Red Rider's Hood

by Нил Шустерман

  Boom, Boom, Boom. The whole apartment shook with his pounding. I thought werewolves couldn't resist the urge to sleep after changing back to human! That's what Grandma had said. I had to think fast. I grabbed my mom's shower cap from the bathroom, and a pair of pink fuzzy slippers.

  Boom, Boom, Boom.

  I raced into my parents' room and pulled down the shades.

  Boom, Boom, Boom.

  I dove under the covers, pulling them tight around me.

  Boom, Boom, CRASH! The front door tore loose and smashed to the ground. I heard Cedric stomping around, until he appeared, a large silhouette in the doorway.

  "Red?"

  "How dare you break into our home!" I said in a high- pitched voice. "Red's not here. Now go away, you hoodlum, before I call the police!"

  Cedric slowly strode in. "So, you're Red's mother?"

  "I said leave!"

  Still Cedric strode closer. "My, my, ma'am. What big feet you have," he said. "You barely fit in those slippers of yours."

  "I'm warning you―I have nine-one-one on auto-dial."

  "My, my, ma'am," said Cedric. "What broad shoulders you have."

  "Runs in the family I'm picking up the phone."

  I reached for the phone, but Cedric grabbed it first. "My, my, ma'am, what nail-bitten fingers you have."

  "From worrying about my Little Red."

  Cedric hurled the phone across the room. It shattered against the wall in a hundred pieces. Then he grabbed the cov­ers, tore them off, and pulled off my shower cap.

  "I knew it!" he said. "You're busted!"

  I braced for the last and most painful moment of my life.

  "After what you did last night you think you can just go back home, like nothing happened?"

  I said nothing.

  "You saved my life, man!" Cedric said. "That changes every­thing."

  Saved his life? I was still speechless, but now for a whole dif­ferent reason.

  "The way you stopped Marvin's sister when she was about to silverize me. The way you knocked down your own grandma when she was about to get A/C. You showed true loyalty, man. True loyalty."

  He thought I was shooting at Marissa! He had no idea I had been aiming at him. I couldn't believe it! I didn't know whether to laugh, or barf.

  "You were right―there were dozens of hunters, coming after us from all directions. Little red laser spots everywhere! We should have been more careful."

  I tried to speak, but my voice came out squeaky, like I was still imitating my mother. I cleared my throat and tried again. "How many Wolves did they get?"

  "Too many." Cedric shook his head angrily, his hands balled into fists. He smashed a hole in the wall, then recited the list of those who got silverized. The honored dead. Warhead, Roswell, the Tank . . . eight in all.

  "So there's still fourteen left," I said.

  Cedric smiled in spite of his anger. "Fifteen," he said. "Tonight, you get made―and you'll be a full-fledged werewolf."

  I suppressed a shiver. "Just what I've always wanted."

  "I know."

  "What about Marvin? What happened to him?"

  Cedric's face went red. I thought he might punch another hole in the wall. "That low-life stinking traitor knows better than to show his ugly face around here again. His sister joins the wolf hunters, and he saves her, instead of fighting for us. Don't you worry, Red―we'll find Marvin, and when we do, he's gonna suffer for what he did last night." Cedric took a deep breath, releasing his anger with it.

  I thought back to the fight the night before, and how it ended. If I was on Cedric's good side, maybe I could ask about it.

  "Cedric―I saw something strange last night. Even stranger than a pack of werewolves, I mean. Whatever it was, it flew over my head."

  "We'll talk about that later," he said. "You deserve to know, and so you will know."

  Then Cedric clamped his hand down on my shoulder like a brother. "Last night I learned who my true friends are." He grabbed my hand and pressed a set of keys into them. "You did good, Red. You take your car back―it don't matter if your grandma sees you riding around in it now, since she already knows you're on our side. And if there's anything else you want, all you gotta do is ask."

  I couldn't believe my luck. In one minute I went from being werewolf chow to being a decorated hero. I was behind the wheel of my car again, and I was so tempted to take off and leave all of this behind. The car was full of gas, and I had good reason to leave . . . but that meant I was leaving Marissa and Grandma at the mercy of the Wolves. Or was it the Wolves being left at their mercy? After all, they had taken out eight of them without my help, making the Wolves think there were dozens of hunters on their tail.

