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Adventures In Living With The Mythical |
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A military veteran is adopted by a werewolf and brought into his pack. Insanity ensues. About "Life With A Werewolf" Life with a werewolf is a dramatic blog. As such the characters in this blog are not real but maybe loosely based on real people. The situations represented are not real but maybe loosely based on real things that have happened in my life. There are a multitude of ways to view life, this is simply one of the ways I have chosen to view mine. Updated Every Friday unless I can't or don't want to. If this is your first time reading this...start here: https://www.writing.com/main/books/entry_id/1040400-Welcome-To-The-Pack The first year is available as a compilation on Amazon Kindle: https://a.co/d/gBLLL7E Audio and print versions will be available in the future. My book, "Dreamers of The Sea" is available now on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0uz7xa3 |
| Strange things have been happening in the garage. Last week I went to change my oil in my Topaz and the wrench I needed wasn’t there. Instead, there was this strange, tiny ceramic wrench in its place on the wall, on a small ceramic hook that somehow held its own in the ancient pegboard. Other tools had been slowly replaced as well: a hammer. A saw. Nails had become giant and ceramic. As if something was changing them or swapping them out for something else. Something that might have had red beady eyes hidden behind a ceramic pair of sunglasses. When I saw this, a cold chill ran down my spine as I remembered the previous year. The spring where I nearly lost my mind and freedom to those tiny pointy hatted terrorists. I made my way, with a steady, yet dignified…. yeah, okay so I ran shouting Crash’s name the entire way. Through the kitchen, past the bathroom, on towards his bedroom. “Crash!” I shouted bolting inside, slamming the door behind me. He was laying atop the covers, still in werewolf form. His tail hung limply between his legs, hiding his dignity, (thank God) since he had taken it upon himself to sleep naked. Of course, he probably hadn’t counted on a half-scared roommate barging in and interrupting his rest. “What,” he groaned. His first set of eyelids were partially peeled back, revealing a second set beneath that he was staring at me through. “That’s kind of creepy,” I muttered. “Well, I’m a man-eating monster, what do you expect? And what do you want?” He grumbled. “And don’t even mention me being naked. This is your fault for barging in.” Well, he had me there, still I looked down and blushed. “Okay,” I grumbled. “Sorry. Maybe I over-reacted a bit.” “What, did the neighbors get a gnome,” he asked. “Our tools are becoming ceramic.” He sighed. “They’re exchanging tools. Cause they’re building something. And that means we have an infestation in our garage.” The garage is a detached three car garage that sits next to the property. There is quite a bit of stuff stored within it in the rafters and in the corners. Like most people’s garages, we tend to store things we hardly used within them. Christmas and Halloween decorations, for example. Those strange tools and appliances that only seem to do one thing, and that being something you don’t even need or care about. Strange relics from the past that you don’t like enough to keep in your bedroom, but don’t dislike enough to throw out. Since we had five adults in the house our pile had grown to being quite big. Large enough in fact that it was plausible for a creature as small as a lawn gnome to hide, building their little projects here and there, and then…I don’t know. Sell snow cones? Launch cat turds at the old troll house and blame it on us? I had no idea what they were making, but I knew it could be nothing good. “I’ll call, Larry,” Crash mumbled, and began fumbling for his cell phone on his night stand. I nodded and walked out, heading back towards the garage. Look, I’ll admit to being freaked out by lawn gnomes now. Thanks to Kheid and his unholy brood of ceramic psychopaths, I don’t ever want to see another stone hat or vegetable again. However, at that moment in time, I looked at them like I looked at wasps. Let’s say you have a massive wasp nest on your property. You have one or two options. You can either stare at it and hope they don’t sting you, or you can get poison or pest control or something and remove them. I know, I know. I can hear a thousand pest control professionals out there shouting at me “don’t do it! Don’t do it!” But, of course, I did it. I backed Old Betsy out of the garage first, figuring she could be out of the line of fire. Then slowly began to pull items back out of the massive stuff pile. I worked through the Christmas decorations, past the Halloween stuff and over the old weed eater that Crash swears he’s going to get working someday. (No, you’re not! Throw it out!) There was a blue tarp hidden in the corner. Beneath which I could see the tiniest ceramic foot sticking out. “No, you don’t you little,” I shouted, then threw the canvas back. Something hard hit me in the head, knocking back onto the floor. When I awoke, Crash was standing over me, now in human form, holding back a laugh. “Are you alright,” he half-chuckled. “I’d rather have squirrels,” I groaned, then grabbed an offered hand to stand up. I had a black eye from…something. And my face they painted with rosy cheeks, eye liner, and red lipstick. Crash said when he arrived they were putting a pointed hat on my head, but he managed to scare them off. “I came out here to help,” he said. “Larry told me he doesn’t do garages. But if we flush them out in the open, then he’s happy to have another buffet.” I pointed at the canvas in the corner. “They’re working on something back there. I think they intend to take out Larry with it.” Crash nodded, then walked over and pulled the canvas back. Something struck him in the face, sending him flying backwards, and landing on his backside. I winced in sympathetic pain as he sat up, shaking his head. “Did they build,” he began, then climbed to his feet, and looked again. Shaking his head. “They built a trebuchet and a ballista.” He said, in amazement. I scratched my head. “The giant roman crossbow thing?" I got a dumbfounded look from Crash. “Yes, the giant roman crossbow thing. And the giant slingshot thing.” “I guess to take out the giant flying lizard thing,” I groaned as I stood. “What are we going to do.” Crash raised all the doors to the garage. “Get rid of them,” he said, and began slowly moving things outside. We started with the Christmas decorations, then a few things we’ve meant to throw out. As we slid the first few items around to get room to move the medieval siege weapons, something hard and round hit my shoulder. “Ow!” I cried, then looked down. “Crash,” I said, “It’s one of your sockets.” “Incoming!” He shouted, and more sockets and wrenches began to fly downward towards us. There was a table by the wall that had more junk on it. Crash cleared that table, and set it up as a shield for us to hide behind. The table rang out with a thwack, thwack! as larger sockets and wrenches crashed into it. “Keep them busy!” Crash shouted. Here’s where those snow ball throwing skills really came into play. I had the strange image of kids outside their houses having a snowball fight behind snow forts in the thick of winter. If things weren’t so deadly, it might have even been fun. But as I began to advance my attack, they somehow managed to get ahold of the screw drivers, and started throwing them. For my effort, I grabbed as many tools as I could and began to throw them back. There was a lot of clattering, an occasional cry, but nothing else, really. Crash was banging around in the back and soon returned wielding a shovel with a metal handle, wielding it like a barbarian would wield a battle axe. But we weren’t the only ones with plans. As Crash came running back from the far wall of the garage, the ballista went off, and a 2x4 struck Crash in the chest. He made an “oof” sound, then fell backwards, falling to the floor. The 2x4 clattered behind him. What did I do? Well, I certainly didn’t cry out his name in shock and horror and stopped what I was doing to check on him. No. That gets people killed and really only works in the movies, where they have that magic “war buddy’s hit so they can’t hit us now” spell. Since I didn’t have that “war buddy got his so they can’t hit us right now” magic, I kept throwing, trying to keep their heads down as I worked my way slowly back towards him, till I could grab his shirt collar and pull him back towards the table, dodging missiles as I went. Some would call that heroic, I guess. I say it was just luck and a calculated move on my part, counting on their bad aim. For any human being they’d have to go to the hospital right then. But for Crash? “Those bastards,” he growled, standing up. Racing over towards the siege weapons, he kicked them over on their sides, then stomped on