by Jeff Strand
He hit Ivan, several times, but the pain kept coming. He punched and clawed and kicked in blind panic, thinking that this might be the end because suddenly time seemed to be creeping along as if in a weird dream and he could see a few droplets of his own blood flying into the air in slow motion, almost a beautiful thing, yet his life wasn't flashing before his eyes, and wasn't that supposed to happen when you were moments away from death?
Time sped up with a jolt.
Ivan howled and clutched at his eye. Lou had gotten the son of a bitch. Incredible.
Lou scooted away, forcing himself not to completely lose it over the sight of so much of his own blood. Ivan removed his hand from his eye. Instead of the gooey orb dripping jelly that Lou hoped for, his eye was just dark red. Not punctured. Not a fight-ending injury by any stretch of the imagination.
Lou got up, elated that he wasn't hurt badly enough to simply lie bleeding to death on the kitchen floor, and rushed for the food preparation counter. He saw a flash of metal. A meat cleaver.
He grabbed the meat cleaver and slammed it into Ivan's chest. The blade sunk in deep. He wrenched it out and slammed it in again. Got him in the heart.
A wave of pain shot through his arm as he pulled the blade out again. Holding the handle of the meat cleaver with both hands and swinging it like a baseball bat, Lou smacked the blade across Ivan's throat, trying to chop his fucking head right off.
Ivan threw his head back and howled as a geyser of blood spewed forth. The cut was so deep that he shouldn't even be able to howl, not with severed vocal chords.
Lou swung again but missed as Ivan pushed past him and raced for the swinging door. Lou flung the meat cleaver at him. It sailed through the air, rotating end over end, and hit Ivan in the back--unfortunately, handle-first. The kitchen implement dropped to the floor as Ivan threw open the door, now ripping it completely off its hinges, and rushed back into the main part of the bar.
Lou heard a cry of "Shit!" that obviously came from George.
He glanced down at himself and wished he hadn't. Ivan had gotten him good in a couple of places, and there were several other small gouges that would have, at another time, ruined his entire day. But he'd worry about that later.
He ran out into the main tavern area just as George tossed the silver ring-lined blanket over Ivan. George struggled to get the blanket completely over him, but could only get it over his head, and as Ivan violently thrashed, even that bit of progress looked extremely temporary.
"Lou, get over here, you lazy fuck!" George shouted.
Moving as quickly as he could, which wasn't all that fast anymore, Lou ran over to help his partner. George now had Ivan in a bear hug from behind and clutched the blanket tightly in his fists, and though he wasn't coming close to holding Ivan in place, he did seem to be successfully steering the werewolf in an awkward stumble toward the exit.
The blanket was already soaked red.
Lou reached them just as the werewolf changed direction, claws slashing through the air as he struggled to get free. Lou stuck out his foot. Ivan lost his balance and fell to the floor, with George landing on top of him.
He'd actually tripped a werewolf. Holy shit. Something new to add to his resume.
"He's getting loose!" George shouted. "Don't let him get away!"
Lou kicked Ivan in the head, as hard as he possibly could.
"Do it again! Do it again!"
Lou did it again. He wasn't sure if it was the slit throat or the silver rings or both, but Ivan did seem to be legitimately weakened. A few stomps on his head and they might be able to drag him back out to the van and--
"Get away from it!"
Two cops stood at the broken window, guns raised. Young guys, one black, one white, and both quite visibly horrified by the grisly and absurd scene in front of them. Mutilated corpses, two blood-covered thugs, and a thrashing werewolf with a blanket over its head.
"Everything's okay!" George insisted.
"Get away from it!" the white cop repeated.
Are the cops seriously trying to save Ivan? Lou wondered, incredulous. Then he realized that, no, they were trying to save him and George from the homicidal beast.
"We can't do that! But you could help us hold him down!"
The cops exchanged an uncertain glance. Lou didn't blame them. He sure as hell wouldn't come through that window if he were them.
