Bestial Read online

  “Just about a block left to go,” Chesya said.

  “Don’t they see the danger? Don’t they wonder if it’s all gonna start again when it gets dark?”

  “Maybe they don’t care. There’s bound to be a percentage of the population that actually likes reverting to their animal instincts. A lot of them would probably embrace it. There are all kinds of wackos out there, serial killers and such. They’re gonna love the change.”

  “That’s so fuckin’ … I mean, that’s so sick.”

  She grinned at him. “Thanks for censoring yourself. Even if it was too late.”

  “Yeah, well …” Taking a last drag, he flicked the cigarette into an alley.

  “Hey, look. There’s the bank.”

  As they approached the building, edging around the Brink’s truck that lay on its side like some saurian turtle, Rick saw that looters had infiltrated the broken windows of the building. Even more glass had been busted out from the window frames, and the bags of money they had left behind were missing. The vault door was gaping wide, and all the safety-deposit boxes had been ripped open, probably with a crowbar. Documents and inferior jewelry littered the floor of the vault.

  “All the money’s gone,” Chesya said. She looked at Rick, waiting for a reaction—disappointment, anger, anything.

  He sighed. “Doesn’t seem so important all of a sudden.”

  She nodded. “It’s getting pretty dark out there. What time is it?”

  Glancing at the watch he’d stripped from the dead diner owner’s hand, he answered, “Almost seven o’clock.”

  “Then we’d better set up house for the night.”

  He dropped the bag of necessities from his shoulder, letting it fall to the floor of the bank vault. He thought, It’s kind of dark in here.

  “Oh, no,” Chesya moaned.

  “What?”

  “No lights,” she said, flipping the switch several times, willing it to turn on the fluorescent bulbs. “The electricity’s out. The battery must have died. Maybe from having the vault door open all day. I don’t get it. The manager always said—”

  “Does this mean what I think it means?” Rick asked.

  Something outside the bank howled, low and mournful. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, one by one.

  “It means we can’t stay in the vault. The air won’t circulate; the lights won’t come on. The timer on the lock is out for some reason. Maybe sabotage.”

  A second howl, this one lower, growling, joined the first.

  “It means,” she said, “we don’t have any safe place to stay tonight.”

  16

  SEPTEMBER 17, 6:50 P.M.

  Cathy Wright placed a bag of groceries on the floor of the shed in her backyard, just a few things she had thrown together from the kitchen. She caught sight of her bicycle, neglected in a corner of the structure. Years ago, she had made a point to ride it every day, even entering in some races, but as years of marriage and luxury sped by, she had forgotten the bike. Her muscles, once so hard and strong, had become flabby. She thought she might start riding again, after everything had settled back to normal.

  If anything was ever normal again.

  Looking down at the bag of food, she sighed. She hadn’t trusted the freshness of the meat in her refrigerator. The electricity had remained disconnected. The bread was still good, and she had made Karl peanut butter sandwiches with juice to drink. There were also some oranges, a pear, and a couple of granola bars.

  It didn’t seem right, somehow, providing her husband with such a pathetic meal. Over the years, as their lifestyle had become more grandiose, they had eaten out more than they had cooked, and there was a woman who came in to make their dinner and clean the kitchen every evening. Cathy had grown accustomed to this little bustling woman. She wondered if the woman—what was her name again?—was still alive.

  Running a hand through her hair and heading back toward the house, she realized she had grown accustomed to a great many things. Karl was so successful they rarely did without. If she saw a dress or a hat that she desired, she simply charged it. When she asked for a new car because the last one was two years old, Karl bought her a lovely BMW. A gardener took care of the lawn and landscaping, a maid cleaned the house, and the cook worked her magic in the kitchen, a room that pretty much stupefied Cathy.

  Trying to remember a time when she had been forced to take care of everything herself, Cathy discovered she really couldn’t recall such a period. Her parents had been well-to-do. They had paid for her college and her room and board so that she did not have to work while studying French literature at an Ivy League school. She had met Karl at a dance thrown by her sorority, and they’d gotten married six weeks after graduation.

