The Howling III

Chapter Six

For a long while after the boy had fallen asleep Jones sat in one of the chairs in the cabin and watched the dying coals. The chair of wood and woven reeds creaked and settled comfortably under his weight. Outside the rainfall softened. It would be clear in the morning. Jones frowned, thinking about the boy he had found in the trap.

In the years he had spent alone in the woods he had brushed the lives of many people with many different backgrounds. This boy was not like the others. There was something strange about him. Despite the boy's reticence, Jones could sense a danger that lurked somewhere deep inside him. Something to be feared. Something not quite natural.

The big man dug out an old corncob pipe, stuck it in his mouth unlit, and chewed meditatively on the stem. He had not smoked anything since his teenage years, but it calmed him to chew on the old pipe. It helped him sort out his thoughts.

Tragic fact: the boy's foot was destroyed. No doctor living could save it. When he awoke Jones would give him another heavy draught of the herb tea to keep him drowsy during the long trip they had to make into Pinyon. Jones was not worried about carrying the boy that far; he was confident of his own strength. But a certain amount of jostling would be unavoidable. His strength could not ease the boy's pain.

The kid had been exceedingly brave so far, but he was probably still in partial shock. When he fully realized the damage to his body, he would need a friend close by.

Jones eyes narrowed and his great shoulders bunched as he thought of the men who had set the deadly trap. He had not struck another human being in anger for more years than he could recall, but at that moment Jones would have happily ripped the trappers" limbs from their bodies.

The boy stirred in his sleep and mumbled something unintelligible. Jones got up and walked over to the cot. He lay his big hand on the boy's forehead. There was a fever, but less than it had been. Jones pulled the blanket up snug around the boy's shoulders and walked back to his chair.

The presence of the boy in his cabin brought back thoughts to Jones of his own son. Sometimes, not often, the big man let himself think about John. What he would look like now. What kind of a young man he would become.

John would now be, let's see, going on fourteen. That would put him in high school. Jesus, it was hard to think of that tiny helpless human as a gawky teenager. Probably the boy would be living with his mother in some comfortable California suburb, if Jones correctly read the direction Beverly was going. He would have an upwardly mobile stepfather who wore a three-piece suit to work and fired up the backyard barbecue on weekends. Well, what was wrong with that? What if John had stayed here? What kind of a life would he have had with a ragged hermit for a father living in the woods?

"A damn good life, that's what," Jones muttered aloud. As he had many times in the past, Jones regretted that he had not fought to keep his son. Probably, he would have lost, but at least he would have tried. He grunted and bit down hard on the pipe-stem, consigning the doubts to their place in the closed-off attic of his mind.

He got up again and lay a big chunk of fir on the coals. In a moment little flames licked tentatively up the bark. The log was still moist, and it would burn slowly. It would probably last till morning. Jones went back to his chair and sat down, listening to the sizzle and pop as the fire probed at the pitch pockets in the log. He closed his eyes and let himself dream.

As always, his dreams were of Beverly. In his heart he had known from the start that she was not for him. Living off the land had sounded to her like an adventure. Like the six months she spent in the Peace Corps teaching Tanzanians things they had no desire to know. She never really saw it as a true life style.

She was happy enough in the commune where there were other people around to sing folksongs with while they held hands in a big circle around a campfire. Having a shopping centre with a big Safeway nearby didn't hurt, either. Jones tried it for a while, but that scene was not for him. Living in one of those hippie communes was like using somebody else's bath water.

Then as now, Jones was his own man. He did not join movements or march for causes because it was trendy. He did it because he believed. And if he stopped believing, he stopped marching. Why lock yourself into something that no longer made sense?

Now Beverly, she had grabbed on to every hip liberal cause that came around. But if her beliefs did not run as deep as his, Jones didn't give a damn. She was so achingly beautiful it still brought a lump to his throat. He had loved her blindly and uncritically from the moment he saw her sitting naked under the sun, her shining yellow hair spread like a veil down over those wonderful breasts.

