A Heart in the Right Place

by Heide Goody

  Nick ran at it. His feet were clearly braver than his brain.

  The Oz-wolf reared to bring its claws to bear. Nick swung with the bottle of Talisker. It made a dull clonk against the beast’s head, rattling Nick’s wrist. The werewolf’s jaws widened in surprise and anger. It lunged down at him. Nick raised the tyre foam kit to block the attack. Muscular jaws and powerful teeth ground at the canister shoved into its mouth. It tried to rear back but, scared beyond reason of that mouth getting a grip on him, Nick pushed it as deep and as far as it would go.

  “Run, dad!” he yelled.

  Tony grabbed his rubbish axe and pulled at Nick, hauling him away. Pickles bounded about and barked. It was half a second’s worth of distraction, and the father-son team stumbled back to the door of the outbuilding.

  Tony tried to close the door the moment were through, but the werewolf barged it and him aside. It charged inside, still gargling and chewing the foam canister like a cartoon cigar. As he fell back, Tony swung blindly with his weapon. It whacked the monster’s snout, and the end of the cannister.

  Like rabid saliva, expanding tyre-repairing foam bubbled from the werewolf’s jaws. It reared back in surprise, thrashed its arms and legs. Panicked, it tried to rip the can from its mouth. It roared a weird, gurgling roar.

  Its yellow eyes widened. Foam shot out of its nostrils like jets of silly string. Foam which hardened on contact with air and fell in noodle-y loops to the floor. The werewolf descended into mindless panic: spinning round and round, waving its arms to dispel the choking gloop. Nick was irresistibly reminded of one of those inflatable wavy-armed men used outside car dealerships or carpet shops: wiggling and waving their limbs as air was forced through them.

  In its last moments, the Oz-wolf made some attempts to roll over and spit the stuff out, but the foam was drying to a toffee thickness. Mouth and noise and—

  “Oh, my God,” said Nick. “Is it coming out of its ears?”

  “Eustachian tubes,” said Tony, fighting to get his breath back.

  The werewolf writhed its last on the floor, and fell still.

  “I thought we needed silver,” said Nick.

  “I guess werewolves still need to breathe,” said Tony.

  Pickles barked and licked the dead thing’s nose.

  49

  Finn belched. Wild boar tasted good.

  What had the idiot target been blathering about? Something to do with advertisements for sausages? She had an advertisement for him right here: her grinning face covered in delicious and tangy pig’s blood.

  “Picture,” she said and patted her pockets. Yes, her camera was still in her Muubaa pocket, although there were some chunks missing from the casing.

  As she unzipped it and took the camera out, she remembered and saw the photographs she had scattered about her as she lay dying.

  They had been very important to her not so long ago yet, right now, those images of lives she had taken seemed entirely unmoving. She had the music of the Moon in her veins and a fresh outlook on life; Polaroid images of the dead seemed silly and juvenile in retrospect. They were like a childhood scrapbook: important and precious in the moment, but something to be set aside upon reaching adulthood.

  She held up the camera, struggling with it one handed, giving a broad smile. The picture was almost completely developed by the time the flash’s afterimage cleared from her eyes. She gave it a final waft and a blow.

  Finn looked upon herself. She had certainly changed. There was a new, powerful line to her jaw – a nice strong jaw. And her teeth … they’d grown too. Had her ears shifted round a bit? Her hairline had moved down, that much was certain. There was a new hairiness around her cheeks, a not unfeminine hairiness. It was sleek, beautiful and predatory, and definitely matched the new yellow of her eyes. Blood drenched her lower face.

  “There’s your advert,” she said. “Eat sausages. Because meat is fucking tasty.”

  She frowned at the picture. Her nose was a bloody mess. It had been smashed flat in the fight and it ached as she’d gorged on fresh wild boar. And there was the business with her missing arm, ripped away at the elbow.

  This new vitality she was feeling deserved a whole body; a complete body. She felt so pepped up she imagined she could regrow a new arm and hand if she put her mind to it. She wanted two strong arms. She wanted claws.

