High Bloods

by John Farris

  He placed the mouth of a bottle of tequila between my lips.

  “Drink now,” he said. “It relax you. Soon you feel no more pain.”

  22

  r. RawSON,” the girl’s voice pleaded. “Mr. RAWSON! Wake up! Get me out of here!”

  Someone was always inviting me to have a friendly drink, I thought. Or two. Or in the most recent instance damn near a full fifth of tequila, whatever amount I hadn’t been able to spit out. I was going to have to learn to choose my drinking companions more carefully.

  I lay on my back, barely conscious, throbbing with pain and very goddamned drunk. Why couldn’t someone shut the brat up? I thought. She was disturbing me. All I wanted was to catch a few winks and when I woke up again maybe the squirrels using the squeaky exercise wheel in my head would have stopped.

  “Mr. Rawww-son!” she wailed again. “Please! It’s almost time! Luvagod, help me!”

  Time for what? I thought. Don’t be cryptic. Out with it, girl.

  “Where am I?” I muttered.

  Wherever it was, there was a metallic resonance, a sort of hollow drainpipe effect when she screamed at me again.

  “We’re in an AIRplane!”

  “Oh. Okay.” But I missed the sensation of flight, the drone of engines.

  “You sure?” I said witlessly.

  “An old airplane! There’s a lot of them parked here! Would you please look at me?”

  So I rolled my head toward the sound of her voice. Which confirmed by the feel of rivets in steel plate that I actually was lying on a deck. Airplane. Submarine, maybe: because I had the sensation of being submerged, drowning in gloom. And we were moving, intermittently rocked by big gusts of wind. The Santa Ana. I had memories—of trucks blowing up in cataclysmic sequence and knocking a big helicopter around in a fiery sky until it crashed. The face of a lovely Nordic girl who never knew what hit her. There was sickness in my mouth, the back of my throat. Tequila had never been my drink of choice.

  “I hate the wind! It’s been blowing like this all day! It’s driving me crazy!”

  Complain, complain. My eyes felt as if they’d been spray-painted shut. I forced the lids to open, blinked away the sticky mucus until I was focusing. The light was very bad, just a brownish yellow stain from a single dim old lightbulb. Flying dust and bits of desert mica pecked at the skin of the fuselage. There was a steady low hum inside. The air was moving in drafts. At least it was breathable, piped in from a mobile APU.

  I saw her crouched a dozen feet from me. Leaning forward in a hampered, crippled attitude like a street beggar. In the poor light I saw strain in her smudged, pretty, vapid face.

  “Told you… I was coming, Mal,” I said.

  “What? You never told me anything! And you’re certainly no good to me the way you are! I WANT OUT OF HERE BEFORE THEY SHOOT ME!”

  I tried to move my hands. They felt swollen and they tingled. They were fastened tightly together at my waist. I couldn’t raise my head high enough to see what my hands were restrained with.

  “How long have you been here?” I said to Mal. Just to keep the conversation going while I figured something out.

  “I don’t know! A couple of days! But it’s almost time! I can feel it! The moon. It’s about to happen to me! They’re all here already! The hunters with their guns! They came in a couple at a time to stare at me. Like I’m a filthy animal! And I heard them laughing outside when they got into their trucks. Making bets with each other about who’ll be the one to kill me!”

  “It’s not going to happen, Mal.”

  “What’s going to stop them? I’ll hair-up soon. I itch all over!” She sobbed. “They cut out my Snitcher! All they gave me was a local, and they didn’t stitch the wound up. It hurts, I think it’s infected.”

  This was a girl who needed a champion. Invulnerable in the flesh. But every move I made resulted in spasms, knife-edged pain. In movies the hard tough capable hero, ignoring contusions, a broken bone or two, and maybe some gunshot wounds in nonvital places, would cleverly free himself from his surly bonds and carry off the grateful damsel on his back while machine-gunning a dozen bad guys on his way out.

  All in a day’s work. All I could think about was how badly I needed to take a pee.

  “Mal,” I said, “is there some way you could—”

  “I’m as close to you as I can get! I’m chained up. So are you! We’re both chained to ringbolts in the floor and somebody will be coming back soon! Probably the tall greaser with the beard. He said when it got dark he’d come for the other guy!”

