Prowlers: Wild Things

by Christopher Golden

  "Why's that?" Jack asked.

  Max shrugged. "Well, like I said, most of the drivers that come through here have heard plenty of stories on the road. Some stretches of highway, they're kinda reluctant to spend the night in their rigs. This is one of them."

  Then he was off down the counter again to refill some coffee cups. Jack stared after him a moment, then glanced at Molly.

  At her.

  Then past her, to where the ghost of Artie Carroll stood just outside the window staring in, his body a silhouette of translucent mist, barely visible in the bright sun.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Molly staring at him. He turned to her. "Excuse me a second, will you? I left something in the Jeep."

  She hesitated just slightly before nodding. "Sure," she said.

  But they both knew what was really going on.

  Jack got up and walked out of the diner, self-conscious, well aware that many of the people inside were watching him as he left. There were only a few other women in the place, but he was not worried about Molly. It was early in the morning, after all, and despite the rough and tumble reputation Hollywood had given truckers, the people in the diner seemed harmless enough.

  As he pushed out the door, Artie sauntered toward him, his body little more than an afterimage, the suggestion of a person, like the shimmer of a rainbow in the spray of water on a summer's day. Jack had thought, early on, that he would never get used to seeing ghosts, these phantom souls transposed against the solid, three-dimensional world, but the truth was, it had become easier for him to deal with. The Ghostlands and the afterlife, the spirit world.

  The dead.

  But with Artie it was different. The fact of Artie's death still hurt him, the memories they had shared still fresh. How could he be dead, this guy who'd been his best friend since he was old enough to really know what it meant to have a best friend? Taunting their nebbishy algebra teacher in high school; playing one-on-one hoops at a concrete lot behind Artie's grandfather's house in Southie, tough guys at the age of ten; debating the fascism of action films, the dangers of smoking, and whether or not Ghia Frantangelo had really been wearing nothing under her skirt during that assembly junior year.

  Those memories were all laced with a kind of melancholy now and he imagined that would never go away. On the other hand, though, Artie's appearance did not disturb him as much as it once had. What still unnerved him, however, no matter how often he had seen the apparitions of the dead, were their eyes. Artie's eyes. Unlike the rest of him, they seemed solid, not the gossamer texture spirit-forms that seemed spun of spider's webs, but black little holes punched through this world into another. Dark rips through which one might see into the Ghostlands for real if one looked hard enough.

  Jack had reached the point where he tried not to look.

  On top of that, of course, there was still a bit of awkwardness about his feelings for Molly, who had been Artie's girlfriend for years. Still, despite all of that, all Jack had to do was look at the grin on his friend's face, the shaggy blond hair that hung to his neck, the careless way he stood staring at the Blueberry Diner, and he could not help but smile.

  Artie stared at the diner and shook his head in astonishment. "Man, this place is blue."

  Jack laughed, trying to keep his face hidden from the people inside so they wouldn't think he was crazy. "Come on," he muttered as he walked across the parking lot. Once he was inside the Jeep, with the specter of his best friend — dead half a year now — in the seat beside him, Jack at last spoke.

  "Good to see you, man. Thanks for coming."

  "Just reach out, partner, and I'll be there."

  Jack raised an eyebrow. "Don't sing. Really. That would be bad."

  The ghost gave him the finger.

  "We could really use your help," Jack told him.

  "So I heard," Artie replied, slouched in the seat in an imitation of life. "Another conspiracy. It's good to see you too, Jack. Always. How are things with Molly?"

  Jack swallowed, shifted awkwardly in his seat. "How are things with Eden?"

  Artie grinned. "Touché. For what it's worth, I've got my fingers crossed for you two."

  "It's worth everything," Jack said solemnly. "You know that."

  There was a long moment when neither of them spoke. Then Artie nodded and threw up his hands.

  "So what can I do for you guys?"

