Bestial Read online

  As she looked around the tight, claustrophobic room, she thought, Werewolves?

  “What about getting out of here?” he asked. “Do we have to wait until someone comes and sets us free?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s on a timer, remember? It’ll unlock from the outside at eight-thirty. We can use the emergency lever to release the other locks, but I’m afraid we’re stuck here until morning.”

  “I’m not very good in small, tight places.” Rick eyed the cream-colored metal walls of the vault, a soothing shade, probably chosen by some poor slob in a cubicle somewhere. Smaller safety-deposit boxes, each with its own set of locks, lined one side. At the back of the vault was a rectangular door.

  “You’ll just have to live with it,” Chesya said, sitting down on the floor and leaning against the door at the back. “We’re in here for the night. And, honestly, I can’t think of a safer place right now. That door is ten inches of steel. The walls of the vault are more than a foot thick. I doubt anything can get in here. Especially those animals.”

  “Werewolves.”

  “Whatever. They looked more like bears to me. You think a bunch of bears maybe got loose? No, that wouldn’t explain why Gloria and the others started changing. Don’t werewolves have to be scratched or bitten before they turn from people into monsters? That’s how it always worked in the old movies.”

  “Maybe the movies lied.”

  “And only most of the people changed. You didn’t turn into one of those things, and neither did I. Everybody else out there did. Why not us?”

  “I don’t know.” He had a thought, a dark, malignant thought that seared itself into his mind. “Hey, what if someone hits a power line out there and the electricity goes off? That door going to open if there’s no electricity?”

  “It’s got a backup battery that’ll work for a couple days. I think I read once that it can last seventy-two hours. We’ll get out of here just fine.”

  He said, “Okay. That’s good.”

  “If they really are werewolves,” she continued, “why are there so many of them? And what was going on with Gloria and Roger and all your partners in crime? How come they were affected?”

  “Well, they didn’t get scratched. Not that I saw.”

  “No. But they still changed.”

  “It looked like they had stomach cramps when it all started. You remember Jones said that he wasn’t feeling so good? You think … no, it’s too crazy.”

  “What? There isn’t much I wouldn’t believe right now.”

  “You don’t think it was some kind of disease, do you? Like, they caught some weird werewolf virus?”

  “You’re right. That’s crazy.”

  “No, listen.” He was getting excited about his theory, moving his big hands in the air, gesticulating wildly. At least he wasn’t obsessing over the enclosed space of the vault. Small favors were welcome right now. “Think about it. They all got sick and started changing into those animals. Some of us didn’t. We could be immune to this werewolf disease, kind of like those people who never catch measles.”

  “I don’t know,” Chesya said. “I still don’t think they’re werewolves. They didn’t really look much like wolves.”

  “No, they didn’t. They were mixed-up versions of all kinds of animals—like you said, big and bulky, like bears.”

  “But they moved like cats. …”

  “Snouts like dogs’ or a wolves’, and the ears were definitely wolflike.”

  She shivered. “Their eyes, too. So weird. I had a cat, once, that ran away from me. She had eyeshine like they had.”

  “They were fast as shit, though. Never seen anything move that fast.”

  They stopped talking for a moment, glancing at each other. The hum of the lights and the nearly undetectable whir of the air ventilator were comforting. Rick’s heartbeat slowed down for the first time since the aborted robbery had begun. It seemed like a long time to have that much adrenaline coursing through his system.

  “You rob a lot of banks?” Chesya asked.

  Rick leaned back against the wall, feeling its coolness through his oxford shirt. Slowly, he lowered himself to the floor until he was sitting, looking across the prefab room at this woman who had saved his skin.

  “Why you wanna know?”

  “Just being neighborly. We’re going to be in here awhile, and it could get our minds off what’s outside. So, do you?”

  He just grinned and waved a finger at her.

  “Well then,” she continued. “Why do you do it?”

