Bestial Read online

  Throughout the streets, the monsters were getting their bearings after their transformations. They shook their massive heads, scratched themselves like dogs.

  “There’s the truck,” Chesya said, pointing to the middle of the street. All four lanes were crammed with vehicles. Two cars away from them, the Brink’s truck lay dolefully on its side, half-crushing an SUV. One of the back doors was tantalizingly open.

  “Oh, thank God,” Rick said.

  He helped Chesya onto the hood of the first car, and she managed to stand. From the hood of the automobile, she could see much farther down the street.

  “Oh … fucking shit …,” she said.

  As he pulled himself up to her level, Rick said, “I thought you were against swearing, and you just blurted out a real lulu.”

  “I think I have an excuse,” she replied.

  The streets teemed with life, barely hidden beneath the new night’s cloak. Rick and Chesya could see hundreds, maybe more than a thousand beasts running through the streets, savaging each other with claws and teeth, grappling with each other, screwing each other. Males lined up impatiently to take turns with the females. Others battled over partners, tearing at fur, biting into muscular flesh. It was an orgy of animalistic sex and violence …

  … and Rick and Chesya were standing on top of a car, practically wearing neon signs that read, “Eat Me. I’m Delicious.”

  Hundreds of pairs of golden eyes squinted at them.

  “Let’s get in the truck right now,” Chesya suggested.

  “I’m down with that.”

  They turned and ran across the second car. Rick slipped, falling into the space between the automobile and the security truck; the open door beat him in the chest. Wincing, crying out, he opened it. Chesya was right behind him.

  “Oh, that’s gonna bruise,” he said, gritting his teeth.

  The monsters kept approaching, attacking, hundreds of eyes and open, slavering jaws; Rick kept firing his gun, losing track of how many shots he had left.

  Chesya stopped suddenly. Her expression went from relief to shock to fear to anger in a second.

  “What?” he asked.

  She pointed toward the back of the truck.

  It was already occupied.

  A creature stood on its back two legs. It lowered its head and roared at them, exposing blackened gums and needle teeth. It was smaller than the one that had pinned Rick to the sidewalk, and its muzzle was flecked with gray hair. Its ears flicked angrily. Taking a step toward them, it lashed out with razor-sharp claws.

  Rick slammed the door, hitting the beast’s face. It bellowed.

  Putting his back against the door, Rick tried to hold the creature within the back of the truck, but it pounded so hard that it pushed him forward with every blow.

  “I hate to tell you this,” Chesya said, “but we have company.”

  “I know, I know!” Rick shouted. “I’m going to pull the door wide on its next—umph.” The beast hammered on the door, nearly knocking him over. “You gotta get up here so you can—umph—hop in when it falls.”

  She adjusted her position so she was directly beside the door. Rick timed the beast’s poundings, which seemed to be fairly rhythmic, a metronome of violence.

  “Okay,” he said. “On the count of three.”

  The other beasts were getting closer, smelling the scent of their prey. One of them raised its head and howled mournfully.

  “One …”

  A huge lycanthrope leaped onto a Kia, crumpling the metal roof. It stared at the two humans, eyes glowing yellow.

  “Two …”

  Chesya saw movement near the bottom of the truck, something slinking between the cars.

  “Three!”

  Rick opened the door, and the beast plummeted from the back of the truck, landing on the ground. Chesya jumped, felt her grip on the gun loosen, felt it fall from her grasp. She pulled Rick into the Brink’s truck behind her. The door slammed. Chesya reached for the locks, and Rick shoved the metal bars into place.

  One of the creatures slammed its heavy body into the back doors, and the truck slid off the mangled SUV. The front end dropped first. Rick tripped, tumbled to the fore of the vehicle. Chesya followed, crushing him as the back end of the Brink’s van slipped to the ground. Rick heard her head hit something, clanging like a bell. When he reached for her, she was unconscious, and he tried to slap her face to wake her up.

