Bitten

by K. L. Nappier

  Andrew Takei . Angry, frightened and sixteen years old sitting in Tulenar's jail cell. Trying very hard to be the young tough he was expected to be as a member of the Inu Hunters. Inu being the Japanese word for dog. A bunch of boys dedicated to delinquent mischief and grandiose thoughts, trapped in an internment camp, harassing any internee who dared to work for the War Relocation Authority. A bunch of boys that the WRA believed had gone beyond the pale and committed unspeakable atrocities against their own.

  Andrew Takei, whom Max had bitten.

  He swallowed hard. "You said he died. Eight years ago, not long after we came looking for him. You said he was found dead in Frisco."

  She went back to bathing Andrew's face. "I know ... things happened and ... I know. I'm sorry."

  If he looked at her now, there was no telling what Max might do. He kept his gaze glued to Andrew. "You're calling him your son. How'd you manage to adopt a boy who supposedly died in San Francisco? And what the hell happened to his real mother?"

  "Hana died in the camp a few weeks after Andrew and the other boys were carted off to the Butte County Detention Center. Without her husband, without her son ... it was hard. I don't think she expected to see either of them again. And, once the war ended, the adoption wasn't very difficult. I still had a few connections, a few favors to cash in, and my reputation to recommend me. It didn't take much to convince the courts that his identity papers were lost during the dismantling of the internment camps. On the books, his name is Arthur Tsuko."

  He turned to her, his fists clenched. "All this time he's been like this ? Eight years? Why , Doris? Why did you lie? All this time, why didn't you say something?"

  The spark left her eyes and she looked away. Her profile was stony. He felt the urge to jerk her to her feet and start slapping her again. Swallow it, he told himself, it won't get you answers.

  He forced himself to unclench his fists and, with all the control he could muster, said, "It's gonna be a long night. We've got a lot to talk about. If you want to freshen up a little ..." He looked back at Andrew. It was hard to get the words out, but somehow he managed. "I'll watch him for a few minutes."

  When he looked back at Doris, she was staring at him, not budging from the chair.

  "I won't hurt him, Doris."

  She didn't take her eyes off him and she didn't move, laying her hand on Andrew's shoulder again. A mother, protecting her son. A grudging pity pushed through Max's anger and tangled there. He forced himself to lower on one knee and rested his fingers on her leg.

  "I promise."

  Nothing changed at first, but then her eyes welled. She blinked it back. "Okay ... I'll put on some coffee. But I'm coming right back, Max. Right back."

  She rose with Max still on one knee before her. In the split second before she stepped away, he remembered being on two knees before her, eight years ago, in front of that old shack where David had hidden him. Begging her forgiveness, begging her to stay with them, to help him escape the Beast inside him. Clinging to her and sobbing like the damned soul he was ... and still is.

  He looked over at Andrew, quiet for the time being, his eyes closed and his breathing calm. He hadn't had any seizures since Max had broken into the house. He should be about due for a round. Max sat on the edge of the bed and kept staring, listening to Doris run the tap in the kitchen. He reached out and pulled Andrew's cracked lips from the thick, yellow tips of fangs forcing their way in, away from the crowns of immense, bone-crushing molars trying to push through human gums far too small for them, far too narrow for the passage, all tinged with Andrew's human blood.

  He looked up and saw Andrew watching him.

  He fell off the bed, stumbled backward and collided with the water basin, sending it crashing to the floor. Andrew kept staring.

  Doris rushed to the door and Max said, "He's conscious!"

  She sighed, walked into the room, picked up the tumbled basin and set the stool right again. "He's aware of us, yes. He'll be like that off and on until moonset."

  "That's impossible!"

  She pulled a dresser drawer open, drew out a quilt and tossed it over the spilled water. "Maybe it was for you, maybe it is for most hosts, but not for him. From the very beginning, it's been like this. He has a ... an ability. His memory will be patchy in the morning, but he'll have some recall."

