The runt had been quiet for too long. No one had thought to check on him and Whitey thought he was just dumb enough to be the one to do it. The guy was his fault anyway. Had he just stayed in his armchair and drank more whiskey, he would have slept through the whole damned mess outside of his trailer. Sawed Off and his pals would have run around and killed whatever, but he wouldn't have brought the little bastard in here. He probably wouldn't have found the fucker for a few days and instead of coming into work on his day off, he'd have a werewolf-free weekend.
The door was closed. Sawed Off was quiet. No more gibbering. No more singing bullshit and trying to get under their skin. There wasn't even the shuffle of padded feet or claws scraping linoleum. Whitey looked through the window in the door, but couldn't make out much. He should be able to see the bed. Instead, he could only see the wall. He tapped the glass with the barrel of the shotgun. "You think I forgot about you?"
No answer. He reached down and pushed the door open.
The werewolf lunged.
Whitey stumbled back and almost fell. The beast jerked against its restraints. The bed was on its side, but the werewolf was still tethered to it. It swiped with one frail, mostly hairless and clawed foot. It was the one leg that had grown back, the one they never bothered to tie down. The thing growled, whined, and snapped at him. The restraints creaked as it fought against them. Whitey felt the warmth of his bladder almost releasing. He let out a terrified exhalation. The beast writhed and with just another few feet, it could get him, could disembowel him with the ragged claws at the ends of its toes. More feeble swipes and it whined again.
Whitey stroked the spittle out of his beard. Some of it was his. The rest belonged to the beast. He raised the gun and waited until the thing looked right down the barrel. But he knew it wouldn't do any good. He could take the damned thing's head off again and again. It would still get up. Mangy. Hair-lipped. A misshapen runt, angry as a bag of hornets.
Whitey lowered the gun and thought Fuck it. Let the thing whine.
***
Inside, the gift shop was cool and silent. It was an addition to the hospital added in the eighties. The extension of the lobby was in the front, just to the right of the main doors. Hank scanned the parking lot and the lawn beyond. There were beer cans, spent bullet casings, and other bits of debris, but no one stood watch, not that he could see. They could be behind any car or just behind the holly that lined the building, but so far they hadn't been hiding.
It was dark inside. No emergency lights. Only the glow from the streetlights. There were shelves full of the usual crap. A card rack. A few mylar balloons with cursive platitudes scrawled across them. Bouquets. A set of shelves full of flowers and ornamental stems for arrangements. Hank went straight to the shelves and dragged Otero behind him. He had no idea what to look for. Some of them he thought he recognized. Orchids, maybe? Lilies? He'd never given a damn about floristry and had even bought his condo because there was no yard to take care of. He pulled Otero closer.
"Where is it?"
She stared at the selection and Hank hoped to God she could pull it together. As her eyes passed each option, she mouthed the name. Hank threw another glance out the window. Still nothing. In spite of the gun blasts, in spite of the screams, Tribes was quiet. No cars crawled down the streets. No one walked past. It was a crypt.
Hank looked back to Otero. "Monkshood. Wolfsbane. Do you see it? Just point."
She did. There was a bushel of thick stalks with purple leaves. Hank started to grab them, but froze. He stared at Otero's finger. It quivered. The nail grew. It stretched out from the nail bed with a quiet tearing of flesh. The rest of her body seized. She shook and Hank reached to steady her out of habit. Thick froth gathered around her lips. She moaned and threw her head back.
"Simone?"
Head trauma. He should have checked her more closely rather than just stitching up her wounds.
Head trauma? You know what this is, asshole. Run! She’s changing! Fucking run! he said to himself.
The blow across the face had clearly given her severe head trauma. That’s what it was. Yes, she was awful. Yes, he hated her. But she was still his colleague and he was still a doctor. Now that she was seizing she -
From deep within her came a rumble. It was a thick feral keening. She rubbed her hands along her chest, rubbing her breasts beneath the blouse. A thin sheen of hair glistened on her cheeks. Beneath the skin, the bones began to pop and shift. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth and hungrily lapped at the air. It stretched long, licking her lips as the area around her nose and mouth stretched out. She laughed. She moaned. A guttural, wet pleasure. Her hands raced around her changing skin, rubbing and exploring. She tore at her clothes and the business casual uniform that Hank had grown to hate was shredded. Full tufts of hair emerged through the rips. Otero's back lurched forward. Her arms grew by inches, by a full foot. Hank was paralyzed.
