Still, there were times when Amy despised her best-slash-only friend and her pant-seat flying ways. Like now. With the torture of school over for the day, all Amy had wanted to do was to go somewhere quiet and be alone. Cemeteries, she’d found, were exquisite locations for her sombre turns. But no, Gabby sensed trouble and insisted they follow a group of losers out to the ‘clubhouse’ under the bridge of a nearby overpass. High school refugees passed around bottles of Colt 45 while gliding on longboards. Others smoked weed and nodded their chins to inner beats only they could hear. And there was Gabby, right in the thick of it; trawling past Amy’s knees on somebody’s board with a jug of malt liquor in her fist.
Perched on a concrete lip on the far side of the overpass, all Amy could do was sit and resent her BFF for dragging her along to this hellhole of teenage clichés pulling ollies. She despised them all for going about their lives as if nothing had happened, for their smug pretensions and carefree lives. How could they just roll around and laugh like that, oblivious to the fact that monsters were coiled up behind every dark corner waiting to tear them to fucking pieces?
Gabby rolled up, kicked the board into her hand and dropped down beside her on the curb. “You’re about to rabbit on me, aren’t you?”
“Thinking about it.”
“Don’t,” Gabby said. “Try and have some fun.”
“This is fun?” Amy took the bottle from her friend’s hand and sipped.
Gabby shrugged. “Best I can do right now. Time to break out of your bubble, Ames. Engage.”
“I’d settle for being numb.” Amy took another gulp. It was a moment before she spoke again. “Mom wants to sell the house.”
“Your dad’s house?”
“I told her to go hell.”
Gabby took the jug back and stood it between her feet. They watched the other kids roll back and forth around them. One boy tumbled and the others laughed at him.
“Maybe your mom’s got a point.”
“She just wants to get it off her hands.”
“Maybe,” Gabby shrugged. “Or maybe it’s just time to move on.”
“You’re taking her side?”
“It’s just stuff. It’s not your dad. He’s somewhere else, you know?” Gabby scuffed the heel of her shoe against the dirt. “You have to do it sooner or later. And if you keep putting it off, someone else is gonna do it. Do you want that?”
Amy scowled and took up the bottle again. “I hate you sometimes.”
“Join the club.” Gabby nodded at the boy who had crashed his board. “You should go talk to Chris. I think he likes you. Why, God only knows.”
The last time Amy let her friend play match-maker, the results were disastrous. Now, Amy simply didn’t care about boys. They all acted so arrogant and thick, as if proud of their ignorance of anything important. She gave up on them altogether. Amy stood up and brushed her hands. “I gotta go.”
“Why? You’re just gonna go brood somewhere. Stay here.”
“I’m too wound up.” She handed the bottle back to Gabby. “I need to do something. Take the edge off.”
“You want to get high? Kyle’s holding.”
“No. I need something stronger than that.” Amy gave a limp wave goodbye and climbed back up the incline to the hole in the fence.
~
The blast of gunfire dulled to muted popping sounds as she slid the muffs over her ears. Amy took up the loaded magazine and snapped it into place. Raising the piece up with both hands, she lined up the forward and rear sights onto a paper silhouette target at the far end of the gallery. Drawing a bead on the center of the torso mass, she squeezed the trigger and let off seven consecutive rounds without a pause. Lowering the barrel, she peered down at the target to check her marks then inspected the gun in her hand. The Sig Sauer was old and the bluing was worn away in parts but it fired cleanly and felt good in her hand. It seemed a better fit than her dad’s Glock that she hid under her pillow every night.
Amy took a breath and raised the barrel with stiff arms and spent the magazine without stopping again. The barrel was barely warm and she wondered if Tony, the gun’s owner, would be willing to trade out this old Sig for her Glock.