them, snapping boards and ropes. “I’ll get you!” He shouted, then started banging the roof with the shovel. Ceramic feet clattered and scraped against rafter boards. CLANG! CLANG! The shovel rang out as Crash beat it against the roof. I was essentially doing the same thing with my 2x4, banging upwards in as many varied places as I could. My efforts were to try and break them up so they couldn’t regroup and counter-attack. We ran through the garage like mad men trying to catch a squirrel, banging, shouting, occasionally dodging a socket wrench or a screw driver. Finally, Kheid, showed his face. He snarled threats at us in gnomish, that although I understood, can’t really print here. Let’s just say he told us to go do something disgusting with feces and sexual relations. He stared out from the ceiling at us, glaring one last time before he ran off through the door. We chased them through the yard, as the gnomes shouted, fleeing in shouts of terror as they ran towards the woods. Kheid was in the back. He stopped at the entrance to the woods, and took off his glasses, glaring his beady eyes at me. “This means war,” he growled at me in gnomish, then disappeared into the woods. Me and Crash stood at the entrance of those woods, huffing and puffing, Crash with his hands on his knees, me with my hands over my head. We stood there for a minute as our heartrates slowly fell down to reasonable levels. “Great,” I huffed. “Now we got a mess to clean up.” “No,” Crash said, “You got a mess to clean up. I got to get to sleep. I work in the evening, you know.” I nodded, not bothering to argue. “Are you going to catch Kheid and his brood,” I asked. Crash shrugged. “I’m waiting till I go in before I tell Larry.” “Why,” I asked. “Well,” Crash said with a smirk, “he’s done it to me. So, payback. Plus, I think a dragon should occasionally have to work for their food. And third, cause I don’t want to fill out a report. That’s going to take hours. Right now, I want to sleep.” “Fare enough,” I said, walking towards the garage as he went inside. Clean up took far longer than I wanted it too, but at least it’s done now. Topaz’s oil change can wait till tomorrow. Zack, Sean and Kris will just have to wait before they get their turn in the garage bay. Besides, I’m not exactly going to do nighttime car maintenance. I think you understand why. |
| Things have been a little less hectic lately. That’s something I’m not quite used to anymore, but it is nice to drop back into a routine that doesn’t involve a troll trying to kill you or zombies taking you to a Halloween festival of their own. I get a chance to slow down and enjoy the finer things in life. And there’s really nothing finer than sitting at the kitchen table by the window and watching the sunrise. I know some people would prefer Caviar and an ivory-white beach on some completely nude French island somewhere, but me? I'll take this sunrise. When I was in the service and could run, running into the sunrise was one of the few things that I enjoyed about that job. Running into the sun in formation with other people doesn't sound like a lot of fun. However, there was a lot of freedom in that. The wind in your lungs and on your face, the feeling of the pavement beneath your shoes, and of course, the stunning view that you always got every morning with every run. Some days, that was the only enjoyable part of the job. Now, running is pain. After a few steps, it shoots up from the heel to my hip and flares up there for a while before settling into its nice home in my back. Heck, long walks along ivory-white beaches in French nudist colonies are pain these days. As much fun as casual nudity is, it would be ruined by that aching, searing reminder that I’m injured. So, the closest I can get to recapturing that feeling of morning freedom is pretty much the kitchen window, a good cup of coffee, and the sunrise. The window doesn't face Crash and his path back toward the house. So, a lot of times I don’t see him when he gets home. That morning he was already in human form when he got through the door. It was rare but not unheard of. There are times when being in his larger, hairier form makes his job more difficult. Like when more diplomacy is required than growls, threats, bites, and howls. As he trudged inside and began making his evening cup of old man decaf, he let out the most God-awful burps I’ve ever smelled. When I say this burp stank, I mean it. The stench wafted from his side of the kitchen towards mine, peeling paint from the walls, curling tile, staining anything white a sickening brownish-green color. Birds fell from the sky at one whiff of this. Plants withered and died. The president nearly called a national emergency because of it until he forgot what he was doing and called for an ice cream cone instead. The power of the stench and the revenge of whatever meal the werewolf had eaten the previous night was immediate and apparent. "Oh, God!" I cried, trying to fan the stench away from my nose. "That is just awful!" Crash made a face, and said “bleh, that tasted a lot better last night.” Then he looked at me with another of his pearls of unique werewolf wisdom that will only ever apply to him. “Remember, if you bite it, you have to taste it.” That had me thinking about Crash’s little nuggets of wisdom. On the rare occasion, he has a sour stomach, we'll get the odd "must have been someone I ate" of course. But there are also always others. Those sayings and phrases that really could only apply to werewolves themselves and their unique culture. Things like: “Werewolves can’t get electrocuted. We just get new hairstyles”, or “never eat someone you need or like”. Crash has a whole collection of these things. I honestly don’t know where he gets them from. One would have to think that somewhere out there is a “Poor Richard the werewolf version” or something that every werewolf mother reads to their little pups at night before putting them to bed. However, someone by now would have seen a book like this. Wouldn’t someone have come up with something like that sooner or later? I'd collect them all in a book of my own if I wasn't afraid of Crash getting in trouble for it, or him getting angry at me over it. So, here are a few that we've collected over these past few days. One's Crash is particularly proud of, (like that 'if you bite it, you have to taste it' one) and ones he didn't even recall saying at the time. They're in no particular order here. “If it tastes terrible in the night, it will taste even worse in the morning.” This was said one morning after getting terrible indigestion from whatever or whomever he ate the night before. I didn’t ask, not because I was afraid of the consequences, but because I was afraid he’d tell me. Which, in a way, I guess means I was afraid of the consequences. Hey, I’ve never claimed to make sense. It took me the longest time to understand one of his lesser-known favorite sayings ‘makes as much sense as marking a skunk.' Werewolves have been known to use scent markings for different things, such as claiming ownership. Since a skunk already smells, and uses that smell as a defense weapon, putting your scent on it to claim ownership makes as much sense as well, as marking a skunk. The scent will be lost and you’d just end up stinking. “Blends in like a skunk in a trash can at a sewage plant”. He's used this when talking about something he doesn't like going with something else. Like if a lead singer of a band he's not fond of plays with another band he doesn't like. Or when the farmers relative to our town decide it's the day to spread manure on their fields, and we're throwing out rotten food or something the smell will, well, blend in I guess. Or when someone wears a shirt that is just weird and disgusting, and they're not that pretty of a person to start with. I've heard it used in both scenarios. Crash isn't forthcoming on where it came from, though he says he knows the original story. He ain’t talking yet. Ah well, maybe one day.” “Don’t go getting your kibbles and bits stirred up.” Kibbles and bits are a euphemism for a male werewolf's uhmm…ahem….family toolbox shall we say. And this one is in general telling someone not to get too worked up over someone (if you catch my drift), though I've heard him use it as well in the same sense we used to use "Who pissed in your cornflakes?" “They’re all kibble and no bits” You'd think we'd hear "they're all bark and no bite" more, but Crash prefers this one to the latter. Knowing what ‘kibbles and bits’ are, you can get some idea of how this one came into being. This one is usually talking about someone who is all swagger, no swing. All bark, no bite. Someone who talks a big game, but doesn't have the gumption to back up the words. It intrigues me to think that out there somewhere is an entire werewolf family, composed of individuals who use these phrases back and forth all the time. Friends who are werewolves tease each other with these phrases and sayings. A werewolf girlfriend telling her boyfriend 'you're all kibble, no bits' on their date after their first kiss when he's a tad reluctant to go much further, either because of nerves or because of uncertainty. Those are all the ones I’ve collected so far. This may seem a bit frivolous, but collected sayings and phrases are part of a culture's flavor. It's the salt and pepper of a people. These few collected nuggets of wisdom give us a tiny glimpse of a subculture that is werewolves. Perhaps one day we'll get more. I know I wouldn't mind seeing a version of Poor Richard with Crash. Maybe 'Poor Crash's collections of life lessons and nuggets of wisdom' or something? I don't know. I’ll think of a different title sooner or later. Right now, I’ve got to get out to the garage. It’s one of Crash’s rare days off. We’re working on his Cadillac today, as well as possibly trying to clear out a strange infestation. Apparently, some of the tools that we regularly keep around in there have taken on a more ceramic quality to them. Instead of a regular hammer, we now have one that resembles one used by a certain type of statue. Could Kheid be back? I don't know. Let's hope not. |