  “Chesya, Chesya …”

  The pounding began on the truck’s exterior.

  And Rick realized it was going to be a very long night.

  19

  SEPTEMBER 17, 7:05 P.M.

  Cathy Wright watched from her station in the bathroom. The window offered a perfect view of the backyard and the shed where she had incarcerated her husband. The long shadows of the elm trees that separated her yard from that of the neighbors crept slowly eastward until the lawn was cloaked in darkness.

  Sighing, she wondered how long it would take him to change … if he even changed at all. She was running on caffeine and supposition, unsure of how this metamorphosis worked.

  In the movies, when people altered in front of the full moon, gypsies were sure to be hiding in the forest, and you could only kill the monsters with silver bullets. Cathy didn’t have any silver bullets, and she wasn’t even sure how to get some. Did one traipse over to the next-door neighbors and ask for a cup of silver-plated bullets? Hell, they didn’t even own a gun, so the question was moot anyway.

  Even a man who is pure of heart, and says his prayers by night …

  Was Karl pure of heart? She doubted it. The more time that elapsed, the more she thought about the things her son had said, the things she couldn’t bring herself to believe.

  Shaking her head, she wondered why this was happening to her. Her world, the aristocracy of Cincinnati, her fellow residents of Indian Hill, didn’t operate under these rules. Plans were made, men were married, children were born, and the wealthy grew wealthier through wise investments and well-established connections. Weekends were spent traveling or swimming in the Olympic-sized pool in the backyard, boating, sailing, networking over barbecue. There were cocktail parties and dinners at the country club, libraries of unread books and two-hundred-dollar-a-plate luncheons for some cause or another. Children were sent to boarding school. …

  Children. The one thing she had wanted more than anything. Karl had claimed that he wasn’t ready to raise a child, but Cathy had argued her point until he had finally given in to her demands. She felt she had been a competent mother, even with all the problems during the teen years. Now their child was grown, flown from the nest she’d attempted to feather with insulation against the world. Still, you could shield your kids from harsh reality, but things always festered in the house. Accusations she couldn’t bring herself to believe, problems she couldn’t understand. She wondered how much those problems really mattered anymore … with the way the world had turned upside down. With what Karl had become.

  There was a loud thump from inside the shed, loud enough for her to hear it within the thick, brick walls of the house. She placed a hand to her chest, feeling her heartbeat … a hummingbird fluttering beneath her skin.

  With what Karl had become.

  She realized, when the second loud noise came from the backyard, that she was terrified of her husband. She’d spent the day comforting him, soothing his ego, trying to help him understand what was happening, even if she wasn’t sure herself. They had settled right back into the cozy groove of their marriage. He worked, and she helped him. Helped him with dinners with the boss.

  Thump!

  Helped him by providing a comfortable home and supervising the house staff.

  Thump!

  Even helped him with his legal briefs when he needed advice on one of them.

  THUMP!

  Helped him by supporting him, even against the indignation of their child.

  THUMP!

  She wondered if she had been protecting the wr
ong person.

  Cathy stood, gasping; that last noise had seemed louder than the rest.

  Outside the window, the entire shed was shaking, rocking with the violence of the beast trapped within. She could hear the growling, biting sounds, the clawing and scraping. Holes appeared in the sides of the wood as Karl punched them out.

  No, the shed didn’t appear so durable now. In fact, it seemed to be almost paper-thin. She would need something more than all the feeble fortresses she had constructed between the shed and her bathroom. Even if it only meant holding something solid in her hands … a weapon.

  They had no guns, but she remembered that Karl’s softball bat was in their bedroom closet, just down the hallway. That would feel solid. Taking another look out the window, she saw the shed splinter near its door, finally giving in to the incessant pummeling.

  If he could get out of that strong shed, it wouldn’t take much more to pound his way through the barricades and into this bathroom. Not long at all …

  Running to the bathroom door, she unlocked all three locks and pulled back the dead bolt that Karl had installed. As she moved into the hallway, the noises from the shed seemed to dissipate the farther she moved into the house.