Tony was the owner of the firing range and an old friend of her dad’s. She’d met him last October when her father first brought her to the firing range to learn how to shoot. Before the incident, she and her dad used to shoot hoops in the crooked net above the garage. After the incident, they shot guns instead. She had played along, learning to like firearms but considered it another sign of his instability and paranoia. She knew now that he was teaching her to fight back, to defend against the evil that slinked along the periphery of this world, waiting for a chance to snatch you away. Two days before Christmas, she got the chance to turn all that gun-training to practical use when a monster in the form of a gigantic wolf charged at her with its jaws agape. The monster wanted to eat her alive. She blasted a silver-capped fifty caliber round down its throat and watched its head explode.
The evil of fairy tales existed and monsters really did stalk travelers on lonely roads.
Amy decocked the hammer and slid the magazine out, laying the piece on the bench before her. Hitting a button on her right brought the perforated target swinging up to her. The majority of the shots centered around the torso of the silhouette but four rounds landed in the white outside of the target completely. She frowned at the wide shots. She hadn’t visited the firing range in three weeks and her aim was getting rusty.
A voice rumbled up behind her. “You’re drifting to the left again.”
Amy pulled the muffs from her ears. Tony leaned into the narrow space, studying the blown target before them. Tony was a grizzly of a man whose long beard and tattoos masked a warm smile and wry humor. “We missed you around here, Amy. You been alright?”
“Yeah. Just busy, you know.” She nodded at the target. “What am I doing wrong here?”
He took up the piece and, closing one eye, checked the sight alignment. “Not sure. You focusing on your front sight, not the target?”
Amy bit her lip. “I might be.”
“Try dry-firing it a couple times and see. Don’t focus on the target, focus on the front sight. The rear sight and the target ought to be blurry.”
She loaded the empty magazine into the handle. “How have you been, Tony?”
“Busy. Willie quit on me the other day, another dude just disappeared. Haven’t had a day off in two weeks.” He snapped his fingers, as if he’d just thought of something. “You looking for a job, Amy?”
“Maybe. School’s almost done, I’ll be needing something then. You hiring?”
“I need somebody I can depend on. Your dad used to go on and on about how his little girl worked all through high school while every other kid had it easy. Proud as a popgun, the man was.”
“He was?”
“Yup.” Tony watched the girl raise up the empty gun and squint down the sight. “Watch your stance too. Get your feet lined up so you don’t drift. Your old man used to do the same thing.”
Amy snapped the trigger, the hammer falling on the empty chamber. Tony watched her correct her sight. “Is that better?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Good. Here, try it on the big gun.” He laid a hardshell case on the bench and flipped it open. Fitted inside was the Desert Eagle. A nickel-plated mammoth of a gun. The magazine seated in a separate compartment, stacked with fifty caliber rounds. Tony let her store it here on the premises. “I cleaned it for you.”
“Thanks, Tony. Oiled?”
“Of course. Let’s hear it rip.”
She slapped in the mag and took her stance, the gun heavy in her hands. Lining up the sights, she kept the focus on the foresight and let the target haze over into a blur. The report of the gun was sharp and the recoil hard. Amy took a quick breath and blasted off another three rounds.
“See. You’re not drifting so much, even on that monster.” Tony bopped her shoulder with his
knuckles and started away. “We’ll talk more about the job, okay?”
“Okay.” She smiled at him but he was already gone. She looked down at the massive gun in her small hands. The kick from the fifty cal was hard and it jarred her shoulders but it felt good. Felt right. Its sense of control and power might be illusory she knew but firing it was one of the few things that quelled the terror and quieted the paranoia. Blasting off a magazine wouldn’t stop the nightmares but it quieted the noise inside her. She ruminated over the danger of bringing it home to tuck under her pillow instead of the nine millimeter. Was it worth the risk? Probably not.
Her hands felt numb when the loads were spent but when she brought the target up she was pleased to see that all had tagged the silhouette of the cartoon bad guy. Not one puncture mark in the void of white space.
Bring on the monsters, she mused, so they could say hello to her little friend.
