He went over to the man’s trashcan and pulled out some of the worst smelling fish remains he had ever encountered. Without hesitation, he rubbed the fish guts over his naked body.
Silently, he was thankful he had already thrown up.
In the span of a few short hours, he had been reduced to acting like an animal. Now he smelled like one as well.
Trent waited by the door until he heard a group of residents pass, then opened the door just enough to slip out into the dark hallway. He thought for a minute about which animal he should pretend to become, but realized that he only had to be himself to pass for a wild creature. With genuine self-loathing and rage, he scanned the dark hallway and saw that the entire floor was filled with naked, grunting people who all believed themselves to be animals. He slowly approached the back of the nearest group of residents and observed how they were acting.
It was time for him to perform his greatest deception to date. Instead of hiding or fighting, he was going to escape by walking among the very animals that sought to kill him. Without any conscious thought, he crouched with his knees bent and began to emit guttural noises from his throat.
He became one with the excitement of the hunt…even though he was the creature for whom they were all searching.
Chapter 10
THE CROWD OF about fifty or so people to which Trent had attached himself stopped at the door that he had left open as a decoy. In the darkness, he could barely make out the lead animals sniffing his jacket and the doorknob that he knew was covered in blood. It was obvious from their grunts and screeches that they smelled his scent and thought they finally had him trapped. The leader entered with another half dozen of the residents following him in a single file.
Trent wondered to himself whether they had learned a lesson from Christina’s apartment and were going to check behind the door.
Trent moved in close to the others, packed in tight, sweaty skin against sweaty skin as they formed a wall outside of the apartment door. Between his nakedness and his smell, he didn’t receive a second look from any of them. When the smaller group emerged from the apartment, Trent was surprised to see that Alice was their leader and that the others followed her with deference. Even though it was dark in the hall, Trent pulled back and made sure he was mostly hidden behind others in the crowd as he watched Alice growl and grunt at those around her, communicating in a crude animalistic language that everyone but he seemed to understand.
In response to one of her roars, a giant of a man stepped up to the front of the crowd. Unlike those around him, the giant actually looked like a human version of a grizzly bear, especially in the darkness of the hallway. He was huge, standing at what must have been six and a half feet tall with broad, muscled shoulders, a long beard, and wild, thick hair. Alice growled at the giant, who in turn lumbered over to one of the apartment doors and tore it straight off its hinges in one flowing motion. Trent stopped breathing for a few seconds as he took in the raw strength of the man.
A man that big should have been strong, but not that strong. Either he was on some kind of drug like PCP or there was something else going on with him that Trent had yet to figure out. One by one, the giant went through and tore out apartment doors while other residents, as well as Trent, filed into empty apartments to search them. Even though everyone was involved in the exercise, Trent imagined there were going to be some pretty angry tenants in the morning when they realized they no longer had front doors.
Despite his firm belief that all things fantastic could be explained through logic and sound thinking, evidence continued to mount that the people of Whittier were something more than just crazy and less than easily explainable. At least some of them, including Christina when she wasn’t under the effects of the Xanax, seemed to be much stronger than a normal human. And they moved about like they could see better in the dark than he could as well.
As Trent began to grasp that he was surrounded by people who could rip him to pieces, the same tingling of fear he had felt in the barracks began to rise. This time it was mixed with a sickness in his stomach that tasted like dread. Even as his emotions threatened to get the better of him, he focused all of his will on tamping them down—if animals could sense or even smell fear, he had to assume these people could as well.
Eventually, the giant arrived at the apartment where Trent had just been hiding. The giant ripped the door off its hinges even though Trent knew it was still unlocked. Alice and her group entered the apartment and stayed inside for a while. Trent tensed as he prepared for Alice to race out of the apartment and to zero in on him somehow. But when they shuffled out, they acted as if they had found nothing.
After searching the last of the apartments in the hallway, there was what appeared to be a discussion between Alice and a few of the larger males, with the giant standing behind her, dutifully waiting. As they conferred, the animals from up and down the hallway gathered around them so that Trent was now standing as one among what must have been a hundred naked people.
Suddenly, a series of deep growls and yelps went out from Alice, and the larger crowd automatically split into two parts. The larger group headed back toward the elevators and the front wing of the building, while the other smaller group of only twenty or so moved down the hall to the other set of stairs. Trent followed the smaller group even though he knew there might be a greater risk of detection because of the smaller numbers and because Alice might get a clear look at him and recognize his face. At least it was still dark, and as long as he stayed in the back of the group he felt at least a little protected.
When they got to the end of the hallway, Alice opened the stairwell door, and the hall was suddenly flooded with light. Trent knew he must be beyond exhaustion, because he hadn’t taken into account the fact that he would lose his cover of darkness once in the stairwell. But he was too far along now to turn back without raising suspicion. He remained at the back of the group and mimicked how everyone else acted, avoiding eye contact as much as possible; the last thing he wanted was for one of the others to think he was trying to assert his dominance.