  In their bedroom, she opened the French doors to her closet. She rifled through the clothes and found Karl’s old aluminum bat, the baseball glove hanging from its neck. She tossed the glove on the shelf above the clothes and closed the doors. Then she hurried back to the bathroom, the heavy bat gripped tightly in her hands. Not willing to set it down, she continued to hold it in her right hand while she relocked the door with her left.

  Despite her heavy breathing, the night had grown quiet. No loud noises came from the backyard, so she stepped over to the window to investigate.

  “Oh, no,” she said, covering her mouth with her hands.

  The doors had been torn from their hinges and tossed across the lawn into the koi pond. The shed appeared empty.

  Karl—or the thing that had once been Karl—moved close to the house, loping to the back doors. The creature was huge, with an oversized head that swung back and forth on a massive, muscular neck. It was on all fours, and she barely saw its hairy back before it was out of sight. She caught the motion of a back leg, the ankle twisted all wrong.

  She heard nothing for a moment, only the soft chirping of crickets. Then glass was breaking, and something heavy was tossed aside, landing with a horrendous noise. Karl had breached the back door, had thrown that heavy table like it was a toy. She could hear a soft growling from downstairs, a cracking of glass, and she knew the beast was in the house.

  Somewhere closer, something skidded against the hardwood floor. Karl was in the living room, knocking the furniture aside in his attempts to find his wife. Another loud skid, followed by something heavy creaking and falling over. The sound of smashing china told her that Karl had knocked the heavy bureau aside, that he was in the hallway, probably on the stairs.

  Placing an ear against the fragile door of the bathroom, she heard his toenails click-click-clicking on the hard wood of the stairs, followed by the sound of the tables she had placed there crashing to the floor below.

  Briefly, she wondered how this animal knew where she was hiding. Did it retain Karl’s memories? Could it remember all the ways they had tried to bar its path to her? It was certainly making a beeline for the bathroom, trashing everything in its way.

  Stepping back, Cathy was struck by the insanity of the situation. Husbands didn’t turn into monsters and attack their wives, especially husbands who were litigators living on the right side of town. Wives in Indian Hill didn’t wait for their monster-husbands to break down doors so they could bash their brains out. These sorts of things just didn’t happen. They just couldn’t happen. Not here. Not now.

  But Karl had claimed he was itching on the inside, as if hair were growing deep within his guts. Human on the outside, animal within. And it suddenly hit Cathy like a fist to the jaw.

  Her husband had always been hairy on the inside. Under that handsome, respectable exterior, he had hidden his true bestial self. Only this past night had exposed his true emotional state.

  Her son hadn’t lied about what her husband had done to him.

  And she’d supported the wrong family member all along, even to the extent that her boy ran away from his affluent neighborhood and Catholic school, ending up … God knew where.

  Gripping the baseball bat in both hands as though she were stepping up to home plate, she listened to Karl’s toenails click until the beast had reached the door. It sniffed the cracks, and she realized it was operating on an acute sense of smell. It had trailed her through the house like a hunting dog sniffing out pheasants in a field. It took big, snuffling breaths, and she moved her grip a bit higher on her weapon.

  This was not her husband.

  This was not a man she knew, not a man she could love.

  He roared.

  She wanted to weep, but her fear overrode her grief and anger; the tears would not come.

  The beast scraped its claws along the bathroom door, teasing her, trying to scare her. She could imagine the wood curling beneath its claws.

  “Karl,” she warned, “don’t come in here. I’m armed.”

  Whatever restraint the creature was showing dissolved in an instant. It clamored at the door, and cracks began to form. Screaming, she backed away from it, the bat held high.

  “Karl, no!”

  The beast began to throw its heavy shoulders into the door … once, twice. . . . The wood split in the center on the third blow, spilling the monster onto the Italian tile.

