One of the strangers, a large man who had his longish hair pulled back into an efficient ponytail, tossed a menu toward Eric. Eric took it.
“Order something to eat. You’ll need your strength.” Eric recognized the voice from the phone.
“Do you want to tell me what the hell is going in here?” He’d been as calm as he could, but the time for patiently waiting was done with.
The man nodded and gestured for the waitress. The woman wore her nametag and blouse over jeans that looked almost painted on, but she wasn’t even remotely attractive to Eric. She could have been dancing around naked and she wouldn’t have even caught his eye for more than a second.
“He’ll have a steak dinner, make it rare, and a large coffee.” The woman nodded and turned away. “You looked awfully cold out there, Captain.”
The man cleared his throat. “Now then, you’re all here for a reason. You’re here to deal with a matter of bloodshed and how it will be paid for.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” It was Scott that spoke up, confused. He was, as always, the most naïve among them.
The leader of the group around them shook his head and stared at Scott. Scott, the go-getter salesman, dressed in his jeans and his thick preppy sweater and his perfect hair, facing off against a man who looked like he would probably be at home leading a Viking raid on another village. Oh to be sure the clothes were modern, but the man still looked like a savage trying to hide among civilized people.
There was something about all of the strangers that felt the same way. It wasn’t the style of clothing they wore — which spoke more of rural common sense than fashion — it wasn’t that they were unclean or bore a thousand tattoos, but there was something about them, about the way that they carried themselves that drew the soldier’s eye in Eric. They were, for lack of a better way to put it, seasoned warriors. He had no doubt in his mind they had fought together before and maybe even killed together.
“Not this last November, gentlemen, but the year before that, you were out hunting together, do you remember that?”
Eric and the others nodded their assent to the question.
“While you were hunting, you did what almost everyone does. You camped out, you had a good time, and you maybe drank a few too many beers. Nothing out of the ordinary there.” The man took his time and fixed each and every one of them with his stare.
“Except on your last night.” Eric saw it, and felt his stomach drop. Scott didn’t flinch when the Viking talked about the last night, but Cullie, George and Mark all did. Eric flinched too, but for different reasons. He hadn’t been with them. He didn’t know all of the details, but he knew that something had happened that night, after they’d packed up and headed their separate ways.
Scott shook his head, puzzled, and proved again that in his way he was the most naïve, or just maybe the most innocent of them. “I still don’t know what you’re-”
The Viking lifted his hand. “I’m getting to that.” He shot a look to his friends around the table, and without a word between them they communicated something vital. Eric didn’t know what they’d said but they were definitely talking.
“On the last night, after you broke camp, you left in three cars. One of those cars took off with Anthony Ridgemont behind the wheel and went south. The other two vehicles moved to the north and east, heading in this direction. Do you remember that, gentlemen?”
Once again they all nodded their heads. “Excellent. Mr Ridgemont is no longer a part of the story. The closest he came to doing something wrong was failing to put out the fire as well as he should have, and that was fixed easily enough.”
“But the rest of you? Well, now, that’s where things get interesting. I’m an excellent tracker, and I had a little help along the way, but it was rough weather, there was rain, and there was even a little sleet. It’s understandable that one of the gentlemen driving lost his way a bit and managed to slide into a ditch.”
Of course they all remembered. Eric and Scott had turned around after getting a call from Cullie’s cell phone almost an hour and a half after they’d left. The car had gone off the road and run into a tree. Because Scott was smart enough to rent a well-equipped Jeep Wrangler, they’d managed to pull it back up to the road. No big deal, just a few hours of lost time before they all got home.
At least, that was what Eric had thought at first. It was later, when he asked why the others had taken so long to call that he suspected something else might have been up.
“Which three of you were in that vehicle?” The Viking looked at each of the men, and none of them was willing to raise a hand. “Let’s try this again. Which of you were in that vehicle, gentlemen? The other two are free to go.”
“What about our families?” That was Mark. His voice cracked when he spoke, dried and dusty, his eyes shining feverishly.
“The men who weren’t in the car can collect their families and leave, but only after this is all resolved.”
Eric spoke softly, his voice as controlled as he could manage. “What happened in that car?”
The Viking looked at him. “I was hoping you weren’t involved, Captain. I meant what I said. I respect what you’re doing for this country.”
Eric ignored him and looked at Mark. His old friend couldn’t look him in the face.
“What happened in that car, Mark?”
Mark shook his head.
It was George who finally spoke up. “I was in the car. So was Mark. So was Cullie. Eric and Scott didn’t have anything to do with it.”
The Viking nodded and stood. “That was about the way I remembered it, but I couldn’t be sure.”
He was about to speak again when the waitress came back and set down Eric’s meal. Eric nodded his thanks and she went on her way.
“Eat up, Captain.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Take it to go; you and Mr Lassiter are free to leave. Your families are being taken care of and you’ll have them back when this is done.” The man’s eyes barely even looked in his direction. Now that his part had been played, Eric ceased to be important.
