She was on the third floor. And as the door to her ward fell shut behind them, the clatter and voices of Hospital staff and visitors was muted down to almost nothing, replaced by the solemn beeping of eight different life support monitors, chiming away arrhythmically, in the hush of the room. Isaac stole a chair from the bedside of a young man, who looked to be In his mid twenties and was staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and his mom slid down into the seat that was already there, at his Grandma's bedside.
“Hey Momma,” She was saying, laying out the sandwiches on grandma's bedside table, “How you doin' today?”
Grandma didn't reply. Hadn't replied for a little over four years. She lay in bed, pale and delicate as an autumn leaf, as still and peaceful as though she'd only just drifted off to sleep.
“I brung little Isaac to see you, but just between you and me, I think he's a little worst for wear this mornin'.”
“Hey Grandma.” Said Isaac, dutifully, “I was playin' with my band last night, and they was payin' us in beer, so--”
“She don't need to know all the dirty details of it!” His mom objected, cutting him off, “Just that her musician grandson was out workin' late last night. So if she catches him yawnin', it's only that he's a little sleepy, and not that he been raised all wrong. Ain't that so Isaac?”
“Yes Mom.”
He eases into the seat beside her, and is struck, for the first time, by the smell of the place. Not the antiseptic hospital tang that's been catching him in the back of his throat for the last four years of coming to this place, but something else. The low, salt stench of sweat, creeping up from his grandmother's bedside. He frowned, staring at the sheets, and listening to the soft, raindrop patter of his grandmother's heartbeat, muffled by the beep of the life support machine. She didn't look unclean. But then she wouldn't, would she? Not when the hospital staff knew they'd be coming to visit.
“It's a Christian Rock Band.” His mom was saying, applying a certain liberal interpretation of the band's gleefully blasphemous name, “And Isaac's the singer! When you get out of here, you can go to one of their shows!”
Not just sweat. He could smell the hot tang of urine, underneath the chemical clean stench of the room. The bird wing beat of his grandmother's heart was getting louder, and, not wanting her to hear his concerns, Isaac leaned over to whisper into his mother's ear,
“Mom, can you smell that?”
“Smell what, pumpkin-head?”
Faeces. Sweat. The smell of an old woman who hadn't been bathed in days, or weeks.
“She smells-- she don't smell clean, mom.”
His Mother frowned, leaned forward and sniffed the air, then turned back to her son, “I don't smell nothin' Isaac.”
“Lean here, try again-- Mom I'm tellin' you, she don't smell right. They ain't been takin' proper care of her here!”
The copper stench of blood and pus had hit the back of Isaac's throat, and with rising panic Isaac was having visions of bedsores. Of red lesions burning through his grandmother's pale skin. He reached to pull back her blanket but his mother grabbed his wrists.
“I don't smell nothin!” She said, sharply, “And don't you think I'm gonna let you go embarrassin' your grandmomma to check!”
“Well I ain't makin' this up, I smell what I smell!”
“You're so worried, go wait outside.” She ordered, “I'll take a look. Make sure she ain't soiled. But for that, you are gonna give her some privacy, young man!”
Isaac's head ached. He could hear the throb of blood echoing inside his skull, as fast and irregular as the bleating of the life support machines.
“Goddamn disgrace, them doin' her like this!” He muttered unhappily, “Oughta be a goddamn crime!”
“You don't know that they done her like anythin'!” His mother shot back, “Now get outside with you. I'll see her right.”
Isaac complied, pushing unhappily to his feet. Compared to the quiet of the coma ward, the noise in the corridor was deafening, and the smell, so much worse that he could almost have believed that the shit, sweat, blood stench hadn't been coming from his grandma at all, but rather from out here. To his poor head, still tenderized by drink, every rattle of a gurney was like machine gun fire. The voices of squalking nurses and commanding doctors, were louder than screech owls. He could smell soda pop sweetness climbing up from the lobby, mingling with the fragrant medicinal odour of the hospital, and the dank human musk that wafted past him with every body that staggered, strutted, or wheeled by him.