"Get away!" said the black cop. "We'll shoot it!"
"Bullets don't hurt it!"
"Of course bullets hurt it!"
Lou vigorously shook his head. "No, they don't!"
Ivan pushed himself up and almost got out from underneath George, but they managed to keep him on the floor. The blanket was dripping. George punched him in the back of the head. "Shouldn't he be out of goddamn blood by now?"
The cops remained at the window. The white one put a walkie-talkie to his mouth. "Dispatch, where the hell is that backup?"
Lou felt the werewolf slipping away. Oh, crap, we're losing him...we're losing him...
"Get over here and help us!" Lou shouted to the cops. At this point, getting arrested was a minor concern. If the cops dragged Ivan away, Lou and George might be able to take advantage of the distraction to get away and live out the rest of their years as hermits.
The cops, apparently not being complete idiots, remained where they were.
Ivan shook his head from side to side, shaking off most of the blanket. Lou felt himself start to panic. They definitely weren't going to be able to hold him. "Throw me some handcuffs!" Did cops use handcuffs anymore, or was it just those plastic things?
George angrily reached into his pocket, pulled out his keys, and slammed one deep into the back of Ivan's neck. "Stop moving, damn it!"
Ivan stood up part of the way. George remained clamped onto his back for about a second, as if going for a piggyback ride, and then Ivan bucked him off. Lou grabbed for him again and got the werewolf's arm, but it popped out of his grasp.
The cops opened fire as the werewolf, George's keys still dangling from the back of his neck, rushed at them. Ivan flinched with each shot but didn't fall. He broke more glass as he went through the window and pushed through the cops, swiping with both hands simultaneously. Both cops went down, screaming.
They really should have believed Lou about the whole bullets thing.
Instead of finishing them off, though, Ivan left their fallen bodies and ran away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bloodbath Aftermath
Michele was having difficulty reconciling her previous beliefs about tornado chasers with her current plan not to run away.
Tornado chasers were idiots. Why would you ever go toward the storm? Why would you stand outside in a hurricane doing a weather report? Why would you take pictures in a war zone while mortar shells exploded all around you? She'd spent many hours vocally criticizing this kind of stupidity while she watched the news on television, even if nobody else was around to hear. Stay out of the shark tank if you don't want to disappear in a cloud of blood. Don't wrestle the alligator and be surprised when you lose a hand.
So when George and Lou set her free, she should have just run as far away from this whole mess as she could. Let her role in this little drama come to an anticlimactic conclusion. Find a hospital, get better bandages for her shoulder, finish off a bottle of wine to celebrate her survival, finish off a second bottle of wine to celebrate the fact that she wasn't pregnant, and happily pass out.
Instead, she stood at the edge of the parking lot and watched George and Lou walk into the bar.
Was Ivan already inside? Probably not. He had to suspect that George and Lou might burst in there with a dozen cops, so he'd want them to get settled first, give himself a chance to scope things out.
A few minutes later, her theory was proven correct (or Ivan was just running late) as she hid behind a pickup truck and watched him pull into the parking lot. Where had he gotten a car? She prayed there wasn't a fresh corpse in the trunk.
&n
bsp; Ivan drove around the building a couple of times, slowly, then parked at the closest space to the front entrance.
She crept a little closer to the building as Ivan walked inside.
This was still her story, her cash cow, and she needed to know how it all turned out. "Oh, yeah, I was terrified," she'd tell the person who was hired to ghostwrite her book. "I'd never been so scared in my life. Every bit of common sense I had, every piece of knowledge I'd acquired in my entire life was screaming at me to get out of there, but I just couldn't."
The ghostwriter would nod as if she understood completely. Her expression would say You were so very brave without having to speak the words, which would be ass-kissing. "And is that when you called the police?"
"Yes. I mean, there was a dangerous werewolf in the building, so I had to let the authorities know. I couldn't let more innocent people get hurt."
