FULL MOON COUNTRY (FULL MOON SERIES (vol. 2))

by Terry Yates

  “Did you hear about those hunters from Texas that were mauled to death in Mexico a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Yeah, three were killed and one went missing. For the love of God, Kyler, can you just tell me what you’re talking about?”

  “They were killed by the same three types of tracks.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Kyler stared at Potts for a moment, trying to let it all sink in. Potts’ bandaged face and eye-patch didn’t help with things. It’d been tough enough trying to read Potts’ face when it was completely whole, much less now that he looked like half of the Invisible Man. Finally…

  “Are you trying to tell me that the Dixon family made it off the island?”

  “I know it sounds strange, but what if they did make it off the island?”

  “And landed in Mexico.”

  “Hell, Klefka’s plane landed from…”

  If he could’ve found a hole, Kyler would’ve crawled into it, covered it over, then patted it down. The very mention of Nicholas Klefka’s name must send any number of emotions through Potts. It was the Werewolf Klefka that separated one side of Potts’ face from the other, when he and FranAnne Fulton had been trying to keep the beast from entering the military building. The worst part was that Kyler was the reason that Klefka was able to get into the place in the first place. If only he’d turned him in when he found him…or vice-versa, Klefka jumped Kyler from behind…Potts’ face would still be intact.

  “Are you telling me, Kyler, that a black man, a white woman, and a mulatto kid came from an island off the coast of Florida, landed in Texas, and are making their way up through Oklahoma, the whole while, killing dozens of people along the way.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “How the shit should I know? I do know, that I put a few shots into the young lady, and I saw her lying there dead. Cpl. Dixon, I saw fall from the sky through the roof of a building, and I never saw what happened to the little one. What or who’s out there in California? The Model? The photographer? Gringo Boots?”

  “I don’t know, Colonel,” Kyler answered, deflating.

  He wanted to tell Potts about Zora and the Knights of Kravania, the five-hundred year-old order that Nicholas Klefka’s four* older brothers had started centuries ago in Russia, set up to fight the Tsar’s tyranny, but ended up heartbroken, disillusioned, and betrayed. The Knights disbanded, or so Klefka thought, several years later, but on the island, Zora confessed to him the Knights of Kravania had reformed, and had been fighting, killing, or controlling all sorts of creatures and ‘were-things’ for centuries, and she was one of them. She’d been on the island looking for someone, but Kyler never found out whom it was that she had been searching for.

  “Is there anything else, Kyler? Got any more ideas who might be out there ripping people to shreds…Lon Chaney, Jr. perhaps?”

  “Come on…”

  “I’m busy, Kyler. Is there anything else?”

  “No, I guess…”

  Before he could finish, Potts had walked away, leaving him alone as the word ‘not’ fell silently from his lips.

  CHAPTER 39

  Simon was enjoying the ride to the hospital. It was a nice, breezy day. At home it would already be a hundred degrees by now, and the humidity would be some kinda ball-boiling, but here in the back of this old pickup, with six Mexican men, including the leader, all smiling at him in an attempt to keep him calm, it felt like a beautiful May morning. The old woman that screamed like a banshee sat up in the cab with another woman and a man who drove. The back window was open, or actually there was no back window. It was just an open space where a window, followed by plastic, followed by cardboard, followed by a towel had once been used to block up the hole, but with no air conditioning, most nights were in the sixties. The only thing the owner had to worry about was someone breaking into it, but seeing as how these folks seemed to have their own Neighborhood Watch, that probably wasn’t a problem, although the old woman would look back at him once in a while and give him a most distrustful look. Careful, Mama, he thought to himself, as he looked at the back of her head. He could smell…it wasn’t fear coming from her…it was more like she was wary of him, like she knew his life…and his secrets. That couldn’t be true, of course, but he had known many women growing up, many of them Mexican, who had a sort of ESP or an intuition about things and people. Maybe she was one of them, but he doubted it, for if she truly knew him, she wouldn’t be in the truck with him right now, and neither would he. These Chicanos had meant business when they’d come up on him.