She field-stripped the gun like her dad had taught her and laid the pieces onto the bench. A twang of remorse echoed like a piano chord when she thought about him back then, knowing what he knew, trying to teach her while keeping the awful truth of it to himself. And here she was repeating history, an apple falling under the shadow of the tree.
Gabby’s words flitted back to her and she rued the fact that her crazy friend may be right after all. It was time to move on. Do something other than deteriorate into a shell of reclusive paranoia. Cheryl, she was loath to admit, was right too. It was far past time to deal with the house and the thought of someone else doing it made her seethe with propriety. It would hurt like hell walking back into that house but so what? Pain was nothing new and maybe, just maybe, it would alleviate some of the terrors. Like exorcising old ghosts.
She thumbed fresh rounds into the spent loader. One more magazine of fiddy cal destruction, then she would face the long task of dealing with the past.
Bang, bang.
7
THE DAY’S ROUTE TURNED out to be uneventful, no lost migrants wandering among the yucca, no bodies bloating under the punishing sun. Lara and Mason checked water stations seven and eight and then logged a few more hours checking number nine. No signs that anyone had passed through or accessed the water. The skies to the north darkened with ominous-looking clouds but no storm came, just heavy winds that pumiced the truck with high velocity grit.
A ho-hum routine day and for that, Lara was grateful. The excitement of yesterday’s work may have been gratifying in the sense that they actually helped someone but the stress of it rattled her nerves too much. The spike of adrenalin and the quickening of her heart were dangerous. If she was careless, it could trigger a reaction that would awaken the slumbering thing locked away in that secret chamber of her heart. For a time after the incident in the wilderness north of the border, she thought she had earned a grip on her condition and life had normalized to a small extent. New methods of keeping the wolf locked up and new ways of maintaining calm in bad situations had granted a sense of security.
She had begun to think of her situation as a disease. She had simply learned to manage the symptoms and the disease had gone into remission. Bolstered by this, she had set out to slowly, carefully build some kind of life for herself. No more hiding in the forest like some criminal on the run, no more self-imposed exile from the human race. She had found a place to live close to her sister in Albuquerque, found a job in nearby Las Cruces. She had even made friends with a few of her neighbors. They would do delightfully mundane things like Sunday barbecues or trips to Home Depot. After three months of hiding away from the world like some hobo-refugee, Lara relished every moment of the normal, the boring and the everyday.
When it came to managing the symptoms of her condition, silver was crucial. Something about its touch stilled her blood when the wolf threatened to uncoil itself. She used to cut herself with a silver blade, to get the purifying metal to contact the blood but it was Amy who had suggested using a piercing. A silver bolt driven through her navel kept the metal in contact with her skin at all times and proved the most effective. The only downside to this was that the pierced flesh eventually healed over and she would have to get a new puncture in a different spot. The woman at the tattoo parlor where she had this done must have thought she was flighty, returning every month or so to have the piece redone in a different spot.
The silver, however, was losing its efficacy. Over the last few weeks, she found her pulse quickening in that deadly way when triggered by a threat or stress. The sleeping monster stirred and threatened to wake. The piercing alone wasn’t enough to quell it and she had to resort to the old method of cutting into her flesh to lull the wolf back into its slumber. Like any treatment, her body was building up immunity to the silver and Lara shuddered at the thought of it turning impotent. Looking out the window at the flat scrubland as she jostled along in the truck, she wondered if there was anything left to turn to, some method she’d yet to think of. Managing the symptoms was the best she could hope for. She had given up on the idea of a cure a long time ago.
The man who had infected her with this curse in the first place thought he knew the cure. Ivan Prall, a murder suspect she had tracked down in her old life as a homicide detective, believed that he could cure himself by killing the wolf that had infected him. He was wrong. Like cancer, there was no cure for lycanthropy. Lara had bought herself some time by managing it but she knew the remission period was temporary. Eventually it would come back.
The sun was setting over the western rim when she wheeled back into the loading dock of the Luna Rescue office. Mason yawned as he slid out of the cab. “Qittin’ time, muchacha. You wanna hit Larry’s Hideaway for a beer?”
