"Liberal Arts. I'm going for my AA degree. I can only afford to take three or four classes a semester and I should have enough credits to transfer to a state university next year." Mark's jumpiness was not as evident, although Bernard could tell he was itching to leave. "Once I do that I might major in computer science."
"Good job market in that field."
Mark shrugged. "I guess so." Awkward pause. "Listen, it's great talking to you Mr. Roberts, but I've got to get back to work."
Bernard chuckled. "By all means, Mark. Don't let me keep you from doing your job. It was great meeting you."
"You too. Take care."
Bernard gave Mark a farewell wink and strode toward his office. Behind him, he heard Mark move toward the double doors that bordered Computer Operations' maze of cubicles. Mark inserted his security-coded badge in the slot and the lock disengaged with a click. He opened the door and stepped inside. Bernard continued on until he was sure that the door to the hallway was closed and Mark was making his way down the hall to the tape library. Then he turned and walked back the way he had come.
His features remained immobile as he rode the elevator to the first floor and made his way to the rear entrance. He barely looked up as he signed out again at the security booth. Another guard was there, a new guy whom Bernard didn't recognize and didn't care about. The guard acknowledged him with a slight wave and Bernard returned it, pushing his way through the glass door as the guard buzzed him out. Into the night.
His central thoughts as he piloted his Mercedes home was that Mark Wiseman was acting way too jumpy for someone who had just been startled. The way he'd hedged around the questions Bernard had shot at him, the nervous shifting from foot to foot as if he was antsy, waiting for Bernard to spring something on him. His features had held that weak mask of guilt that Bernard had seen a million times on former employees. The guilt of lying, truancy, or stealing from the company. Whatever it was the party was trying to cover up, Bernard could always find a way to the truth. Mark had displayed the blatant signs of a man who had something to hide. He hadn't been downright lying to Bernard as they talked, but he had been trying to break away so that Bernard wouldn't catch a glimpse of whatever secret he was trying to hide.
Bernard grinned. He had played along with the little game perfectly He knew that the guy was hiding something, but he didn't press the issue. He played calm, casual, normal, and when the guy had excused himself he had played along with it. The better to avoid suspicion. And suspicion he had.
Now it was a point of confronting that suspicion. With hard truth. And Bernard knew just how to do it. As an executive of the firm he had a lot of pulling power. The pull of the right strings with some of the right people would help him perfectly. He'd get started tomorrow morning by talking to Paul Rogers, director of Security. Paul would be sure that everything Bernard asked him for would be kept in the strictest of confidence.
And then the 42-inch color big screen TV in his office. The VCR ...
Bernard smiled. The plan was already forming in his mind before he could even confirm his suspicions.
Chapter Four
Mark Wiseman was nervous throughout the rest of his shift that night.
The minute he got back to his work area-a secure, thirty-by-fifteen-foot room with bare white walls and a clean white floor-he headed toward the computer and sat in front of it, his back turned to the security camera that was trained on the main section of his work area. He didn't want to arouse the suspicions of anybody in Security-Christ, he was surprised nobody from Security had come bursting in during the change-because if they saw him shaking now, they might come knocking.
Mark drew his arms close together and hugged himself, trying to control the shaking of his limbs. His mind kept tracking on the way Mr. Roberts had been looking at him when he was talking to him. The look in the CEO's eyes told Mark that he knew something ... that he had one up on Mark, and that he was determined to find out exactly what was brewing in his head.
With nerves on edge, Mark remained in a near fetal position for nearly twenty minutes, the only sound that of the tape machines as they spit out data. A Queensryche CD had long since finished playing in the portable CD player, and at this time of the night Mark would normally have been working away with the music blasting. Now all that was changed. Now that the change had come upon him so suddenly, everything in his life had changed.
When twenty minutes passed with no invasion of Security, Mark began to relax a little. At the time of the attack he had been parked right in front of the tape machine, in direct line of the security camera. If the night-shift guard had been alert, he would have seen the near transformation take place. As it was, he was probably just doing what all security guards do on the late-night shift-either watching TV, or flipping through a skin magazine.
