Bestial Page 15

  Looking out the window across the hallway, she saw nothing unusual about the street. The magnificent homes rested within their manicured lawns, the landscaping diverse and beautifully maintained by an army of gardeners. Each house on the street cost more than 1.5 million dollars, each one a work of architectural genius. The iron gates that surrounded each property matched, maintaining the illusion of continuity. She wondered if the security guards were still watching over the outside gates, or if they, too, had changed into monsters and prowled the bushes.

  The gated community had been created to keep out the riffraff, the undesirables. It hadn’t stopped the devil from invading Indian Hill. It hadn’t even given him pause.

  Folding her arms across her chest, she nodded approvingly at the clean floor across the room. It sparkled.

  “You could eat off that floor,” she said. “Karl, you could eat off of it. And if our son was here …”

  The thought of Christian stopped her, and she placed her hands over her mouth. I will not cry, she thought, clenching her eyes shut. I will not. I will not. I will not cry. He’s gone—they both are. And I have to learn to go on without them.

  She removed her clothes and stepped into the shower. The water was cold, and she had to fumble a bit in the dark for soap and the washrag. The blood on her legs was sticky, but she scrubbed until she could no longer feel its tackiness.

  Shivering with the chill, she stepped out of the shower and toweled herself dry.

  Planning … doing … accomplishing …

  She cleaned the bathroom, paying special care to the baseball bat that had saved her. By the time she wrapped the extension cord around the handle of the vacuum, she decided to make a small fire downstairs. She was cold for some reason.

  Plan … do … accomplish … move on to the next task. …

  Walking back up the stairs, she tried to plan what should be done next. What needed cleaning? What detail had she forgotten in the moonlight?

  Her eyes kept returning to Karl. His head was leaking onto the armrest of the love seat. She would have to eventually take care of it. After she moved Karl’s body.

  But move it where?

  Were funeral homes still operating amidst the chaos? Surely, if she offered enough money, someone would bury him. Funerals, however, were huge events, and they required a lot of planning. She began to draft her blueprints for Karl’s wake and funeral ceremony. Only a few friends. Flowers were perfectly fine, as there were probably not many charities left to which mourners could donate.

  She wondered if funerals were even necessary in this new world. Could she just bury him beneath the rosebushes? Wasn’t there a law against that? What did it matter now? She could certainly save herself a lot of trouble by burying him in the backyard. It had nothing to do with expense and everything to do with convenience.

  Something howled.

  Loudly.

  Close.

  Scurrying to a window, she looked at the backyard. Three of the creatures were snuffling around the shed. A fourth stepped from the shadows and looked right up at her. It seemed to grin; then it dashed for the door.

  The door that Karl had destroyed when he had come for her.

  What to do? Plan … execute … accomplish …

  The bedroom and bathroom doors were wide open; there was nothing with which she could barricade herself from the creatures. Karl had seen to that.

  Something growled inside the house. Toenails clicked on the hardwood floors below her.

  The attic! It came to her suddenly that there was only one way into it and one way out: a ladder that she could pull up after herself. They wouldn’t be able to reach her; she was certain of it.

  Rushing into the hallway, she grabbed the iron bar hidden behind a display case for Hummel figurines. It fit into the panel in the ceiling, and she twisted it. The panel slid back, and a ladder dropped from the hole. She flung the iron rod across the hallway, then turned back to grab it, just in case those things were smart enough to figure out that it was the key to the attic.

  One of the monsters howled, a low, sad sound. They were close, on the stairs.

  She wriggled into the hole that led to the attic and turned, pulled the ladder up. She slammed the panel back into place and dropped the iron pole on the floor.

  As the hatch closed, the beasts leaped after it, stretching on their hind legs to reach the panel. Cathy shoved some heavy boxes over the entrance.

  Below her, the beasts gnashed their teeth and howled their rage.

  23

  SEPTEMBER 17, 10:30 P.M.

  Christian closed the journal, rubbing at his weary eyes. Despite the furious sounds of the beast-men outside the building, he had been able to get through a good thirty pages of Jean’s scientific diary. The book was enlightening, but reading it sapped his energy. He hadn’t slept in so long; he was growing very tired. He yawned, stood, and stretched.

  Andrei was still in the shape of a monster, pacing in his Plexiglas prison. After his initial bout of rage and violence, he had calmed a bit, walking back and forth in the little room as though anxious or bored. Christian couldn’t tell. He watched the beast-man for a while, marveling at the musculature beneath the skin, how broad the chest had grown, how strong the arms and legs. The beast’s neck was a template of muscle, thick intertwining ropes to hold its massive head high. The jaws never seemed to stop dripping saliva from between the enlarged fangs.

  “The better to eat you with, my dear,” Christian muttered, remembering the line from a half-forgotten fairy tale. It seemed appropriate again.

  Sitting back in his chair, facing the creature in its plastic cage, Christian picked up the book again and resumed reading.

  What he had perused so far was fascinating, even if he couldn’t understand all of it. Most of the writing was accessible, and the boy had always been a good reader, above average for his age. Still, some of the scientific terminology went beyond anything he’d assimilated during his classes in high school. Plus the journal was evidently for Jean’s private use, and he employed abbreviations that would be familiar only to him. It made reading slow and tedious, even if the subject matter was engrossing.