  “What other guy?”

  “He’s all the way back there! Unconscious. Or maybe not—I did hear him groan a couple of times. But I know he must be in bad shape. He looked dead when they dragged the two of you inside. They gave him blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Do you have to repeat everything I say?”

  “You mean like a transfusion?”

  “I guess so. Now please think of something. Tell me what we’re going to do!”

  I made an effort to sit up, heard the rattle of a chain behind me on the deck. The pain in my left side was ferocious. I couldn’t breathe very deeply. My hands were getting numb. I flexed my fingers, trying to restore feeling. I was secured at the wrists by one of the notched plastic temporary restraints cops used. Hands below my waist and back to back, putting strain on my arms; my shoulders ached.

  “You can’t move at all?” I said to Mal.

  “J-just enough so I can use my b-bucket when I h-have to,” she said, burbling with tears.

  I saw the bucket referred to. I got slowly to my feet, rocked a little. The old fuselage of whatever aircraft it was resounded with a dull boom when struck by heavy gusts of the Santa Ana. My feet weren’t shackled, which helped me keep my balance. I thought dimly that this oversight might turn out to be unlucky for someone.

  I had about six feet of chain. It allowed me to move closer to Mal where she was kneeling, hunched on the floor with her hands together the way mine were tied. Her shirt was torn, her denim shorts filthy, and there was about her a faint odor of fleshly corruption. Her eyes were feverish. I felt sorry for her, but sorry didn’t get it. What I wanted, had to be, was fired up, mad as hell. I wanted adrenaline. But my blood was sluggish; my brain was on a long slow-burning fuse.

  I slid the slop bucket closer with one foot, fumbled my zipper down, and began relieving myself. Mal watched. The sting of urine in the stale air made her sneeze.

  “Luvagod,” she said after a minute or so had passed. “I didn’t know anybody could hold that much.”

  I zipped up again. “Can you stand?” I said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Just do it,” I said.

  Mal was barefoot. She wore the same type of fancy tooled-leather biker’s belt I had on, with snap-fastened pockets, a lot of studs and steel loops double-stitched to the leather.

  “Let’s see how close we can get to each other,” I suggested.

  I raised my bound palms-out hands toward her, shoulder joints popping audibly. She did the same and shuffled toward me, chain clinking behind her. I advanced another foot or so. We touched hands, kept straining toward each other. She had more slack than I did. When she was close enough I raised my arms higher and brought them down on either side of her head, resting them on her shoulders. Her hands were bent limply against my chest, elbows spread wide. Our foreheads came together. Mal felt feverish to me. We stayed like that a little while, saying nothing, just breathing, in a kind of helpless but loving communion. She breathed through her mouth, breath quickening gradually.

  It’s a bizarre biological imperative: the human species can be battered, dirty, terrified, trembling at the abyss, and still desire to mate. That was what was happening to us. There could be no consummation. But lust was useful; it caused the fuse in my brain to burn brighter and faster, gave me the first mild kick of adrenaline I needed to survive.

  “How are your teeth?” I asked her.

 
“I have great teeth.” Mal’s eyes popped open; she studied me. “What the hell do you—oh. Like, chew through the plastic stuff?” She thought about it. “Yeah. Maybe I can. Then you’d have your hands free.” Her eyes widened a little in anticipation of the hell to pay once that much of our freedom had been achieved.

  I had to disappoint her.

  “Won’t do us much good. I’m still chained to the floor.”

  She grimaced.

  “Fuck. What, then?”

  “I need to get free of the damned chain. Nothing’s going to budge that ringbolt in the floor. The weakest point is where the steel loop is sewn to the belt in back. Probably double-stitched, but if you can chew through enough of it I think I can yank myself free.”

  “Let’s do it!”

  We were face-to-face still, but our bodies were nearly two feet apart. I sensed for the first time a strangeness about Mal, a spoor of wolf. Her eyes looked different. Full-moon eyes shading from Delft blue to a yellow-gray. She licked her lips, smiled at me.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “It’s a great idea, R. It’ll work.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But we’d better get started.”