  She stumbled on. She was sure her broken leg was healing with every step. Ahead of her was a building. The farmhouse. She had been here before, but that had been the old Finn; the Finn whose body didn’t sing with moonshine. The Moon reflected on a closed door. The lock gave way after a single shove.

  It was a kitchen. It smelled of dust and abandonment. There was no light on, yet she could see perfectly. She rooted through stiff wooden drawers and ransacked cupboards. There were knives, but none of them said claw to her. Then, in the back of an upper cupboard, she found it. The perfect arm replacement. Her new claw. It was even battery operated.

  50

  Nick and Tony stared at the dead Oz-wolf.

  “We can’t be sure it will stay dead,” said Nick. “He carved himself like a Halloween pumpkin and came back.”

  “I wasn’t planning on cleaning out its airways and giving it mouth to mouth,” said Tony.

  “They say you shouldn’t do that these days anyway,” said Nick.

  “Give werewolves mouth to mouth?”

  “Anyone.”

  “Oh,” said Tony. “That makes sense. Otherwise it would be oddly specific. We should dismember it.”

  “What?” said Nick.

  His dad looked at him. “Dismember it. Butcher it. Take out the heart.”

  “I thought we were going to leave it well alone.”

  “It’s like you said: we can’t take any chances. Also, those people – the gangsters – they still want its heart.”

  Nick nodded, wishing his dad didn’t have to be right so often.

  “Well, let’s get on with it.” Tony clapped his hands together. “We need some tools. I saw a big old logging saw leaning up against the wall outside.”

  “You don’t want to use the things which are already here?” Nick pointed at the cleavers and knives hanging in the room.

  “Butchering and jointing an animal isn’t easy,” said Tony. “It’s an art. And a saw will be quicker.”

  They went outside. As Tony had said, there was a huge double-handled saw. The blade was brown with rust, but Tony assured Nick it would work well. They carried it back indoors. Working it back and forth between them, they sawed Oz’s body in half.

  Nick couldn’t help think they looked like a pair of low-rent magicians performing the sawing the lady in half trick. He had to fight down the nutty urge to cry out, “And for my next trick…!”

  Gore, blood and bone spilled across the floor. They kept going until the two pieces could be separated. They put the lower half in the walk-in freezer, shutting the door for good measure. Next they sawed across the shoulders. Nick found himself falling into the rhythm of the task.

  It felt so good to be working as a team it was almost possible to overlook what a disgusting task they were undertaking. They used the saw to crack the ribs and dragged the heart out by hand.

  “Let’s put it in one of the boxes from the freezer,” suggested Tony.

  As they packaged the heart, Pickles crowded in, licking at the blood and scraps of flesh on the floor.

  “Stop that, girl,” said Nick. “It’s unsanitary.”

  Pickles ignored him and selected a pulpy gobbet of flesh. She ran outside, its edges trailing on the floor. Nick sighed. If he ever got out of here, that dog would need some obedience classes.

  51

  Finn regarded the battery-powered stick blender and the three sharply-angled blades at its tip. She tried the button and it burst into life, blades whirling.

  “This is the weapon for me,” she said.

  She found the duct-tape in her pocket and bound the stump, although it was no longer bleeding. She us
ed more tape to fasten the stick blender on. She smiled. She needed to be ready in case she met the werewolf again. She had several vulnerabilities and needed to take the opportunity to protect them. Her smashed nose was minor, but she spotted an excellent way to prevent further pain.

  A metal funnel on the side, possibly part of some jam-making kit or something, looked like it could have been custom-made for the job of protecting her broken nose, it fitted so perfectly. She held it to her face and wound duct-tape round the back of her head to hold it in place.

  As she finished she saw hairs – the thickest and blackest hairs – growing from the back of her hands. She considered she was hallucinating due to blood loss, but dismissed the idea at once. There was a far more obvious explanation, although she couldn’t quite put a name to it. A new temporary arm and claw in place, a protective funnel over her still-healing nose, she went back outside.

  The Moon called to her with powerful, throbbing energy. She felt an urge to call to it, biting down on the impulse. She didn’t want to alert others to her presence; not yet. Even through the funnel over her nose she could scent blood on the air. Wolf blood. Man blood. It called to her as much as the Moon. It was coming from the outbuilding just round the corner: the one with the light on.