Sexually, she had been everything a man could ask. Something out of an adolescent's erotic dreams. She knew instinctively where he wanted to be touched and how. She could carry him to dizzying heights of desire, then, when he thought he must surely lose his mind, she would bring on his climax, prolonging it to a point where he lay drained, spent, helpless, and happier than a man should be.

Maybe once a month now Jones would go down to the bars around Saugus and Newhall and find a willing woman. There were always a few strays hanging around the bars. He stayed away from Pinyon. Too many people knew him there. He did not want a relationship, he wanted sex. And that was what the women he met in the bars provided. But even in those momentary bursts of passion he could never stop thinking of Beverly. Most of the time he figured it was just too much trouble to hike all the way to Saugus. Then he let his right hand be his woman.

Gradually his massive head fell forward, cushioned by the mat of red beard, and the giant slept.

He awoke at dawn, startled with the sense that something was not as it should be. Instantly he was on his feet. His eyes darted around the gloomy interior of the cabin until he spied the blanket-covered form on one of the cots. Then he remembered. The boy.

While Jones watched, the boy stirred as though he could feel eyes upon him. He came fully awake all at once, like an animal sensing danger. From the boy's expression, Jones thought for a moment he would try to run out the door.

"Hey, easy, son. It's me, Jones, remember? You're safe here."

For the first time since he had found the boy in the trap

Jones saw the semblance of a smile on the young face. Thin, and not firmly in place, but undeniably a smile.

"I forgot where I was," the boy said.

"Can't blame you. I wake up the same place damn near every morning, and I still forget sometimes."

The boy started to sit up. Jones said, "You better not move around too much with that ankle."

The boy looked down at the hump where the blanket covered his right foot. "Ankle?"

"Don't tell me you forget about that too? Maybe it's just as well. At least you got some sleep."

"Was my ankle hurt?"

"I'm afraid it was. Hurt pretty bad. I'd better have a look at it."

While the boy watched curiously, Jones peeled back the blanket, exposing the foot, still tightly wrapped in the bandage he had fashioned. Very gently the big man untied the torn strips and unwound the clean white cloth.

"Holy shit!"

"What's the matter?" The boy struggled to sit up while Jones held his right foot up off the cot, examining it.

"I don't believe what I'm seeing."

He had expected the swollen and discoloured skin, torn by the steel teeth, the shattered bits of bone, snapped tendons, ligaments, blood, and pus. What he saw was fresh unbroken skin on a foot that moved this way and that with no apparent discomfort to the boy. The only sign of his terrible wound was a faint patch of shiny pink scar tissue where the trap had bitten through the flesh.

"I flat don't believe it," Jones said again.

The boy sat up, bracing himself with his hands and looked curiously from his foot to the face of the big man.

"Doesn't it hurt?" Jones said.

The boy shook his head.

"Not at all?"

"Nope."

"Can you stand on it?"

Still handling the foot gingerly, Jones put it back on the canvas of the cot. The boy swung his feet out to the wooden floor and stood up. He took several steps away from Jones, then back. He jumped up and down. He did a little impromptu dance step.

"Well, I'll be damned."

"Feels fine," the boy said.

Jones sat on the edge of the cot staring down at the boy's feet. "Either you are the fastest healing sonofagun the world has ever seen, or we've just witnessed a miracle."

"Maybe it wasn't hurt as bad as you thought."

Oh, yes, it was hurt all right, Jones thought. Nothing in the world of medicine was going to save that leg much below the knee. He was not likely to make a mistake like that. He opened his mouth to say as much, then saw the strangely pleading look on the boy's face. The boy did not want to hear just now that there was something very strange about him.

"Maybe you're right," Jones said. "Anyway, you appear to be in fine shape this morning. You ought to be able to walk into Pinyon with me. Save me a load."

The boy looked away. "Do we have to go?"

"Course we do. Somebody's going to be looking for you."

"I doubt it."

"Sure they will. You've got folks, haven't you?"

"I–I don't remember."