  It raised its golden eyes, strings of thick saliva dripping from its jaws. Pulling back its lips, it growled, exposed giant teeth, too many teeth to fit in one mouth. It blinked its eyes.

  And Cathy realized there was no humanity in them. There was only an animal, and the needs of an animal … blood, food, meat.

  “Oh … Karl,” she said.

  The beast prepared to pounce, lowering its head, gaining a good hold on the floor with its back legs. Cathy swung the bat with all of her strength, grunting as it hit the beast along its jawline. Sharp teeth flew across the room, and the monster turned to her, surprised, dripping blood from its injured mouth. She raised the bat again.

  This time, Cathy clubbed the beast on the top of its skull, and she was rewarded with a loud crack. She knew she had been incredibly lucky, and she raised the baseball bat over her head again. The monster dropped to the floor. Its legs quivered in a terrible parody of a dance.

  And she hit it again and again and again … until the tiled floor was awash with blood and brains. She smashed it until the beast’s legs stopped their awful twitching ballet. Then she dropped to the floor, hitting her knees on the expensive Italian tile she had insisted Karl buy last year.

  As she watched, the monster she had destroyed slowly changed back into her husband. A single sob escaped her lips as she reached for his hand. The trauma to his face seemed so much worse than it had when he had inhabited the bestial form.

  “Oh, Karl,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so terribly sorry.”

  She stood, moved slightly away from him, as his blood pooled around her feet, the dented baseball bat forgotten by the bathtub.

  20

  SEPTEMBER 17, 8:30 P.M.

  Christian leaned back in the office chair, watching as Andrei Sokosovich transformed into one of the beast-men. The process seemed painful, and there was no shortage of screaming mixed in with the growls and the snapping of his bones as they converted. While the boy watched, the Russian sprouted hair all over his body, the tendrils twisting out of his pores like some bizarre Kirlian photography. The beast-man scratched himself, as though the growing hair made him itch. When the cracking of his joints grew more insistent, Andrei fell on his back, writhing on the floor of the cell in what could only be agony.

  While he observed the transformation, Christian noted with some surprise that he was detached from the
cries of the Russian. It was almost like he was watching a movie through a Plexiglas viewscreen. Somehow, he didn’t think this was a commendable attribute, this indifference. He knew he should feel pity for this man, this human being going through such a painful and tumultuous metamorphosis, but he found himself fascinated by the intricacies of the change, the raw physicality of it.

  He stood, walked right next to the Plexiglas barrier so he could witness the event as closely as possible. It was probably what the scientists of Bio-Gen had done—take notes and watch Andrei. Christian’s eyes grew wide with astonishment.

  When Andrei’s hands mutated, the fingers fused together, stretching out longer and developing an extra joint near the wrist. Three pads seemed to pop out of the skin of his palm, as blisters raised by heat would appear, and his fingernails were shoved from their moorings by long black talons. His ears elongated, extending toward the ceiling, then folding in upon themselves as though the cartilage were alive beneath the skin. The folding created a triangular point at the top of the ear, and delicate fur tufted from it.

  The entire transmutation took less than three minutes. When it was over, Christian was face-to-muzzle with one of the beast-men, and he got his first good look at one of them.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  The thing in the cell began to rage, throwing itself against the walls, pushing at the Plexiglas with its shoulder until the boy was certain the shield would give beneath the pressure. It clamored at the barrier, attempting to scratch its way out of the see-through jail, spittle flooding from its hideous face. It tried to bite the Plexiglas, its jaws opening wider than seemed possible, dragging its black tongue across the barrier, its teeth making a squeaking noise. No matter how hard it pounded and ripped and tore at the barrier, it made no progress toward escape. The beast-man began to pace back and forth in its cell, its short tail tucked between its legs. It cast a wicked glance at Christian every once in a while, but it seemed intent in its pacing. Eventually, it grew tired of this, and it lay on the floor, curled into a ball like an exhausted, monstrous dog. When it fell asleep, it almost seemed benign.