Outcasts

by J. S. Frankel

  By now, Truk was begging for his life. “Please, man, I’m sorry!”

  A few of the bystanders were snapping pictures and using their smartphones to get all this down. Good, let them. It would make a great newscast, but right now, I kept my focus on my quarry. I snarled, “We just wanted to get something to eat. That’s all!”

  It wasn’t enough, and the sound of a lone police car’s siren alerted me to the arrival of the law. Truk was blubbering and wailing in abject misery and fear, and I almost felt sorry for him—almost. The stench of piss—his—filled the air. “Just one question before I let you go,” I said. “What’s my face look like?”

  “You... you,” he gibbered, tears of pain running down his cheeks. “You’re a friggin’ gargoyle, man! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  That last part came out in a shriek of terror. I let go of him then and shoved him away. Turning around, I caught my reflection in a store window. The high, slanted cheekbones. The flattened nose, the eyes, red and smoldering with fury, and the pointy chin—they all showed the world I’d become a monster.

  Taking a deep breath and making a mental effort to calm down, it had its effect. As the rage faded, my features returned to their default self. The claws shrank back into my hands, and my wings melted into my body. I stood there, triumphant over meting out a long overdue lesson.

  A moment later, I saw Truk holding his bloody upper arm and crying like a baby. Shame took over. I’d lost control, and while those fools had deserved a beatdown and more, this way was definitely not the right way. Fighting really solved nothing, and even though both kids were asshats, no, this wasn’t cool.

  The crowd kept murmuring, and a few of the larger dudes comprising the group stepped forward, perhaps to mete out their own version of justice. I tensed, hoping the claws wouldn’t come out again and half hoping they would.

  However, a voice at the back ordered them to stand aside. They did, and the question of, “Mitch, can we talk?” floated over to my ears.

  Spinning around, Chief Sullivan, a tall, strongly built cop in his forties with a quiet, steady manner, stood five feet away. He had a hand on his holster but didn’t make a move to take out his pistol. I’d known him since I was a boy and trusted him, but just to make things clear, I raised my hands. “Yes, sir, we can talk.”

  Sullivan nodded and visibly relaxed, then motioned to his police car. “Get in. We’ll talk.”

  Joe walked over. “Uh, sir, we came here just to get some pizza is all.”

  The man who held the key to our freedom flicked a glance at my friend. “I guess your order is to go.”

  Chapter Two: How not to be conspicuous

  Before Chief Sullivan drove us home, he delivered a warning to the crowd, and also warned Paul and Truk to stay away. Yeah, like they’d listen. They hung their heads, sullenly staring at the pavement, while some of the onlookers voiced their objections. They weren’t exactly shy about it. “Those freaks attacked those two boys,” yelled one bystander. “They ought to be locked up!”

  Sullivan’s glare resembled a solar eruption, and it served to nail the protester to his spot. “Is that so? And just who started the altercation?”

  Quiet descended with a thud. Everyone knew, but no one wanted to step up and do the right thing. So our friendly neighborhood chief took out his notebook and asked a few people what had happened.

  “Speak up,” he commanded and jerked his thumb at me and Joe. “If these two boys started the fight, that’s one thing. If they didn’t, move on.”

  Of course, there had been something to see, and everyone had seen it. They knew, but a sense of community and self-preservation ruled. They may have hated me, and maybe they hated my best bud, but they didn’t want to fall on the wrong side of the law.

  Sullivan then turned his wrath on our two chief tormentors. After lecturing them on how not to behave like asshats, he told them to leave. “He hurt me,” Truk whined and held out his arm. Blood still oozed from the wound.

  The chief’s face screwed up in a moue of disgust. “You’re built like a powerlifter, and you’re complaining about a few cuts? Get your tail out of here now. If I catch you bothering these two boys again, you’ll be in a lot more trouble than Mitch can dish out. Understand?”

