The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  At the end of the corridor, a hulking shadow lurked on the sidewalk. Damn, they’re standing guard down here, she thought. A shape came trudging around the far corner of the L-shaped building, walking into the pool area on all fours. If he looked across the pool into the shadows under the awning.…

  To her left yawned a black doorway. Bracing the shotgun with the haft of the tomahawk, she darted into a shabby little apartment with outdated decor.

  Everything was covered in a fuzzy layer of dust. A surprisingly pristine calendar hanging on the wall said it was September the year of our Lord 2005. Probably the office manager’s living quarters. Santiago’s wolves had demolished the place; the sofa was upended, the kitchen cabinets ripped open. Luckily, there was no food to make a mess with.

  “What is that smell?” asked Gendreau, and Robin’s boot squelched on wet carpet. A pungent, sugary parody of Honey Smacks and chicken bouillon roiled up into her nostrils—wolves had pissed on the floor. She turned the deadbolt on the door that led to the front office and found it blessedly empty.

  Once they were inside, Robin shut the apartment door and wedged it shut with a folding chair. Wouldn’t be much help, but it was better than nothing. She joined Kenway and Gendreau behind the front counter.

  The veteran grabbed her wrist and jerked her rudely to the floor.

  “Ow,” said Robin. “What gives?”

  “Something out there.” Kenway jabbed a finger toward the front entrance. “On the road. Can’t get out this way. Fucking huge, whatever it is.”

  She peered over the Formica counter. Motorcycles were parked in a staggered row in front of the office. A great dark shadow lumbered back and forth on the other side of the fleet, pacing protectively in the watery moonlight. At this distance, it was the approximate size of a buffalo. Maybe bigger.

  “Looks like sabotaging the bikes is out of the question,” said Gendreau.

  “You had that idea, too?”

  Kenway shifted uneasily. “Can’t go forward, can’t go backward. Now what?”

  Track 18

  The hour stretched on as the four of them sat behind the front desk of the foreclosed motel. Kenway propped Carly against the counter, where she stared desolately at the carpet. “No way we can take them on by ourselves,” muttered the veteran, only a lighter smear of gray in the darkness. “Not with just two blades and a handful of shotgun shells.” His tone made it clear that this was something he wasn’t used to saying: “What are we gonna do? He ain’t gonna give up on finding us, not after what happened to Marina.”

  “We’re fucked,” said Gendreau.

  “Hate to agree with you,” said the vet, “but yeah, as much as it pains me to say, we are well and truly fucked.”

  Seeking some kind of solace or strategy, Robin searched the shadows for her mother’s ethereal ghost, but Annie was nowhere to be found. “I don’t know. I just don’t. Guess we wait. Wait for them to come back down from the house, then we’ll go out the back and head up there ourselves and … chill in the attic or something ’til morning.”

  The two men said nothing. She supposed they agreed with her plan. Best they had, anyway.

  Moonlight fell through a small window in the door as she looked outside. Everything was rendered in shades of gray. Straight ahead, the sidewalk stretched across the front of the L-shaped suite complex. To her left gaped an empty parking lot. She leaned so she could see the fallen gate to her right.

  A dark shape came loping up the pool-area corridor. It clutched the gate and gently lifted it out of the way, leaning it against the clapboard wall of the L, and the werewolf dropped back on all fours, walking up the corridor in the slow, hip-rolling saunter of a caged panther, moving up the sidewalk toward the parking lot. As she watched it move, Robin wondered where the extra mass came from when people were transfigured—Theresa’s hog-monster form was easily ten times larger than her original shape. These wolf-men were twice the size of an average human, with hulking shoulders, barrel chests, towering shoulders.

  “Bitch gotta be here somewhere,” said a voice outside.

  A shadow cut through the moonlight in the corridor window. “Can’t believe they wasn’t in the house. Thought for sure they’d be up there in the house, shakin’ and pissin’ they panties.”

  “Must have been Tuco that caused the crash. That weird motherfucker was down there with Marina’s body.”

  “So it’s Tuco’s fault?”

  “I ain’t sayin—”

  “Well, he’s dead, so—” said a third.