  The writing in the journal explained how Jean had been obsessed with the werewolf mythology of Eastern Europe since he was a teenager. He had been taken to Auschwitz by train and forced to work with the other Jews in the death camp, watching in horror as Nazis fed the weakest prisoners to the gas chambers. Jean adapted his behaviors, showing his captors respectfulness, acquiescence, submissiveness. As humiliated as he had been, spurned by his own people for his alleged bootlicking, Jean had survived the camp, which was more than most of the prisoners could say.

  Once, while serving the officers drinks on a silver platter, he’d overheard them talking about “the werewolves,” a covert group of dissidents, anarchists, spreading bombs and sabotage like a band of vengeful Johnny Appleseeds. Witnesses claimed that animals were the only things near train stations just before explosions ripped trains from their tracks, and spies had reported the saboteurs could actually turn into wolves to better undermine the Third Reich.

  Although he had not completely believed the story, his imagination had been sparked, and a lifetime of research had begun. He spent his nights wishing he could turn into an animal, burrow under the fences and run away from that horrible place. He wanted to be a creature that could run fast enough to elude the searchlights and the tracking dogs, fast enough to dodge the bullets. Perhaps such a drastic metamorphosis could cure him of his growing love for young men, something he found distasteful but irresistible. If only he could change … While no such transformation ever occurred, the fanciful notion had been planted in his head.

  When he had finally been freed by Americans arriving in tanks (a strange hybrid he saw as half man, half machine, not quite as interesting as his own hybrid, animal and man), he’d returned to college, graduating with honors. He’d worked in various laboratories for different corporations around the world, solving
chemical problems and seizing upon this new scientific field: genetics. While he’d toiled in the labs in the daytime, he bought and read every book on lycanthropy and shape-shifting he could find.

  In his research, he found that nearly every civilization had its own shape-shifter myth. In Eastern Europe, the wolf was the preferred animal that lycanthropes could become. In Russia, they turned into huge bears. In China, men became jaguars. In India, they became tigers. The common denominator was that they were all predators, all endowed with teeth and claws for hunting. Jean had wondered if the myths were some vestige of an ancient past, when man needed to be stronger in order to hunt and kill food for his family, a buried memory from the Stone Age.

  Surely, he reasoned, if so many different civilizations possessed superstitions about a very similar beast, there had to be something genuine about it.

  Jean believed that man was endowed with two alter egos: one human, with all the attributes of the selfish, destructive race of man; the other animal, manifesting the characteristics of the predatory animal kingdom. He saw the animalistic side of man as the true identity, a pure soul untouched by greed and hatred, existing only to exist … feeding, copulating, and nurturing its family. The human side was responsible for all that he had witnessed at Auschwitz.

  Jean had been reading about sightings of a huge animal in East Siberia, north of Noril’sk. The beast seemed to appear every full moon cycle, and the sightings had been taking place for several generations. Only a few incidents of humans being killed and half-devoured had occurred during the past forty years, but several dozen animal mutilations—usually involving cattle—were reported. Jean had researched the area more, placing pins on a map for every verified sighting, using different colored pushpins for every animal mutilation. They seemed centralized around a small village on the plains, Chakl’sa.

  This could be the proof he had sought for so long, a true shape-shifter. If he could find the one person in the village who had been there during the entire time the attacks had taken place, if he could isolate which one of them was the lycanthrope, he was certain it would lead to more and more discoveries about the animalistic side of mankind. Perhaps he could isolate the cause of the disease and cure it. Maybe he could make sure that there would never again be a Third Reich.

  He traveled to Siberia, where he—

  Christian was startled out of his reading by a noise from outside the laboratory. Flicking off the flashlight he was using, he glanced up at Andrei, who had stopped his frenetic pacing and stared at the doors, growling. The beast-man had heard something as well.

  Christian grabbed the pistol Jean had used to shoot himself. There were still five bullets in the chamber. He wondered if it would be enough.

  Slowly opening the door, he stuck his head into the hallway. It was very quiet. Christian crept into the hall, looking each way, waiting for a repeat of the sound.

  It didn’t take long.

  Something scratched at the stairs in the stairwell, claws scrabbling for a better hold on each step. There was a muffled noise, then a growl followed by a high-pitched yipe. Growls interrupted the clicking sound for a few seconds as what sounded like two creatures broke into a fight.

  Christian slowly backed up to the room he had left. He raised the pistol to point at the door leading to the stairs. A twelve-by-six-inch window displayed only darkness on the other side of the door.

  Can they work doorknobs? he wondered. Can they get their filthy paws around them without opposable thumbs?

  His breathing was the only sound once the fight had run its course. It seemed terribly loud in the hallway, and he attempted to slow it down, exhaling through his mouth, breathing in through his nostrils.

  The silence dragged on for what seemed like hours, but Christian knew it couldn’t be more than thirty seconds.

  A few clicks from the stairwell. Something’s talons scraped on the stairs.