Isaac swallowed down a wave of nausea, and headed for the nurses station. Maybe coming out today had been a bad idea. The events of the previous night were half submerged in shallow pools of his drunken memory, hazed by liquor and panic, fleeting even as he tried to pin them down. He'd gotten into a fight-- been pinned hard to the floor. Harvey-- with hands around his throat that became teeth even as the thought spun out. Tommy had come to get him (only Tommy hadn't come to get him, he'd woken up sick and bloody in the street) and he'd needed the help, because his arms had been pinned to his--
No.
His arms hadn't been pinned.
Isaac froze in his tracks - a step away from the nurses station, as the memory rose in a flash of clarity out of the drunken mists.
It was an image. A brief, panicked thought. His arm brought up to block the dripping jaws that snapped at his throat. Teeth sinking into his flesh. Blood falling from the wound onto his chest, his face. He remembered his own voice pleading with a colossus of fur and teeth, and the sick snap of bone, and--
A man in a charcoal grey suit cut in front of him to get to the nurses station, and Isaac jolted his arm up to stare at the unmarred flesh. There was no scarring. No bruises. No indication that his memory was anything more than a sick, drink fueled nightmare. Except for the blood that had painted his chest when he'd awoken. Except for the black gore trail of it that had led into the alley where he'd awoken.
In front of him, the man in the suit was arguing with the nurse, something about admissions or lost relatives or something, and he smelled like cologne, that broke down into the scents of wild pine and fat and alcohol and something sharp and citrus, and beneath that, dust and blood and sweat, just like everyone else. Beyond the man, the nurse smelled like moisturiser and pretzels and apple shampoo that didn't quite hide the acrid chemical under taste, and Isaac could hear her heartbeat-- could hear both of their heartbeats, added to the cacophony of noise that had stayed with him since he swayed out of his grandma's ward.
“He would have come in last night.” The man was saying, in a crisp, New England accent. Far from home, “Or early this morning-- look, please, I need to find him...”
Isaac, struck by the fear that he was of losing his mind, decided that his problem was too urgent to wait, and elbowed the man aside.
“Maam, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think there's something wrong with me--”
The man in the suit turned to stare at him, wide eyed and bristling with indignation, “Yes, I believe it's called rudeness?”
“--Like, maybe I'm seeing things? Or smelling things? I don't know, like, maybe it's a brain tumor, right?”
“Excuse me, but yes you are interrupting, and I happen to be here on a matter of utmost importance!” The man in the suit grabbed Isaac's arm, pushing it back to turn him away from the nurses station, but Isaac was not to be told. He turned, to fix the man with a stare of his own, grey eyes saucer wide and bloodshot from drink.
“Hey this is a bad day to mess with me, man. I went to bed extra crazy this morning, and I didn't even notice until just now. So get your fancy, pine cone smelling hands off me!”
The man did no such thing, but something in his expression shifted, in answer to the challenge. Looking at him directly, he wasn't as old as Isaac had first thought, perhaps in his mid thirties at the most, and under the sharp lines of the suit was the unmistakable firmness of muscle. His eyes were a deep, chocolate brown, and his hair, which was pushed out of his eyes in thick, black w
aves, was already streaked with metallic strands of grey. For the longest moment, after Isaac finished his tirade, the man merely stared at him, forehead drawn in an expression of deep, deep apprehension, before finally, he spoke:
“Pine-cone-smelling-hands?”
“Yeah,” Isaac snapped, suddenly self conscious about his detail oriented accusation, “You need to go easy on that cologne, buddy, you're swimming in it.”
This only caused the man to frown more deeply, and then, without warning or explanation, he leaned forward into Isaac's personal space, and loudly, aggressively sniffed at him.
Stranger still, obedient to the whim of some undetermined instinct, as the stranger moved close enough to him to block the full range of his vision, Isaac tilted his head a little, and sniffed back.
