Running With the Pack (13 page)

He steps back, letting go of his sleeve. “No, thank you,” his voice says, with eerie politeness. “Not now.”

“Are you sure? We could—”

Tyler’s head shakes itself stiffly, and his legs turn him around and walk him out of the room, down the long hallway, and out of the school building.

His father is still sitting at the kitchen table, clutching a cup of coffee with both hands. He doesn’t seem surprised to see Tyler back home at ten o’clock in the morning on a school day. He raises his haggard face to look at Tyler, but he doesn’t speak.

“It’s getting worse,” Tyler tells him.

“Yes,” his dad says. Just: Yes.

Tyler takes a deep, painful breath. “Is it going to happen to me?”

His father passes a hand over his eyes, wiping away a vision, or a nightmare. “I don’t . . . Dear God, Tyler. I don’t know.”

“But Mom thought it would.”

“Thought it might,” his father says, his voice strained. “Only that it might.”

“Whatever.” Tyler’s chest tightens around the knowledge.

The phone call he’s been waiting for is never going to come.

He starts to turn away, but his father’s voice stops him.

“Tyler,” he says. “I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again that way, I promise. We’ll figure out some safeguard. We’ll make sure you’re protected. We’ll—”

“I know,” Tyler says. “It’s all right, Dad.”

The words feel funny in his mouth. False and jagged. Hurtful. Necessary.

He’s never lied to his father before.

Experiments
, his mother’s voice reminds him.
Labs . . .

Antidotes,
Tyler tells her.
Cures.

The phone book is upstairs, underneath his bed.

WERELOVE

LAURA ANNE GILMAN

Katya sat on her porch, and watched the street. The neighborhood had been built in the 50s, when sprawl was something you did on the sofa, and everyone had two cars and a lawn. Her house was the third in the pretty little cul-de-sac, five houses set in landscaped lots, with backyards perfect for games of touch football or Frisbee or general roughhousing—safe places for wild-tempered kids with too much energy, or teenagers counting down the days of the month, or adults who just liked to laze about in hammocks, and watch the night sky, a glass of sangria in their hands and the remains of dinner on the patio table.

Katya had raised children herself. Two boys, who had gone off and done things in the world. Max was an immigration lawyer. Leon taught grade school math and coached the local track team. Neither of them had children of their own, at least not that they told her, and she never asked why. She had no interest in being grandmotherly.

So it had been a true surprise to her when, somewhere in her sixties, the neighborhood children started coming to her with their problems.

Not the human ones, no. Only the werewolves.

Katya had come to this neighborhood when her sons were grown, had lived in the small green-painted house in the cul-de-sac for ten years. She had drawn no attention to herself, nor sought out others. But they came to her, appearing on her porch and sitting quietly, waiting for her attention. She would come out with a pitcher of lemonade, sometimes, or a thermos of coffee. They would sit on the porch, in all weather, and she would listen. And, because they were teenagers, they almost always asked variations on the same thing.

Katya gave them the truth. “Sex is for release and offspring. There is no morality to it and no immorality. Those are rules for someone else’s game.”

Some of them looked relieved. Some protested, swallowing the veneer of their surroundings instead of listening to their own nature.

“Sleep with them and get it over with,” she told the girls. “Don’t expect anything more than the moment,” she told the boys. Not unkindly, not cruelly, but with age’s knowledge: sex meant more to the males. It was how they marked their place, laid their scent. They were basic: hunt, kill, eat, protect. Girls looked forward, long-view. It did not matter what the pairing: the gender traits bred true. Katya was an old woman, and knew enough about nurture to give Nature her due.

Contrary to modern folklore, weres did not run in packs, did not have territories, and did not keep to their own kind. It would, she thought often, have been simpler if they did: a way to remember who they were, not losing themselves in what they pretended. Of course, that would also mean a serious bit of inbreeding, which brought its own problems. Instead they lived with humans, lived as humans, sheathing claw and tooth in handshakes and smiles, squeezing their inner selves into the brief window the Moon demanded.

But they should never forget. The danger lay in forgetting.

Not everyone felt as she did. “You should not tell them these things.” A parent cornered her once in the supermarket, their carts side by side in the produce department. “You confuse them, lead them into trouble.” His face had been stern, his eyes worried. Katya only shrugged; she did not invite these children onto her porch, she did not ask them to confide in her. She did not tell them anything that was not true.

“Their blood runs hot, the change confuses them, they are learning how different they are when they need to be the same, to fit in. If we are not truthful, how can we teach them?”

