“Now.”
Bobby shook his head. “This ain’t—”
“Think about it,” Dean said. “If he’s a Big Mouth, this is how he’d gank us. Isolated. No witnesses.”
Outside, McClary knocked again, louder.
“Naturally, he’d knock first,” Bobby said dryly.
“Catch us with our guard down,” Sam said, swayed by Dean’s argument.
Dean nodded to the door, ready.
Bobby shook his head. “You’re starting to remind me of Frank.”
As soon as Bobby pulled the door open, McClary, in uniform, burst into the room.
Dean stepped in front of him, pretended to dry off with the soaked towel, and extended his right hand. “Welcome, Sergeant.”
A distracted frown flickered across McClary’s face, but he reflexively shook Dean’s offered hand, then looked down at his own—now dripping harmlessly with borax.
“I think you missed a spot,” he said.
“Yeah, sorry,” Dean apologized, feeling the tension leave his body. He had been ready to spring into action at the first sign of burning, melting Leviathan flesh. “I’ll grab a fresh towel.”
Before turning his attention to McClary, Bobby shot Dean an “I told you so” glare. Dean responded with a minuscule “better safe than sorry” shrug.
“I’m here unofficially,” McClary said, “about as unofficially as unofficial gets.”
“I expected a call, Sergeant,” Bobby said to the agitated cop, “not a personal visit.”
“Sorry. I haven’t slept,” McClary said, pacing around the small room. “I’m kinda wired.”
“We hadn’t noticed,” Dean remarked as he offered the man a fresh towel from the kitchen.
“About last night…” Bobby said.
“Want to know what I wrote in my report?”
“Okay.”
“Absolutely nothing about horns.”
“Wise omission.”
“I suggested the assailant may have been wounded,” McClary said. “Know why?”
“I’ll bite.”
“The only blood found at the scene belonged to the victims.”
“Makes sense,” Bobby said.
“Sure. If you weren’t there,” McClary said. “And Chief Donato was not there. But I hit the guy. You hit him too.”
“This is true.”
McClary threw up his arms in frustration. “But I can’t write that bullets bounced off this guy.”
“Maybe he wore a Kevlar vest,” Sam suggested.
McClary snapped his fingers. “Bulletproof vest. Good one. I can use that.”
“Happy to help.”
“But it’s not true,” McClary said, turning to Bobby. “Because I’m guessing guys with horns sprouting from their head don’t shop the Kevlar aisles.”
“Probably not,” Bobby said.
“So … those were real horns?” McClary asked. “Not some kind of appliances or implants, like those fake vampire teeth fetishists get anchored in their jaw?”
“You could write that in your report,” Bobby suggested. “Cover yourself.”
McClary plopped down on the sofa and sighed. “Yeah, if anyone else saw what we saw. But that doesn’t explain the other stuff.”
Bobby walked over to the man and sat in the armchair perpendicular to the sofa so he could address McClary on his level. “Comes a time, Sergeant, when you have to decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Live the comfortable lie,” Bobby said, “or face the hard truth.”
Twenty-Two
Sumiko stood in front of Ryan’s house for five minutes, trying to decide if she wanted to walk up to the door or go back home. After a night to sleep on their argument, she tried to decide if she’d been fair to him and, conversely, if he’d been fair to her. If she was honest with herself, she had to admit she had been a bit self-absorbed about the blog. All the crazy stuff happening in town fed into her need to post updates, to try to find a connection that might explain all the oddities. She’d graduated from posting current events at school—tongue-in-cheek investigative reports about the mystery meat in the school cafeteria, and speculation about the identity of the perpetrators of various school pranks—along with hearty helpings of libidinous gossip, to writing posts about people dying in horrifying accidents and outbreaks of deadly diseases. At some point, the information flow had overwhelmed her.
Now that her emotions were at a low boil, instead of seething, she tried to see things from Ryan’s point of view. She had been a girlfriend consumed by information and events that had little relevance to her blog’s professed subject matter or to them as high school students. Maybe she hadn’t made enough time for him. Setting aside her own interests for a moment, she knew he worried about his grades and about his future, and that he had little support from an absentee father. That was something they had in common. Ryan would need scholarship help and a boatload of loans to have a shot at college, any college. He probably had more stress in his life at the moment than he could handle. So, maybe he needed to talk to someone, and she had been the only person willing to listen—except she was too busy rattling on about all the weird stuff she was documenting on her blog.
She took a deep breath.
Okay, she admitted. I was kind of a jerk. But, she reminded herself, he crossed a line by destroying my property.
Was the destruction intentional? He had grown several inches in the last year, and sometimes he was ungainly, to say the least. She hadn’t really given him time to explain.
We were both wrong, she concluded.
With a sigh, she walked up to his door and knocked.
Ryan opened the door, wearing an old blue hoodie pulled over his head, and quickly stuffed his hands in the pockets. He seemed a bit twitchy, his eyes looking as if he’d seen a ghost. If she didn’t known him so well, she might assume he was using illegal drugs.
“Sumiko?”
“Ryan,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yes—I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I’m not sure what ‘okay’ means anymore.”
