Chapter 13
Nightfall of January 1st, and on the outskirts of Phoenix, just off a highway, the van from Ashcraft lurked in the parking lot between a small tavern and a seedy economy motel. The lot was far from empty - holiday revelry was picking right up from where it had left off the night before, the frosty temperature proving to be no deterrent. Few people lingered outdoors, though; most darted like swallows from car to bar to bedroom and back again, some individually, some in clusters.
Inside the van, Spike drummed his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel. Oz sat quietly, almost meditatively, in the passenger seat. Every so often they passed a flashlight and a tiny bottle back and forth between them. Thu Khiem and Paloma occupied the bench seat behind them, gazing out through the windows at the human traffic.
"I'm gonna call Michael again." Thu dug her cellular phone from her coat pocket and fiddled with it in the darkness. Michael's vision that morning had been much clearer than those of the previous days - this time Elsie D's TV remote control had yielded him an actual address: The Roadrunner Inn (or as Dilip contemptuously referred to it, a "Motel 2.")
"Hi, it's me...uh-uh, we're still just sitting here waiting. Has the remote given you anything new?" She cupped her hand over the phone and told the others, "He keeps smelling beer and seeing little flashes, but they're blurry."
"Tell him to try adjusting the tracking buttons."
"Paloma says try adjusting the trac-" She stopped and rolled her eyes at Paloma's little smile. "Oh, haha. Very funny."
Another car pulled into a parking space not far from their own. They watched as a familiar figure in a dark overcoat stepped out of it and crunched across the gravel toward them. Paloma reached over and unlocked the van's door. "Buenos noches," she greeted, as Angel slid the door open and hoisted himself inside.
Spike gave him a glance, then turned his attention back to the view through the windshield again. "Running a little behind schedule, aren't you?"
"I had to drop Nina off at Wight's house." Angel nodded at the passenger seat. "Hey, Oz."
"Drop Nina off?" Spike piped, more than a little surprised. "What's she doing here?"
"She heard there were werewolves. Well, that Oz was here, and she wanted to see if he can teach her how to do the mutation control thing. And she thinks she might be able to help guard his family...do I smell fingernail polish?"
Spike and Oz each wordlessly raised a hand in the air without taking their eyes from the buildings. Their nails were freshly painted black.
Spike looked back over his shoulder at Angel and flashed an amused grin. "And you tried to tell her that she couldn't come, an' she told you to take a long walk off a short pier."
Angel shifted uncomfortably and scowled at Spike. "I just told her that I was concerned about her getting mixed up in a potentially dangerous situation." He paused. "And why am I explaining this to you, anyway?"
Oz sat up suddenly. "That's them."
Two men had just emerged from one of the motel rooms, their shoulders hunched and their faces obscured by the turned-up collars of their workshirts. They pulled the door shut behind them and stuffed their hands in their pants pockets. Neither wore a coat, but in spite of the cold they moved unhurriedly.
Oz was out of the van almost before anyone even realized he'd spoken.
"Wait!" Angel made a grab for the young werewolf, but he was already out of reach. Thu pressed her face to the glass for a view of Oz's departing back.
"There's no need to fear; Underdog is here!" she cheered in a stage whisper. "...And he's kind of scary-looking when he's pissed." She flopped across the bench seat's back with her head and arms hanging down and her legs kicking the air for balance and began digging through the weapons box in the cargo area.
The cold wasn't bothering Jeep as much as it should have. Nothing much seemed to bother him now, in fact - he felt A-fucking-firmative, in fact. Slicker'n snot on a doorknob. Had been, ever since they'd driven into this end of town...there was something under their feet, something in the ground, and it was giving them the finest rush they'd ever had in their lives.
He ambled along the side of the motel shoulder to shoulder with Barry, aiming for the alcove with the ice and soda machines. From the corner of his eye he noticed a short, smallish guy standing a few feet away in front of a row of parked cars, watching them. The stare rankled Jeep. As they passed by he glared at the stranger and snapped out, "What're you lookin' at, Shithead?"
Then he caught an odor he recognized, and jerked to a stop.
The stranger spoke.
"Stay away from Jordy."
Bobby's smell was on the guy, and Elsie's. Jeep remembered the little fucker now - it was the same sumbitch who'd had them arrested. The kid's brother or uncle or some damn thing.
