by Grace, A. E.
“What?” she shouted, frustrated. Why the hell couldn’t he just tell her and get it over with?
“It’s not something easy to explain.”
“Well, if you don’t explain it, I’m slowing down.”
“You can’t slow down. You need to catch this guy. He’s your guy, and he’s attacked two police officers, right?”
“We must have a dozen guys looking for him. At least.”
“Yeah, well they won’t find him,” Dylan stated. “They won’t.”
Sasha glared at him. “Why? How the hell do you know? Who is this guy?”
She changed gears angrily, and heard them groan and grind. She asked her question again. “Why won’t they find him?”
“Because they won’t know how to look or where to look.”
“But you do?”
“Yes, but you’re probably not going to believe me.”
Sasha blinked, opened her mouth to speak, but didn’t know what to say. She wheeled the car around a corner, hearing the metal frame groan in complaint, feeling the strain against her seatbelt.
“Try me.”
“Okay, there’s no easy way to say it, so I’m just going to say it.”
“Please!”
“He’s a shapeshifter.”
She bunched her face up. At first she couldn’t think of what to say, and then she said the most obvious. “Like what, he can turn into animals?”
“Yes. But if my guess is right, just one animal. A wolf.”
“So, what, he’s a werewolf?” Sasha asked, humor in her voice. “Our killer is a werewolf?”
“I don’t know what he’s called. Werewolves change under the full moon, don’t they? He’s got control of it.”
She laughed, and opened her mouth to speak but he cut her off.
“Look,” he said. “It fits. Look at the wounds on Charlie Kinnear. I didn’t see them, but judging by the blood, I bet you they looked an awful lot like deep scratch marks. Right? Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“And you asked why he was naked? Well, if he changes, what do you think happens to his clothing? Or would he keep it on, even? So my guess is if he was climbing into a back garden somewhere, there was probably washing on the line. Did your boss tell you that?”
“No.”
“That’s why you’ll never find him. And why I can. I know how he thinks.”
She wasn’t sure why it took so long, but the penny finally dropped. “Wait, you’re not telling me that you’re…”
“Yes,” Dylan said after she failed to finish her question. “And that’s why I can find him. I can smell him.”
Silence settled over them like a fine dust. Everything seemed coated in this quiet war of belief and trust that was waging in her mind. This was ridiculous, right? This was all bullshit! There was no way shapeshifters existed.
And yet, the idea wasn’t something she couldn’t wrap her head around. She’d grown up always with an open mind, had loved reading about strange things, paranormal things. Nature was full of aberrations and oddities and surprises. There were animals that could change their shape. Was it so unbelievable that a human could?
“This was your condition, wasn’t it? You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie. What I told you was the truth. My blood cells do show abnormal behavior. I was tested for anemia when I was young. But that was when I was a child, which actually leads to something else I need to tell you.”
“There’s more?”
“There’s more,” he confirmed. “We, uh, have different lifespans, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“This year I turned eighty.”
Sasha shook her head, laughing again. “What the hell, I can’t believe this,” she murmured to herself. “Damn, what a day. Eighty?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look a day over twenty five.”
“I know.”
“Wow,” Sasha said. “I don’t know whether or not to believe you. You have to admit, this is some ridiculous shit, Dylan.”
“Imagine being me. Watching all my friends age while I stayed the same. It was pretty terrifying.”
“Look, even if this is true, it doesn’t make any sense.” Sasha purposefully inflexed calmness and levelness. “Why didn’t you see a doctor? What about your pediatrician?”
“He wanted to share his findings, but my parents didn’t let him. And why would I find a doctor? You think I want to submit myself to that academic community uninterested in my wellbeing compared with their data bank and published papers? Expose myself to the world as a monster? Remember, I thought I was the only one!”
She saw, then, the truth in his eyes. She was looking at a man haunted by a lack of understanding of his own self. She let her imagination wander for a moment, thinking how it would feel to be different in a way that nobody else was, and to not know why.
Sasha wanted to argue back, but she conceded that he was probably right. A person who aged at only a fraction of the speed of a normal human? Who could shapeshift into a fucking animal? He would be snatched up by somebody sooner or later.
“Shit.” She couldn’t let herself think like that. She couldn’t let herself start to believe him. “What animal can you change into?”
He put up a hand. “I’ll come to that. But there’s something else, too.”
Sasha sighed. “What?”
“About your victim.”
“Charlie Kinnear?”
“Yeah. Remember when I talked about having seen Charlie Kinnear before?”
“Yeah. That photograph in the tourist office.”
“Right,” Dylan said. “When was the last time you were in there?”
“Not long ago,” she said. “It was part of my old beat before I was promoted.”
“So you go inside ever?”
“Yes,” she said. They always had free treats, coffee and tea, and soft drinks. Sasha wasn’t above popping in on her patrol for a quick bite and refresher, especially during the summer time. “What are you getting at?”