"Well, they'll remember. And they'll be damn worried about you."

"I could stay here with you."

"No way. That's all I'd need is to have a big ass search party come crashing in here and find me with a runaway boy. So far the local people haven't called me a kidnapper or a pervert, but all they'd need is something to put the thought in their heads. I'm taking you back, boy, and that's final."

The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Does it have to be today?"

"Well… " and immediately Jones cursed himself for weakening. The boy's face lit up with a smile, a real one this time.

"I don't eat much, Jones. And I can help around here. I can cut firewood. I can help with your garden. You've got a leak right over the door. I'll bet I could fix that."

"I could fix it myself if it bothered me that much," Jones said grumpily.

The boy looked at him sideways. "My foot's still a little tender."

Jones ran his fingers through his wiry red beard. "Well, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to give it a day's rest."

The boy's happiness was so obvious that Jones was embarrassed and turned away. What kind of life must this kid have been living to want so much to stay in a broken-down forest cabin with a burnt-out hermit?

"But tomorrow, bright and early, rain or shine, we head for Pinyon, hear?"

"Whatever you say, Jones." The boy sat on the bed and began happily lacing the blood-caked shoe on to the foot that by all rights should have been a mangled stump.

"Tomorrow," Jones repeated in his deepest no-nonsense voice. "Tomorrow we hike."

It was four days before they started for Pinyon. During that time the boy had not only repaired the stubborn leak over the door that had plagued Jones for a year, he had cleaned out the weeds from what remained of Beverly's flower garden, and helped Jones straighten up his vegetable plot. He had chopped and stacked a month's worth of firewood and brought back pails of wild blackberries and pine-nuts from the nearby woods.

More than all that, he gave Jones somebody to talk to.

The big man had forgotten how good the sound of another human voice was. Even better, another ear to listen, for in fact the boy talked very little, while Jones almost never stopped. Jones talked about how it was living off the land. He talked about his own memories as a boy. He talked about the turbulent time of his young manhood. He talked about Beverly. And he talked about John.

The boy listened. He listened, and whether he fully understood or not, he nodded at the right places, asked the right questions, and agreed when it was important to agree. He still claimed to have no memory of his own past, and Jones did not press him. If it were true, there was nothing Jones could do about it, and if the boy were concealing something, that was none of Jones's business.

On the morning of the fifth day Jones was wearing his heavy boots and buckling up his backpack when the boy awoke. When the boy started to speak the big man held up a massive hand to silence him.

"Before you say a word, forget it. Today's the day."

"Aw, Jones…"

"No. I set out a pair of boots there that might fit you if you put on three or four pairs of socks. Don't worry, I've got plenty. You wash up and I'll get some breakfast going."

They ate hot biscuits with butter and blackberry jam, and washed them down with some of Jones's powerful coffee. The boy made no more protests, but as they left the cabin and were halfway across the clearing he stopped to look back.

"It was a good time, Jones."

The big man waited until the boy was ready, then they turned and walked together into the heavy forest. "Yes," he said. "It was a good time."

Abe Craddock and Curly Vane were mad as hell. They had caught something in their trap almost a week ago and some sonofabitch had let it out. No animal would ever get itself out of one of those traps. It could very well have been one of those things from Drago. There were still a few of them in the woods. They had heard the howling.

What made it even worse, whoever freed the animal had deliberately ruined the trap. Those babies didn't come cheap. You couldn't get them at a regular sporting goods store. So as they tramped through the woods for the fifth straight day of looking for the trap robber, Craddock and Vane were mad as hell.

Moreover, they were drunk. Each of them had put away enough Jim Beam to knock out a normal man. But Craddock and Vane were experienced drinkers. Over the years they had built up a tolerance for the stuff as they tore up their livers.

Abe Craddock was a beefy man with a perpetually red face and an ass that stretched the seat of his jeans. Curly Vane was thinner, less talkative, and if anything, meaner than his companion. The two of them, when they got to drinking, were as welcome around La Reina County as the Mexican fruit fly.