  Jack gave him the run down on Jared Wilkes, Doug and Arlene Rausch, Chet Douglas, and Suzanne Robinson. "If you can find any of them in the Ghostlands, or anyone else around here who knows anything about the Prowlers, it would be a huge help."

  "Anything," Artie said. "You know that, Jack. Word travels on my side of the fence, bro. If there have been as many attacks around here as you think, it shouldn't be a problem."

  "Thanks." For a moment, Jack felt the urge to shake Artie's hand or clasp his shoulder, to make contact. It opened a fresh wound in his heart to remind himself that such contact was impossible.

  Artie must have seen the pain in Jack's expression, for he gave his friend a knowing look and a gentle nod. "I know. It's getting harder instead of easier, isn't it? Weird."

  And that was the truth of it. Jack had just been thinking that he was getting used to seeing the dead, that it was easier now. And that was true, too. But seeing Artie was different. All it did was remind him again and again of what he had lost; what they had all lost.

  "Weird," Jack agreed.

  Artie gazed at him with those eternal eyes. "Give her my love," he said. "I'll be back."

  Then he was simply gone like the flame of a candle that has been snuffed, yet without even a telltale swirl of smoke to mark his departure. Jack stared at the empty seat beside him a moment and then reached out to open his door. Even as he did, the cell phone clipped to the back of his belt began to ring.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The apartment was too quiet.

  Courtney was in Jack's room, sitting on the edge of his bed. Her cane was heavy enough to sink deep into the comforter and this illustration of its weight, its substance, surprised her. Next to the cane was her cellular phone, painfully silent and still, like the apartment. Soon, Wendy and Tim would arrive downstairs and other members of the staff not long after, and then the gears in the mechanism that was Bridget's Irish Rose pub would start to grind and they wouldn't wind down until after one in the morning.

  Right now, though, the whole building was too quiet. It was all a ghost to her. Not the benevolent spirit of her mother that she often felt looking over her shoulder on the premises of this place that Bridget Dwyer had worked so hard to build. Though Jack insisted that he had never seen their mother's ghost, Courtney secretly felt that the pub would forever be imbued with her soul. But the specter that haunted her now was something else entirely. It was an emptiness, a loneliness, a dread that filled her with the certainty that awful things were in motion, things that could only lead to grief.

  The previous night was the first she had slept alone in the apartment in some time. It had never really bothered her before, but now that she knew that her childhood fears were real, that monsters really did lurk in the shadows and closets and under the bed, it was different. More than anything, she needed Jack here, right now.

  Right now.

  He had been only nine years old when their mother was killed in the same accident that left Courtney with a permanent limp, and yet Jack had always been her strength. There were other phones in the apartment, but Courtney had come in here to make a call because she needed his confidence to steady her. Even with him absent, just being in his room helped. It held his essence, neat and sparsely-decorated. Jack was a kid who had never liked clutter, never needed a lot of things around to distract him from life. They had that in common, Courtney guessed.

  And while outsiders might have thought she was the strong one, holding them together despite Jack's age when they were orphaned, building the pub into the successful enterprise it was today, it was really Jack all along. She co
uld remember with perfect clarity the way he had looked at her the morning after their mother's funeral, when he had walked in to find her crying, wondering aloud how they were going to carry on, to make it work. He had stood there in his Ninja Turtles pajamas, eyes wide and earnest, and insisted that they would be all right if they just stuck together. That they could handle anything together.

  Courtney had asked how he could be so sure. His reply was only bittersweet and precious then. Now, it gave her chills to remember those words, words she was certain Jack did not recall ever speaking.

  "I dreamed about Mommy last night," he had said. "She danced with me to Irish Eyes'r Smilin' and she told me we were gonna be okay, Court. Everything's gonna be okay."

  Now, a decade later, Courtney sat on her little brother's bed and picked up his phone from its cradle. She did not dare use her own cell, for she feared that the moment she tried would be that moment that Bill would try to call. She stared at the lifeless phone that lay on the bed beside her, cursing it in her head. With Jack's phone in her hand, she dialed. On the other end of the line, she heard ringing, and then he answered.