Two gunshots thumped into the Otero-thing's torso. She twitched with the impact. She lashed out and backhanded Hank. He felt himself fly, smashing things along the way. There was the earsplitting sound of breaking glass. The full moon above. A cool breeze. Dewy grass on his cheek. Darkness.
***
Bullet screamed at Hank, but he couldn't hear her. He stood in front of Otero as the bitch changed. It happened fast and Hank was transfixed, like watching a fireworks display or a car crash.
"What's happening in there?" Whitey asked, jogging back up to her from the west hallway.
"Just watch the back!"
Her gun wasn't going to hurt the thing, she knew that much. She fired anyway. Two into the heart. One was dead center, the other went high. The wolf swatted Hank aside, knocking him through a display of music boxes and cheap jewelry, through the plate glass window, and onto the front lawn. It locked eyes with Bullet and she felt the thing stare into her. The eyes were all lupine, yet still Otero's. And there was recognition. It smiled and crouched to leap. Bullet dug in, leveling the gun at the thing's eyes. She might not hurt it, but she could blind it. The wolf stopped before it jumped and shook its head. It seemed to choke, like a dog with a snout full of pepper. It tried to shake it off again. Snot and spit flew in thick gouts. It looked over at the monkshood, yelped once, and ran on all fours through the broken window.
Bullet stepped into the gift shop. Hank's trajectory out into the front lawn had destroyed most of it. A few helium filled 'Get Well' balloons floated towards the jagged opening in the window. One caught on a sharp point and burst. Bullet jumped, but stayed sharp. Just outside, the Otero-wolf crouched over Hank. Two others loped across the lawn to join it. Bullet raised the gun and squeezed the trigger twice. Both shots missed. The wolves seemed unbothered. One of them tittered. In the orange glow of the parking lot lights, they cast horned shadows, like demons capering around a victim. At their feet, Hank began to stir. They sniffed at him and one of them licked his neck. Bullet retreated.
She ran back through the lobby. Whitey was screaming for her. He stood by the nurse's station. A werewolf prowled across the open floor of the ER. It lay low, moving more like a crawling man than any sort of wolf. It growled. At the halfway point, Whitey blasted it. Part of its head sprayed in hairy chunks across the floor, taking the right arm with it at the shoulder. It skittered around in circles for a second, grabbed its own arm in its mangled mouth and ran back out into the parking lot.
Another one took its place. This one walked upright. It was bigger, broader. Its chest heaved and it wiggled its clawed fingers in anticipation. "Whitey?" Bullet asked.
"Yeah?" He trained the gun on the new wolf and waited for it to get closer.
Bullet ran over to Otero's office and looked at the sigil carved into the door. "How you doing?" She called back at Whitey.
"'Bout to get bit, sweetheart."
Bullet tried the knob. Locked. "I need the keys." She looked around for them near her feet, in a puddle of blood, and by the nurse's desk, but didn't expect to find them.
"Oh, hell no," Whitey s
aid, seeing what she was attempting.
She kicked the door. Even without her injuries, the thing was solid. It didn't budge.
Whitey backed away from the werewolf that stalked slowly towards him. "Bullet. Don't open that damned door."
"These things are going to kill us, Whitey."
"You open that door and that's one more thing that's gonna kill us!"
The werewolf rushed Whitey. It leaped, claws extended. Its maw opened wide.
Bullet shot the knob. It exploded into twisted shards of brass. The door opened slowly into the office. The darkness within was absolute. With it came a chill. She saw her breath cloud as it passed her lips. The darkness moved. Faster than she could register, it whipped outwards and past her.
Varney caught the werewolf that flew at Whitey by the throat. Its growl choked off with a pained yelp. With one greenish, bony arm, he slammed the wolf to the floor. Bullet felt the impact from where she stood. A splatter of blood and hair fanned out across the floor from the back of the werewolf's skull. Varney was on top of it. He plunged his fingertips into its sternum and with one quick motion, opened its ribcage. The thing threw its head back and screamed as it pawed at Varney's arms. The vampire leapt to his feet, still holding the two halves of the ribcage, and hurled the beast towards the open bay to the parking lot. Blood and innards rained down in a red arc. The wolf hit the pavement, twisted up in its own insides.