“Teenaged politics,” the parent said with a shrug, not callous but with the casual disdain that time endows. “The change comes to us all. We all survive.”

He believed that, but she knew that some did not. And there were not so many of them in this world that she could stand aside, and simply watch.

Katya had not asked for this, the sharing of confidences, the laying out of fears, but she would not shy away, either. Most of their questions were foolish ones, puppy whingings or worries. They asked, and some-times they listened, but more often they drank her iced tea or her coffee and made their noises, and went away, not learning a thing.

She made no promises, and told them no lies. The rest was up to them.

Most of those children who came to her moved away as they became adults, looking for something new, something more. Empty-den parents moved away, and new families came, because the suburbs were kind to their folk. Katya stayed, because she had nowhere else to be, and the new children followed what had become tradition, to ask the old bitch for advice.

Once alpha, always alpha. She had not announced herself, but you could not change what you were.

The girl was no teenager, no raw and anxious child climbing her stairs. She was long and lean, the way weres were, her shoulders erect and her eyes bright and clear. Brown curls clung to the side of her head in a fashion that had been daring when Katya was her age, accentuating her nose and eyes, and her skin was dusky-smooth and unwrinkled. Her car was parked by the curb, a sedate little coupe, dark blue and brand-new.

Katya did not make her wait in the hot sun, but brought out the pitcher of iced tea, placed it on the table between their chairs, and waited.

“They say . . . you know what to do. You understand the old ways.”

“They say many things.” Katya poured two glasses, left one on the table and drank from hers.

“It’s over. My marriage.”

“I’m sorry.” Katya was. She might never have chosen that path herself, but love was never to be disparaged. But she said no more. This girl was none of hers, had not grown up here; Katya had no obligation to her.

Save the girl had climbed her stairs, had lifted her throat in submission, and asked for help.

“Is he..”

“One of us? Yes.”

Katya knew, then, where this would end, and felt a deep, bone-deep sorrow.

“I don’t want it to be over but. . . . ” The girl—woman, really—waved her hands helplessly, unable to find the words. “But it is. And I don’t know how to do this.”

“File for divorce?”

That got a sad, bitter laugh. “I know that. I have a lawyer. It . . . the moment I realized it wasn’t going to work, I moved out, got a lawyer, told him to stay away. He didn’t understand. He thought we could work it out, that I’d change back, come back to him.”

She shuddered, although Katya couldn’t tell if it was at the thought of going back to her ex, or the fact that she couldn’t. The girl’s hand shook as she lifted the iced tea to her lips. “I mean, this, the messy stuff. The inside stuff.”

Katya did not nod, or make an encouraging noise. She sat in her chair, back straight, shoulders relaxed. The cane she never used lay at her feet, the wooden grain satin-smooth. Katya was old now, but she had not always been so, and she knew what would follow. The girl was seeking a reminder of what she already knew, had forgotten in her years out in the world, where people wore civilization as though it was more than a veneer.

“I want to howl my pain. I want to bite his hand when he dares touch me. I want to cuddle and tell him it’s okay, I forgive him, I understand, and hear the same words from him, so we can let it go, move on. I need to move on, and I can’t, because he can’t and I don’t know what to do.”

The words fell from her mouth like well-chewed meat, soft and broken-down. Katya felt exhaustion in her bones, exhaustion and sadness growing as the words filled the air between them. Nobody had ever told this child anything, and Katya felt a growl grow in her throat. Who were her people, to have been so careless?

You cannot choose whom you love. Not human, not were. But it was safer to be human. Kinder to be human, and not so fierce.

The girl went on, her voice crackling. “I feel like I’m chasing my tail, only I have three tails and only one jaw. And I try to talk to my friends and they look at me like I’m insane, and give advice that doesn’t fit, and all I can do is change and run, and it feels all right for a moment and then I’m back and everything’s the same.”

She looked at the older woman, despair in her eyes. “Does that make any sense?”

“None at all,” Katya said, in the voice that said
Yes, it makes perfect sense, I understand.

She had not always been an old woman. Once her skin had been dusky-smooth as well. Her eyes had been bright, her heart fierce, and she had loved a man who could not match her, and would not let her go.

You could not choose where your heart went. You could only suffer the consequences.

The girl finished speaking, draining the dregs of her tea and placing it with exaggerated care, as though she were drunk, on the small round table beside her, the glass top perfectly polished, the cast iron legs weather-washed and nicked. Like her, like this girl: a survivor.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Katya did not give advice. She did not make promises, and she did not lie.