  She sprinted on feet that ached to be free of encumbering and constricting shoes. Even with the ridiculous boots on her feet, she found silence easy. She crept forward, alert for any sign of the werewolf. She stepped into the doorway and was staggered to see the werewolf, her target – her kin! – lying dead, mutilated almost beyond recognition, reduced to an upper torso and a pile of offal.

  The dog looked up from its delicate nibbling at the remains, saw Finn and then went back to its meal. It had food and was in a live-and-let-live kind of mood. The two human targets stood nearby, soaked in blood to their elbows, placing a slightly larger than fist-sized organ into a plastic box.

  It was Oz’s heart! This was excellent.

  52

  “So, we take it with us,” said Tony.

  “We might need it for bargaining with these lunatics,” agreed Nick.

  “Right. But if we get out of here alive, we burn it, or bury it.”

  “Absolutely. Is that a tooth mark?” Nick jiggled the Tupperware box.

  “We might have caught it with the knife,” said Tony. “But it’s not like anyone wants it for a transplant organ.”

  Nick looked up at the open doorway.

  “Holy crap.”

  His brain took a moment to process what he was seeing. The woman was back, and she looked like a cyborg. A cyborg which had been run over by a lawnmower. Run over by a lawnmower and stuffed in a gorilla costume. Her face had some sort of metal beak strapped to it and her arm had been replaced with a food mixer: one of those handheld devices Nick saw the pros using on Saturday Morning Kitchen. Her clothes hung off her in rags, still coated in food pellets in places. The skin which he could see sprouted thick black hairs. She looked ridiculous – like she was trying to audition for the roles of Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Toto simultaneously – but she was every inch the predator. Her eyes blazed with malevolence. As her mouth opened in a smile, she displayed fangs dripping a mixture of drool and blood.

  “Perfect!” she growled. “I’ll take that box.”

  She approached Tony and slashed lazily down his chest with her remaining arm, and the three-inch claws where her fingernails had been. Tony’s chest split into a set of gaping, parallel wounds. She caught the box as he fell: Nick’s attention was solely on his dad. He grabbed hold of Tony and cushioned his weight as he collapsed to the floor.

  There was a helicopter buzz overhead. Searchlight beams swept across the room. Another helicopter? Or was it the same one, circling?

  The Finn-wolf raised her head as though listening. “Too soon,” she growled. “I don’t need any help!”

  She looked at Nick. Her eyes locked with his. Her claw hand twitched. The stationery blades of the food mixer wavered. She looked like she was struggling with a decision.

  “I don’t need any help!” She ran, howling, into the night.

  Tony laid by Nick’s side. Blood was pumping out of him at a terrifying rate, pooling on his chest, soaking through his no-nonsense shirt and wouldn’t-suffer-fools-gladly raincoat.

  “Shit, dad! What do I do?”

  Tony’s eyes fixed on him. He was incapable of speech. Nick wavered in distress. He should know what to do: he’d watched enough episodes of Casualty and Holby City. Something about applying pressure? Maybe a tourniquet. Nick grabbed the bundled remains of Oz’s trousers (which had exploded off him in the transformation into werewolf) and pressed them against his dad’s chest. Tony groaned.

  “I don’t know…” muttered Nick.

  He fished for his phone and dialled 999. Pickles licked the top of Tony’s head with a long, red tongue, and nudged Nick, hard. Nick shoved the stupid creature away.

  His phone made a crackle, produced a single phone ring and then made the bleep bloop sound signifying a dead battery. Nick stared at the black screen before throwing his phone away as hard as possible. It smashed against the far wall.

  “Fuck!”

  Tony’s face was pale and he was blinking like a bewildered frog. His hand flapped against Nick’s.

  “Dad. I’m not ready…” said Nick. “I don’t know what it is I’m saying. You’re a good dad – no, you’re a great dad and—”

  Pickles nudged Nick again.

  “Pickles!” Nick was ready to punch the dog but he saw there was something different about the mutt. Pickles looked— “Pickles, have you grown bigger?”

