Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  Roderick lifted his elbows away from his sides as though to hold his arms out but didn’t remove his hands from his pockets. “Apparently!” He chuckled. She chuckled. “A little chilly, but I prefer it that way.”

  “Yes,” the woman said in agreement. She held up the mug of steaming coffee and gestured with it, took another drink. “It’s going to stay that way for a few days, they say.”

  Roderick heard the sweep of heavy fabrics in the back yard of the house she was watching and then the latch of a door being released. He stepped forward, back towards the car, blocking the view. “Indeed? And which ‘they?’”

  The woman blinked at him. “The... weather ‘they.’”

  Roderick did take his hands out of his packets then and clap them together. “Oh, yes, of course,” he replied. “I meant...” He paused. “Well, whatever.” Without a moment’s hesitation he turned halfway and looked back at Clyde’s house, over his right shoulder. “Pity about that, isn’t it?” His eyes stayed there, like he was looking for something.

  H’Diane coughed and cleared her throat. “Yes, it’s tragic. Did you know him?”

  Roderick looked back finally and then took two more steps towards her. He was thin as a knife but H’Diane found her view off the house entirely blocked. “Heavens no,” he finally said. “I’m visiting some relatives.” He closed his mouth, then opened it again. “I’m in from out of town.”

  “Ah,” H’Diane said. “I did notice that the accent is different, but with all the retirees around now, you never know.”

  “As is yours,” Roderick said. “The accent.” She could only see his silhouette but his cheeks were pointed in a way that made her assume he was smiling.

  “I didn’t grow up here,” she said. “Well, I mostly did. Parents didn’t, though. I never really picked it up. It was hard enough knowing two languages: English and Vietnamese. I didn’t need to add mountain drawl to the mix.” She chuckled at him and so he laughed in return.

  “So do you know who did it?” His voice was like a laser, somehow.

  H’Diane sighed heavily, very suddenly, like something had escaped from under pressure and come blowing out of her lungs in its escape. “No comment,” she said. “And no reporters in general.” She scowled now, and reached for the ignition as though to leave.

  “Oh, no, no,” Roderick quickly said, and in a step he closed the gap so that he was leaning on the front fender of her car where it met the seal of the door. Her eyes jumped to where his hips touched that metal joint and then back up. “I’m no reporter,” he added. “Just a concerned citizen.” He smiled again. Standing sideways as he was, H’Diane could see the right half of his face, more or less, by the security light from the victim’s yard. Funny how a big old night light like that turns everything blue, she thought. He smelled strongly of soap and shampoo and cigarettes and absolutely nothing else. Something about it made the hair on her neck stand up. “So is this where you wait for him to return to the scene of the crime?” The half-expression on his half-face might have been mockery or amusement or simple salacious voyeurism.

  H’Diane sighed so quietly that only Roderick could possibly have ever heard her. “No. Besides, this isn’t the scene of the crime.”

  Roderick arched one eyebrow at her - well, at least one, she couldn’t see both - and then smiled. “I read in the paper that you don’t know where it happened.”

  H’Diane closed her mouth and said nothing. She’d had about enough of all this. Just taking a walk her ass. She should cuff him right now just to see what he coughed up down at the station. She started to say something to him, started to reach for the car door, when he produced another winner.

  “Let’s say you never find whoever did it.” His voice had dropped half an octave and he’d cut the volume by a lot. It was distressingly intimate to hear him like that. He drummed the tips of four fingers and a thumb on the roof of her car, idly, and looked back at the house. “How long until the case is closed? Like, how long do you look before you just say, oh well, we’ll never know? I ask because I read that the man who was killed had a case like that as one of his very first and I can’t help wondering what that must be like.” He sighed quietly. “That would really, really stink.”

