Bestial (15 page)

Moving toward the house, she raised a hand to her face, touching the spot where he had kissed her. She wondered if this was the last kiss she would ever receive from him. She wanted to rush back to the shed, hold his head in her hands and kiss him passionately, feel his hands roaming over her body … at least one more time.

As they had kissed … so long before …

Passion had been absent from their marriage since the second year. Instead of a wild sex life, they had settled into something different, but just as nice in its own way. They had grown familiar with each other, their friendship deepening. They still loved each other. She had witnessed it in his eyes just a moment earlier, or at least something deceptively similar. Still, she felt this would have been a time for passion. This would have been the occasion for a real kiss. It could have compensated for so much that had gone wrong.

After securing all three locks on the kitchen door, she moved into the dining room. She shoved the heavy table against the kitchen door. If Karl was going to come after her, she decided to make it as difficult as possible.

In the hall, she struggled to shift a bureau so that it blocked the doorway. It took a few minutes, and she could hear the china tinkling inside. She also blocked the top of the stairway with two small end tables.

Finally, she locked herself in the second-story bathroom, using three locks, two of which Karl had installed. Pulling the final dead bolt into position, she exhaled.

The little window provided a view of the backyard, the stone pathway, and part of the shed. She put the toilet seat down and sat on it, watching the shadows of the trees elongate, handlike apparitions that reached for her. Grabbing a bag of potato chips, she started to eat them, compulsively tossing one after another into her mouth.

Somehow, even with all the precautions they had taken, she didn’t feel safe.

She tried to remember the last time she had truly felt safe and secure in her marriage. It must have been before the troubles, before the terrible accusations.

The first animalistic growling that she heard came from the street in front of her house. She waited for it to begin in the shed.

SEPTEMBER 17, 6:58 P.M.

C
hristian rushed toward the sound of the crying man. The shouts were tricky to pinpoint, because the empty hallways of Bio-Gen amplified and bounced them back and forth. He stopped to get a better fix on the direction.

“Help me, please! I hear you out there. Please, help me.” The cries sounded raspy, indicating that the screamer had been calling out for some time. There also seemed to be an accent to the words. Russian, Serbo-Croatian? Christian wasn’t sure, but the man’s hard consonants, his
c
’s and
k
’s, contained a harsh vibrato; his vowels seemed to be drawn out, spoken in broader tones.

Christian prayed the shouter wasn’t laying some sort of trap, luring him into a darkened room only to pounce upon him. Confidence in human nature didn’t come easily to him. And the mayhem last night hadn’t helped. For all he knew, the voice calling him belonged to one of the beast-men, alone and hungry in this maze of an office building.

But the cries seemed to be genuine. They seemed to be coming from a person in need of help.

“Oh God, are you still out there?” the voice came again, low and guttural. The accent was even more pronounced. “Is anybody out there? I am starving in here. I am dying.” In his native language, the shouter added, “
Ya ne mogu bolshe terpet’. Esus Hristos, Ya molius, shto-bi ti poslal mne kovo-nibud na pomosh. Pozhaluista. . . .
”

Christian closed his eyes, decided the voice was coming from his left, maybe only a few doors down the corridor. Turning, he raced down the hallway, his feet smacking the floor, pounding like his heartbeat. He burst into one of the rooms where the voice seemed
to originate. It was another office, vacated or abandoned, very much like Jean’s, only in pristine condition. Even the garbage cans had been emptied.

Immediately, the cries resumed. “Please, you are so close. I hear you. Please, to not let an unhappy man suffer.”

As Christian opened the next door, the shadows in the hallway began to stretch. Night was approaching. He needed a safe place to hide, and he didn’t have time to return to his elevator.

The entry opened onto a huge room—a laboratory, from the look of it. The door was heavy as it swung open. Locks and bars covered the back of it—protection taken to extremes. Three long tables were arranged into a cross formation, metal folding chairs scattered around it. At the far right side of the room sat three oak desks, each covered and surrounded by papers. One of the desks still sported a nameplate—“Jean Cowell.” Bits of glass had sprayed in every direction, covering the floor with a gleaming layer of sharp edges. A single painting of boats on a river hung on the far wall. Above the third desk, someone had printed the words
I’m sorry
in ragged letters of blood, the writing childlike, the sentiment murky and smeared.