  A weed poked through the stone sidewalk, and she leaned down, pinched it off, and tossed it into the yard. Now the sidewalk was perfect, beautiful in its sloping curve of white stone. Smiling, she brushed her hands on her jeans.

  Opening the back door into the kitchen, she realized things would never be quite the same. Even if this bizarre metamorphosis had been a one-night event, people were going to be different. She wondered again why she was immune to the symptoms that had claimed her husband and neighbors and, according to the battery-operated radio in the kitchen, most everyone in the tristate area. It seemed odd that, out of so many people, she had been the one graced with an exemption.

  Washing her hands in the sink (which sparkled from her earlier cleaning), she called out to her husband. “Karl, I have the shed ready for you. I put a six-pack of bottled water out there for you, too.”

  He stepped into the room. He had showered and shaved and had put on khaki slacks and an Arrow button-down shirt. He looked almost normal, except for the bruises on his arms and the cut below his right eye.

  He had claimed he still felt hairy on the inside, she reminded herself.

  “Is that what you’re wearing?” she asked, joking.

  “If you have any suggestions, I’d be willing to hear them.” He leaned against the center island in the kitchen. “Seriously, I’m comfortable in these clothes.”

  “I’d think jeans or sweats would be more comfortable.”

  He shrugged. “You work enough hours in a certain kind of outfit, you get used to it. Also, and I know this sounds stupid, but I feel more … well, human in these clothes. More respectable. Less savage.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I don’t know. It’s going to be cramped and wet and—”

  “You can take a bit of discomfort, Karl. This is to protect you from doing something you’ll regret tomorrow, and to protect me from having to defend myself against you.”

  “I know, honey,” he said, whining. “I know. It’s just … degrading.”

  “You want to know what’s degrading? Having to sit across a table from you, listening to you talk about drinking blood and chasing prey through the streets, and acting as though it were the normal thing to do nowadays. I had to be a good wife. I couldn’t turn away from you in revulsion, because a good wife doesn’t do that. She supports her husband. I’ve supported you before, if you remember. But this good wife wants to be here in the morning.”

  “I’m a jackass.” He looked sheepish, younger than his years.

  “Yes, you are,” she said, kissing him on the forehead. “Now, let’s get you locked up safe and sound.”

  They held hands as they walked down the garden path. The shed seemed rather small to Cathy now. Cramped and frail. The wood didn’t appear nearly as sturdy as it had in the noontime sun. The shadows of dusk seemed to eat away the soundness of the little structure, like some fungus that deteriorated the boards.

  Karl gave her a peck on the cheek, fleeting and insubstantial. She had been ready to kiss him on the lips, but he turned his head, saying, “I love you, Cathy. Know that. After everything …”

  She touched her cheek, the residue of the kiss still evaporating. “I do know that, Karl. And I love you, too.” Her words seemed hollow. />
  From within the darkness of the shed, his face glowed. It reminded her of Marlon Brando in that Vietnam movie she hated so much and that Karl adored. He nodded to her once.

  “Do it,” he said.

  And then his face melted back into the shadows.

  Fumbling a bit, Cathy closed the shed’s door and used a key to clinch it. She latched it with two padlocks, one which Karl had installed earlier that day. As her husband had instructed, she also overturned the wheelbarrow in front of the door, digging it into the ground, just one more safety precaution.

  Moving toward the house, she raised a hand to her face, touching the spot where he had kissed her. She wondered if this was the last kiss she would ever receive from him. She wanted to rush back to the shed, hold his head in her hands and kiss him passionately, feel his hands roaming over her body … at least one more time.

  As they had kissed … so long before …

  Passion had been absent from their marriage since the second year. Instead of a wild sex life, they had settled into something different, but just as nice in its own way. They had grown familiar with each other, their friendship deepening. They still loved each other. She had witnessed it in his eyes just a moment earlier, or at least something deceptively similar. Still, she felt this would have been a time for passion. This would have been the occasion for a real kiss. It could have compensated for so much that had gone wrong.

