Red Rider's Hood

by Нил Шустерман

  I threw up my hands. "Fine, whatever you say. But until we know what he's up to, let's not tell him what we're up to."

  I thought she'd put up an argument, but instead she agreed. Across the street, Marvin honked the horn impatiently.

  "You'd better go so I can lock up," Marissa said.

  "I still need the skull."

  She pulled it out again and handed it to me. I put it in the empty chip bag, which I tucked under my arm.

  "When will I get it back?" she asked.

  "I don't know. But if you're lucky, you'll end up with a few more for your collection."

  It turns out that the Wolves had more than one hangout. They kept themselves mobile so no one would know exactly where they were at any given time. The manager of the Cave was of no help. He didn't know a thing, but I knew someone who would.

  As I had predicted, Cedric's sister, Tina, was playing yet another game on the sidewalk of their apartment building. The rain had let up by dusk, and she was out there with a big red ball, bouncing it in puddles, getting her white socks spotted with mud.

  "Where's your brother?" I asked her.

  "Ain't gonna tell."

  "But I'm a friend now."

  "You might be a friend, or you might be a fool. So which is it?"

  "A little bit of both," I told her.

  She looked at the bag in my hands. "That looks too heavy to be a bag of chips," she said. She was way too smart for a seven-year-old. If she ever joined a gang, we were all in for trouble. When I didn't say anything, she bounced her ball up and down, splattering me with puddle water. She bounced it under her leg, then back again, and said in a singsong voice: "Little Red, Little Red, what's in the chip bag, Little Red?"

  And in the same singsong voice I answered, "Nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all but your grandpa's head."

  That made her miss the ball, and it went bouncing across the street, almost getting nailed by a passing car.

  "You're not funny," she said. "Now go get my ball."

  "Tell me where Cedric is, and I'll get your ball," I told her. "Unless, of course, you want me to tell Cedric you showed dis­respect to a Wolf."

  She looked at me, a little afraid to tell me, and a little bit afraid not to. "He's in the Troll Bridge Hollow," she said. "Now go get my ball before I tell my mama you been teasing me."

  9

  Troll Bridge Hollow

  Nightshade Boulevard ran into Bleakwood, and Bleakwood ran into Troll. Troll Street went over the river. The Troll Street Bridge was an old gray monster: an iron suspension bridge, with two towers rising like twin tombstones, cables spun like spiderwebs between them. It stretched across the mile-wide river, making you think there was a way out of the city. Like maybe if you crossed it you might find life a little bit easier. But, as everyone knew, when you got to the other side off the Troll Street Bridge, all you found was more of the same.

  The bridge itself was the sort of crumbling mess that always seemed minutes away from plunging into the river. Whole chunks of the roadway had fallen away, and you could actually see the river through the potholes. Beneath the roadway, where the bridge touched shore, was a walled-in space at least fifty feet high. In that stone wall beneath the bridge was a single steel door. For as long as I can remember, and before that I'm sure, there were stories about what was behind that door. Some people said there were bodies hidden there, back from the gangster days before even Grandma was born. Others said it was full of gold stolen from Fort Knox. Still others whispered that it held secret stockpiles of nuclear weapons the govern­ment had forgotten about.

  But the truth was worse than any of that. Troll Bridge Hol­low was a werewolf lair.

  If there was a secret knock, I didn't know it, so I just pounded on the door until I heard heavy bolts sliding on the other side.

  The door creaked open, and in the dim light I saw a pair of eyes, pupils open all the way, like a cat at night.

  "Who told you to come here?" It was one of the many Wolves I didn't know.

  "I told myself," I said. Although this guy was much bigger than me, I wasn't going to let myself feel threatened. Rule of the jungle: Don't show fear unless you want to be lunch.

  "Let him in," I heard Cedric say from somewhere in the darkness of the hollow.

  The guy looked at me with a menacing glare.

  "You heard him, let me in."

  He grunted and stepped aside. I went in and he closed the door behind me. The metallic boom of the closing door echoed in the vast hollow chamber beneath the bridge.