As he entered the room, Christian saw the body, that of a man, lying behind one of the three desks, his corpse surrounded by shards of ruined beakers. Blood had pooled around the corpse, congealing throughout the day. Shoddy, amateurish, ragged wounds disfigured the man’s skin from his wrists to his elbows. The suicide disturbed Christian, as had Jean’s, yet he felt himself moving toward the dead man.

He had to be sure.

When he had almost reached the body, noting that the man’s chest wasn’t moving, Christian heard something move behind him.

“Thank God,” came that heavily accented voice, crackling at the edges, exhausted.

Spinning, Christian saw what the door had obscured from him as he had walked into the lab. The entire left side of the room appeared to be a prison. A Plexiglas barrier separated the cell from the rest of the room, ascending all the way to the ceiling and stretching from wall to wall. A door had been cut into the shielding, replete with six
heavy-duty locks, and a circle of small holes, barely large enough for a housefly to fit through, had been drilled into the Plexiglas at face level. The holes reminded Christian of the pattern cut into a telephone receiver, and he knew the holes were used to communicate with the man inside the cell.

The naked man.

Pressed against the Plexiglas, his hands pushing against the barrier, the man appeared to be in his late forties. His bearded face was a mask of terror, his blue eyes open wide, his mouth a slice of grimace. His body was muscular, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, but the man was not very tall. He had the sort of stocky shape usually associated with rugby players. His body was rather hirsute, with curly, wiry hair that covered even his shoulders.

His cell appeared to be roughly twelve by twenty feet, taking up a good fourth of the laboratory’s square footage. In the corner were a stained toilet, a couple of rolls of toilet paper, and a cheap air freshener. The bed was situated against the opposing wall, tiny, but it looked comfortable … softer than the stained, burnt, discarded mattresses Christian had been using in the warehouse. A night table and bureau were placed on either side of the bed, the night table supporting a lamp and a few books. By the lamp, there was an overstuffed chair, a television, and a small stereo unit. Several DVDs and CDs were placed on various surfaces. All in all, if you had to be imprisoned somewhere, this was the way to do it.

“Please, to help me?” the naked man asked, and Christian could see the worry lines in his face deepen. “I … I have not eaten in two days.”

“Who locked you in there?” Christian asked.

“I am … so very hungry.”

The boy moved toward the Plexiglas barrier of the cell. It reminded him of the bug jars in which he’d imprisoned praying mantises when he was a child. Something about the way you could view what had been captured from every possible angle. Even the tiny holes cut in the Plexiglas … air holes?

“First, tell me who you are,” Christian demanded.

“So hungry … They feed me by now usually, but Doctor Hodder
over there, he kill himself today. I have to stay here and watch him die. I could do nothing. Nothing.”

“Why are you in there? What did you do?”

The man’s eyes darted across the floor, as preoccupied as his mind. “He cut himself. Bleed all day. It took him so long to die.”

Okay,
Christian thought.
If he wants to talk about the dead guy, we’ll talk about the dead guy.

“Who was he? Doctor Hodder?”

“A good man. It took him so long … so long to bleed. He could not … what is the word … cope. He could not cope with the things he did when he was animal. I believe he kill his grandson.”

“What was his job here?”

“To take care of me. To watch me. Observe. I am so very hungry. Please to give me some food.”

“Why did he watch you?”

“Please … food?”

Christian looked around the room. “Okay, I’ll get you something.”

“Behind the cabinet. There is a small refrigerator with some meat in it. Please to get me the meat.”

Walking across the room, Christian felt refuse crunch beneath his feet. He located the little fridge, opened it, and recoiled at the smell.

“Dude,” he said. “I don’t think this stuff’s any good. It smells rotten.”

“It smells … delicious. Please … through the little door.”

Pulling the rancid lunch meat from the refrigerator, the boy wrinkled his nose. He stepped back to the barrier, finding a handle attached to the Plexiglas. When he pulled it, the mechanism rolled inside of it, exposing a gap in its metal machinations.