  The dog opened her huge mouth. It was filled with giant fangs, her tongue lolled over them in a goofy, yet slightly threatening manner.

  “Jesus, Pickles! Not you as well?”

  The most unhinged and half-formed plan slammed into Nick’s brain.

  “Oh, God, let’s do this,” he said. He looked around at the bloody carnage remaining from their impromptu butchering of Oz. The gaping hole in what remained of the torso seemed a good place to start. Nick delved in and pulled out shreds of remaining gore. He looked in disgust at the red morsels. “They’ve never done this on Casualty…”

  With bloody fingers, Nick parted Tony’s lips and put a sliver of meat into his mouth.

  The old man – and he did look old now: old and worn and as close to being done in as any human could without actually being dead – the old man looked at Nick, blinking and staring. Staring and blinking.

  “Come on,” said Nick. “Chew.”

  There was a weak movement in Tony’s mouth. Just a reflex, or a memory of eating, perhaps. Nick repeated the manoeuvre, murmuring encouragement, trying not to think about what he was doing. If there was any chance he could save his dad, he would take it, even if it meant…

  He glanced at Pickles. The dog had definitely changed. A nibble on the Oz-wolf corpse, heart or not, and the dog had been transformed. Nick had seen with his own eyes the magical repairs worked on Oz’s body when man became were-beast.

  When he looked back at his dad, he was clearly getting weaker. What was Nick supposed to do? Moving injured people was a bad thing, he was certain of that. He was even more certain leaving people lying there when a confirmed serial killer (now with super powers and a worse attitude) was planning to return was a very bad thing. Could he even move his dad, though? He looked around to see what he could use. There was a latticed basket on a shelf, the sort used by bakers to deliver bread. He left his dad’s side for a moment, dragged it over, and sort of half-scooped Tony into it.

  Tony moaned softly.

  “Sorry, dad, sorry. Just need to move us out of the way.”

  Nick backed out of the outbuilding, convinced he would be attacked from behind as he hauled the breadbasket across the floor. He was nudged by boars, but he ignored them, shoving them out of the way with knees and elbows as necessary. He made his way past the red diesel tanker and across the square of scrubland to wher
e he’d spotted a possible hiding place. It was either an old Wendy house or a former log store. He really didn’t care either way. He managed to drag Tony inside and close the door.

  Tony moaned again as Nick lowered the makeshift stretcher bed. The moonlight was incredibly bright outside, but in the shed there were only deep shadows, the sole illumination coming from a grimy Perspex window. He felt around and found a garden lounger, mouldering in a corner. Nick grabbed the mildewed cushions, folded and squeezed them under his dad’s head and shoulders.

  There was a noise outside. After a few seconds Nick realised it was the helicopter, circling again.

  “It’s not going to be mountain rescue, is it?” he said bitterly.

  There was a barely audible response from Tony. Nick wasn’t at all sure what to do. Nothing in life had prepared him for any of this. His dad was going to die. Nick couldn’t even begin to process the idea. He would keep his dad going. Keep him talking for now.

  53

  Finn watched the helicopter swing over the forests to the south, temporarily blotting out the Moon. That interruption, the breaking of her sacred communion with the energy-giving Moon, angered her in a way and for reasons she couldn’t define. But it gave her a chance to see the helicopter’s silhouette. It was a civilian craft, a Eurocopter or similar. That meant it wasn’t the police or any of the armed forces. Which meant Col, and the forces Mr Argyll was able to bring to bear on the situation.

  The helicopter was descending, somewhere on the far side of the river. It was time for her to go meet them.

  She made her way through the trees. The scent of Scots pine, rowan, aspen and juniper filled her nostrils; she knew these trees like never before. She knew them in her blood. She could smell the animals too: squirrels, pine martens, badgers, the passing trails of red deer and, of course, the boars. Boars pestered her as she loped down the slope. They were attracted to the pellets clinging to her remaining clothes. She pressed the button on the stick blender and its high-pitched whine made the boars back off slightly. She thrust it towards them, blades catching the ends of a couple of snouts and they retreated, angry and afraid.