Pine and cologne and dirt and blood and sweat... and under that, something crisp and delicate and faint as a passing breeze. Like the smell of freshly fallen snow, or night air. Isaac sniffed again, trying to pin down the last, strange scent and the man swallowed, then murmured, in the lilting, measured tones of his New England accent,
“Oh no. It was you, wasn't it?”
Behind, the door to the coma ward opened. Isaac could tell because even from way down the corridor, he heard the distinct, cheeping of the eight out of time life support monitors. He could smell his mom's sandwiches. He could hear his grandma's delicate, butterfly heartbeat.
“Isaac? Isaac leave that poor man alone!”
“You're not insane,” said the man, “And you don't have a tumor.”
Isaac jerked back, fast and sharp, freezing only to stare at the man again. Searching, unconsciously, for flecks of amber in his sharp, brown eyes.
“You pay no attention to him, Sir,” yelled Isaacs mother from down the hall, “He's hungover, and woke up belligerent because of it!”
“Sorry about your arm.” Said the man, and Isaac unfroze. He twisted away, and fled down the corridor, back to the relative security of his grandmother's ward.
—————-
On the drive home, Isaac's mother assured him that grandma had been fine. No soiling. No leisions. No bedsores. Lou Reed sang about Andy Warhol's chest, and about what happened to missionaries in the dark, and after, perhaps, ten minutes of staring out the window, Isaac decided to ask,
“Mom, back when daddy – y'know, asshole that he was – back when he used to take you out hunting... did you ever see somethin' that your brain couldn't make sense of?”
She stole a sidelong glance at her son, before returning her attention to the road, “Somethin' like what?”
“I don't know, but people see things, don't they? Bigfoots, Jackalopes...Wolfmen?”
She stole another sidlong glance at him, this time watching him for a long moment before tearing her gaze back to the road.
“No.” She said, and without further comment, the conversation ended.
His Mom dropped him off at the corner of his block, and Isaac ducked into the convenience store before going upstairs. The store owner, a placid asian man in his late forties named Lucas Zhen, was leaning back in his chair behind the bandit screen, watching the security monitor with the kind of dedicated attentiveness that made Isaac suspect that he'd tuned the reception on it to play one of the local sports channels, rather than actually show the cctv footage.
Isaac tapped on the glass with two knuckles, and tried to look like a respectable, hard working young man.
“Hey Mr. Zhen, you got any shifts that need filling this week?”
Lucas (who enjoyed being called Mr. Zhen when he was being asked favours) rolled his gaze laboriously away from the screen.
“You can have the graveyard shift tomorrow night.” He said, “Then maybe, if you don't fuck it up, you can have the graveyard shift on Tuesday night as well. You don't screw that one up either, and you can take some groceries and we'll call that your rent paid for the week.”
“Yeah, good deal. Thanks Mr. Zhen.”
“Cool.” Said Lucas, then leaned back, and turned up the volume on the women's tennis.
Isaac, taking this as his cue to leave, departed the store, and struggled back up the stairs to his apartment, where he promptly climbed back into his grimy mattress bed, and resumed the task of sleeping off his hangover.
The next time his phone rang, darkness had already fallen, and again, Isaac went through the same scrambling, mattress patting search for the handset as he had that morning. This time, however, when he picked up and blurred his wordless sound down the phone, it was the dulcet tones of scat-porn-Tommy that greeted him in reply,
“Nghhmmmm?”
“Hey,” There was something strangely subdued in his tone, that made Isaac sit up in his bed, “You still asleep, asshole?”
“I was.” Said Isaac, “Why? There something wrong?”
“Nah, it's just... me and Kellogg swung back to the bar to get your guitar...”
“What's wrong with my guitar?” Isaac demanded, his voice immediately jumping up an octave or two.
“Nothing's wrong with your guitar, Isaac. It's in the back of the van with the rest of the kit.”
“So what's the problem?” Isaac asked, “Why d'you sound so weird, Man?”
“We just... okay, so we went to get the kit, then we thought we'd come by and drop your axe off, yeah?”
