The Craving (34 page)

All the cabs were full; it was hopeless, but wait, an older woman was getting into a cab down the block toward the Hyatt. Stephen sprinted over there, holding a twenty-dollar bill out, and said to the woman, “Here.”

The woman was confused.

“Here, I’m buying your cab from you.”

“What?” the woman said.

“My wife’s in the hospital, she’s dying,” Stephen said.

The confused woman took the twenty and Stephen got into the cab.

“Follow that cab,” Stephen said to the driver, feeling ridiculous as soon as the words left his mouth.

The foreign driver said, “What?”

Stephen didn’t know if the guy didn’t hear or didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. The light at Park had turned, and Simon’s cab was moving.

“That cab, up there!” Stephen was shouting. “Follow it now!” He held up some bills. “I’ll give you a fifty-dollar tip. Fifty dollars!”

“Why you want—”

“Just do it, fifty dollars! I’ll
give you fifty dollars.”

The cabbie hit the gas and said, “What cab? I don’t see no—”

“That one, right there, the one heading toward Fifth!”

“You’re crazy.”

“Here.” Stephen gave the driver two twenties and a ten. “Here’s your fifty, now just don’t lose that cab, okay? Follow it, just keep following it.”

The cab continued downtown on Fifth, then headed back to the East Side.

“I don’t know where he’s going,” the driver said.

“It doesn’t matter where he’s going, I’m paying you,” Stephen said.

“Crazy, you’re crazy,” the driver muttered.

Simon’s cab got on the FDR, heading downtown, prompting the driver to whine, “He’s taking FDR.”

Stephen ignored this.

Traffic was bumper-to-bumper. Stephen’s cab was a few cars behind Simon’s but well within view. Then Simon did something weird. He was leaning his head out the window and seemed to be gasping for breath, with his tongue even exposed, hanging from his mouth. Wow, when Alison said Simon thought he was a werewolf, she wasn’t kidding. He definitely seemed like he thought he was a dog or some kind of animal. Stephen was actually glad to see that Simon was such a psychological mess because it would make Alison even more likely to want to have some fast rebound sex. After all, compared to her screwed-up, train-wreck husband, Stephen would come off as the greatest guy on the planet.

Finally the traffic broke and Simon’s cab got onto the Manhattan Bridge.

“He’s going to Brooklyn,” the driver complained, as if Brooklyn were the other side of the world.

Stephen wasn’t
surprised that Simon was going to Brooklyn. Simon had the beard, the identity crisis; maybe he was becoming some kind of hipster. Maybe he was shacking up with a wannabe werewolf chick in Williamsburg, Stephen thought, and almost started laughing out loud.

But Simon wasn’t going to Williamsburg. He took the first exit off the bridge and then into an industrial area in the Navy Yard.

“Jesus Christ, this is crazy,” the driver whined.

Okay, so maybe Simon’s hipster werewolf broad had an apartment down here. The neighborhood didn’t exactly look residential, but nowadays you never knew, there could be some renovated old building with condos in it.

Simon’s cab turned down a deserted-looking street near the river, then slowed at the end of the block.

“Pull over right here, right here,” Stephen said to the driver. Their cab had just turned the corner, and he wanted to stay a safe distance from Simon.

Stephen watched Simon get out of the cab and head toward a building. He seemed to yank on the door for a few seconds and then entered. Stephen paid the fare and then rushed along the sidewalk. He saw on the building above the entrance:

HARTMAN BREWERY

This didn’t look like a freakin’ condo. Then Stephen noticed that the new-looking padlock on the door had been busted. Was that what Simon had been doing before he entered the building? Busting the lock? No, it was impossible, the lock must’ve already been broken.

Stephen considered waiting outside to see if Simon exited with some chick but decided it was too risky. There could be another exit
to the building and he could lose the tail. So he waited a few minutes until he was sure he didn’t hear anything, then opened the door very slowly and slipped into the dark, dilapidated building thinking,
The hell?

The room was dark, the only light coming from the door Stephen had just entered through. Was Simon hiding somewhere here? If he was Stephen would’ve been screwed, but at this point he had nothing to lose. He went to the flashlight app on his Droid and shined the beam around the room. No sign of Simon, thankfully—just boxes, old newspapers, paint cans, and other junk strewn everywhere. What the hell was Simon doing here, in some old run-down brewery?

Stephen shined the beam on the door. He went over and saw that it opened to a staircase leading up. This seemed to be the only place Simon could have gone. Stephen hesitated for a moment, getting a bad feeling about this, then thought,
Oh, stop being such a wuss
, and headed up the stairs.

O
f all the places Simon had been since he’d become a werewolf, Grand Central Station was by far the most unpleasant. The thousands of human scents were overwhelming enough, but to Simon’s ultrasensitive ears the noise was like being in front of a speaker at a rock concert. He wasn’t sure why Alison had wanted to meet him here anyway. Maybe it was because there were so many people around and after their fight yesterday she was afraid to be with him alone. Well, he couldn’t blame her for that.

At five fifteen he knew Alison wasn’t going to show up. For as long as he’d known her she’d been late only a handful of times, and she was usually early. Why would she blow him off when she was the one who’d suggested they meet? That wasn’t like her either; she always
told Simon to “do what you say you’re going to do.” He just hoped everything was okay with Jeremy, that there hadn’t been some kind of medical emergency or something.

At five thirty he texted her:

He gave it another few minutes, and then that was it—he had to get out of this hellhole. When he left Grand Central it was a relief to be able to be outside, breathing in fresh air; well, if you considered the air on Forty-second Street fresh. He figured he’d walk back to Charlie’s, but then he had a better idea. Michael had said he had a date tonight, right? And Charlie was working a twenty-four-hour shift at the firehouse and Ramon had a rehearsal for the Ibsen play, so this would be the perfect time to go to the brewery and search for the remedy beer.

