by Leod D. Fitz
“I swear, Walter, it doesn't happen that much anymore. I've been dealing to them off and on for years now, and they almost never pull this kind of shit. I just... I made an error in judgment.” He grimaced and shook his head. “I never should’ve taken on a new client.”
I motioned for him to continue.
Percy took a deep breath and licked his lips. “I got a hot tip about some crotchsniffers north of town--”
“Are you fucking kidding me!” I screamed at my assistant. “You tried to sell to the wildboys?”
“They wanted something better than the shit they usually use and... I heard they'd come into some money.”
“And you thought they wanted to share it with you? They aren't even a fucking pack, they're a gang! None of the real packs will let them in. How fucked up does someone have to be so that crotchsniffers don't want anything to do with them?”
Percy bit his lip, likely weighing the pros and cons of reminding me that the crotchsniffers didn’t want anything to do with me, either.
I gave him a good glower.
Percy cleared his throat and stared at the ground uncomfortably.
I hopped off the table, scuttling to the other side of the room on all fours. Most humans find my natural movements disconcerting, but Percy's comfort was the last thing on my mind as I paced. I needed to think and moving helped.
“Okay, the drugs are gone, the money is gone. Forget about them. The wiseguys are the problem. I need to get them out of my life. How the hell am I going to do that? Kill them all?”
Percy cleared his throat. “That might not be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“They're one of the major suppliers to the crotchsniffers. Not directly, obviously, but they get a lot of drugs pumped into the area. If you kill their suppliers, Neal's pack is going to get cranky.”
I grunted. The thing about being a werewolf is that it's probably one of the most painful conditions possible. Once a month their bodies would shift from human to wolf form, a process which one crotchsniffer described as something like being fed through a meat grinder while on fire. If it weren't for the massive increase in adrenaline that accompanied the change, they'd pass out from the pain in the first few seconds, and if it weren't for the incredible regenerative powers that accompanied that time of the month, they'd certainly die from the process.
Every werewolf I'd ever met or heard of used something for the pain. A few of them, the old-school, hardcore bastards would down a bottle of whiskey and smoke weed in the hours leading up to the change, but most needed something a little stronger. On the upside, healing as fast as they did, and having their metabolism shifting like it did, by the time they were human again the drugs were completely out of their system. On the downside, for the first couple of hours after they'd turned into wolves, they were basically batshit crazy from the combination of drugs and pain.
If I cut off a major portion of their supply, and they traced it back to me, they might actually be willing to defy Aldred's protection just for the pleasure of ripping me to pieces.
“Shit, shit, double-shit,” I grumbled. “Okay, I can't kill them. How do I get them out of my life, and out of my mortuary?”
“I don't know. If we could come up with enough money, we could pay him off.”
I snorted. “You mean we could buy our way out of selling drugs and just pay him protection. No. I'm not going to put myself under anyone's thumb. I'll burn the place down first.”
“Good to know.” Percy repositioned himself on the table, wincing in pain as he did. “So, we can't kill them, and we can't pay them off. Maybe we can scare them away? If they think you’re in tight with the cops, maybe they'll cut their losses.”
“And how do we do that? I'm sure as hell not going to make friends with any cops.”
“Yeah, probably not a good idea.” Percy scratched his chin. “Maybe I could find them a better place to set up shop.”
I shook my head. “People like that don't give up something good for something better. They take the better and keep the good. We can't just offer them a carrot; we need a stick. They have to want to be done with this place.”
Percy snorted.
“What?”
“Oh, it's nothing. I was just thinking; we could always try to convince them there was some kind of supernatural creature here that wanted to eat them.”
I stopped my pacing and started chuckling. “Okay, that's pretty good.”
“Thanks.”
I dropped the grin and scowled at him. “But not helpful.”
“Sorry.”
I settled into a comfortable squat and rubbed my head. “I'll come up with something. I just need to think. In the meantime, you've got funerals to prepare for. Go upstairs and clean your blood out of the lobby.”
“Right, boss.”
Percy limped out of the room, shutting the door behind him. I listened to him climb the stairs and open the closet with the cleaning supplies. I kept listening until I heard the mop slap against the floor around the spot where he'd taken his beating.
It was important to keep an eye on Percy, or an ear as the case may be. He was completely reliable, as long as his interests coincided with mine. The second he thought he could improve his place in the world at my expense, he’d be looking for the softest spot on my back to stick the knife.
Since I was at work anyways, and there was no way I was going to be able to enjoy my day off even if I did go home for the rest of it, I decided to get some shit done.
I moved a stool over next to the table by my next patient and hopped up, crouching on top as I began my work. Preparing a body for viewing is a fine art. Time has a way of ravaging the body, both pre, and post fatality. Loved ones don't want to see the ravages, and they don't want to see the pain, and they definitely, definitely don't want to see their recently deceased looking like what they really are: a corpse.
We use embalming fluid to re-inflate them, spackle to fill in any holes, and then we cover all of that up with a layer of paint thicker than what you’d put on your kitchen walls.
