Family Secrets

by Thomas F Monteleone

  36

  From his perch in the tree, Telly tried to ignore the occasional shrieks and growls punctuating the moonlit night all around him. He had planned to get comfortable enough to try to fall asleep but the sight of Koertig still puttering in the lab building just beyond the compound wall had piqued his curiosity and kept him alert.

  Watching the pluriban at his workbench, Telly tried to figure out what he tinkered with. But then something changed all that.

  Koertig’s arms began to lengthen, extending his hands abnormally beyond the sleeves of his lab coat. And fur started sprouting all over this body, puffing out his clothes. As his hands transformed into paws, Koertig dropped the tool he’d been holding and stood for an instant staring down at the bench and his interrupted project. He’d obviously been so absorbed in his work, he’d forgotten to replace the hand becoming a paw with a more functional limb.

  The scene reminded Telly that pluribans preferred the lycan torso when they realized the transformation would not affect their rational minds as long as they used a head that was not lycan. Koertig’s big old troll noggin kept him from becoming a slavering beast banging around in the woods beyond the compound walls.

  But Telly felt sorry for his titular colleague in science. He could almost feel the frustration at not being able to do his work. Because, for Koertig, his work was everything.

  Why else would he endure a monster like Falzon?

  A good question, and the only viable answer.

  Inside the lab, Koertig turned away from the bench, and exited the room. The lights went out and all the building’s windows assumed a uniform darkness. Several minutes passed before Koertig appeared at the double doors where Ergel and the Uberall sat at their guard posts. Telly watched as they both jumped up from their seats as Koertig pushed through the double doors. The three of them had a brief conversation, then the odd professor shambled off to his quarters in another section of the compound.

  As he watched Koertig vanish into the shadows, he heard a growl from the base of the tree. He shrank against the trunk as he saw below three transformed lycans loping along. One of them stopped and looked up in his direction. It sniffed as its yellow eyes seemed to look right at him. Telly froze, not daring to breathe. It sniffed again, and its fellow wolves paused to join him. They all stared up at him with the gleam of the moon in their eyes, but none of them snarled or growled. Instead, they continued to thrust their fanged snouts upward, sniffing the air with great purpose.

  The largest of the three issued several short barks that did not sound aggressive at all. It was almost as if it were trying to communicate with him.

  Now that was weird.

  Telly released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. For a second there he thought he’d been discovered and the howls of the wolves might bring out some of the compound guards – even perhaps the disgusting Ergel. Telly did not move, nor make a sound, and finally the three werewolves lost interest in him and slinked off into the night.

  He’d been feeling so jumpy and twitchy up here in this tree, and now that the beasts had departed, he hoped he might slip off to at least sleep for an hour or two.

  37

  “Get back in here! Hurry!”

  Standing outside the clump of bramble bushes, Ryan ignored his sister’s words as he assessed his chances and decided that was a bad idea.

  “Can’t! No time! If I get hung up in the branches, they’ve got me.”

  “Ryan!”

  “I’m running down the road to the trees! I can draw them off!”

  “No!”

  “It’s okay, Em. I can make it. I’ll head for the trees on the right side of the road. As soon as they get past you, get out and run for the trees on the left. We’ll hang out till morning.”

  The sounds of another foraging pack racing up the road pushed him out of the bushes before she could answer him. As he accelerated up the road, he hoped she understood that he had no other options.

  Breaking into an all-out sprint, he closed the distance to the trees on the right side, but the barks and snaps of the pack behind him were growing louder and closer with each stride.

  He wasn’t going to make it.

  Uh-uh…never think like that. They were no longer as smart as he – they’d been changed into a bunch mindless killing things.

  He had a human brain on his side.

  The howling and shrieking tore the air around him and he knew the frontrunners of the pack had to be right behind him.

  And then he was into the small copse of trees where the light of the moon cast deep shadows in the leafy darkness. Springing upward, he launched him at lowest branch he could see and hoped it was strong enough to hold him.

  It was.

  And as he swung himself up and into an outward arc, he felt something tug at the heel of his sneaker – the slightest brush of incisors trying to drag him down into the snarling pack of snapping jaws. And then they clacked shut and fell away.

  His breath stuck in his chest as he chinned himself up and over the branch. One of the beasts sprang upward with such force it surged past his place on the branch. If the monster had been more accurate in the darkness, Ryan would have gone down in its jaws.

  As the predator fell away from him, Ryan scrambled higher into the upper branches where the pack could not go. He watched them circling the trunk, clawing at the bark as they made frantic leaps toward the branches, only to fall back to earth. He had their full attention, and that would give Emma a window of opportunity to reach her own tree in the other copse.

  As his heart pounded and his breath returned in ragged bursts, he yelled as loud as he could: “Em… maa! Em… maa! RUN! NOWWWW!”

  His voice sound high and thin and he was a little embarrassed by it, but it had been loud and that was most important. And being of a higher pitch, it had certainly cut through the low rumble of growls of the pack that had treed him.