Or shooting the shit with the head honcho of the company.
Mark's stomach did a slow flip as the grim realization of what had just happened set in. He had worked a summer job at Free State Insurance Corporation two years ago and had become acquainted with the corporate structure during those two months. From that, he learned that Bernard Roberts had a plush office on the fourth floor, in the penthouse suite on the opposite side of Computer Operations. To exit the building after six-thirty p.m., he would have to walk to the Computer Operations side of the building and take the back elevator to the first floor, which let off right outside of Security. What Bernard Roberts was doing at the office at this late an hour Mark didn't want to guess, but if he was here doing-late night CEO work, he would have had to leave by the back exit. Which meant he would have had to sign out at Security. The security screens mounted in the booth the guards worked in were easily visible to those exiting the building. If Mr. Big-Shot CEO had paused to shoot the shit with one of the guards, he could have very well witnessed either part, or all, of his near transformation.
Shit.
Mark hoped that wasn't the case. Part of him whispered and even f he did happen to see it on the security screen, why worry about it? All you'd have to do is change and stalk the sonofabitch and silence him forever. Big deal. But the human part of him, the part of him that refused to give in to this primal animal nature of himself that he despised so much, refused to see things that way. It was this part of himself that was coming up with a plan, an excuse, some bullshit story to tell if he were confronted with what happened.
Yeah and what if Bernard or somebody in Security comes down and asks what the hell was wrong with you and you say nothing, and they pull out a tape of tonight's spectacle? I'm sure that'll go over quite well. Then what'll you do?
Killing Bernard and whatever security guard might be on duty wasn't the answer. The answer was lying low and waiting to see if the storm blew over. For all he knew he could have been over-reacting. He had been so agitated after he had fought the change back that he could have simply imagined Bernard's reaction as he ran into the executive. His paranoid mind had most likely been running on overdrive, backtracking through the past fifteen minutes, trying to cover all avenues of possible witnesses.
Mark Wiseman was becoming more relaxed now, but he was still tense. Even so, he felt well enough to rise from his chair and move over to the terminal that was his main workstation. He looked down at the screen at the jobs coming across and saw that he had four in the queue ready for processing. He sat down in a second chair and began to work mechanically, going about the motions of his job with a blind routine that he had mastered over the past two years. All the while his mind was working, backtracking through the past ten years, fighting down the selfloathing he sometimes felt for himself.
He'd had the curse under control for the past four years now. When it first reared its ugly head nine years ago, when he was seventeen, it had come suddenly and without warning. Luckily for him it had come at a time when it was just himself and Buddy Vance, a kid two years older than he who had been stomping the crap out of him since the seventh grade. As fate would have it, Buddy had cornered him
in an alley that afternoon on his way home from school. There hadn't been anybody around. It was just him and Buddy and the graffiti splattered walls of the alley...
Buddy tackled him from behind, driving him to the ground hard. The fall knocked the breath out of Mark, and Buddy was up in an instant, swinging his booted foot and kicking him in the ribs. Something sprang in Mark's chest and pain blossomed. Buddy's voice rang high and merrily in the late spring afternoon: "Haha- hahahaha ... you fucking pussy! I'm gonna kick your ass again! Hahahahaha!"