  The trick was to put my back to Mal and for her to have enough leverage to gnaw away at the tough saddle-stitching. She slid away from me and went down on one knee. I tried to twist myself all the way around but the chain pulled taut. I ended up standing a little better than sideways to her. Mal’s long fingers and broken nails scrabbled against my slick khakis, groped higher. I twisted my head until the muscles of my neck burned to look down at her. Mal’s teeth glinted and her jaw seemed to have a new, prognathic thrust; but the light was barely there and my perspective was distorted.

  Confinement and hangover were giving me the jimmy-jams. I saw, before I had to change the angle of my head to relieve pressure, that sweat was beading on her swarthy brow and there were flickering disturbances beneath her skin as if nerves and muscles were firing out of control.

  Part of the training to be an ILC Wolfer is, you have to watch a couple of them hair-up. The time it takes can vary considerably, depending on the power of the human organism to resist the profound physiological change.

  I was able only to bring my hands up a few inches before the strain on my shoulders became excruciating. I still couldn’t reach with my backward fingers the three small buckles that fastened the belt around my waist.

  It was up to Mal, who had begun to slip away from me into a world where I had never been.

  “You’re not close enough!” Mal said, with a gnashing of her teeth. “Suck in your gut!”

  I did. Mal then was able to hook her fingers onto the stout belt and pull hard, with more than girlish strength. She bent me back until there was a drastic curve to my spine. I was sweating too, and I barely could handle the pain of my injured ribs. Mal cried out in an agony of her own. Then she began to snuffle and chew, grinding her teeth into the tough stitching around the steel loop. I felt her hands on me, desperate, pawing.

  When she needed to stop for breath she panted and whimpered.

  “Rawson. It hurts—so bad.”

  “You are Mallory. Mallory Scarlett. Don’t give in to the wolf! Say your name.”

  “Yes. I am—Mallory.”

  “Get me loose from this chain. Or we’ll both be dead.”

  I heard a faint pleading voice from the dark rear section of the aircraft.

  “Rawson?”

  The voice sounded like Miles Brenta’s.

  “Hang on. I’m coming!”

  Behind me Mal growled with renewed effort, tearing now at the heavy belt. The sounds she made chilled me. I couldn’t afford the effort to look at her again. Nor did I want to see her eyes, the cold baleful beauty of wolf light.

  Outside I heard the diesel engine of a truck or SUV approaching the plane that I thought might be an old Mitchell bomber from World War II. Most of them had been torched for scrap decades ago, but a few remained in the hands of collectors. The engine noise surged louder through the wind and hard sift of sand against the vinyl-sealed fuselage, then idled nearby.

  And inside the odor of blood, birthing blood and a darker, saturating stain, absorbed my attention. I felt the sharp nudge of her teeth and distended physiognomy as she ravaged the biker belt with some remnant of purpose in her moon-drunk brain. But she was no longer satisfied to rip out stitching. She was devouring leather and still hungry for meat, muscle, bones; then the exposed sweets of liver and kidneys.

  “Mal! Get me loose!”

  The biker belt parted. I lurched away from her, tripped and fell heavily to the deck. I rolled onto my left side and made a grab for the slithering chain. I caught it with my right hand, pulled it out of the deck ring and rolled again farther away from Mal as she kneeled with her head thrown back, a howl beginning in her throat. Her teeth were bared in the snap, crackle, and pop agony of ongoing trauma and disfigurement.

  A door opened in the left side of the plane. I saw a section of low canted wing forward of the door space. More sand than light filtered in. A man stepped off the ladder outside and climbed in with us. He wore gear that was useful in a blow like this: lace-up hunter’s boots, a lightweight orange parka, a skier’s darkly tinted face shield. The hood of the parka was pulled tight around his face. He carried a flashlight. As he ducked inside the wind caught the door and slammed it shut behind him.

  The diffuse beam of his three-cell flashlight revealed Mal in the throes of hairing up.

  “Jaysus Christ!” he said in shock. I thought I knew the voice.

  The sight of the half-wolf girl bathed in his light transfixed him for eight or ten seconds. Mal was still restrained by the biker belt but her powerful shoulders and muscular forearms had easily allowed her to snap in two the plastic restraints.

