Strays (25 page)

“I saw something on the road,” Sarah finally said.

What did you see?

“An animal of some kind.”

What did it look like?
  The voice was becoming more feminine, and Sarah began to wonder if it wasn’t Strawberry murmuring in her ear.

“A dog,” Sarah said.  “Or a wolf.  Maybe not quite a wolf, but something like that.”  She closed her eyes and tried to see it.  “A coyote, maybe.  Yes, a coyote.  Gray with white and brown mixed in.”  She strained to see it, eyes glowing on the back of her eyelids.  “Small eyes and a pointed black nose … no … not nose …”

Go on, Sarah.  What do you see?

“Not nose,” she said.  “
Noses
.  Three noses.”  She felt her heart kick its march into double-time, and she could not tell if it was fear or the thrill of remembering.  “Three noses,” she repeated.  “Because it had three heads.” 

Her eyes clicked open again.  She turned her head toward Strawberry and nestled her cheek against the cat’s ears. 

“A coyote with three heads.”

What else?

“Three heads and …”  She let the thought hang as she could see it now, could see all of the dream.  She had been standing there on the highway, looking to the east, and off in the distance, framed by some soft amber light that seemed to have no source, she saw the boy, that silly boy, walking down toward the road toward her with that swinging, loping stride.

And something else.

The dog or wolf or something in between, the coyote with three heads, hunched in the road before, staring off to the east as it waited for its meal.  Whatever the thing was, it paid Sarah no mind, was turned away from her and ever fixated on the graceless, skeletal boy as each step brought him nearer.  The creature’s shoulders hunched like bloated tumors, and its hind haunches kicked and pawed the asphalt road, and as it growled and snapped its three slavering jaws, the hair across its spine began to thin and separate, the way Tom’s fur had done when she first watched him turn from cat to man.  The coyote’s three heads howled, voices crooning in unison, and as the fur fell away and its fleshy back separated, she saw that each of its necks extended down, creating three bony spines, notched and jagged centipedes that writhed beneath the skin.

“Three spines,” she said to Strawberry as the dream became more vivid.  “It has three heads and three backs.”

She had turned in the dream and run to the west, abandoning the gawky boy to his fate, but she did not get far.  A light arose off to the right, a mist of green and ash, and there were more monsters crawling from its belly.  She saw two of them and no more, but these two were enough to eradicate any measure of hope she had left.

She heard the clump of muddied work boots, echoing across the sky with each stride, thunderous whacks on the earth as loud as a jack hammer.

She smelled the creature’s stench, a mixture of rum-sweat and cigarettes, and she heard the creature laugh. 

“
Saraahhhh …
” it roared.  “
Come on, Sarah … let’s plaaayyyy …
”

Sarah whirled and looked back to the east for the boy who was coming to save her, her only protector at the moment.  But the other beast, the three-headed thing with a trio of wriggling, serpentine spines, was there as well, waiting and groaning.

“They’re coming,” Sarah whispered.  “They’re coming
here
.”

Who, Sarah?  Who is coming?

“The monsters,” she cried, her voice barely strong enough to crack the shadowy silence.  “The very worst monsters in the world.”

Part IV:
Monsters

Good Ol’ Rhino

Some said Jack was an imaginary friend, but Ryan “Rhino” Chuler knew better.  Ever since his Mom left when he was seven years old, Jack had been the only one he could trust, and he came to look forward to bedtime, to that moment when his father turned off the evening news in the living room and shuffled off to bed.  Once the lights went off in his father’s bedroom, the catch on Ryan’s closet door would click, and the door would slide open ever so silently (because Ryan’s father kept all the hinges in the house well-oiled), and there would be Jack, a tow-headed little boy about Ryan’s age with round red cheeks and huge black eyes.

“Hey Rhino,” Jack would always chirp, using the nickname Ryan always loved.  “Let’s play.”

And play they would, sometimes into the wee hours of morning.

Jack had been a staple in Ryan’s life for the bulk of his childhood, and he even popped up now and then when Ryan was a student at Mount Tahoma High.  Each time he showed up, he was just a little bit different, aging with Ryan, growing and maturing.  Jack was wise too, and he seemed to understand what Ryan was feeling.  Jack seemed to get how awful it was when Ryan’s Mom had just up and left, and he often sang to Ryan and assured him that it would be okay.

