“I’ll do it,” said Lyle. Turning to Allyson, her back was toward him. He placed a hand on her shoulder and asked, “Is Ben the guy Ralph came in with?”
Before she could answer there was a crash from the kitchen, then a long mournful howl which was immediately followed by Ralph bellowing out, “To hell with the damned beef burger! Out there is live meat! He was staring at me like I was some kind of thing.Live meat! ”
“He’s right,” came Waldo’s voice. “That guy, Lyle! He’s not one of us! He’s meat!”
His hand still on Allyson’s shoulder, he looked at the back of her head and whispered, “What — what should I do?”
She turned her head to the right, looked down at Lyle’s fingers grasping her shoulder, and then bit them. “Ow!” He pulled back his arm, looked at his hand, and sucked on the side of his fingers where Allyson had bitten him. The skin wasn’t broken, but it hurt like the dickens. “What in the—”
She turned and looked at him with blood red eyes. She then smiled displaying gleaming white fangs that seemed to grow before his eyes. He bolted and ran screaming into the night.
“Allyson?”
She faced the kitchen door, removed her false fangs and faced Dr. Raeder. “You people were too slow. He ran before anyone could shout ‘April fool.’”
Janos Raeder dropped his Waldo mask and makeup on one of the chairs and said between gasps of laughter, “You mean he still doesn’t know? Hey, everybody, Lyle still doesn’t know. He’s probably calling the police right now.”
Ben and his two smoking companions came in from the front. “Hey, what gives? Lyle or someone was supposed to come and get me to sit on Ralph, right? I just saw Lyle going ninety plus across Alameda. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed.”
The laughter died down as Ben’s comment sobered them a bit. Allyson cocked her head to one side and said, “It’s my fault. I got a little deep into the part and bit his hand.”
“You bit his hand?” demanded Dr. Raeder.
“Just a little nip. I didn’t draw blood or anything with these rubber teeth.”
They all stood in silence for a moment, then one of them made a rude sound by letting the air out of his pneumatic muscles. They all broke down and laughed as they howled and began removing their makeup. It was the best psych department April fool’s prank ever.
Out of breath, Lyle leaned his back against the alley wall and gulped air. After only a few seconds, he looked around the corner and saw that the street was empty. “Oh, god,” he gasped. “Oh, god.”
There was a tightness in his chest and shoulders, and he pushed away from the wall to shake it out. As he crossed his arms in front of him, he could hear the seam on the back of his shirt split. He looked down and watched in horror as the hair on the backs of his arms lengthened.
“What? Oh, god! No! It couldn’t—”
He shook his head as he thought at panic speed. That woman, Allyson, had bitten him, but she hadn’t broken the skin. How—
He looked down at the hand that Allyson had bitten, hair already covering the spot, skin a darkening purple in the dim alley light, the nails already beginning their metamorphosis to claws. She hadn’t broken the skin, but he had sucked on his hand immediately afterward.
“The saliva! Omigod! The saliva!”
The sleeve seams split one after another and Lyle felt himself filled with savage power, physical strength beyond anything he could have ever imagined, cravings and lusts that seemed to blot out portions of his awareness. His chest expanded as his thighs and upper arms thickened. He lifted his clawed hands and felt the shape of a muzzle erupting from his face.
“Hey, who’s that? Look here, Pauly.”
A young man with a blue printed bandanna covering his curly black hair stood in the alley entrance, his face hidden by shadows cast by the street lights. Lyle saw him and felt an eerie heat fill his chest as his heart pumped energy to his growing musculature.
“What you got here?” said the one called Pauly. He carried a wicked looking stiletto in his hand.
As the pair advanced on him, Lyle could see his immediate future very clearly. It would involve a lot of late nights, demands, and sacrifices that would probably savage his grade point average, but there was the excitement, the high, the incredible thrill waiting for him. Now he knew why Ralph had been drooling as Allyson related her war stories at the meeting. It was, Lyle knew, the first step on a walk through hell. It was a journey, however, that would not be denied.
Deep within his soul there remained a tiny human spark that spoke to him with fear. Perhaps there would come a time when the pain of the night hunt would exceed the sick thrill and excitement. Possibly then, when enough was enough, he would want help from those people at Lycanthropics Anonymous. He nodded his shaggy head as he felt the drool fall on the backs of his bristly paws. As soon as he was finished with Pauly and his friend, he’d have to go to Dr. Raeder’s home and get his copy of the meeting list. He’d have to go to Dr. Raeder’s house in any event. He could already tell that the pair facing him in the alley would never be enough.
Old Soldiers Never Die
As the tour bus rounded the circle and approached the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, Mark glanced to his left. Johnny was sitting next to the window, looking through the winter grime toward Roosevelt Island, seeing neither the island nor the fresh flakes of snow falling into the pale gray waters of the Potomac. Johnny Nolan’s face was lined and hard set above a full beard salted with gray. The maroon stocking cap on his head was jammed forward, almost covering his eyebrows. The narrowed eyes beneath those brows were dark circled and a long way from the snow and slush of Washington, DC. He was back in the jungle, decades in the past, trying hard to forget the things he refused to remember. Mark rubbed his eyes and nodded. That was the problem with them all, he reminded himself.
“Why didn’t you get off at the Arlington stop?” he asked Johnny. The man next to the window closed his eyes, turned his head from the wintry scene, and hunched his head down into his shoulders as he attempted to snuggle some warmth from the collar of his faded olive jacket.
“Why didn’t you get off at the cemetery?” Mark insisted. “You made a contract with the group.”
“I know. Sorry.” Johnny let out a long sigh and closed his eyes. “I just couldn’t.”
“You’ve heard it a thousand times, man. If you don’t face what happened and accept it, you’re never going to be able to let go of it.”
A flash of anger passed over Johnny’s features. It quickly faded, leaving him as he had been for twenty three years: frightened, hostile, confused, depressed, and desperate in his isolation and loneliness. “They’re all still alive in my head, Mark. I see them just like they were then. That’s the way I want to remember them.” He pulled a bare hand from his jacket pocket and waved it around. “On the TV I see these beer-gutted, balding old farts carrying signs in front of the V.A., and I don’t know them.” He lowered his hand to his lap. “I see my own balding head in the mirror, and I don’t know me.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a photograph from it. He looked down at the plastic laminated picture, then faced it toward Mark. It depicted eleven young soldiers standing, squatting, and sitting before a burned out piece of North Vietnamese artillery. The young men were grinning and waving. Not one of them looked older than twenty, although back in group Johnny had said his sergeant, Glenn Dunham, had been close to thirty. Mark could see the young Johnny Nolan standing in the center at the back. He had his arms over the shoulders of the two men who stood at either side.