  The place had a gamy, damp smell, like wet dog and mildew. It took my eyes a while to adjust, and when they did, I could see that the chamber was full of high brick arches that disap­peared into hazy darkness above. I could hear the buzz of traf­fic on the bridge overhead. The only light came from a TV in the corner, and around it the Wolves stretched out on old couches, watching some bloody action film.

  "Our new pledge wants to hang with us," Cedric's voice boomed. He didn't bother to get up from his comfortable couch. "Should we let him?"

  "Only if he lets me use him as a footstool," said a kid called A/C, who I guessed was Cedric's second in command. I don't know what his real name was―everyone called him A/C because he always claimed to be "too cool for the room."

  Cedric laughed. "You heard him, Red. Go be a footstool."

  "Nobody uses me as a footstool."

  Cedric's eyes turned from the TV and looked at me, meaner than I thought they could get. "You're a pledge. That means you gotta do whatever we tell you until you're a full-fledged Wolf." Then he grinned a nasty grin. "Or would you rather run crying to your grandma?"

  "He knows our hangout," said another voice in the dark­ness. "If he tells her . . ."

  "He won't," said Cedric. "See, we keep a watch on that old witch. If she starts sniffing around here, we'll know Red told her, and that will be the end of Red's story."

  I tried not to think about what end Cedric had in mind.

  "Do you want to see what I brought you, or not?" I said impatiently.

  Finally he got up and stalked toward me. He glanced down at the bag in my hands. "For me? And it ain't even Christmas." A few of the other guys laughed. Not because it was funny, but because Cedric thought it was. Cedric was the kind of guy who had to have his own private laugh track cackling behind his jokes.

  "So, what is it?" he asked. "And it better be more than just chips."

  I held the bag up to him. "See for yourself."

  He took the bag, threw me a suspicious glance, then tried to look inside, but it was too dark. So he reached in, felt around a bit, and his hand came out holding a human skull. He yelped in surprise and dropped it to the musty ground.

  "You think that's funny?" Cedric barked.

  "Nothing funny about it," I told him. "Take a good look at it. Tell me if it looks familiar, because it should."

  By now all the rest of the Wolves had crowded around. Cedric picked up the skull.

  "Is it someone I should know?"

  "It's your grandpa."

  I watched as a whole busload of emotions drove by on Cedric's face. By the time the bus had passed, I could tell he believed me.

  "Where did you get this?" he asked through gritted teeth.

  Well, I couldn't tell him the truth―but I had a better story anyway, and I knew I could sell it, because lately I'd become a real good liar.

  "Where do you think I got it?" I said. "I stole it from my grandma. She had it hanging on the wall like a trophy, in that secret room where she keeps all her werewolf-hunting stuff."

  The Wolves all murmured, cursing in awe and anger. Cedric screwed his lips into a scowl. "That old woman is going down! I won't even wait until the full moon."

  "Bad idea," I said. "If you do that, you'll never get all the others."

  Cedric looked at me with suspicion written all over his face. "What others?"

  "You know . . . The C.W.H."

  He gave me a blank look.

&
nbsp; "The Confederacy of Werewolf Hunters," I explained. "They're coming into town during the next full moon. They mean to get rid of all of you." And then I corrected myself. "All of us, I mean."

  The Wolves all looked at one another, whispering worry. Cedric snapped his fingers to shut them up.

  "It ain't gonna happen," Cedric said. "Because Red here is going to feed us information and let us know their every move, so we can attack first. Isn't that right, Red?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I thought you wanted me to be a footstool."

  "You do this right," Cedric said, "and I'll make A/C into your footstool."

  "Hey!" said A/C.

  "Shut up!" said Cedric.

  I paused for effect. "Okay, I'll do it," I told him. "On one condition."

  "What's the condition?"

  "That my grandma doesn't end up in a werewolf's belly."

  Cedric looked at me, then broke out laughing. At first I wasn't sure what his laughter meant. The rest of the Wolves didn't know, either, but they laughed along with him anyway.

  "We got ourselves a master negotiator here!" he said.

  "Yeah―maybe we oughta send him to negotiate with the Crypts," snorted Loogie. That brought another round of laugh­ter. The Crypts were the all-girl gang whose turf was way across town. Scary bunch, from what I'd heard.

