by Terry Yates
The growl turned into a snarl, and then a growl again. Whatever it was, it was just outside the door. Michael reached up and nervously wiped the fog from his glasses, the gun starting to sag as he tried to hold it with the one hand, even if it was only for a moment. Immediately after wiping his glasses, he returned the other hand to the gun, and raised it to eye level and waited.
He saw something moving slowly through the doorway. He could only see part of it, but whatever it was, it had thick auburn hair…or fur. He thought it was a hairy face that was barely bobbing in and out of the doorway as if it was teasing him, waiting for him to shoot and miss before attacking him.
Where was everyone? Had they left him to fend for himself like his parents had done? Where was the doctor? He thought that if there was one person that he could count on, if there was one person who wouldn’t abandon him, it was the doctor. Who knows, maybe the thing in the hallway had found him and eaten him.
Michael put the gun up in front of his face. There was no reason to even attempt to aim at whatever was bobbing in and out of the room, because his hands were shaking so badly that the barrel of the gun weaved left and right. He couldn’t draw a bead on an elephant at that moment.
The thing appeared to be getting bolder, peeking its head in even further now. He began to apply pressure to the trigger with his index finger.
“Please, God,” he whispered, “don’t let me miss.”
The thing was almost completely through the door. It was smaller than he thought, but he didn’t care. It was here and he was going to shoot it. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger as hard as he could. It wouldn’t budge. He squeezed tighter and tighter. Still nothing. As he heard the thing begin to growl again, he remembered something. The safety catch. He’d forgotten to release the safety. In a blind panic, he lowered the gun and began to search for the lever. Where was it? Sgt. Cohen had showed him and now he couldn’t remember! A small moan escaped his lips as tears began to well up in his eyes. He moved his hands all over the gun butt. Where was it? Where was it? He was shocked that the thing hadn’t already torn him to pieces by now. As he continued blindly moving his eyes along the gun, he felt his fingers touch something. He turned the gun sideways and wiped his eyes. There it was…the small lever. He pushed against the lever with his thumb. It wouldn’t budge…then he pushed it the other direction. It moved. He heard a click telling him that the safety was off. Gripping the gun again with both hands, he raised it to face level once again. The fog and the tears had made it impossible to see. He was just going to shoot in the direction of the door and hope for the best. He placed his finger on the trigger and pulled. Nothing. He pulled on the trigger again. Nothing. It still wouldn’t budge!
“Michael?”
Michael thought that he had heard his name, but wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything anymore. Only that the gun that Sgt. Cohen had given him had proved to be useless.
“Michael?”
It was a female voice calling his name.
“Who is it!” he screamed, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Who is it!”
“It’s me, Michael,” answered the voice. “Lauren.”
“Lauren?”
“Michael, put the gun down” came another female voice.
Michael, still spooked, lowered the gun and wiped his glasses. Just inside the doorway, stood Lauren, Ariella, and Joe. Lauren was holding a hand towel in her hand, Joe with one end of it in his mouth and tugging at it, and Ariella stood pasty faced staring at him. It was then that Michael realized what had happened. The three different footsteps that he had heard coming down the corridor, had been Ariella’s shoes, Lauren’s bare feet, and Joe’s claws. It was the back of Lauren’s head that he had seen bobbing in and out of the door. She and Joe had been playing tug o’ war with the towel, and that’s why he had been growling. They had been playing a game…and he’d almost shot her.
“Are you all right, Michael?” Ariella asked in her usual monotone voice, but the look on her face betraying her voice. She had almost seen her daughter shot in front of her eyes.
“I…I’m…sorry…I…couldn’t…I didn’t…”
“It’s okay, Michael,” Lauren said softly as they approached him.
Michael lowered his head and began to sob, the gun falling from his lap, and clattering to the floor. After a moment, he felt a pair of hands on each side of him stroking his shoulders and patting his back. The pair of hands on his left were stroking him softly, the ones on his right, were stroking him very awkwardly, but with, he felt, good intentions. He kept his head bowed until he felt someone place both hands on his lap. This was followed by something warm and wet licking his face. He looked up to see Joe, standing up on his hind legs, his forepaws on each of Michael’s thighs, and wagging his nub of a tail as hard as he could as he licked the salt filled tears from Michael’s face.
“I almost shot you,” Michael whimpered. “I’m sorry.”
“But you didn’t,” Lauren came back, her hand now sitting limply on his shoulder.
“I would’ve, but the gun doesn’t work,” he came back.
Ariella reached down and carefully picked the pistol up off of the floor, pushed her glasses up on her nose, and studied it as if she were looking at a dinosaur bone.
“If my hypothesis is correct,” she said in a very professional tone, “I believe you have to pull back this lever, I believe the term is “cocking”, until it catches back here. Then and only then will the trigger mechanism function properly.”
Sgt. Cohen had failed to tell him to be sure and cock the pistol first, and thank God he had. He knew that the chances of him hitting anything but the ceiling were slim, but he knew that if he had hurt or, God forbid, killed Lauren, he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself…however much longer that might be.