The girl had a faraway look in her eyes, the kind that looked at something distant, invisible. “I don’t want to hurt him. But I will. I’ll gut him, if I have to, to get away. He doesn’t get that.”

Katya closed her eyes, the powder-dry skin softening in repose.

They never do. Not until it is too late.

They both heard the howl rising, and both turned to look; a motorcycle, turning down the street, cutting the engine in front of Katya’s house, the rumbling echo fading into the sky above the houses. He swung his leg over the beast, removing his helmet and placing it on the handlebar. A handsome creature, as strong and lithe as the girl. Each motion was precise, steady, the moves of a surgeon, or a painter.

“Oh, fuck.”

The girl’s words were soft, barely whispered, but Katya felt her jaw drop open slightly in sympathetic laughter, a wolf’s humor trumping any human shell.

The boy strode up the walk, standing at the base of the stairs, glaring up at them. He was angry, so angry; Katya could feel the heat of his rage simmering above his skin. The girl was angry too, but she controlled it, holding it within. Females have more understanding, they know how to embrace their emotions, offering them up to the Moon, racing them down until they’re manageable, shifting them into calories burned, not words said.

An alpha female thinks long-term, survival of the species. Males know only kill, or die.

“Get down here!” His voice was hoarse, his gaze not angry but despairing. He does not understand; he will not leave without her, not willingly.

He is were; he should know better. But they have no choice, none of them.

“Humans are fortunate,” Katya says, speaking as much to her own memories as the flesh and blood girl in front of her. Too late, the lesson comes. “They can let go of love. It fades, dims, becomes a pleasant memory. They can choose to part as friends.

They didn’t, all too often, but they had that choice.

“We are made from stronger passions, and domestication has neither stripped nor blunted us. We have only two options: turn love to hate, or love until we die.”

The words were no comfort. A were who loved was a mighty thing. A were who hated . . .

Freedom, like love, has a price.

“I can’t do this.”

But the girl stands, her body slim but muscled, her head high and her eyes clear, staring down her fate, and Katya knows that she can.

IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

MOLLY TANZER

My daughter turned into a lamb and I ate her.

It wasn’t my fault—I mean, it was, it is. It is still my fault, but I didn’t know what I was doing.
I knew not what I did
, that was an expression, or something similar, at least. I knit the sweater, but how could I know about the other? Times were lean, dire even. We were so
cold
. I should have put two and two together, as the expression used to be. Simple math. In high school I struggled through algebra and geometry, but I dropped trig. I could do the easy stuff, I used that later, keeping the books at the yarn store, but I liked more to work with my hands, cooking, and crafts. Knitting, of course.

Now the school is closed. I mean, no, it is open, but open to the sky; the roof caved in because we stripped the shingles, took everything salvageable, so though it is closed it is still open, empty, like a skin. Like her skin. What was left of it.

Things get worse before they get better,
that was another expression, and it was like that for me, for a time, even after the corn-sickness.
Darkest before the dawn.
That was another way they used to say the same thing. Things get worse before they better, it’s darkest before the dawn, but now things are just worse, and I don’t like daylight very much any more.

The funny thing is, I thought I was safe. I didn’t eat anything with corn syrup in it, never-ever, and I never let Elsbet eat it either. I’ve always been into natural living, now more than ever, I suppose, green, eco-friendly. I’d talk to others about it on internet forums, I once drove down to Boulder to go to a workshop on minimizing my carbon footprint. The news was full of global warming and consumerism, the sheep flu that mutated and mutated, sheep, then people, then cats, ferrets even, spreading, people were dying, it was bad. The government rushed to find a vaccine but I didn’t take it. Jimmy did, he said it was all right, said they’d tested it enough. He wanted Elsbet to get it but I wouldn’t allow it; there’s mercury in vaccines, I read an article about it in
Mother Jones.

Why they never talked about the dangers of corn we’ll never know, but that’s what did it. I figured it out for myself, after everything. Not the stuff on the cob, though that was dangerous enough, but the syrup and the derivatives and the isolates and whatever. I always said that stuff would be the death of us, but I was speaking metaphorically. I thought. Just an expression. I was talking about heart disease and cancer, not actually the corn itself, but what it did to your body, spiked your blood sugar, made you fat, rotted your teeth, made kids too hyper to learn. But in the end, it was the actual corn, not just the long-term stuff, and it got all of us, in its own way.