  For an instant, he was worried that he might have drawn attention to his sister, but that would assume these transformed lycans – these “luners,” as Mr. Jantz had called them – were capable of understanding human speech in their crazed state. Somehow Ryan doubted it.

  He moved slowly and carefully the next level of branches. Below him the pack still circled and snapped upward against trunk of the tree. He must have really stirred them up when they had been so close to actually overtaking him… because they hadn’t lost interest in ripping him into smaller bite-sized pieces.

  Well, not tonight, fellas…

  Ryan would stay awake all night if he had to do it. It was simple after all – he was a lot smarter than the whole bunch of them combined.

  Now, he could only hope that Emma had heard him, and had acted upon it.

  38

  When Ryan’s soprano cry pierced the darkness of her bramble bush haven, Emma almost smiled. He’d made it! That little speedster, that crazy boy had done exactly what he’d said he would.

  And now she had to trust him. Now she had to make her own move.

  Staying as low as possible in the thicket, Emma slipped among the branches and thinner shoots in quick, brief movements. She didn’t want to make any noise or cause the shrubbery to shake in any way that might attract the attention of the lycans. A step, then a pause to disengage from the twigs and tendrils of the bushes, so thick in places they were grabbing her clothes in multiple places. And then another step forward as she pushed her hands out in front to keep the leaves and sticks from her eyes.

  A slow process, and even though a part of her wanted to burst out of the cover and run as fast as she could toward the trees, she knew she couldn’t do that. As she finally cleared the last of brambles, she stood stock-still in the cool night air and took a few seconds to just listen.

  Silence.

  Utter and complete silence. The breeze had dropped off and Emma heard not even the rustle of leaves scudding down the road. If anything was lurking out there, it was being as quiet and stealthy as she.

  Ry
an had drawn the lycans across the road. The way was clear to the nearest clump of trees – her clump. She should go… but something held her back. A feeling that something bad was about happen. Her prescience or clairvoyance or whatever talent she possessed had been growing stronger here on Nocturnia, and had suddenly switched on.

  The trouble was that her feelings were so vague. Something bad was going to happen, sure, but when, where, and to whom were never clear.

  Is it me? She thought. Am I in danger? Or is it Ryan or Telly. If only she knew.

  One thing she did know was that she couldn’t stay here. She’d scoot to a safer place and worry about it there.

  And so she began to move again. Remaining in a half-crouch, Emma followed the line of shrubbery that hugged the road all the way up to the near clump of trees. It should be empty – or so she prayed. She took small, short steps that kept the sound of her passing to a dead minimum. And even though it was sooo slow, she new it was also the safest.

  One step at a time, the distance to the trees diminished.

  Moving in almost total darkness, keeping oriented only by the moonlight limning the shapes of the bushes and trees, Emma felt as if she had to force her way through the darkness, fight for every step.

  And that was how it went until she heard the noise.

  At least she thought she heard it…

  That made her stop and straighten up, hands on hips. A single, loud snap! It sounded exactly like someone had stepped on a stick, and she almost giggled partially from fear and partially from a memory of something she’d read by Mark Twain when he was doing a harsh criticism of the novels of James Fennimore Cooper. Twain had written that whenever Cooper needed to alert somebody in the woods, there was always a twig just waiting to be tramped to make just enough noise.

  She shook herself. Why am I thinking about that now?

  Because in this case, it seemed exactly right.

  She had heard the noise, and that was exactly what it sounded like.

  Keeping still, she wondered what the sound signaled. A small animal huddling in the near shrubbery, hoping to avoid the night of the lycan savagery? Another person wandering in the darkness like herself?

  Because she’d only detected that single sound, it appeared that whatever or whoever had made it, was also trying to remain quiet, to remain unnoticed.

  It couldn’t be a “luner,” because they were anything but quiet as they rampaged across the open countryside.

  Stop worrying about it, and get moving.

  The thought, as if coming from Ryan, prodded her into motion once again and she closed the distance to the trees and safety. Another thirty or forty paces and she would be there.

  That notion got her excited and she increased her stride, edging closer to the edge of bushes along the road.

  And that was when it happened.

  Emma stopped in mid-step. She could feel the nearness of something. Something bigger than her… something breathing.

  She could hear its breath easing in and out with a hint of labor and exertion, and just as she knew she must run from this spot. And then the sudden breaking of branches as the thing burst from shrubs alongside her and wrapped her up in its arms.

  As she was lifted off her feet, a hand – not a paw or a claw – clamped over her mouth before she could scream.

  That last she noticed that there was no hair on its palm…

  39

  Ryan realized he was in some sort of apple tree – or what passed for apples in this weird world. He wondered if they were edible but had no desire to find out. The way things worked here, bite a fruit and it might bite you back.

  He watched the snarling feral lycans milling below. He’d attracted quite a posse, which was exactly what he’d wanted. He noticed they came in all shapes and sizes – some long, some short, some lean, some downright dumpy. He guessed if they were overweight in their daily form they’d be overweight after they turned. Looked like the law of conservation of mass and energy worked here as well.

