Undead and Underwater (25 page)

“So how about you get the fuck outta here?”

“But I just got comfy. See?” He pointed to what he was lying on. “It’s my tanning secret: an authentic President Eastwood beach blanket circa 2016. Note his squinty expression, like Popeye with a kidney stone. His squint says, ‘I’ll keep you safe and will blow up any country that dares mock the U.S. of A., punk.’”

“We never know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Geoff whined. Sean could tell by their tone and scents that they were frustrated bordering on bored; their body language just hadn’t caught up. Their stance and scent broadcast their confusion: they were being all kinds of aggressive and Sean didn’t much care.

Yep. He didn’t. They’d get bored and leave, and he didn’t care; he’d go back to sunbathing. They’d stick around and harass him, and he didn’t care; he’d dish it back. (And nobody could outtalk Sean Wyndham.) They’d step up the harassment and get physical, and he didn’t care; he’d hold his own, or decide they weren’t worth physical exertion and go back to his private beach.

He. Didn’t. Care.

It made bullying Sean Wyndham a nightmare.

“Is it true your grandpa and your uncle both died of cancer this year?” he asked with honest curiosity. Packers didn’t get cancer. Geoff hadn’t taken a break from snapping bras, handing out wedgies, or rolling up on beaches to pick fights with smaller kids, so it was hard to tell if he was in mourning or not. “Because I’m sorry if it’s true.” And he was. Cancer sounded just awful. It was like hearing someone died of bubonic plague—it was nothing you or yours had had to worry about for centuries, but it was still pretty bad news.

Geoff’s hands, which looked the size and texture of catcher’s mitts, balled into fists. “You shut up about that.”

“So, yes?”

“Faggot,” Geoff said, desperation clear in his tone. So: no sympathy today; all bullying activities will continue as scheduled. You had to admire the boy’s stoic endurance.

“Careful, or I’ll tell my boyfriend on you and he’ll kick sand in your urethra.” Sean yawned and lay back down. “Don’t you guys have date-raping skills to bone up on? Get it? Bone?”

“You—” Jeff broke off and, even though his back was to the parking lot, Sean was downwind and knew why. “Uh.”

“Now you’ll be sorry, A, B, and B-minus.”

“What?” Riley asked, just as Sean’s father reached their little group.

“What’s going on?”

“Heeeeeeere’s Daddy!”

His father glanced down at him. Sean waved up at him from his Clint Eastwood towel. “I love that movie,
The Shining
,” Sean said, apropos of nothing. “The third remake was the best.”

“Your mom’s been looking for you.”

“Probably because I stole her towel,” he agreed.

“At least you’re willing to confess your crime.” His father stared across his son’s sprawled tanning body at the would-be bullies. Even in faded, paint-stained cargo shorts, a T-shirt from Cap’n Frosty’s, and bare feet, his father cut a formidable figure. And Dad was old. Almost forty. He’d prob’ly need a cane soon. “Is there a problem, boys?”

“Uh—”

“No, sir.”

“Nuh-uh, Mr. Wyndham, we were just hanging out with Sean.”

“Mmmm. I don’t think I know any of you.”

“That’s A,” Sean said, pointing to Riley. “That’s B.” To Jeff. “That’s B-minus.” To Geoff. “B-minus had recent deaths in the family, so we’re being nice to him. Right, B-minus?”

“What?” his father and B-minus asked in unison.

“They’re exchange students,” Sean explained. “From a land far, far away. Their real names are too complex for my feeble American brain, so I’ve given them letters.”

“Sean—”

“Thanks for stopping,” he told the three boys, who were retreating as quickly as they could while trying to make it look like they weren’t. “See? All gone.”

“Sean—”

“No, Dad,” he said kindly. “I’m not giving you their names. I handled it. It’s fine. No need to pull a Godfather.”

His father squatted beside him, yellow eyes intent on his face. “You’ve got sand all over your mouth.”

“I got hungry while lying on Clint’s face.”

“Sean! They rolled up on you, kicked sand at you, crowded you.”

He put his sunglasses back on. “I know the short-term memory of a preteen boy is horrifically short, but I did manage to remember the events of the past forty seconds, Dad.”