  "Court?"

  At the sound of his voice, she fell apart. Her left hand clutched the phone tight enough that it hurt and the right fluttered up to her face. She sat rigid on the edge of the bed.

  "Jack. Have you heard from Bill?"

  Pause, as the implications of her question sank in. "No. We haven't. What's the matter, Courtney? It's not even nine in the morning. It's too early to freak out if he hasn't called yet today. I mean, I know —"

  "No. That's not it. He did call."

  Another moment's hesitation. "What happened?"

  A sickening flutter began in her stomach. It didn't feel like butterflies the way they always described it in books and on television. This felt more like someone had shoved their entire fist into her stomach and was rooting around in there looking for something.

  "It rang twice. When I picked it up he was already gone. I checked the caller ID, though, and it came from his phone."

  "Twice," Jack repeated.

  Courtney knew what he meant. Their signal for an emergency was one ring. Only one ring. If Bill was trying to tell her something, run up a red flag, he would have done a single ring and left it at that.

  "Twice," Courtney said again. "But Jack, I tried calling him back and there was no answer."

  "Take a breath, Court," he said. "All right, listen, it's too early to jump to conclusions. Could be he called you from somewhere then went into a dead zone or something where there was no signal. That would explain it all."

  He was right, too. That would explain it all. But the dread that was eating her up inside would not let her believe that was all it was.

  "I guess," she replied.

  "Chances are he'll call later. If he has a lead on Olivia, he might get pretty sidetracked. Try him every couple of hours. And if he hasn't connected with you by tonight, first thing tomorrow we'll get in the Jeep and drive down to Manhattan. Just try not to panic yet."

  Courtney lay back on his bed and closed her eyes. "All right. Okay, little brother. I just hate this, being back here alone. Makes me feel helpless."

  "He's probably fine," Jack insisted. "Really. Now don't you have some work to do?"

  A smile spread across Courtney's face. "Jerk."

  They both laughed softly, then said their goodbyes and hung up. For another few minutes she just sat there, but eventually Courtney picked up her cane and her cell phone, rose and went out of the room. He might have been teasing her, but Jack was right. She had a great deal of work to do. Work that would help take her mind off Bill, and those two rings.

  Two rings, not one.

  And yet she could not shake the feeling something had gone very, very wrong.

  Deep beneath Manhattan, in a tunnel that lay forgotten by all but a handful of record-keepers, on a rail that dead ended at a stone wall, sat a pair of antique train cars that had not carried passengers in more than seventy years. A cave-in had made the use of that stretch of the line untenable and only homeless squatters had been aboard since then.

  Until now.

  The cars had been cleaned inside and out, starting with the scouring from the wooden train of all trace of human presence. The occupants had been dragged onto the tracks first, however. No need to make even more of a mess inside. In a matter of weeks, this underground dwelling had been transformed. Alec and several other members of the pack had followed home a trendy Soho couple and slain them in their living room. The very same night a stolen truck had carried drapes, art, carpets and furniture belonging to the dead pair — Joe and Annie Beldin — to the 48th Street overpass. A mahogany sleigh bed had been shattered in the process of lowering the booty down to the tracks, but the two train cars were cluttered enough as it was.

  Jasmine lay curled upon a bed of goose down pillows with an ivory comforter over her filled with the same material. She loved the smell of the old wood now that it had been polished, and there was an old beauty to this new lair she had claimed that enchanted her. The Beldins had had superb taste. The windows were covered with silks and there were paintings, wood carvings, and hand-blown glass from Venice.

  Though they had tapped power lines in the adjacent tunnel and there were lamps on board, Jasmine much preferred candles. The windows had been repaired and the doors restored, yet there was still a significant draft from the tunnel, and the candlewicks burned with a constant flutter that cast strange shadows on the walls, a strange sort of theatre as dark shapes flowed into one another with each flicker of light.

