Mongrels Read online

  Darren nodded to himself about this.

  This was nature. This was the natural order. This was medieval, man.

  He had to talk to these cats.

  He stepped out from the darkness so they could see him, and as one they looked up, their muzzles bloody to the eyes.

  To show what he was, Darren kept walking, his hands raised, palms open, seven fingers and two thumbs spread wide. He walked out among the older graves—the food past its date. The three daughters caught his scent, backed off snarling, but the mother, she stood her ground over the dead woman, nosed into Darren’s crotch when he was close enough.

  This is nature as well.

  Darren rotated his hips away a bit to keep from getting racked. But he kept his hands up, his smile burning bright. This would be four-on-one, after all. And they had the jump on him, already had their teeth out.

  “Not a bad idea,” Darren said, and squatted down, lifted the dead woman’s arm, already pulled away from the shoulder. “Nice to meet you,” he went on, shaking the dead woman’s hand in his version of play, “thanks for the meal, ma’am,” and that was when the three werewolves who’d backed off hunkered down, started growling, their hackles coming up like manes.

  Darren looked over to them, held the arm out to show he wasn’t stealing their meal, no worries, and then, like smoke, they all three melted into the night.

  Darren looked over to the fourth, the mother, the aunt, whatever she was, and she’d backed off now as well, was standing in her own patch of darkness, lips raised like she was trying to say something.

  “What?” Darren said, catching the scent an instant too late to duck the flat of a shovel coming at the back of his skull like a baseball bat.

  The last thing Darren saw was the cherry of that cop’s cigarette.

  It had burst from the impact of this home-run swing, was floating its delicate orange sparks over the open grave. Over the dead woman. Over this half-eaten young mother.

  And then nothing.

  The sirens from the line of cop cars speeding by pulled us out into the motel parking lot. We were already on alert, since Darren had been gone too long.

  “No, no,” Libby was saying.

  But yes.

  In the second police cruiser, there was Darren. He was propped up, dead to the world.

  “Go to the room,” Libby said, and when I started to protest—I was fifteen, I was like them—she turned to me with a growl in her chest.

  I locked the door behind me.

  She was back inside twenty minutes, knocking at the bathroom window because her clothes were rags, were blowing down Main Street.

  She dressed and explained to me that Darren had been caught at the cemetery. That his smell was everywhere, there. And that the others had been there as well, feeding.

  “On what?” I said.

  “More like who,” Libby said, throwing clothes into a trash bag, flashing her eyes around for anything we might be leaving. Anything that might get put into an evidence bag later.

  Grandpa’s story cued up in my head.

  “He’ll be sick,” I said. “From the preservatives.”

  “It’s not that kind of graveyard,” Libby said. “And it’s called embalming. We don’t have time for this.”

  The room was empty now. Paid for and not slept in.

  It was one crime we’d never committed, not in all the years since Arkansas.

  “So we’re breaking him out?” I said, pulling my second boot on, no time to work my jeans over it.

  Libby collected our crumpled cash from the dresser, said, “Sort of.”

  Two minutes later the Impala was a blur, a streak, a flash. The most desperate bullet.

  We were going back south. Three exits south, specifically.

  There’d been a tourist trap there, one Darren had wanted to stop at.

  It was a bar where you could wrestle a bear for a chance to win three hundred dollars.

  “Easy money,” Darren had said, easing over for the off-ramp, to launch us into history. But he knew better, was just funning us.

  Now that bear, it was his best chance.

  Libby was tight-lipped, had the steering wheel in both hands because a tire had to blow pretty soon at this speed, but my guess was that the bear was going to be proof of some sort. Darren had heard a noise behind the temple, and, being a good citizen, had gone to check it out, discourage any looters.

  What he’d found instead was a bear.

  A bear had dug that body up, gone to town on it.

  It was a plan that assumed a lot, of course. That Darren hadn’t been chewing on a leg. That he hadn’t tried to shift.

  That he was unconscious in the back of the cruiser, though, not shot full of holes in a coroner’s wagon, that suggested the cops didn’t know what they had. Didn’t know what they’d locked up.

  But Darren was going to wake soon. We were racing that as much as anything.

  “I never should have let him go out alone like that,” Libby said, about to cry it sounded like.

  I wanted to say the right thing, but couldn’t think of it.

  We slid to a stop in the bar’s dirt parking lot, stood from the Impala before the dust we’d pulled in had even settled.

  “Get that,” Libby said, reaching down to touch the thick cable strung between concrete-filled stubby metal poles. It was a fence, but for truck bumpers, not people. To show that this was the parking lot, that wasn’t.

  I backed the Impala up, hooked the once-chrome trailer ball under the low sway of the cable, and gave it the gas. The cable whipped out ring after metal ring, and they came at me like shot, taking out the rear window of the Impala, filling the car with shattered glass.

  I looped the cable over my shoulder as best as it would loop, then stepped around the side of the bar, where Libby’s nose had already led her. She was stepping down from the make-do porch of a travel trailer the bartender or bouncer usually slept in. The front door of it was swinging behind her.

  “Empty,” she said.

  Sometimes they do smile on you, the werewolf gods.

