Bestial (19 page)

Its struggles with the van attracted two more of the monsters, which promptly began gnawing at the chicken wire on the other window, pounding against the side of the truck with their fists, pulling and plucking at the wire.

Meanwhile, the first monster pulled the protective wire free with its teeth, tossing it away with a shake of its head. It landed several
yards off, alerting three more passing creatures. These newcomers loped toward the van, began scratching at the sides, tearing at the metal in an attempt to get at the tender morsels inside.

Chesya said, “I’m sorry. It was me, wasn’t it?”

Rick nodded. “You were unconscious. You couldn’t help it.”

The noise was growing to a terrifying, incomprehensible level. The truck began to shake as more of the beasts tried to get inside.

“Damn.”

“Does your head hurt?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a goose egg here.” She touched the spot beneath the bruise and winced.

Rick looked out the back windows. The outside was completely covered with monsters. They shoved their faces forward, snapped at the glass. The chicken wire on the second window came loose and clattered to the ground.

He moaned. There were so many of them. Dozens, maybe up to a hundred of them circling the van, taking turns scratching or biting at the windows.

Two of the things started fighting, and Rick saw one of the beasts bite another just over the eyes. The flesh and hair peeled away from its forehead like the rind on a nectarine. Blood spattered the windows, and the creature turned and ran away.

“How many are there?” she asked, sitting up.

She closed her eyes, saw shooting stars because of the pain in her head.

“I don’t know. A lot. A hell of a lot,” he said.

“Can they get in?”

“I don’t think so.” His voice conveyed his assurance.

Chesya pushed herself back farther from the windows that were teeming with seething faces, teeth gnashing and spit flying in ropes. She counted nine pairs of eyes, but the monsters kept shoving each other aside. One would replace another, then snap at a third, then one would be trampled as two more leaped at the glass, battering it with their hard skulls.

It sounded like there were many more around the van, some even on top of it.

“Stay still,” Rick said, allowing Chesya to lean back against his chest. He put an arm around her. “They’ll grow bored or tired soon, maybe go after easier game.”

He could smell her sweat. Her head rested against his throat, and he had to swallow.

“They’ll go away eventually,” he said.

Outside the van, something inhuman, something mechanical groaned.

“You promise?” she asked.

He couldn’t answer her.

The only reply she got was the incessant noise of the monsters clawing and biting and scratching and growling … determination made visceral.

SEPTEMBER 17, 10:40 P.M.

B
lood covered Cathy’s legs from knees to ankles, a solid sheen of dark rust. Her blouse was spattered with Karl’s bodily fluids, and her hands were beginning to grow cold and sticky. Her kneecaps were sore where she had fallen on the tiles, and she knew bruises were forming beneath her jeans. The baseball bat, forgotten, had rolled over to the bathtub, leaving streaks of crimson across the tiled floor.

Cathy grasped the bat in both hands and lifted herself to her feet. She nearly dropped to the floor again. Her legs had fallen asleep while she had sat cross-legged across from Karl, and her skin was suddenly punctured by thousands of pinpricks. Walking it off, she left bloody footprints on the floor.

Karl was dead. Her partnered, lawyer husband, her provider, was gone. He lay naked on his back, his smashed face turned to the side, oozing brain tissue and blood. One of his eyes stared at Cathy from across the room.

“Oh, Karl,” she said, looking down at his demolished head. “You bastard, you did everything for me. You made all the decisions. Even the bad ones. Now what do I do? What on earth do I do?”

Karl didn’t reply.

So Cathy began performing the role she’d perfected over the years, of offering comfort and security. She made things right. She made things pretty. She accomplished.

Her time leading committees and planning for parties would come in handy after all. Her wasted life was suddenly not so worthless. She knew how to do some things—how to plan, maintain, make sure everything was just right.

As long as everything didn’t include her own family relations …

“I’m sorry, Karl,” she said, bending down and lifting his broken body in her arms. He seemed very light, as though something was missing from within him. She pulled the corpse from the bathroom to their bed. She nearly laid him on the ruffled bedspread, but changed her mind at the last minute. At the far end of the bedroom was a love seat situated next to her morning table, where she applied her face every day. Grunting, she wrestled him down on the love seat.