  Simon pretended to doze. Just as he supposed they would, the men began to talk about him in Spanish. They obviously knew that he wasn’t from their neighborhood. Someone once told him that he looked like Larry Bird and John Holmes had a kid. He heard them talking about the night before. According to what they were saying, he stomped across the corner of their neighborhood, but only got hold of one old homeless woman. None of them in the truck actually saw him last night, but they heard his howl. El Lobo, they called him. He knew that he liked these guys. They saw him as a lobo, too. They were simpatico…except the old lady, of course. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel her gaze and still smell her wariness.

  He felt the truck slow down, then dip, then speed up again. They must be in a parking lot, he thought. He slowly cracked one eye open and saw the word “Emergency Room”. Yep, they were at the hospital.

  Simon could hear all sorts of voices in extreme panic mode. He pretended to awaken to the din. The leader placed his hand on Simon’s shoulder as he tried to sit up and look around. The emergency driveway was full of cars parked haphazardly. Jiminy Xmas, he must’ve really gone on a tear last night.

  Simon feigned weakness and let the men help him out of the truck Two of the men began to take him by the arms. Smiling weakly, he shook them off, letting them know that he’d rather walk. He nodded to the men in gratitude. He did allow the leader to take his arm and guide him inside, where they didn’t get very far before having to stop because of all the patients. He saw people holding bandages to different parts of their bodies. He didn’t feel so bad at all, standing there naked in a bloody sheet. He took a big sniff into the air. Oh yeah, he thought, wanting to laugh. I’ve got a bunch of ‘em in here. But some of them weren’t his. They belonged to something or someone else. Some patients were terribly burned. Simon saw a ten-year-old boy that was just covered with them. Tough break, Kid, he thought. The boy wasn’t his though. He knew he didn’t bite or hurt this one. Simon turned to the leader who still had him by the arm.

  “Graaacciasss…ameego…,” he told the man, smiling.

  The Mexican man smiled kindly and nodded to Simon, before turning and making his way back through the crowd of people. What a nice man. He hoped he stayed indoors the next time the moon was full. He wondered when that was, by the way.

  Presently, a young, pretty lady nurse approached him. She was tall and probably in her late twenties. She looked hot, even though Simon could tell that she’d been up all night dealing with the Hairy One’s mischief.

  “Are you hurt badly?” she asked him, slowly pulling the sheet away from his skin. It came away a little easier this time than it had when the Mexican leader had first checked his wounds. She gave off all sorts of scents. She had more perfume than usual, probably because she had not been able to shower properly. She’d probably been on duty all day when several different emergencies happened at once, and had been here ever since.

  “I should be okay,” Simon answered.

  When he’d first made eye contact with her, it looked as if she had almost scowled at him with her dark eyes, which would have made her a top white light candidate, but after hearing him say that he was all right, and that she should move on to someone in more need, she smiled up at him. It wasn’t much of a smile, but enough to quell the white light. Hey, maybe she was smiling at his chest, or maybe even scoped him down a little farther south and liked what she saw.

  “W
hat happened here last night?” he asked the nurse as she was looking at his self-inflicted wound.

  “Some sort of animal attacked a large group of people, and then there was a gang/mob shootout that’s put about two dozen people in here, and a drunk driver who took out four cars and put eight in here, so we’ve pretty much been at it all night.”

  Simon could tell now that the lady was exhausted, not by her appearance, but now he could smell it, and hear it in her heartbeat.

  “You need to take it easy,” Simon said with as much concern as he could muster. He was kind of digging the girl, but you never knew with The ‘S-Man’. Digging and DIGGING could be two different things, yes, lawdy. Usually only hookers and snobs turned on the lights, but he could never really be too sure.

  “Wish I could,” she answered. “You can go ahead and stand in the ward, but there aren’t any more beds, but you look big and strong enough to stand for a while. I’ll try to get someone to put a bandage on that thing. Was it the animal?”

  Simon was surprised by her question. He knew that he shouldn’t have been, a shitload of the people that were here, were here because of him, not to mention the fact that she just talked about herself.