  The bear was in a boxcar up on concrete pylons. Even I could smell it in there.

  “He’s big,” Libby said. “That’s good.”

  “What do you—?” I said about the cable, and Libby took it, dropped it right at the front of the ramp leading up to the sliding door.

  Inside, the bear huffed out air, letting us know it had heard us.

  “This isn’t going to be pretty,” Libby said.

  “What’ll they do to Darren?” I said.

  Libby pursed her lips, swallowed, and shook her head no.

  “I need that lock gone,” she said, tying her hair back now, and I found a piece of rebar, popped the big padlock, dragged the chain out. Libby picked it up. It was maybe four feet long, had been a tow chain at some point, if not logging. It left her hands dusty red like dried blood.

  “Shit,” she said about all this, standing on the ramp before that massive door.

  It was the first time I’d ever heard her cuss in years.

  “We can just—” I said, about to detail some jail breakout I’d seen documented on a western from forty years ago, but Libby pointed with her chin up to the door’s tall pull-handle for me, said, “This is an old trick of your grandpa’s.”

  “What?” I asked, taking the handle in both hands.

  “Letting someone else take the fall,” she said, and with that I pulled the door back all at once.

  The bear didn’t crash out like we’d been expecting.

  Libby rattled the chain once, in invitation.

  Nothing.

  But it was moving in there. It was breathing. It was waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” Libby said to it, to the idea of it, and then, on two feet instead of four like I’d figured, like I’d be if I could, she stepped up that ramp, into that darkness.

  The bear came at her all at once, launched both of them back, clearing the ramp and the cable both, driving her
down into the dirt, the dust pluming up all around.

  This wasn’t a black bear like we knew, from the South.

  This bear was twice again as big, and more golden brown. A graham-cracker bear from a nature show.

  It weighed as much a young horse, probably. As much as a motorcycle.

  And I couldn’t even see Libby under it anymore.

  I screamed, saying I don’t even know what—this was a night I could lose my whole family, something that wasn’t supposed to happen for a year yet—and, maybe six seconds later, the bear arched its back like a cat and stood up, roaring from insult.

  On the ground where a woman had been, there was something else now.

  Libby stood on all fours, not all the way wolf yet but closer to that than anything else. Her back-hair when it came in was stiff, and the chain was still draped across her. Just the tips of her toes were touching the ground, and she circled, growling hard, clear saliva dripping down like it was all she had in her.

  The way the bear looked at her too, I could tell this wasn’t just a her-and-it thing. This was a species thing. The bear didn’t have to have ever seen or smelled a real live werewolf to remember one. From centuries of fighting us over livestock. From bears moving in from one side of a war-massacred village, to sniff out a meal, and werewolves creeping in from the other side, their eyes laid back, paws reaching far ahead and delicately, because this is a landscape that explodes.

  A long time ago Darren had said that bears and wolves weren’t meant to get along. I thought he’d been talking about state troopers, though.

  This bear, it knew better.

  It came at Libby with everything it had.

  Instead of meeting it head-on like I knew she wanted, like her instincts were telling her to, instead of spearing in for its throat somewhere under all that shag meant for another altitude, Libby sidestepped but hooked on, whipped around the bear’s back like to ride it, only she was already shifting back, now.

  Because she needed hands.

  Because werewolves, they can’t hold a chain.

  Libby had it pulled around the bear’s thick neck, her knees buried in the back of its head, and she was pulling it tight, her arms corded with effort, every vein in her neck standing out, blood seeping down from her nose and her mouth and her eyes, from shifting back so fast before she’d even been all the way there.

  The bear didn’t understand, but it knew to drive her back, into the side of the car, hard enough to rock it on its pylons. Once, twice, like a wrestler on television.

  Bears have shorter arms than wrestlers, though. A wrestler can peel a body up from their back, sling it into the ropes.

  A bear can just scratch. And this bear, it didn’t even have claws anymore.

  Going against drunks in a pen in a bar, you don’t need claws. Or teeth, as it turned out.

  That was why Libby’d had time to start shifting. That was why she still had a face.

  At four minutes, then five, the bear finally started to slow, and stagger. Its lungs must have been furnace bellows.

  By seven minutes, one of its eyes burst red capillary by capillary. The great bear fell forward like the giant it was.

  Libby rolled to the side, worked her hand around to the bear’s nose.

  It was still breathing.

  She did too, finally.

  She used my shirt to clean the blood from her face, but it was still coming. Her hands were shaking.

  “Sit down,” I told her, trying to think what Darren would have done to make this mad enterprise work out.

  The least likely thing, I figured. The least likely, most magical thing.

  The least likely, most magical thing was a junked-out old Beetle back in the weeds. If it’d been a Corvair like you usually see people holding on to past all reason, my idea wouldn’t have had a chance. Beetles are like ramps on wheels, though. You can walk right up the back of one, walk right down the front, never have to high-step it.

  Of the hood and the trunk, I judged the hood to be the gentler ramp.