Varney turned. Bullet closed her eyes. The half second look at the face was enough. A grinning skull floating atop a lithe cascade of darkness. She shivered and felt her muscles tense, recoiling inwards as if everything in her body told her to shrink, to disappear. The breeze, if that's what it was - more like a sudden nausea and a prickling on the back of her neck - passed by her. She opened her eyes and followed the wake of shadows through the lobby and into the gift shop.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rudy crawled. He was half way there. The rocks in the drainage ditch had raked the flesh from his chest and knees. Grass burs stuck to his clothes and hands. He moved slowly, more slowly than he ever had in his life. The twenty yards or so was going to take him hours. Better than getting spotted. Every time he went through the tall weeds, they shook. Their dead leaves rattled. They left tiny, itchy hairs in his skin. Every breath he took was a shallow one. Any deeper and they'd hear him.
The sound of motorcycles had stopped. The gunshots - the ones from outside the hospital - stopped, too. There were no more bellowing, gravel-throated laughs. No more taunts from the bikers. Just the sounds and smells of animals. He could hear the scrape of nails and padded feed on the asphalt, could hear panting and growling, and something that sounded like tittering, like when he'd heard hyenas on some nature program. He supposed it could be coyotes. They made weird yipping noises, but this wasn't quite the same. Had they brought their dogs? He knew thugs liked to have pit bulls to show off or to fight for money. His uncle Rodrigo, did. He had a steely-eyed pit that Rodrigo swore could tear a man's arm off. Rudy didn't doubt it. It took all of his effort not to look up, to just peek his head over the edge of the ditch, just for a second. But no. He'd show those dumb fuckers inside what needed to be done and how to do it. They just thought he was a stupid kid. Hell, it would serve them right if he just climbed into Whitey's wrecker and drove off. Fuck them. Let the Black Goats come in and blow them all away. Otero was a bitch anyway. And Doctor Hank thought he was cool, always walking around like a badass. It would serve them right to get all shot up. They let his mom die, after all.
Now and again, the dogs would growl at each other and Rudy would stop and listen. Back and forth, they would growl. It sounded like they were talking, like they were having a conversation. Again, the creeping fear that he was losing his mind would grab hold. This time, it wasn't a conversation, though. This was hungry, feral, and full of wet tearing. Rudy thought of his uncle Rodrigo, tossing a few slabs of raw steak into the pen with his dogs. It sounded like this. It wasn't just the food they enjoyed, it was the killing. The dogs, seeking attention and maybe a scratch behind the ears a second before, would go wild, like sharks. Dark eyes. Teeth and slobber and hate. Rudy hated going around the damned things. Now the sound was close. Rudy turned his head to the left, expecting to see a couple of hungry mastiffs standing at the edge of the ditch. Something moved in the parking lot lights, casting a jerky shadow across him. He froze, trying to make himself flat and invisible. If he held his breath and focused, maybe he could blend in with the rocks and weeds.
Just over the lip of the ditch, a head came into view. It was a dog. Maybe. The head was weird. The hair was wiry and filthy and it seemed to stand too high and he couldn't see its back. He didn't dare move to make out the rest of it. The head bobbed in and out of sight. It was the one making the noise, tearing at the meat. It cast whatever it was chewing aside.
A forty pound hunk of mangled meat tumbled into the ditch and landed on top of Rudy. It stank. It smelled like shit and blood and sweat. A gouged-out eye in a ruined face looked back at him. It was Nathan. Rudy choked back a scream and looked up towards the dog. It froze. Its ears perked up and the hackles raised. Rudy's stomach sank further. It looked all wrong. Not a dog. Not a dog at all. But Rudy didn't move. He felt Nathan’s blood trickle down on top of him. It was only half of the nurse’s body, just Nathan from the waist up, and only one of the arms, one with most of the hand missing. Nathan's face, frozen in a skinless scream, touched his. The tongue was gone. The lips and cheeks were gone. The bone underneath was chewed up. Overhead, the thing that Rudy now knew was no dog crept to the edge of the ditch. It was on all fours, backlit by the streetlights. Even in silhouette, Rudy could make out its long claws, its tail, and its matted fur. It craned its neck back and breathed deep. Rudy held fast, trying to will his legs from trembling. The thing lowered its head and sniffed. If it just looked down, it would see him. It would see him, shaking beneath the corpse of the nurse. Rudy thought for a second that he should run. He might be able to make it back to the window before the thing realized what was happening. Or to the Wrecker. The wolf-thing let out a long, low growl.
