Mark Henry_Amanda Feral 02 (16 page)

From his spot on the bar’s porch, the werewolf faced the field and snorted. The piggybacking pair had nearly made a break in the forest and were quickly approaching the freeway gulley. I snatched the gun from Honey and ran. I picked off the bartender from five yards—inexplicably as I’d never had any formal training—and somehow expected the entire thing to stop instead of just the top half slap against a tree stump and nod off.

Pimples kept trudging forward, mere feet from a break in the brush but gaining momentum. Cars breezed by on the other side, so close I could hear radio snippets. Raising the gun again, I stepped forward, pressed it to the back of the zombie’s skull and squeezed. Then …

Nothing.

No kick. No dead zombie.

Nothing.

Oh wait. There was a chuckle. The pimpled undead glanced toward me with a lidless eye and moaned a stuttering laugh. And my phone rang, but it seemed inappropriate to take the call so I let it go. Plus, there was a great deal of limbs cracking from within the treed area. So, not nothing.

He stepped through trees and out onto the grassy shoulder of the freeway.

“Hey!” I called and to my surprise he actually turned to face me, lips clenched in a smug little grin. I turned the gun around and raised it to bludgeon him. His expression changed. Eyebrows drooped, shoulders curled in a defeated posture.

“You’re goddamn right,” I said, right before I was pushed aside into the tangle of a thick-leafed rhododendron by the werewolf, who snatched the zombie in one hand and tossed him back into the woods. Pimples gave it the old college try with an attack of his own, but the wolf simply fisted the kid’s head and held him at arm’s length before twisting it like a bottle cap and watching the body drop away.

“That’s lovely.” I backed away, certain it was my turn. I thought about the hole in Wendy’s stomach and imagined similar horrors visited upon my flawless skin. It was enough to send shudders through my dead frame. But, at least she could live with it. This was it.

This was my death. I closed my eyes and waited.

The werewolf didn’t charge though. I heard some scrambling in the undergrowth and caught a whiff of pine rot and freshly disturbed loam, but no physical assault.

When I peeked, the area was empty. Even the body was gone. I trudged through the brush back to the parking lot to find the crew gathered and loading bodies into the tavern. The werewolf had even turned back to his human form and was chatting politely with Honey.

Hello? Was I dreaming?

Marching out of the forest, I assessed my outfit for presentability and decided that mud stains plus blood spatter equaled a bad first impression. I ducked into
the camper, swiped a T-shirt and shorts from Honey’s suitcase and prayed that I’d fit into the tiny scraps of fabric. It was a close one. I shook the twigs from my hair, grabbed my cell and returned the call from Marithé.
⁸⁸
She answered on the first ring.

“Where the fuck are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Idaho?”

“Jesus! I’ve got some guy from
Supernatural Seattle
breathing down my neck for a scoop. He’s certain you’ve flown to Bangalore for transcendental surgery on your thighs and he says if he doesn’t get the truth within twenty-four hours he’s going to run that, front page.”

“Tell him I’m in rehab.”

“For what?”

Yes. For what? I couldn’t very well say alcohol; zombies don’t get drunk. Food was out of the question; nothing will kill celebrity quicker than thoughts of incontinence, just ask June Allyson.
⁸⁹
We could tell him I was visiting a sick relative, but then we’d have reporters swarming Rapid City by the time we got there. Not going to happen. And then I landed on it.

“Tell that cockroach I’m providing a personal consultation to a Hollywood celebrity that may be interested in crossing over. That’ll have him drooling. He’ll have his reporters swarming Los Angeles before nightfall.”

“He’ll want to know why Wendy is with you.” She filed her nails in the background.

“Am I on speaker?”

“Oh.” The phone clicked. “You were saying?”

“Tell him she’s my bait. Plus—and this’ll really make him hard—tell him she’s getting the inside story first hand. He’ll cream.”

“Will do.” Marithé hung up without saying goodbye, a less-than-endearing trait.

I slapped my phone closed, checked my face one last time and stepped out to introduce myself to the werewolf.

He was waiting and clothed. I damned my vanity for causing me to miss the full frontal nudity that comes standard with every were-retransformation. Wendy stood behind the guy holding up nine fingers and biting her lower lip in a seriously slutty way.
⁹⁰

“I’m Scott.” He reached for my hand and shook it. Holding on for a moment before releasing, searching my face with hazel eyes like round cut topaz.

For a reaction? I wondered.

“Amanda.”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked, a sly smile curling on his lips.

I had caught a passing familiarity, but if I’d fucked him, I’d surely remember, right? It’s not like I was promiscuous, that was Wendy’s bit. He probably wasn’t one of my string of therapy dates, either.
⁹¹
What can I say, nine out of ten unethical therapists agree, Amanda is an easy mark.

“No.” I smiled and touched his arm. “But, I’d like to. Do refresh.”

Jesus.

Was I hitting on a werewolf? Wendy scowled over his shoulder. Apparently she had plans.

“We met briefly last year, very briefly. I’m sure you’ll remember the murders at the Washington Mutual Starbucks. The majority of the staff and customers were … um … eaten?”

“Maybe.”

Maybe nothing. The memories flooded back.

I was hiding in the bathroom when the gunshots started. The garbage can was full and wads of paper towels overflowed onto the floor around it. It’s funny how you remember those things. The gross things. I’d hoped the reapers would come and clean house or the zombies would simply eat themselves out.
⁹²
Neither happened.

I counted the gunshots, ten of them, for nine zombies.

I eased the door open and peeked out.

Scott was the shooter. A cop. Gorgeous in his uniform and empathetic to a fault, he gave me a comforting hug, which rubbed my makeup clean off and exposed my dead flesh in all its veined glory—
so
not a great first impression. Memorable, certainly, but not for romantic reasons. Intellectual, maybe.

