by S A Ison
A BONE TO PICK
S.A. ISON
A Bone to Pick
Copyright © 2021 by S.A. Ison All rights reserved.
Book Design by Elizabeth Mackey
Book Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan
Book Edited by Ronald Ison Esq. Editing Services
Book Edited by Boyd Editing Ent.
All rights Reserved. Except as under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without prior written permission of S.A. Ison
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the production of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons – living or dead- is entirely coincidental.
OTHER BOOKS BY S.A. ISON
BLACK SOUL RISING From the Taldano Files
INOCULATION ZERO Welcome to the Stone Age
Book 1
INOCULATION ZERO Welcome to the Age of War
Book 2
EMP ANTEDILUVIAN PURGE
Book 1
EMP ANTEDILUVIAN FEAR
Book 2
EMP ANTEDILUVIAN COURAGE
Book 3
POSEIDON RUSSIAN DOOMSDAY
Book 1
POSEIDON RUBBLE AND ASH
Book 2
EMP PRIMEVAL
THE HIVE A POST-APOCALYPTIC LIFE
PUSHED BACK A TIME TRAVELER’S JOURNAL
Book 1
PUSHED BACK THE TIME TRAVELER’S DAUGHTERS
Book 2
THE LONG WALK HOME
THE RECALCITRANT ASSASSIN
BREAKING NEWS
EMP DESOLATION
PYTHAGORAS FALLS
THE VERMILION STRAIN POST-APOCALYPTIC EXTINCTION
MY NAME IS MARY: A REINCARNATION
DISTURBANCE IN THE WAKE
THE MAD DOG EVENT
OUT OF TIME AN OLD FASHION WESTERN
YESTERDAY’S WARRIOR
NO TIME FOR WITCHES
THE WILDER SIDE OF Z
FUTURE RELEASES
NO ONE’S TIME
THE INNOCUOUS MAN A.I. APOCALYPSE
For the lost and forgotten children
ONE
Hellen Marigold propped her feet up on the dark mahogany coffee table. She was in her nightgown, the one with pink penguins on it. She studied her brilliant ruby red toenails as she shifted the phone from one ear to the other. Her older sister Vivian was on the phone; she and Viv chatted an hour every morning. They’d done so for years, ever since Viv had retired from the Navy and was in one location, within the continental United States.
Vivian had been a vagabond of sorts, traveling the world and different duty stations outside the United States. Viv preferred international locales as opposed to stateside ones during her thirty years in the service.
Vivian settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, nearly thirty years ago, around Sugar River, a once small sleepy community which had grown exponentially in the heart of Charlotte. Hellen had settled in Atlanta, Georgia, but the sisters stayed connected via phone and the occasional visits.
Hellen cradled a hot cup of fresh ground Kona coffee on her stomach. She was finally able to drink the brew without retching out her entire upper and lower GI from her weakened body. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer three years ago and had run the gamut of radiation and chemo and all the heinous shit that went with it.
Getting old isn’t for pussies, she’d thought on more than one occasion. Her bones, skin, and body had ached with a pitiless cadence, each heartbeat reverberating the pain throughout her petite frame. Even her werewolf had suffered, not from the cancer, but from the treatments. It was rare that she transformed anymore. She could feel her wolf weakening and it tore at her heart. Werewolves and humans were two different creatures but they shared the same form and were symbiotic in nature. She might have been the one to get cancer but her werewolf had suffered right alongside her.
Now though, she was cancer free and gaining her strength back every day. Her werewolf was healing, but Hellen knew her wolf would never be the same, never regain the old vigor. She held up her hand as she grunted a response to Vivian. She let long black claws emerge from her hand. The claws were nearly six inches long and seemed duller, not as sharp. The fur around her hand was patchy, like her head. She let the claws retract.
Her sister, older by fifteen years, was on the other end of the telephone, bitching her usual bitch. Hellen wasn’t really listening. Then she nearly spat her coffee across the room when Viv said, “That ofay motherfucker spit on me!”
“What? What did you say?” Hellen said, wiping at her mouth.
Viv had a mouth like a sailor, since she had been a sailor. But by the age of seventy-five, Hellen figured her sister would lose that habit of the potty mouth. Not that Hellen was any better at age sixty. She didn’t give a damn, especially after surviving cancer. Hellen tried not to choke and laugh at the same time, but she couldn’t help it. Viv was hot under the collar.
“Why are you laughin’, Hell? This ain’t funny at all. I told that greasy little shit stain, ‘I got a bone to pick with you’ and that motherfucker out and out spit on me,” she huffed on the other end of the line.
“Viv, I’ve told you before to leave those assholes alone. Engaging with them just pisses you off. You don’t need your blood pressure raised like that.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Hell, you live in a nice neighborhood. This place has gone to hell in a handbasket. It was so nice when I first retired here, but now, hell’s bells. It’s a fuckin’ haven for the damned druggies, pimps, and gangs.”
“Viv, even Atlanta has it bad. It’s just the way of big cities anymore. Why don’t you move?” This argument wasn’t new.
