by Tammy Turner
Callahan could not have known that the truck drivers were lost, but close. Only a mile away, at the Gas ’n’ Go, the white, boxy truck was idling while its driver went to make inquiries inside. He kicked open the gas station’s clouded glass doors and greeted the perpetually grumpy Rhonda with a good day. He was facing a sourpuss with deep wrinkles and a bad perm. From her lofty perch behind the counter, she did not bother to look up at Lucas Harper, even when he put his last five dollars in cash down in front of her. All he wanted was a lottery ticket, a lighter, and directions to Mockingbird Lane.
“How should I know?” she said, barely audible. She slid a couple of pennies and a nickel across the counter toward his palm.
“Keep it,” he told her, swatting away the change and shoving the lighter and scratch-off lottery ticket into the front pocket of his orange-and-blue flannel shirt. He had customized it for the summer by cutting off the long sleeves.
His delivery truck was still idling outside at the diesel pump where he had left it. Inside the truck was his younger brother, Tommy, who huddled against his door in the passenger seat, snoring obnoxiously. His faded blue-and-red Atlanta Braves baseball cap was pulled protectively down over his baby face, hiding an eye that was turning deeper shades of black and blue with each passing minute.
Lucas cracked his driver’s window and wiped at the foggy cloud created by Tommy’s heated, heavy breathing. He tasted the smell of smoke in the air and swatted at his brother’s shoulder to wake him up from his midday nap.
“What is it?” Tommy complained groggily, stretching his long legs in the cramped truck cabin.
“Your girlfriend is looking for you,” Lucas laughed, pointing to Rhonda in the rearview mirror as she stood outside the building for a smoke.
“No, man, only one girlfriend at a time for me from now on,” Tommy explained to his older brother. Lucas chuckled as Tommy tenderly rubbed his swollen left eye.
Clogged city drains had left the asphalt at the Gas ’n’ Go wet from the storm the night before. As Lucas Harper punched the gas pedal, his truck peeled out sideways from the station and onto the narrow, two-lane street.
“We ain’t there yet?” Tommy complained again over the sound of the squealing tires. Then he closed his eyes.
“Almost,” said Lucas, straining to read the passing street signs through the fogged windshield. Ahead of his truck, a man standing in the middle of the road threatened to hold up his progress. Bearing down on the pedestrian, Lucas blared his horn.
Rousing at the commotion, Tommy glanced out his window. “Mockingbird Lane,” he read aloud to his brother and pointed a thumb at the green sign looming above them.
“That’s it,” muttered Lucas. He slammed his foot on the brake and shoved the gear into reverse, his smoking tires begging for forgiveness from the steaming asphalt. “Idiot,” Lucas screamed at the man. He rolled down his window and sped forward around the man, who was standing still as a stone statue in the middle of the road. “Get out of the way,” he yelled, swerving back into his own lane, his eyes locked on the bearded figure in his rearview mirror.
“Oh no,” Lucas mumbled.
“Ease up, man!” Tommy shouted at his brother, with his eyes buried in his hands.
“Too late,” Lucas whispered.
“What?” Tommy asked in a panic, his head dropping to his thighs as nausea boiled in his belly.
In the rearview mirror, the bearded man lay prostrate on the street, his body as still as a corpse. Lucas kept his foot on the gas and panic seized his senses.
“Slow down!” Tommy yelled. “You’re going to kill somebody.” He had not yet checked the rearview mirror.
There was suddenly a loud crunch at the front grill.
“What was that?” asked Lucas, his voice quivering.
“A dog,” Tommy replied, frantic. “I think you hit someone’s dog, you idiot!” Tommy struggled to rip the seat belt away from his stinging chest.
The brakes screeched, and smoke issued from the tires of the delivery truck. For several minutes, not a single breath passed the lips of the brothers inside the cabin.
“Get out,” Tommy finally hissed.
“No,” Lucas whispered fearfully.
Ripping his brother’s seat belt away from his shaking chest, Tommy reached across Lucas’s lap and unlocked the driver’s door. “Get out,” he repeated and pushed his brother roughly from the cabin of the truck.