  But running away was something I had never done. It just wasn't in me. In the end, I drove around town until I had the feel of my Mustang again. Driving around town gave me a little bit of comfort. A sense of my territory. Then I went to the Wolves' new hangout, which Cedric had told me about. It was one Grandma didn't know about, and I'm sure the Wolves weren't too happy about its location, because it was beyond Abject End Park, smack in the heart of the Canyons. Apparently we had permission from the Crypts to be there, thanks to my little mission of diplomacy last week.

  Dead storehouses and factories loomed above me, as they had the last time I ventured into the Canyons, but this time I had wheels. Cedric had claimed an extinct dance club as our new hangout. Dust covered a wooden dance floor. A disco ball still hung at its center. Chairs and tables were stacked and pushed to the side. Some tables still had salt-and-pepper shak­ers, left exactly as they had been the day the club closed, prob­ably long before I born.

  "We'll lick our wounds, and we'll go out again tonight," Cedric told us. "We'll do it in spite of the hunters." And then he said, "I want them to know they've failed."

  The others all sat in groups, some still sleeping off the night, others reliving the worst of it. Through all of this, Loogie sat off in the corner by himself, not talking, not wanting to be near any of us. He watched. Not just watched, but leered. I could feel his eyes like they were drilling holes in everyone he looked at, as if he was looking at the world through a new, more intense set of eyes.

  I went over to him and sat down next to him. He didn't say anything for a while.

  "Freaky," he finally said. Nothing else. Just "Freaky."

  "What's freaky?"

  "Everything," he said. I noticed that he looked even paler than he had the day before. I wondered if there was some werewolf sickness going around that I didn't know about. His skin was downright pasty. Almost green.

  "Where's Cedric?"

  "Negotiating," was all he said.

  I turned away from him for just a second, and when I turned back, he wasn't there anymore. Instead, he was sitting on the other side of me.

  "What the . . ."

  "See, didn't I tell you? Freaky."

  A/C came to sit down next to us. "Man, Loogie, you got that Bobby Tanaka look." At the mention of Bobby Tanaka, a couple of the other guys came over.

  Loogie gave a bitter laugh. "Oh, I guess you could say that."

  I glanced around, and no one was saying anything. No one could even look at one another. "What happened to Bobby Tanaka, anyway?" I asked. "And don't give me that 'some things are worse than death' line, because I don't buy it."

  No one would talk.

  "I don't know," said Moxie.

  "Me neither," said El Toro. "It happened before most of us became Wolves."

  "I know," said Loogie.

  All eyes turned to him.

  "Don't talk about it," said A/C. "Cedric hates when anyone talks about it."

  Loogie shrugged, not caring. "But Cedric's not here, is he? And even if he was, not even he can stop me now."

  By this point most of the remaining Wolves had pulled up chairs. It was like Loogie's presence was a black hole in the room, drawing everyone to him. I wondered if it was just my imagination.

  "It happened a couple of ye
ars ago, when the Wolves were just starting out," Loogie began. "There were about ten of us then. Cedric didn't like the idea that there was another gang in town almost as powerful as us. He was just as power hungry then as he is now. He decided we should make the Canyons our territory, too, and take on the Crypts. So one full moon, already in werewolf form, we stormed into the Canyons. But the farther down the abandoned old streets we got, the denser the fog got. It wasn't a normal fog. It was thick and stunk like swamp rot. It wasn't a city smell―it was unnatural, like the whole place was built on rotting dirt from some other dark, faraway place." Loogie turned to me. "A stench like that is unbearable to a werewolf," he explained. "We got supersensi­tive noses. Anyway, the smell was so strong it made us howl in agony. That's when they came. Dropping down from the ledges of the old burned-out factories."

  "The Crypts?" Moxie asked.

  "Bats. Dozens of bats, swarming us, clawing at us, screech­ing in our ears, but no matter how fast we moved to swat them away, they were faster. In the end, they attacked one of us, and only one. A dozen of them bit into Bobby Tanaka. Why they chose him, I don't know. They could have gone after any of us, but he was just the unlucky one."