  "So," said Cedric, "Little Red's willing to sell out his grandma's life's work in exchange for her life."

  "She's a crazy old woman," I told him, "but she's still my grandma, and I want her to live. If you get rid of all her werewolf-hunting friends, you won't have to get rid of her, because she'll be powerless."

  Cedric began to pace the big space of the Troll Bridge Hol­low, weaving in and out of his pack of Wolves. "Sure," he said. "I'll make her watch all her friends get eaten, and then make her watch as you turn into a werewolf right before her eyes. You're right, Red―letting her live will be a much better revenge. It'll be sweet."

  He grinned at A/C, and although A/C grinned back, he looked a little worried―like maybe he really would end up being my footstool.

  Cedric pointed at me. "You go back to your grandma, but keep your eyes and ears open. Then report back to me."

  "I'll be your man on the inside." I turned to go, but Cedric called to me.

  "Hey, Red!"

  When I turned back to him, something was flying through the air toward me. I snapped my hand up to catch it, and the second it hit my hand, jingling slightly, I knew what it was. My car keys.

  "It's parked near the corner of Moat Street and Troll," said Cedric.

  I clasped the keys in my hand and felt my heart speed to near breaking. I had my Mustang back! I could have just walked right out of there, gone to my car, and driven off into the sun­set, but instead, I threw the keys back to Cedric. "If Grandma sees me with the Mustang, she'll be suspicious. She'll wonder how I got it back. Best if you keep it, and we play enemies for a while."

  Cedric smiled. "Red," he said, "I think you might just be too smart for your own good!"

  10

  "The way of the wild is our way, too"

  I got to know all of the Wolves by name―or at least by the nicknames Cedric had given them. There was Warhead, who was always ready for a fight. There was the kid with a head shaped kind of like an alien's, called Roswell. There was El Toro, Moxie, and the kid named Sherman, who everyone called "the Tank"―twenty-two in all. By the end of my first week, I knew where most of them lived, and they knew where I spent my time, too, because there was always someone tailing me. Cedric wasn't about to trust me entirely―not considering my family tree―so lessons with Grandma on the craft of wolf hunting had to be in short sessions so as to not arouse suspicion.

  "Twenty-two Wolves are gonna be hard to put down for a boy, a girl, and an old woman," Grandma said one afternoon. "Especially if we got no master plan."

  Grandma was big on "master plans." Me, my plans kind of came to me in spurts. I liked it that way. It kept me on my feet, able to move with the flow of things. But lately that flow was taking some strange new directions.

  "It's a dangerous game you're playing, Red," she was always telling me. But at the same time I could see a glimmer of admi­ration in her eyes. Like tricking Cedric made me worthy of being her grandson.

  By the end of the second week, I was the Wolves' official errand boy. They laughed and called me "the Wolverine," like I was a werewolf Cub Scout. I guess they didn't know that a wolverine could be fiercer than a wolf.

  All that time I was learning things I couldn't have learned any other way. Like which famous citizens from history had been werewolves (like Frank Sinatra), and how that crazy old woman with the golf-ball eyes managed to get a lock of his hair (you don't want to know).

  On the night when the moon had slimmed to a dying cres­cent in the sky, Cedric took the gang up to the roof of his apart­ment building, to get away from the heat and humidity that fell on the city like a hot, sopping rag. There was something the others didn't like about going up there. I could tell from the moment Cedric kicked open the door to the roof.

  There were a bunch of chairs thrown around up there, still wet from an afternoon rain. In a corner was an old, rusty weight set, and I almost laughed at the thought that werewolves needed to pump iron. Rather than moving into standard hang poses, the Wolves just waited at the door. Loogie coughed up a wad and spat it, hitting Klutz's shoe. They fought about it until Cedric shouted at them, and they stopped.

  I didn't like this. I didn't like the way they were all acting, like they were scared of something up here. Just then Cedric came up behind me and kicked me to the ground.

  "Ow!" I scraped my arm on the gritty tar paper of the roof.

  "The Wolverine's gotta toughen himself up," Cedric said. I tried to get up, and he put a foot on my chest, pushing me down again.