  He's aware. He's aware! Max felt nauseous with the realization. He got to his feet, his stare fixed on Andrew. Andrew's lids fluttered, his eyes rolled upward and he was gone again. But there was no doubt about it. It had been Andrew, not the Beast, who had been watching him.

  * * *

  Andrew began to seize, rattling the bed so badly Doris had to lay prone against him until it passed. She didn't let Max help; still didn't trust him. When he was certain Doris wouldn't be hurt during the thrashing, Max went into the kitchen and finished making the coffee.

  He brought back a chair for himself, then two steaming cups. He watched her pick the soggy washcloth out of the empty basin and stroke Andrew's face and chest with it. Max noticed the water pitcher sitting on the dresser and took it to the bathroom sink. He filled the bedside basin for her. The more sympathetic he could appear, the better. She glanced over and dropped the washcloth in, then grabbed one of the coffee cups.

  "Thanks."

  Max sat down with his own cup. He didn't do a very good job of keeping accusation out of his voice when he said, "Why'd you lie?"

  She did everything but answer him. Looked at her coffee, looked at Andrew, lifted her cup to her lips, sipped, looked toward the shaded window.

  " Doris ..."

  "You weren't hunting then, Max, what could you have done? David had his hands full with your recovery; the two of you disappeared for weeks before you even contacted me about Andrew ..."

  Max let silence speak for him. Doris looked down at her hands again.

  "I can't count the times I almost told you," she said, "how many letters I wrote, then tore up. How often I stood in front of the Ham in the other room with the microphone in my hand." She rubbed her eyes. "A lot of why-nots pile up in eight years. Do you want to hear them all?"

  "I got all night."

  He brought his cup to his lips, took a long drink and waited for Doris to start.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Eight Years Earlier

  Tulenar Internment Camp

  Twenty Miles North of Disjunction Lake, Eastern California

  1942

  Morning. New Moon.

  The last Doris saw of Tulenar was the red dust of its road billowing behind the chauffeured sedan. It obscured the guard towers, it obscured the high wood-and-barbed-wire gate, obscured the tar paper buildings that were the dormitories and simple apartments of the unmarried, the widowers and the families. It blocked her view so completely as she stared through the car's rear window, she couldn't even see the administration building or the little tar paper house that had been hers for a year.

  She hadn't expected to feel this way, as if she was leaving home. She had to be the only one in the entire camp who would pair the words "Tulenar" and "home." Certainly the Issei wouldn't -the aging Japanese Nationals who had long made America theirs- nor the Nisei, their American born children.

  She thought of those she was forced to leave behind: her now ex-secretary Harriet Haku and Harriet's husband Jesse, inconsolable over the death of their daughter, their only child, Joy. Five years old, and bloodied and dead She thought of the widow of poor old Mr. Tsuko Ataki, the beast's first victim, and the twin sons of Nancy Tamura, the next, who was still classified as "missing," like Maxwell Pierce, because her body had never been found. She thought again and again and again of Arthur Satsugai and what the Beast had done to him.

  She turned from the window. Her government issue driver, performing the last of his government issue services for her, looked briefly in the rearview mirror then back at the road. In the little town of Disjunction Lake, he dropped her off at the Red Shore Inn and, just like that, she was no lo
nger affiliated with the United States government. No longer Center Administrator for Tulenar Internment Camp.

  * * *

  The Butte County Juvenile Offenders Detention Center had begun its life as a state-owned orphanage some fifty or sixty years before the war. It had been the destination for Sacramento's and San Francisco's parentless and abandoned children. Then, thirty years ago, it became one of the facilities for a new, experimental trend: keeping delinquent teenaged males away from adult offenders.

  The Butte County Center was low security. No fencing, no gates. The only reason nine Nisei boys were being held there, charged with such grisly crimes, was because it was the closest facility to the internment camp. It was a stop-gap measure, meant to get the boys out of Tulenar fast and restore calm to the camp.

  That all nine boys were sequestered at the juvenile prison was a lucky break for Howard, Ludlow and Gershom, a law firm that had the wealth and power to choose its pro-bono cases on merit. But the luck wouldn't last long. Paperwork to transfer the boys, scattering them among tougher institutions, was being pushed through a fast chute by both federal and state.