At that moment, Zack Olsen walked into the room.
“What happened?” he asked, seeing Ariella, Lauren, and Joe surrounding Michael, who had obviously been crying.
Michael quickly wiped his eyes, not wanting the older boy to see that he had been crying. He pushed Joe off of his lap, and then gently took the gun from Ariella and held it out.
“Here,” he said, holding the gun out toward Zack. “Take this, would you?”
Zack walked across the room, looking at all of the cots and chairs that were piled next to the open doorway.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked as he neared the group.
“Sgt. Cohen gave it to me,” Michael answered as Zack reached them.
“Luckily, he forgot to tell Michael how to cock it,” Lauren told the boy as he took the gun from Michael’s hand.
“Lucky for whom?” he asked, looking down on the quartet.
“Just lucky,” Ariella came back, as she stood up. Lucky seemed to be a word that was foreign to Ariella’s scientific vocabulary.
Zack looked around the room.
“Where’s my dad?” he asked, seeing that neither Rob Olsen nor his cot were where they had been just an hour earlier.
“I don’t know,” Michael answered, shifting in his chair. “I can’t remember if he was even here when I came back from the arcade room.”
“You can’t remem…” Zack stopped in mid sentence, a wave of panic beginning to rush through his body.
“I’m sorry,” Michael told him, but Zack didn’t hear him. He was almost spinning around in place, searching the room for his father, half expecting or hoping that Rob Olsen would suddenly be standing there, smiling at him, like he had pulled a great prank on his only son.
“Was he with Doctor Kyler?”
“No, Dr. Kyler went to get Mrs. Dixon a glass of water.”
“Dammit!” he screamed.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said again, feeling somehow responsible for Zack’s father.
“He wasn’t your responsibility…he was mine,” Zack came back, not looking at Michael, but still searching the room for his father.
“Here, take this,” he told Michael, hol
ding out the gun to him.
“No,” Michael shot back adamantly. “Keep it. Sgt. Cohen told me to either give it to you, Dr. Kyler, or Mr. Boots, whoever came back first.”
“What are you going to do?” Ariella asked.
“I’ve got to go and find him!”
“I don’t think you should,” Ariella told him. “Why don’t you wait for one of the other men to come back, and then you can go?”
“I don’t know how long my father’s been gone or how long it’s going to take for someone to come back!” he answered her. “Look,” he told the three, “I’ve got to go and find my father.”
“Do you think that wise?” Ariella asked him.
“Probably not, Dr. O’Hearley, but I don’t have a choice! He’s my responsibility and he’s all I’ve got left. I’ve lost my mother and my grandmother to that thing. I can’t lose him to it, too!
With this, Zack jammed the revolver into the back of his pants and sprinted for the door.
“Be careful!” Lauren yelled after him, but the boy was gone before the words were completely out of her mouth. “We probably should have tried harder to keep him here with us,” she said, turning to her mother.
“It would’ve been an exercise in futility,” Ariella answered, pushing her glasses back up onto her nose.
Sylvia Morrison put her hand in the doorway of the commissary, and looked into the darkness.
“Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone here?”
Getting no answer, she moved into the cafeteria, her hands held out in front of her. Why hadn’t she brought her spare pair of glasses, she asked herself, moving further and further into the darkness. She bumped her frail and skinny thighs into one table and then another. She stopped for a moment, trying to get her bearings. Why hadn’t the lights in the commissary come on when she crossed the threshold like every other room in the building?
She made her way to the serving line without much incident, hitting only a few chairs along the way and then inched her way around the serving line and into the kitchen.
“Hello?” she called again. “Samantha?”
Again she got no answer. She slowly moved through the kitchen, continuing to hold her hands out in front of her, more afraid now than ever. She walked into the pantry area, feeling her hands along the wall in search of a light switch, but not finding one.
“Samantha?”
She slowly walked forward until she hit something. Something made of iron. It was a large door. It felt exactly like the kind that restaurants would use to store food in. It had the long metal handle like large freezers usually have. Sylvia didn’t see or feel the large indention that the beast had made in the door, nearly knocking Gringo cold just moments before. She placed her hand on the handle, and started to pull the door open, but suddenly froze.
“Samantha? Samantha, Dear, are you in here?”
She thought she heard movement coming from inside, but she wasn’t sure.
“Samantha? Is that you? It’s me…Sylvia. Samantha?”
She put her ear to the door and listened. She heard a whimpering sound, like a little girl moaning coming through the cracks.
“Samantha?”
The whimpering abruptly stopped. Sylvia pulled her head back from the door and pulled on the handle. She heard a suction sound as the door cracked open.
“Samantha, are you all right?” she asked. “It’s me, Sylvia. Don’t be afraid, Sweetie, I’m coming in.”
With this, she pulled the door completely open. She took a step inside the room, leaving the door open behind her. She peered into the darkness.