  There were a few spatters of blood on the stereo system that sat on an antique sideboard at the far end of the car, but Jasmine had not bothered to clean them off. The sultry velvet voice of Billie Holiday lingered in the air with smoke from the candles, along with tinny music recorded in another age. Listening to it was much like going back in time for Jasmine, and she stretched languorously on her downy bed and let herself be swept away by the ache and pain in the voice of a woman long dead.

  The music made her think of Tanzer. He had been her lover, the Alpha of her pack, and he had had a great ambition. In long ago times Tanzer's father had been one of the finest leaders and warriors their race had ever seen, but over time the Prowlers had become little better than vermin. Many of them merely wanted to survive, to live amongst the human cattle, even to love them. Others, including the remnants of once proud packs, subsisted by hunting only on the fringes of human society, preying upon hunters in the wilderness, or the homeless in the inner city.

  Tanzer had been a beast with a dream. He wanted to unite all the packs in the world, to repopulate the land with Prowlers, and eventually to rise up and show the humans their place as prey for a superior species.

  Jack Dwyer and Molly Hatcher had killed him, and engineered the slaughter of most of the pack. Jasmine had escaped alone. She had run away, and the shame of that burned within her.

  Now she was the Alpha of a new pack and with each day that passed they grew stronger and more numerous. Jasmine had loved Tanzer, adored him, but she was not foolish enough to look upon him as perfect. He had made mistakes, that much was clear. If he had not, he would likely still be alive. And so she learned from his mistakes. Tanzer would have been far too proud to embrace this underground lair; he would have considered it cowardly to hide in such a way.

  Jasmine considered it simple logic.

  From this forgotten place, they had access to a warren of tunnels that could take them literally anywhere in the city. They could hunt wherever they liked, and if they were discovered, there were a thousand possible escapes. While Tanzer would have felt denigrated by living beneath the humans, it gave Jasmine an intoxicating sense of power. She could strike at them whenever and wherever she liked.

  First, though, the pack must grow strong. Most of them were unknown to her, and so she must forge a bond with them. Already she had faced half a dozen challenges from the new group and she had cowed them all
in battle, forced them to bare their throats to her. At last they were beginning to truly look upon her as Alpha, as the superior warrior amongst them.

  The music played softly in the candlelit darkness of the train car. Jasmine knew she ought to rise, knew it was mid-morning at least, but there was a pleasure in simply lying there, listening to the ache in that human voice. Humans were capable of such beauty, and yet so often they squandered it. It disgusted her. But the pain in that voice made her think of Tanzer, and of how much she missed the wild. At last she sat up and glanced around the car and she made a silent vow that much as this lair amused her, there would be a time soon when she would take the pack back to the wilderness.

  For the truth was, though she had surrounded herself with beautiful, elegant things, and she knew that coming to the city had been necessary, she did not like it here. Humans were the most dangerous prey imaginable, and she would not underestimate them the way that Tanzer had. Down there in the belly of this city, she was haunted by the knowledge that humans had the power to destroy them. Jasmine had seen too many of her kind slaughtered by human weapons, human hands.

  In the bowels of this city that represented all that humanity was capable of, there was the constant banshee wail of passing trains, their wheels screeching metal upon metal on the tracks. To Jasmine those screams were the death cries of her race.

  And that was the true purpose of the music that played constantly inside her strange, beautiful lair. It blocked out the everpresent metal whisper of the ghosts.

  There was a loud rap on the door at the far end of the car.

  "Come," Jasmine called.

  The door opened and Alec stepped up into the train. He wore his human face and though she had no physical appreciation of humans the way some of her kind did, Jasmine could not deny that his appearance even in that form was pleasing. Alec's skin was a rich bronze, his hair black as tar and his eyes — his eyes never changed. He was dressed very well, too well for the underground, but their business took him above often. The moment he stepped up into the car he looked at her and a smile bloomed upon his face as though whatever had been on his mind was gone a moment, pushed out of his head by the mere sight of her.