I thought I was doing the right things, and I guess it turns out I was. Maybe. If I think about it, remember, or if I look at old cans when I find them, cat food, even, it all had corn. Animal feed. Envelopes, the sweet taste when you licked them. I knew something would happen, I mean, if you mess with the genetics of something enough, how can you tell what it will do in the real world? It isn’t natural. I knew it. I figured it out. For myself.

We had been GMO-free in our house for years, but it didn’t save Jimmy. He loved soda, that’s how it got him. He had gone to the doctor’s office, I remember that, Jimmy got vaccinated that day. It was the first day they had it where we were,
in the boonies
or
the sticks
, as they used to say, before everywhere was the boonies. I stayed at the yarn store while he waited in line for hours to get it, and then he went to the vet to get the vaccine for Smokey, she was his cat from before we were married, and he insisted. I had told him to get gas, and he got a soda while he was there. I saw the cup in the trash. That night we watched the news and heard there had been a rash of hospitalizations, people sick, they didn’t know what was wrong. We turned it off. They said to call poison control if you had unexplained abdominal cramping, vomiting, bloody diarrhea.

I fed Smokey. She had a routine, she’d meow and meow when I opened the can, purring around my legs. When she was done she’d lick her whiskers and roll on her back, but that night, she stopped halfway through her dinner, stood up on her hind legs, howled at us, started walking around. Elsbet started crying. We called the all-night vet but they weren’t there, just the voice mail. Finally we got Smokey into her carrier, but when we drove by, the place was dark. A lot of places were dark. Houses. Like I said, it all happened so fast, it felt like overnight, now that I think back on it. So we shut Smokey in the basement with some water and a blanket, we didn’t know what else to do. Elsbet was so sad, she was three and she loved the kitty so much. We put in a video because nothing any of us liked was on. Most of the stations were just test patterns anyways.

It was a long time before I checked on Smokey. I don’t know when she died. I forgot about her, because of Jimmy. At first it seemed like salmonella, he just doubled over while brushing his teeth, shat himself on the bathroom floor. Then he was gone—911 didn’t answer when I called. Neither did the police. I was scared, really scared, I slept in Elsbet’s bed with her, tried not to cry so she wouldn’t be scared too. I wondered if we would die, but we woke up the next morning just fine. I thought we were lucky.

I don’t know how many people died. A lot. Maybe most. That shit was in everything. And I don’t know either if it built up in the bloodstream or was just a bad batch that poisoned everyone. Probably the latter, Jimmy didn’t eat so much of it, and it was just the one Dr Pepper that got him. But Elsbet and I, we were fine. Our town was small, outside of Boulder, and frankly, we weren’t doing too well before it happened. Knotty or Knice, my yarn shop, Jimmy and I had sunk a lot of money into it, but before everything, with the way things were, it was more expensive to knit your own scarves and hats and sweaters than to just buy them, even the nice brands. Yarn was pricy. And it still was after the corn-sickness got everyone, you just couldn’t buy it with money. Credit cards, and even cash got abandoned pretty quick. You couldn’t eat it, you can’t really wear it. Most of the bills got stuffed into blankets or hats or shoes as padding, the coins melted down for more useful purposes. Barter economy. It just sort of fell into place. At least it did where I was. I don’t know about anywhere else.

There was a lot of theft, in the wake of it all, but at that point we had no choice, it was getting cold already. Another expression:
desperate times lead to desperate measures
, more true than the others. Sometimes two and two don’t get put together, and sometimes, as I said, the dawn doesn’t break after the darkest part of the night. But desperate times
always
lead to desperate measures.

People stocked up on food and clothing for free, looted, stole. Not as violent as you’d think, and no one stole my yarn. We didn’t even have a window broken at Knotty or Knice. Target, Wal-Mart, after the first few weeks no one was taking the TVs and jewelry. When we realized how widespread it was it became about clothing, warm clothing, shoes, and old-fashioned household appliances, the kind you could use without electricity. And food. Nothing with corn syrup. You couldn’t be too careful. At least, in my opinion. I saw fools taking soda and Oreos and ketchup, but not me. After we’d cleaned out our local supermarket of meat and produce, and our health food store for cookies and shit that didn’t have the killer corn, we went on a raid to Boulder, loaded up in our Subarus and used precious gasoline to drive down and see what we could get. I left Elsbet with a couple of the other kids who survived, some were older and could be trusted.