| Well, January was the frozen month at home, so we sort of bunkered down while we waited the weather out. In truth, I mostly bugged Crash about how he remembered things happening and compared them with notes of my own. Even Sarah, for her credit, was willing to throw in a bone here and there, so to speak, so we could piece together the story as much as we could for it to be as accurate as possible. As I was gathering the information for that, I also started a little side project. I’ve collected a few questions for Crash to answer, in an AMA style thing. Now, this is something I’ve never done before. I’ve never done an AMA, much less on this blog. I’m still getting used to Crash reading it and seeing this thing, to be entirely honest. It’s like writing notes about your teacher while your teacher is reading them over your shoulder. Only in this case, my teacher is a werewolf, I already know that, and technically have been telling the entire world what’s been happening. Doing this is especially strange since he’s currently in my room, “getting his steps in” on his smart watch. Nothing more strange than watching a werewolf walk in place while answering questions. Were you always a wolf (born)? Oh, yeah. Hmm, maybe this could be if he ever thought of himself as some animal? Yes. We’re all animals. Did you ever play sports? Which ones? Tried to. You know there’s some places that tell you you’re too big to play football? I played baseball. I’m not very good at playing baseball. But I can throw a bat a long ways. Do you have any artistic talent or enjoy any of the arts (music, painting, dance, etc.)? I do. In all weird things I find interesting stuff interesting. Even messed around with finger print portraits for a while, using different finer print paints to do a portrait. Did it for an art class. Even did some paintings with my claws too, get some interesting effects. Though I’ll never share how I got those effects…or did I just share that? What do you do to have fun? I do music. Took piano classes. Picked up odd instruments. Got invited to tour with a bluegrass band playing the washboard, cause I played the washboard at a party. Still don’t know why I didn’t take them up on it. Do you have favorite books or movies? Lots of them. I like werewolf literature, even though a lot of it is horrible. I don’t get into werewolf romance stuff, a lot of that is horrible. But I like the classics, like Stephen Kings “Silver Bullet”, “Hunter’s Moon,” and an older one titled “The Hairy One’s Shall Dance.” I also like HP Lovecraft. Do you believe that UFO's are real? Well, yeah. Anything you can’t identify as flying, is an Unidentified Flying Object. (Jason: I think they mean aliens.) (Crash: That’s no way to talk about them. They’re just misplaced.) The supernatural in the blog takes on a more natural presence despite the associated dangers of the uninitiated (Thinking specifically of the garden gnomes here). Would Crash say that normal people just ignore the presence of this underlayer of life, or are there active efforts to keep it secret? A combination of both. Because some of them have beliefs they shouldn’t be seen by humans for different cultural reasons. Others its just easier for day-to-day life to just not be noticed as other than a normal human. It’s been taken as a general rule as you don’t make it super publicly known. Do werewolves date? If so, do they care in what form (human or transformed)? Yes we date. Whether if its in our transformed form it generally depends on the relationship and who we’re dating. And forgive me if I have missed this if explained in the blog, but how did Crash get his nickname? Or is that his real name? It’s a nickname, and part of that depends on which time. In grade school I totaled a bicycle and a BMW. And walked away from it. Kept it through high school. Then in college I totalled my buddies S-10 car surfing and walked away from that. So, after that I just accepted it. |
| 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." |
| I was pinned against the cheap wall of a local diner in a tiny town in the middle of Arkansas. The dawn was far off, and thanks to the encroaching darkness that pressed in at the edges of my vision, it felt as if it would never arrive. As I hung, grasping at the hands that were choking the life out of me, Sarah stood and turned towards a vision of someone else that stood in the doorway. In hindsight, it resembled the meth-headed vampire that was trying to kill me. However, at the time it could have been King Kong Bundy for all I knew and could see. My life was being drained literally by a vampire with rotted-out fangs and red glowing eyes. When Leeroy’s eyes began to glow was about when everything faded to black. If you will humor me but a moment, picture in your mind a door. A draw bridge of a door. This draw bridge is sturdy and strong and protects the castle of your mind that holds everything you are. Your identity, your memories, every lever and pully that your spirit uses to run and operate who you are. Now picture a massive, fierce beast of a creature outside of this draw bridge. It has pale white skin, is rail thin, and has massive claws. It exists in a dark grey cloud of some sort of smoke that slowly begins to drift over your castle. That demon that towers over the draw bridge has its claws on it and is pulling downward. The chains holding the drawbridge wrench, squeal, and fail, collapsing into the darkness that was the ground below. Normally, when this happens, you’re done for. The demon, in this case, the vampire, pretty much has control of the keep. Every lever, every pully. Every memory and feeling even your every thought is at its command. Everything you are is no longer under your control. Not everyone has the image of a draw bridge. For some it’s a car, others it’s a house. For me, it’s a castle. I suppose it goes back to my military training, and love of history. I won’t turn this into a history lecture, but medieval castles at the end of that age were some of the best-built defensive fortresses around. Even the stairs were designed to thwart invaders and made it nearly impossible to penetrate. I guess that’s why my mind picked that to represent the interior battle that was being waged. I needed security and defense. So my mind picked the best defense it could conjure on short notice. When the invading demon that was the meth-headed vampire in my mind wrenched down the drawbridge of my mind, instead of stepping inside and enslaving its sole resident, me, it met a massive wall of muscle, fur, and fangs. What happened afterward I only have glimpses of in my memory. A shove with my feet to break a hold. A pistol in my hands, and rapid gunfire in a diner, far faster and more accurate than I could ever have been capable. Two angry monsters in a rearview mirror give chase as I and Sarah race away in Crash’s Buick, leaving small town main street Arkansas behind us. When I came to, I was sitting in a Walmart parking lot. The car parked to take up about six spaces, parked longways in one of the slanted rows. The blue and gray façade of the store resembled a bit too much of the mental castle, so I looked away, and stared down for a moment at the dashboard. Sarah sat beside me, her eyes wide with terror, her hair looked as if it had been in some sort of wind storm. “Are you back? Jason! Are you here?” I took two deep breaths and nodded. A headache was coming on. But at least I was alive. And free. Kind of. “What the hell was that?” I asked, a note of slight panic in my voice. Sarah exhaled loudly as she looked toward the sky. “Thank God!” “I’m serious, what the hell was that?” I asked. A note of panic crept into my voice. Okay, so my voice squeaked like a scared twelve-year-old girl. But it was my first time being possessed by anything, so sue me. Well, the second time. There was that entire thing with the lawn gnome. But that all happened when I was asleep, so I don't