Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 3.


The other kids were scrambling to drag their defenestrated bedrolls into the house before they got too soaked. Myron was sitting in an overstuffed chair, trying desperately to will himself into the form of a wolf. Or a tiger. Or an alligator. Mr. Rodriguez had turned bright flaming red.

“I take you in, I feed and clothe you, and this is the thanks you give me,” he roared. “You betray me, you run away, you try to betray our family secrets! I didn’t want to hurt you, I wasn’t going to do anything to you.” Outside, dimly refracted through the pounding rain, lightning momently illuminated the sky. “But you forcing my hand, boy!” Then, so loud both of them jumped, the thunder struck.

“I wasn’t going to say anything about you, I just wanted to call my parents.”

“I’m your parents now, dumb-ass! You don’t know how hard this is! I don’t know what to do with these kids in December when they have to go home, and then they tell all their friends I don’t have no school. I can’t let them go, but I can’t keep them here another year. And then you have to show up, and you can actually talk normal . . .”

It suddenly occurred to Myron that Mr. Rodriguez was under the impression that the school year started in January, and he began to laugh.

“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re at the bottom of the river,” Mr. Rodriguez was shrieking. He jumped up and began to tremble all over. Myron was scared; he could feel every hair on the back of his neck, where Mr. Rodriguez had picked him up, begin to tingle. Suddenly he remembered feeling this way before. And at that moment a bison came bursting through the wall. Its great head smashed into Mr. Rodriguez and sent him flying to one side. The bison skidded into a bookshelf, and a set of hardcover Time-Life books came tumbling down onto its back. When it turned around, Myron had already darted out the hole in the wall and was running through the rain.

The wind and the driving rain made it hard to see, but Myron was fairly certain that a bison had managed to burst back out of the house and was in pursuit. He could feel it in his hackles. A bison was probably faster than a boy, he figured, so he deliberately headed for the copse of trees he’d passed a couple of hours before. He could hear the bison snorting and the thundering of its hooves close behind him, and he practically dived into the thick tangle of birch branches. Scrambling through the copse, he lit out at an oblique angle to the direction he’d entered, and was soon dodging between the rusted-orange chassis and engine blocks. It was hard to see in the rain, and a black tire, camouflaged against the ground, caught Myron’s foot. He went head over heels and was fortunate to land on nothing harder than the deep mud. He was breathing hard, and, in the precious seconds he spent prying himself out of the ground, he could sense his lead evaporating. Indeed, no sooner had he begun to run than he could hear the metallic clanging of a bison ricocheting off the upside-down body of half a minibus. Myron’s mud-sodden shoes were making their own noise, a grotesque sucking sound with every step.

“A cheetah, a cheetah,” Myron tried, but in vain. He remained a biped, and the bison was gaining.

But there ahead were the railroad tracks, and between him and them the broad ditch. Myron pitched down into it, through the filthy morass at the bottom, and began to mount the far side. Surely a bison would not be able to follow. Maybe Benson could turn into a man and climb around in ditches that way, but, frankly, Myron figured it was better to be pursued by a man than by a solid ton with horns. All these hopes flashed through Myron’s mind in the moment he scrambled up the side, but then, with a palpable burst of air pressure, a train came whistling by, less than a foot away. It was a freight train, and boxcar after boxcar sped past, with no end in sight. Myron was cut off.

“All right, it was a nice race, but you’re trapped now.”

Myron turned at the sound of the voice. There, separated from him only by six feet of ditch, stood, naked, the man who had terrified him in Westfield.

“What do you want?” Myron asked. The din of the rain and the hammering rails meant that he had to shout to be heard.

“The boss is curious about you. So you’re coming with me to meet him.”

“Is he going to hurt me?” Myron asked. The train was still going, still rumbling past.

“What do I care?”

Myron was desperate to keep Benson talking. Once the train was gone, maybe he could start running again. “How did you find me? What did you do with my parents?”

“You don’t have a choice in this, you know,” Benson said. And taking a step or two back, and then forward, he launched himself across the ditch, landing close to the speeding train. In the mud he slipped for a moment, and Myron caught his breath, but Benson righted himself. He was now standing right in front of Myron.

“Is it true,” Myron asked, “tell me first, is it true that we’re immortal lycanthropes?”

“I don’t know, or care, what they told you, but I can kill you, you know. I can gore you.”

“But you’d have to gore me, right? You can only kill me in animal form.”

Benson put his hand out. “Make this easy. Just give me your hand, and we’ll go back to the car.” Benson’s face, and his hand, lit up for a moment as a bolt forked across the sky.

Myron at that moment launched himself sideways, directly at the train. He bounced off the side with a horrible squelch, landed back on his soggy sneakers, tottered a moment, and fell directly back against the train. This time he happened to fall between cars, and with a series of cracks and a great outpouring of blood the front of a boxcar slammed into him. He fell down, as loose as a rag doll, gushing blood, but he stayed where he was, stuck on the coupling, as the train dragged him away. Benson stood wet and dumbfounded. Myron’s limp body was out of sight by the time the thunder sounded.