Life With A Werewolf

To The Rescue! Saving Sarah Finale

          Walmart indeed has all the supplies you'd need to make homemade C-4 and other fun explosive devices. What's more, they wouldn't bat an eye if we purchased all of the things in their necessary quantities to make such things, as long as we did it properly. But making explosives takes time and that was a luxury we could not afford. The things we did get however made it look like we were playing a real live version of that old game, "Which three or four items would you buy at Walmart to shock the cashier?"


         A taser. Garlic, both garlic powder and in the squeezable tube. Snake shot for my pistol. A pair of pliers. The elderly woman who was ringing us up didn't even blink. "Looks like one hell of a party," she said, then gave us our total.

          "Vampire hunting," Sarah said with a smile.

         She gave Sarah a knowing wink, then said, "good luck."

          As we made it to the car, I said, "Now think. Where would they be?"

          "Is this plan even going to work," She asked. There was genuine fear on her face. She wanted reassurances. Promises. Something that had been ingrained in me to never give. Don't promise what you're not certain you can deliver. It's one of the first things I learned in the military. You don't say, 'It's going to be okay', and you never say 'you'll get out of this alive'. You say, 'we're doing everything we can.' You say, 'help is on the way', then you give them an order to distract them from their impending doom.

          The look in her eyes screamed she needed me to hold her. To hug her. To tell her, 'everything will be alright.' Instead, I began to drive the car out of the parking lot. 'A bad plan is better than no plan,' I said. "You know how to fill those?" I pointed at the ammunition with my thumb.

          She gave me a weary sigh and said "I think I can figure it out." Distraction. It does work from time to time. Using the pliers, she pulled off the plastic caps on the snake shot one at a time. Then, dumping the pellets out she put inside each cap a mixture of powdered and diced garlic. After which, she stuck the caps back on each round and wiped them clean.

         It took her a full clip of ruined rounds before she got the hang of it. Good thing we bought almost four hundred rounds of it. She filled as many as she could, then after getting the first couple of rounds backward in the magazines and having to pull them back out, she started to fill the magazines properly as well. "Not gonna get a lot of shots out of this," I grumbled. "It'll probably gum up after the first ten rounds or so."

         She sighed, then looked at me. "So we only need one?"

         "No," I replied. "Do them all." After all, distraction. Besides, I couldn't quite tell if we would need them.

         Sarah directed us in a somewhat meandering direction towards a trailer home out in the middle of nowhere. Trash had been strewn all over the property, shoved between the smattering of trees that were scattered across it. There were some obvious half-hearted attempts at making booby traps, but aside from a few pits with railroad spikes sticking up out of them, there wasn't anything I was concerned with.

         Besides, I didn't have to worry about sneaking inside. Especially since as soon as our wheels touched the dirt road leading towards the diner, the look of fear in Sarah's eyes changed back into the blank look I saw on her in that diner. "Far enough, moron." She growled.

         "Is that you Leeroy? Why only this far?" I asked, pointing up at the hill. "What if I made it this far?"

         "What if my brother sawed off your werewolf boyfriend's arm and ate it," she said.

         "First, he's not my boyfriend, and second, I'll tell his replacement to shit on your doorstep."

         She motioned with the gun while grumbling about how disgusting werewolves were, and lead me up the property, towards a metal building near the back.

         That's what was going on outside her mind. Inside her mind was a completely different story. Sarah's mental keep wasn't a castle. Hers was a car. She felt safest in her father's automobile as a child. She took road trips with him constantly. It was a connection they both maintained, and during the marriage would still do the occasional road trip to this random meet-up or convention or whatever.

         For months the monster drove with her trapped in the trunk of her mental vehicle. Completely away from everything. It had taken a sheer force of will, and a reminder from me to break her out of that, to give her the will to shove the monster onto the street. She was given control of her mental car, but when she got within a certain range of the toxic twins, something opened the driver's door as if it was unlocked and violently shoved her aside and took the wheel. The creature she would tell me later resembled much of the one I described for my mental keep. Tall, thin with white skin, red eyes, and long claws and fangs. She no longer had control, but unlike last time, wouldn't, and couldn't be locked in the trunk.

         Outside the windows was the world, the movements her body made. The monster did not move toward the glovebox of the vehicle, didn't even look at it. Just let the seat back and stomped the throttle grinning out the windows as it assumed full control. Sarah did her best to stare out the windows as well, avoiding every thought or glance towards that glovebox. If the creature wanted to, it could have ripped the glovebox open, and torn through the contents. Then Sarah would have been done for. And with Sarah gone, all our hope would have been gone too.

         She watched as I walked in front of her, pretending to be scared. She was trying in vain to not think about the glove box in front of her. Which is really hard. You ever try and not to think about something? The harder you try to not think of something, the more you end up thinking about it. It runs through your mind, tantalizing you. Teasing you. Especially if it's something horrific. The more you try to not think about it, the worse details you end up imagining by accident.

         Which is exactly what was going on for Sarah. The more she tried not to think about the glove box, the more it ran through her mind. So much so, that images of it began to flash in the rearview mirror of her mental car. So, as we reached the metal side door of the building, the creature inside her said something like "what's in the glovebox?" And made a reach for it.