think that count. “Drive.” She said. “Where?” I asked. “Where are we going?” “Anywhere.” She said, waving her arm at the road. “Just get us as far away from Arkansas as possible. Go northeast towards Chicago. I hear there are plenty of werewolves and things there. We’ll be safe.” “As fun as this random road trip sounds, I need a bit more information than 'drive',” I said, stepping out of the car. “Jesus, are you stupid?! I just barely escaped those monsters. They nearly ate you till your pet werewolf took over.” She was near hysterics, waving her arms as she spoke. Behind her eyes sat months of hell that she went through, a pain that was only communicated in wide-eyed terror and furtive glances as she spoke, as if she was a caged animal with a predator circling outside. “Look,” I growled, leaning on the door of the convertible. “Let’s play pretend. Let’s pretend I have no clue as to what the hell is going on. Would you please, for the love of God, start from the beginning and explain it to me!” Then it happened. The glare that I had been used to getting all of those months ago, back when we were unhappily married and still pretending that we had a thing for each other. Back when it was just the two of us in that apartment complex, existing but despising each other. “Why do you never trust me.” “Look, I trust you, but I don’t know what the hell I’m running from. I don’t know what the hell just happened. I prefer to know what I’m fleeing before I just start running.” I growled. She laughed, then said, “You don’t know a meth-headed vampire when you see one?” We had been together for almost ten minutes now by my calculations, and already things were approaching a boiling point. I clenched my fists hard, turned to her, and said, “I know about the damn vamps. I also know that something was trying to crawl around in my brain before something else kicked it out, so if you know what the hell is going on, I would love a little understanding, some fucking courtesy, and an explanation!” That last bit was said louder than I’d have liked. I didn’t want to fight. I wasn’t trying to make her feel bad. She did just escape a horror that I couldn’t begin to understand. Anyone in such a circumstance might have started crying. Any number of guys would have just punched me to avoid the tears, preferring a physical fight they could win to an emotional one they can’t. Sarah did none of those things. She just looked down at her hands for a moment, rubbed them together, and said, “Crash kicked them out. It may have been his dying act. He took control of you, fought them off, and got us out.” I swallowed hard. “Dying act? Nothing can kill him! He’s a werewolf!” She looked down at her hands for a moment then rubbed them together. “Yes, something can. Silver is poisonous to them after all. Especially when it’s in bullet form.” She swallowed. Took a couple of deep breaths, then began speaking again. “They’ve been planning it for months. They didn’t know I was starting to gain control back. The meth clouds their thinking, it weakens their abilities a bit. So, the higher they got, the crazier their plan became, but the more control I had over myself. They were selling meth and other drugs, buying up cheap silver trinkets online, melting it down into bullets. Building an arsenal.” “What for?” I already knew the answer before she said it. For war. She explained their plan, in shaky, horrified words. They had one crazy idea. The meth just gave them the will to do something that most others in their position would have been too terrified or too smart to try. Take out the local protections. Leave the regular civilian stuff. Take control of them. There were no vampires in the area other than them. No other real mythicals besides the resident sheriff. No one else to help the poor unsuspecting citizens if the sheriff were to be captured and killed. The people would become their cattle, for only God knows how long. “And no one can stop them.” She said, more horrified. “Nothing. Not even the meth can stop them now.” “Almost no one,” I growled, clenching the butt of my pistol tighter. In the past, especially with my training, I’ve learned that if you have a choice between anger or panic, always choose anger. Anger can be tamed; honed. Turned into an attack dog to be used on those who would destroy you. As long as you know how to keep that dog on a leash, anger can be a very effective weapon. If you lose control of that leash, your attack dog will turn on you, and destroy your very life. Crash, the werewolf who had saved my life, the subsequent creature that had adopted me and done everything he could to turn me into a respectable member of society instead of letting me rot and die like the rest of the world said to do needed help. He needed rescuing. I could panic. I could cry for my friend, or be afraid for him. But none of those things would save him. Sarah looked at me as if I was crazy. “What the hell can you do?” “Look,” I said as I ejected the magazine from my weapon. It was empty. Nothing in the chamber either. Crash had used every round I had in his effort to save me. I slipped the magazine into my back pocket as I looked back at Sarah and spoke. “I’m a crappy boyfriend. I’m a worse husband. I know. But there’s one thing I was actually decent at doing when we were together.” “What’s that?” She asked, in a tone that said she already knew the answer. “A soldier. Come on. We gotta stock up on supplies first.” I turned towards the Walmart and began walking towards it. “Supplies?!” She cried. “For what?” “For going to war.” |
| 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. |
| It took us several hours to get back through Kentucky. We were halfway through Missouri when we finally decided to call it a day and rest for a few hours. Crash found a small parking spot on the far end of a rest stop and parked his old Caddy, allowing us to sleep a while. It was cold, hadn’t started snowing yet, and getting colder. I would have loved to have a hotel room, even if I had to share the bed. But none of the locations either of us called would have a room for another three hours or more. So, we slept, bundled in our coats with the top up. Thankfully the seats in these older vehicles tend to lay almost completely flat. These came from an earlier time when prospective motorists didn’t have access to Airbnb or luxury accommodations and many times had nothing more than roadside motels. Those could be iffy at best. They could either be new construction, with the fancy “massage beds” (which was nothing more really than a small Earthquake simulator that would shake you into oblivion) or they could be roach-infested run-down shacks, complete with moldy carpeting, leaky roofs, and bed bugs large enough to ask if you have change for the snack machine. Since both of these for some people, especially those who spent a good part of their day on the road, didn’t seem all that appealing, a large portion of Americans then would just sleep in their cars at various rest stops. Vehicles were designed for this, with fold-down seats which allowed one to do so in comfort. And despite the arctic winds getting colder and colder, Crash and I were able to do the same, and doze for a good two or three hours with nothing more bothersome than a little cold wind leaking through the rough patched top of the Caddy. It was a few hours later that we veered, and instead of ending up somewhere in Texas, as I had expected, we found ourselves in Northern Arkansas, in a community with a population small enough to make our tiny hometown feel like a metropolis in comparison. Typical American small towns are based around two separate highways. One allows you to pass through the town with relative ease. You may have to take things down to a pace that a slug would consider slow, but you need not even stop. Mainstreet will ride alongside or intersect with the highway, and that is where the vast majority of the community does their living, bill paying, and dying in. The small town that we stopped in was no different. Small “historical” style buildings resided around a courthouse that looked as if it was built out of a catalog that advertised buildings that looked historic. Each small business in the area resided in such styles of buildings. Only the gas stations and a Dollar General was different: they were newer pre-fab metal-style buildings with strange exteriors that always reminded me of the interior of corrugated cardboard. We stopped at a local truck stop diner that sold grease with a side of warm smiles and a friendly “Hey y’all”. Sitting in an ancient booth surrounded by wood paneling, feeling as though Aunt B was about to show up any minute with Andy Griffith and Opie, we ordered food and coffee, then sat and waited. Crash and I were talked out, exhausted by the road, and enjoying the peace only a quiet meal with a good friend could provide. As the caffeine began to work its magic a sheriff’s car arrived in front and out stepped a man that I thought for a moment might even dwarf Crash’s stature. They