His father pulled the sunglasses off to maintain eye contact. “They were challenging you for territory. People will do that your whole life and it’s okay, it’s how things are. I can help you with that. You’ve got to—”

“What, Dad?” Sean propped himself up on his elbows. “I’m three times as strong and five times as fast as they are. They only made the football team because I didn’t bother to try out. Same with basketball, same with every organized sport ever. They think they’re stronger than me and we know they aren’t. So, what? Show them they’re wrong? Put them in the ER for the rest of the afternoon? For what? To prove they didn’t scare me? They
didn’t
scare me.” He wondered how to politely ask his father to keep lecturing him on the other side of his pilfered towel, where he wasn’t blocking the rays. “Besides, karma’s gonna get them.”

“You have to make your own karma, Sean.”

“I’m not sure you actually understand what karma is, Dad.”

“Sean, you can’t let people like that—”

“Kids. Kids like that. Actually, asshats like that.”

“Asshats?” His dad sighed. “You’ve been talking to Betsy Taylor again.”

“Only because you weren’t home to take the call. Oh, and because she’s an honest-to-God vampire! It’s weird that I think she’s so smokin’ she’s absolute zero, right?”

“She’s been eligible for Social Security for years, so, yes, it’s weird.”

“What’s Social Security?”

“A program President Fey had to—we’re getting off the subject.”

“Are we? Huh.”

“Nice try. But still,” his father persisted, and Sean stifled a groan. The old man had the worst time letting go of a bone. Any bone. “You’ve got to stand up for yourself or—”

“Or they’ll think I’m a chicken? Do not care, Dad. At all. Or you will? I’m not a coward, Dad, and it’s enough that I know that. I don’t need to waste one moment proving it to anyone, even you.” Sean sighed and laid down, then sat back up. “All this—it’s the same again.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re different. What all this means is, if someone did that to
you
,
you’d
have to prove you were El Alpha Supreme-o and kick their asses and send them to the ER in garbage bags. And that’s fine. But I’m not you. I don’t have to prove anything. Not even to you.”
Maybe,
he thought, thinking of his big sister, who would not have been able to walk away from A, B, and B-minus,
especially to you
.

His father looked at him for a long time—well, probably only a few seconds, but it felt like a long time. Finally he shook his head. “Sean, I don’t understand you.”

“That’s okay, Dad. I understand you.”

And he smiled, not bounced out of countenance by anything that had happened in the last ten minutes. Or the last ten years.

And his father shook his head once more, and smiled back.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

It had been a long day, Lara’s first full day as leader. And it had gone all right, she thought. Well. She had no frame of reference, but no one died, no one wanted to fight, no one even wanted to raise their voice.

The full moon was three days away, and the Pack’s territory was bursting. Often people who lived in other parts of the state/country/world would travel to the seat of power for their Change. Pack members who hardly ever got to see each other could kick back, relax, chase some rabbits together, maybe make a new friend and fuck on the dunes . . . good times. The moon, so enticing when she was full and fat, always went back on her crash diet, and Pack members back to their day jobs as accountants and Democrats.

Those who lived too far from Cape Cod, or didn’t feel it necessary to fuck on dunes, would absolutely show up this moon of all moons to inspect a new Pack leader. So Lara’s day had been filled with meeting and greeting and (she hoped) assuaging anxiety with her serene, responsible demeanor. Or at least a demeanor that said,
Hey, things will be okay under the new regime, probably, I’m pretty sure . . . Steak tartare, anyone?

(“Confidence,” her brother had teased her hours ago, “thy name is Lara.” Sheer self-respect demanded she put him in a head lock until their mother began shrieking that they’d punch through the wall or stair banister again and threatened to go for her Beretta.)

Thank God for Sean.
She knew her little brother’s disinterest in all things aggressive, forceful, or hostile disconcerted their father and amused their mother to no end, but she’d never been more grateful for their differences than this week. An Armageddon-esque comet could be rocketing toward Massachusetts, and Sean would swipe Mom’s Clint Eastwood towel and lay out on the beach to watch it come in and kill them, possibly sucking down Bloody Marys by the barrelful.