“This is hard for me,” she said, looking down at her feet for a second, “but I want to apologize. Not for yelling at you when you broke my monitor. You totally deserved that. I want to apologize for not listening to you—”
“I’ll pay for the monitor,” Ryan said. “It was my fault.”
“Thanks. I’m using my old CRT for now. So, no rush on paying me back. I’ll see if I can have it repaired. It’ll be cheaper than buying a new one. Maybe.”
“Okay,” Ryan said absently. “Send me the bill.”
“Ryan,” Sumiko said, “what’s wrong? You seem … odd.”
“Look, I gotta go.”
“Where?”
“You were right about us breaking up,” Ryan said. “You’re busy and I … I need some time alone, you know? You should stay away from me. Seriously.”
“Ryan, are you blowing me off?”
“It’s a bad time,” Ryan said, looking past her. “That’s all.”
“You’re breaking up with me?”
“It’s inevitable, right?” he said. “You’ve got your pick of colleges. You’ll be gone, new worlds to conquer, and I’ll be here. It was just a high school fling, right?”
“Ryan, that’s not how I see us.”
“Maybe you should face reality, Sumiko,” Ryan said. “This has to end. No sense prolonging the pain. Just … rip off the Band-Aid, right?”
“It was a stupid fight, Ryan,” she pleaded. “Couples have fights all the time. They get over it. Why are you acting this way?”
“It’s a bad time, Miko,” he said, reaching for the door. “I’ve gotta go.”
As she stood on the doorstep, her jaw practically unhinged in surprise, he stepped back and closed the door in her face. For a few moments, she stared at the door in disbelief. Waiting. But he left her standing there, dumbfounded. Obviously something was wrong with him, the way he huddled inside the hoodie, his
lack of eye contact, his twitchiness. An idea began to form, that Ryan had somehow become part of the craziness infecting the town. Yes, the bomb scare was a hoax, but that didn’t mean Ryan’s weird behavior wasn’t part of the general madness.
Finally, she turned and walked away, in the general direction of her home. “What the hell was that?” she asked herself aloud.
At that moment, she had no idea, but she was determined to find out.
Ryan leaned against the closed door, sensing Sumiko’s presence on the doormat outside. Certain she had seen through him, he tried to remember what he had said or what signs he’d exhibited. He was sure he’d been infected by something, and he couldn’t bear the thought of infecting her. Or of admitting to her that he might be dying. Best to push her away.
As soon as he lowered his guard, he felt the rage bubbling up inside him and his muscles trembled with the urge to smash something or hurt someone. Talking to Sumiko had exhausted him. Pushing her away had been painful, but necessary. It was the only way to protect her from whatever was happening.
Inside the pocket of his hoodie, his right hand clutched the letter his mother had written to his father weeks before he had been born. The idea that his father kept that letter secret from him all these years made him want to scream. Once more he unfolded the paper and stared at the words as if they were a puzzle and its solution would explain his life.
He found himself sitting at the kitchen table looking down at the sheet of paper. The letter spoke about commitment despite what had happened to his mother. Without getting into specifics, she hinted at a terrible event that his parents had endured, a tragedy his father had kept hidden from him. His fists trembled on either side of the letter. A fever burned within him. His forehead continued to throb with a dull ache, itching as if he had a rash. His fingernails, now completely dark, had coarsened, with pointed tips so sharp he had been able to carve his name in the wooden tabletop with one of them, as if it were the blade of a penknife. He had hidden his nails from Sumiko, even as a sick desire to wrap his hands around her throat surged within him like a dark tide.
When he heard a key in the front door lock, Ryan jumped out of his chair, worried that Sumiko had come back. But she didn’t have a key. Only his father…
“I forgot some letters I wanted to mail,” Ryan’s father said when he spotted his son standing in the kitchen. He twirled his car keys around his index finger as if he couldn’t wait to get back on the road.
“What is this?” Ryan asked, feeling anger rising inside him again.
His father stopped by the sideboard, his hands on a stack of stamped bills to be mailed. “What are you talking about?”
“This letter mom wrote you before I was born.”
“Where did you find that?”
“Answer the question!”
“Ryan …” His father looked away, trying to compose himself. “You were never meant to see that.”
“What does it mean?”
“Your mother and I were going through a rough patch when she wrote that,” his father said. “Trying to deal with … to get ready for parenthood.”
“What about the attack?”
“Ryan…”
“She writes, ‘Honestly, I didn’t know how we could survive together, after the attack. In different ways, it was incredibly hard for both of us. My decision to keep this child was the hardest decision I’ve ever made, knowing you might not choose to walk this path with me. I know this is nothing like how we envisioned raising a child together. So thank you for supporting my decision to have this baby and to raise him as if he were ours. Together, we are so strong, my love. I know we can handle this and create something positive out of what has, until now, only been horrible.’”
Ryan stopped reading and stared at his father.
“You’ve always hated me.”
“That’s not true.”
“My whole life, you’ve avoided me, never wanted to spend any time with me.”
“I’ve had to work two jobs,” his father said, “to keep a roof over our heads.”