  H’Diane started to tense just a little and thought about starting to slide a hand towards her pepper spray, but then the guy just shrugged it all off. “Oh well. You’ll find him. Or her. It could always be he had a woman on the side.” His voice was just as bright as it had been at first, his body no longer some close, cloying presence right against the door of her county car. He was once again just some skinny blond guy in a biker jacket. Sort of. It was to biker jackets what those new Beetles are to a Super Bug: a yuppie impersonation to one person’s eye, a stylish update to another’s. “Anyway, you should probably go back to doing what you were doing and I should stop interrupting.” He leaned down a little, waved with the fingers of one hand, then stepped off neatly and went whistling back the direction he’d come from originally. Two minutes later, H’Diane stopped gripping the wheel and allowed herself to look in the mirror.

  He was gone. Must be a bend in the road back there, she thought to herself. There simply must be.

  She sat in perfect silence for three or four more minutes, eyes rotating between the rear view and side mirrors and the road in front of her. The house could take care of itself for a little bit. Finally she convinced herself that the freak in the jacket was well and truly gone. Ten minutes later she’d fallen asleep in the driver’s seat and wouldn’t wake up for nearly two hours. She would hate herself for the lapse in discipline but her body would be incredibly grateful. She never once heard Roderick Surrett climb back in his tree and start humming old lullabies to himself.

  2

  I was careful and quiet going out of Clyde’s place - out the back door, straight through the yard, into the trees, over the hill and back down to my car. I drove out of where I’d stashed it and went on back down to North Kills River, then over and back onto 280 and south towards Hardisonville. A few hundred yards ahead I had to decide. 280 forked so that 191 went south to Hardisonville proper between farms and little patches of aspirational housing developments whereas 280 turned west in the direction of Brevard, a sleepy destination at the other end of a long tunnel of night and nothing. I thought of Marty Macintosh and his map of disappearances around Brevard and I kept going on NC 280.

  The newspaper said Cliff worked in Brevard. He was a security guard at some old film plant that had shut down a few years back. Not much of it left, I imagined, but they paid someone to keep an eye on it all the same. The cops hadn’t been able to find him but I still wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to go there and see if I could tell when he’d been there. If he was dead, too, this was something weird and tragic but not really anything scary. Mass murderers, serial killers, revenge killing: all that stuff is pretty low-rent in my world. Vampires are not murderers by habit. We have a culture of secrecy, of stealth, and attracting the attention of the local law every time we eat dinner is about as far from stealthy as one can get. That doesn’t mean killing never happens, though, or that we are particularly horrified when humans turn their various powers against one another in some final and drastic way. I figured Cliff was probably dead. If he was still alive, though, I had some questions for him. First among them would be, where’s the bracelet?

  I shook my head and let my mind wander while I drove the four-lane highway around twists and curves and up and down gentle hills. The only place the road really got interesting was at the border of Transylvania County - I’m not making that up, it’s really named that - when it climbed hard up a high mountain and then swept fast down the other side into Pisgah Forest. At the bottom of that steep descent, it ran through a little neighborhood that had grown up around the highway when it was two lanes and as quiet as could be. When the road had been widened they had just cut it into people’s yards. Front porches and mailboxes were perched just feet - sometimes it looked more lik
e inches - from the slow lane on either side. Someone in the past had put houses here to take advantage of the only straight shot to Asheville and the road had nearly knocked their houses over in thanks.

  Transylvania County was named for a business, supposedly, not that region of Romania it so closely resembles: high peaks, deep crags and hundreds of waterfalls along rivers of every imaginable size. Either way, the name is derived from Latin: trans sylvan, meaning “through forests”. That definitely describes Transylvania County, which is basically a few thousand people standing sideways on a bunch of woods-covered cliffs. It’s home to some tremendously gifted musicians and artists and to some of the most backwards, inbred redneck freakjobs you can imagine. I love it for its quiet woods, so silent at night, and its many miles of trails and streams. It’s a good place for a body to get lost for a while. It’s also a good place to help another do the same.