Funeral homes are paid for a very specific service. We provide grievers with the illusion of a final farewell. They get all the benefits of death, a quiet figure who won't hold back love or forgiveness, with the facade of life, as though any moment their dearly beloved will sit up, healthy and smiling.
But most of all, we give people hope; the hope that time isn't as brutal as we all know it is, that it won't pick us all off, one at a time, tear us down until we're nothing but a shell.
Personally, I don't get it. I like knowing that, in the end, everybody truly is equal. Even if it's only because we're all equally screwed. But then, I'm not exactly normal.
I smiled at the corpse in front of me, ran a finger down her cheek and looked deep into her empty eyes. “Well, darling, you're all kinds of beautiful to me, but we've got a long way to go if we’re going to make your kids happy.”
I knew something was wrong before my house even came into view. As much time as I spend at the trailer park, I can literally smell when something new is visiting the neighborhood.
There was an eclectic and troubling collection of odors: I detected timber wolf and bear and tiger, and half a dozen others. But even ignoring the fact that so many of them were not native to region, the way the odors seemed blended together, and muted was just... wrong.
It's hard to explain if you don't have the nose for it, but smells can be muted in different ways: they can diminish over time, be covered up. They can be cast-offs, smells that have gotten caught and transported somewhere else, or they can be windblown. In this case, the odors were covered somehow, strained as though through a sieve.
Underneath those smells was something else, something old and powerful, and more than a little magical. I slowed my vehicle down as I headed around the corner towards my place, sticking my head out the window a little to get a better whiff.
The magical odor sent shivers down my spine. It smelled like burnt
corruption. And not the tasty kind.
The smell wasn't strong; I doubted that anyone except a few of the neighborhood dogs had noticed it, but with a nose like mine, and in a place I knew as well as this, it was as good as a flashing sign.
And the source of the odor had made a beeline to my front door.
I hesitated, staring at the trailer I called home. What to do now? Something was in my house, presumably waiting for me. I could avoid it easily enough, but for how long? I liked my home. I had things in there that I needed. Probably best to just confront whatever was inside and sort out exactly what it wanted.
But that didn't mean I had to walk into the proverbial – or from the smell of it, possibly a literal – lion's den, with my thumbs up my ass. I pulled my seat forward and grabbed my spare jacket out from behind it. I don't really need a jacket, but I keep one on hand so I don't stand out if I'm ever anywhere that a human would need one. Or in case I need to go somewhere while covered in viscera.
The jacket is at least two sizes too big for me, making it excellent for concealing almost anything.
I glanced around as I shut the door and headed to the back of my truck.
A few months back I'd had some trouble with some hunters who were looking to collect a bounty on me. In the course of things, I'd briefly gotten my hands on a sledgehammer, and, though I hadn't made much use for it at the time, I had found the weight and feel of it pleasing. So, when I came across one for cheap at an estate sale, I’d bought it and stuck it in the back of my pickup.
Sliding the handle of it up my sleeve, three quarters of the way to my shoulder, I gripped the head with my fingertips and pressed all of it close against my body.
It wasn't completely hidden, but as long as I didn't bend my elbow, and kept my right arm next to and slightly behind my leg, it wouldn’t draw a whole lot of attention.
One more quick glance around the neighborhood, and I headed up the steps.
Whoever broke into my place had definitely used the front door, but they'd taken the time to lock it after themselves. Presumably they thought they were going to catch me by surprise.
Fantastic.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
My guest stood against the far wall, massive and angry, reminding me, oddly, of a train coming down a track. Inevitable and unstoppable. He was at least seven feet tall, and wore what I thought must be a special-order trench coat. I didn't think there could be much demand for something that covered someone his size from neck to heel. He had dark, thick hair and a face that only a mother could love. Not that I was judging: I'm in pretty much the same boat myself.
Surrounding him was the debris that had once been my living room.
This was not the first time my place had been trashed, but it was, to date, the most complete trashing I'd seen. Every book and DVD had been ripped off the shelf, the television had been broken and, from the looks of it, the insides searched. My refrigerator had been emptied and pulled away from the wall. Thankfully I'd binged recently, so there were only a few rat carcasses and a pile of rotting vegetables on the ground.
All of that was easily fixed. The thing that pissed me off was my tower.
For personal reasons, I'd wanted a strong support beam in my living room that I could hang objects from.
Well, that I could hang myself from.
Fine, I needed something that could support my full weight so that I could hang myself by the neck when I masturbated. The point is, living in a trailer home, there aren't a lot of great places to put a hook in for that kind of activity, so I bought myself a few pieces of solid timber, cut them, and built a framework that stretched from one side of the trailer to the other with a firm base on both sides. It wasn't a masterpiece of carpentry, or anything, but the wood was expensive, and it took me the better part of a day to build.
And this jackass had broken it in three places. No way was it an accident, either, I'd made that thing to last.
“Where is it?”
I blinked at the hulking intruder.
“Uh, hello.” I closed the door behind me and flipped on the light switch.