“Where are you, Samantha?” she asked, trying to figure out the scope of the room. She took a small step forward, the toe of her shoe touching something. Whatever it was, it was light in weight, because her foot had barely touched it, and it had moved a few inches, making a light scraping noise like the sound of plastic. She reached down and felt around for a moment. As her hand touched the object, she knew immediately what it was. Her disposable camera, the one she kept in her purse. Gringo must’ve taken it again before he had left the sleeping quarters.
She groped it lightly with her fingers, turning it over in her hands until it was right side up. She could tell by the touch that it wasn’t broken. Gringo had to be the most worthless human being she had ever known in her life and she was in the modeling trade where people stole ideas all of the time and would cut each other’s throat just to have their little place in the industry.
Sylvia heard a noise coming from the other side of the room. It almost sounded like a snort.
“Come out, Samantha. It’s me Sylvia. I’m not going to hurt you, Baby Doll.”
She heard what sounded like scraping sounds moving toward her.
“Samantha?” she whispered softly, becoming nervous as the sound grew louder.
She took a step back and bumped against the table that Gringo had been sitting on earlier. The scraping sounds were loud now. Even though her eyes were bad, she could see shapes, and there was one moving toward her.
“Please say something,” she whimpered, starting to become terrified now. “Please.”
The shape was no more than four or five feet from her now, and becoming larger with each step that it took.
“Oh no,” she moaned. “Please, Samantha.”
The scraping noise stopped, telling her that whatever it was was directly in front of her and looming over her. Her shaky hands fumbled with the camera.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” she cried softly as she heard another snort…the same type of snort that she had heard that night in the hospital when the burn victim had turned into a monster.
Fear gripped her as the thing stood silently over her, its hot, rancid breath blowing down onto the top of her head. She could actually feel her hair moving with each breath that it took.
As paralyzed by fear as she was, she remembered that the camera had saved her life in the hospital. She had accidentally hit the shutter release button causing the camera to flash. The werewolf had howled in pain whenever a flash went off in its eyes.
She aimed the camera upward as she felt for the button. She pressed it with her index finger and a bright flash lit up the room for a moment allowing her to see clearly the shape and the outline of what stood before. Although she couldn’t focus clearly on the thing, she could see its outline as the room grew bright. Above her, stood something with ears that stood straight above its head.
Instead of whimpering or crying at the sight of the werewolf’s silhouette, she let out a loud and long scream. She pressed down on the shutter button again and again as she screamed, but instead of the monster howling in pain or putting its forearms in front of its eyes, it just stood there. The room looked like a strobe lit disco as flash after flash went off to no avail. Sylvia screamed and screamed. Her terror-addled brain couldn’t understand why the creature wasn’t running away…but then it dawned on her. Some eyes were sensitive to light and others weren’t. She had foolishly thought that since the first werewolf’s eyes had been sensitive to the light, that Samantha’s werewolf eyes would also be sensitive to them, but Samantha had never had trouble with flashes going off in her face…when she was in human form, that is, but here she was, a she-beast that was going to kill her.
She felt pain in both shoulders as the thing clamped down on her and slowly picked her up. The camera fell from her hands and dropped to the floor.
“Please! Please! Please, Samantha! No!” Sylvia screamed again and again, but the thing that held her up was no longer Samantha.
Sylvia writhed in agony as the beast’s claws dug deeper and deeper into her shoulders.
“Please! Please! No! No! No! Samantha…”
The monster’s breath was strong now, which told Sylvia that its mouth was probably open. She felt her bowels let go as the werewolf that had once been Samantha snarled, shook her like a rag doll, and then threw her to the floor, her head hitting hard against the cement.
“Please…please�
��” she moaned softly, slowly losing conscious from the blow to her head.
If she had been able to think clearly, she would’ve probably been grateful that her head injury was causing her to pass out, because the thing was now lying on top of her, but unlike the rock star from the 60’s that she had spent that wonderful night with, there would be no leaving the next morning. There would be no next morning for Sylvia Morrison. She gave one last soft moan as the werewolf began to feed…and feed…and feed.
The moon shone brighter than FranAnne had seen it since she left home. In North Carolina, they would’ve called it a lover’s moon or a redneck moon, depending on whether you were getting any or not. She’d witnessed way more of the redneck moons than she had the lovers. A moon like this one would’ve had every young redneck kid in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, their trucks blaring the latest Kenny Chesney or Toby Keith CD. The beer would be flowing and everyone would be having a great time…that is until the one kid who couldn’t handle his beer, would start picking fights with everyone and then get his ass kicked because he wasn’t as tough as he thought he was. FranAnne had attended only a handful of these events, because invariably, when the one kid got drunk, names like “dyke” or “she male” got thrown her direction. No, on these nights, she generally went to the movies and saw one of the two films that were showing on their two screens, or she went to the video store and rented the one foreign film or the one lesbian themed film that they had in stock. That’s what she loved about small town video stores. If a person had an eclectic taste in movies, you could always find it sitting alone on the shelf. Now, if you wanted to see a Tyler Perry video, a “Fast and Furious” movie, or one of the “Scary Movie” sequels, you might have to wait weeks on end before you got to enjoy one of those rare gems.
“You okay over there?” Hawkins asked in a soft, hushed tone.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess.”