         At the same time, I opened the barn and flicked on the lights by the door. Crash was wrapped up in a chain that was coated in silver. Pretty poorly coated, I might add. Something had melted down cheap silver and poured it over the chains. They weren't thick, but the burning and weakness he got every time he tried to break them made escape impossible.

         I tried not to look at the bloody instruments near him, though there was a handful of household tools there being misused as torture implements. He was chained to a pillar of some kind, near a beaten and bloody heap in the corner must have been the sheriff. I didn't know what could cause a werewolf to shift back to human, whether he did it voluntarily, or if he was just dead, and I didn't want to contemplate it. Crash was still in wolf form, weakened, terrified. When he saw me enter, a look of despair crossed over him, as if he'd just been defeated. The meth heads were nowhere to be seen.

         "Shit," I growled.

         Inside Sarah's mind, the creature placed a claw on the glove box, at the same time Sarah pressed her hand to it, clamping it shut. It glared at her, red eyes that seemed to pierce right through her. "You cannot deny me," It snarled, and a thick black fog began to fill the car.

          "This place," she cried, "is mine!"

          Outside, I walked forward a couple more paces, standing in the center of the room. My arms were still up. Sarah was holding the pistol on me. A sick smile was on her face. A tear or two streamed down her face. It was as if inside she was battling against the world, and the world was winning. "Sarah," I said.

         "Don't," she whispered. The pistol shook in her hands.

         "Do," Leeroy said. Or was it Mitch? I could never tell. "Kill that moron." He entered the room, walking towards her. Mitch (or was it Leeroy?) was right along behind, a train of meth, glassy-eyed and black-toothed smiling, their teeth and very faces almost completely rotted out from the drug. "Don't kill him." He said. "I want him to see his boyfriend and the sheriff die first. Then we feed on what's left."

         They stood on either side of Sarah, triumph painted on their faces. Shoot him in the leg first," the one on the left grinned, showing off all of his rotten fangs. A mouth full of death and tooth decay.

          Inside her head, the creature banged and pulled on the glove box. While another outside started pulling on the door handles to her mental car, trying to force their way in. She shoved as hard as she could with her shoulder against the monster in the driver's seat, forcing it back for a second, long enough to grab the object out of the glove box. To this day she never told me what that object was, and I never pried. I know it was something beautiful, memorable, and precious to her. A singular object that encapsulated a time of happiness and purity, the only weapon we have sometimes against the darkness.

          The creature temporarily recoiled from it, the brightness hurting its eyes. The driver's door to her mental car opened, and with two swift kicks, she shoved the creature out, slammed the door, and locked it.

          What we could see outside is both Leeroy and Mitch turning to her, a look of shock and anger on their faces. She swung the pistol as fast as she could, and pulled the trigger, right in Leeroy's face. Leeroy gave an unholy blood-curdling scream, falling backward, clutching his face. She turned towards Mitch, who grabbed her arm. She fired anyway, a spray of burnt garlic powder and blackened sizzling diced garlic spread out, causing him to gag and choke.

          While that was going on, I raced over toward Crash. His ears were pinned against his skull as he looked at me as if I was crazy. "This was your plan?" He growled.

         I shrugged. "You have a better one?" I started to look for the lock that bound the chain.

         "It's a key lock," He said. "you gotta get the key from Mitch."

         Both vampires were gagging, coughing. With lightning-quick slashes, they blindly swung, searching for their target, which was still firing the garlic bullets at them, sometimes at point-blank range. The scent of burnt garlic and gunpowder filled the room. She pulled out the taser, and held it in her other hand, getting it ready as she kept firing.

         I grabbed a bloody hammer from their torture tools, and the closest thing that I could find that resembled a chisel, a fat flat-tip screwdriver, and began striking the chain next to the lock. It took three hard strikes to break the link. "Get back to the car!" I shouted at Sarah. "Get back now!"

         I unraveled Crash's chains as fast as I could. He stood, then looked at me. "I got this. Help the Sheriff."

         The gun in Sarah's hand had two more shots in it, then jammed. I have to hand it to Glock. After nearly a full clip of shoving out half-cooked, half-burnt diced Garlic and Garlic powder through its barrel, it finally jammed. That is one durable pistol. Sarah dropped the pistol and sprinted for the door. She got two steps before Leeroy (or was it Mitch?) grabbed her and pulled her back by her collar. "That wasn't very nice," He snarled.

         She turned and pressed the taser against him. It crackled and sizzled. But did nothing else against his flesh. He just grinned at her as he threw her down to the dirt, and climbed on top of her.

         What happened next, was confusing for me for the longest time.

         One moment, a meth-headed vampire was telling Sarah that he was going to skin her alive, then next, faster than you can blink, its head was missing and its body collapsed on top of her. All of the vampire movies and shows have it wrong. They don't just turn to dust when you kill them or crumple up like burnt paper. The vampire's body began to leak blood over her face. Sarah gave a blood-curdling scream.

