Hanging over the stairs was the biggest banner for a movie Stu had ever seen. It covered an entire side of one staircase and in Stu’s line of sight was one big, metal foot connected to a metal leg attached to the meanest, sleekest creature imaginable. Wide-eyed, the young Stuart followed all the way up to the metal visor, the huge gun in one hand and finally drank the entire image into his consciousness. The creature was getting out of a car, gun ready for action, wearing a look of indestructability on the lower half of his face.
Before Stu knew much in this world, he knew he wanted to be RoboCop.
Of course, he begged his mom to take him to the movie and she, prudently, said no. It was rated R for a long list of reasons and that was a line not to be crossed. Such was his desire and mania for all things RoboCop, that Stu asked his sister to sneak him in to the movie theater. She promptly told on him and that was the end of that.
Over the years he saw several posters for more RoboCop movies come and go and his desire only grew until, at the tender age of thirteen, Stu committed his first crime. The Motor City Video Emporium was one of those VHS rental stores that made the crucial mistake early on of putting the physical videos in clear plastic behind the cases. If the tape wasn’t there, it was checked out. Stu had his friend Ally cause a distraction by knocking over a candy display, and he grabbed the video and hightailed it out of there. She never told anyone and he had a stolen copy of RoboCop in his room, tucked under his mattress later that night.
Stu waited and waited for a time when everyone had left the house so he could watch and finally had to fake being sick from school so he could view his stolen treasure. He waited a long time to make sure parents and sisters hadn’t forgotten anything (thought he was sure Dana was on to at least part of his plan) and after breakfast, he popped in the tape.
Regardless of what the movie turned out to be, RoboCop was already part of Stu’s origin story, so the fact that the film was excessively violent and bloody, mean-spirited and ass-kicking, only added to the legend. An adult Stu knew the movie by heart and all of it, stealing the tape, getting his first blast of cinema and how much he loved that flick made him smile, ever so slightly, before another right hand landed to his cheekbone, sending him into increasingly more agony.
“I don’t like having you beaten, Mr. Dietz, but at this point, what choice do I have?” Stander said. They were in Stu’s office and had been for so long that Stu had lost track. It was light out so he knew it had been more than twelve hours, but beyond that he was at a loss. Getting the shit beaten out of you tends to suppress your appetite and make regular body functions less important, so he couldn’t even use hunger or the need to pee as markers for the passage of time.
They had come in the middle of the knight, Stander and his men. After the events at “Bar” Stu had welcomed his bed, as his head was swimming with all manner of societal, sociological, scientific and religious questions. He had headed straight for his bed and what seemed like a few short moments later, was being manhandled and pulled up hard to his feet, slapped around, forced to dress and taken to his office. Stu hadn’t had the wherewithal to put up a fight at the time and now he was handcuffed to a chair suffering his third round of fists to the face and stomach in … at least twelve hours. Maybe more.
“What you’ve told us just doesn’t make sense,” Stander said, walking a lazy circle around Stu’s chair. “Think of it from our perspective. This man, Mr. Rhodes, tells you his family’s deepest, darkest, most destructive secret and then lets you walk away? He doesn’t protect himself? He trusts you, a stranger, with this secret? Tell me, Mr. Dietz, if I were a suspect and I came to you with such a story, would you believe me?”
That last punch was a weak one and Stu could tell that Stander’s men weren’t looking to hurt him in a lasting way, but they were loyal. They all seemed to hop to it whenever they were given an order and there were whispers of consequences that Stu hadn’t been able to fully comprehend.
Just because they weren’t looking to hurt him permanently didn’t mean they wouldn’t soon. Or that the punches didn’t really sting on his already bruised and tender skin.
Stu spit and there was a bit of blood mixed in with his saliva. It looked tough, he figured.
“I don’t know how to convince you that I’m not lying,” Stu said. “If I were you, you know what I’d do?”
“Enlighten me,” Stander said.
“I would look for inconsistencies in my story,” Stu said. “It’s one of the main tools used in interrogation. If a person is making up the story on the spot or even if they’ve made it up before getting in that room they are going to forget stuff. Little details, sequences of events, stuff like that.”
“Mm hmmm,” Stander said, his arms crossed.
“So I’ll tell you what I know again and if it’s different than what I’ve told you before, hit me with that. Because I’m going to tell you what I know and it’s the same as the last two times, I promise you.”
“No need,” Stander said. “At this point I know your story, Mr. Dietz and I know it’s consistent.”
Stu started to get a sinking feeling in his guts, but wasn’t sure why. Nothing had changed except for something in the air.
“What is surprising to me is you think you’re getting out of that chair.”
Stander knew enough to let his threat sit a second before continuing on. He pulled up his own chair from behind Stu’s desk and straddled it so the two men’s faces were inches from each other and Stander’s anger suddenly started pouring out in quiet, punctuated bursts of speech.