  By now everyone in the room was listening to him. I was so drawn into Loogie's tale, I couldn't look away.

  "If you think nothing can scare a werewolf, you're wrong, because when one of those bats turned into a girl―you've never heard wolf howls so loud. It was Rowena, the Crypts' leader. She just stood there, smiling at us as the bats behind her drained every last bit of Bobby Tanaka's blood in a minute flat. Then Rowena turned back into a bat herself and flew off with the rest of them."

  "Wow," was all I could say.

  "That's not the worst of it," said A/C, picking up the story. "The Crypts drained his blood and left him there wailing in agony, because, see, he was a werewolf―he couldn't die . . . But to be alive without any blood left inside you . . . it was hor­rible. He said it felt like someone had sliced open his gut and sewn it full of stones."

  Some of the other Wolves reached down to their own stom­achs and held them, as if they could feel a gut full of stones themselves.

  "It went on like that for two days," A/C said, "with Bobby screaming in pain, until Cedric finally silverized him, to put him out of his misery. We all knew the Crypts had done it as a warning. 'Mess with us, and you'll all end up like Bobby.' So we never messed with them again."

  "Until now," said Loogie, and pulled down the collar of his shirt to show two little puncture marks on his neck. Everyone gasped.

  "So how come you're not screaming, Loogie?" asked one of the others. "If the Crypts got you, how come you didn't end up like Bobby?"

  "Vampires got a choice," Loogie said. "Just like we do. We can eat our prey, or we can just bite 'em, and turn them into a werewolf." Then Loogie pulled down the collar of his shirt a little farther to show two more bites, just beneath the first. "Three bites over three nights and poof! You're a vampire, too."

  The room was silent, until I spoke. "So . . . it was you I saw last night. That flying fox!"

  "No way."

  "That's crazy!"

  "You're joking, Loogie, right?"

  Loogie shook his head. "Want me to 'wing' right here in front of you? That's what they call turning into a bat―'wing­ing.'"

  But no one wanted to see it. We believed.

  "So, Loogie," asked A/C, "are you a werewolf now, or a vampire?"

  "He's both," said Cedric. We turned to see him standing behind us. "He's what the Mexicans call a chupacabra. The strength of a werewolf, the power of a vampire, able to change at will and fly all night long."

  The Wolves looked at Cedric in amazement.

  "How come Loogie gets to fly?" asked A/C. "Why not me?"

  "Yeah, why not us?" complained the others.

  "Don't worry," said Cedric. "I've been working things out with the Crypts. Thanks to a new pact between them and us, in a few days we're all going to be just like Loogie."

  18

  "Which side are you on?"

  What do you do if you're a kid living in Pearl Harbor, and you just happen to pick up a message on your walkie-talkie that the Japanese are going to be attacking tomorrow? What if those same Japanese pilots had taken you in and made you their friend?

  I had this massive bit of knowledge that no one else knew. Cedric was building himself an army―not just werewolves, but vampire werewolves! I mean, how do you kill a vampire werewolf? A silver stake through the heart? What would happen if Cedric got his way, and he started sending the surviving pack members to distant cities, with the power of flight, and a hunger not only for flesh, but for blood? The whole pack was excited about the thought, thrilled by it. . . and the thing is, so was I. As much as I wanted to stop it before it started, I wanted to fly like Loogie did. I wanted to know the hunger, and the feeling of satisfying it.

  Back in my car, I drove aimlessly, breaking all the rules I had learned in Driver's Ed. Finally, exhausted beyond belief, I pulled over in a parking lot, leaned my head against the wheel, and closed my eyes, trying to sort out my thoughts. Good and evil, right and wrong, had all blended into a murky gray haze.

  The next thing I remember, I was turning down Forest Boulevard and parking out in front of Grandma's. I didn't know what I would tell her, but I felt sure I would have the words once I found her.

  Her door was unlocked. That wasn't a good sign. Carefully I went in. "Grandma?"