         "Leeroy!" the other vampire shouted in horror. Crash threw the severed head down on the dirt floor and looked over at Mitch, blood dripping from his claws and muzzle. The vampire then looked at me of all people, and snarled, "you're gonna pay!" and disappeared.

         "What did I do?!" I shouted after him. Of course, I got no answer.

         Thankfully the sheriff wasn't dead. He was passed out however from whatever they had injected him with. Crash had been injected as well, which is how they captured both of them. Crash, it seems was brought back so they could torture him, probably for fun, which was why we found him the way we did.

         There is a substance relatively unknown to me or most humans that will incapacitate a werewolf. Neither Crash nor the sheriff told me what it was, and I did not ask them. One of the things I am learning from all of this insanity is that certain things in life we, as humans, are simply not meant to know.

         The sheriff once he got his bearings and was given a working cell phone was able to call in the "special task force" as he called it to help clean the site up. I'm told that Leeroy was given a proper burial. Mitch was never found.

         The long slow process of cleanup had begun. The sheriff's "special taskforce" arrived, and took us back to the sheriff's office. We sat outside, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups while watching the sunlight as it gently kissed the horizon good morning in a splendid display of gold and reds.

         "For a moment, I never thought I'd see the sun again," Sarah said.

         I shrugged. "We all die sometime."

         She turned to look at me. "You're always like that. What did they do to you in the military?"

         I laughed, then said "that's my secret. I've always been this way. The military actually toned me down."

         "So what now," She asked.

         I sighed, rubbing the back of my head for a moment. "I was going to ask you the same thing."

         "I can go to my dad's. He has a room for me he told me before, whenever I want to come back." She was staring at the sunrise again, watching the rays play off the surface of the Earth.

         "I'd need to find a job, I guess," I said, "but maybe afterward, we could,"

         Sarah turned to me then and smiled a sweet, sad smile. "Don't."

         "Don't what?" I asked.

         "Just don't."

         I swallowed a lump that had risen in my throat. "Weren't we in love? Didn't we have some good times? Wasn't there one point you were happy with me?"

         She hugged me so sweetly then. It was the sweetest, saddest hug I've ever received in my life. "We had fun." She said. "But we were never happy. Jason, you spent most of our marriage drunk."

         "That was because, the job, you know? The stress and everything."

         "No, it wasn't." She gave my cheek a gentle touch. "We were both miserable. You wanted out of the barracks; I wanted your benefits. Neither of us really knew each other all that well. We had a mutual physical attraction that had some financial and emotional benefits. But that isn't love."

         I rubbed my eyes, the world burning for a moment. "I suck at showing it," I said. "But I did love you once. I still care for you now." Then, I turned towards her and gave her my own sad smile. "If you ever need me. You tell me."

         "Jason," she smiled, "I promise. I'll be fine."

         "But still," I replied.

         "I'll be fine."

         In my hand, she placed a knife that was well-known to me. When my father died, I didn't get much. He didn't own a lot in this world, and what little he did have had been divided up amongst my relatives, my other sibling, and myself. What I got was an old belt buckle, his wedding ring, and a knife. That knife was the most special to me cause it was the one thing that reminded me most of him. Whenever he went fishing that knife came out. It was a small switchblade with a wooden handle. On that handle was an engraving he had done for his father when his father was in the service, of a military dog sitting in front of a flag. I guess his dad was an MP of some sort. But it was something he never talked about, and I hadn't asked.

         "I hid this from them for months," she said. "Thankfully they never searched my pockets all that well. If they ever saw it they never cared. I never wanted to dump you like that. I wanted a clean divorce, you could have had the apartment, we divide the stuff, and I was going to be gone and out of your life. But Leeroy came along, saw I was depressed said he would cheer me up. I agreed, and before you know it by the end of the day, he had a moving van in front of the apartment and I was happily moving everything out so we could sell everything and I give it to him, despite every fiber of my being actually not wanting to do any of that."

         "You saved this," I said.

         "I'm sorry, it was all I could," she began.

         I cut her off with a long, tight hug. Sure, to the rest of the world, it looked like a ratty old pocket knife with a faded image that now more closely resembled a bear or something staring at a tree than a dog in front of a flag. But to me, it was fishing trips and camping. It was long nights in front of a bonfire learning how to roast marshmallows and make s'mores. It was a piece of my family that I thought was gone. And I had just got it back.

         After dropping Sarah off at the police station with the sheriff, we decided it would be best to just get a start that day, find a room to sleep in or if need be, sleep in the car again. Since it was an hour after noon before we ran out of energy to drive anymore, we found ourselves at a rest stop sleeping near the highway. The sounds of the trucks passing by on the interstate as we snored away at the rest stop were more comforting than it was the first time we did it. We finally made it home a couple of hours after midnight.

         I was holding the switchblade in my hands, turning it over with the memories of times gone by in my mind when I felt Crash's heavy hand land on my shoulder. "I know this was hard for you." He said. "I didn't expect you to save me this time. Let's get you inside and get you wasted. I think you've earned it."

         I smiled at Crash. "It's alright," I said. "You can have the beer, but I don't want any. I really don't need it anymore."