  I was out of range of the light, motionless, waiting. It occurred to the visitor that I wasn’t sprawled unconscious and drunk where I ought to have been. He flashed the light on me then but I was already whirling to gain momentum. He may have heard the whip of the chain coming but couldn’t move fast enough in those boots to skip completely out of the way. The chain lashed around his right ankle and I pulled hard. He flew up and back, losing his grip on the flashlight, and smacked the back of his head on the deck. The hood of his parka did little to cushion the jolt. He was knocked cold.

  23

  al Scarlett writhed on the floor of the barren old airplane, another repetition of the devolutionary freak-show, the genomic calamity known as Lycanthropy. For her the changeover was excruciatingly slow. Her eyes, wild from the pain and the animal desire to be free of a trap, were fixed on me. The air inside the fuselage was thick, gamey, vile.

  “Rawwwwssson.”

  Her plea for help was the last intelligible thing she had to say to me. But there was nothing I could do now except try to protect her until her spell broke, which would be many hours, as much as a full day from now.

  The unconscious man had a walkie on his belt that crackled with static and someone’s faint inquiry. Others would be coming if he didn’t respond.

  I kneeled beside him. I needed a knife. He had one, in a woven leather belt scabbard. He also had a gun, a fourteen-shot Sig Sauer 9-millimeter automatic. Full magazine. Now I liked our chances better.

  I was able to pull the knife without cutting myself. No way I could grip it usefully to slice through the tough plastic wrist restraint with the partly serrated, six-inch blade. I needed help.

  “Brenta!” I called. “Can you hear me?”

  He answered weakly. I got a grip on the flashlight with my other hand and hunched my way on the seat of my pants to the back of the plane.

  Miles Brenta’s eyes squinted shut when the light hit his face. He lay on his back on a slant ladder used for deplaning, an arm across his chest. The forearm was badly broken near the wrist, a compound fracture.

  Into the AC vein at the elbow of his left arm a needle had been inserted and taped down. A small nearly noiseless transfusion unit
had pumped about 250 cc from a bloodpack suspended from a ceiling hook overhead. The bloodpack was labeled with a big red O. Presumably Brenta’s blood type; another type would have killed him quickly. Someone had taken care. I didn’t think it was loving care, or that he’d been given blood to save his life, but to turn the life he had left into yet another revelation of hell on earth.

  I let go of the flashlight and awkwardly peeled away the transparent tape, then pulled the needle from the antecubital vein. Blood welled from the small wound. He sucked in a breath.

  “Oh Jesus. So much pain. I need a doctor.”

  “Brenta, can you use your left hand?”

  “Use it… ?”

  “Pay attention! My hands are still tied. The other guy is out but he may not be unconscious for long. I have his knife. I want you to cut my hands free.”

  “Try,” he said. “Put the knife… in my hand.”

  I did the best I could. His fingers were slippery from blood, or nerveless. The blade rattled on the floor.

  “Shit,” he said dispiritedly.

  Brenta breathed deeply then and there was a commotion in his chest that had him panting desperately. Blood came to his lips. He moved very slowly but closed his hand over the leather hilt of the knife.

  “The blood. He did it.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Raoul Ortega. Gave me… bad blood, didn’t he? Made me… one of them.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I damn well did know.

  Mal, her transformation nearly completed, howled and jerked at her chain. Maybe it would hold her. A full-grown male werewolf, forget it. I was a gusher of sweat, holding down the reasonable, primitive impulse to save myself and get out of there.

  “The girl… my God. Not me! Not me.” Brenta’s eyes appeared delirious; his voice was breaking. The size and color of the swelling on his forehead looked dangerous. “Don’t… let it happen to me, Rawson.” His lips pursed in a childish way. He shook from terror. I was about to lose him to the terror.

  “Cut me loose, damn it!”

  Brenta moaned hopelessly but reacted with strength, hacking away with the blade, with enough accuracy to avoid slashing either of my wrists. Finally I could pull my hands apart. Brenta sank back on the ladder coughing, blood on his lower lip and chin. He moved the point of the hunting knife to the pulse of the carotid artery beneath his jaw.