“See,” she said. “You’ll be comfortable here. You always loved the cushions on the love seat. Besides, I’ll have to sleep somewhere, and I can’t do that if the bed is covered in your blood. I loved you, Karl, but I’m not sleeping next to your body. Sorry. Not after this. Not after what you did …”

Shaking her head, she flushed the thoughts from her mind. She couldn’t think of that now. Not now. Not yet. She wasn’t ready.

Hurrying back to the bathroom, she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and retrieved two rolls of paper towels and cleanser from the closet. The cleanser was supposed to be gentle, so it shouldn’t harm the expensive imported tiles; Cathy didn’t know for sure because the maid had done all the cleaning. She scrubbed the blood from the floor, changing the water in her bucket five times so it wouldn’t streak. She put her face just next to the tiling, squinting in the moonlight to be sure she got it all cleaned. As terrible as it appeared now, it would seem far worse in the daylight tomorrow.

She emptied another bucket of pink water into the toilet. Flushing it, she grimaced.

Cathy continued speaking to her husband, as though he could hear her. “You always told me how to handle things, Karl. You took control, and I always took your advice. Now look where that got us. Our son has run away. . . . God knows where he is now. Turns out you were telling me lies, weren’t you, Karl? You made me believe you, just as you always did.”

Outside, something howled in the night. Now and then, a scream pierced the darkness. She wondered who was being killed … or what.

“I guess I should have listened to Christian, should have believed
him, but you were so sincere. You’d never lied to me before—or had you? Karl, was everything a lie? My entire life, your lawyer friends who came over? Was this all some kind of play I’ve been living, and was this beautiful house the stage? I … I don’t understand.”

Looking out the window across the hallway, she saw nothing unusual about the street. The magnificent homes rested within their manicured lawns, the landscaping diverse and beautifully maintained by an army of gardeners. Each house on the street cost more than 1.5 million dollars, each one a work of architectural genius. The iron gates that surrounded each property matched, maintaining the illusion of continuity. She wondered if the security guards were still watching over the outside gates, or if they, too, had changed into monsters and prowled the bushes.

The gated community had been created to keep out the riffraff, the undesirables. It hadn’t stopped the devil from invading Indian Hill. It hadn’t even given him pause.

Folding her arms across her chest, she nodded approvingly at the clean floor across the room. It sparkled.

“You could eat off that floor,” she said. “Karl, you could eat off of it. And if our son was here …”

The thought of Christian stopped her, and she placed her hands over her mouth.
I will not cry,
she thought, clenching her eyes shut.
I will not. I will not. I will not cry. He’s gone—they both are. And I have to learn to go on without them
.

She removed her clothes and stepped into the shower. The water was cold, and she had to fumble a bit in the dark for soap and the washrag. The blood on her legs was sticky, but she scrubbed until she could no longer feel its tackiness.

Shivering with the chill, she stepped out of the shower and toweled herself dry.

Planning … doing … accomplishing …

She cleaned the bathroom, paying special care to the baseball bat that had saved her. By the time she wrapped the extension cord around the handle of the vacuum, she decided to make a small fire downstairs. She was cold for some reason.

Plan … do … accomplish … move on to the next task. …

Walking back up the stairs, she tried to plan what should be done next. What needed cleaning? What detail had she forgotten in the moonlight?

Her eyes kept returning to Karl. His head was leaking onto the armrest of the love seat. She would have to eventually take care of it. After she moved Karl’s body.

But move it where?

Were funeral homes still operating amidst the chaos? Surely, if she offered enough money, someone would bury him. Funerals, however, were huge events, and they required a lot of planning. She began to draft her blueprints for Karl’s wake and funeral ceremony. Only a few friends. Flowers were perfectly fine, as there were probably not many charities left to which mourners could donate.

She wondered if funerals were even necessary in this new world. Could she just bury him beneath the rosebushes? Wasn’t there a law against that? What did it matter now? She could certainly save herself a lot of trouble by burying him in the backyard. It had nothing to do with expense and everything to do with convenience.

Something howled.

Loudly.

Close.