  I swung a left onto 64, still two lanes here, past the fish camp and a barbecue joint and then very abruptly I was back in the middle of nowhere. More turns, more two-lane roads, and I had arrived at an intersection in the middle of nowhere. An old country garage was on one corner of it and a sign pointed to the right that read, “Clarke Industries.” I pulled into the dark gravel lot of the garage to look over that printout Marty had given me. I was in the very thick of the disappearances Marty had noted over the last five years. They didn’t all happen here, to be sure, and they hadn’t happened all at once, but they were clustered here more densely than anywhere else other than the middle of downtown Asheville.

  I turned back onto the road in the direction of the old plant and immediately had to start climbing. The car dropped into a lower gear and I put my foot to the floor and listened to it work. Gravity and the steep grade were not my friends on this one and I’d dropped to thirty-five, then to thirty, before I’d made it around the first couple of curves. The engine roared and I juiced it into passing gear to try to get some licks in of my own against them both. Eventually the grade got a little kinder and I was able to build some speed and relax a little. Here and there a house dotted the side of the road but never less than a mile from one another and never very far from the road. This was the middle of nowhere; Clarke Industries had once owned what’s now an enormous land preserve owned by the state. In the very center of that was their film operation. I wondered at first why anyone would huddle their house so close to the road and then wondered again why anyone would come this far out to build a home in the first place, with all these trees and mountains and yards at thirty degree slopes to make them feel alone and uncertain, always slightly angled, waiting to tumble away down the hill the first time something gave way.

  It was a lousy place to live unless you were a person who hated other people. It wouldn’t make a bad place for a vampire, though.

  I kept going and going, around sharp curves and up one steep hill after another, and wondered if the mountain would ever stop or if I would eventually just burst through the clouds and find myself driving all the way to the moon. At last I rounded another curve and saw another sign for Clarke Industries with “Ahead 1/2 Mile” at the bottom. Thinking back, Clarke had always been up here. They’re one of those big international conglomerates that make stuff that never has their name on it: they make the chemicals that go into things rather than the things themselves, or they make highly specialized components, that kind of stuff. This plant, they’d made film. It was one of their few commercial products. Of course, business had dried up in the age of digital cameras - computer-aided imaging, they’d called it in a newspaper story when the plant closed down - and so this place had been boarded up.

  A minute later, I saw the sign sitting at the mouth of an innocuous little road that turned left and disappeared into trees. There were the rusted, overgrown remains of a softball pitch in a field opposite the road, skeletal remains of an earlier time when families attached to the plant would come here for field days and vacations. After I turned into the drive of Clarke Industries I noticed that one side of the drive was solid woods but the other was an enormous muddy expanse. I slowed a little, the moonlight reflecting weirdly on the landscape, and when I paid more attention I could see that it wasn’t a dirty field: it was a drained lake. A couple of small docks and a pier made of planks jutted up out of the filthy dried pit like jagged teeth in a beggar’s mouth. I had a ways to go on this driveway and by the time I’d gotten to the plant I’d passed the moldering remains of a Clarke Industries Employee Credit Union and some tennis courts and what looked like carved wooden signs for an exercise trail back into the thick woods on the left and off gods know where. I’d read one time that the whole property covered 35,000 acres. Amazing, in this day and age.

  There were cars in the parking lot: half a dozen old pickup trucks and a couple of shitty little subcompacts. I pulled up across a couple of spaces right at the gatehouse and rolled down my windows. I sniffed the air and at first I didn't smell anything much. I started to think driving this far out of my way was kind of a stupid idea, wasting time when I could be talking to vampires I knew existed, but then I caught it.

  The whiff of predator: the telltale scent of a fellow hunter. Smiles could smell it, too, and he made a noise like a chainsaw starting.

  I sat very still and breathed deep and even. The night was clear, the moon approaching full but not there yet. There were lights on in the parking lot but only a couple and right where I was. That wasn't very smart, I thought to myself. I should have parked in one of the darker corners.