seemed to be the same build and height, with the sheriff being several shades older than Crash in appearance. His face held the ancient shape of worn leather, beaten and creased by years of rough weather. White hair sprouted out from around his cowboy hat. He had the dark skin of an unknown ancestry and wild blue eyes that pierced into me. I could tell right away, that the sheriff was also a werewolf. He sat down at our table and held his hand out to me first with as warm of a grin as he could muster. “I’m Nathaniel Collier. Just call me Sheriff Nate.” I shook his hand and gave him my name, not even attempting to give him the same warm smile he gave me. “I apologize for my sour demeanor,” I said. “It’s alright. I’d be a little sour myself if I was told I had to come get my ex-wife for she killed herself,” he said with a grin. I yawned. “I thought it was vampires that were trying to kill her. Or did I have it wrong?” Sheriff Nate’s jaw dropped open. For a moment I was tempted to tell him he could catch flies that way but wisely kept my mouth shut and instead looked down into my coffee. He turned to Crash and asked, “How much does he know?” “Jason knows a lot,” Crash replied. “Not everything yet, but he knows a lot. Much of it he learned on his own.” “Well, I’ll let you boys grab a bite real quick,” Nate said, with a serious look, then turned towards me. “After dinner, Crash can drop you off at the motel and get y’all a couple of rooms while me and him go poke around a bit. Won’t take us too long.” “Sheriff,” I said, “You’re not putting me in a cage like some damsel in distress while you go off and play the hero. I’m in this.” “You have no idea what you’re dealing with here,” Nate growled. “Me and Crash have got this. It would be better for all involved if you stayed out of it until you’re called.” “Nate,” Crash said. “He’s alright. He can handle himself.” He rolled his eyes and sighed. “Alright. He can come. But if he pukes or freaks out, I’m leaving y’all there at the crime scene.” Our food arrived a couple of minutes after that. We ate about as quickly as we could and in less than five minutes me and crash both had empty plates and coffee mugs in front of us. Standing up almost as one, we both said, “alright, let’s go.” I’m not sure Sheriff Nate was prepared for that. He blinked a couple of times, then shrugged. “Well, I guess that proves it.” He said to himself, as we paid our bill and left. As we were about to get into our cars, I grabbed the sheriff’s shoulder and asked. “Proves what?” “Huh?” He looked at me as if I caught him off guard. “You said ‘I guess that proves it.’” “Oh,” he replied then pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “Heard you were military. Combat vet or something. Didn’t believe it until I saw you eat in there. Only two types eat like you just did. Werewolves and veterans. Makes sense why Crash has so much faith in you. Though, if you screw up, you die.” I shrugged. “Well, we’re all gonna die anyway.” Then walked over to the passenger side of Crash’s Caddy. Sheriff Nate was glaring at me. “What? I never said it was gonna be today.” I climbed into the car, then looked at Crash. “Your werewolf friend has no sense of humor.” He shrugged. “He says life is precious. It’s why he became a cop, after all.” Life is precious. As if I didn’t already know that. A lot of people whose risked life or limb for their occupation can get jaded. It can seem like a giant game of Whack-o-mole. The moment you press down a problem in one area, three more in three different places seem to pop up. It can feel like an accident. Lightning struck a puddle somewhere and then before you know it the algae was learning how to walk. I’ve never subscribed to that theory. Yes, life can be insane at times. A near trainwreck of cosmic insanity, a joke played out by God, the stars, the universe, or whatever other entity you can think of, playing out pranks on us actors born onto a stage whose only job is to die in some spectacularly entertaining fashion. But if life can be as dark and psychotic as some people claim, then the inverse, the light has to be just as bright, if not brighter. The prevailing theory in entertainment about such things right now is that you can’t have good without Evil. That you need the negative to know what the positive is like. I’ve never personally subscribed to that. My theory is a bit different. You can’t have evil without good. For things to be dark, bitterly dark, you have to have a light source. That brightness out there in the ether that illuminates everything. For something to exist in the shadow, to pull life down into it for the sole sake of devaluing it and destroying it then the light must exist somewhere. The light has to be there, otherwise, we don’t have life. I know it’s crazy. However, if you think about it, it just may not be as crazy as you first thought. Cause after all, for there to be rebellion against good (which, let’s be honest, is all that evil really is) there has to be good first. Good has to exist. Without it, you don’t have evil. And with that empty vacuum of good and evil, you get nothing. Which is a far scarier thing to have than good or evil. True evil does exist. I know it, I’ve seen it. Raised my right hand and have made my oath to give to my best ability to fight it. Was injured, and taken out of that fight, true. But I did fight it. Me and anyone who has served in a capacity, whether it's military, police, firefighter, what have you, have seen it. And for there to be evil, for it to exist and give those individuals a job in fighting against it, there must be a good out there for that evil to rebel against. All of this was on my mind on the short trek out to the crime scene. We drove through wooded hills and houses out onto a gravel road that lead into a valley in the literal middle of nowhere. A trailer home draped in blood. It was in this trailer home that my brief story took a bit of a darker turn. |
| Nothing is ever normal with Crash. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned time and again. A simple “Christmas party” and a “work function” for most people might be a few drinks in the conference room with some white elephant gift-giving thrown in on the side. Maybe Sally or Jimmy or whoever brings in cookies or candies made in that special way that’s been in their family for generations. You know the ones. They look nasty, taste weird, and everyone eats one because no one has the heart to tell them that their family's secret recipe should probably be kept a secret. This is what I expected when I was invited to this. “It’s a bit of a work thing” is the way it was sold to me. He was dressed in fairly nice clothing, for Crash. He wore a pair of Jeans that looked brand new, a nice button-up that looked only twenty percent flannel, and even a pair of snakeskin boots on. Had his chin strap beard trimmed up nice as well and even had a small mustache grown in to fit it. I wore a clean shirt and pants that I had picked up for the office job I held for almost a week. But I skipped the tie, still don’t know why. Maybe out of some sort of late protest against the job? Maybe. But more likely because in my heart, I know I’m a slob and we were already a bit late. The reason for my tagging along was born of one burning question: What the hell does a werewolf do as a job?! I mean, is he a cop like in that cheesy horror movie, “Werewolf Cop”? Is he a supernatural trashman? Does he transport stolen goods and drugs for a vampire mafia working off some life debt to them so he could gain their trust and overthrow the bloodsuckers in a dangerous coup that could endanger all of life as we know it? If you can’t tell already, sometimes it’s a bit of a burden to have an overactive imagination. In the service, I’d just write all of these ideas down and throw them away when done. It kept my brain busy and wasn’t important to work so I didn’t want to get too involved in creating them. But putting them on paper at least gave my imagination some outlet. Sort of like putting your dog on a run instead of chaining them to one spot. By now, however, my imagination had run more than wild. It had broken the chain, leaped the fence, gone feral, and was now stalking and killing house pets, so to speak. Scenarios of all kinds popped into my mind: A secret werewolf congress. No, a secret werewolf society, that secretly ran the entire world through their werewolf mind control powers! It was at the point of actually creating a werewolf language and handshake for the secret werewolf society, (The Loup-Garou Congress, or LGC as it’s known to the inner circle), that I figured it was time I finally came clean to Crash and just outright asked him what the heck he does for a living. His solution? “Well, there’s this sort of a Christmas function. Why don’t you just come along to that? You can be my plus one.” So, of course, I said yes. I saw he was dressed up fancy. I dressed in what niceties that I had, and joined him as we climbed into his old Caddy and raced off, with the top down of