Mark had lost count of how many times he had been beaten up by Buddy Vance, but he knew this beating would result in serious bodily injury. He could tell by the ferocity of the attack, the proximity to home, and the location. All three conspired to give Buddy ample time to stomp, break, pulverize, and then perhaps spit at him, maybe pull out his wanker and finish him off with a hot golden shower before leaving him in a bloodied heap on the ground. Buddy would walk away with smug confidence; the last four serious beatings, which had resulted in a concussion, a broken nose, several broken teeth and numerous stitches, hadn't brought any legal repercussions down on Buddy Vance's head. Mark Wiseman had stopped telling his parents about Buddy Vance's various poundings on him because all they ever did was pound on him and beat him some more for disrupting their lives. The one time Mark had actually called the cops himself had resulted in his dad beating him to within an inch of his life. "I'm not only gonna have faggots in this house; I'm not gonna have any snitches under my roof either," his old man had thundered. "You either fight your own fights or suffer the consequences. Bring the cops into this next time, bring the cops into my house and I will fucking kill you, boy"
Mark had long stopped reporting Buddy's as saults, both at the school level or at the local law enforcement level. Instead he had done everything he could to avoid a beating, but every time Buddy had caught him he had been beaten to a pulp, with Mark reduced to a crying, whimpering baby in the street, pleading like a blubbermouth to stop, just please stop. And then later, in the humming black of the night as he would lie awake in his room, the dull throb of his injuries chasing his sleep away, the hopelessness of his situation would slowly turn to pity and rage. And he would lie in his bed, the pain and rage roiling and churning in his gut, many times his injuries left untreated by a doctor because his father was out of a job and out of medical insurance. He would lie in bed and try to sleep but the sandman never came, leaving him awake to wonder why he had been born into such a horrible home as the dawn bled away the night.
And as the years passed the rage and hate grew.
Mark was expecting a similar outcome in this beating as Buddy danced around him, kicking him in the upper thigh, the stomach, the right arm. Each kick sent a stab of pain through his body and he felt the rage blossom, exploding out of him like the eruption of a volcano. The past four years flashed by in a millisecond-the neglect at home, the physical and emotional abuse, the constant attacks from Buddy Vance, the cruel, vicious cycle of it all-and then something exploded in Mark and he was up on his feet.
It all happened so fast that Mark still barely remembered it. What he did remember came in snatches, brief images that remained imprinted in his memory banks. He remembered the look of surprise on Buddy's face as he stood up. He remembered the smile on Buddy's face as he recognized the challenge. He remembered the blinding speed of Buddy's blood as it splattered against the graffitistained wall. He remembered how easily his fingers slid into Buddy's throat and ripped out his trachea. There was a brief image of a whirlwind of violence and blood, all accompanied by a near silent fury, which later reminded him of the way a pit bull never makes a sound when it tears into another dog and begins the kill. There was a brief image of something flying through the air, something long-Buddy's arm pulled out of the socket-and the next thing he knew, he was walking out of the alley with Buddy's blood and scraps of flesh all over him, staining his shirt and hair. The taste of it was in his mouth. He cut through another alley, his body warm as he threaded his way home through alleys, his sense fine-tuned to cars and people blocks away, and then he was home.
Mom and Dad weren't home when he let himself in through the back door, hopping the fence from the alley behind the house to gain entrance into the backyard. He headed straight to his room, peeled his clothes off, and scrubbed Buddy's hair and blood off of him. After he was finished with his shower and all the blood had been washed down the drain, he took his bloody clothes, put them in a plastic garbage bag, which he tied securely, and placed them at the bottom of one of the garbage cans in the backyard. Since the following day was trash pick-up day, he dragged both cans outside to the curb and went back into the house.
Mark still found it hard to believe. The police had come around that evening to question him about Buddy Vance's murder; his body had been found a few hours earlier by a homeless person, and they were just making the rounds of known acquaintances and enemies. Buddy had a juvenile record a mile long. Any kid with a grudge-many of them of the same mold as Buddy-were better suspects for murder. For the first time in his life, Mark's father hadn't beaten him for "bringing the police home." In fact, Mark's father had been rather stunned at the ferocity of the attack on Buddy.
"Had to have been an animal," he'd said the following morning at breakfast. He'd been reading the write-up of the incident in the morning edition of the Los Angeles Times, and Mark had pretended to be interested. His dad had looked at him with unease. "A wild dog or something. You would think we wouldn't have that kind of problem in L.A., but you never know the way people just dump animals nowadays. You see any packs of wild dogs in the area, skipper?"