“How can I have sired a beta male?” her father had wondered once, years ago, when he thought Lara was farther away than she was. He’d only dared bring it up when Sean was several states away on his annual camping trip with BabyJon Taylor, the vampire queen’s brother/son hybrid. Who wasn’t a baby, but that was by far the least weird thing about the Taylor pack.
By far.

“You mean, how come your son isn’t a raging, testosterone-stuffed, date-raping jackhole like his papa?” her mother had asked with aggravating cheer. “Not that we were even on a date when we first met, Mikey, if you’ll recall correctly, and I can see by the way you suddenly can’t look me in the eye that you do. Nothing like
Wham, bam, sorry I knocked you up, now you gotta move to the Cape and raise cubs with me . . . What was your name again,
ma’am?
to liven up a girl’s evening. What a romantic you were, my love!”
††

“Argh. You made your point.” Lara could hear the ruefulness in his tone, knew he was scrubbing his hands through his thick hair and, yes, avoiding eye contact with her mother. They would both kill or die for each other, but her mother maintained the lifelong right to tease her father about their first “date.” “Okay, so, of course, betas aren’t
all
bad.”

“I think you mean”—Lara sucked in her breath, hearing the warning (and if she could pick up on it, her father could, too)—“betas aren’t bad at
all
.”

“Yes. Of course. That’s what I meant. Yes. Yes. We need them, obviously. The Pack wouldn’t survive without them. If it was all alphas—”

“You’d be fighting.”

“Yeah.”

“All the time.”

“Well, yes.”

“You’d be fighting about when to fuck, or fighting about who to fuck, or fighting about where to fuck who and when, and in the meantime the rest of the Pack would have starved to death. It’d be just,
aarrggh, we’re so hungry, please stop fighting for just a little while so we can take five minutes to hunt for
—gaakkk!”

“Yes.” Michael choked back a laugh. “That’s just right.”

“So, what? You’ve got an alpha. You’ve got something else. At least you and Sean can be in the same room without wanting to set each other on fire after twenty seconds.”

“That was an accident,” he corrected her, “and it had nothing to do with the Miniskirt Battle of 2020. And the firemen were able to save most of the wing.”

“I’m gonna indulge my inner Trekkie for a minute—”

“
Please
don’t.”

“—and remind you of the IDIC. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination. Translation: you’re a fortunate man in all things, if everyone was the same, it’d be a nightmare of boredom, so shut your jackhole and kiss me.”

“It sounded different when Spock explained it,” he’d replied with a sigh, and then they weren’t talking anymore, and Lara went back outside without her mom’s Clint Eastwood towel, so they wouldn’t know she’d heard.

No, she didn’t understand Sean’s way of seeing the world, but she appreciated it. He was a blast of freezer air in August—different and refreshing and weird. He tolerated things she couldn’t: bullies and bullshit. And knew things she didn’t—how to go along to get along. Not for nothing did he graduate Best Storyteller and Best Shoulder To Lean On. He put up with a lot, and she didn’t understand it but did respect it.

(Also, she’d tracked down every cowardly stinking shit-mouth bully who ever dared touch her brother and kicked their asses, from Dennis Linderman in preschool to Jeff Pedermahn in middle school to Maureen Chowton at high school graduation.)

Tonight, she knew Sean would rather be in Boston with their folks but had never so much as hinted at the possibility of making the trip with them, or meeting them later. She appreciated that, too.

So Lara meeted and greeted and her parents were not at the mansion, were deliberately not at the mansion. They’d spent the afternoon and evening in Boston, doing their own meeting and greeting with Dr. Bimm and l’il Dr. Bimm. Knowing how much Sean enjoyed l’il Dr. Bimm’s company, she made a mental note to invite Fred’s pack to swim and sun and eat with them before summer disappeared completely. Once things settled. Because they would settle. They’d
better
.

Dr. Bimm had to kill her own father to
not
take the Pack. So things could be a lot worse.
She still wasn’t quite sure what had brought such calamitous events about, had never gotten the whole story. Dr. Bimm would never talk about it, and l’il Dr. Bimm hadn’t even been whelped when it had happened. If her parents knew any of the deliciously gory-sounding details, they’d never shared.