  I felt that strange surge of deja vu―this was exactly as it had been on the day Cedric lay hidden in her bed and stole that bag of blood money.

  "Grandma?"

  I pushed open the door to her room. This time no one was in the bed―not Grandma, not Cedric, nobody.

  "Grandma, are you here? We have to talk. It's important!"

  It was getting dark very quickly. Night was falling like a cur­tain over the day, or maybe it was just the dense trees outside. On Grandma's nightstand sat a glass, and in that glass sat her gross old dentures, all magnified by the water inside. Then a shaft of light pierced a slit in the curtains. It was the moon. It was already night, and the full moon was rising! The moonlight hit the glass, and right before my eyes, the teeth in that glass began to change. They stretched and grew, the canines elongating, getting sharp, and growing until the horrible dentures were so big, they broke the glass.

  I couldn't scream, I couldn't breathe, then the bathroom door slammed open, and out loped a werewolf, with big, frizzy gray fur and old familiar eyes.

  "Been waiting for you, Red," the Grandma-wolf said. "Glad you came by." She picked up the wolf chompers lying on the table and stuck them into her toothless, wolfen mouth.

  "There we are," she said, baring her teeth. "The better to eat you with!"

  She lunged at me, I screamed, and wham―

  —I bumped my head on the steering wheel of my Mustang.

  I jumped, still reeling, still believing that the dream was real. It took a few good minutes for me to convince myself that I was still there, in the parking lot, at the wheel of my Mustang, and not at Grandma's house.

  As I caught my breath, and shook off the evil feel of the night­mare, I realized that part of the dream was real. The part about the moon... because it was night, the full moon was on the rise, and I could already hear the far-off howls of wolves on the prowl.

  The battery on my watch had died, so I had no idea what time it was, but time didn't matter to me anymore―not in the nor­mal sense. All that mattered was that the moon was full, and it was night, which meant that every second was an eternity, and dawn was a lifetime away.

  The howls echoed from the faces of buildings, making it hard to tell which direction they came from, and as I drove, turning corner after corner, I felt like I was chasing my own tail. And then I thought, Pretty soon, I will have a tail, if Cedric bites me. The thought was so powerful, it took my mind off the road, and before I knew what was happening, I barreled through a red light, and a Mercedes came flying out of the
intersection, right into my path.

  I slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel to the right. A horn blared, and I missed the Mercedes by inches, but I was still careening out of control. I hit the curb, pedestrians scat­tered, and I plowed over an empty bus-stop bench.

  No! No, not now! I can't have an accident now!

  If this morning had blessed me with good luck, tonight was cursing me with bad. I threw the car into reverse, but the wheels just spun. I put it into drive, but that didn't help either. I hopped out of the car to see green radiator fluid pouring out, and the broken bench wedged under the car in such a way that only one of the four wheels was actually touching the ground.

  My car! My beautiful car!

  But no, I couldn't worry about the car now. Was that a dis­tant scream I heard? A woman attacked by a wolf? Was it just my imagination?

  "You all right, son?" said an old man from the group of gawking pedestrians.

  "Get out of the streets!" I told them all. "Get to your homes before it's too late!" But they just stared at me like I was insane. Nothing I could do would convince them of the danger. Now, with my car useless, I took off on foot.

  I ran till I was out of breath, and further, to the very end of my endurance. Sweat poured from me like rain, and a heavi­ness filled my lungs. My head began to spin, but I had to push myself on. I heard another howl, not so distant this time. A snarl―it could have been around the next corner. I had lost track of where I was, and realized I had no weapon―even if I found the Wolves, what could I do? Talk them out of devouring innocent people? As if they would actually listen. It's what werewolves did―it's what they were. Predators. The only way to stop a predator was to cage it or kill it, and I don't think there were any bars in the world strong enough to cage in Cedric and his gang.

  If you can't beat them, join them, said a nagging voice in my head. It's what they want. It's what you want. Don't deny it!

  I put my hands against my head, trying to press the voice away, but it was too deep in me now. It's out of your hands, the voice said. Let nature take its course. And accept your true nature. You're one of them. You've been one of them since the moment you stepped into Troll Bridge Hollow.