Falling to the asphalt, Lucas picked himself up from his trembling knees and peeked around the front of the truck. The crushed grill smoked from the crash. Horrified, he saw that a splatter of blood was boiling on the hot, white truck hood and was dripping down the side of the wheel hubs onto the front tires. Lucas came around to the other side of the truck.
Tommy was kneeling next to a massive brown dog on the pavement. It whimpered. “Look what you did!” he shouted.
Lucas put one foot behind the other and retreated slowly to the rear of the leaning truck. He realized that the load of chain, rope, and cement mix from the hardware store must have shifted in the accident.
Lucas saw that in the middle of the road, twenty feet behind the truck, the man lay flat on his back. He was utterly still, and at Lucas’s distance, Lucas could not detect any motion of the man’s chest. The man had long, scraggly, salt and pepper hair, and a beard. A ripped plastic poncho covered his arms and belly. His faded jeans were ripped at the knees.
“No!” Tommy shouted from the front of the truck. “Help me!” he yelled again.
Lucas jerked his neck but saw only a blur of matted fur that smothered his nose. He sunk to the ground in a helpless heap, flat in the middle of the street.
Shaking leaves and twigs from his fur, Cyrus stepped on Lucas’s chest.
Tommy crawled around the side of the truck on his hands and knees. He trembled when the wolf raised his head toward the sky and howled in conquest.
Hopping off Lucas’s chest, Cyrus stalked toward the still body behind the truck.
A trickle of blood dripped from the man’s gaping mouth, and Cyrus lapped the red liquid greedily. The beast shook, a spasm of joy wreaking havoc upon his bones.
While the wolf was preoccupied, Tommy rose from the asphalt and reached inside the gaping door of the idling truck. He found Lucas’s baseball bat waiting for him underneath the driver’s seat.
“Tommy!” Lucas stuttered from the ground, pointing to an aluminum lunchbox tucked behind the driver’s seat.
Cyrus sniffed at the man in the street, while the man took in shallow breaths of air. The beast forgot the brothers until he heard the hammer of a pistol.
Tommy had aimed the gun at Cyrus’s head. With a flash of smoke, the bullet fired from the chamber of the revolver and raced toward the beast’s brain.
Cyrus grinned, ducking the bullet. He pounced on the trigger man, ripping into the boy’s flesh. He tore a chunk of skin from his thigh and latched onto the bone. Suddenly Cyrus wobbled from a penetrating slam into his ribs.
“Foul beast!” Callahan cursed. He beat the wolf until the wolf finally let go of Tommy’s leg. Whining, Cyrus retreated back to the bearded man. He growled at Callahan, who was wildly waving a baseball bat.
“Get out of here!” Callahan shouted at Tommy and Lucas Harper. They looked at him, unsure. “Go now!” he instructed them. Tommy quickly helped his brother from the ground. Stumbling to the sidewalk, they sprinted away as best they could muster, given their injuries. Not once did they look back. After a mile, they collapsed on the sidewalk, panting, too frightened to admit even to themselves what they had seen.
Tommy ventured to ask, “Do you think the emergency room is going to believe dog bite?”
Lucas shot back, “Do you think the hardware store would believe we’ve been carjacked?”
They decided that those were their stories, and that they were sticking to them.
Next to the bearded man, Cyrus itched fiercely, his fur morphing into sallow, wrinkled flesh. When his jaw squared, he spat at the ground. “Get ou
t da way, fool.”
With the bat in his hand, Callahan advanced on Cyrus. “No, beast, you are mine. Now relinquish that body, or pay the price.”
The revolver lay on the ground between them. Cyrus licked his lips and sprang upon it. Raising the barrel to the air, he aimed the loaded gun at Callahan.
“Him mine now,” Cyrus said calmly and fired a shot at the teacher, the bullet missing his ear by less than an inch.
The whiz of the missile rang in Callahan’s head, and he stared in stunned silence as Cyrus raised the sliding back door of the delivery truck “Him in there,” Cyrus commanded Callahan.
Loose chain and rope littered the floor of the truck. Callahan had ordered it from the hardware store in order to contain the very beast he now obeyed. Callahan lifted the scraggly man from street. A steady breath came from the man’s chest as Callahan laid him in the back of the truck.
“What do you want with him?” Callahan asked. A drop of blood from the stranger had stained his palms, and he rubbed them against his pants.