As Ryan made his way through high school, every major decision was run past Jack first.  When Ryan tried out for the Mount Tahoma football team (where he hoped that everyone else would start calling him Rhino as Jack did), it was Jack who warned him not to play (“You’re too good for those dumb jocks,” Jack said).  Jack also steered Ryan away from theater (“They’re all fags, you know”), the music department (“Guaranteed way to make all the cool people hate you”), and pretty much vetoed any girl Ryan thought about asking out.  When Ryan at last fell in with the “wrong” crowd, that group of guys who hung out in the parking lot before school and passed funny rolled cigarettes between them, Jack disappeared for awhile, but in the spring of 1982, with graduation approaching, Jack popped back up and once again assured Ryan that it was time to move on.

When Ryan graduated from Mount Tahoma, he believed he would finally be able to kill his past.  He spent the summer after commencement lifting weights, and upon turning 18 he was able to tell his father to go to hell when his monthly haircut rolled around.  He enrolled in some classes at Tacoma Community College, and he got himself a cheap apartment near campus.  He made rent via student loans, but when that wasn’t enough, he took a job working second shift at a warehouse on the Sea-Tac Strip about a mile south of the airport.  By second semester at TCC, he was barely making a 2.0, and the warehouse wanted to take him on fulltime.  He liked the warehouse and liked that in this world he was not just Rhino but “good ol’ Rhino” to his coworkers.

He dropped out of college. 

The next three years were spent working nights at the warehouse on The Strip and looking for something to do the rest of the time.  Hard to say if life was good for “good ol’ Rhino.”  He didn’t like his job, but he liked that they let him grow his hair as long as he wanted, and his shift supervisor never complained about his increasing collection of tattoos. 

By the summer of 1986, when Rhino turned 22, his hair was down around his shoulders, and he fancied that he looked a bit like Tom Araya, lead singer of his favorite band Slayer.  Damn, but he loved that band!  He loved them so much, in fact, that he was going to tattoo the word
SLAYER
across the front of his neck for all the world to see, but just as he sat down in the chair for the ink artist to go to work across his throat, a vision of Jack came to mind, and he instead opted to replace
SLAYER
with the words
LET’S PLAY
.  As consolation and in deference to his favorite band, he had the same artist tattoo the best line from his favorite Slayer song across his back in archaic Românese font:

JESUS KNOWS YOUR SOUL CANNOT BE SAVED
.

Story of my life
, thought good ol’ Rhino. 
Words to live by.

He never questioned why he always seemed to be alone. 

*   *   *   *

It was the late summer of 1986 when Rhino first saw the girl wandering about the empty C-store.  He spied her in the early hours of a Friday morning, and at first he thought she was a hooker, although she lacked the affected swagger of the best whores on The Strip.  Still, it was a week night, and he had been walking up and down The Strip for awhile, wired and edgy after clocking out from his shift at the warehouse.  The idea of some female company sounded pretty good at the moment, so he made his proposition directly, and even when she revealed herself to be jail-bait (“Fifteen will get you twenty,” she said), he still couldn’t resist showing her the
LET’S PLAY
tattoo on his neck in hopes that this would impress her.  It did not.  If anything, it seemed to freak her out a bit, and the moment she staggered away from him, gagging as if she might vomit, Rhino had a moment of déjà vu.

He had seen her before.  Oh yes, he had seen her.

It was on one of those flyers that had been splattered all over The Strip, a weird photocopied image of a doe-eyed teenage girl named Sarah Smallhouse, handwritten announcement in black magic marker that she had run away and that there was a reward for information leading to her whereabouts.  When Rhino first saw one of the makeshift posters taped to the post of a cross-walk light, a niggling tickle in the back of his head told him he should take it for himself …
just in case
.  As it turned out, his instincts had been correct, for what were the odds that a late-night stroll to combat insomnia would lead him directly to this
very
girl at this
very
place and time?

When he had stolen the flyer two days earlier, he had folded it and placed it in his wallet.  Once the girl in the C-store slipped off to the bathroom, he retrieved it to check the face, and sure enough, it was her, Sarah Smallhouse, 15-year-old girl gone missing.  The flyer promised a $500 reward for information leading to her whereabouts, and just looking at those numbers again, written in huge fat strokes with the magic marker, gave Rhino a little thrill down his leg. 