Once inside the hallway, the group split up again with the first half going downstairs and the second half being led upstairs by Alice. Trent thankfully followed the group going downstairs. With each step, he focused his mind on thinking like he imagined an animal would think, trying to react to everything with all his senses. He also forced himself to recall in vivid detail everything he had done that evening, most of which made him feel less like a human being than ever before.
As they shuffled down the stairs, they passed the sixth floor, and arrived at the fifth. The animal in front of Trent turned to him and started growling in garbled tones as if trying to relay some kind of an order. Trent answered back without hesitation, trying his best to imitate the man’s sounds. As best as he could remember, one of the symptoms of clinical lycanthropy was people thinking they could talk like animals, when in reality, they just were just making up noises and grunts to imitate the animal they thought they had become.
Unfortunately, when Trent tried to growl back, the man stopped, sniffed the air, and swiped at Trent’s mid-section with a loud roar that echoed up and down the stairwell. The eight other creatures in front of him turned to look, just as he knew that the group upstairs with Alice was stopping in its tracks as well. With nowhere to hide and no tricks left, Trent jumped over the rail and started to free-fall to the ground floor below. It was a desperate act, but the only card he had left to play.
The open space between the staircases was just wide enough for him to fall through, but not wide enough for him to do so without him colliding with the metal and concrete pieces of the stairwell on the way down. He fell only two floors before his left arm became tangled in the railing, stopping his descent suddenly and painfully as he felt and heard his arm break.
The pain was shocking, and only his savage fight-or-flight instinct allowed him to power through it, disentangle himself from the metal pole, and keep moving. By t
he time his feet were solidly on the stairs again, his pursuers were only one floor behind him. He bounded down the steps past the third floor as fast as he could, holding his broken arm close to his torso, buoyed by the steady supply of adrenaline his brain was supplying to his body. He could tell they were closing the distance as their grunts and breathing grew louder behind him. As he passed by the second floor, he briefly considered making a break for it and trying to find an unlocked apartment from which he could jump to the ground below. But he couldn’t take the chance of not finding an open door and then being stuck in the hall with nowhere left to run.
In three more seconds, he was at the first floor. He knew that the ground level was locked up tightly, so he made an instantaneous decision to continue running down the stairs to the basement.
His foot touched down at the basement level with his pursuers right behind him. He pulled the door open and looked behind him to see one of the animals ready to leap. Before he could react, a flash of a figure moved past him from the open basement door and took down his pursuer with a single swing of what looked to be a wooden Louisville Slugger bat.
His savior turned around and Trent saw that it was Christina who had just saved his life.
She didn’t look exactly happy to see him as she shoved him through the doorway and closed the door behind them. The instant the door closed, more of his pursuers crashed into it, piling on top of each other, so that they didn’t have enough room to pull the door open immediately.
Christina still didn’t say a word. She just grabbed Trent by his good arm and pulled him down the hallway. He almost didn’t recognize her because she was dressed in jeans, flannel shirt, and a fleece jacket, making her the only person in the building to not be naked.
Within seconds, the crowd of animals opened the door and collectively let out a horrendous yelp when they saw Trent running away with Christina by his side.
He navigated as quickly as possible around the turns of the hallway, shifting his body weight from one foot to the other. At one of the turns, he missed his footing and accidentally slammed Christina and himself into one of the painted cinderblock walls. He almost blacked out from the pain in his arm. He bit down on the sharp ache and launched them both off the wall as they headed down a final stretch before spilling into the large open space where the residents of The Towers had been caged only hours before.
This time, the scene in the large room was much different than before. It was eerily quiet and still with all the cage doors opened and none of the residents present.
Trent and Christina ran to where she had sat at her post earlier.
The first of their pursuers erupted through the door behind them, and soon he was joined by six more of the pack. On the opposite side of the room, where Trent had first entered so many hours ago, more people showed up, probably having come downstairs from the main stairwell at the front of the building.
With every passing second, Trent and Christina were surrounded by an increasing number of residents.
The two of them backed away from the approaching throng. The crowd took its time, sensing that their prey was at last caught. Trent and Christina backed their way through the maze of open cages until they literally had their backs up against the rear basement wall.
Without having to communicate their intentions, they both started pulling nearby cages in front of them and stacking them up to act as a makeshift fortification between them and their impending killers. Just as they stacked the last cage they were able to reach in time, the first of the mob approached them and started banging at the cages. Trent and Christina tried to hold their makeshift wall together, even as the animals attempted to rip it apart. Luckily, the open doors of the cages made it so that their construct was more of a tangled-together heap than a neatly stacked set of boxes, making it much harder to take their wall apart than it had been to build it up.
As the struggle continued, Trent looked over at Christina and couldn’t help but notice how much stronger she was than him. Not as strong as when she thought she had fully shifted back in her apartment, but still more so than a woman her size should have been.