He heard a chuffing sound of vehicle doors opening and closing, and four other people appeared from out of the darkness: two men, a woman, and a little girl.
Easy enough.
Barry began to chuckle low in his throat. A musky smell rose from his body as he and Jeep removed their hands from their pockets and fixed L'il Fucker and his friends with slow, nasty grins. Follicle by follicle, fur broke through the surface of their arms and jawlines and necks and across the back of their hands, traveling in a bizarre path like unchecked mold. Jeep raised his head to accommodate his stretching chin as his gums filled with new, savage teeth. It was the Moon Feel, but this time power was coming from the earth instead of the sky.
They waited gleefully for the fear, the gasps of shock, the looks of terror and the stumbling backwards and the running ("The runnin's the best part, watch 'em go; take out three or four with a swipe and chase down the last ones, tail 'em 'til they drop, maybe hump 'em if they're pretty.")
...But hell, they weren't running, they were just standing there, and that asshole with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth was smiling!
Then one by one the uncle-brother and the other two men and the woman started changing shape, too, and Jeep's and Barry's cocksureness faltered a little. Uncle Brother's eyes turned solid black, like theirs, and his fingers curved into claws and hair and teeth sprouted and damned if he wasn't a werewolf, too...and the hulking guy in the overcoat and the smiling smoker were God knew what; yellow eyes and caveman foreheads and two big fangs apiece, and the woman - jeezus tits, the woman suddenly looked as if she was half lizard.
Only the little girl remained human, studying Jeep and Barry with a dark, solemn scrutiny that Jeep found infuriating. Studied him like a bug, gawdammit; like he was a stuffed display in some pansy-ass museum, calm as a cucumber when she was supposed to be crying and screaming and crapping her pants, and this blatant disrespect maddened Jeep beyond all reason.
"You SHIT!" Livid, he threw himself at the girl, determined to wipe that curious expression off of her face and to wipe that face off of her head. He was almost on top of her when he saw a flash of metal swing up from her side. Alarm bells went off in his brain, and he checked himself in midair and twisted his body in a great convulsive effort to change direction. The movement pulled his legs up momentarily against his chest, and the girl's sword (SWORD? What the hell's a little girl doing with a SWORD?) whished across the air in front of her and missed his ankles by mere inches - if she'd been a foot taller she would have sliced open his kneecaps. He landed rolling and the blade arced back in the opposite path, whistling just over his head. Its edge grazed sidelong across his scalp; only a shallow surface wound, but for some reason it burned as though it were acid. Jeep leaped to his feet and backwards, and incredulously, saw the girl advancing on him, swinging the sword with both hands in a rhythmic side-to-side motion, rapidly, viciously, steady as a pendulum, and the look on her face was cold and deadly.
Barry - who had dropped to all fours and taken on the freakish appearance of an enormous brindle bulldog - let out a hoarse bark and lunged forward, but was intercepted by Oz and Paloma. The three of them went down in a hissing, snarling tangle that rolled behind an SUV and into the shadows.
In the same instant, one of the motel doors flew open, and the three missing members of the pack rushed out and looked around wildly. Rita shrieked at the sight of her husband dodging Thu. She charged after them, yellow terrycloth house slippers flapping insanely on her feet. The slippers burst apart when her feet expanded to almost twice their size and became paws. As she ran past, Angel balled up his hand, swung his arm out, and clouted her in the mouth with the back of his fist. Rita dropped like a struck ox.
It was then that another wondrous thing happened. In her youth, before Jeep and his exciting promises of immortality with just one small bite, a toothache-plagued Rita had had several cavities filled in her back molars. The shape-shifting didn't affect these back teeth much, although as years went by some of the fillings loosened. Angel's blow cracked four of her teeth, freeing the bits of metal. As she fell, she inhaled sharply, sucking the broken fragments of her mouth -blood, teeth, loose fillings - down her windpipe. The fine-edged little fillings, composed from a mixture of silver, copper, and tin, scratched the lining of Rita's trachea when she slammed against the ground.
Dilip would have gotten no argument from Gunn about the trachea's status as a vital organ.
As the fighting went on around her, Rita wheezed, thrashed, gaped wide-eyed at the gravel and asphalt in front of her face, and died.