"And you'd have a better story if the cops actually caught him or shot him down, right?"
"You said that, not me."
"Do you want to say it in the book?"
"No. That sounds kind of bad."
Michele didn't have her cell phone or any change, but there was a pay phone next to the entrance, and she was pretty sure you didn't need the fifty cents to make an emergency call. She hurried over to the phone, picked up the receiver, and cursed. The entire mouthpiece was gone, exposing a few broken wires.
She placed it to her ear anyway. They'd still trace a 911 call even if nobody said anything.
No dial tone.
Okay, this was a pretty big problem.
Now what? She certainly wasn't going to go inside the Cotton Mouse Tavern and ask if she could use their phone.
A large, burly man walked out of the bar, looking annoyed and angry, as if he'd just had a heated argument. "Sir?" she said, gently touching his arm.
His eyes lit up, but then he frowned as he noticed her bandaged-up shoulder and bloody clothes. "Yes?"
"Can I borrow your cell phone? It's an emergency."
"What kind of emergency?"
"I need to call the police. A man just went in there with a gun and I think he's going to start shooting."
"Is this a scam?"
"No, I swear."
"I can't give you my phone."
"Then could you call the police for me?"
"Sure, sure." He took out a cell phone and punched in three digits. "You say a guy with a gun?"
"Yes."
"Should we be standing here?"
"Probably not."
They began to quickly walk away from the building. The man touched a button on his phone, and the speaker came on. "911, what is your emergency?" The man kept the phone in his hand, but held it toward Michele so she could talk.
"Hi," she said. "I think there's going to be some trouble..."
* * *
Ivan didn't look back at the cops after he savaged them. They were both probably still alive, but they'd be needing some serious skin grafts. Fuckers. He hoped they spent the rest of their lives being shunned as disfigured freaks.
The pain was almost unbearable. Yeah, he was a fast healer, but he'd been shot, sliced, punched, stabbed, and kicked. Bullets didn't just pop out of his body when he healed--he had to dig them out, and that was not a pleasant process. He didn't mind getting mangled every once in a while, but Jesus Christ, this was insane.
He reached back and tugged the car keys out of his neck. Slit throat, stabbed neck--he was lucky he hadn't been decapitated. When he'd fully recovered he'd hunt George and Lou down and make them die ever so slowly, but for now, he just needed to get away. Revenge could wait. A dish best served cold and all that shit.
Or...not.
He saw their black van. If he couldn't kill them, he could at least steal their van using the keys they'd stabbed him with. That would keep them nicely frustrated until he came back into their lives.
He transformed back into his human form as he reached the driver's side door and hurriedly unlocked it, blood gushing down onto his hands as he did so. He got inside, slammed the door shut, and started the engine.
Shit. He was really bleeding bad. He didn't think he could die from this, but he'd never sustained these kinds of injuries. He'd gotten cocky again. Time for that to stop.
He sped off, but then managed a smile. It didn't matter how badly he was hurt, the sight of George and Lou running after their stolen van was fucking hilarious.
* * *
"He stole our van!" Lou shouted, as they ran after Ivan in a rather pathetic half-run, half-limp.
"I know!"
"A werewolf just stole our van!"
"I know, Lou!"
"With the keys you stabbed him with!"
"I can see! I still have my eyes!"
"So now what do we do?"
"We get the hell out of here before more cops show up!"
"We should have just waited for the reinforcements."
"Well, freakin' duh! How'd you figure that out? The slaughtered corpses? Your eight thousand werewolf wounds? The fact that he just drove away in our goddamn van?"
"It's not even our van."
"I realize that! Believe it or not, I'm not a complete ignoramus and I am aware of the severity of the situation!"
Lou stopped running. "I bet you're not."
"What do you mean?"
"We left the briefcase of cash in the bar."
"Fuck!"
"Yeah."
"Oh, that is bullshit!"
"What do we do?"
"So, what, you're back to being cool with me making decisions again?"
"George, we don't have time for this!"
