Life With A Werewolf

From Trailer To Tempest - Getting Sarah part 2

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******

Well, I didn’t puke. I can say that much at least.

There was blood. Quite a lot of blood. Two people had been taped down to the kitchen chairs of some dining room set that either came from Goodwill or a dumpster. The brown wooden chairs at least matched the brown wood paneling on the walls. Green shag carpeting in the living room looked as if it hadn’t seen a vacuum cleaner in quite some time. The bodies of whatever unlucky S.O.B.s who had crossed the vampires had been hauled away by some coroner hours ago, but the chairs and duct tape remained. A lot of blood pooled into the carpeting, sprayed on the walls, and tracked to the kitchen, the bedrooms, and just about everywhere else. Well, that is before all the blood was spilled over it. Someone had spent a good amount of time walking through that blood. Back and forth to the kitchen, the bathroom, and the spare bedroom where all the meth was cooked.

I didn’t go back there. I didn’t want to. The cop said there wasn’t anything for me to see there anyway. Besides, I wasn’t that interested in the makings of meth, or whatever hillbilly experiment that was going on back there that resembled meth. I was more interested in footprints.

Namely, the footprints in the blood stains I did recognize. They were the same size and shape as Sarah. It seemed to scream out to me. I could see her standing in the middle of all of this and…

What? I wasn’t sure. What would she be doing there? What would I have been doing there? Was she an active participant? A captive? Cheerleading or pleading? Was she delivering pizza and just waiting for her tip? I could see Sarah, wearing a pizza delivery outfit, holding two pizza boxes and sighing in contempt as hot red blood splattered over the boxes and her blond hair. “Are you done here yet? Can I have my tip now?” Rolling her eyes and smacking on gum as she did so.

I don’t know where the gum thing came from. Sarah never chewed gum. She liked it okay, but it wasn’t something she regularly bought.
She preferred breath mints. It’s strange the things that come to mind when you’re standing amid carnage and chaos. Standing in the middle of blood and a clear case of someone or a couple of someones who have an absolute distaste for human life, here I was thinking about how Sarah preferred breath mints to chewing gum. The human brain copes with things in strange ways and looking back on it now, this was a coping mechanism. The more you concentrate on the unimportant, the smaller the important things can seem, and the further away they feel.

As much as I pretended to no longer care for or about Sarah, there were still some feelings left. Always will be. I married her for a reason, after all, and still missed her despite whatever she claimed or would claim I suppose.

But concentrating on that weird fact made dealing with the blood in the living room, and those perfect Sarah footprints standing there in the middle of everything as if nothing was wrong, just that much easier. Nothing was smeared, and nothing was pressed. There were no signs of any struggle. Just one person waiting in a room, not paying attention to the two people in the chairs being slowly bled to death or having that blood tracked everywhere. Crash laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. For some reason, he was still looking human.

“You okay,” He asked, concern etched upon his face.

I blinked away a tear that came up from somewhere.
“I guess so, yeah,” I said. “Sarah was here.”

“I know,” he said. “I could smell her. Don’t worry, this blood ain’t hers.”

“I know,” I said. “Those footprints are hers. And they're not of someone struggling or fighting. But why barefoot?”

Crash shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s vampire logic. It will have some sort of twisted weird logical sense to it when you finally find out.”

“So the twins, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” I asked.

“Those,” Sheriff Nate said from behind me somewhere, I think in the trailer's tiny kitchen, “are Hank and Frank Kilton. Those names sound fake because they are. It’s just the latest in a string of aliases used by these two knuckleheads. I know them better as Leeroy and Milton Chambers. Identical twins.”

“Leeroy and Milton?” I said, conjuring the image of the meth heads in my mind. Their names pulled some of the venom out of their image, turning them into even less threatening creatures. “They sound like a couple of trailer trash bumpkins.”

“That’s cause they are,” Crash said.

I gave Crash a look. Sheriff Nate shrugged, then said “what? Just because they’re vampires they have to be dark and mysterious?
Don’t usually work that way.”

“In movies,” I said, “vampires are always immortal.
Powerful. Extremely intelligent and rich.”

“Well, these two are about thirty and will be lucky to live to see their fiftieth birthday thanks to all the meth they smoke. They’re weak even for vampires thanks to the meth, not very smart but dangerous, and are only meth-head rich.” Crash was poking around the kitchen, picking up various things, looking at them, occasionally sniffing this or that, and setting them back down. Their movements throughout the trailer reminded me a bit of how dogs would begin tracking prey.

I walked into the kitchen and spotted something gleaming on the countertop. It seemed to be interspersed with the blood and muck that covered everything in the kitchen. “That’s,” Crash began as I held it up for him. He paused a moment. Couldn’t finish the statement.

“Her wedding ring.” I finished for him.

“If I was you guys, I’d start right here.” I had to go outside then. For some reason, the floor began to get wavy, the walls started pushing in toward me. I didn’t notice I was sprinting until I reached the edge of the trailer home outside and dry-heaved a couple of times. I didn’t want to cry. Not yet.

Emotion was a luxury I couldn’t be afforded at that moment. In my mind, I pictured a box. Inside that box I took a mental photograph of me and Sarah standing there, smiling and holding each other as we did on that wedding day. I placed that picture inside, folded the box up, then set it up on a shelf in my mind high out of my reach. After I did that, I inhaled a few times, took a few deep breaths, then turned. The emotion could be dealt with later. I'd have plenty of time for crying over what happened to her and what became of our love. There was time later to deal with the destruction of decisions and their repercussions in our life. Right then there was a crime scene to deal with.