“I can see it in your eyes, Mr. Dietz. You’re trying to figure the magic words to get me to uncuff you and let you go but you must be so dense that you honestly don’t realize what’s going on here, so let me tell you. My men and I have already razed two buildings, committed three murders and are detaining upwards of twenty people. We have a plan in place to burn this blank spot on the map into nothingness, Mr. Dietz, even though it’s basically there already. I will destroy each and every thing that Dave Rhodes and his compatriots hold dear until they come back here and when they get back I will tranquilize them and load them into trucks and ship them across the country where they will live the rest of their lives in Old Testament-style suffering.”
The pit in Stu’s stomach had already turned to full-blown panic that he was working hard to suppress.
“I don’t mean to be vulgar with you, Mr. Dietz, but if it means getting one more, even one more nugget of information out of you that will lead me to these people, I will shoot your chest and fuck the wound until you bleed out. Do you understand?”
Stu managed a nod. Stander resumed his standing, arms-crossed position.
Somewhere, deep inside Stu’s consciousness, something started to stir. It started logically—why was this man so hell-bent on finding Dave and his pack? Money didn’t engender this sort of rage, so what was it? Dave was a good person, as far as Stu could tell, if a little wimpy at times. There must be more to this if Stander was starting to lose his cool now after several weeks of hunting.
Then, deeper in Stu’s mind, he was thirteen, several weeks after watching RoboCop for the first time. His friend, Rick, had rented RoboCop 2 while his parents were away for the weekend. The boys huddled in the basement and watched the sequel in a moment of joy so pure, its memory pierced the panic, fear and pain.
“Bad language makes for bad feelings,” Stu said.
One of the henchmen punched him again. Stander’s face was unchanged.
“I have a business call to make right now,” Stander said. “Or else things would escalate. As it stands, you have probably around an hour before I come back and when I do you are going to deeply, deeply regret your insolence.”
He walked away, his expensive shoes clattering on the linoleum. His men followed.
“Have a nice day,” Stu said, and gave his cuffs a hard tug. The cuffs and the chair were solid.
•••
Across the street from the
Sheriff’s office was a building that had recently been abandoned. While the fixtures had been pulled, the tile on the floor gave off the impression that the place had been a restaurant of some kind. Frankly, Stander couldn’t have cared less. His eyes were glued to his watch, a high-end number he purchased for himself his third week on the job. He was to take a call at precisely 11:30 a.m. Central Time and for the people he was about to speak with, “precisely” meant something.
He watched the second hand click, heard the tick as there was no sound to distract from it, and pulled out his phone with ten seconds to spare. On the nose, the phone’s simple, strong ringer went off.
“Stander speaking,” he answered.
“Any progress?”
“Not yet.”
“Any leads?”
“Several.”
“Any need to remind you of the stakes involved?”
“No. I fully understand.”
“You will take another call at 3:00 p.m. Central Time. Understood?”
“Understood.”
The line went dead. As was his habit, Stander checked the length of time the call had taken. It had been fourteen seconds.
The company man let himself have a moment of humanity. His bosses would not have sent him if they didn’t have faith he could accomplish the task at hand, but their support waned. Now it was time to deliver and receive the reward or fail and face the consequences.
He stared at the walls in the room where he stood. The patterns on the floor suggested tables and chairs had been there at some point and the northwestern corner showed signs that it had once been a kitchen. He let out a long sigh but before the breath had finished exiting his body, his phone rang again.
“Stander speaking.”
“Sir, we have eyes on William Rhodes.”
“You do? Where is he?”
“He’s currently on Highway 11, four miles outside of Cherry.”
Stander started to move his body before his mind had commanded it. His walk was slightly awkward as he wasn’t in a full-blown run but certainly was moving about that fast.
“I want three units on him. Set up a roadblock on Main Street, I will be there to direct myself momentarily.”
Stander was two blocks away and already saw movement down the street, which was pleasing. He moved as fast as he could, leaving Stu Dietz handcuffed to a chair behind him.
•••
Willie smelled them first, the smell of plastic and gun oil and unfamiliar thread.
“Here we go,” he said to himself and gripped the steering wheel a little more tightly, putting his foot further down on the accelerator, feeling the pressure and acceleration.
As far as plans go, Willie didn’t have one. Not really. A good part of him wanted to go out in a blaze of glory but he figured that wouldn’t accomplish much. They’d still have his body and something told him they wouldn’t let Dave go, so his idea was to get captured. At the very least, it would force Dave to finally do something.
But as he got closer and smelled the strangers to his town, the thinking changed as his temper flared. Willie decided to make them work for it.
By the time he was rolling around toward Main Street, a car was behind him blaring its sirens and Willie was going seventy miles an hour. By the time he saw the checkpoint, he was going eighty.
“Suck on this, fuckers,” Willie said to the empty car, pulling on his seat belt over his round belly.
The checkpoint didn’t look like much—a few sawhorses and barrels, probably full of water. What Willie hadn’t counted on were the spike strips that punctured all four of his tires a half mile away from the checkpoint, slowing him significantly. He started losing speed right as he neared the checkpoint as the weight of the burst rubber pulled and dragged the car. His “making them work for it” amounted to crashing into a few water-filled barrels at forty miles an hour or so, sending water spraying everywhere and knocking the wind out of the old man.