course, and raced off away from town. I wasn’t keeping track of the turns we were taking. I just noticed that we kept going deeper and deeper into the wooded area. Past the point, that weekend hunters would find comfortable, but not quite encroaching on the sasquatch hunters out and about trying to film their episode where they “finally bag big foot” and it turns out, again, to be a random weirdo in a hairy suit playing a prank on them. Trees pushed inwards closer and closer as the highway became a road then became a rutted trail that pushed through the underbrush. We pressed through one last clearing and entered, what I can only describe as a carnival of sorts. There were a few booths set up scattered around, and even a band that played live music near the edge of the woods. Some of the band members were hairier than others, though I’m not certain that all of them were werewolves. Cotton candy and frozen “meat treats” were being handed out from one of the booths near the edge. There was a beer booth as well, though since Crash was driving, he couldn’t partake in that. However, since I was not driving, I couldn’t partake in it either, with the alcohol content of the “beer” being so high it was on the edge of just being carbonated liquor, and I didn’t want to be inebriated around this crowd. In what way could I describe the ones at the carnival? Well, in truth, I can’t. There were wolves, Crash among them, who had begun his change almost immediately upon arrival. A couple of, well I’m not sure what to call them, so right now they’ll go by “were cats”, though that explanation feels a bit lame. Sasquatch could have been there, however, I’m not certain I would have recognized him in the middle of all of the creatures I saw. There were a few vampires there as well. They could be recognized as the regular-looking humans that nearly froze my blood when they glanced my way. Those tended to keep to themselves, however barely even saying hi to me. I’m a little glad I was off the menu, so to speak. How to explain Crash’s co-workers? Well, to put it bluntly, I can’t. I gawked for probably a good ten minutes at the entire scene before me. I was still in the car when I saw Crash next. He was in full morph form, fur and claws hanging from his sleeves, a full-blown muzzle pressed out from his face, and of course the black coarse hair everywhere. “Now, Jason,” Crash said, crouching down to look at me. “You can’t talk about anyone you meet today in that blog of yours.” My heart stopped. Then sunk as it started again. “Blog?” I said, trying to play dumb. “Yes, blog.” He arched an eyebrow. “What, you didn’t think I knew you started that?” As dumb as I tried to play things, he only laughed in that gruff way that werewolves seem to chuckle in and said, “we’ll talk about it later.” So yeah, I can’t discuss or mention his co-workers. How many there are, what they look like, and whether they’re even fully human or partially something else. They may come into this blog later, and if they do it will be of their own volition to be mentioned, not mine. Cause when you have what I can only describe as a “werebear” telling you to keep certain details out, with Crash nodding in fear as well as agreement next to you in full werewolf form, you listen. The carnival itself wasn’t large. There were a few booths pressed into the rim of trees at the far end of the clearing, with parking on the other end. The stage was centered towards everything else, giving people plenty of space for dancing near the front of it as well as providing background noise for the booths and games near the back. The night raced on, though I barely noticed it. The other booths mostly were typical booths with games and prizes. Some of the games were easy (ring toss, etc), and others relied on senses that I simply did not have and couldn’t play. For example, one of the booths was called “sniffer”, which was essentially a scent trail game. They blindfolded you, spun you around several times, then you had to get down and sniff out a scent trail they made using rabbit meat. This trail dragged through the grass on the ground in a strange pattern and ended up in one of the several holes at the end of the booth. The way Crash explained it to me they used other things to scramble the scent trail: chicken, beef, pork, humans dragged their feet through it, and you had to sort through all of the background noise to find the right hole that had the rabbit meat in time. Find the meat, and win the prize. I couldn’t even play of course, but he won it easy finding the rabbit meat in record time. We played some games, watched the band play more than danced, and even got to eat some regular burgers and fries while Crash quickly inhaled several frozen “meat treats”, essentially half-cooked meat, frozen on a popsicle stick. The night simply melted away as we enjoyed ourselves and I got to meet several nice co-workers and other individuals Crash meets regularly on his job. The one thing I was asked to mention is that there is no, nor has there ever been a skinwalker employed by the county, or state for that matter. If I had ever met one, it wouldn’t be as funny or cute as I made “Larry” out to be, to say the very least and it would possibly end up being one of the more horrific times in my life. My werewolf escort only disappeared once in the middle of everything. I was hanging out with his boss, who was going through a humorous situation he’d been through, which again, I can’t detail here. When I looked around and noticed Crash was gone. I suppose my blood should have run cold at that thought, but you’d be amazed at how quickly you can get used to a situation you’re thrown into. I was already used to the carnival, though I’d only been there a couple of hours. Rides, games, and of course Christmas-themed things, all with Krampus instead of Santa, blended into the background as we talked. Crash came back as we were talking about the myth of Krampus and their version of events for things. Did you know that Krampus is Santa’s were form? It’s why it's so crazy. And Krampus isn’t just meant to take the naughty kids, but bring treats to the good little were boys and girls. I’m sure you can guess where the naughty kids go. That myth is as dark and entertaining as the Santa myth is jolly. As the dawn started to approach, Crash and I made it back to his car. The following conversation I’m told I’m allowed to put here. After some discussion about the band and their taste in music, I finally got into the question that had been burning on my mind since we began this insanity: What is his job?! We were driving back home in that good time daze you get after having a blast for so long when I decided to finally pop the question. The vehicle pressed down the trail back through sasquatch country, on the road out toward our home. Sunlight had begun to dance its way through the leaves leaving occasional patches of red and gold to pierce through the darkness. “Well, you could say I’m a detective of sorts.” Crash replied. “I work with the police, but not for them. We’re like the other side of that coin in the whole enforcement.” I did a literal head tilt. “You’re a werewolf cop? Like the movie?” He snickered. His muzzle was starting to press back inwards towards his face, though he still had the hair. “No. Well, kinda. If, say, a hulderfolk troll goes crazy and tries to kill a normal human, I’m called in to deal with it. If a vampire goes rogue and starts killing the people in their town instead of just light feeding, I’m called in.” “So, you deal with the situations that the regular police just can’t handle,” I said, as everything finally clicked in place for me. “Right,” he smiled, then tipped one of his pointed ears at me. The ear had slid back down somewhat to its normal position but still looked more “Hollywood Wolfman” than human. Everything made sense. Everything. When his shift started, he went on patrol, stalking the towns and neighborhoods and checking on things. He investigated certain crime scenes that cops would view as being just too vicious for it to be a regular human. “So, if there’s like evidence on the scene of something or something?” I asked. As we started passing through the thinner woods, the sun was now in full-rising mode. There was no more evidence that I was even with a werewolf. This time, he was standard Crash. Rugged features, chinstrap beard. “Well, it goes,” he shrugged, “I investigate things, or if the cops stumble on something, they contact the ‘special unit’ as they call us, and we’re pulled in.” “Look,” Crash said, turning to look at me for a moment. We were nearly back in civilization at this point, though we hadn’t reached town yet. “We’ll do a sit-down-like thing after everything is said and done. But I heard some things tonight at our little get-together that I don’t like.” “What things?” “You remember Sarah, don’t you?” How could I not remember Sarah? Coming home from a deployment to an empty house devoid of literally everything kind of burns a person into your memory, the way landing face