  “Uh…yes…” he stammered. “I didn’t get a good look at it. It just sort of swung at me as I was running away.”

  “You were lucky,” the nurse came back. “Gotta go now. The ward’s just around this corner,” she told him, pointing. “I’ll have someone see to you as soon as I can.”

  “Thank you,” Simon replied as he watched her walk away.

  He closed the bloody sheet tightly around his body and began to move down the end of the hallway. He saw mostly wreck victims and gunshot wounds. As he rounded the corner to enter the large room, he felt strange. It was nothing that frightened him…what could frighten a psychopath/werewolf…it was more a feeling of familiarity. When he entered the room, he realized that it wasn’t the room that he was familiar with, but the patients. He seemed to know many of them. There were three beds in a row, two of them with youngish men lying in them, and the other a middle-aged woman of about fifty. As he passed the three, all three suddenly shot looks his way. They were his. He knew it. He could feel it. He had bitten the three, but they didn’t know it…yet. He could feel others, as well. He passed bed after bed, looking both directions as he moved down the main aisle. He saw an old man, a young girl, a little boy…ah, sorry, Kid, he wanted to say. Didn’t wanna do it, just couldn’t help myself. He passed a little hottie whose face looked almost half gone. Don’t worry, he wanted to tell her. It’s the one’s who didn’t receive his bite that he sort of felt for. Their wounds weren’t going to heal, and he saw a lot of claw marks on a lot of patients. Limbs were gone. Faces were gone! Jiminy Xmas! He’d sure partied hardy. He came across another dozen or so as he reached the far wall and leaned against it. Yep, there were a lot in here that belonged to the Hairy One. This ought to be interesting.

  After a moment, a nurse approached him, a gauze bandage in one hand, some sort of medicine, probably alcohol related, in the other, and a white washcloth draped over her right forearm. This one was a tad older than the first one, and nowhere near as hot.

  “Can you open the sheet a little for me?” she asked him, dropping to her knees, and taking the washcloth off of her arm in preparation to clean the wound. “We should probably find you something to wear,” the nurse said as she began to gently rub the cloth against the cut.

  “Oh, just give me another sheet, I guess,” Simon drawled. “Preferably a whiter one.”

  “Don’t know if there are anymore to spare,” she came back.

  As the nurse continued to dress his wound, Simon noticed that the ward was quieter now. A moment ago, there were screams in ten different languages, but now they seemed to have subsided some, not much, but a little. The ones that had gone silent were all staring at him, some in confusion, others as if they knew who he was. Either way, all peepers of the werewolf bite victims were on him. He wasn’t sure how to act or react to their stares. He’d never been the center of attention like this and he was never comfortable with it, except when he danced in the country and western bars where, he must admit, he did stand out. He could dance a sum-bitch…that’s usually how he picked his non-hooker victims. He would just cut-a-rug, go to the bar, catch some pretty heifer looking his direction, and then…he wanted to chuckle…give her the hairy eyeball. As he did, he would say things to the girl mentally, knowing full well she couldn’t actually hear him, but the thought occurred that he might be able to do it now. He glared at the group.

  “Go to sleep!” he yelled mentally.

  He was met with a few strange looks, confusion mostly. It was if they didn’t know why they were looking at him.

  “Go to sleep!” Simon repeated.

  As if an invisible hypnotist snapped his fingers, the victims began to slowly close their eyes.

  “Ain’t that the shits,” Simon uttered softly.

  “I’m sorry?” the nurse asked, looking up at him.

  “Uh…nothing. I was saying…ain’t this some sheet?”

  “There,” the nurse said, standing up. “I’ll have…”

  “Someone see me as soon as possible.”

  “Yes.”

  Like the nurse before her, this nurse also left. Simon watched her as she stopped to attend the next patient, a middle-aged man with a bad comb-over, who was also holding his stomach, which was bleeding through his shirt. His short, fat, dumpy wife stood next to him, suspiciously looking like the one who might have put that wound there. Probably got enough of his shit and took a butcher knife to him. His mom was right. There’s white trash everywhere.