“Gat ya!” Cyrus hissed in pleasure at Callahan and raised the barrel of the gun to the air, his lanky fingers itching to pull the trigger again. “Me gonna need ya clothins,” he demanded. “Now,” Cyrus howled, aiming the gun at Callahan’s muddied pants.
Ripping his sweaty and mud-stained t-shirt over his head and shoulders, Callahan tossed the rag at the Cyrus’s bare feet.
“Faster,” Cyrus urged him.
“You did not answer my question, mongrel,” Callahan spat.
Cyrus slid on the baggy pants, his hips too narrow to hold them to his body. Snatching the t-shirt in his claws, he looked at Callahan down the barrel of the stolen gun.
“Him goin’ home,” Cyrus said smiling, waving the pistol in his face. “Ya go home now, too. Ya tell dat girl, me got her daddy.”
Callahan angrily slammed the back door of the truck closed. Cyrus backed away from him and slid around the bumper. Climbing into the driver’s seat, Cyrus locked the door and honked the horn. “Bye, bye,” he waved from the open window, as his bony foot searched for the gas pedal. He liked how these contraptions moved so fast. And he had far to go: All the way back to Jasmine and Peyton Manor.
15
Ghosts in the Attic
With a flip of her hair, Alexandra had exhausted Kraven’s soul. The pretty teen had completely and utterly withered the hope in his long-broken heart. She could not bear to stand next to him another second while his blood soaked into her skin, so she ran from him without a goodbye. He saw only a tangle of auburn waves fluttering down her back.
Kraven paced the sidewalk across the street from Park View Tower, Alexandra’s apartment building. “She is right,” he muttered. “I am a monster, a freak.” His voice rose slowly above the den of passing city traffic and drew the stares of a herd of Japanese tourists strolling past.
As they raised the lenses of their pricey cameras at the brooding, raven-haired stranger, their shutters clicked in unison. With his image recorded on the memory cards in their cameras, he realized he was ignoring a fundamental rule of immortality, which was to keep a low profile. Dropping to his knees, he beat his fists against his broad chest. “Alexandra, I am a monster!” he shouted.
Careful to keep a safe distance, the crowd of tourists circled Kraven while he knelt on the ground, his stone face hidden under his wide palms. Their shutters snapped open and shut furiously as they chronicled his collapse to the filthy sidewalk.
At the curb, a sleek passenger van eased to a stop with squeaking brakes and a sharp tap to the horn. The tourists threw one-dollar bills at the strange man lying on the sidewalk with pink chewing gum stuck to the back of his black hair. “Konnichiwa,” the tourists sang in unison as they boarded the van.
With his eyes closed, Kraven absorbed the rumble of the passing traffic. Except for the tourists, everyone else left him alone: transit buses, taxi cabs, and delivery trucks. Everyone passed by him without a nod to his distress: a pale, middle-aged man in pink spandex on a mountain bike and some plaid-shirted college girls with matching camouflage backpacks.
When he let the noise fade into the background, he could hear her. Her voice echoed in his skull from somewhere above his head. His azure-blue eyes popped open, scouring each direction until he realized she was in the parking garage. The four-story cement and rebar behemoth sat adjacent to Park View Tower. He was fairly sure that her run-down Jeep was sitting obstinately on the open top floor, refusing to start again.
“Here, hold this,” Benjamin said, handing Alexandra his cell phone.
She ignored him. She was sprawled across the back seat of her disabled Jeep with her arms folded across her head.
“Alex,” Benjamin called again from the front of the Jeep. “Did you hear me?”
Exasperated by her car problems, Benjamin wiped his oily fingers on his jeans and slapped the rusty bumper.
“Did you say something?” Alexandra called, not asleep but not entirely awake. She decided that she was dazed and confused, with a twinge of guilt for running away from Kraven in the park. But she had needed to get away from him, and she and Benjamin needed to get Taylor out of jail.
Glancing down at his blood still staining her fingertips, she shuddered. Her tenth-floor apartment was not far; if the car wasn’t running, they could go back. She wanted a long shower. Alexandra rubbed her palms, which yet burned, along the tops of her jean-clad thighs.
