Life With A Werewolf

Absentminded Accusations Finale - Running Through The Dark

          There is a strange, surreal nature to having a group of people shouting your name and chasing you through the woods. My impromptu gardening, spurred on by the thought that it was somehow responsible for Crash’s predicament, sat abandoned. Gary and several others I didn’t know were shouting my name and chasing me; stumbling through the woods in the darkness.

          My heart pounded; my pulse quickened as I tried to move through the trees. I could tell I was being herded in a direction, moved closer towards buildings and town itself instead of away from our old house on the edge of the woods. Soon, I had spilled into a roadway that would eventually become main street. The hills on either side of the road had houses on them, the squat kind that felt more manufactured than purpose built. Short buildings loomed ahead in the darkness. Street lamps cast a feint glow upon the pavement holding back the harshest parts of the darkness.

          Dozens of people began to fill the road behind me, all shouting my name. Gary at the front, called out to me, saying that he was promised my death would be quick, that it would be nice. That I was going to get the nice, happy death. Whatever the hell that meant. The only sensible thing to do was to run. To ignore the darkened store fronts that had faces glaring at me out of them, and to keep running. Don’t look back. There may be something after you, after all.

          Every small town is built the same. There is one main intersection that the rest of the town exists upon. It is human nature to design them like this. No matter if it’s a third world country that’s seen more war than a Kardashian has seen shoes, the towns and villages, what little of them there are there, are still built around a single intersection.

          Ours had two story buildings on all four corners, with two of them being department style stores and apartments above, one of them being a bar of some kind with apartments above, and the other being a local restaurant. With apartments above, of course. I ran straight towards this intersection, knowing full well what was coming.

          It was a classic pincher movement. Lure your enemy into an area, close the gap around them and now they’re surrounded. This time it was dozens, if not a couple hundred people versus little old me. Without my pistol. Without Crash. Without even so much as a prayer.

          The only way out of it was straight through. If I could run faster than they expected, then perhaps I could blow right by them and escape; get far enough that I could…. well, I didn’t know. At least get away and time to make another plan.

          Ten feet. Five. My legs burned. My lungs ached. There were scratches on top of scratches from running through the woods half blind. I put everything I had into my legs and sprinted. A tangle of bodies sprinted after me, like a hoard of zombies in an AMC TV show. Someone grabbed my arm, I twisted yanking on it, someone else grabbed my waist. Down I went.

          I thrashed, I writhed as the horde of not AMC zombies grabbed my limbs and pulled them taught. I looked up, glaring at everyone, but not threatening anyone. After all, I knew who was behind it, didn’t I? If given a choice, I figure none of them would even be there then. But that was just it, they really didn’t have much of a choice. Something else was controlling them against their will.

          The mass of faces parted. I looked up as much as I could to see them clearing a path in the street. A white pickup truck backed up through the crowd. In the truck bed was an expensive lazy boy recliner of some kind, and seated upon it like it was his throne was the one and only, king of the meth-headed vampires, Mitch. His black greasy hair was combed back. He was wearing some sort of Kid Rock T-shirt with a big grin on his face.

          “There he is, there he is,” he smiled as the truck stopped a couple feet in front of me, clapping a few times in mock cheer. “My, my, my. Why, me and my fam here ran you like a wild boar, didn’t we? But here you are now, just as pretty as a picture.”

          “Lee Roy! As I live and breathe,” I smirked.

          He stepped off the truck and knelt down on top of me, snarling. “Lee Roy was my brother,” he growled.

          “I’m sorry Lee Roy,” I said. “I keep getting you two mixed up. How is your brother these days?”

          He grabbed me by the throat and pinned me down, growling in my face. I could smell the stench of his unwashed body, the sickening beef like coppery scent of blood on his breath. And of course, the sweet scent of frequent meth abuse.

          “Oh,” I gasped. “Still dead I see. Sorry about that.”

          “Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” he snarled in my ear. “See, your death is going to be a long one. A simple suicide isn’t enough to pay for what you done. I’m going to cut on you. Bleed you all night. My fam here will be dining on you while you scream. And every time I feed from them; I’ll get a small part of you. You ugly sumbitch are going to spend hours bleeding and screaming, and I’ll get to watch. You’ll get to watch me feeding on all your friends. Best of all, your werewolf pet cannot save you this time. He will die knowing that he. Could. Not. Save. You.”

          In times like this, you cannot give in to what they want. Mitch wanted me to crumble, to break down and cry. So, I had to do anything I could to not give him that. Some accomplish this by being stoic. I had never been the stoic type. “Damn Lee Roy,” I said, “I didn’t know you cared so much. You could always just send flowers, you know. Or do what every redneck does and talk shit on TikTok.”

          He rolled his eyes and stood. “Prepare him,” He shouted “Gary, you get first….”

          He never finished. As he turned, he looked towards the sky and froze. Crash in full werewolf form had leaped over the truck in a single, snarling bound, and crashed down upon the meth-head. They collapsed into a heap next to me, with the vampire pinned beneath four hundred plus pounds of snarling, angry werewolf. A single clawed hand held his throat.. Crash’s fangs glinted deadly in the thin light. Crash denies it, but he did drool on the vampire. I know what I saw.