Before he knew it, the doors were open and men were pointing guns at him and screaming. He was foggy from the impact and tasted blood in his mouth, but knew he was basically OK. And he immediately regretted his decision.
“Shit,” Willie muttered and spit blood before putting up his hands. One of the men in combat gear reached toward him with a knife and cut the seat belt. For a brief second, Willie contemplated biting him, but he wasn’t sure all his teeth were still in his head.
The front of the car was smoking and before they pulled Willie from the car and pushed him, hard, onto the gravel road he was able to make out a man with a bow tie and a wide grin walking toward the car. A combination of his injuries from the crash and his sudden meeting with the ground caused him to black out.
•••
It hadn’t hurt as bad this time.
As she watched Ron and Kenny Kirk move Conall (not nearly as gingerly as they could have, but still), the truth struck her and the implications burned through her mind.
It hadn’t felt good, obviously, but Josie had only transformed twice in the past five years, and even then it was out of urging from the pack to make sure she could still do it. The transformations were immensely painful for her, rivaling childbirth but this time it had seemed like a more natural thing. It was less a ripping and more a deep, painful stretch, and once it was done she had been ready to kick ass.
She hadn’t felt that way in a long time.
What happens now? Would it always be like this? Would she get the “hunger” her husband and his friends were always talking about? The possibilities were running ragged through her mind when Dave put a hand on her shoulder. She turned to face him noticing the deep bruises already forming along one cheek and eye socket and a few cuts visible from the beating he had taken at the hands of the Irishman.
“You OK?” he asked.
It was too simplistic a question, obviously.
“How do you mean?”
“I guess, for right now, are you OK physically?”
“Never better,” Josie said. “I kicked his ass.”
“Yes, you did.”
“He kicked your ass then I kicked his ass. Does that make me the Alpha?”
She was half teasing but by the time the words were out of her mouth, she realized it was a serious question. Was she in the lead now? And if so, what the hell was she going to do with that?
“I think you’re the Alpha if you want to be,” Dave said, not reading her mind but sensing her unease. “But if I could give you a bit of advice, I think we’re way past any sort of chain of command thing. I think this is a group deal.”
She nodded, then got an idea.
“Can you cover for me for about fifteen minutes?”
“Yeah, what do you need?
“I need to go test something out. Get the guys together, take care of Conall and I’ll be there soon, OK?”
Dave nodded and went off to do his job, leaving Josie on the edge of the woods, the wind starting to pick up, blowing a symphony of sound through the trees and grass. Her clothes were ruined. The T-shirt she had on was still basically sound but the jeans had ripped and torn in multiple places exposing her legs all the way up to her panties, which were also full of tears. She remembered when her mother did the laundry when Josie was a little girl, she called them “church underwear” because they were “hole-y.”
Josie took her clothes off and folded them, placing the pile beside a tree, then took off running. Barefoot and naked, the run was initially awkward as she was used to having support in places that were now unencumbered, but she got the hang of it, until she was in tune with the sounds of her bare feet hitting the leaves. She gave intense focus to not stepping on roots and rocks and after a few hundred feet it became a natural state.
Then she turned to her memory.
Before, her memory was weak. It involved a time an ex-boyfriend had called her a cow and she had knocked him over, twisted his arm, gotten right in his face and said “moo.” She had never felt so powerful as at that moment, and that f
eeling of anger-fueled power had given her the kick she needed to transform, but now something was different. When she had taken after Dilly and Conall, what brought about the transformation wasn’t a thought, but a need. It was the urgency of needing to save her son, to keep him from danger that he was smack in the middle of.
Feet pumping and chest heaving, she tapped back into that feeling of primal urgency, of a mother protecting her son, and soon she was a wolf mother protecting her cub. The transformation was swift and while the pain was there, the running and the urgency helped push it away and her brain, focused on nothing but protection, stayed sharp and unaffected by the massive changes happening to the body. By the time Josie came to a stop, she had become the Mother Wolf without breaking stride, something that would have seemed impossible just a day earlier.
The Mother Wolf pivoted and began running, full speed, back the way she had come. The woods yielded to her movements creating a sleek, elegant harmony between wolf and trees, wolf and ground, wolf and stone. She glided with a never-before-felt sense of harmony and agility, mixed with the panic of her thoughts and the anger that fueled them all. By the time she reached the edge of the woods she could see her family and her pack gathered and, on a whim, decided to run up the side of a large pine tree and vault from the edge of the woods into view, landing with a gentle thud a few feet from where they were standing.
Kenny Kirk let out a “holy shit,” when she landed and she could sense apprehension in everyone present.
“How’s the Irishman?” she growled, her voice still feminine but many times more threatening.
“He’s fine,” Dave said, stepping up. “We laid him down in his hotel room. His leg is pretty messed up and he’s not walking for a week or so …”
“His fault,” the Mother Wolf interrupted. “Ron, you have a plan to get those fuckers out of our town?”
Dilly blushed after hearing his mother swear. She was the sort who let the occasional profanity out, but never an f-bomb and certainly not in his presence. She was different, Dilly figured, and after this was done, they all would be different too.
Pack Page 21
