, but clearly no one best get in her way. Immediately, Stroud got the feeling she didn't want him here. It was as cold inside the car as out.
The chatter of the radio car buzz recalled his days as a police officer in Chicago. "I'm Dr. Stroud, and you must be Chief Laughing More?"
Her Ojibway ancestry showed in the high cheekbones and her proud bearing. She was beautiful to look at. He imagined she'd worn her hair long all her life, up to the point she'd become a police woman. She was as tall as Stroud, and he guessed her to be in her early to mid-thirties. The skin was a smooth, tight, coppery color and her eyes were as black as the darkness on a blank computer screen, giving up nothing.
"I know who you are, Dr. Stroud."
"You understand why I've come?"
"You've come to"--she paused, considering her words carefully--"help out, as I understand it."
She spoke exquisite English, despite her exotic features. "Yes, any way I can."
"You say you saw this man, Kerac, in a dream, kill our Dr. Perotto and Carl Holms?"
"I didn't know their names at the time. Read about it later in the papers, like everyone else."
"But your dream--"
"More a nightmare than a dream, a premonition."
"Premonition, yes ... well..."
Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2) Page 2