  This was going to be Doris's first chance to see the boys since they had been arrested and removed from Tulenar, only a day before her own ouster. A. Frederick Gershom's chauffeured sedan picked her up at the studio apartment she'd moved into just days before.

  Gershom had a thick folder atop the briefcase on his lap and was paging through it, stopping to look up as she climbed in. "Mrs. Tebbe, good morning. Let me say once again that I appreciate you coming on as consultant and witness on behalf of these boys." He tapped a finger against the paperwork as the sedan pulled away from the curb. "Before the war, my partners and I would have called the government's case against them weak as wet tissue paper. These boys, these Inu Hunters ... am I pronouncing that correctly ...?"

  "Close enough. It's Japanese for dog. The Inu Hunters labeled any internee as traitor that accepted a paying position with the War Relocation Authority while at Tulenar. Teachers, doctors, nurses, secretarial ... it didn't matter. But volunteers just wanting to make internee life a little easier were targets, too. Before being carted off, the Inu Hunters' last act of vandalism was destroying the outdoor stage meant for Shibai performances."

  "Shibai ...?"

  "A kind of Japanese opera."

  Gershom nodded and looked back at the paperwork. "There's adequate evidence to prosecute them as the petty delinquents they appear to be. But a prosecutor pressing for their conviction as murderers, multiple-murderers at that, would have been laughed right out of the state of California a couple of years ago. The entire case is based on circumstantial evidence. A few people reporting verbal threats while being attacked ... credible as these people may be, this is all hearsay ..."

  He opened the folder, turned several pages and quoted from the report Harriet Haku had filled out for the internee police a few months ago: "They said I had better quit my job as Mrs. Tebbe's secretary or I'd end up like all the other informants. They said I'd end up like Mr. Ataki.'" Gershom glanced at Doris. "Mr. Ataki was the first of the murders? And these so-called informants would be internee residents who reported the boys' general mischief?"

  Doris nodded.

  Gershom looked again at the page he'd read from. "The reference to Mr. Ataki is disturbing, as no doubt intended. But it reads like a threat, not a confession to murder. Plus the attack on Mrs. Haku came from behind, so she never got a look at her assailants. And those who can identify their attackers never saw or heard anything that could tie an Inu Hunter to such gruesome acts."

  There was something in his voice that unsettled Doris; an unspoken "however." She said, "Mr. Gershom, I'm not the one you need to convince," while she was thinking, Mister, I already know. It wasn't those kids, and it wasn't some Japanese loyalist inside the camp controlling them. It wasn't a "who" at all that killed those people. Or slaughtered the man I loved.

  Gershom looked thoughtfully at the folder, closed it, and finally spoke the unspoken. "However ... in times like these ..."

  Doris felt her stomach go icy and she bristled. "'In times like these?' Only a minute ago, you were saying the government's case was weak as wet tissue paper. Now you sound as if you're rethinking defending these boys."

  Gershom's gaze came up quickly from the folder. "If I were rethinking my firm's representation, I wouldn't be driving to Butte County and I wouldn't have asked you to come. Mrs. Tebbe, I'm sure you remember who Richard Hauptmann was ..."

  Doris sagged back against the car seat. She nodded. Gershom was talking about the man accused of kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby, seven years ago.

  "Did you follow the trial very closely? Did you notice the strength of the so-called evidence that sent Hauptmann to the electric chair?"

  "You've made your point, Mr. Gershom."

  "I hope so, Mrs. Tebbe. Because that man went to his death based on his thick German accent and evidence very much like that against the Inu Hunters. Do you understand? This battle is going to be ferocious. Very long and very tough for these boys and for their families ... and for you."

  For me? Counselor, if you only knew.

  Doris said, "Those kids should be in the custody of Tulenar's internee police. They've injured people and vandalized property, and should be facing punishment that fits their age and crimes. But they shouldn't be warehoused at the juvenile prison, looking at a future of rubbing shoulders with felons in Folsom or San Quentin. Look ... I know the War Relocation Authority believes they're doing the right thing. But those boys didn't kill anybody."