“I got good news and bad news,” Sheriff Nate said as I stepped inside. “Good news is this blood around here ain’t hers.”

“I knew that,” I said. “From the footprints. What’s the bad news, that they’re bleeding her?”

“How did you know that?” He asked.

I shrugged. “From the last time, I saw her. She didn’t look all that great. Figured it was meth at the time, after all, she was running with meth heads. But now, I figure different.”

“The blood on the ring,” Crash said. “Is hers.”

“And y’all got a lead,” I replied.

“More than one.” Sheriff Nate said. “We got a couple.”

Crash had a pad out that I hadn’t noticed before, with notations on it. He wouldn’t let me see what was on it but mentioned it had something to do with scent patterns. It was all nonsense to me but made perfect sense to Crash and Sheriff Nate, as it would have to any werewolf I suppose. Different abilities, different ways of viewing the world. A scent to them could be like a fingerprint, they can identify not only who the scent belongs to, but just like a grease smear on a glass window, reasonably identify where it came from. Such as from working on automotive engines or working in the kitchen. This scent had tinges of both but leaned more heavily into vehicles than it did into the kitchen. It led them to a back-alley repair shop across the street from a diner.

The sheriff’s car led the way through the small town, down a series of back alleys that you would have no idea even existed if you hadn’t lived in a town similar. None of it was visible from either the main street or the adjoining highway.

Businesses pushed towards the road, alongside the occasional house or trailer home. Sitting in the small alleyway, next to an ancient picket fence on one side and a brick building on the other, Crash threw open the door and was out of the car almost before it stopped. Sheriff Nate jumped out of his cop car as well, both whiles shifting into something far more bestial than man.

I of course remained behind, left to study the brickwork of the businesses, and the street lamp in front of them. To huddle against the freezing temperatures as I tried to ignore the loud snarling, that only I could hear it seemed. The diner across the street was the kind that was open at five in the morning and closed sometime after dinner hours. It was seedy but seemed to be the right kind of seedy you’d expect and love in a small town like that one. The kind of place that always has the best kind of cheap coffee, the greasiest breakfasts, and the nicest wait staff around to wash it all down with.

The diner was closed, with no neon signs even lit up to announce it. The windows and glass door were too dark to see the handwritten sign to announce their new hours. There were two lights lit over the counter itself, but no other light on in the entire place. Sitting by the counter on a stool, looking towards the door was a familiar woman with blond hair. She looked at me without recognition, then looked away, holding a coffee cup in her hands.

I don’t remember opening my car door. Don’t remember opening the front door to the café either which thankfully was unlocked. Both seemed to have happened of their own volition. Soon, I was standing there, in front of Sarah, the woman who had stomped all over my feelings and left me to rot so long ago.

It’s hard to come up with something to say in a situation like that. She held her cup of coffee, then looked down and away, as if too embarrassed to look me in the eye.

I patted my hand on her shoulder, then sat down on a stool next to her. “Sarah?”

Maybe it was the concern in my voice. Or perhaps the image of my face itself. But for a moment she looked up as if she recognized me, then it was gone again. “W-who are you,” she asked. Her voice was tinted with a touch of pain and confusion.

I sighed. “Come on. Our marriage maybe wasn’t the best, but you can’t have forgotten me after all this time.”

She shrugged. “Sorry, I,”

The kitchen door slammed open. A stringy, grungy bastard of a man stood there, absent-mindedly scratching at his scabbed forearms. He looked at me and tried to snarl. Meth had rotted out most of his teeth, leaving no fangs. A fangless meth-headed vampire doesn’t leave a lot for one to be scared of. “Who the fuck are you?” He growled. Then looked down at Sarah, “Come on, we gotta go.”

I pulled my pistol and leveled at the stranger's chest.
“Sarah’s not leaving with you.”

“Her name’s not Sarah.” He looked down at her, his eyes flashed as if a light shined behind them. “It’s Julie, isn’t it?”

She looked away from me and then said, “Yeah, my name’s Julie.”

“Then how do you explain,” I began, then flipped the hair up on her neck. We had gotten matching tattoos one year as an anniversary present. I had a similar one that’s faded on the back of my neck as well.
The military threw a shit fit when I got it without checking with them first, but in the end, it didn’t affect my career, only meant I had to do some extra cleaning for a few weeks. It was supposed to be half a heart with my name in it. My neck had the other half a heart with her name in it. Only the tattoo was no longer on her neck. Instead, it was a series of scratches and scars, as if she was cutting on it for weeks and months trying to cut the name and heart out.

“What the fuck?” I said more than asked. Meth mouth began to laugh for a moment.

You never pull a trigger. It’s more of a gentle squeeze. Pulling only pulls the weapon to one side and you miss your target. I gave my trigger a gentle squeeze and hit my target dead on. Right through the heart.

He stumbled backward a step, then glared at me for a moment. His eyes flashed as if they were lit up. “Oh you’re his aren’t you,” he said, then was over the counter in a flash, lifted me off the stool, and pressed my back against the wall before I could react. “Well, I’m LeeRoy. Milton will be along in a moment.” He snarled. Then smiled up at me. “We’ll be the ones devouring you this evening. You and that purty wife of yours.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I no longer heard any snarling, growling, or any evidence of werewolves of any kind. No part of me then thought to be afraid for that reason. Had I the presence of mind to notice that sort of thing, right then I might have been terrified.