“I’m not movin.’ I’m too damned old. Besides, it is my neighborhood. Me and my girls shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of shit at our age. These maggots are poisonin’ the children here. The police can’t do anything. It’s like a cancer. Oh, sorry. About the cancer thing.”
“No worries. I understand, but provoking Mike isn’t good. Every time he’s out there slinging his shit, just call the cops. Let them handle it,” Hellen advised.
“Mike” was Mike Todd, a street thug who ran drugs. He posted ridiculous videos on YouTube, a wannabe gangsta movie star. He ran a bunch of hood-rats and was slowly encroaching on Viv’s neighborhood. Hellen was sure that if Viv left the little shit alone and kept calling the police, the kid would move on to another location.
That wasn’t Viv’s way though, she would never walk away from a fight. Nor would Hellen, for that matter, but Hellen was better equipped to handle scumbags like that.
Perhaps I should go for a visit and do a little hunting, she thought, taking another sip of her coffee. It warmed her belly nicely. Her werewolf could do with some hunting and killing. It was too long since her last kill. There was movement within. Apparently her wolf was up for a road trip. The animal squirmed.
Be careful what you think, she reminded herself.
“All I want to do is live in peace. Me and my book club gals just want to sit out and relax and talk about books, Hell, that’s it.”
“I know, dear, I understand. Just pull back and give Mike some space and keep the police on speed dial. He’ll move on when he’s tired of it. You goading him isn’t gonna help.”
“You don’t understand, this place is crawlin’ with lowlife scum. Really.”
“Then move, Viv. You have the money,” Hellen said and sighed heavily. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers.
“I’m not leavin’ my home for those shitheads,” came her recalcitrant
reply.
“I gotta go, dishes and laundry are waiting.” Hellen lied. She was simply tired of the conversation, it was one they’d had every day for nearly two years.
“Alright, Hell, I’ll talk to you later.”
Hellen laid the phone down and rubbed her face. This feud was an ongoing event for a long time. Before Mike it was some other hoodlum whose name escaped her. Sugar River had become one of the worst places in Charlotte to live and yet her sister refused to leave. At her age, life could be so much easier if she’d just let it. Hellen rubbed her head and the stubble tickled her fingertips, rasping softly under her touch. She’d have to shave in a few days.
Since she lost her hair from the chemo, it had grown back in patchy, off grays, blacks, and whites. There were large areas that had no hair growing at all. She resembled a half-blown dandelion. It was the same with her werewolf. She grunted with amused sadness. She had seen herself in full glory as her wolf. Her werewolf looked like a plucked chicken or like a dog groomer had gone wild with the shears. How far she had fallen from her glorious youth? She sighed. For her human form Hellen opted for colorful wigs and when inside her home, opted for none.
Getting up from the couch, she went to the desk where her laptop sat. She hadn’t had an assignment for well over two years. She’d been forced to retire nearly three years ago from the agency. Hellen had worked for the CIA for nearly thirty-two years. She longed to go back into the field; she was a specialty operative. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she’d been abandoned at an orphanage at birth. Then she had been adopted, at the age of two, by Helene and Ralph Marigold fifty-eight years before. Vivian, seventeen at the time of the adoption, had chosen Hellen from all the infants at the orphanage.
Hellen’s fingers moved over the keys and then she remembered her coffee. That was another thing that plagued her, forgetfulness. She wasn’t sure if it was the natural aging process or the poisonous sludge that was injected into her body. She walked back over to the chair and grabbed the phone and her cup. She took another sip and sat back down at her computer. She surfed the dark web, scanning for anything interesting. There was plenty of that.
Hellen’s memories didn’t really start until the age of three, and the memories were a kaleidoscope of images. It was only in her deepest sleep that she found answers. In the darkness of her dreams, she remembered brief glimpses into her life at the orphanage that shaped her nature. It wasn’t until she hit puberty that she’d found out she was a werewolf. It was a frightening time in her young life. Her adoptive parents had been shocked but had stepped up to the plate to help her through her struggles. Vivian had even taken emergency leave to help.
“Mom, I’m a freak. What’s wrong with me?” Hellen had asked. The werewolf had come a week after her first period.
“You were made special. You’re not a freak, little lady.” Her mother had been adamant. Vivian had added her voice as well.
“Surprise, surprise, surprise,” Vivian said in a Gomer Pyle voice, her bright blue eyes filled with compassion though her tone was lighthearted. “Far out, sis! Do you realize how unique you are? Maybe you could work for the CIA one day. Heck, Neil Armstrong just walked on the moon last month. If he can do that, then you can be a werewolf. Seriously, I’m stoked, little sister.” Vivian’s enthusiasm had banished the self-doubt.
“You do need to keep that secret, though. I’d say ninety-nine percent of the population ain’t ready for a werewolf. They’ll flip out. The world is filled with knuckleheads. Trust me, I’m pretty sure there are more werewolves out there.”
Vivian was correct, there were more werewolves out there. That was in the late summer of 1969. So many years ago, yet it was fresh in Hellen’s mind. Her heart squeezed. She was truly lucky to have Vivian and her parents. She wondered more than a few times if her birth mother was a werewolf, or perhaps her biological father? There were questions that would never be answered.