first on a hot stove would. “Yeah,” I grumbled. “Well, she’s in trouble,” Crash replied. “Good,” I growled, looking out towards the road. “No, I mean, deadly trouble.” He spoke. I sighed. Well, it was probably closer to a growl. “Let me get my gun,” I grumbled as he pulled up to the house. It wasn’t even Christmas, and already things were looking crazy. Sarah. That blond-haired beauty who could quote UCMJ and military regulations like some preachers quoted scripture. That should have been clue one that she was trouble, however hard-headed dolts like me never actually ever seem to learn, especially when they blink their pretty blue eyes at you in that way that causes all of the blood running your intelligence to flee your brain for a more nether region of your body. Some people are always in trouble. From the moment they enter your life to the moment they exit everything they do or touch just ends up being more trouble for you than what it’s worth. Still, either by loyalty, stupidity, or some sense of insanity you feel a responsibility to help them. She was responsible for a lot of the pain I had felt. A lot of the pain I had gone through over the past several years. And now, I was about to try and help her. “You aren’t going to ask what sort of trouble she’s in,” Crash asked. “She left me for twin meth heads. I can guess what the trouble is.” I growled. “No, not meth-heads. Meth-headed vampires. Twin meth-head vampires. And for her things just got a whole lot worse.” |
| Last week I’ve had a much-needed break. Spending time online with friends playing a drinking game without actually drinking through it was something I needed in my life at that moment in time. Drinking is something I’ve been trying to cut back on. When you have an addictive personality like I do, certain things must always be kept in check. When I go overboard on drinking, my internal clock goes out of whack. I grow irritable. I occasionally may forget to bathe, and food becomes whatever cheap, fried, greasy thing I can get my hands on. That’s completely different from video games, where my internal clock goes out of whack, and I sleep in more often. I grow irritable. I occasionally may forget to bathe and food becomes whatever cheap, fried, greasy and fast thing I can get my hands on. See? Completely different. All jokes aside, they are entirely two different things. And people who don’t have my type of condition can handle both quite easy. After all, they can manage their time wisely. Zack is an avid gamer. He bathes regularly, has never missed a day of work or called in sick because of it (that I know of) and keeps himself in general good shape. Me on the other hand? I go overboard. It’s easy for eleven AM to become one AM if I get caught up in the wrong game, wasting the literal day away as I try to fight my way through hordes of zombies and things. However, the online drinking game was fun. Got to know a couple of acquaintances a bit better, and was able to get my butt kicked in a drinking game that might have been more fun if I had been drinking, but I still avoided drinking. I don’t want to go down that dark road ever again. Other changes are coming as well. It seems that Crash is having some sort of holiday bash at work. I’ve been invited to attend. So, I may FINALLY get to know what it is exactly that he does for a living. The term “on call werewolf’ just doesn’t seem to fit all that well. Besides, it’s a strange concept. After all, why would a county need a werewolf on call? What exactly would be the reason for that? Those are the only things going on this holiday season it seems. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. I will enjoy every minute of hanging out with friends, exchanging gifts and taking things slow. The lawn gnomes are more spring and summer creatures it seems. I’ve not seen hide nor hair of them and thank GOD. At least I can drive my Topaz around right now without fear of the brakes randomly failing or a fuel line being cut. A slow, careful, and somewhat relaxing holiday season is just what the doctor ordered; I think. A few cheap gifts for friends. A few cheap gifts from friends. Nothing strange or nasty about any of it. Now that I’ve said that though, watch something crazy happen. If I don’t post anything in the next couple of weeks, well, you know what happened, something crazy. Sad thing is, I don’t know if I should knock on wood now, or later. Is it bad luck to say nothing strange is happening or to point out that something strange will happen. If something weird does happen, did I just curse myself because I made the lame joke that something strange would happen? Or was me pointing out in my lame joke that something strange is going to happen now ONLY happens because I didn’t make the joke strong enough? How does any of these weird curse things work anyway? Someone have a clue? |
| Getting to know all of the mythical creatures that are alive and somewhat well in and around your area is a daunting task. One I personally am not really all that well equipped to handle. I’m a bit anti-social. Discussions is a task left to others when they’re strangers and sometimes even when they’re acquaintances. I’ll follow along and nod when appropriate, but I tend to not offer much in the way of the discussion itself if I don’t know them that well. I must admit that I can be a bit judgmental at times as well, deeming others to be of less intelligence than they actually are – especially if they catch me on a bad day. That is just a very wordy way of saying I quietly judge my neighbors. In that, I hardly think I’m alone. I know it’s not the most honorable of practices, and the judgements I proclaim upon others usually ends up being incorrect in some way or another. However, occasionally, people have raced to prove me right. We used to have a resident here by the name of, well we’ll just call him Charles after the guy on MASH. He had a large house, a beautiful wife, an expensive and gorgeous car. His features were chiseled, he enjoyed working out, and never in all of my many days of knowing this guy have I ever even seen a hair misplaced on his head. His blue eyes held the cold look of vapid vanity, one that always seemed to be looking down on you as you spoke to him. If you were lucky enough to engage him in conversation, he would try to use words in the discussion that were purposefully too big to match what he was talking about. I’ve never seen someone use a four-syllable word to talk about getting diarrhea from a bad taco before I met this guy. You’d think that hearing about his expensive Mercedes Sports car, his obviously overpriced haircut, the expensive manor in which he kept literally everything including his yard that I hated the guy. However, you’d be wrong. Cause Charles had just about as many braincells in his skull as a Ken doll. And nearly every discussion with him always ended up in his own humiliation, something that he never seemed to catch on to. I caught him outside of the liquor store one day, for example. He had a scowl on his face. A look that was either extreme concentration or constipation. I wasn’t sure which one. He stood next to his sports car, staring at the front door of the store. I pulled up next to one of the two parking spaces he took up with his car in my econobox special, got out and stopped in front of him for a moment. Pausing to stare at the door with him, me in puzzlement, him in that extreme constipated concentration. “What are we looking at?” I asked after a few moments. “I swear, how can they call themselves a liquor store if they do not have the appropriate prefunctions of such an establishment,” He grumbled. See what I mean? Who the hell talks like that! Like he wants to sound more intelligent than he actually is. I tilted my head in confusion, like Crash has done so many times at my jokes. “I’m sorry,” I asked. “Oh, it’s my wife, Nancy,” he said, “I got to get a bottle of champaigne. You see, me and her were attempting a romantic rendezvous last night, and I apparently wasn’t up to the task, so to speak. So, I’m trying to apologize.” All I had in my head then was that image of smiling Bob and his sad neighbors from the commercials years ago. I didn’t want to know anything about his “romantic rendezvous’” or anything else! Yet here we were discussing his lack of ability to perform in the bedroom. Who else in the world would talk like him? He’d tell you that he has “Asperger’s”, but even people with that condition understand that no one else wants to hear about their diarrhea or impotence problems! That conversation ended with me giving him what I hoped was a comforting pat on the shoulder, then entering the establishment to replace the bottle of liquor I’d borrowed from Crash. It was interactions like that one that made me think Charles was just weird. That is, until I finally saw his tail. Now, my understanding of things is still somewhat dim, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t happen to get all of this correct. However, the more I’m exposed to Crash’s insane life and werewolf tendencies, the less traditional tricks of the mythical work on me. So, where as you might see Charles as just a quirky, self-absorbed vapid neighbor, I was finally seeing Charles for what he really was – a troll. He was working out in the yard as he does, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a smile as he mowed the lawn. He does this because, according to him, ‘you kill two birds with one stone. Lawn gets mowed. I get tan.’ Of course, I told him “you also get itchy,” which lead to a lengthy discussion on what really makes someone itchy. According to him, it’s something to do with pheromones. A ‘chemical’ he’s ensured he’s not susceptible to. When I told him that explanation was nuttier than a squirrel turd, he looked at me as if I had the largest wart on my nose. “Squirrel turds aren’t nutty.” He stated, “what are you talking about?” A few days later, me and Crash was discussing our strange neighbor, and his tail, the lawn mowing incident, the works. “You see,” Crash held his coffee cup out in front of himself while he was pontificating, something he does from time to time, especially when he’s about to say something profound, or what he thinks is profound. “Charles is what’s known as a hulderfolk.” I head tilted at him. “A holder what?” He chuckled, in that gruff tone he gets. Crash was close to changing into his ‘night uniform’ as he calls it, to go on patrol or scent mark trees or scare small children. To do whatever it is that he does. “It’s a type of troll. They’re the nice ones. They look almost like people. Sometimes gorgeous people. Though their tails give it away.” He then went on to explain to me that they’re actually quite dangerous if you’re not careful around them. “Don’t get them angry,” he warned me. “They’re not smart. They try to act smart, but they’re not that smart. And, they have no problems attacking or killing humans they think are getting in their way or making fun of them.” Now, I know what you’re thinking. And you’d be wrong. This time, it wasn’t my fault! Seriously, I learned my lesson with the lawn gnomes. Crash said stay out of the way, I stayed out of the way. I didn’t talk to Charles anymore other than to say hello in passing, and had never even seen his wife Nancy in weeks. I didn’t want anything to do with them or their peculiar brand of crazy. So, literally you cannot blame me for Charles banging on our door at four in the morning, growling and muttering. Trolls have their own language. What I heard was literal gibberish. Words and entire sentences without consonants. Others without vowels. A whole heap of banging, and snarling. Crash was gone, doing whatever it is he does for his job as a werewolf. Zack was asleep, and he sleeps like the dead at times. I didn’t think the other two upstairs had the ability to back me up on this, and I wasn’t about to ask. I didn’t bother calling the cops, either. What would you say in a situation like that? Hello, officer I’d like to report a troll banging on my door? I exited the house by the side door, pistol in my hand, lowered at the low ready. It’s a position held with your firearm that allows you to destroy a target quickly, without having to draw it out of your holster. This target being one very large, angry and snarling troll. He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts, with a tail snaking down one leg. It resembled something like a cow’s tail. His eyes seemed to glow with rage. He turned to me, glaring, his perfectly shaped nostrils flaring. I raised my weapon once, then lowered the pistol back down for a moment. My finger was near the trigger but not resting on it. Resting your finger on the trigger after all is a great way to cause incidents. “Buddy, right now you got two options. A, you leave my property now, and don’t try this shit again, or B, you’re dead before you hit the ground.” We stood there, glaring at each other for a few seconds, my pistol held at the ready, my finger close to the trigger, his arms down by his sides, grasping at the air as he heaved in anger. “It was you, wasn’t it.” He snarled, taking a step towards me. “You destroyed it. You ruined it. You, filthy, human.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about. One more step, and I’ll,” He grinned at me, then took another step. From that point onward, it was automatic. In the service I had a tendency to aim for legs first if I was shooting to wound. A shoulder wound has too much potential to be fatal. A bullet hits a bone and goes in a direction that destroys lungs, heart, liver, all manner of things. A leg wound bleeds like hell, but they have a greater chance to live through it, usually provided they get a tourniquet in time. Like I said, I liked Charles. So, I was willing to sacrifice a belt to the cause. The shot rang out as a loud pop. I expected lights in neighbors’ windows to turn to light up, people to look out. Cops to be called. None of that actually happened. The bullet penetrated his leg, I could see a small puff of blood in the street light. But he glared at me, and began sprinting towards me. I fired four more rounds, this time into his chest, before he reached me, slamming me into the ground and knocking the pistol away. “Now,” He glared down at me. “I make you pay.” “For what?!” I groaned. “I didn’t do nothing.” “You insulted my wife. Hurt my wife. You attack her. I attack you.” He reached up with a large fist to hammer down on me. My training told me to make space, to bridge out so I could get room to maneuver my way out of this deadly situation, or perhaps even reverse it. But before I could do any of that, a dark furred blur slammed into the side of him. One moment I was about to be pounded into hamburger, the next Crash, in wolf form was snarling over the troll, a clawed hand/paw thing holding his throat. He growled a low guttural growl, one that sent chills down my spine. Charles blinked a couple of times. “But he attack Nancy. Violent, filthy human. He attempted to foul her with his hands, his,” The low guttural growl cut him off in mid-sentence. “Your wife is fine.” I heard Crash say. “But she was she’s,” the troll began. Crash cut him off. “She’s having an affair.” Crash growled. “Who she’s cheating with, you’ll have to get it out of her. You come here again; you forfeit your life. Do you understand?” The troll nodded. I honestly thought I saw tears of fear in his eyes. I walked over to my pistol and picked it up, then went back inside. I hadn’t seen or heard from the troll again. Nor did I see Crash again for another few hours. Over the next few days, things got strange around the troll house. Words were exchanged. Threats made between each other, not many of which made much sense to us regular folk. Crash came in, human form that morning. He stood in the kitchen wearing a torn-up pair of jeans and held a ceramic mug that read This Is My Human Costume”. I made a couple jokes about how you know your old because you drink decaf before bed. He smiled politely, then went finished his coffee and went to sleep. The troll incident bothered me for a while. I had no idea why he fingered me as the adulterer or rapist or whatever. Crash still hasn’t given any indication as to why he’d think that. Was she cheating on him with a human? There has to be more humans than us in this area, right? Sure, the town is a little strange. I get that. More than once I’ve seen centaurs and minotaurs. Of course, there’s the werewolf and the vampire we met, who technically doesn’t live in this town but I still count. Now the trolls, both of whom seemed to have moved on. I don’t look too hard at the red stains around the house. The police aren’t asking too many questions either, and I’m not trying to do their job for them. In life sometimes there are no clear resolutions to things. I may never see Charles again. If I do, we will not speak of that night or the bullets I put in him. We may do little more than nod at each other in passing. I’d love to know more about his wife, Nancy, and who she was seeing on the side. To know if they got divorced, if they separated, forgave each other, or if she’s planted out back in the rose bushes. Perhaps maybe even get to know the person dumb enough to break up the marriage of a troll. After all, that long tail is a dead giveaway, and tricks or not you’re going to notice that thing sooner or later, especially when it’s rubbing your inner thigh. However, right now, once again I am forced to be content with wondering what happened and what might have been. To let my imagination run wild and try to answer these questions for me. Crash has never been one to talk about a “case” as he calls it. Whatever that means. Maybe he’s a werewolf Columbo? Solving crimes in a raincoat at night. Although a werewolf in a raincoat would give me images less of Columbo and more of some sort of cursed flasher. The Columbo thing is a fun image and one that gives me an idea for a character. I might write it down or let it go. I don’t know yet. We’ll see. |
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