Somewhere, glass shattered. More gunshots. It was from the other side of the hospital, from around front. The wolf-thing tensed, looked over its shoulder, and was gone. Dozens of them erupted into barks and howls, sounds that grew fainter in the distance. It would be another hour before Rudy moved.
***
Hank awoke to hot, rancid breath in his face. He went to swat it away. He was staring up at the moon, perfect and white, when they lurched over him. He could feel them pawing at him and was dimly aware of pain in his calf and shoulder. And everywhere, really. The smells washed over him - meat, gunpowder, the road, sweat, and cheap perfume.
Otero.
Hank sat up and his body screamed. He remembered Otero changing. Now he was outside. Three of them loomed over him. One of them snapped at his face. He fell back and held his hands up. He was covered in blood. A giant gash was torn through his Polo and into the flesh below. Looking down he saw a large blade of glass jutting from his calf. Blood trickled onto the tightly cut grass.
They circled him. One of them licked its chops. When they growled, he thought he could make out pieces of words. Doctor. Tear. Slow. It was a game. It was still a game. Even in his last moments, he'd be swatted about. More of them appeared from the side of the building. They yipped and howled, alerting the rest.
Then the darkness came. It wasn't that the lights went out or that they were obscured. They grew sick and weak. The light bled from everything. The Otero-thing, still wearing the tattered blouse, whimpered and took a few steps away, looking around. The air became cold and still. And then Varney was there next to Otero. He snatched at her head and jerked it clean from the shoulders. The body fell where it stood and spasmed in the grass while gouts of blood sprayed from the stump. Varney grimaced and tossed it aside. It rolled into the street, sloppily shrank into something almost resembling Otero's head, and stopped. One of the other wolves turned to ru
n. Effortlessly, Varney grabbed it by the nape of the neck and brought its head crashing into another wolf. He held them, smashing them together.
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
The howling near the side of the building changed. It was a battle cry. The pack came. Varney raised both bodies over his head, one in each hand, and hurled them. They tumbled end over end into the horde, sending werewolves tumbling and flying in every direction. Hank felt the cold grip of Varney's own talons on his wounded shoulder and nearly blacked out from pain. Varney lifted him like a rag doll and propped him up.
"On your feet, Doctor."
Hank looked up into the man's face. It had the consistency of weathered wood. It was sharp enough to have been carved, yet old enough to have been shaped by God. He was a man again. Mostly. It was the eyes, cold and bottomless, that made him more. He shoved Hank towards the gift shop. "Move!"
Hank started to run, but could only limp as the glass shard cut into his leg. By the time they reached the opening in the window, he was hopping. Navigating the debris was tricky. He fell forward onto the toppled shelves for support, only to have Varney pull them out from under him. The shadowed man put the metal shelves in front of the window just as the wolves gathered. Three. Five. Then ten. They could easily knock down the makeshift barricade, but instead kept their distance.
"The monkshood, Doctor. Grab it."
Hank struggled to his feet and grabbed the entire bushel, an armload of the flower. Another window smashed. One of them had thrown Otero's body through the glass. It hit the checkout counter and another geyser of blood erupted from where its head had been. The body was mostly hairless now, but still unnatural. The fingers were long and clawed, still bearing Otero's gaudy, gold jewelry. Its hands and arms feebly reached up to its shoulders, twitching and pawing in an attempt to find its head.
Bullet was there. Hank stumbled over to her. She tucked the gun into her belt and threw his arm around her shoulder. Both of them groaned. Varney threw a cold gaze out at the gathering pack. Some recoiled. Others howled plaintively. They didn't come inside. Bullet dumped Hank into the lobby chair he'd used to smash the glass. A bit of it stabbed him in the ass, but he didn't care. With her good arm, she pulled the shutter back down and threw the bolt. Varney stood in the midst of them, there but not there, a living shadow where one shouldn't be. Whitey stared at him and Hank could tell the guy was transfixed. They all were, really. Jesus, Castle wasn't kidding, Hank thought, and flashes of mutilated wolves came to mind. Varney had just appeared and butchered them with a quickness that was far from human. It was more than human. Now the man - if that's what he was - stood before them. His shape could be made out of the darkness. He was mostly visible, if you stared. He had aged again. He was older. His shoulders slumped. He held his hands to his chest. They were knotted into arthritic claws. Varney was grimacing. He reached for Hank. Hank recoiled in the seat and thought he would vomit. The man took the monkshood stems from his lap and passed them to Whitey.
The Black Goat Motorcycle Club Page 14