  “Don’t give a damn whose fault it is. Santiago sure don’t. He just wants that girl’s ass, and any of her friends we can find out here. Wouldn’t pay to piss him off today. He wrecked Pops, according to Javi. Said he ate Guillermo’s face right off his skull. Killed him.”

  Kenway swore under his breath. “Gil got ganked.”

  “Yeah. Shit’s crazy,” said one of the wolves.

  “Man, I kinda hate that, y’know?” someone replied. “I liked Pops.”

  “Getting too big for his britches. He the one that let this bitch run off with Marina. He had it coming.”

  “Still.…”

  “What is going on?” asked one of the bikers.

  “Whatchu mean, man?”

  “Like, this werewolf shit. Feel like I’m losin’ my fucking mind. This shit real? I feel like I’m not real. This is some seriously weird shit. Right? We on the same page here?”

  Trying to internalize the relic’s influence, Robin realized. Trying to work out their cognitive dissonance, beginning to “converge,” the Dogs’ term for the merging of their magic-influenced minds and non-influenced minds, the spark of understanding that—

  “This shit ain’t real?” asked one of the men.

  —the strange phenomena they were experiencing wasn’t just coincidence, or a fever-dream, or a hallucination. It was real life, these transformations and half-lucid fugue states were actually happening, and they had a source.

  “Feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Found a dead cat on my porch two months ago; thought the neighbor’s dog did it or something. Dreams I’ve been having … dreaming about running naked in the desert, huntin’ down rabbits and shit out in the badlands. Waking up with dirty feet. Blood in my bathtub. So, it’s real? All of it?”

  One of the shadows shrugged.

  “You too?”

  “What you think’s doing it? D’you think we’re—”

  “Real werewolves?”

  “Yeah. Like, d’you think silver hurts us?”

  “Don’t know. Think that’s just Hollywood bullshit.”

  They’re like … false werewolves, thought Robin. Ginned-up bullshit from that Transfiguration relic in Santiago’s motorcycle. That movie stuff—silver bullets, full moon, none of that applies here. You can kill them with steel. She caught Kenway’s expression and had the feeling he silently agreed.

  “I’d ask Santi, but—that—man, I just—he’s fuckin’ scary, dude. I don’t want to piss him off, you know? I mean, does he even know what it is? What’s causing it?”

  “If he does, he hasn’t mentioned it.”

  “Is he the one doin’ it?”

  Someone laughed. “Man, Santi’s a hard-ass and he’s got chops, but he couldn’t pour out a piss-pot if the instructions were on the bottom. I doubt he’s into that eye-of-newt black-magic shit.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

  Another voice rang out from the pool area. “Hey, Donato. What is this in the pool? Was this always here? Looks like something got trapped in here and died.” A pregnant pause. Robin could still smell the musty pond-scum stink of the stagnant water; it lingered in her nostrils like a stain. “What the shit? It’s José. The bitch killed José.”

  “Got some kind of Lady Rambo on our hands, boys,” said one of them. “First grenades, now she out here cuttin’ us up. Who is this chick?”

  “Santi gonna be pissed. And you know piss runs downhill, man.”

  “T
hat’s why he don’t need to find out.”

  “Find her,” rumbled the beast.

  “Hey, what are you guys up to?” asked another biker, joining them. Sounded like he wasn’t alone, by the plop-plop of bare feet. “Ain’t nobody in the house. Santi says we’re gonna go across the road and fan out, look for ’em out in the desert. ‘Hands Across America’ or some shit.”

  “I think we should keep looking here at the motel.”

  “You’ll do what I tell you to do,” said Santiago. He sounded tired, his voice raspy, low, a breathless murmur. “And you’ll do it. Unless you want what Gil got.”

  “Yeah, okay, man.”

  “Good. Goddamn, it stinks out here. Pool smells like rancid frog shit. Hidey, you go down and check the RV again—they might have doubled back on us.”

  “You don’t think Max woulda seen ’em?”

  “Just do what I told you,” said Santi. “You fuckers are like herding cats, you know that?” Snick, snick, snick, the ignition of a lighter. Santi firing up a cigarette. “Anybody know where José went?”

  “Said something about going to take a piss.”

