Fright Squad

by Flint Maxwell

  Slowly, the werewolf turned and faced us. I saw something in those eyes I’d never seen before. This werewolf wasn’t one who hated his condition, like the dozen or so men currently chained to chairs in the church’s basement. No. This was a werewolf who understood. Those eyes spoke volumes of evil. In their yellow pools, I saw the man Buddy once was, but I saw the werewolf, too, and the werewolf had pretty much completely taken over. The taste of blood and the freedom of being a beast was too sweet. This man would never go back to the way he’d been, and he was perfectly at peace with that.

  For a moment, I thought the beast was unbeatable.

  Then I remembered who I was and I knew that wasn’t true. I was my father’s son. I was Abraham Crowley, and no monster got the best of me.

  Not without me putting up a fight.

  Against all the fear telling me to run, I stayed true and didn’t flee.

  “Yeah, you, Fido. I’m talking to you,” Zack said.

  The werewolf’s lips peeled back in a snarl. The long, yellow fangs dripped saliva and what I thought of as blood.

  “Jesus, man, you ever hear of a toothbrush?” Zack fanned the air in front of his face.

  “Zack…” I whispered to my left. “Probably not a good idea to piss off the werewolf.”

  Then kicked myself for neglecting to add more to that previous statement, because Buddy was already pissed off.

  “When’s the last time you’ve been groomed?” Zack asked. Slowly, he was rising.

  My blood pumped at light speed.

  “Where’s your owner? You got a tag with your address on it?” he continued.

  Buddy growled again, this time revving up in intensity. His hind legs bent into a crouch. He was about to charge us.

  All I needed was a matador’s hat and a red cape and this crazy night would reach its apex.

  “What’s that?” Zack asked. “Is Timmy trapped in a well?”

  In my peripheral vision I saw Maddie going for her gun. If I looked directly at her, I’d give her away. If the werewolf heard her, which I’m almost certain he did, he gave no evidence.

  “I think you need to see the dentist,” Zack continued. The werewolf tilted his head, as if he expected him to go on. “Because one of your canines is loose.”

  “What are you trying to do, man?” I pleaded out of the corner of my mouth. “Kill him with terrible puns?”

  He ignored this. “Why don’t we take this fight back to the parking lot—or should I say barking lot?”

  Oh God, have mercy, I thought.

  Maddie stopped when she heard that one and glared at Zack. Yeah, it was that bad, but the werewolf was distracted.

  Still, he edged closer, his blade-like nails clicking on the asphalt. I could hear this over the roaring and straining chains in the basement below.

  I raised a hand.

  “Yeah, wait a minute,” Zack said. “Let’s just hit paws on this fight.”

  Cricket noises. Actual cricket noises.

  “We can still be buddies!” This time, Zack was making a play on his name.

  Again, no one laughed. I don’t think we could’ve laughed if we wanted to.

  Talking would only get us so far. So I decided it was time for me to be more than a pretty face, I figured it was time for the big guns, now. My grandpa had a dog who loved this chewed-up tennis ball so much that he slept with it, took it everywhere, saved a little dog chow for it. He was a weird dog, a beagle, I think, and whenever we’d have dinner over there, the dog would just beg and beg, sitting right below the table, looking at you with watery eyes. The only way he’d get the dog away from the table—other than caging him up, which only resulted in Floppy (the dog’s name, after his floppy ears) howling like a werewolf—was for Grandpa to take that tennis ball and go out to the back deck and fake throw it into the huge fenced-in backyard. Floppy would take off and look for the ball for literally hours. In hindsight, that was probably an asshole thing to do to a puppy.

  But not a werewolf.

  So, even though my grandfather was long gone, this trick brought him back to life. I reached in my pocket, pulling out nothing, of course, and said, “Oh, what do I have here?”

  The werewolf stopped—or pawsed, as Zack might’ve said—and looked at my closed hand.

  Slowly, I moved it around in a circle. He followed it with his yellow eyes.

  “Yeah. I got a nice tennis ball right here. All yours.” Then, I cocked my arm back and threw nothing. “Go get it!”