“Where Is It!” My intruder crossed the room in a heartbeat and had me pinned against the wall, about a foot off the ground with a single massive hand.
I grabbed onto his arm with my left hand, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I was keeping my right arm straight and to my side. I was also hoping that he wouldn’t notice that I’d become slightly aroused as soon as he grabbed me. Years of autoerotic asphyxiation had taught me that trouble breathing meant I’d be getting off soon.
I tried to take my mind off of that and place it on the realities of my current situation. This close, I couldn't help but get a better whiff of him.
All of the smells I'd detected were coming from him. He was like an animal menagerie. But they weren't castoff odors: I wasn't detecting scents that he'd picked up somewhere else, they were coming from his pores, they were on his breath. Somehow, he was a tiger and a bear and a lion, and so on and so forth.
So, what did that make him? Some kind of were-creature I'd never heard of? The smells didn't seem quite right for that.
His low, but growing growl drew my attention back to the situation at hand.
“Any chance you could be more specific?” I choked out.
“The key! Where is the key!”
I fumbled in my left pocket for a few seconds before coming up with my keys and presenting them to the giant. “Every key I own.”
He grabbed the keys from me, still holding me against the wall with an iron grip as he examined them.
When he'd looked all of them over he hurled them across the room, through one of the kitchen cabinets, then he turned back to me, disgust and rage on his face. “Fucking shiteater!”
As he drew his right hand back to strike me, his sleeve slipped and I could see more evidence of his inhumanity: the muscles in his arms seemed wrong to me, large knotted things, straining against his skin in the wrong places. And his hand, with stunted, but thick fingers, didn't look like anything I'd ever seen on a person. It looked more like a paw with a thumb sewn on.
No sooner had that thought entered my mind than I saw the claws emerging from his fingertips.
The time for reflection was over. I dropped the head of the sledgehammer out of my jacket and caught the handle about halfway down. I aimed my blow at a spot about six inches inside his skull and swung for the fences.
The hammer connected with my attacker's temple resulting in a heavy crunching sound. The hand holding me off the ground went slack and the thing's body fell to the ground in front of me.
“Wow.” I stepped away from the body shaking my head. Two major questions were running through my mind, first and foremost, why did that jackass think I had his key? And second, what the hell was he?
The body twitched. I adjusted my stance, holding the sledgehammer more like a golf club, and swung hard at his head, flattening one side of it, and breaking his neck to boot.
There weren’t too terribly many creatures that could recover from that kind of damage, but there were enough that it wasn’t worth taking the risk. I opened up his jacket and slammed the hammer down on his chest enough times to turn his ribs into mush. I grabbed a piece of wood that had probably been a part of some piece of furniture, and buried it into his chest, aiming for the heart.
That should do the trick.
A quick sniff assured me that there weren't any more of whatever he was in the vicinity. I leaned my sledgehammer up against the wall as I surveyed the damage to my house. It was extensive.
I knelt next to what had been my entertainment center and sorted through the wreckage. Of the hundred or so DVDs in my collection, there were only six or seven that I actually cared about. No offense to human sensibilities, but ghouls are not, as a rule, obsessed with things like love and romance, or family, or wealth, or social change. We have simple needs: dead carcasses and lots of them. Oh, and we need our space. Ghouls have a tendency to be te
rritorial. Point being, I don't much go for romantic comedies and action adventures. I’ve got four documentaries, two horror movies, and a compilation of old home movies that I actually occasionally watch. The rest are just for show.
I dug through the wrecked boxes and discs looking for the few discs that I actually cared about. Two were broken, one was scratched. I set those aside, intending to buy replacements somewhere down the line. I stacked the good copies up, and began gathering the boxes of everything else and putting them on the shelf. For those, I didn't need quality copies. I didn't need the DVDs at all; I needed the boxes.
The sound of cracking bones drew my attention back to the body on the floor.
The creature that should have been dead pulled itself up into a crouch, shaking its rapidly healing head as if it had just gotten an unusually painful slap instead of a twenty-pound mallet to the temple.
The piece of wood I’d put through its heart fell to the ground, and I watched as the chest I’d ravaged healed shut.
“Well. Shit.”
I had no idea what this thing was, but he was stronger than me, about as fast, and he healed almost as quickly as I did.
I glanced at my favored weapon, but my not-so-dead enemy was directly between me and my goal.
“That hurt,” the giant rumbled.
“Sorry about that. I was going for fatal, not painful.”
A deep growl rose from the creature's throat. “I'd rip you limb from limb and suck the marrow from your bones, but Andres wants you alive.”
A bit of a cliché threat. But this fellow didn’t strike me as particularly creative. But more important than his threats, who the fuck was Andres? And more importantly, what the fuck was Andres?
“Well, that's certainly kind of him. Say, why don't you send him my regards. Oh, and best of luck with that key thing.”
The man curled his lip at me. “When Andres is done with you, you'll beg me to kill you.”
Dammit, and here I was hoping Andres wanted me alive so we could have a nice tea party and talk about our feelings.