“The photo of Charlie!” Dylan urged. “Didn’t you notice anything strange about it?”
Sasha thought hard, but though she could envision the photograph on the wall, she couldn’t really make out the details.
“To tell you the truth,” she said. “I never really noticed it.”
“Well think, okay, Sasha, because it’s really important. Think of his face in the photograph.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Now, tell me, how long ago was that photograph taken?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It must have been-” Her voice trailed off as the beginnings of understanding took root in her mind.
“I’m not lying to you, Sasha. This is how you know I’m telling you the truth.”
“Holy shit,” she breathed. “He looks exactly the same in that photo as the day that he died.”
Dylan looked at her, conviction in his eyes. “Didn’t age a day in decades, did he?”
“I can’t believe I’m actually going to go along with this. As mad as it all sounds, I kind of believe you.”
“You’ve an open mind, Sasha. Use it. I’m telling you the honest truth. Also… you’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
“So what animal do you change into?”
“A moon bear.”
“A moon bear? Why so specific?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what happened.”
“Well then why is this guy we’re looking for a wolf?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you find out you could shift?”
“That’s a long story, and I’ll tell you another time,” he said. “For now, we’ve got to focus on this guy. Your lab will come back with results on that fur you found and will confirm that, I’m willing to bet.”
“And you can track him?”
“Yes, I can smell him. Better when I’
m a bear.”
Sasha breathed deep, negotiated two slow-moving cars. “Damn. I don’t know why I’m not more shocked.”
Dylan let out a small laugh. “To be honest, I’m a little surprised, too.”
“So you’re really eighty?”
“Around that, yeah.”
“You were alive during World War II?”
“Yes,” he replied softly. “Too young to remember much. Only the broad strokes.”
“Wow,” Sasha breathed. “You must have seen so much.”
“I might have,” Dylan said, “if I hadn’t pissed away forty years.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say I led a life of sin for a while. Those were years I was lost.”
Sasha shook her head, brows furrowed as she struggled to actually comprehend the idea that this man had spent forty years pissing about with booze or drugs or whatever he meant by ‘sin’. That was longer than she had been alive. She looked at him in a new light, then. This was an old man. How had he retained such energy after all this time? At least it explained why something had always seemed different about him. The confidence he had was just a product of his huge wealth of life experience, paired with a physical youth so that it wasn’t wasted away to frailty and senility.
Thousands of questions burned in her brain. She wanted to ask about what he’d seen, what it was like to witness so many of the pivotal moments of the twentieth century. She wanted to know what it would have been like to live before the television was something mainstream, before even the beginnings of computers. She wanted to know what fashion was really like, through the decades, and not just how the pop-culture icons represented it to be. He would have watched it change, year by year. He would have seen both the contemporary styling of a certain time, and then the inevitable retro return much later in the future.
She knew that she was going to have to interrogate him at some point, satisfy her own curiosity, her own lust for knowledge and understanding. It was the same drive that had pushed her into law enforcement, but that had been under the misguided, yet rosy idea that being a police officer was all about getting to the truth of things.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s say I believe you. How do we start looking?”
“He’ll probably be looking to leave town, right?” Dylan looked at her. “That’s what I would do.”
“Okay,” she agreed, nodding. “So he’ll look to steal a car.”
“No. That’s too obvious. I wouldn’t do that, and I have to assume he has more experience evading the law than I have.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s killed a man and injured two police officers. This isn’t a rookie’s first go-around.”
Sasha nodded. “Sounds fine. So what do you do, given your unique… condition? With the cops after you?”
“I shift,” Dylan said.
“Shift? Into your animal form?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Run out into the desert.”
“Why? There’s nothing out there. You’d die of exposure once the sun comes up. You wouldn’t make it a day. Especially with all the fur of a wolf, or bear.”
“I’d stay nearby the main road,” he said. “But they wouldn’t be looking for me, out in the sand. All your police cars would speed by without even seeing me. And even if they saw me, my dark shape would not be that of a man. They wouldn’t come looking.”
Their eyes met, and she pursed her lip. “Works for me. I’m pretty sure the boss has got the whole night shift out for this guy. They are going to hurt him when they find him.”
“And who says the police force isn’t just a government-sponsored gang?”
“Don’t start.”
“Fine. So that leaves you free to explore the suggestion of a crazy man who claims he can shapeshift?” Dylan asked.
“Yeah. Something like that. Well, the police station is quite close to the edge of town. We’ll start there.”
“Drive toward the highway. He’ll look to hitch a ride when he’s safely out of town.”
Sasha nodded, swerved the car around a bend, and gunned down the empty road. She passed the police station, and saw the flashing lights of an ambulance parked outside.
*
“There!” Dylan shouted, pointing. “See that?”
“No.”
“Trust me.” He had seen a shadow, something bounding, but he was almost certain that was the wolf. They had driven up the main road leading out of town for a couple of miles before he had seen the dark figure, on the horizon.
“Go toward it!”