  The werewolf snapped his head and looked toward the sky, his eyes moving in the same arc as the fake ball would’ve moved. His ragged ears pricked up, expecting the sound of the ball coming back down to earth. When that didn’t happen, the werewolf turned his attention back toward me. His eyes said playtime was over. He meant to rip our innards out and use them as chew toys. Still, this worked! I couldn’t believe it.

  And it didn’t matter if playtime was over.

  Because Maddie sprang up. In her hand she held her gun. Thank God she had found it. I didn’t think Zack had anymore dog puns left in him.

  She whistled.

  The werewolf spun around too fast.

  Maddie was faster. She pulled the trigger three times. Each shot made me wince at their thunderous booms. Each shot was true. The werewolf had stood up on its hind legs, seemingly fifteen feet in height, and the bullets smacked him in the sternum with all the force of a speeding car. The first bullet landed and there was a spray of dark blood and the beast took a shaky step backward. Then came the second and third and in my head I was yelling TIMBER! And the werewolf hit the concrete hard enough to crack it.

  Slowly, like watching a time-lapse video, the werewolf vanished. The limbs shrank, the hair retracted into the skin, the muzzle shortened and changed into the crooked nose of a man with a scarred face. Lying there naked as the day he was born was the human form of this beast that had ripped the intestines out of a few Northington Springs guards and torn the arms and head off of a very unfortunate cab driver.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Zack got up and stood next to me. We looked down at this naked man with leaking holes inside of his chest.

  “Someone really should invent werewolf pants,” Zack said.

  “At least he’s hairy,” I added. “Can hardly see the goods and that’s good.”

  “The goods?” Zack shook his head. “Jesus, Abe.”

  “Uh, hello?” Maddie said. She hadn’t left the spot she fired from and she still held the gun in her hands, her shaking hands. Little puffs of smoke wafted up from the barrel and caught on the breeze, dispersing. “Can I get a ‘Good job, Maddie?’ or maybe a ‘Way to go!’?”

  “Fine shooting, Tex,” Zack said in a cowboy drawl that was really more antebellum than anything.

  “Thanks,” she replied unenthused.

  “Yeah, this would be the part where you tip the gun back and blow into the barrel,” Zack said.

  Maddie just shook her head, holstered the weapon, and walked over to us. “Well, now what?” she asked.

  “You teach Zack how to shoot,” I said. “Damn, Maddie.”

  She shrugged, smiling a little wider than before. “You know what I pictured?” she asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “My mom’s dog Kevin, that Golden Retriever,” Maddie said.

  Zack took a step back, eyes wide. “Whoa. You pictured a cute puppy when you were shooting a werewolf. What the hell, Maddie?”

  “No!” She shook her head. “I meant, I pictured him because I haven’t seen him in person. And he’s so gosh darn cute, I couldn’t die without seeing him, you know?”

  “Women,” Zack said.

  I smiled. “Whatever works, Maddie,” I said then looked back at the mess in front of us. “I guess we call headquarters and have them send over a cleanup crew again before the local police find their way over here. Man, they are gonna hate us. But I really don’t feel like explaining this, especially to Woodhaven cops.”

  Zack took his phone o
ut of his pocket. “Damn.” He raised it so we all could see.

  The screen had a crack shaped like a bolt of lightning through it. All part of the job. He was fortunate it was his cell that cracked and not his head.

  Although, with those terrible dog puns, I wasn’t so sure his head hadn’t cracked…

  “Don’t worry.” Maddie reached in her pocket for her own.

  And as she did this, the naked man’s corpse started wriggling.

  10

  The Penis-Tentacle

  Okay, so yeah, something wriggled.

  What the hell it was, we didn’t know.

  Maddie, as usual, was the reasonable one and took a step back.

  Zack and I didn’t—also per usual.

  Zack looked down at the naked man gyrating there in the cold moonlight and said, “Stop it. Hey, you! Stop! You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “He is dead,” Maddie said. She brought a hand up to her mouth and looked, for a second, like she was going to hurl.