If I’d known he was supernatural, I might not have fled. But, how could I know, he looked like a tasty nugget to me.

Must have been fate, then.

“Fate?” he asked.

Had I said that aloud? Crap.

“No way. I’ve been looking for you ever since we met. I guess you could say you changed my life.”

His smile turned into a dark smirk I didn’t care for,
but I was happy to return the snark. “Wow. I’m so glad I could be of service. Care to be more vague?”

I didn’t think that last sentence out, clearly, because …

“After you ran, I was left with no proof of what had happened. My back up refused to corroborate my story. I knew it was zombies in that shop—couldn’t be nothin’ else but zombies—but all that was left was dead bodies. The kind that weren’t moving. I won’t kid you; I was shocked and, unfortunately for my career, too honest. My Chief put me on administrative leave when she read the final report. Said I needed R and R. Signed me up to see a shrink. What I needed was to find you.

“I started searching the following day.

“Man, I looked everywhere. From the CD. to Aurora to West Seattle, I questioned every low-life informer I’d ever talked to and turned up nothin’. I started doing research on zombies, book research, but that was a dead end too, ’cause what I saw wasn’t the kind that was still livin’, like the voodoo kind. These were the flesheatin’ variety.

“So I started thinkin’ like a zombie, or at least what I thought a zombie would think like. I asked myself, where would I go for food? Who would I feed on? And
then it was like a light bulb turned on, just like in the cartoons.

“The homeless.

“I got my big break in the Tent City, roaming amongst the leaky tents, muddy alleys and burn barrels. It didn’t quiet until about three in the A.M., so I normally showed up at two. This one night, I seen a well-dressed guy, musta been about twenty-five, tall, dark-haired, good lookin’ I supposed, maybe a little pale. Completely out of place.

“I followed him through the blocks of tents, careful not to slosh in the puddles and alert him, hanging back in the shadows. He came up to an elderly man, who’d ducked out of a refrigerator box lean-to and was smoking under a big evergreen. They talked for a minute and then started walking together, down the backside of the area, toward Rupert Street, toward a long black limo. The door opened from the inside and a blond stepped out. She sauntered over to the homeless man, put her arm around him, led him to the car, and then pushed him inside with such force I could hear his body hit the opposite side of the interior.

“I didn’t see any more that night. But, I did get the license plate and had a friend run it. That’s when I knew I’d been looking in all the wrong places. It led me to a house in Medina. Not just a house, a mansion. Huge place.

“It didn’t take long for that guy to lead me to you.

“When I saw you the second time, you were coming out of a wall into an alley near the furniture stores on Western Avenue. Not a door in a wall, either,
through
the fuckin’ wall. I followed you home that night.

“During that time, I lost my job. Not that I miss it, but it was income. Like most out-of-work cops I ended
up doin’ security. I got a gig as a bodyguard for this big-time titty bar owner. Well, actually, they weren’t titty bars.

“It wasn’t long before he invited me into his ‘inner circle.’

“Me and three other guys went to his new club for cigars and drinks. It was after hours and the place was smoked out as it was. There were clouds of the stuff, you couldn’t even see the walls. We sat at a round table. Markham was across from me.

“He told me, ’Scotty, things are going to change around here and I need men by my side that I can trust. Can I trust you, Scotty?’ ’Cause that’s what he called me. Scotty.

“So, I say, ‘Yeah. Of course you can, Mr. Markham. What do I look like? An asshole?’

“And that’s when the girl comes, drop-dead gorgeous. I don’t normally get turned on by redheads, but this one had somethin’, green eyes that sparkled plus an Irish accent that vibrated through me. I could feel it in my balls, real freaky-like.

“She says, ‘Alright there, boys, I want you to roll up your sleeves for me.’

“Jimmy, he’s to my right, he goes, ‘Whatchoo gonna do give us shots?’ and laughs it up.

“But that’s kinda what she did. We all rolled up our sleeves, ’cause Markham was nodding and she’d asked nice, and like I said I could feel that accent of hers in my balls. She held her hand up and wiggled her fingers. They stretched and cracked until they were so long and pointy, I thought I’d scream. But, she was still smiling. And Markham was sipping his scotch like nothin’ was wrong. So when she dragged that spike of a finger up my arm, cutting me right through to the bone, I wasn’t expecting a thing.”

“She was a werewolf,” I said.

“Fuckin’ A right. Didn’t mean a thing to me, at first. The change was really … refreshing, freeing, kinda. But the other night, when we were chasing Markham’s quarry, and I saw you, it got me back on track. I need to know everything. Markham doesn’t tell us shit.”

“What do you mean? You’re not chasing Gil?”

“Well yeah. That’s the excuse, but really I wanted to talk to you. I thought I’d lost your trail back in Ellens-burg. It was sheer luck that I saw that ugly ass camper on the freeway a ways back.”

“You’re not here to kill us?” I frowned.

“Nope.” He spread his arms wide as though I’d run in for a hug.

“Swear to God?”

“Yep.”

Hold up. Confusion setting in.

Hold up. Hold up. Hold up.

It’s terribly flattering that I’ve got people searching for me, and all. But if Scott wasn’t hunting us, and Honey’d already revealed her secrets, then who did that leave?

Who killed Granita, or whatever her name was? Who was scratching at the bathroom door? What had freaked Fishhook out to the point of nearly overdosing on shrooms? Had he seen something?

Was it even necessary to continue driving to Rapid City? Maybe I could get out of this whole Mother thing.

And, possibly more importantly, where was I going to find a new outfit?