  After securing all three locks on the kitchen door, she moved into the dining room. She shoved the heavy table against the kitchen door. If Karl was going to come after her, she decided to make it as difficult as possible.

  In the hall, she struggled to shift a bureau so that it blocked the doorway. It took a few minutes, and she could hear the china tinkling inside. She also blocked the top of the stairway with two small end tables.

  Finally, she locked herself in the second-story bathroom, using three locks, two of which Karl had installed. Pulling the final dead bolt into position, she exhaled.

  The little window provided a view of the backyard, the stone pathway, and part of the shed. She put the toilet seat down and sat on it, watching the shadows of the trees elongate, handlike apparitions that reached for her. Grabbing a bag of potato chips, she started to eat them, compulsively tossing one after another into her mouth.

  Somehow, even with all the precautions they had taken, she didn’t feel safe.

  She tried to remember the last time she had truly felt safe and secure in her marriage. It must have been before the troubles, before the terrible accusations.

  The first animalistic growling that she heard came from the street in front of her house. She waited for it to begin in the shed.

  PART 2

  17

  SEPTEMBER 17, 6:58 P.M.

  Christian rushed toward the sound of the crying man. The shouts were tricky to pinpoint, because the empty hallways of Bio-Gen amplified and bounced them back and forth. He stopped to get a better fix on the direction.

  “Help me, please! I hear you out there. Please, help me.” The cries sounded raspy, indicating that the screamer had been calling out for some time. There also seemed to be an accent to the words. Russian, Serbo-Croatian? Christian wasn’t sure, but the man’s hard consonants, his c’s and k’s, contained a harsh vibrato; his vowels seemed to be drawn out, spoken in broader tones.

  Christian prayed the shouter wasn’t laying some sort of trap, luring him into a darkened room only to pounce upon him. Confidence in human nature didn’t come easily to him. And the mayhem last night hadn’t helped. For all he knew, the voice calling him belonged to one of the beast-men, alone and hungry in this maze of an office building.

  But the cries seemed to be genuine. They seemed to be coming from a person in need of help.

  “Oh God, are you still out there?” the voice came again, low and guttural. The accent was even more pronounced. “Is anybody out there? I am starving in here. I am dying.” In his native language, the shouter added, “Ya ne mogu bolshe terpet’. Esus Hristos, Ya molius, shto-bi ti poslal mne kovo-nibud na pomosh. Pozhaluista. . . . ”

  Christian closed his eyes, decided the voice was coming from his left, maybe only a few doors down the corridor. Turning, he raced down the hallway, his feet smacking the floor, pounding like his heartbeat. He burst into one of the rooms where the voice seemed to originate. It was another office, vacated or abandoned, very much like Jean’s, only in pristine condition. Even the garbage cans had been emptied.

  Immediately, the cries resumed. “Please, you are so close. I hear you. Please, to not let an unhappy man suffer.”

  As Christian opened the next door, the shadows in the hallway began to stretch. Night was approaching. He needed a safe place to hide, and he didn’t have time to return to his elevator.

  The entry opened onto a huge room—a laboratory, from the look of it. The door was heavy as it swung open. Locks and bars covered the back of it—protection taken to extremes. Three long tables were arranged into a cross formation, metal folding chairs scattered around it. At the far right side of the room sat three oak desks, each covered and surrounded by papers. One of the desks still sported a nameplate—“Jean Cowell.” Bits of glass had sprayed in every direction, covering the floor with a gleaming layer of sharp edges. A single painting of boats on a river hung on the far wall. Above the third desk, someone had printed the words I’m sorry in ragged letters of blood, the writing childlike, the sentiment murky and smeared.