  A moment of silence, and then Santi blew out smoke and said, “Why didn’t he just piss on the floor? He’s a dog. That’s what dogs do.”

  More silence.

  “Don’t shrug at me, asshole. Go get him.” Santi walked away into the parking lot. “You guys come with me. We’re gonna go look out there across the road. They might have headed south and gone to ground up there in those hills. Lot of places to hide.”

  The other men followed him, leaving the parking lot desolately still.

  “I think we should sneak up the hill and go hide in the house while they’re out of the picture,” muttered Gendreau, a few minutes later.

  Her boyfriend scratched his beard, a dry sawing noise in the shadowy quiet.

  Robin studied Carly’s emotionless gaze. The girl seemed to be transfixed by something on the other side of the planet. Robin waved her hand in front of Carly’s face. No reaction. She lightly patted her face, and this time Carly looked away, shifting her whole body to the side and tightening into a fetal position. Okay, so she’s not totally out of it. She’s just dissociating.

  “All right,” said Robin. “Let’s move.”

  She got up and pulled the chair out from under the door handle, revealing the apartment.

  Relief. No wolf-man waiting in the cramped living room to ambush her. She checked the breech on the shotgun and led them outside, preserving the silence with an index finger to her lips. The four of them slipped out the back and around the pool area.

  Steps made out of cross-ties zigzagged up the hill toward the house, and tufts of chaparral bristled from the sand. Robin found herself exposed on a hillside with no tree cover, showered in frosty blue moonlight. She glanced over her shoulder and saw a constellation across the desert: Santi’s ants crawling their way toward the south horizon. Flashlights and lighters twinkled in the dark.

  Dread of being spotted up here on this bald slope made her pick up the pace, running with the shotgun at low-ready. The tomahawk’s handle beat against her knee.

  Ten or twenty years earlier, the house on the hill might have been nice, if a bit boring. Utilitarian. Puritan, even. Probably aiming at “Victorian,” but there was no unnecessary ornamentation, no gingerbread scrollwork. Just no-nonsense clapboard.

  Darkness gaped at the top of the steps; the doors had been torn down and thrown into the front yard. Robin raised the shotgun and pushed into the house, rolling her steps, swiveling back and forth cop-style. Stacks of old magazines, newspapers, and novels were hoarded against the baseboards in jagged stacks. Lawn chairs in various states of abuse shared space with about a dozen aquariums—which, thankfully, had been empty, because the werewolves had smashed them and strewn the floor with shards of cloudy glass. A tweed sofa was soaked in sour piss, a coffee table smashed in half. Walls were sprayed with a litany of obscene graffiti and had gaping holes smashed into them, through which Robin could see adjacent rooms.

  Ranch implements were nailed up like the decorations at a fancy down-home restaurant: horse tack, a scythe, horseshoes, a two-man tree saw, frontiersman snowshoes that looked like wooden tennis rackets. Also a few car parts and rear tags: Arizona. New Jersey. North Dakota. New Mexico.

  Black screws picked out a missing item about the size of a Frisbee.

  Followed by an increasingly tired-looking Gendreau, Kenway stepped up onto the front porch, cradling Carly in his beefy arms.

  Robin paused to look out the window.

  The biker that had been ordered to go find José had returned to the pool and was dragging his shaggy werewolf corpse out of the blue pit.

  Behind her, Gendreau turned his head sideways to read the titles on the weather-beaten paperback novels with his penlight. Stephen King, Nora Roberts, an assortment of nineties sword-and-sorcery.

  “They’re afraid of him,” said Robin.

  “Afraid of what he’ll do if he sees them fuck up.” Gendreau picked up one of the Koontz novels and tried to open it, but the pages were stuck together. He dropped it like a hot potato and wiped his hand on the wallpaper. “Hate to wonder what he did to poor Gil back there.” The magician sighed and looked toward the second floor, as if beseeching the gods for guidance. “If we can get into it, I think we should hide in the attic.”

  Framed photographs lined the stairwell walls, depicting an older couple, both of them wearing rose-colored bifocals. None of them looked newer than 1995. Progressively older photos of two boys and a girl.