  Still shell-shocked by their ordeal, both punks nodded and unsteadily made their way from the scene. Truk tried to hide the stain on the front of his pants and didn’t succeed. Uttering a squawk of shame, he tore off his shirt and covered the sopping wet area as he shoved his way through the crowd. The stink of ammonia still hung in the hot air, a thoroughly unpleasant odor that seemed to cling to everything and everyone. I couldn’t wait to leave.

  Wish granted. “Get in the back,” Sullivan ordered us. “I’m taking you home, and once we’re there, we’ll have a little talk.”

  On the way back, a few shouts of, “Garg-boy,” came my way. Those comments were followed by, “Gargoyle,” “Monster,” and the old standby, “Freak.” Someone hurled a rock at Chief Sullivan’s car. It whizzed across the hood, but to his credit, he didn’t slow down or even break his driving rhythm. He kept the car going at a steady thirty miles per hour, and soon we passed out of range.

  “Just in case you haven’t noticed, that crowd was not friendly at all,” he said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I muttered, but managed to keep a lid on my temper.

  “We weren’t doing anything wrong,” Joe added. “They started it and—”

  The chief held up his hand as a signal for silence. “Hold that thought.”

  Silence ruled, which left me alone with my thoughts. In the movies, the scenario always went as follows. The heroes, usually short or skinny losers, suddenly developed super-powers. They built their super-secret hideout, developed cool weapons to fight the bad guys, and designed their own costumes. Then they had their battles, got the girl, and the rest of the populace practically worshipped them. That was how things usually went.

  In our case, reality bit. No one had ever given us a parade. The few interviews we’d given had long since been forgotten. It seemed as though the rest of Independence—along with the rest of the country—didn’t care what we did, as long as we did it elsewhere.

  “We don’t need super-freaks in our town,” one person had told the Independent Free Press, the local newspaper. A middle-aged man dressed in a rumpled suit, he tried to come across as being respectable. “Let the police handle things. That’s their job. I don’t want to live next to a mutated family, and I doubt anyone else does, either. Mutants go against God’s will.”

  Yeah, that had been the general consensus, then as now, although not everyone came at us from a religious angle. Acceptance was a ten-letter word meaning piss off. No matter where we went, it was always the same. It always would be.

  The car slowed down, and glancing out the window, I saw that we’d arrived at my house. My neighborhood, a tree-lined street of white houses, stately elms, and well-kept front lawns, greeted me. Most of the neighbors had their sprinklers going. Summertime was in full swing, and their grass just had to be greener.

  “We’re here,” Sullivan said as he pulled up to the curb. “You boys exit, and we’ll have our talk. Your parents are off at work, so I’ll lay it out for you.”

  Silently, we got out and stood in front his car. A pleasantly cool breeze blew, taking some of the heat away. The chief leaned against the hood, took off his hat, and scratched his scalp with a thick forefinger. “Guys, I’m going to let this little incident slide. I know you’ve been through a lot and I know your hearts are in the right place.”

  He sounded sincere, but underneath I sensed he was about to read us the riot act, that being the well-known you-have-powers-and-they-should-be-used-wisely speech. Sure enough, he did.

  “However, with your abilities, you should also know better. Truk’s a moron and his buddy Paul isn’t much better, but all the same, knowing what you can do, show a little restraint.
”

  Restraint was something I’d been practicing for the past year. Much as I wanted to yell, “They started it,” I said nothing except, “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re both good kids,” Sullivan said, continuing his lecture. “At the same time, you should be careful of who you meet. One day, someone is going to get hurt real bad, and I don’t think it’s going to be you. You’re eighteen now. That makes you adults, and theoretically, you can be charged under the law. Remember that.”

  After a few more minutes of giving us his be-responsible speech, he tipped his cap, re-entered his car, and drove off. Joe let out a gust of wind along with the comment of, “No pizza... that was a fun time, wasn’t it?”

  Sarcasm was so not needed right now, but I was too tired and deflated to get mad. “Yeah, fun wow, I’m going inside.”