  Christian held his breath. His hands were shaking.

  The pistol wavered.

  Darkness filled the window; then suddenly a huge head and snout appeared at the glass. A long black tongue licked the pane.

  Even in the darkness of the stairwell, Christian could see the monster’s golden eyeshine, scanning the hallway. As he stepped backward into the laboratory, the eyes latched on to him, and the beast, reinvigorated by the sight of tender, juicy flesh, pounded on the door.

  Christian pushed a heavy desk in front of the entrance to the lab.

  Andrei began howling in short, powerful bursts, as if to signal the beast-men in the stairwell.

  Something smashed in the hall—the glass window in the door to the stairs.

  Christian looked around the room—there had to be something here to save him, a weapon, a point of escape—but he could see very little. The only light fell from the full moon, slipping through the window and draping the sill.

  Andrei’s howls grew higher in pitch, then he huffed like a grizzly bear. He tore at the Plexiglas again in a futile effort to escape.

  In the hall, something clanked, loud, like a bullet being fired.

  The growling grew excited, stertorous.

  They had managed to open the stairwell door. Now all that stood between Christian and who knew how many sets of claws and teeth was a single door, mostly made of glass, and a heavy desk.

  There had to be someplace to hide. …

  Through the frosted glass with the names painted on it, he could see two silhouettes rise up from the ground. The creatures were gigantic, at least seven feet tall when standing on their hind legs. One turned its head sideways, and Christian got a good glimpse of its crooked fangs.

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit!”

  Both of the heads snapped back so they were facing the door.

  Christian slapped a hand over his mouth. He had just given away his position. He began to rush around the room, looking for any escape route, anything other than the pistol, which now seemed ridiculously inadequate. He wanted an ax, something solid and sharp.

  There was nothing.

  His eyes were drawn to Jean’s journal, which he’d left on the chair, open to maintain his place in the narrative. He couldn’t lose this book, he realized. It offered too many clues as to what was happening, why people were changing. He snatched it up and stuffed it in the front of his pants.

  There was only one way out of the room. He unlatched the window and yanked it open. The air was surprisingly cool on his skin, and it smelled much better than the stale laboratory. The edge of a metal ladder, covered in flaking paint, gleamed in the pale moonlight.

  Yes! he thought, his heart rushing with triumph and adrenaline, so hard it threatened to burst from his rib cage.

  The glass on the door shattered, and the low animal noises gave way to victorious roars.

  Don’t look back, don’t look back, Christian told himself as he hopped through the window and hooked his leg over the end of the metal ladder, which was six inches higher than would be comfortable. Don’t you fucking look back!

  Of course, as soon as he turned to slam down the window, he looked back.

  “Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

  There were more of them than he’d thought, at least five or six. The door splintered beneath the heavy shoulders of the first creature in line. The wood cracked and fell to the floor, and the creature stepped over the broken barrier, sniffing at the room.

  It had deep brown fur, and its body was muscular, especially around the neck and shoulders. Its barrel chest heaved as it stood awkwardly on its hind legs, exposing withered dugs. Raising its head, it howled at the ceiling.

  As the second monster loped into the room, the first spotted Christian outside the window.

  The ladder, rusted metal with brown spots on the grips from years of use, was mounted perpendicular to the side of the Bio-Gen building, sticking out a few inches from the brick. It rose to the fire escape leading to the roof. If Christian could get up there, he might be safe. At least for a while.

  He g
rabbed the ladder, shifting his balance to the rungs under his feet. To his surprise and horror, the ladder was on a pulley, and it dropped eight feet, well below the fragile protection of the window he’d just closed. The ladder dropped toward the alley, where vague, ominous shapes moved in the shadows. Luckily, it stopped with a jolt, six feet from the pavement, and Christian climbed, hand over hand, the rungs cool to his touch.

  When the boy reached the window of the lab, the first beast-man began pounding tentatively on the glass. Christian knew the window wouldn’t last long, and he moved faster, climbing the rungs as quickly as his hands and feet could manage. The book began to work its way out of his jeans, and he could feel it escaping. No way was he losing this precious volume!

  His feet were a mere six inches above the window when the glass shattered into the alley beneath him.

  The monster shoved its upper body through the jagged space, yelping when it cut its torso on the broken glass. Its clumsy hands reached for the ladder, not adapted for such tasks, fingers resembling talons, pads replacing most of the palm. It fumbled with one of the rungs two feet beneath Christian’s sneakers.

  He ascended faster, each rung taking him four more inches away from the horror below.

  Just as the journal almost liberated itself from his pants, Christian grabbed it and put it in his mouth, clenching his teeth around the soft leather. The scent of it infiltrated his nostrils.

  The creature below him was being shoved aside by another inside the laboratory. It grasped at the ladder for half a second; then it fell three stories into the alley, landing with a crash on its head. Brains and blood shot from the shattered skull.

  Christian reached the uppermost segment of the ladder, and the pulleys, not restricted by a lycanthrope’s fumbling paws, retracted, raising the ladder to its original position, six inches above the window. The boy laughed, the sound stunted by the book he clenched in his jaws.