There was more to eat down there than you’d think, not a lot of people in Boulder were left, even with their ordinances and bike paths and eco-friendly coffee shops and whatever. Most of them drank Coke, ate unsafe candy, got a shot of corn-laced hazelnut syrup in their lattes, and that was all it took. When we walked into Whole Foods there was a gang of ragged-looking folks raiding the meat case, most of it had gone off but some was still all right, we talked with them for a while but when they found out we were out-of-towners it got a little ugly. After it all, my friend Samantha suggested we see if any seeds were left at Home Depot and there were, we took cucumbers and squashes and broccoli and carrots and everything. I don’t have a green thumb, I traded most of those for food.

I thought we were set, and we were, at first. Our house was old, we had a wood-burning stove, and I kept Elsbet and I in meals by teaching people to knit. I’d made another stop before I’d driven back up home, Michael’s, Jo-Ann Fabrics, took all the yarn they had in stock. There was a lot, people weren’t thinking ahead. Most of it was acrylic, I’d never knit with it before, but it was more about keeping warm than anything else.

So finally people were coming to Knotty or Knice, people who never cared to support me before the corn-sickness. The snows started early that year and a few months in, when their stuff wore out or they just needed more scarves and socks to bundle up in at night, they came. They were quick studies. When the needles sold out they made them out of dowels pilfered from the hardware store, sanded down. Elsbet and I were rich, so much food, we put on weight while our neighbors were getting thinner, but with all the factories shut down and no phones I couldn’t order more yarn when it ran out. I had to get it from somewhere else. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Begin at the beginning, and when you get to the end, stop.
Another expression. Or was it a quote? I can’t remember now.
Also, if you teach a man to fish.
When my yarn ran out, times got lean again, people were frogging their sweaters and re-knitting them. I’d taught them to fish, but I ended up hungry for it.

Jimmy used to make fun of me for not eating meat. He used to laugh and say that humans hadn’t crawled to the top of the food chain just to eat lettuce. But there’s a problem with being at the top of the food chain. I had read an article on pesticides killing birds of prey, they were dying because of farmers setting out poisoned grain to kill rats. The rats would eat the poison and die, and then vultures and eagles and owls would eat the poisoned rats, and they’d get poisoned. Same with sharks and mercury-tainted fish. They were at the top of their food chain, I mean, except for humans, but it wasn’t doing them any favors. Not in the end.

In the end, it didn’t do us any favors, either.

I had started eating meat. I had to. Elsbet too, though she hadn’t ever had it before, Jimmy had been all right with us raising her vegetarian, but towards the middle of that first winter, when we ran out of canned beans and damn near everything else, I traded some knitted stuff for some goat meat and we cooked it and ate it. It had been so long I couldn’t recall if it tasted strange or not, but we were starving, it wouldn’t have mattered. Elsbet hated it, eating animals. I did too. At first. But what can you do?
Desperate times
. Meat was scarce, though, a lot of animals had died, too, corn in their feed. The ones that survived must’ve been immune, a slight genetic abnormality or something. Recessive traits, I remember doing Mendel’s Squares in biology class. Something like that. But thinking about it I also remember reading something about evolutionary defenses, how onions make you cry because they’re trying not to get eaten, like poison ivy—
one-two-three, don’t touch me,
another expression—or like skunks. Maybe skunks would be a better analogy here because they’re animals. But I’m not sure. It’s all I’ve got, my only theory, I figured it out for myself.

The way it started was this: I had seen Fred Jones in town, he traded me some meat for a scarf and a hat, he didn’t have time to learn to knit, he was a farmer, his wife had died. Anyways Fred and I got to talking and I told him I was running low on yarn, and he asked if I could spin, he had a bunch of sheepskins and if I wanted to shear off the wool and spin it into yarn I’d be welcome to, as long as he got something out of it. So I went out there.

It should’ve tipped me off when I saw the flock, standing on their hind legs, huddled together, bleating at one another like it was the most natural thing in the world. But things had gotten so crazy at that point it didn’t even occur to me that I should be concerned. I’d seen odder things, everybody had, but the sheep, there they were, standing upright. I wish now I’d asked Fred if that was normal for them. I can’t ask anymore, I can’t speak, only to myself, so it’s too late. I’d ask the sheep, but they shy away from my scent, and rightfully so.

I took the fleece and began to learn to spin it. I had a book in the shop and a few distaffs, spindles, and spinning wheels Jimmy and I had ordered when we thought our shop would be a success. I mean, it was. Briefly. Just not in the way we’d meant. Actually, it wasn’t. Isn’t. Not anymore. It doesn’t matter. I got the hang of it quickly—it wasn’t too hard, really, but everything takes time. I finally had enough to knit some long underwear for Fred and a sweater for Elsbet, and I’d just started on the knitting when the wolf attacked us.