  “Why do you work here?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “For the money, the benefits.”

  “Same with robbing a bank. It’s all about the money, Chesya. You knock over a decent-sized bank, you got enough to live on for a good year or two. All for one night of work and a couple of days of planning. If that’s not a great benefit, I don’t know what is.”

  “What if you get caught?”

  “Then I’ll go to jail. The risks come with the territory. Just like you take a risk being a teller here. There’s always a chance some son of a bitch like me might come along and stick up the place.”

  “That’s a pretty fatalistic way of looking at things.”

  “Well, I’m just that kind of a guy. I never saw the glass as half full. I always just wanted to refill it to the top.”

  “But if you had a steady job, you’d get the money without the danger.”

  “Yeah, but that isn’t for me,” he said with a hint of a grin. “I kind of like the danger, living on the edge. I’m not much of a human being, I know. But I’m really good with a gun, good with my hands.”

  “You don’t look like a bank robber. You look like … maybe a stuntman for westerns—the old kind of western, Roy Rogers or Audie Murphy. I could see you falling backward over a bar and into a mirror.”

  “You could, huh? I’ve been in enough brawls back in the day. Now I just take my risks one day a year, get my cash, and relax for three hundred and sixty-four days in a sunny place. I work a lot on my tan.”

  “You don’t look very tan to me.”

  “Maybe I’m just feeding you a bunch of lies,” he said with a grin. “Maybe I know you’re grilling me so you can help the police find me. It isn’t gonna be that easy, Chesya.”

  She rolled her eyes, ran a hand through her Afro, disappointed he’d discovered her ruse. “Must be some kinda life,” she said. “Always running from the law, the government. I’ll take my nice, steady income over that any day.”

  “You don’t see the romance in it, the life of a bank robber?”

  “Hey, I see things in practical terms. You ever catch that movie about Bonnie and Clyde? They sure were romantic, especially when they were being gunned down at the end—all bullet holes and blood flying. Sorry, but not for me. I’ll take my safe life, my four-oh-one K, and my little apartment.”

  “You really don’t see it, do you? Why it’s worth all the problems?”

  “No. Seems pretty ridiculous to me,” she said, trying to hit him in his pride so he’d let some detail about his life slip. “But, hey, you want to rob a bunch of banks and risk your life, more power to you. I grew up in Over the Rhine, the worst part of the city. There were guns all over the place, and I watched my older brother die by a gun. He was shot six times by some punk in a rival gang after he killed one of their homies. My other brother overdosed in a back alley, so excuse me if I don’t get excited over the gangster lifestyle you’ve chosen. I’ve seen the results firsthand.”

  “Hey, I’m not that bad,” he said. “I just rob banks. I’ve never killed anyone during one of the robberies.”

  “You’ve never killed anyone? That tough-guy persona is just an act?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I couldn’t ever really hurt anyone.”

  “Tell that to Bob Gunner.”

  “Who?”

  “The man you pistol-whipped and left to die on the floor.”

  “Aw, Christ, I didn’t think of that,”
he said, and he winced. “I just wanted to knock him out and get him out of the way. You’re right, though. He didn’t start to change, did he?”

  She shook her head slowly back and forth. “No. We forgot about him, left him out there for those things to get.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “Yeah … shit. He was a good man. A good boss. He had three kids and a wife. He’s just meat now.”

  Her voice was rising with emotion, and Rick thought he’d finally distracted her from gathering incriminating facts about him. He did regret leaving that guy to be killed.

  “We were running for our lives,” he explained, trying to sound more disturbed than he was, not an easy task. “I just forgot about him.”

  She said, “I forgot, too, so I’ll take some of the blame. Still, you didn’t need to hit him with the gun. He wouldn’t have caused any trouble. He would’ve just stayed on the floor, thinking about his kids. They were good kids, too.”