Her lips trembled as she remembered the dream she’d been having. She wanted to go back to sleep, to see her father again. He had been waiting for her in her apartment. He hugged her and told her everything would be fine. He squeezed her tighter, so tight she could not breathe. But when she looked up to his face, he vanished. Her arms were empty, and she was squeezing herself.
She pushed the passenger seat forward and slid her legs down to the cement.
“Come here,” Benjamin asked. “I need you to look up something on my phone.”
Alexandra tiptoed around the side of the Jeep and stared down into the cavernous engine compartment full of so many dirty, oily bits and wires.
“Okay,” she said, holding out her palm.
“Google this: valve head gasket,” he said, providing the words slowly and loudly.
She stared down at his cell screen and grinned. “Aw, he is so cute,” Alexandra cooed to Benjamin over the golden retriever puppy, who was curled into a sleeping ball.
“His name is Roscoe,” Benjamin said while his fingers tugged on a yellow hose.
“Maybe we should Google impound yards?” Alexandra suggested tactfully, her fingers scrolling over the touch screen.
Lifting his golden-blond head from the engine, Benjamin unhooked the steady metal rod holding up the hood and let it slam slut. “Alex,” he said, shaking his head, “my mom loves that car.”
“They don’t play around in Atlanta,” Alexandra said, handing the cell back to Benjamin. “Don’t park in a tow zone. Not for a minute, not for a second, not ever.”
“Now I know.” Benjamin stepped away from the Jeep. He walked across the fourth floor of the parking garage, stopping at the cement wall separating him from a steep drop to the sidewalk. He stared down at a fateful portion of the curb painted red for “Absolutely no parking allowed in front of Park View Tower.”
Approaching him from behind, Alexandra stretched her arms out to hug his shoulders. But then she stopped short, letting her right arm fall limp at her side, while she raised her left hand’s chewed thumbnail to her lips. She had suddenly realized that this was a bad time to develop a violent crush on the kid, and that he deserved someone normal. She wasn’t even sure who she was.
“My step-dad bought that BMW for her as a wedding present,” Benjamin explained, his eyes peeled on the city park across the street.
Biting the inside of her lip, Alexandra gulped when she realized she needed to say something to calm the handsome boy in front of her. “Sorry,” she stuttered, tears welling in her eyes.
Jerk
ing his head around when he heard her voice shake, Benjamin clasped his tanned arms around Alexandra’s waist. She dropped her chin to her chest to avoid his prying, sky-blue eyes.
“No worries, Alex,” he told her when he raised her freckled face to his.
He bent down closer, their lips brushing. But they were cut short when behind them, the sound of a muffler roared up the ramp from the third floor of the parking garage.
The golden Mustang levitated as the driver gunned the engine up the ramp and landed with a thud in the sunshine of the open fourth floor. With its tires squealing, the sports car galloped for a lap around the empty spaces before the driver stopped beside the pair of gawking teenagers.
“For sale,” Benjamin mouthed aloud, reading a black sign with orange letters mounted on the rear window behind the driver. Patting the back left pocket of his jeans, he made sure he had his wallet.
Forgetting she had his cell phone in her hand, Alexandra was startled when the device buzzed in her sweaty palm. “Unknown number,” she told Benjamin, trying to hand him the phone.
“Don’t answer,” he said, staring at the Mustang. The driver gunned the idling engine, and the rear muffler popped in their ears.
“What if it’s Taylor?” Alexandra asked, shoving the phone in Benjamin’s face.
“Answer it, then,” he said, approaching the sports car.
“Hmph,” Alexandra fumed and slapped at a green button. “Hello?” she asked stiffly and held her breath.
A nervous cough answered her unfriendly greeting.
“Hello?” she repeated again, even more acridly.
“Miss Woodward, might that be you, by chance?” the voice asked on the other end of the line.
Oh no, Alexandra thought. This is going to be bad.
“Yes,” she answered. “You’ve reached Alexandra Peyton, and I’m with Ben. Do you need to talk to him, Callahan?”
“No,” Callahan said calmly. “I was actually looking for you. I couldn’t reach you on any of the numbers provided on my student contact list.” Alexandra heard paper rustling in the background. “I could not reach Miss Woodward, either.”