          I hadn’t thought it possible for the vampire to go even whiter than what he was. Mitch stammered, “I-i-it’s impossible! You’re supposed to be bleeding to death! Th-the wolfsbane! I-it should be b-burning you alive! You should be a ball of whimpering pain!”

          “A werewolf’s life IS pain,” Crash snarled then raised a clawed hand up. Mitch was about to be beheaded, and I, thanks to my wonderful neighbors still holding me down, was going to get a front row seat.

          “Wait!” Shouted the vampire. “If you kill me, it will kill all these folk!” A groan of pain began to fill the crowd around us. People started grabbing their heads as if something was trying to claw its way out from inside. I had no idea what Mitch was doing or how he was doing it. “I swear it’ll be my last act on God’s green earth.”

          “You sick bastard,” Crash snarled down on him. Then he looked up. His expression changed briefly staring at the growing pain that was on everyone’s face. “Run,” he said. “You have exactly one hour to get out of my county. Then I’m coming after you. And I WILL find you.”

          Crash stood and let the vampire up, who didn’t waste any time. He raced over to the truck and pulled out some skinny teenager from the driver’s seat and jumped inside. Tires squealed. His recliner thumped forward. And with that, he was gone. As he left, the collective groans, which almost became cries of agony finally stopped. As the tail lights disappeared into the night, Crash knelt down, shivering. A pained whimper rose up in his throat. And then he collapsed in the road.

          I stood. I was numb. Unsure. Tired. All feelings I had been used to in my previous job. Feelings I was used to. That old familiar instinct kicked in. “You,” I pointed at an on-looker, “You got a car?”

          He nodded his head. “Good, get me,”

          “I have an ambulance.”

          I turned. It was the sheriff. Will wonders never cease. “Good, I need,”

          “Don’t worry,” he said, cutting me off. “I know what to do.”

          There isn’t much more to tell from that night. Sherriff kept most folks in the area. A few wandered off. Vic came down with Crash’s boss, and one at a time worked on the people there, doing whatever sort of mental trickery that vampires do. He managed to hold back the meth addiction in most of them as well as suppress their memories. Of course, a few of the more addictive types had a new chemical dependency they had to worry about. Or worry about again, whatever the case maybe there. But that was nothing new for the town or the local cops to deal with.

          The sheriff had the ambulance take us home, even had the EMTs bring Crash right back to my bed. The sun had risen and I was ready for some sleep by the time Vic came around to check on him. He looked in on Crash, the two joked as per their usual banter, though I didn’t go into the room at that time. I waited in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in my hands, watching the sunrise. Soon Vic came in, a heavy sigh in his throat, but waved down the offered coffee. I didn’t even know if vampires touched that stuff, but it never hurts to be polite.

          “You finally know what happened,” I asked.

          “You were right,” Vic said in that plain vanilla midwestern accent of his. His brownish blond hair was almost on fire in the early morning light. “It was the wolfsbane. But that son of a bitch was smart. He didn’t just plant it around the house and hoped it would get him sick. He put itching powder over it, and just about everything else in the vicinity of the woods.”

          “I don’t get it,” I said. “Itching powder? Why that?”

          “Cause,” Vic said, “Crash would scratch. With a claw. That will eventually draw blood, and get the wolfsbane pollen and other chemicals he spread around, in his system. Which will cause him to scratch more.”

          “Oh,” I said. “So the more he scratched,”

          “The more he was infecting himself,” Vic finished for me.

          “You were pretty smart too,” Vic said. “That bit with the dawn and stuff is probably what saved his life.”

          I smiled and shrugged. “Worked on oil-soaked penguins.”

          Vic arched an eyebrow and clapped me on the shoulder. Some people have no sense of humor. “I gave him a shot. He should be up and around in a day or two. And you,” he said, pointing at me. “No more fights with vampires. I mean it! If Crash hadn’t been there,”

          “I’d be dead and fed to the masses, I heard.”

          “No, it would have been worse than that. Far worse. He wanted to keep you alive for days. Weeks if possible. I’ve seen some of the plans he had from the memories of his food. Slowly bleeding to death would have been the least of your torments.”

          “That sick son of a bitch,” I grumbled.

          “Yes,” Vic replied. “No more fights with vampires.”

          “I swear,” I said, “I will not start any fights with vampires.”

          That was a couple days ago. Crash is back up and around again. Certain foods have upset his stomach, but I hope that’s just a side effect of the shot and not a permanent thing for the poor guy. But we’ll see what happens. Most of the towns people has forgotten what had happened or pretended to. They look at Crash as that weird guy who lives near the woods with those other weird guys again. No one has threatened me in a while, which is nice. I can get used to this whole having a normal, boring day thing. But Gary hasn’t looked me in the eye for a while and hasn’t come over to talk cars since. Which, honestly, is just too bad. Cause I’m not mad at him. After all, it’s like he chose to do those things.

          But we can’t change what we remember. We can’t change what had happened. All we have is the present day, and even that, for some of us, is sketchy moment to moment. We have but few pleasures in this world: whether it’s cars or music or movies or games or what have you. When someone manages to steal the pleasure out of one of those things for you, they’ve stolen a part of you. In which case, if Gary truly did lose that sense of enjoyment he gets from old station wagons, that would be just too bad. Cause that would mean, at least in some small way, that meth-headed vampire jerk did win.