“Okay. Hold on.” Sasha looked at him briefly before veering the car off road. He immediately felt the drag of the sand, and realized that they might not catch up with the wolf.
“No, wait,” he said. He began to remove his shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“Get back on the road, drive a couple of miles up, and cut him off.”
“What about you?”
Taking off his jeans, he looked over at her. “You’re about to watch me change into a bear. Slow down a bit.”
She did as she turned back toward the main road, and Dylan opened the passenger side door, now completely naked, and leaped out. He started to shift before he landed, tumbled onto the jagged ground a lump of morphing flesh and fur, and then he was up on his paws, smelling the air.
Wolf!
He ran off into the night, hearing the car’s tires tearing up the road behind him. At basically full gallop, he was downwind from the wolf, and he’d be able to gain on the canine once it began to slow.
He paced himself, struggled to breathe. He was already heating up, and saliva dripped from his mouth copiously as his tongue thickened and flattened, as it hung out of his mouth a little to the side.
Still able to see it on the horizon, he realized he was shortening the distance between them, and that the wolf was no longer moving quickly. The heat, even in the cooling night air, must have gotten to him. Moving laterally as well as forward so that he remained downwind, he saw the wolf’s silhouette more clearly now. It was a huge beast, with a snout half a foot long, and a bushy tail so large it looked like a flail. The wolf’s body was obviously nimble, but its sheer size, and the thickness of its torso, was unusually large.
If the animal was so strong, then what would the man be like?
Dylan redoubled his efforts, padded quickly and silently up behind the wolf until he was within leaping distance away. But the wolf’s ears pricked up, and two burning yellow eyes turned to look at him. He jumped then, a great hulking mass of muscle and fur, and landed on the wolf. A piercing yelp shot out into the sky, but with nothing to echo on, it faded as quickly as it had erupted.
Growling, the wolf turned beneath him, managed to get its paws against his chest, and kicked Dylan off. Grunting, Dylan rolled to the side, but was caught by surprise by the wolf’s jaw locking around the back of his neck. He felt intense, searing pain, roared as his anger flared, and he rolled over more, pulling the wolf across his body and crushing it beneath.
The wolf’s snarls were savage and saliva-drenched, and as Dylan continued the roll, getting to his paws, he saw that the wolf was already on its feet, front legs ducked low, snout sniffing the air.
Dylan wanted to take the chance to shift back into a man, to talk to this creature, but he couldn’t. The wolf had responded with such immediate violence that he knew that would be a silly risk to take. He roared at the wolf, a deep, bellowing rumble that seemed to shake the surface layer of sand that lined the desert ground beneath them. He didn’t know how far from the main road they had run, and from what he could see – he was unwilling to take his eyes off the wolf – he couldn’t place where he was relative to Salty Springs.
The wolf, still snarling, pink tongue hanging out of its mouth, began to pace left and right in front of Dylan, as though biding its time. He couldn’t understand it, thought again about shifting back into a man. He was almost re
ady to when the wolf pounced at him, and dagger-like claws raked across his face before he felt the clench of the wolf’s jaw again, but this time around his own snout.
He bucked backward, lifting up his head, and the wolf with it. He could feel blood streaming out of every hole the wolf’s teeth had made in his flesh, and with the canine still clamped on tightly, he slammed his head downward, head-butting the wolf’s body against the ground.
The wolf, winded and wheezing, scampered backward, but all Dylan saw was red. He charged at the wolf, caught it again with his head, and sent the beast sprawling backward onto its back. He bit down on one of the kicking legs, and felt bone grate against his teeth.
The wolf whined, and Dylan felt against his tongue a tendon snap, the elastic stretch shriveling back up into the wolf’s hip. The beast wouldn’t be running or jumping for a while.
He let go of the leg, spat out the blood in his mouth, a mixture of his own and the wolf’s. He shifted, and held his face that felt like it was on fire. Gingerly, he traced his chin and his lips, feeling there deep lacerations, though the blood was already starting to clot.
“Fuck!” he shouted, kicking the wolf that was trying to drag its bum leg away. Even though the beast was larger than him now, as long as he avoided its snapping snout.
But then the wolf began to change before him. He saw the mass of flesh seemingly congeal into one unformed, undefined mass of meat, before a human torso, and arms, and shoulders, became obvious outlines. He was quite amazed by it, never having seen himself shift before, and he wondered why he had never tried recording it so he could watch what it looked like.
A head emerged, then hips and legs, and soon, curled up on the floor, was a gigantic man, every bit as impressive to him as the wolf would have been to other wolves.
“Who are you?” Dylan asked, advancing on the man. When he tried to get to his feet, Dylan kicked at his arm, buckling it so that the man fell backward instead. “Don’t get up. Just talk.”
Breathing hard, the man looked at him, and Dylan was shocked. He wore on his face so many scars and creases that spoke of fights… and time.
“Shit,” Dylan whispered, seeing an age in the man’s eyes. “How old are you?”