  “Maybe when you die you hear music,” Zack said. “Salsa music.”

  “Dead people don’t dance,” I said. “And they don’t hear, either.”

  “Tell that to Chip.” Then Zack disappeared from my peripheral vision and reappeared seconds later. He had a stick in his hand. “I’m gonna poke him,” he said.

  This, of course, was majorly against protocol. But boys will be boys. When they see a dead thing, they must, according to every known law in the universe, poke it with a stick.

  “Don’t do that!” Maddie protested.

  Zack looked at me for approval. I shrugged. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I said.

  I now know that you shouldn’t say that. Ever. It’s also a universal rule that when making dumb decisions, if you say that, very bad things will happen.

  I continued with: “Can’t get much worse than being attacked by a werewolf, can it?”

  I now know to never say that, too. Of course it can get much worse. It always can. That was life in a nutshell.

  Now Zack shrugged. Maddie looked on with slight fascination, as if she wanted to poke the wiggling skin herself, but was too hung up on gender identities to do so.

  From the basement, those werewolves hadn’t stopped howling. I didn’t really notice them until they did stop, like how you don’t notice the air conditioner was running until it turns off.

  It was eerily quiet. Major emphasis on the eerily.

  Since the wolves had stopped their howling—yet another warning sign we should’ve took—we could hear the flesh moving, the slight creaking of something under Buddy’s skin, trying to get out.

  Zack poked a long tube near the guy’s stomach, which was bloating right before our eyes, and the tube retracted, only to pop up near his upper thigh. It looked like the bulging veins of a professional bodybuilder. Except, Buddy wasn’t anything special. He was of pretty average build. Still, he looked better than me, and that was a pretty crappy realization that a dead guy had a better body than I did. Anyway, did bodybuilders ever have veins that played peek-a-boo?

  I didn’t think so.

  “Sick,” Zack said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m gonna be. Come on, let’s go. We need to call this in to HQ,” Maddie said.

  But Zack and I were hardly listening. He poked at the vein-like thing and this time it stayed.

  “It’s hard,” Zack said. “Like a muscle or something.”

  About this time, the silence was really getting to me. I’d seen too many horror movies to fall for this classic mistake. A jump-scare was right around the corner, and I didn’t think it would be one of those cheap ones where a black cat runs out from under a bed and the music crescendos for no reason whatsoever. I thought it would be something major. The climax of the story. The final reveal of the monster that has been stalking the main character for the duration of the ninety minute runtime. I’ll tell you, it was a bad feeling.

  Again, I asked myself the question: How did we go from routine patrol jobs to slaying a she-vamp and one of Ohio’s worst werewolves in a single night? Not to mention all the stuff that happened at Val’s.

  Thy tentacles of death, she had said, her voice ringing in my head.

  That’s when I put two and two together.

  The vein-things weren’t veins at all.

  They were—

  “Is that a tentacle?” Zack was saying, and as he said this he must’ve put too much pressure on the stick because the dead guy’s skin split like ripping fabric.

  And the answer to his question was right there in the bloody mess.

  A tentacle flopped out from the torn seam of Buddy’s skin suit. It slapped wetly on the ground, left a trail of reddish-green slime.

  I was stunned. My muscles stopped working and I wondered if they truly ever had worked or if I could even call them muscles in the first place. So I couldn’t move. Believe me, I tried.

  It wasn’t the fact that I’d seen a tentacle come out of a dead guy. No. It was the fact that Val had been right. She was never right.

  But was the dead guy a void, the void she had seen?

  I was thinking of this when another tentacle burst from Buddy’s chest. The stink of his insides was thick on the air.

  Then another tentacle, this one the length of Buddy’s arm, joined the fun. It thumped the grass and wriggled through it like a preying snake.

  But it wasn’t over. Three tentacles wasn’t enough. I’m not even sure how they all fit inside of Buddy’s body. They seemed to be growing bigger by the second.

  The fourth, though—that was the cherry on top of this disgusting sundae. I’ll give you three guesses where this one came from.