“That’s always been your excuse,” Ryan said. “But you don’t look at me like a son, not really. I’m like a neighbor’s kid you’ve had to watch for too long.” He laughed bitterly. “All these years, feeling like I wasn’t good enough for you, that I was somehow lacking. No matter how hard I worked, how good my grades were, nothing made a difference.”
“You have worked hard,” his father said. “Maybe I didn’t tell you often enough.”
“Are you kidding? You never said ‘good job’ like you meant it. Any compliment, any scrap of praise, all I felt was your disappointment. I assumed I wasn’t good enough. I changed the way I looked!” Ryan grabbed a hank of his dyed blue hair. “Every time I looked in the mirror, I thought something was wrong with me. Because of the way you treated me!”
“You’re not a neighbor’s kid,” his father said, but he continued to look past Ryan’s shoulder, finding something more interesting about the kitchen cabinets than his child. “Every morning I wake up, I tell myself you are your mother’s son.”
“But not yours,” Ryan said, finally voicing the truth. He dyed his hair to hide its natural color, because it marked him as different from his father, his only surviving parent.
“Not mine,” his father conceded. “I tried to give you a good home, a safe place to live, a chance to grow and learn…”
“This house isn’t a home,” Ryan said angrily. “It’s a motel, with two strangers renting rooms.”
“Your mother was the strong one,” his father said. “I tell myself that you are her son, but when I look at you… all I see is him.”
“My real father?”
“The man who attacked your mother,” he said. “I’ll never forgive him.”
“Who—Where is he?” Ryan asked.
“They—The police never found him,” his father said. “Your mother and I decided we’d raise you, but on that one day she wasn’t strong enough.”
“The day she was attacked?”
“The day you were born,” his father said, and now a tear rolled down his cheek. “She hemorrhaged so badly, the doctors tried everything…” His voice became strangled with emotion for a couple of moments. “Before she died, she made me promise… promise I would take care of you.”
In that moment, Ryan finally witnessed genuine emotion from his father, the love for the mother Ryan had never known. Throughout Ryan’s life, his father had been a stoic, distant man, never showing emotion. He had watched over Ryan, given him a place to live, but had never shown him real affection. Never a tear shed in pride or joy. He had taken care of him, kept his promise to Ryan’s mother, but nothing more.
Watching his father moved to tears, but not for him— never for him—Ryan felt rage boiling inside again. He had received more affection from teachers, and from his friends’ parents, even from complete strangers, than he ever had from this man before him.
“A lie,” Ryan shouted at him. “From the minute I was born, my life has been one big fat lie!”
With a roar of anger, Ryan grabbed the edge of the table and flipped it over.
“Ryan!”
He grabbed the dish drainer, lined with drying glasses and bowls, and threw it against the wall. Glass and ceramic shattered and the dish drainer knocked the calendar off the wall.
“All these years, I’ve hated my life,” Ryan yelled, striding toward his father with clenched fists, “and now I know why. Because I’ve hated you!”
His father stood there, stricken, hardly reacting when Ryan punched him in the face. Beneath his knuckles, he felt his father’s nose crunch and shift. Blood streaked down his face. Ryan punched him in the face again, knocking him to the ground. When he fell, Ryan drew back his right foot and kicked him in the gut.
His father doubled over, helpless.
Ryan pulled back his foot again and aimed the toe of his boot at his father’s head. As the rage burned within him, he imagined his father’s
face pulverized, his skull fractured, and the mental picture made him smile in anticipation. He trembled with the need to crush the life out of the man who had made his whole life a sham.
At the last moment, something stopped him from delivering a fatal blow, something fought against the rage inside him and won.
“You’re not worth it!” he whispered fiercely and ran outside.
Standing in front of his house—never his home—he bent over, hands on his knees, panting as he waited for his heart rate to return to normal. When his head began to clear, he realized what had stopped him—Sumiko. She was the only thing that had ever truly meant something in his life and deep inside he knew that if he murdered his father, he would lose her forever. For a moment, he had stared into the abyss and finality had stared back at him.
Even though he had pushed her away for her own safety, he couldn’t accept a future without the possibility of her in his life. She had saved his father. But he wasn’t sure if anything could save him.
Twenty-Three
Disoriented, Jesse assumed the previous night’s beer consumption had dehydrated him, because something was definitely wrong with his body, other than a standard-issue hangover. He thought food might settle his stomach, make the pounding in his head go away or simmer down. He staggered down the hall to the staircase and grabbed the banister railing with his right hand while massaging his brow with the left. The raised bumps at the top of his forehead— just behind where his hairline would be if he didn’t shave his head bald—felt dry and scaly, as if he had some kind of rash. His probing fingers found a split in the skin, like a cut, but without blood.
His father climbed the stairs, clutching a forty-ounce beer bottle in his hand but paying attention to little else. Jesse, distracted by the bloodless slit in his scalp, bumped into his old man and knocked the bottle loose. It hit the stairs and toppled over, spilling the rest of the beer.
“What the hell!?” his father groused, his speech slurred. “You some kind of moron, boy?”
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