  "You want my help, stop treating me like an animal."

  "We're the animals," he said. "But you haven't earned your fangs yet."

  I got up and readied myself for the next blow. "So I gotta let you beat me up? That's how I earn my fangs?"

  A/C came forward. "The pack leader's gotta show his dom­inance," he said. "The way of the wild is our way, too."

  "He fought us all up here," said Marvin, smiling like he couldn't wait to see me beaten to a pulp.

  Cedric spun and did a roundhouse kick, smashing me in the side of the head. It would have been more lethal if he actually knew karate, but even so, it was pretty painful. It knocked me to my knees, but I got right back up. He tried it again, but this time I caught his leg and pushed him back.

  The other Wolves backed away. The Wolf everyone called El Toro came up to me and whispered, "Don't fight back. Just take it."

  Sorry, but that just wasn't the way I was made.

  Cedric lunged at me. I stepped aside and threw my fist into his gut. It hurt him, because he wasn't ready, but he tried not to show it. He punched me in the stomach twice as hard, then grabbed me before I could double over from the pain. He lifted me off the ground, and before I knew it, I couldn't see ground beneath me at all―just air. He was holding me by the front of my shirt out over the edge of the fifteen-story roof. I couldn't see his eyes in the dim rooftop light, but I could hear his fury. It came in snarling breaths.

  "You hit me!" he growled. "After all I've done for you, you hit me!"

  "Self-defense," I said. I tried to squirm out of his grip, and then I realized how stupid that would be―if he lost his grip, I'd fall to my death. The panic was welling up inside of me like a bad school lunch. I tried to speak again, but only a pitiful squeak came out.

  "Cedric, don't!" yelled A/C. "He's not a Wolf yet! He'll die!"

  A sneaker slipped from my foot, but I never heard it hit the ground, because the ground was so far away. I could still hear the wild snarl in Cedric's voice. "Do you know what happens when one of us falls from this roof?"

  "What?" I squeaked out, figuring that if he keeps talking, he's not dropping.

  "I
knocked Loogie off a few weeks ago," Cedric said. "Accident."

  Yeah, right, I thought. Like Hiroshima was an accident. It seemed to me Cedric liked to use Loogie for experiments, like seeing what would happen if a werewolf fell off a roof.

  "He landed flat on his back, got broken up real bad."

  "Yeah," said Klutz. "It turned him into a sidewalk Loogie."

  That started Klutz and Loogie fighting again.

  "It sure did hurt, but he healed in a few days," Cedric said. "Werewolves do. But you won't."

  "Drop me, and you lose your edge on the hunters," I told him.

  "Beg," he demanded. "Beg me not to kill you."

  I flashed to the time he had choked me, and I gave up Grandma's money to save myself. Money's one thing, but self-respect is another. I don't beg. Not even for my life. So I whis­pered so only Cedric could hear, "I think you showed enough dominance."

  I thought he'd either drop me or throw me back onto the roof. Instead, he set me gently back on my feet. His rage had passed like a summer thunderhead, all rained out before you could find an umbrella.

  "Good for you, Wolverine," he said. "You're one step closer."

  "He didn't bleed! He didn't bruise!" Marvin complained. "Not even a black eye!"

  "You got a problem?" yelled Cedric. "Maybe you want to take a flying leap today?"

  That shut Marvin up. The other Wolves came up around me, to congratulate me for passing Cedric's test―I guess the only rule for passing is that you survive. They patted me on the back, they gave me the secret handshake. It took the edge off the anger I felt toward Cedric. In fact, in spite of what I had just been through, I felt an odd sense of accomplishment. A sense of pride.

  But I'm just pretending to be one of them, aren't I? Aren't I?

  Still, I didn't tell Grandma or Marissa about what happened on that roof.

  I didn't see much of Marissa during my first two weeks as a Wolf pledge because Cedric kept me so busy. I went to the antique shop when I could, but the owner was there most of the time, or there were customers, so Marissa and I couldn't really talk. We did get to sit and eat hot dogs one evening on the end of a pier. We had to meet there because it was the only place I knew I could go where a spying Wolf couldn't get close enough to listen.