  I looped one end of the cable under the bear’s front legs and the other to the Impala, and dragged the bear to the front of the Beetle, at which point I had to unhook from the Impala and reposition, then hook on to the ball again, with the cable pressing down over the Beetle like to cut it in half. But the bear didn’t weigh that much. A couple of jerks clumped it up onto the Beetle’s hood, and one more pulled it up onto the roof, the Beetle’s remaining two windows going white the instant before they shattered out. Then it was just a matter of unhooking the cable from the Impala and backing it up against the Beetle’s passenger door, dumping the bear into the endless trunk.

  We wrapped the cable around and around the bear and the trunk both, tied it in every way we could come up with.

  “They usually drug them in places like this, right?” I said, looking around like for the bar’s stash of tranquilizers.

  “No time,” Libby said, not even able to make complete sentences yet. “You, drive.”

  I took us three exits north, our headlights pointing at the sky from the bear’s weight, and followed Libby’s direction to the Jewish temple.

  I backed the car right across the cut grass and through the squared-off hedges, all the way to the dead woman behind the yellow tape and the floodlights. I don’t know where the police were. Unless Darren had already shifted, and reinforcements had been called in.

  Not yet, I said inside, like a prayer.

  Just give us a few more minutes.

  We dragged as much of the bear over the lip of the trunk as we could, then climbed in behind it, pushed it the rest of the way out with our legs.

  It just lay there, sleeping another one off.

  Libby took the dead woman’s arm, rubbed the blood on the bear’s nose.

  The bear’s face twitched, recognizing this.

  “Call them,” Libby said, nodding me into the temple.

  I didn’t have time to be quiet, just elbowed a window in, found a phone, 911’d, said it had come back for seconds, it was eating the rest of her, get here, get here now!

  By the time I got back to the cemetery, Libby had her face down to the bear’s. Her words were thick because her teeth were coming in, but I could still hear her. She was apologizing as best she could. And she was calling the bear a name. Sad Eyes.

  I cocked my head, dredged that term up. It was what Grandpa had called the moondog baby he’d brought back in a cardboard box, as a lesson for his three pups.

  I’d thought the name was a corruption from some other language.

  I was wrong.

  It’s how werewolves say they’re sorry.

  It’s how you acknowledged the person inside the animal. How you tell them that you see them in there, yes. And you’re sorry it has to be like this. Grandpa had said it to that baby before he pinched its head shut, and now Libby was smoothing this great bear’s hair back, kissing it once on the nose, her eyes wet.

  And then, her mouth full of teeth again, her nose bleeding freely, she hugged her left arm around the great bear’s head.

  It was so she could pull her mouth over to its shoulder.

  She bit hard and deep, and tore a big hunk away, spit it into the grass.

  The bear jerked back, its own roar seeming to wake it up.

  Libby stood, walked over, planted her hand on my shoulder to guide me away. To keep herself between this bear and me.

  The thing about our bite, it’s that it only passes the wolf on to people.

  What animals get, it’s the hunger, the rage, the madness.

  It’s like instant rabies. End-stage rabies, on speed.

  Even a deer you bite before it runs off, inside of a minute or two it’ll come back for you. Not slashing with its hooves or sweeping with its rack, but biting with its flat teeth.

  An infected animal doesn’t live more than an hour. Not even long enough to get a proper name. But it’s a bad hour.

  This bear, it was just waking up to that.

&n
bsp; And that’s when I saw Libby’s real plan.

  She wasn’t going to have to talk to anybody.

  This bear, it was going to say it all, just by being here. It had rocked its boxcar back and forth enough that it could break out, and it had lumbered up the ditch along the interstate, snuffling for food, and here was some practically on a dinner plate.

  What my 911 call had done, it was give all these good old boys a chance to put lead in an honest-to-god grizzly bear.

  They were going to be falling over each other to get through the door.

  The jail by the time we eased up, it was a ghost town.

  Libby left the Impala running, walked in through the front door, walked out a minute later with Darren.

  That easy.

  Darren was gulping air like the claustrophobe he was, his skin jumping, his hands twitchy.

  It had been close. The only thing that had kept him from shifting, as it turned out, it was Grandpa’s story about the doorknobs.

  He didn’t want to force his way through the bars of his cell only to be trapped in a bigger cell.

  It had saved his life. It had kept the guns on the rack, and in their holsters.

  Because he couldn’t yet, Libby drove us away. The other side of town was pulsing with police lights. The gunfire boomed across, passed us, kept going, windows glowing on up and down the street.

  In slow motion in front of us, a tall man ran past in a robe and one slipper. He was carrying a shotgun in one hand, a two- or three-day infant in the other, his fingers on the back of that new baby’s head the same careful way you hold a football. Or, in the same way you hold on to something that’s the last bit of your wife, who’s supposed to be buried down at the temple.

  Supposed to be.

  I tracked him as far as I could.

  “What say we blow this chicken joint?” Libby said, looking over to her little brother, his hair full grey now, his chin stubbly.

  Darren dabbed at a touch of blood by her mouth, rubbed it on the dashboard in what was going to be a scabby X by morning, and grubbed another cap up from the floorboard, worked it low onto his head.

  At the big red light on Main Street, he pointed with his eyes to a spot of fluttering white tucked up in the brick.