Mark had nodded. "Yeah, maybe." He had beaten a hasty retreat, just as his mother was rising from the prior evening's drunk. He'd spent the rest of the day at school and at the Gardena Public Library where he had done some research.
It had taken him a long time to get a firm grasp on what he was. Most of the books he had read at the Ii- brary that first time were bullshit. It wasn't until he'd awakened one morning a month or so later, his clothes stained with blood and the taste of it in his mouth, that he realized he had done it again.
This time it had been a young couple out on a date. It had happened at Alondra Park, a quarter of a mile from where he lived. He remembered everything about it; the transformation in his bedroom while his parents were out at the neighborhood bar; hearing his wolflike howl of pain as the metamorphosis took place; his human-side going into shock as he watched his body shape-change; the sense of his animal-self taking over as instinct eclipsed his human side; then, slipping out of the house quietly, letting his senses carry him on. And then the attack. Their bodies had been found along the man-made pond in the center of the park, and along the park itself. There had been no witnesses.
That was the only time Mark had considered suicide. Two days after the attack he had stood in the bathroom, a bottle of his mother's sleeping pills in his hand, contemplation weighing heavily on his mind. A haunted, troubled soul encased in the body of a skinny, gawky teenager had looked back at him from the mirror. He had closed his eyes and struggled against the feelings for perhaps twenty minutes before he'd finally flushed the pills down the toilet.
He had been sixteen going on seventeen. He'd conducted more research at the library and had found more information. Roman and Greek myths, European legends, Native American stories of shape-changers abounded. Early writers of literature documented tales of werewolves that fed on human flesh, raided villages, stole babies in the dead of night. Medieval legends exploded with the myths; wolves were the Devil's agents, along with cats and other animals. Thousands of people were accused, convicted, and burned at the stake for lycanthropy on mere speculation. He had turned from the legends to books that supposedly contained true accounts of lycanthropy. He had never been bitten by a werewolf or cursed by a witch, nor had he been inadvertently placed in the hands of an evil or incompetent experimenter with youth-giving elixirs and potions. All three were grounds for one
becoming a werewolf involuntarily. As involuntary werewolves, they had little control over their changes from man to wolf and back again, and their changes were subject to the phases of the moon.
The moon had been full on the afternoon he had killed Buddy Vance. And he was certain it had been full when he'd slaughtered that couple in Alondra Park.
Those who wished to become a werewolf for pleasure were said to obtain a salve from a witch, which they then rubbed into the skin. Mark remembered shaking his head at that when he'd read it. Nope, he surely hadn't rubbed salve over his body in the hope of becoming a werewolf. What bullshit.
The closest explanation he'd ever found of his condition was a book he had found in the occult section of a run-down bookstore on Crenshaw Boulevard, next to Perry's Pizza, across the street from El Camino College. He had grown tired of all the Hollywood bullshit, had grown jaded by most of the books he'd come across. But that book had been dif ferent. It had contained a large section on lycanthropy, which, he'd learned, came from the Greek words lykoi and anthropos: "Wolfman." Lycanthropy had been described as a psychiatric state in which the patient believes he or she is a wolf, or some other non-human animal. Undoubtedly stimulated by the once widespread superstition that lycanthropy was a supernatural condition in which men actually assumed the physical form of animals, the delusion was most likely to occur among people who believed in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. It was a rare condition. Examples were often linked to schizophrenia, and the rare state of the condition made clinical studies difficult.
Upon reading the part about schizophrenia Mark had panicked, though he'd quickly gained control of himself. He wasn't schizophrenic; he had seen himself change physically. He had looked down upon himself covered with thick, black fur, had seen his feet and hands change into twisted claws with razorsharp nails. He had felt his senses grow more acute and sharpened. It wasn't the result of some hallucination wrought by a psychiatric disorder. Mark had seen something more malignant and supernatural.
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