Scurrying to a window, she looked at the backyard. Three of the creatures were snuffling around the shed. A fourth stepped from the shadows and looked right up at her. It seemed to grin; then it dashed for the door.

The door that Karl had destroyed when he had come for her.

What to do?
Plan … execute … accomplish …

The bedroom and bathroom doors were wide open; there was nothing with which she could barricade herself from the creatures. Karl had seen to that.

Something growled inside the house. Toenails clicked on the hardwood floors below her.

The attic! It came to her suddenly that there was only one way into it and one way out: a ladder that she could pull up after herself. They wouldn’t be able to reach her; she was certain of it.

Rushing into the hallway, she grabbed the iron bar hidden behind
a display case for Hummel figurines. It fit into the panel in the ceiling, and she twisted it. The panel slid back, and a ladder dropped from the hole. She flung the iron rod across the hallway, then turned back to grab it, just in case those things were smart enough to figure out that it was the key to the attic.

One of the monsters howled, a low, sad sound. They were close, on the stairs.

She wriggled into the hole that led to the attic and turned, pulled the ladder up. She slammed the panel back into place and dropped the iron pole on the floor.

As the hatch closed, the beasts leaped after it, stretching on their hind legs to reach the panel. Cathy shoved some heavy boxes over the entrance.

Below her, the beasts gnashed their teeth and howled their rage.

SEPTEMBER 17, 10:30 P.M.

C
hristian closed the journal, rubbing at his weary eyes. Despite the furious sounds of the beast-men outside the building, he had been able to get through a good thirty pages of Jean’s scientific diary. The book was enlightening, but reading it sapped his energy. He hadn’t slept in so long; he was growing very tired. He yawned, stood, and stretched.

Andrei was still in the shape of a monster, pacing in his Plexiglas prison. After his initial bout of rage and violence, he had calmed a bit, walking back and forth in the little room as though anxious or bored. Christian couldn’t tell. He watched the beast-man for a while, marveling at the musculature beneath the skin, how broad the chest had grown, how strong the arms and legs. The beast’s neck was a template of muscle, thick intertwining ropes to hold its massive head high. The jaws never seemed to stop dripping saliva from between the enlarged fangs.

“The better to eat you with, my dear,” Christian muttered, remembering the line from a half-forgotten fairy tale. It seemed appropriate again.

Sitting back in his chair, facing the creature in its plastic cage, Christian picked up the book again and resumed reading.

What he had perused so far was fascinating, even if he couldn’t understand all of it. Most of the writing was accessible, and the boy had always been a good reader, above average for his age. Still, some of the scientific terminology went beyond anything he’d assimilated during his classes in high school. Plus the journal was evidently for Jean’s private use, and he employed abbreviations that would be
familiar only to him. It made reading slow and tedious, even if the subject matter was engrossing.

The writing in the journal explained how Jean had been obsessed with the werewolf mythology of Eastern Europe since he was a teenager. He had been taken to Auschwitz by train and forced to work with the other Jews in the death camp, watching in horror as Nazis fed the weakest prisoners to the gas chambers. Jean adapted his behaviors, showing his captors respectfulness, acquiescence, submissiveness. As humiliated as he had been, spurned by his own people for his alleged bootlicking, Jean had survived the camp, which was more than most of the prisoners could say.

Once, while serving the officers drinks on a silver platter, he’d overheard them talking about “the werewolves,” a covert group of dissidents, anarchists, spreading bombs and sabotage like a band of vengeful Johnny Appleseeds. Witnesses claimed that animals were the only things near train stations just before explosions ripped trains from their tracks, and spies had reported the saboteurs could actually turn into wolves to better undermine the Third Reich.

Although he had not completely believed the story, his imagination had been sparked, and a lifetime of research had begun. He spent his nights wishing he could turn into an animal, burrow under the fences and run away from that horrible place. He wanted to be a creature that could run fast enough to elude the searchlights and the tracking dogs, fast enough to dodge the bullets. Perhaps such a drastic metamorphosis could cure him of his growing love for young men, something he found distasteful but irresistible. If only he could change … While no such transformation ever occurred, the fanciful notion had been planted in his head.