He quickly went to the payphone on the front dock, dialed the operator, and placed a collect call to the number that promised the reward.  A gruff voice answered.  It was thick with the rattle of smoker’s phlegm.  The man on the other end identified himself as Bud, “but everybody calls me Big Buddy.”  Rhino told Big Buddy what he knew, and he agreed to wait at the C-store, to keep an eye on the girl. 

Even as they spoke, Sarah Smallhouse, terrified and hungry, was slipping away out the back, almost right under his nose.

Minutes later, as Rhino paced about on the C-store’s dock, an unusual-looking man stepped out of the shadows.  He stood a good foot taller than Rhino, and when he first appeared Rhino couldn’t help but notice his heavy black eyes the size of silver dollars.  The stranger’s face was bulging in places, misshapen, and Rhino thought that maybe he had some rare form of that elephant man disease he had read about at TCC.  There were slits on the face as well that seemed to be oozing something awful, not quite blood but a sort of black phlegmy version the stuff hacked up by chronic smokers.  When the malformed freak started walking toward him, Rhino backed against the glass picture window of the C-store and tensed himself for a run.

“Rhino?” the stranger asked.

“Yeah, sure.  Big Buddy?”

The freak shook his head.  The sagging flesh quivered like melted cheese.  The eyes looked like something you saw in a science fiction movie, huge, over-evolved orbs of a space alien but the color of charcoal.  When he spoke again, his voice was clearer.  “It’s me, Rhino.  It’s Jack.”  He stepped up onto the dock, pushing that awful visage into the illumination of the store’s fluorescent lights.

“Whoa,” said Rhino.  “What happened to your face?”

Jack, paused and glanced into the reflective surface of the convex security mirror, which hung at an angle above the payphone.  When he saw his own image—strips of skin hanging from his forehead and cheeks, streaks of black blood about his nose, chin, and eyes—he grinned.  “Had a little disagreement with someone.  Want to see a neat trick?”

“Sure, I guess.”

Jack put his hands on his face, covering every inch of tattered, bloody flesh.  With one quick swipe, he pressed his hands back.  Rhino looked up, astonished, to see a face almost whole, free of scars or splattered blood.  Jack repeated the motion, pushing back the drooping flesh and globular lumps, poking with his fingers like a potter modeling clay.  At last, he was done, and the friendly smile that Rhino had known since childhood emerged.

“How’d you do that?”

Jack ignored his question.  “You’re waiting for someone,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re looking for a girl.”

“That’s right.”

“She got away, Rhino.  Right out from under your now.”

Rhino stamped the dock and spit.  “Dammit.”

“I know where she is,” Jack assured him.  “Let me take you to her.”

*   *   *   *

Late the next morning, Rhino came stumbling out of the woods just west of 99.  He held his right hand out in front of him to feel his way, and his left hand pressed against his nose, trying to stem the flow of blood.  He had intended to flag down a ride on 99, eliciting sympathy from the ground beef mass that was now his face, and perhaps grab a lift to the hospital.  He did not expect to find a ride already waiting for him.

“Hello, Ryan.”  Jack stood at the edge of the road, arms crossed, legs spread wide.  “Looks like you just lost a fight with a wood-chipper.”

“Need … a doctor,” Rhino moaned.

“You do indeed.  Let’s get you fixed up, shall we?”

Rhino had no idea how much time he spent in the ER.  Somehow, Jack flagged down a ride and piled Rhino inside, but the pain was so great that parts of this were wiped clean from Rhino’s memory, like someone went to town on his brain with a giant chalkboard eraser.  Once he was stabilized, Rhino did remember struggling to fill out forms, waiting in ER, and finally getting a PA to patch up his face.  The lacerations on Rhino’s head took multiple stitches, as did the one alongside his right eye that had painfully widened the socket.  His nose was reset, and a splint was placed, and a nurse put some powder in the nostril that burned but nevertheless stopped the bleeding.  Small butterfly bandages were applied to hold together the lesser scars on his cheeks and eyebrows, and his face, neck, and chest were cleansed with antiseptic.  They gave him some painkillers and let him rest a bit, and the minutes clicked away but Rhino didn’t care.