  Simon took another look at his victims. Most had closed their eyes. A few were talking to doctors, nurses, or family members. Boy, the shit had really hit the fan lately, what with all the storms, the price of gas, and now a werewolf and or werewolves. Simon smiled at the thought.

  CHAPTER 40

  “Not too shabby,” Kyler said, adjusting Anthony’s golf shirt collar. The shirt was pink and obviously made for a woman, albeit a large woman, but Anthony had seen it and wanted it. Several shipments of clothes and other sundries had made their way into the camp, and Kyler had just grabbed what he could and hightailed back to the barracks, where he threw two large garbage bags on the bed, where Sam and Zack Olson began sorting them for the children.

  With the help of Sam and Zack, Kyler had managed to get all of the children showered and cleaned, and re-clothed. Heather helped with the girls, which made him wonder where FranAnne had gone. The big German, Peter Valkenberg, showed up late and gave no excuse, but immediately jumped in and began to help with the children. Two large army trucks and one eighteen-wheeler full of supplies, arrived into camp that morning, and he just happened to be there, talking to Jack Willette when the trio arrived. Kyler scrounged toothbrushes, deodorant, tampons, brushes, soap, disposable razors, both he and she, and everything from floss to toenail clippers. He’d wanted to grab everything in sight, but there were scores of other children in the camp, so he took what he hoped might last for at least a week or two.

  Kyler smiled as he watched Peter with Werner and Astrid. The children were extremely animated, and chattered non-stop to the man, who smiled, laughed, and nodded his head in return. Sooner or later, he was going to have to get down and dirty and find out what went on in the Wartler home, if you could call it a home, but for now, it seemed everyone was just happy being out of it. They were all a little malnourished, but had healthy appetites, which was a good sign. The Wartler’s hadn’t had enough time to properly starve them. Had it been only a matter of weeks since the whole U.S. had changed? Hurricanes, tsunamis, werewolves, and millions dead or missing. For a moment, Kyler thought of his family…or what was left of it. Everyone was dead except for his older sister, Cheryl, and his younger brother, Stephen. Cheryl, her husband, Robert, and their three kids moved from California to New Mexico. He’d get a Christmas card and a birthday c
all once a year, but other than that, not much. Unless they saw him on TV, they wouldn’t know where he was. Stephen left home six years ago, and Kyler had only seen him twice since, once when bailing him out of jail, and the other when he dropped him off at the airport after loaning him a thousand bucks. He wondered where he was right now. He wondered if he was even alive.

  “What now, Doc?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What now?”

  Kyler looked up to see Sam Fong and the rest of the crowd looking at him.

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m famished. What do ya’ say we go get something to eat and generally just play around for a bit, until I have to start my rounds? Huh?”

  “That sounds like a positively splendid idea,” Lauren said smiling, her white teeth even whiter against her yellow skin.”

  “A sound hypothesis,” Sam came back.

  “Wunderbar!” Peter Valkenberg said loudly, fist clenched.

  “Then let’s move out!” Kyler yelled even louder, placing one hand on Ben Rollins and the other on Astrid Werner. “Who knows…maybe we can get a swim in today, what do ya’ think?”

  Everyone cheered and began to move toward the door, when FranAnne walked in, dressed in her battle fatigues, helmet and all. She even had her sidearm on her hip, something he hadn’t seen her with since the island.

  “Gen. Mueller wants to see you, Doctor?” she said matter of fact.

  “What’s all this? Kyler asked moving his finger up and down, pointing to her Ready-For-Bear uniform. “And where have you been lately?”

  “I’ve been busy doing soldier stuff. Doctor, Gen. Mueller made it sound like it might be urgent.”

  “Oh, he did, did he…and I told you on the island to call me Richard.”

  “Doc-Rich…please!”

  “All right! All right! I’m going!” Kyler shot back. “Well, Gang,” he said, turning to the children. “I guess you’ll have to go without me, but I’ll be along as soon as I can.”