It didn’t matter, though.
No matter how strong she was, she would be no match for the nearly two hundred residents now in the basement, all of them struggling to get through for their chance at the cage wall. It would only be a matter of short, precious time before the crowd made its way through and the two of them were dead.
Through the bars of the cages, he could see their mad eyes glaring at both of them in the same way lions might look at a wounded antelope before going in for the kill. At the front of the crowd, Alice stood, her face as mad as an inmate from an asylum. He assumed Christina could see her as well. She, once a part of their pack, had turned traitor, and would now suffer the same fate as his.
Suddenly, the naked, mad residents of Whittier started to pull back and to move away from the wall of cages.
Trent and Christina didn’t dare look at each other, but subconsciously, they each relaxed their grips on the cages just slightly. Maybe some kind of miracle had actually occurred. Perhaps someone had come to save them.
And then they saw the giant of a man who was capable of ripping apartment doors off their hinges, and they both knew that their fortress, along with their hope, was about to be demolished.
The giant lumbered up to the two of them and glared at them through the layers of metal bars before grabbing one of the entangled cages with a single hand and flinging the cage away with the sound of tearing metal. He exerted no more effort than a child would use while throwing away an unwanted toy.
Trent raised his knee and kicked with the flat of his foot against the wall behind him in frustration and anger. He had come so far. Other than a broken arm, he had made it mostly in one piece from the twelfth floor all the way down to the basement. He had done things he would not thought himself capable of doing to make it this far. And he had learned what he had hoped to learn in Whittier in the first place. He knew what the fear of the unknown tasted like—so well that he would never forget. If he ever made it back to do another show, he knew he could incorporate what he had discovered about himself and human nature into his routine. But none of that mattered, because everything was going to end here.
He struck the wall behind him again with his naked foot and barely registered the fact that the wall gave way a little. He might not have noticed at all if he hadn’t stepped on some fragments of brick that had fallen to the floor beneath his feet. He recoiled in pain, but looked back to see a hole in the wall starting to form where he had twice kicked it.
He heard the giant pulling and rending the stacked cages behind him. Trent frantically began using any part of his body and all the energy he could muster to pound away at the brick wall. As he bashed into it with his knees and his right shoulder, he registered that the brick was the same coloration of the crumbled wall he had seen at the mouth of the tunnel in the old barracks across town. A brief glimmer of hope sparked inside his chest as he bloodied himself on the rough brick wall. He was rewarded promptly with an opening the size of his fist just as Christina turned and realized what he was up to.
She took her Louisville Slugger and started slamming away at the wall. Between the two of them, they soon opened a hole large enough for a head to fit through. They stuck their hands into the hole and started ripping out bricks as fast as they could. They involuntarily looked back every few seconds to see how close the giant was, even as they continued to pull out the bricks piece by piece.
A minute later, the hole wasn’t quite large enough for Trent to fit through, but the giant only had one more layer of cages left before getting to them. The crowd of residents was closing in with anticipation, howling so loudly that the noise physically hurt Trent’s skull.
Because Christina was smaller than him, he grabbed her by the shoulders and practically shoved her through, head first, even as she scrambled to get inside. Her struggles widened the hole a little bit more, and
after she was all the way inside, Trent tried to dive through, holding his broken left arm close to his torso, but his body became stuck only half-way through.
Trent heard the crash of metal behind him.
He shimmied with all his might, and with Christina pulling him from the other side, he finally made it through.
They were safe for the moment, but the giant wouldn’t expend more than a single breath ripping out the rest of the brick wall that looked like it had patched the tunnel for so many years. Trent peered down the tunnel and saw only darkness beyond the twenty or so feet that was illuminated by the dim light spilling in from the basement.
Trent looked back through the opening just in time to see the giant rush up to the tunnel opening. He shoved his face right up to hole and roared loudly.
But he did not come any closer.
The giant glared at Trent, then backed away. Alice’s face appeared in the opening. She was frothing, her eyes filled with hatred as she glared at Trent and then Christina. Trent waited for her to order her giant to tear through the remaining bricks, but she did…nothing.
When he turned back, he saw that Christina was sitting on the tunnel floor, laughing softly.
“You find some part of this funny?” he said, trying to catch a full breath still.
“I guess what they say about the tunnels must be true after all,” she said, her breathing already returning to normal.
He looked around the tunnel, waiting for some other creature to suddenly jump out at them.
“What’s wrong with the tunnels?”
Christina took a deep breath and exhaled.
“Supposedly back when the military base was still being built, the soldiers used the tunnels to trap, kill and even store some of the animals. Hooked up huge freezer units to keep the meat from spoiling. The Elder says these tunnels are bad ground. Stained forever and avoided even by the ghosts of the dead animals.”
The Whittier Trilogy Page 9