  A vampire rarely forgets a scent. It was very faint, very far away, but I could smell it and I'd smelled it before. It was the scent of the predator who'd been at that crime scene Clyde had investigated decades before. I was certain that place and this were connected by a vampire who’d been to both and that vampire wasn’t me. Well, no time like the present to make an introduction.

  I climbed out of the car, left it unlocked behind me and crossed to the door of the gatehouse. A high chain-link fence with barbed wire looped in complicated non-patterns at the top surrounded the plant itself. It was rusted but a glance in either direction told me it seemed to be whole. There was no light on in the gatehouse but I figured it was worth checking to see if it was locked before I bothered climbing over and winding up with a torn coat. The gatehouse was a small, square, brick building with a flat roof and large windows overlooking the parking lot and the drive into the plant. The plant itself was a series of connected, dark-faced and multi-storeyed monoliths perched like a Mayan ziggurat complex on the hill that rose behind it. The paint was peeling on the ones that were painted and the brick facing of the others had started to crumble here and there. Loose bricks littered a scraggly, weed-covered lawn untended for so long the grass had all died from drought and now there was hardly anything anyone could consider alive at all. I took it all in for a few moments – nobody had taken any shots at me on the way in or while I sat in the car sniffing the air so I figured I needn't skitter and hide – and out of curiosity pulled out my phone and checked for signal. Much to my surprise I had three bars. Progress marches forward, even in these old hills.

  Finally, I steeled myself and pulled on the handle of the door into the gatehouse. I couldn't tell whether or not I was surprised when it opened with a tug. Smiles preceded me through the door then I stepped inside and listened. I heard nothing, saw nothing. We kept walking through a little waiting room. The magazines were ten years out of date, dust was everywhere a guest would have sat and nowhere a guard would be stationed. Smiles snuffled here and there and sneezed a time or two. We kept going and pushed open the door directly opposite the entrance. That left us on a once-manicured lawn that stretched up a slight incline between the gatehouse and the plant itself. I stepped quietly but easily up the hill on broken sidewalks while Smiles turned and watched behind me. At the top, I found three entrances, one to either side and one farther back. A rusted metal sign indicated CLERICAL to the left, CHEMICAL to the right, PRODUCTION straight ahead.

&nb
sp; If I were going to hide out in a plant, I thought to myself, I sure wouldn't pick the secretarial wing and I wouldn't want to be around a bunch of chemicals I didn't understand. A big, cavernous factory floor, as I imagined the production floors would be, seemed the best choice. So on I went, straight ahead. The double doors into the production facility had cracked glass on the left side and were unlocked. Bingo.

  The building itself seemed to be mostly hallways in rectangles defining the inner perimeter of the building. Offices, storage closets and the like were littered around the outside. The inside was utilitarian and sparse, gray- and green-painted walls of cement blocks, hard tile that would have rung like a gong when anyone else walked on it. My preternatural abilities allowed me to stay mostly quiet but I had to move quick and light as I went and I could certainly hear myself move. Smiles padded along in silence, his nails occasionally scraping but only very rarely. He is almost as good at sneaking as I am, but never quite as good what with all those claws and rabies tags on a thick leather collar. We glided along together, with me noting doors for dressing rooms – they'd made the workers wear uniforms when the plant was in production – and signs for a cafeteria. I listened at the door for the men's locker room and didn't hear anything. Locker rooms and bathrooms and the like are a popular place for our kind because they so rarely feature windows. Sunlight is bad. Sleeping in a locker room is almost always good. I’d heard tell of a couple of vampires who lived in a locker in a high school gymnasium and kept just enough staff in their thrall to keep doing so for the long term. I kept going, up some stairs, following signs, more or less wandering. My nose eventually picked up something and with concentration I could nail it down as ham.

  It was definitely ham. I could also smell vampire, but it hadn’t gotten any stronger. Luncheon meat seemed to be my best lead. The cafeteria, then.