“Tempting.” Lara stretched her back, trying to shake off the cramp of all those road miles. “But I think I’ll pass.”
“Oh?” He looked a little crestfallen. “Got plans tonight?”
“I want to stop by the hospital, check on the girl. Then I’m going home.”
Mason stopped and waited for her to do the same. “She’s not your responsibility, Lara. You know that right?”
“Doesn’t mean I have to forget about her.”
“You saved her bacon but that don’t make you responsible for her. Her mom or dad took her into the desert. That was their mistake, not yours.”
Lara nodded as if conceding the point but she simply didn’t want to discuss it any further. She held the door open for him and he passed through with a mock flourish.
The offices behind the ministry were empty save for Trumbo, who sat at a workstation with his boots propped up on the desk. That was the first indicator that sent a twinge down Lara’s spine. This late on a Friday, the only one left behind was Pastor Talbot, waist-deep in work to keep the operation afloat and functional. Trumbo was notorious for cutting out early every Friday afternoon. Why was he still here?
“Last team back,” Trumbo said, dropping his feet to the floor with a thud. “As usual. Did you guys have any fun out there? Any more survivors?”
Mason dropped a bag of gear on the long table. “Nope. Just a routine day.”
“Where’s the pastor?” Lara asked, looking over the empty office space as if she’d missed him on her first sweep of the room.
Trumbo rose to his feet and sighed. “He’s at the hospital. Guys, I got some bad news.”
The twinge in Lara’s spine plucked twice as hard. She took a breath, already calming her lungs. “It’s not the girl, is it? Tell me she’s okay.”
Trumbo looked at the floor. “I’m sorry. The pastor called about two hours ago. He’d gone to the hospital earlier, hoping to be there when she woke. She didn’t make it.”
Lara teetered on her heels, vaguely aware of the sudden vertigo spinning her head around. She felt a grip on her elbow as Mason pulled up the nearest chair and made her sit down. “What happened?”
“Talbot didn’t say.” Trumbo shrugged. “My guess is she’d been out there too long.”
“Shit,” Mason said. His chin dropped to his clavicl
e. “I’m sorry, Lara.”
“Me too.”
“Come have that drink with me. You need it,” he said.
“I’m fine. I just want to go home.” Lara touched his arm and gave it a tiny squeeze. “You go on.”
Mason didn’t want to leave her but she assured him he was fine, shooing him out the door. She was gathering her things when Trumbo spoke up. “Hold up, Lara. I need to talk to you before you go.”
The taut piano cord in her backbone twinged again. She put her bag down and looked at him. “Yeah?”
“I’ve been helping out the pastor,” he said, nodding at the computer screen before him. “All this administration shit. Help lighten his load, ya know?”
Lara smelled a rat but let it slide. “I’m sure he appreciates that. The man works too hard.”
“Yes, he does. But I’m plowing through this backlog of paperwork for him and I came across something funny. Weird funny, not ha-ha funny.”
“And?” Lara harrumphed, too tired to play games at this late hour.
“I found this.” Tumbo clicked the mouse and the screen flickered to a blank white screen. Some text at the top of the page. Her name. “This is the background check on Lara Quesada. The mandatory check. It’s blank.”
“And?” Lara repeated. “The data was never inputted? A glitch?”
“That’s what I thought at first too. But then I started digging. Not that there was a lot to dig into. A phone number and an address. The social security number is registered to a Lara Quesada who’s been dead for ten years. And there’s fuck-all else info here about you.”
Something awful fluttered up in Lara’s heart. Like a murmur with a deep kick. She bit it down. “An oversight, like I said.”
Trumbo waved his hand, dismissing her protests. “Stop. We both know what this is. You gave Talbot a bullshit ID and he never looked it up. Now, I don’t know what kinda hold you got on our good pastor or if you’re fucking him on the sly to keep him quiet but—no more.”
Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 58