  “Okay, so maybe through neglect I accidentally killed a man,” he said. “One man in six robberies—and that wouldn’t have happened if those … those things hadn’t shown up.” Quickly, he added, “Of course, I could be lying again. I could’ve killed dozens of men over the years. Bodies could’ve been left all over the place.”

  Chesya sighed. “I don’t think any of it matters much, anyway. We’re talking about all this morality and philosophy, and I think that when we open that door in the morning, we’re going to have a lot more to worry about than who got hurt in a robbery. I think it’s going to be terrible. Like the Apocalypse.”

  “You think it’s happening all over?”

  “Yeah. You saw how fast Gloria and all your friends changed. It only took a couple of minutes.”

  “And all those sirens.”

  “Huh?”

  “I heard car alarms and sirens going off all over the place outside the bank, and I mean a lot of them.”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t look very good, does it?”

  “If that’s going on all over the place, I don’t know if there’ll be anyone left alive in the morning.”

  “Some people have to have gotten away, hidden themselves someplace safe, just like we did. I mean, we were lucky to be where we were with an open vault only a few dozen feet away. Maybe people hid out in their houses or their basements.”

  They were quiet for a while, and Rick glanced at his watch. It was just after 10:00 p.m. They had at least ten more hours until the automated lock would slide open and allow them to exit.

  Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted the doors to open. What would be left of the world on the other side?

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe some of them hid. Maybe …”

  They listened to the hum of the lights, wondering what the morning would bring.

  4

  SEPTEMBER 17, 5:30 A.M.

  Cathy Wright was trying to get to sleep with Karl, spooning him, her arm wrapped around his thickening middle. They had slept in the same position for more than eighteen years. If they altered their arms or faced a different direction, they would both remain awake until they settled back into the old, familiar stance. Nineteen years of marriage brought many such traditions, and it was easier to settle into them than to fight them. When things were difficult, even impossible to handle, she scurried back to the nuclear model her mother had taught her. She chose to embrace the comfortable, mellowing into her middle age, ignoring the tough questions.

  And there had certainly been tough questions lately.

  Cathy felt the roll of Karl’s stomach beneath her fingers as he breathed softly. She’d chastised him to get to the gym more often, to watch his diet. He agreed that those were good ideas, but so far he had not acted upon them. Acting on advice was something Karl saved for the law offices of Wright, Steptoe, and Stevenson. Within his walls, he was the king, and there was little room for advice.

  Little room for opposition and debate.

  Listening to her husband’s snoring, she wondered if she had time to have another child, or if Karl would agree to an adoption. After Christian’s disappearance, she had been feeling the emptiness of her house during the daytime when Karl was at work. She missed the sound of her boy’s voice and his bragging tenor ringing from the dining room where he always seemed to be eating.

  After what had happened, after all the accusations and sleepless nights of brutal refutations, Cathy doubted Karl would allow another child into their lives. Even a baby can eventually be corrupted, can turn against his parents.

  The parenting books she had devoured while she was pregnant had not addressed this. It was something that happened to other families, poor families. Rich children didn’t just disappear in the night after accusing their parents of abuse and neglect. It was as though someone had switched scripts on her, and she had to admit, if only in the deepest part of the night with her arm around her husband, that she was floundering.

  She thought she had known her own child; then he simply changed overnight into a creature she no longer recognized. Where did that little boy go? And could he ever return to her?

  Cathy felt something moving in the depths of Karl’s flabby stomach. At first, it was a tickling sensation beneath her fingers, then hair began to sprout from his skin. He awoke, clutching at his abdomen and screeching in pain, shoving her away.

  In the moonlight that streamed through the open window, she watched her husband’s transformation in awe and alarm. She reached out to him, and he tried to grasp her hand, his eyes somehow reflecting the moonlight in an odd, golden manner. His hand lashed out, then the wrist changed, snapped into a slanted, doglike position, the fingers elongating as she watched, his fingernails growing long and black and sharp.