  Fingers?

  Toes?

  Eyeballs?

  ERRR! Wrong!

  It came from Buddy’s flaccid penis. Now my frozen muscles began shaking as I stood there watching this dead man’s genitals move around like an out-of-control firehose, extending, extending, extending until it—

  SMACK!

  POW!

  Right in the kisser.

  Yep. It hit me in the face, like a pornographic sucker punch.

  Really, I was just glad my mouth wasn’t open.

  I vaguely remembered tasting blood as I fell.

  Zack was the next victim. He dodged the penis-tentacle, which didn’t look like a penis anymore—and I guess that was somehow scarier, not knowing which one was Buddy’s genitalia. But a different tentacle wrapped around his ankle and threw him up on the church’s roof. He landed with a clattering of shingles and a puff of dust. If I were him, I’d just stay up there.

  Maddie fired her gun, and I thought she was going to save me yet again, but only one of her shots registered, blowing a chunk of the greenish tube away, before another smacked her in the stomach and sent her skittering toward the tree line.

  I stood up on shaking legs, about to run for her. I really, really didn’t want my death certificate to read: Death by penis-tentacle.

  Plus, you know, I’d already slain a she-vamp and helped take down a werewolf that night. I saw nothing wrong with running. When one is scared, one runs. It was a basic law of the universe, this messed-up, virtually endless place we existed in.

  So that’s what I did.

  I got about three steps before I felt something warm and slimy through my pant leg. Then—

  I was yanked back. It was like a nightmare, where you’re running, pumping your legs as fast as you can but getting nowhere.

  I fell and the tentacle spun me around. I saw that there was now six of them. Thick ones came from the legs, skinnier ones from the arms, then the original one from the midsection, and finally the one from Buddy’s downstairs area, which—go figure—was the one currently wrapped around my windpipe, dragging me back to the torn carcass of the former werewolf.

  Still, penis-tentacle or not, I had to fight back. Running was out of the question now. With my free leg, I kicked the tentacle. It made a sound like squeaking rats. I didn’t even want t
o know what hole that sound came from.

  The grip loosened on me. I wasn’t completely free, but I did see my gun in the tall grass just a few feet out of my reach. I decided that’s what I was going to go for, even though I really should’ve grabbed it immediately after we had killed Buddy Wolverton.

  Scrambling, nearly falling on my face, I managed about three feet before the tentacle tightened and pulled me back.

  This time, it brought friends.

  The thicker ones from the legs reminded me of a tree’s roots. They coiled around my midsection, pinning my arms to the side of my body. Then the others perched like one of those Indian cobras out of a snake charmer’s basket.

  The way to make this worse was imagining they were snakes. Hands down. I hated snakes.

  As the hold on me grew tighter and tighter, I noticed something rising from the opening in Buddy’s midsection. It was a gelatinous purple glob. But the glob wasn’t a glob, I saw that pretty fast when a large eyelid peeled back and revealed the eye beneath.

  This giant eyeball looked at me, through me, all of the above, and then I got to thinking that I’d really hate for the last thing that I saw before I died to be this and a penis-tentacle. That would really suck, especially if it somehow wound up in my obituary: Abraham Crowley was last seen in the company of a weird alien and a penis-tentacle, both of which had become good friends to the deceased.

  Jesus Christ, my mind was running wild. I needed to get out of this before I blacked out.

  Still, I held on for a moment longer. The blackness of the world was becoming more and more complete. My own eyes felt like they would explode. My heartbeat slowed. Ears rang, a warm liquid oozed out of them. It couldn’t be anything else but blood.

  Maybe, I thought, I should’ve listened to my mom and never followed in my father’s footsteps.

  Maybe—

  “Abe!” it was Zack’s voice, calling from above.

  Suddenly, a great white light bathed me.

  “Move away from the light! Don’t go toward that light!” Zack yelled again and I thought: What a cliché!

  I heard the roaring of an engine and smelled the pungent scent of burning rubber and exhaust fumes, and that confused the hell out of me.