  The bedrooms upstairs were completely devoid of furniture except for a gang of ratty-looking mattresses, also foul with werewolf piss. Neatly stacked collection of shoeboxes, each one full of various things: baby-food jars full of what looked like lab specimens preserved in formaldehyde, Beanie Babies, USB thumb drives, broken china. Another bedroom held a massive stockpile of clothes hangers, while another was wallpapered with pages torn from porno magazines.

  As soon as Gendreau stepped into the porn room, he recoiled like he’d walked into a spiderweb and pulled his shirt over his face. “Jesus Christ.”

  Other than an eternity of nudity the only thing in the room was a moldy-looking cardboard box in the corner. As if beckoning them closer, a mannequin arm stuck up out of the box.

  “Hell, no,” said Robin, leaving.

  Didn’t seem to be an attic. No access ladder, at any rate. “Probably full of bullshit like the rest of the house, anyway,” said the curandero.

  “Hey,” Robin said, mildly.

  “Yes?”

  “Got a question for you.”

  “Fire away,” Gendreau said, arming sweat from his forehead.

  “Don’t know if it’s my demon blood or what, but sometimes when I touch things—relics, or just sentimental possessions—I get a flash of insight about who handled it last. Sometimes just a sensation, a snapshot of their mental state. Sometimes it’s a whole moment in time.” Robin pointed at the ring glistening on Gendreau’s finger. “When I touched that ring back there in the Winnebago, I saw you and Rook, standing together in a place that looked like a card catalog in a library. Think it was the day she gave it to you.”

  Wincing in exhaustion, the magician glanced at his finger and let his hand fall back to his side. “Weird. Kinda cool, I guess. Did you ever tell me you could do that? I don’t remember you telling me you could do that.”

  “Didn’t seem important. It’s never really helped me. I mean, it’s how I found out the Euchiss boys poisoned Joel Ellis last year, but it wasn’t really vital information. Something different happened this time.”

  “Oh, yeah? What was that?”

  “You called her Haruko,” said Robin.

  She didn’t say anything else, opting to let Gendreau fill the silence.

  “Now is not a great time to talk about this,” he said curtly, calling her bluff, and started to walk away. Robin reached out to clutch his shoulder, and as if by insti
nct, he shrugged her hand away, his hand up in a guarded posture, creating distance between the magic-eating demon and his relic.

  “That’s Leon’s wife, isn’t it?” She held his stare. “Wayne’s mother. They think she died of cancer. Why are you hiding her from them?”

  “We’ll talk about this later, when we’re not running for our lives.” The magician turned and marched down the stairs. “But I will tell you that we have a very good reason.”

  “Better be a great one.”

  * * *

  Along the top rim of the kitchen cabinetry were about a hundred empty liquor bottles, their luster lost. The counters were a wilderness of garbage and filthy appliances. Three refrigerators stood open, each one full of a nasty ichor dried to a scummy spackle. Beer bottles and plastic wrappers jutted out of the black paste. The sour miasma floating in the humid kitchen could gag a Sasquatch.

  “Basement,” said Kenway, pointing at an open door. Gendreau shined his keychain light, holding his shirt over his face like a colonial fop with a lace handkerchief. A stairwell led down into black nothing.

  “After you,” he said, adjusting his grip on Carly.

  “You first.”

  “You have the flashlight.”

  “Ugh.” Gendreau plodded down them, his silhouette pushing the dim white glow down the stairs. Wooden risers complained under his expensive Italian leather shoes.

  “I’ll stay up here and keep an eye out,” Robin told them.

  Kenway’s voice came from somewhere down in the dark. “I’ll leave Carly down here with David Blaine and come up there with you.”

  “David Blaine?” asked Gendreau.

  “Need you down there protecting her, babe.”

  Kenway’s reply was muffled. “Uhhh?”

  “Your ego will live,” said Robin.

  “You know me better than that, lady. I’m not leavin’ you alone with Teen Wolf out there.”

  “Goddammit.” Robin pushed past him. The stairs complained, creaking and crackling as her hand slid down the dusty, smooth wood of the baluster. Gendreau stood in the middle of the basement, shining his keychain light to and fro. “If I come down here with you, will you be satisfied?”