“Huh,” Christian said. “Just like the drive-in teller at the bank.”

He placed the meat within the hole and closed the little door. The naked man hurried over to the other side of the tray. After several beeps and hydraulic whirs, the other side of the machine opened up for the inmate, who greedily reached into the hole and grabbed the meat. He sniffed it, smiled at Christian, and began to tear into it with the ferocity of a wild dog.

“Oh,” he said, his mouth full of the rancid stuff. “That is so good.”

Christian turned away, revolted that the man was chewing the nasty-smelling meat with his mouth open, his eyes wide and crazed. He kept his back to the man as he ate. Not only did the scene gross him out, but the eating of this bologna seemed to be a private matter, like sex or defecation. Although with the toilet in plain view, it didn’t seem as though this guy was worried about his privacy … let alone about shitting where he ate.

“What’s your name?” Christian asked, trying to glean information through the simplest of methods: asking direct questions.

“Andrei Sokosovich,” the man said with his mouth full.

“You aren’t from around here, are you?”

“No. I am from Siberia, a small village called Kirskania.”

“Then why are you here? In America? In Cincinnati, for chrissake?”

“I was hunted.”

Christian spun around, facing the naked man, who was licking his fingers and looking at the dissipating light from the window. The meat was gone.

“What?” Christian asked.

The man seemed worried, his gaze fastened upon the window. “It is almost time again.”

“Time for what?”

The man smiled at him, a wide, wolfish grin. “Time to change.”

“You were hunted down and brought here?” Christian asked, trying to circle back to a subject he could comprehend. “From your village in Siberia, right?”

“Yes. It was a nice place to live. The cold was welcoming to me. This American heat seems ridiculous.”

“Tell me about the people who hunted you.”

“There is not much time.” The man adopted that same love-struck, mooning appearance as he looked back at the window.

“Then tell me fast.”

“My family was cursed for many generations. It has taken one of us from each … litter. I was the one who was cursed this time. We had many safeties at the house, but I was smart. I sometimes got loose. I loved the taste of sheep.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am a shape-shifter. The doctors here, when they were alive, called me a lycanthrope.”

Christian remembered black-and-white movies from his childhood, flickering across televisions in the basement where his father took him. “You mean, like, a werewolf?”

The naked man smiled. “Yes … and no. Bigger than a wolf. More like a bear and a lion all mixed up.”

“Like those things last night.”

Andrei Sokosovich sighed. “A mistake. Something happened here. Something … that will happen again. Bigger. Worse this time.”

Christian was becoming confused. Waving his hands in the air, he said, “So you inherited the curse, just like in the werewolf movies, only you’re a bigger monster.”

“I do not like this word …
monster
.”

“But you changed. Shape-shifted.”

“Yes. It was glorious. When I could roam the land freely, I was the master of all. The villagers would lock themselves away. They would bar their doors. I would wander in the moonlight, eating and drinking and fucking—”

“Whoa there! You said you had safety precautions.”

“Yes. My family was wise to our ways. We had a little prison in the basement, with chains for the feet and hands. It was uncomfortable. I did not like it.”

“But sometimes …,” Christian coaxed.

“Sometimes … oh, sometimes they would tell the villagers and allow me to run free. That is probably how the men found out about me.”

“Which men?”

“The authorities. The secret police.”

“I thought they didn’t have any more secret police? I thought they did away with them during glasnost.”

The man smiled again, and his teeth glinted. They looked slightly larger to Christian, but he couldn’t be sure of it.

“Oh, you are young. So young and so naïve. Mother Russia may
have hidden her watchdogs well, but hidden watchdogs are still dogs. They still need to sniff around. They still need to bite sometimes.”

“But they didn’t bite like you could, did they Andrei?”

“No,” the man said. “They merely chased me. Reported me. I think they called other men. The men who are now dead in this building. They paid me money to come here. The old Frenchman.” He took a deep breath. “I can smell their blood. Even the old … how you say it … ah, the old homosexual. He is four or five rooms away, yes?”