  An animal—that’s what Christian had called him. Karl seemed to be changing in affirmation of this charge.

  When he dropped to all fours, he turned his massive head toward her, and she saw the hunger in his eyes, the desire … the frightening lack of recognition. She turned and rushed for the bathroom before he was accustomed to his four legs. Stumbling over her nightgown, she nearly fell, but she caught herself with her hands and hurtled forward. She slammed the door, locking it behind her, thanking God that the contractor had insisted upon the heavy oak.

  He smashed his body into the door several times, until something else eventually caught his attention. He sniffed, gave a low growl, then started tearing the bedroom apart. After several minutes of ripping and crashing noises, he howled and bounded off somewhere.

  She didn’t hear another sound through most of the night, except for some noises from the street, separated from the house by a good two acres of manicured lawns and a swimming pool. There were a few distant screams, some loud cars zooming past, and once she thought she heard something mechanical smash into pieces. There were a few minutes of crashing sounds from downstairs, muffled by the walls. Then it grew eerily quiet.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the door to the dawn and looked upon the bedroom. One hand remained on the door to slam it shut if anything suddenly moved toward her. The other hand held a pair of scissors that she’d discovered in the vanity drawer. They weren’t very sharp, but they’d inflict damage in a pinch.

  Her stomach growled, demanding sustenance.

  “Karl?” she called into the brightening room. Orange and yellow hues sparkled off the crown molding.

  The bedroom had been torn to pieces. The bedclothes were shredded, and long strips had been clawed out of the mattress, matching sets of five talon marks each. The dresser had been overturned, the drawers torn from it and tossed across the room, and the curtains were canted, hanging by a single side of the window treatment. The window itself was smashed, glass scattered across the floor. The closet doors were crumpled in the middle. The bottom half of one of the doors had been flung near the bed, but the top halves hung like batwing doors in a western saloon. Her clothes, torn into ribbons, were dispersed all over the room. She could smell stale piss, and she discovered the puddle near the bookshelves
, which were, oddly, untouched.

  “Oh God, Karl.”

  Dawn had arrived in a cloudless, autumn sky in Cincinnati, edging the bridges that spanned the Ohio River in tones of gold and crisp yellow. The sky was blue, almost aqua, and the birds began to call out to each other, gossiping in singsong. The temperature rose to a warm seventy degrees, a vestige of Indian summer.

  Cathy couldn’t bring herself to become enthusiastic about the weather.

  She searched the house, discovering some new brand of destruction in nearly every room. She tried the phone, dialing 911, but was greeted by a dead line. She attempted the same call on her cell phone, but she only received a busy signal. She wondered how many other people were trying to call for help.

  Setting down her phone, she moved to the foyer. The front door had been torn from its hinges, and she ran her hand over the splintered wood.

  Then, like so many others in the city, Cathy Wright put on a pair of shoes and, after peeking through the doorway and ascertaining there was no immediate danger, stepped out into a new world.

  5

  SEPTEMBER 17, 5:30 A.M.

  Chesya eyed Rick as he paced the length of the vault. She’d long been a people-watcher, and she could usually define behaviors of customers and coworkers. This skill helped her business sense. She could always tell when someone was nervous about a loan, no matter how the applicant struggled to maintain a smile. Now, as Rick paced and attempted to contain his hysteria, she noticed little things about him, telltale signals that she alone would heed.

  Rick’s hair was graying at the temples, and she thought he was self-conscious of it because he ran his fingers through it just above his ears, where the new gray mixed with the sandy brown. His arms were muscular beneath his shirt, stretching the fabric across his chest, but his legs appeared thin through his tight jeans. This told Chesya that he worked out, but he didn’t discipline himself to complete the training, probably skipping his legs altogether. His desire for a cigarette belied a dependency upon smoking, and the frustration he exhibited showed that he rarely went without one of the cancer sticks. His nails were chewed down to the quick, a nervous habit.