It was Curly who heard the sounds in the woods off to their left. He held up a hand to warn Craddock, and the two of them stood there holding their breath, listening.

Something was definitely moving through the brush. Something big.

"Bear?" Craddock said in a hoarse whisper.

"Maybe." Both men brought their guns up to ready.

Curly Vane carried a heavy old Winchester deer rifle that could put a copper-jacketed slug through a brick wall. Craddock, whose marksmanship was poor, favoured a 12-gauge shotgun that he loaded with 00 buckshot. Anything he came close to with that cannon was as good as dead.

They waited. The sound of their own heavy breathing muffled the noise of whatever was approaching through the brush. They had never encountered anything bigger or more dangerous than a deer in these woods. Whatever was coming toward them now, they convinced themselves, was no deer.

The brush parted twenty yards away with a suddenness that made both men jump. A fierce, hairy head rose above the low chapparal and glared.

"Bear!" shouted Craddock.

Curly Vane squeezed off three shots.

Craddock's shotgun thundered.

The rifle slugs pounded into Jones's chest like three rapid hammer blows. For a second all he felt was the impact, then came the pain as the cold air hit the tunnels the bullets had bored into his lungs. He roared and started for the hunters. His only thought through the pain was to get his hands on the rotten bastards. Then the load of Craddock's buckshot blew away most of his head, and Jones's pain was over.

"Oh, fuck me, it was a man!" Curly moaned.

"What'd you shoot for?" Craddock said. "I wouldn't of shot if you didn't."

"Shut up, you stupid fuck. We got to get out of here."

Craddock seized him by the arm. "Hold it! There's another one."

"Oooh, shit!"

They turned back and saw that there was sure enough a companion with the man they had killed. More of a boy than a man. He knelt over the bloody remains of the big man sobbing. Then he raised his head and looked straight at Craddock and Vane. Curly Vane brought up the Winchester.

"What are you doing?" Craddock said.

"We've got to kill him, you dumb fuck. He seen us."

Vane's rifle cracked. A branch snapped off inches from the boy's face. For one frozen instant the boy stared at the hunters. His lips spread in a snarl unlike anything the men had seen on a human face. Then he was up and running.

Curly fired again, but the boy was already lost in the brush. They could hear his feet pounding the carpet of fir needles. He was fast.

"Come on," Curly urged. "We've got to catch him."

The two hunters crashed through the brush, heedless of the branches that whipped their faces and tore at their clothing. Ahead they caught glimpses of the fleeing boy. Their only thought was to kill.

There was yet another witness to the killing of Jones. After many weeks of searching out the scattered survivors of Drago, Derak, the leader, had finally found Malcolm. He saw him leave the cabin with the big man and start for the town. Derak had paced them silently, awaiting his chance to move in and take the boy. He knew of Jones, and had no wish to harm the big man. But Malcolm had to be brought back to his own kind.

Then the other two had approached. The drunken men with their guns. The scent of them alone, their sweat, the whiskey on their breath, had been enough to start the change in Derak. He felt the bones shift and crack and reshape themselves under his skin. He stripped away the restraining clothes and dropped silently to all fours. His jaw worked silently as the teeth grew to their terrible length, strong, yellow, and sharp as knives.

Without warning the men had fired and Jones fell. Malcolm dropped beside him, and for a moment Derak thought the boy was going to go through the full change for the first time in his life. If it happened before he was prepared, it could be devastating. But the boy's body was not quite ready. He rose and fled.

The men fired at him and gave chase.

The ancient rage of his kind welled up in Derak. He flexed the powerful muscles under the thick coat of coarse fur and bounded after them.

The men were far too clumsy to elude him. Derak broke from the bushes with a roar and fell upon the one nearest to him, the one with the thin body and the head of tight black curls. He bore the man screaming to the forest floor and tore out his throat. The other threw down his useless gun and ran.

As his rage ebbed, Derak's hunger grew. He pushed his muzzle into the raw open flesh of the man's chest and fed.