  As he entered the room, Christian saw the body, that of a man, lying behind one of the three desks, his corpse surrounded by shards of ruined beakers. Blood had pooled around the corpse, congealing throughout the day. Shoddy, amateurish, ragged wounds disfigured the man’s skin from his wrists to his elbows. The suicide disturbed Christian, as had Jean’s, yet he felt himself moving toward the dead man.

  He had to be sure.

  When he had almost reached the body, noting that the man’s chest wasn’t moving, Christian heard something move behind him.

  “Thank God,” came that heavily accented voice, crackling at the edges, exhausted.

  Spinning, Christian saw what the door had obscured from him as he had walked into the lab. The entire left side of the room appeared to be a prison. A Plexiglas barrier separated the cell from the rest of the room, ascending all the way to the ceiling and stretching from wall to wall. A door had been cut into the shielding, replete with six heavy-duty locks, and a circle of small holes, barely large enough for a housefly to fit through, had been drilled into the Plexiglas at face level. The holes reminded Christian of the pattern cut into a telephone receiver, and he knew the holes were used to communicate with the man inside the cell.

  The naked man.

  Pressed against the Plexiglas, his hands pushing against the barrier, the man appeared to be in his late forties. His bearded face was a mask of terror, his blue eyes open wide, his mouth a slice of grimace. His body was muscular, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, but the man was not very tall. He had the sort of stocky shape usually associated with rugby players. His body was rather hirsute, with curly, wiry hair that covered even his shoulders.

  His cell appeared to be roughly twelve by twenty feet, taking up a good fourth of the laboratory’s square footage. In the corner were a stained toilet, a couple of rolls of toilet paper, and a cheap air freshener. The bed was situated against the opposing wall, tiny, but it looked comfortable … softer than the stained, burnt, discarded mattresses Christian had been using in the warehouse. A night table and bureau were placed on either side of the bed, the night table supporting a lamp and a few books. By the lamp, there was an overstuffed chair, a television, and a small stereo unit. Several DVDs and CDs were placed on various surfaces. All in all, if you had to be imprisoned somewhere, this was the way to do it.

  “Please, to help me?” the naked man asked, and Christian could see the worry lines in his face deepen. “I … I have not eaten in two days.”

  “Who locked you in there?” C
hristian asked.

  “I am … so very hungry.”

  The boy moved toward the Plexiglas barrier of the cell. It reminded him of the bug jars in which he’d imprisoned praying mantises when he was a child. Something about the way you could view what had been captured from every possible angle. Even the tiny holes cut in the Plexiglas … air holes?

  “First, tell me who you are,” Christian demanded.

  “So hungry … They feed me by now usually, but Doctor Hodder over there, he kill himself today. I have to stay here and watch him die. I could do nothing. Nothing.”

  “Why are you in there? What did you do?”

  The man’s eyes darted across the floor, as preoccupied as his mind. “He cut himself. Bleed all day. It took him so long to die.”

  Okay, Christian thought. If he wants to talk about the dead guy, we’ll talk about the dead guy.

  “Who was he? Doctor Hodder?”

  “A good man. It took him so long … so long to bleed. He could not … what is the word … cope. He could not cope with the things he did when he was animal. I believe he kill his grandson.”

  “What was his job here?”

  “To take care of me. To watch me. Observe. I am so very hungry. Please to give me some food.”

  “Why did he watch you?”

  “Please … food?”

  Christian looked around the room. “Okay, I’ll get you something.”

  “Behind the cabinet. There is a small refrigerator with some meat in it. Please to get me the meat.”

  Walking across the room, Christian felt refuse crunch beneath his feet. He located the little fridge, opened it, and recoiled at the smell.

  “Dude,” he said. “I don’t think this stuff’s any good. It smells rotten.”

  “It smells … delicious. Please … through the little door.”

  Pulling the rancid lunch meat from the refrigerator, the boy wrinkled his nose. He stepped back to the barrier, finding a handle attached to the Plexiglas. When he pulled it, the mechanism rolled inside of it, exposing a gap in its metal machinations.