  Gershom opened the file again and paged through until he found what he was looking for. "The WRA's theory is that they were under the influence of someone, as yet unknown. A shrewd and heartless killer, to say the least. A possible fifth columnist caught up in the relocation dragnet and so, finding himself confined in Tulenar, preyed on his fellow internees ... those he pegged as disloyal to the Emperor and their Japanese heritage. As you pointed out, only internees in community service or who applied for work were abused by the Inu Hunters. And the murder victims weren't simply murdered, they were mutilated. The least abused before death was that poor little girl, but even her death is in keeping with the WRA's theory ... she was the daughter of an internee police volunteer and his wife, your former secretary. Everyone in the WRA is on board with this. Even Tulenar's internees are now convinced this terror reign was the work of the Inu Hunters. You seem to be the lone dissenter."

  "I know."

  "You seem very sure."

  "I am."

  "Why?"

  "Are you testing me for the courtroom, Mr. Gershom?"

  He smiled a moment, replied, "That'll come later," then turned serious again. "If you're holding anything back, Mrs. Tebbe ... anything at all ... that you worry may reflect poorly on these boys, don't think for a moment you're doing them a favor by keeping it to yourself. Have you ever been cross-examined in a court of law?"

  "This will be my first."

  "Do I need to tell you how tough our opponent will be? The government's evidence may be weak, but their argument is viable and the times are on their side. Why are you so certain these boys aren't connected to the murders?"

  Doris had been rehearsing a safe, logical answer ever since the Inu Hunters' arrest: one about their youth, about their circumstances, about their lack of even the most minor juvenile record before they were hemmed in by the stark confines of the internment camp. She stuck with that now, as she talked with Gershom.

  What else could she say?

  I'm certain because I came face to face with the thing responsible for that slow, methodical massacre. I saw the man it controlled and twisted and hid within. I saw it burst out of his body and I saw it with its fangs sunk into a five-year-old girl.

  I'm certain because I'm the one who killed that son-of-a-bitch. I took a quiver of silver-tipped arrows and plunged them halfway up their shafts into its goddamn gut. I felt the blood spray on my face and
I watched its carcass rot off the newborn skin of Maxwell Pierce.

  How's that for testimony, Counselor? Think it'll fly in court?

  * * *

  They were mostly silent the rest of the way to the prison. Gershom pored over the work balanced on his lap. Doris watched the landscape turn from urban to small town, to rural to small town again before the view became scattered farms and, finally, woodland. The woodland stopped abruptly at the beginning of the prison's two acres of pastures and garden plots.

  The building was a monolithic, brick-and-mortar Victorian hulk big enough to house staff offices and a hundred youths. Presently there were less than thirty, including the Inu Hunters. It wasn't as bleak as something out of Oliver Twist , but somber enough all the same. There were two single-story dormitory wings jutting from either side of a square, two-storied center. A vacant bell tower rose above the middle, looking as if it had been empty since its orphanage days.

  The car rolled up to the double entrance and the driver got out to hold Doris' door for her, then Gershom's. The counselor pressed a button at the prison's entry, sounding a claxon inside, and a rectangular spy hole in the right-hand door popped open. A corrections officer peered out before admitting them.

  The reception area was as sterile and institutional as Doris expected, built for function and apparently on a strict budget. What had probably been a plank floor at the turn of the century was tiled over with large, no-nonsense terrazzo slabs. The visitors' chairs sitting along the walls on either side of the entrance were sturdy straight-back pine, footed with rubber.

  Other than that, the only furniture was a squarish, U-shaped station in the middle, where a receptionist sat along with a second officer in olive drab. The officer was working on a crossword puzzle, the receptionist busy at a switchboard, connecting a caller to someone in an office somewhere above their heads on the second story. There were worn wooden stairways on the north and south walls, and several feet behind the work station were double doors again with a plaque above them that read Mess Hall. Every sound echoed.