The children of the night...what a stonking great stench they make, Spike thought when Toni hurtled into him. She'd gone Full Dog, reeking of acrid feral odors like skunk and mouse piss and tomcat spray. Smells like the monkey house at the zoo. He managed to stay on his feet, grappling to keep her claws from ripping him a new one, feeling absurdly as if he were wrestling with someone's overly-friendly Great Dane, or a dancing bear. Down, Fido. BAD pup.
Richard was still partially human and still standing upright, and in his confused mid-transformation state he tried to make fists of hands that could no longer be fisted, so that the punches he threw at Angel were ineffective. The vampire knocked him off his feet with a powerful leg sweep and shoved a sterling silver salad fork into his heart and that was the last of Richard.
"Gim-" Spike jerked his face to one side and spit wolf hair. "Gimme a hand here!" One of his feet had skidded in the gravel, and with Toni's weight against him he had overbalanced and fallen backwards across the hood of a car. Something else thudded onto the hood, too, and he heard a high-pitched "KyeeAAAAAH!" and caught a glimpse of Thu Khiem standing over him with the sword above her head, her mouth open and bellowing and her almond eyes as round and loony-looking as John Belushi's Samuri: Dry Cleaner. She gave WereToni two solid whacks across the torso. Toni stiffened and arched her back, and the motel porchlights lit up her snout to reveal bright pink lipstick smeared grotesquely across her flews. Then blood began running from her mouth and nose, and the lipstick wasn't visible anymore.
Spike rolled WereToni's limp body off of him in disgust. "Bitch."
Angel made a quick survey of the carnage: four of the pack were dead, or at least appeared to be - the male Thu had hit seemed to have succumbed to his head injury and was lying motionless a few yards away - while the fifth was fleeing into the open pasture east of the motel, with Paloma and Oz (It looks like...are they running on all fours?) at his heels.
Flashing red and blue lights turned in from the highway and made their way toward the tavern. "Buggar," Spike muttered. "Cops makin' a run through the car park." They'd hoped to pull off this job silently, avoid any run-in with law enforcement, and leave no trace of their having been here. Now they ducked low and hurried back to the van. They clicked the doors shut quietly, cranked the engine, and drove at what they hoped was an inconspicuous pace down the rows to the access road.
As they moved up onto the highway, Thu hung her head out the window and scanned the pastureland. "Where'd they go?" she fretted. "Crap, I hope they don't try to go back to the mo- Oh! There they are!" Two figures could just be made out in the pasture's center, walking in the direction of the parking lot. Spike idled the van on the shoulder of the road. Thu put her pinky fingers in the corners of her mouth and whistled. The figures stopped, then began walking again, this time in the van's direction. They quickened their pace to a jog. A few moments later, they crawled through a barbed-wire fence and climbed into the van, bloody and filthy, their clothing in tatters.
"We get 'em all?" Paloma gasped.
"Yep. Think so, anyway. Kind of lost track of who took out who." Spike glanced in the rearview mirror at the retreating motel grounds. "Coroner should have a hell of a time tryin' to make heads or tails of those corpses."
"Maybe he'll just think that they've got that condition where you grow hair all over your body that I saw on the Discovery Channel," Thu decided.
"Hypertrichosis." Oz found a roll of paper towels under the seat and wiped some of the gore from his hands and face. He was still breathing a little heavily, and in the van's dim interior lights his darkened eyes glittered like blackberries.
Paloma tried to speak again, but only succeeded in making a gargling noise. She stopped and waited a moment for her tongue and vocal chords to shift out of their natural chupacabra shapes and back into the alien human ones, and then she continued, "The guy we chased was pretty heavy. That must have been Barry." She mentally ran through the descriptions that Elsie D had given them. "The tall, skinny, long-haired grenudo was the brother-in-law."
"I picked off...Guy Number Three..." Angel tried to recall the name.
"Richard. You sporked Richard." Thu counted off the pack members on her fingers. "He's for sure dead. So's Barry - gross, you guys didn't eat him, did you? - and so is the brown-haired lady, Toni. Didn't Elsie say her sister was a blonde?"
"Yeah. I'm not sure if she's actually dead, though. All I did was knock her down."
"What about the hubby?" Spike asked. "Mr. The Hills Have Eyes?"
"I cut his head open," Thu replied. "I guess that killed him, didn't it?" She contemplated the silver-coated sword and her three upright fingers, and her voice trailed off worriedly.
"I guess it killed him..."