Without giving it any more thought, Simon hailed a cab to Assembly Road in Brooklyn. The cabdriver didn’t know where the address was, so Simon had to get a map up on his phone to show him. Afterward, since he had his phone out, he decided to Google
Hartman Brewery
, just to see if the information jibed with what Volker had told him. There was a short Wikipedia entry for the brewery that described its history—how the brewery was opened in 1914 in Freiburg, Germany, by Heinrich Hartmann, how Volker Hartman had expanded the brewery’s operations to Brooklyn, New York, in 1949, and how the brewery had officially shut down in 2006. Of course, this was Wikipedia, and it was possible that Volker himself had created the entry, but it all seemed legitimate.

While Simon was surprised that so much of Volker’s story seemed to be true, he was also excited. After all, if the history of the
brewery was accurate, maybe the rest of Volker’s story—as implausible as it had sounded—was accurate as well, including that there was a werewolf remedy beer hidden somewhere at the brewery in Brooklyn.

The cab meandered through the midtown streets and then got on the FDR. The traffic made Simon particularly restless and claustrophobic, and he had to stick his head out the window for air. He was seriously tempted to just get out and run, but especially now he didn’t want to do anything weird that would attract too much attention. Hopefully he didn’t have too much time left as a werewolf, but in the meantime he wanted to be as safe as possible.

Finally the traffic broke and they made it to Brooklyn. Being near the brewery was bringing back lots of bad memories, but Simon tried to focus on the positives—there was a finish line in sight, he had hope, this nightmare was going to end soon.

Simon got out of the cab and saw that the door was padlocked. He wasn’t expecting this. He tried to think of some other way in—through a window? around the back?—when he remembered he had superhuman strength now. With minimal effort he tore the lock apart. Wow, that was pretty cool, but he was going to need that strength and more if he was going to tear Michael’s jaw apart.

But first things first—he needed that remedy beer, if the remedy beer was even here. The brewery building was huge, and he had no idea where to look for it. Though he’d been to the brewery a couple of times before, he’d only been on the top floor and on the roof, and the building had ten floors. Ten big, industrial-size floors, as the building occupied about a quarter of the block. And Simon had no idea what he was even looking for. What, was there going to be a big bottle with the label
WEREWOLF REMEDY
on it? Whatever he was
looking for could be hidden somewhere in the building, or not in the building at all.

He went up the dark stairwell to the second floor. It was pitch-black, but he was somehow able to find his way around. He couldn’t see objects, but he knew where they were without thinking about it. He sensed some movement to his left. It was something alive, with an animal scent, probably a rat or a mouse. Weirdly, the thought of a live rodent in his vicinity made him hungry, and he had to resist an urge to go after it.

He veered off into some large room. There was stuff—boxes mainly—in his way. But avoiding knocking into things wasn’t good enough; if he was going to actually find this remedy beer he was going to need some light. He felt along the wall near the door and found the switch. Would’ve been great, except when he flicked the switch, nothing happened. Avoiding some more objects, he made his way to the other end of the large space, to the opposite wall. After some searching he found another set of switches. He flicked all of them and one light in the room went on.

The room, like the rest of the building, had an art deco style and several large chandeliers—one was lit. The space was filled mainly with boxes and other junk. Going by all the cobwebs and dust everywhere, it didn’t seem like anyone had been here in a while. Struggling with that trapped, claustrophobic feeling again, Simon checked some of the boxes—some were empty, some filled with other boxes. If he went box to box, it would take hours to search the room, and he couldn’t handle being in here that long. He tried to harness his ability to detect scents, trying to hone in on a beer scent. For several minutes, he continued checking boxes, not smelling any beer, but then he did pick up something. It was very faint, though, and it
seemed to be coming from one of the far corners of the room. He made his way over there and realized the scent wasn’t coming from the room, but from a vent in the ceiling. Okay, there was definitely beer somewhere in this building; now he just had to find it.

With some renewed hope, he shut off the light, then went back out to the dark stairwell and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The beer odor was definitely stronger up here, which encouraged him. He flicked some light switches and this time they all went on—the sudden brightness was startling, even a little painful, and he had to shield his eyes for several seconds before they adjusted. This was definitely where the beer odor was coming from, because he was in what had been a beer manufacturing area.
Had been
for sure because there were stainless steel beer-tapping tanks and what looked like bottle-filling machines and other equipment, all covered in dust and cobwebs, that seemed as if they hadn’t been used since the brewery had shut down. As Simon walked through an aisle between the equipment, it was becoming increasingly clear that this wasn’t where Michael had concocted any types of beer recently.

Then it hit him that he was going about this all wrong. Instead of trying to find a beer scent, he should be trying to find Michael’s scent. After all, it figured that if there was an active brewing area in the building where Michael had spent a considerable amount of time, and perhaps hung out there recently, then the remedy beer might be in the same area. Buzzed about this new strategy, Simon did a cursory look around the rest of the room, not detecting Michael’s scent, then left and went up to the next floor.

This was another seemingly inactive part of the brewery with a layout and equipment similar to the floor below. He couldn’t make out Michael’s scent here either, but just to make sure he gave the space a quick walk-through. He was inspecting the back of the room, where
most of the tanks and other brewery equipment were concentrated, when it happened. There was the noise of footsteps coming from the floor he’d just vacated. He didn’t know how he knew this because the floors and walls in this building were thick, and with normal human hearing it would’ve been impossible to actually make out footsteps from a lower floor, but Simon didn’t have normal human ears and he was certain of what he’d heard. Then he heard another noise; someone laughing?