Hell with that. “What happened in the fucking car?” His voice was rising and a few of the diners at nearby tables looked in their direction, but quickly looked away when they saw the strangers surrounding the table. All of the men with the Viking had stood.
“That doesn’t concern you any more, Captain. Leave it like that. I’ll call you when everything is finished.”
Scott shook his head. “No way. I want to see my wife. Now.
“Mr Lancaster, I know you’re missing your wife. I appreciate that. But it just isn’t going to work out that way for a while. I have business to take care of with your friends. That’s all you need to know.”
Scott opened his mouth to speak. “That’s not going to work for me! My wife’s condition is delicate!”
Eric shook his head and responded at the same time: “This is nonsense. Whatever happened, you can take care of it in a court of law.”
George stood at the same time, shaking his head, red faced. “I didn’t have any part in it, I tried to stop them. I didn’t kill anyone.”
And all of the voices together stopped as George’s words rang out through the cacophony.
Scott spoke first, his eyes wider than usual and his voice shaken by the words he’d just heard from a long-time friend. “Wait a minute. Wait a goddamned minute! Who got killed?”
* * *
Just a few words at the wrong time can put an awkward spin on a situation. The Viking looked at everyone at the surrounding tables and shook his head: Can you believe the lack of tact from some people?
The people around their joined tables suddenly decided they had better places to be. Four couples and at least two families got up and headed to the cash register to pay for their meals, several of which were barely even touched.
The six men who had called Scott and his friends to the diner stood looking pointedly at the people who’d had their mea
ls interrupted until they left the building.
There was a long few seconds of silence until the last of the diners left and then the guy with the ponytail spoke again. “Would one of you like to tell Mr Lassiter what happened? Or would you prefer I do it for you?”
None of the three men looked at Scott. The big guy finally shrugged his shoulders.
“I guess it’s me then. While you were driving on your way and these three were doing their own thing, they hit something on the side of the road. They ran over a wolf.”
“We didn’t see it.” That was Cullie, who was whining.
“You had your chance. Shut up.” The man skewered Cullie with a glance and then went back to his tale. “Now, accidents happen, I’m the first to acknowledge that. They’re unfortunate, but they really can’t be avoided.” Scott was fascinated by the man’s face. The features were all where they belonged, but the way his eyes moved, the way his lips worked as they formed words, seemed just slightly off-kilter somehow.
“What would you have done in their situation Mr Lassiter?”
“I would have stopped to see what I could do to help and I would have called emergency services.” That was, to Scott’s way of thinking, the only thing to do in that sort of situation.
“You see? That’s where you and I are on the same page. You render aid. If aid is not possible, you might even get a guilty conscience and just scamper on your way. It happens from time to time. I spent twenty-five years with the Highway Patrol. I saw more accidents than I ever want to think about.”
The strangers around the table were all looking at Cullie, staring hard, their silence filling the air with tension.
“What your friends here did, however, was first check to see if the wounded animal was alive, and then torture it to death.”
Eric looked at his three hunting buddies, his normally stoic face showing disgust. Scott looked at them and shook his head. “That’s not possible. They wouldn’t do that.”
“Didn’t go so well for all of you guys on that hunting trip, did it? I believe you and your friend Anthony were the only ones who managed to bag a deer.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So all I can figure was that they didn’t want to go home empty handed. They backed their car off of the wounded wolf.” And here he paused and looked at each of them men who were in the hunting party before he continued. His face when he stared at Eric and Scott was calm and conversational. His expression changed substantially when he stared at the other three, as if the only thing stopping him from killing them right then and there was the lack of a handgun.
“When they saw what they’d hit, George actually wanted to call 9-1-1. He reached for his phone and he started dialing.” Those deep blue eyes stared hard at George, who looked down and shook his head, blinking his eyes against tears. “Before he could finish, Cullie Landers said he had a better idea.” And again the eyes moved, staring hard at Cullie, who stared back defiantly. The two men locked gazes and while it took several seconds, Cullie finally looked away. “Cullie thought it would be fun to play with the poor thing, to make it suffer a bit more and then to take the pelt home with him.”
The man turned and looked at Scott again, his features once more softening from what looked like homicidal rage. “There are laws against it, of course, but what the hell, maybe he could get it treated.” A shrug of broad shoulders. “It might have worked out that George won the argument. Your friend George seems like a decent enough man. But then Mark Loman decided he wouldn’t mind having a prize himself.”
The man moved across the side of the table until he was inches away from Mark. Mark was hyperventilating. He was sweating enough to look greasy, his dark hair was plastered to his skull, and he trembled.
“What was it you took, again, Loman? The head, I believe?”
Cullie roared when he opened his mouth again. “It was a fucking dog! Who cares?”
All six of the men around them did something completely unexpected. They growled. Not a little low noise like clearing the throat, but a deep rumble that came from their chests as their lips peel back from the teeth.
The leader spoke again. “Show them, John. Show them why we would care about a ‘dog’.”