She sighed and got up; she needed another cup of coffee.
§
Vivian huffed and went back to the window. She could just see the little peckerwood up the street, right behind the lamppost. Dammit, she wished she could just go out and blow his friggen head off. She needed to get a gun for that. She noticed her hands were shaking. Gritting her teeth, she went back to the couch and picked up her knitting needles. Hell just didn’t understand. Or rather, perhaps she did. Hellen dealt with scumbags in her job before she was forced to retire.
Hellen had given Vivian the cleaned-up and redacted version of some of the assignments she’d been assigned. Vivian knew there was more to it than what she’d been told, especially if Hellen’s werewolf was involved. She’d seen her sister in werewolf form and the animal was glorious back in the day. Now though, after the cancer and chemo, her werewolf looked weak and pathetic. It had broken her heart to see the magnificent animal brought so low, its power diminished and a pathetic animal left in its place.
Hell didn’t speak much about her wolf and Vivian understood and respected that. Vivian suspected that Hellen and her beast did dark things. When it came to her job in the CIA, that was a little different. Hellen hadn’t wanted to tell, but Vivian had a way of wrangling the stories from her sibling. She admired Hellen for her equanimity under pressure. Her younger sister had come a long way since the orphanage in Seoul. Hell had come a long way since her first change into werewolf-hood.
Vivian’s closest friends knew about Hellen and her secrets. They knew of the assassin and the werewolf. Her friends loved hearing the exciting stories. Vivian pushed a strand of faded blonde hair behind her ear. It was more white than blonde now. Age and time had ravaged her and her body. Time was not kind to the elderly. She shook her head. Time wasn’t kind, period, to old or young.
She remembered when she’d first seen Hellen in that awful orphanage. Hellen’s name had been Park Wook, all the children were named Park, since that was the surname of the owner of the orphanage. Though nearly sixty years ago, Vivian could even now recall the rancid smell of the place. The orphanage could only be described as a cruel place, one of suffering and abdication. With dirt floors and sagging, warped walls, the place had an air of neglect and melancholy.
Haunted thin, pinched faces peered at the visitors uncomprehendingly, their dark eyes blank. The children’s noses were crusted with snot and red with sores. Newborns and disregarded infants laid in rough, splinter riddled wooden vegetable crates. Babies were left in their filthy diapers, their tiny bottoms red and raw. Their delicate skin was covered in the slimy stench, heavy and cloying. There were no blankets in the bottom of the crates to cushion tender heads and fragile bones, only the splintered wooden slats.
Bottles of rice water were propped against the sides of the crates for the babies to drink. That was if the babies were capable of holding the nipple firmly within their mouth. If the babies didn’t and the bottle fell, they didn’t eat. No one held these children, no one cuddled them. There were no tender words, no loving songs. The children were shunned and ignored. They were kept alive for the money that would come, eventually, from selling the female children as slaves or prostitutes. The boys ended up in the military or dead, if they made it to adulthood. Life in the orphanage was inextricably miserable. The children were thrown away and forgotten, unloved and unwanted.
Vivian remembered seeing a four-year-old boy, his head misshaped from malnutrition. He could barely sit up. His delicate limbs resembled thin twigs. His large, vacant, and lethargic eyes reflected his misery. At seventeen, Vivian had difficulty reconciling these images to her own well lived young life. The American women who volunteered at the orphanage were horrified by its conditions, but there was little effect or change. The orphanage sheltered only misery.
There was no tender loving care within those walls. Toddlers unable to walk, so weak and malnourished, they pulled themselves across the floor. Some so weak, they were unable to sit up, skeletal arms and legs attached to weak little bodies. The Park orphanage wasn’t the only place that harbored such
conditions. It was endemic across the country; orphans were considered nonpersons and were treated as such. Vivian didn’t know if circumstances were similar in other countries.
Hellen never received the loving touches a newborn should. She was left to live or die by her own will. Vivian wondered if conditions had improved since the 50s and 60s? They were all beyond her now. It was her first real world experience of how life really was outside of her home, how other children fared. It was eye opening, shocking, and unsettling.
Vivian stood by the window, her finger tracing patterns on the glass. Looking out, she didn’t see the criminal, the drug dealer, Mike. She saw instead the little girl who had taken her heart. Vivian had chosen the two-year-old, who could not yet walk and could barely sit up. Too thin and too weak, Wook was a mixed-race child. She’d been some American soldier’s by-blow; her hazel eyes bespoke of that. It was rare for a mixed-race child to survive the orphanage. Especially back in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ralph Marigold worked for the State Department in Seoul and Helene and Vivian volunteered at the orphanage. The women brought a kind of gruel for the children to eat because the supplies that were given to the orphanage were sold on the black market. In order for the children to gain any sustenance outside of their normal ration, the American women fed the food directly to the children.
Little Wook was chosen, and through an expensive process, the little girl had finally been adopted. They had named the baby Hellen. Vivian lavished love on Hellen, as had Helene and Ralph. Hellen, however, was unable to reciprocate the emotional connection. She’d never received empathy or sympathy in her first two crucial years. But she was a bright child and love was heaped onto her like an avalanche.