“Yeah, I hear you. So where are you now?”Isaac scrubbed a hand over his face, shuffling across to the end of the bed, so that he could plant his feet on the ground and shift upright.
“We're actually just parked up over the road, but, Isaac--”
“You want me to come let you in?”
“No, dude, that's the fucking thing, we're parked over the road, but you got some fucking blacked out windows men in black bmw literally sitting on the kerb outside your place.”
Isaac's flat had only one window, a narrow line of frosted glass that let him look out onto the convenience store's garbage and recycling cans, and very little else, which made it hard to tell if Tommy was being sincere, or playing an elaborate joke on him.
“You're playin' with me?”
“The car door just opened. Someone's getting out.” Tommy's voice had turned resigned and serious, like a man watching an unavoidable future close in on him, “Isaac, if I get disappeared by the anti-feds, you gotta call it into infowars for me-- Yeah, shit, he is definitely coming over here. ”
“It's not the anti-feds. You and Kellogg just got each other paranoid.” Isaac insisted, scrambling over to his record collection, and selecting the most disposable vinyl he owned (Saint Anger, by Metallica), to be used as a weapon if necessary “You spend all night smoking weed and watching that conspiracy shit on youtube, of course everyone's going to look like the illuminati to you!”
“He wants me to wind the window down.”
“Don't wind the window down!” Isaac practically shrieked, abandoning his attempt to sound calm.
“Well I don't know, Isaac. He does look like a man in black. But he also looks like he might have something interesting to say.”
“Tommy just--” Isaac, armed with the deadly weapon that was Saint Anger, had already begun stumbling downstairs towards his front door, “Just don't wind down the window! Tell him you're on the phone to the police.”
“Okay, but I'm gonna wind down the window so he can hear me when I tell him that.”
“Tommy-- Oh my god, if you're messing with me--”
“Hey dude,” Tommy's voice was suddenly distant, like he'd moved the phone away from his ear, to address somebody else, “Can't talk right now, I got my buddy Officer Pacman on the line. He wants to know why the fuck you're casing our local seven eleven.”
And then, more distant still, another voice answered. Mild and serious, in a New England accent,
“It's Isaac, isn't it? Tell him I need to talk to him, please. And that his doorbell's broken.”
It was in that same instant that the phone clicked off, and whether it was because Tommy had expressed his refusal t
o comply by hanging up the call, or because of something more menacing, Isaac couldn't guess. He dropped the phone on his bottom step, and wrenched open his front door.
To say that the black sedan parked in front of the convenience store looked expensive, did it a serious disservice. It looked old. Not old like any car that Isaac had ever owned, but old, like it came from an era when it was fashionable to have cars that could fit your entire extended Mafia family into. Almost more remarkable, to Isaac's mind. It was clean. Black and gleaming like it'd been carved out of obsidian. He only lingered on the car for a moment, though, before he shifted his gaze up and across the street, to where, sure enough Kellogg's van was parked, out of the window of which, Tommy was having a rather animated argument with the man whose voice, Isaac had immediately recognized, over the phone. The man from the hospital.
Perhaps he heard the door open, or perhaps Isaac's own, potent stank wafted across the road quickly enough to herald his arrival, but for whatever reason, as soon as Isaac laid eyes on the stranger, the man's head turned, and his dark eyes locked onto Isaac's. At some point, he'd apparently shed the grey suit jacket, and was dressed instead in an immaculate black frock coat, hanging open over a crisp white shirt, and charcoal coloured slacks. Somehow, everything he wore clung to him like it was pinned in place. Like every scrap of fabric had been cut to fit the contours of his body flawlessly. And from the look of his car, Isaac supposed it was entirely possible that that was the truth.
The man pulled back from the van and started towards Isaac, with a long, rolling stride,
“Isaac, isn't it? We need to talk.”
“I don't want to talk to you, man. I don't know you. And you only think you know me because my mom yelled my name too loud in the hospital today, so don't use it like you know me.”
Some Punk Rock Werewolf Romance in the Oklahoma Sun Page 2