"I know, I know. You keep running. Find us a car that we can hotwire. I'll run back in and get it. It'll only take a minute."
"All right. Don't get killed."
"I'll try." George turned and ran back to the bar. He couldn't believe how badly things were working out for him today. Next there'd probably be some kind of earthquake that split open the earth and swallowed him up, dropping him right into Hell, which might be preferable to dealing with Ivan.
Oh, how he hated that werewolf. Despised him. Loathed him. Abhorred him. He could take every synonym in the thesaurus, plus all of their foreign language equivalents, including dead languages that only a couple of scholars in the world still knew how to translate, and it wouldn't come close to expressing just how deeply he hated that man-beast.
From now on, every old man whose thumbs he broke would have Ivan's face superimposed over his own. And George expected to start doing some mad cackling in the near future.
The black cop lay on the ground, walkie-talkie to his lips. "Officer down..." he said, voice weak. The white cop looked at George with pleading eyes, which was one of the only facial features that was still recognizable. George was not a cop-hater--he had no problem with them or their duties as long as they weren't specifically coming after him--and he felt horrible. What if the guy had kids? Still, there was no time to offer a moment of comfort. He hurried past the cops and went back into the bar.
He could hear somebody sobbing upstairs. He wondered how badly the woman up there had been hurt when she got shot.
George ran to the booth where they'd sat in slightly happier times. He stepped on some viscera but, thankfully, did not slip on it.
He picked up the suitcase, the side of which was stained with werewolf blood. He quickly glanced around for the guns they'd dropped, or the sharpened cross, or Lou's switchblade, but didn't immediately see them and he could hear sirens in the distance, so he ran back out of the bar. Not stepping in blood was a challenge.
Now they needed a vehicle. George and Lou both knew how to hotwire a car, but it wasn't as easy of a task as it looked in the movies. They couldn't do it here. Hopefully they'd find another car relatively nearby where they could break in without arousing suspicion.
* * *
Ivan was getting blood all over the seat. Good. Another reason for Bateman to hunt down his unfortunate, incompetent thu
gs. Ivan rubbed his palm on the dashboard, smearing blood everywhere.
No, wait. He didn't want George and Lou to get exterminated by their employer. That would be too painless, even if Bateman used a red-hot poker and a cheese grater. And besides, Ivan wouldn't get to watch.
He stuck his tongue in the gap from his missing tooth. He'd never lost a fang before. He didn't think it would grow back.
He could turn the van around and--
No.
Let them go. Even if their ghastly fate didn't come at his hands, he had to let this drop. He was too badly injured right now. Werewolves who didn't learn from the past ten minutes were condemned to repeat them.
It was also disappointing that Michele hadn't come with them. He still wanted to sink his teeth into her. He wondered where she'd gone.
Then he laughed out loud. He knew exactly where a person in her position would go. The GPS was still mounted on the dashboard, so he bloodied up the screen and found the nearest hospital. Six miles away. He floored the accelerator and sped off.
* * *
Right after she'd gotten into his car, Michele suddenly decided that the burly guy was a serial killer, and that her arms and legs would turn up in four different counties. Then she decided that he was just kind of weird.
When the chaos inside the tavern began, she'd rolled down the window, leaned out, and vomited onto the pavement. She should've called the police sooner, but she didn't want them to scare Ivan away.
The man had insisted that they drive off. She'd protested. The man had explained that it was his car and that she was welcome to get out. She'd decided that it was time to revert back to her stance on tornado chasers and leave with him.
"Could you take me to the hospital?" she'd asked.
"Of course."
There hadn't been much in the way of conversation during the drive. He kept asking her if she was okay. He kept insisting that she'd be fine. She kept thanking him for going out of his way to help her. He kept saying that it was absolutely no problem.
He pulled right up in front of the emergency room entrance. "Do you want me to come in with you?" he asked.
Michele shook her head. "No, I'll be fine. You've done enough."