One of the men with him stepped forward and quickly unbuttoned his shirt, setting it aside. Scott and his friends all watched while the man disrobed completely, down to nothing but his underwear.
The man was lean and hard, athletic enough but definitely not a body builder. Scott, who tended to work out regularly, was about the same height and had him by easily thirty pounds of muscle.
John stared directly at Cullie, his face still set in a sneer, and started breathing fast. His breaths were almost silent at first, but then there was a light whimper followed by a full-out groan.
Scott watched it happen, every last second of it, his mind frozen, his eyes bulging.
The man threw his head back and gasped and as he did so, his skin split, tearing like thick paper and revealing a different shape beneath its surface. There was no long drawn out process as he’d seen in several movies, there was simply a sudden growth spurt as the average sized man became something entirely different.
What shook off the shredded remains of a human being was a werewolf, one that stood easily seven-and-a-half-feet tall, and had to weigh at least a hundred pounds more than the man it had replaced.
The guy with the ponytail kept speaking, while every one of the hunters who’d been called to pay a debt scrambled away from the beast looming over Cullie.
“Wolfmen, werewolves, lycanthropes, whatever you want to call us, gentlemen, we’re very real.” He moved forward and looked the beast in the eyes. Scott could only stare in awe, but his friend Eric had a different look on his face. Eric looked like a man who’d just had an epiphany.
“Sweet Jesus,” Mark spoke softly, his voice shaking.
“Keep your gods to yourself, thank you.” The man staring at the monster in front of him stepped back and the werewolf fell forward, onto its hands and knees, even as it once again became the man named John. John very calmly put his clothes back on, leaving behind the shredded underwear.
“Hate when I forget the briefs,” John muttered almost apologetically as he got himself back into his jeans.
“Would you like me to tell you the rest of the story now, gentlemen?” The obvious leader of the group settled down against one of the tables and crossed his arms. “This is the part where things get grisly, and since you wanted the truth, you’ll get it.”
He looked over at George when he spoke. “George wanted them to stop, but I guess he didn’t feel too strongly about the situation. Instead of making them leave the wolf alone, he lit a cigarette, grabbed himself a beer and went into the woods.
“So he didn’t get to see everything that Cullie and Mark did. He didn’t watch while they took turns cutting at the crippled animal on the ground.” The rumble was back in the man’s voice, a sound unsettlingly like a dog growling as it ate. “He was busy leaning against a tree and then puking his guts out when he heard the animal’s cries change.”
He pinned Cullie with his glare and continued again. “What gets me, what really amazes me above all else, is that your friends didn’t stop with the cutting when the wolf started to change shape.”
Mark was hyperventilating, his hands were clenched and his eyes were locked on the ground at his feet. Cullie was looking at the ground too, but more like he’d been caught in the act of doing something he wouldn’t have minded doing as long as no one knew about it. He looked more like a man accused of public masturbation than a murderer.
“When the change happens, there’s no mistaking that what you are dealing with is human. You saw that yourself a moment ago, gentlemen. But Mark and Cullie here? That didn’t stop them.”
He moved away from the edge of the table and looked at the two men. Turning his head from one to the other, his own breaths coming like a bellows stoking a furnace, he made sure to look them both over.
“In the very farthest stretches of polite society, it’s possible that someone could have overlooked their killing a wolf, even if they felt the need to torture it to death. But I ask you gentlemen, what do you think about your friends murdering a twenty-year-old woman?”
Eric shook his head; his face pale and sickly.
Scott felt his gag reflex try to force his recently consumed dinner into reverse and dry swallowed until the impulse vanished.
“Now, how about we add one more factor into the equation, one I’m sure neither of these fine, upstanding citizens decided to mention, even to George over here. The girl, my daughter and John’s wife, was pregnant when they hit her.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake you’ve got to be kidding.” The words were out of Scott’s mouth before he realized that he had spoken. The giant of a man turned on him and nailed him in place with a stare.
“I wish I were. I’m not. They murdered my daughter and my grandchildren, Mr Lassiter.” He walked closer until he was physically looking down at Scott. “They murdered her and then, to make sure no one would ever know, they dug her a shallow grave and buried her. On the bright side, at least your friend Loman was good enough to bury her head with the rest of her body.”
“How do you know all of this?” Eric spoke, as calmly as he could. He looked a little green around the gills, but still composed.
“I guess I edited the story a little. You see, they didn’t hit one wolf. They hit two. They just didn’t notice me when I crawled away to tend to my own wounds.” He looked over at Eric as he spoke. “We’re a hearty breed. We have to be. We can heal from almost any trauma, but it takes time. They’d shattered my hips and broken my back when the car hit me. Two days later I was fine, but until then, it took time to mend. Much as I wanted to stop them, to explain what they were doing, I couldn’t do anything but listen to the sounds they made.”
He moved again and this time he faced George, who was trembling. “That’s right. I had to listen while they murdered my little girl, same as you chose to listen. The difference is, you could have stopped them.”
SNAFU: Wolves at the Door: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 19