  With a quick wave, Joe spun off for home. My house was empty and quiet as I entered. Television didn’t cut it for me, but I turned it on, anyway, just for the noise. A carton of milk sat in the fridge, so I drank that and settled back in my chair. It creaked as I sat.

  So did the floorboards. The walls had a few cracks caused by heat and rain. The bathtub upstairs had a massive ring around its base. I had the feeling that it would go crashing through the ceiling any day now. Wonderful, all we needed now was a massive water bill. Aging wasn’t always positive, especially in a house.

  Additionally, this place was over forty years old. The wiring wasn’t great, the paint outside was peeling on the eastern side, and the back screen door hung halfway off its hinges. I’d have to get around to fixing things one day.

  As I sat on the couch in the living room, watching but not watching the boob tube and stewing over the day’s events as well as thinking of what to do job-wise, my stomach began to growl. Not eating bothered me, but today’s events had bothered me even more. The shows started and finished, and before I knew it, it was after five.

  The telephone rang, another antique of ours, a dial-tone job. No money for a newer model, and it also hissed out a fuzzy noise. My mother had a cellphone, courtesy of her company. I had to rely on texting from my aged computer and calling people the old-fashioned way.

  The phone was screaming now. Answering it, my mother’s voice came through. “Mitch, I have to work late. There’s some emergency money in the coffee can in the cupboard. Get yourself something, will you? I’ll be home at eleven or so.”

  “Will do, Mom.”

  My mother often worked overtime for extra cash. I hung up and then placed the call to the pizza place. The delivery would come in thirty minutes.

  Waiting inside was the pits, so I hauled my butt outside to sit on the porch. Dusk had begun to settle in, and the breeze continued, blowing away some of my bad mood. I thought about the earlier altercation. Life seemed to be so unfair, but I calmed myself by saying that the pizza guy should be coming by soon.

  While waiting, though, a noise emanated from the forest, like something heavy was dragging itself over the ground. It made a sloppy, slippery kind of sound, as if it was covered in slime. Wounded animal, maybe? Doubtful.

  Curiosity got the better of me, and I got up to walk carefully toward the edge of the tree line. Once there, a smell hit me, something akin to an overflowing toilet combined with rotten eggs. Geez, what a stink! “This... isn’t good,” I whispered.

  Silence hit. As if on cue, the birds stopped chirping, the wind stood still, and then something erupted from the behind the trees. Short and squat, it reminded me of a large toad, maybe five feet in height and circumference, brown and dripping with a brownish-green ooze.

  Its hands, though, got me. They were tremendously oversized, resembling catcher’s mitts, and had the same type of thick webbing between meaty fingers, fingers designed to tear through something.

  Then came the ultimate mind-bender. It spoke in a throaty, low voice, exactly how I thought a frog would talk if it could. “You... you’re the one.”

  “You can talk?”

  It could. In a flash, it shot out a long, incredibly thick tongue that wrapped around my waist and trapped my left arm. It began to squeeze, and its grip went beyond powerful. The breath rushed out of me. Hammering away at it didn’t help. “Hey, someone want to give me a hand?”

  Its voice came out slurred, considering its tongue was wrapped around me, but the message was clear enough. “No one is going to help you,” the toad-thing said and squeezed even harder.

  My timing would have to suck, as the guy from Portland Pizza Delivery decided to make his grand entrance. He buzzed up to my place and got out, carrying my order. “I got your pizza. That’ll be thirteen bucks plus tax...”

  His voice trailed off when he saw what was going on and he dropped the pizza on the grass. “It’s on the house.” He then rushed back to his car for the great escape.

  Thanks for helping out, you maggot.

  Mr. Toad had the advantage of surprise as well as having a tongue strong enough to crush someone out of existence. “Now you die,” it said, squeezing harder.

  As the constrictions got worse, so did my vision, but then it turned red. With the red came anger, and the anger morphed into rage. My claws came out, and with a monumental effort, I used my right arm to slash at the tongue. Blood spurted out, and after two more swipes, the severed flesh dropped from my waist and continued to flop around on the grass. “Aw man, that is sick!”