  He wished he could see the road from his perch, but the leaves of his own tree and the one around him masked it. He figured Emma had made it to safety by now. He hadn’t heard any lycan howls from her direction. He wished he could call out and ask if she was safe, but then she’d have to answer, and that would give her position away. Best if she kept silent and let the lycans think there was only one human wandering around out here.

  He noticed a drop in the volume of their growls. He looked down and saw a couple of them start to wander off. What if they found Emma? What if they attacked her tree and she fell?

  He grabbed an apple from a nearby branch and threw it.

  “Leaving so soon?” He tossed another and it struck one of the retreating form in the back. “The party’s just begun!”

  The howls doubled and redoubled in volume as the wolves attacked the tree again.

  He kept tossing and taunting.

  “That’s right! Stay with me, you fur-brained dummies! I’m the one you want! Ain’t nobody else out there!”

  Just keep quiet, Emma, he thought, and we’ll get through this in one piece.

  Part 5:

  Lost and Lycan

  40

  The warmth of the sun tickled his eyelids, urging Telly to wakefulness. After a moment of total disorientation, he remembered where he was and reached out to steady himself among the spread of branches he’d settled into the previous night. Then he pulled himself to a sitting position and dangled his legs from the tree as he looked out over the compound wall. Close by lay the laboratory building where he’d spied Koertig struggling valiantly with his “lunar” proclivities.

  The image made Telly smile for an instant, but then he recalled the near miss of being discovered by those passing lycans.

  Careful not to lose his grip, he lowered himself out of the branches, down the trunk, and finally to good old terra firma. Telly walked around to the front entrance of the compound where a new pair of Sasquatches stood inside the huge iron gates.

  “Hey, luner! Have good night takin’ bites outta stuff?!” said the one on the right who looked a little leaner than most of his kind. His tan fur was streaked with black and gray, and Telly couldn’t remember ever seeing him before. One of Falzon’s newer recruits no doubt.

  “It was…sufficient,” said Telly. “Let me in. I’ve got to check in for work.”

  “Name?” said the bigger guy on the left.

  “Teddy…I’m working in the lab with Koertig.”

  The squatch checked his clipboard, nodded. “Open ’er up.”

  The other one unlocked the gate and threw back the heavy latches as if they were made of balsa wood. “Come on in, wolfie!”

  Telly gave them a lame little salute and sidled into the outer courtyard, angling to the right toward the lab. He entered the building and headed up to see his boss. As Telly entered the second floor lab he found Koertig splayed across a wheeled desk chair, his oversized turnip-shaped head tilted at an odd angle. His clothes weren’t torn or shredded in the usual post-lunar lycan manner – he hadn’t gone nuts tearing them off. He showed no aftereffects from his torso’s transformation the previous night.

  The room’s acoustics echoed the pluriban’s sonorous and syncopated snoring. It had a bouncy rhythm that brought an impish grin to Telly’s face. Koertig looked so totally out of it, so peacefully asleep, Telly was unsure whether or not to disturb him. As he stood there watching, the doctor shifted in his chair, snorted, and almost slid off. He blinked, then opened his eyes, struggling to focus on Telly who remained poised at the entrance to the room.

  “Wha–??! What’s going on!? What’re you doing here?”

  “It’s morning,” said Telly. “I was reporting for work. As usual.”

  Koertig righted himself and stopped his slide toward the floor. He made a dignified effort to stand and smoothed the rumpled clothes beneath his white lab coat.

  “Good to see you on time, Teddy. I have plenty planned for the day.”
<
br />   “Just tell me where you want me to start.”

  Koertig moved away from the chair that flanked the lab’s primary workbench and ambled over to his smaller paperwork desk. Opening, the center drawer, he pulled out a red and white pack of cigarettes. As he fumbled one out and into his mouth, he rummaged the drawer for a lighter or a match.

  “Seriously?” Telly said. “You just woke up and you’re going to smoke?’

  Koertig gave him a look. “Know your place, lycan.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And what is this ‘seriously’? Of course I’m serious. Some of your mid-Lycanthum bumpkin slang?”

  “I-I guess so.”

  He couldn’t tell him it was a common expression back in the good old U.S. of A.

  Telly watched him with sad interest. He had never understood why anyone would want to inhale the post-combustion gases of paper and tobacco deep into the soft tissues of their lungs. Just thinking about it sounded dreadful.

  “Ah…” said Koertig as he found a pack of wooden matches. “I love to have one good smoke to get the day started.”

  He ran the match-head across the edge of the box and as it flared into life he applied it to the end of a Marlboro. It made Telly wonder where he’d gotten the pack of cigarettes from Humania and for how long had he been hoarding them.

  “So, what’re we doing today?”

  Koertig waved off the question as he took a deep drag on the cigarette, exhaled a watched with rapt attention the thin blue stream of smoke he sent toward the ceiling.

  “I want to figure out how the breach generator was compromised. And I want to see if between the two of us we can deduce how to expand the window and keep it open long enough for Falzon’s plans.”

  Telly didn’t answer right away. But the second half of Koertig’s plan was the last thing he wanted to accomplish today or any other day. But he couldn’t let Koertig suspect that.

  “Okay, sure,” said Telly. “But I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”