  The thing let out a howl of agony and ran into the forest. I chased it but found nothing. How in the hell could something that big disappear so fast?

  After staggering back to my house, I found a few of the neighbors on the street holding flashlights. “What happened out there?” one of them asked me in a frightened voice. My mother and I didn’t interact with our neighbors very often, and they preferred to keep their distance. This time, though, was an exception.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you think we should call the police?” an elderly man asked. “You kids, always getting into trouble.” He shook his head and tsk-tsked his way back to his house.

  Yeah, right, blame us kids. Nothing left to do but call the police and hope they’d come soon. After placing the call, I thought about trying to call the pizza delivery guy back. Nah, I doubted he’d come this way again.

  Chapter Three: Searching for clues

  Chief Sullivan drove up ten minutes after I contacted him, exiting his cruiser in a snit. “I got the call just before going off-shift. I was going home,” he said, accompanying his statement with a pissed-off look. “My wife expects me home.”

  Ordinarily, I would have let that pass. I’d learned to let a lot of things go. But almost getting tongued to death had a way of changing a person’s mind. “Maybe your wife can keep your dinner warm while you do your job?”

  A scowl greeted my snarky question. “Do you know hard it is to patrol this area with the men I’ve got?”

  I half-expected him to recite the exact figures of who was on duty. He did. “Outside of nine other police officers, three sergeants, and some volunteers, there’s just me. That’s about twenty to thirty people in charge of policing around nine thousand citizens, so appreciate my situation.”

  While mentally deciding whether to toss out another snarky answer or hold it in, the chief interrupted me to ask, “What happened?”

  Wordlessly, I pointed out where the attack had taken place. Sighing, he accompanied me to the forest, shone his flashlight on the ground while checking the surface for footprints, and then played it over the area. The beam revealed a number of broken branches and smashed shrubs.

  Sullivan groused, “It’s dark, and I’m not about to call out additional men to check this. There’s been enough trouble already between you and the citizens in this town.”

  Gee, thanks for bringing that up, considering it wasn’t my fault to begin with. Right now, snark was called for, but it was late, I was hungry and tired, and I wanted to go inside and sleep it off. Too bad I couldn’t. Not yet.
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br />   Sullivan continued his impromptu investigation with, “I see some smashed branches, and that’s about it. No footprints, except for you and about a thousand other people who’ve probably gone through here. Are you sure you saw something?”

  I showed him my left arm. In the glare of the flashlight, a number of welts shone out clearly, along with some swelling. “I didn’t get this from falling down,” I said, lethargy now gone and supremely annoyed by the BS implication that I’d been lying. “I saw it, and so did the pizza guy. And the neighbors—”

  “I spoke to them before,” Sullivan interrupted, a frown creasing his features. “A few of them called me and said they heard someone crashing through the forest.”

  After giving the place another quick once-over with his flashlight, his frown deepened. “If I have no evidence, what am I supposed to do?”

  He then jockeyed his flashlight up and down my body and sighed. “You said some creature grabbed you, but outside of a ripped shirt and some marks on your arm, I don’t see anything else, and I don’t see a path made by that toad-thing.” A hint of a smile came over his face. “You also said that it grabbed you with its tongue. If you slashed it off, I’d see it lying around. There’s nothing.”

  Damn it, couldn’t he accept the truth? Considering that the creature had disappeared and we couldn’t find anything, no, he couldn’t. I checked my arm and surprise, the welts and bruises had faded considerably. Weird... I’d always healed fast but in only ten or so minutes? “I’m not lying, sir. I did see it.”

  Sullivan was already heading for Mrs. Fleishman’s house, two places over. “You’ve had a long night, so I’m going to suggest you get some rest. I’m going to get a few statements first, and then I’ll swing by tomorrow morning.”

  He didn’t bother tipping his cap this time, simply walked away. As for me, I staggered into the house and wondered what to do next. Dinner was out at this point, and no way was I going to tell my mother what had happened.