Strays (34 page)

“You don’t know?” Tom asked.

Kyle frowned.  “All I know is I drove over 1000 miles in the last 24 hours because I’m supposed to
do
something.  I don’t know
what
yet, but here I am.”

“That’s it?” Tom groaned.  “You hop in a car, have no idea what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go?”  He rolled his eyes.  “Strays,” he muttered.  “They’ll never make much sense to me.”

“To be fair,” Kyle said, “it took some persuading from Molly.”

“Not much, I suppose.”

“Damn right, not much.  Look at her, man, who could say no to that?”  He felt Molly’s fingernails digging harder into his leg, and he flinched.  “I’m still in the dark,” he said.  “Well, more like in the gray.  I think I’m the only one at the table who
doesn’t
know all that’s going on.  Anyone want to bring me up to speed?”

He sat back in his chair, folded his hands, and looked at each person (or whatever some of them were) who sat at the table.  Tom wasn’t going to say anything—it was clear he wanted Kyle gone—and Strawberry and the older woman, Trudy, remained forever taciturn, as if this information was not theirs to reveal.  That left Molly, who hadn’t given him a straight answer since he’d met her, and then there was the girl he’d just met in the front yard, Sarah, the only other human in the bunch besides Trudy.  He decided at last to let his eyes rest upon her.

“You have answers,” he said.  “At least, you look like you do.”

Sarah did not meet his stare.  With eyes lowered, hands at the edge of the table, she forced a wan smile and pushed herself up in her chair.

“Where are you going?” Tom asked.

“He’s coming,” she said, frowning.  “In case you forgot.  And from the looks of this bunch, there’s not much that’s going to stop him.  Might as well go out and wait for him.”

She walked with soft steps around the table to the porch door.  The spring played its off-kilter guitar slide as she opened it.  She stepped outside and let the door slam behind her.  Kyle turned and peered out the window, watching her as she went to the edge of the porch and sat.

“That’s just great,” Tom said.  “Now look what you’ve done.”

“Who’s coming?” Kyle asked. 

“You really don’t know?”

Kyle worked it in his head.  There had been something when she touched him, a vision of a terrible thing that smelled of stale cigarettes and chuckled at her from the shadows.  “I have a vague idea,” he said.  “But I don’t know all of it.”

“She ran away from home about a week ago,” Tom said. 

Kyle nodded.  “I saw that w she put her hand on my chest.  I saw that she’s running from something.  Something awful.” 

“Her stepfather,” Tom said.  “He’s coming to take her back.”

Kyle looked out the window at Sarah, who sat with her back to the house, facing a sea of cats that waited in the yard.  Her narrow shoulders were hunched forward as if cowering from the cold, even though it was a warm summer day.

“We can’t let that happen,” Tom said.  “He can’t have her back.”

“This stepfather,” Kyle said.  “I felt him when she touched me.” 
Felt
was an understatement.  Kyle had almost been able to
smell
the bastard, a pungent cloud that boiled above a maggot-covered piece of meat rotting in an ashtray.  “He’s bad news.”

“He is,” Tom admitted.  “But he’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Kyle’s eyes were fixed on Sarah through the open window, on how alone and terrified she looked.  The urge to stand between her and whatever was coming burned as fiercely as his cravings for the drink.  “She’s the one.”

Tom shook his head and discharged one of his customary
humphs
.  “What do you know about Sarah anyway?”

“I saw her in a dream,” Kyle said. 

“What was she doing?”

Kyle scratched his chin and continued to watch Sarah through the window.  “She was in trouble.  And something, probably her stepfather, was coming.  I was trying to protect her.”

“Did you?” Tom asked. 

Kyle glanced over at him and frowned.  “I did not.”

“No surprise there.”

“Look,” Kyle said, turning back to the table.  “She’s the reason I drove all this way.  I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do with her.”

There was a slight thud as Tom’s hands gripped the edge of the table.  “What do you
want
to do with her?”

“Don’t be disgusting,” Kyle said.  “She's only … what?  Fourteen?”

“Fifteen,” Tom said. 

“Well, I don’t know what works for you cat-people, but in my neck of the woods, carrying on with a girl that young is plain wrong.”  He shook his head and ran his fingers across his head.  His hair was slick with a day’s worth of travel, oily and in need of a wash, and for some reason that made him angry.  “My father didn’t raise me that way.  I didn’t come all this way for
that
.”

“Then what?” Tom said.  “What’s in it for you?”  He watched Kyle, waiting, and all at once his eyes twitched and he offered a slow nod.  “Ah, that’s it.  Molly.”

“What about her?” Kyle asked.  He could feel the muscles in his legs tensing, coiling to spring him from his seat and challenge Tom to battle.   He glanced over at Strawberry and Trudy, who seemed to be inching back from the table with every word spoken, clearing the way for a makeshift arena where he and Tom could settle this like men.

“You think you get her when all this is said and done?” asked Tom.  “Is that what’s in it for you?”

“Who says
anything’s
in it for me?” snapped Kyle.  “Maybe this isn’t even
about
me.”

“It’s
always
about you!”  Tom’s fingers were tightening, kneading against the table.  “Your kind doesn’t do anything unless there’s something in it for yourself.” 

Kyle noted Tom’s arms, firm and cut and trembling with an effort to restrain.  At any moment, he might pounce over the table and make the first move if Kyle did not chose his next words carefully.  With great care, he reached down and removed Molly’s hand from his leg.  He then lifted both hands, offered them both palm up and open.  Dad had told him once—

Never lost a fight because I always found a way to stay out of them.

—that the idea for the friendly wave came from primitive man raising a hand to show that he had no weapon.  He might as well allow himself to be unarmed right now.

“It’s none of your business why I’m here, Tom,” he said, “and I don’t feel I’m required to tell you.  Nevertheless, I will …
if
it will un-bunch your panties a little bit.”

Kyle heard a snort to his left, and he glanced over at Strawberry, who was covering her mouth to suppress a laugh.  Well, why not?  The annoyed look on Tom’s face was priceless.

“Speak,” Tom said.  “I’m all ears.”

Kyle folded his hands on the table next to his cup of coffee, stared at his intertwined fingers a moment.  “I don’t know what it’s like for you cat-people—”

“Don’t call us that,” Tom interrupted.  “We’re not a bunch of freaks out of a comic book.”

Kyle nodded.  “My apologies.  I don’t know what it’s like for you … for your kind, but for
my
kind, for … for humans—”

“Strays,” Tom corrected.

“For us, the world doesn’t add up most of the time.  It’s like your whole life is spent being told you’re supposed to be something you never can be.  Does that make sense?”

Tom’s face was confused, but it also seemed to soften.  “No, not really.”

“We’ve got these things called movies,” Kyle continued.  “You heard of movies, Tom?”

Tom grinned.  “We’re not living with the Amish here.  I’ve heard of movies.”

Kyle smiled back, and the first real moment of understanding seemed to pass between them.  “These movies,” he said.  “They show us things.  Men behaving the way men are
supposed
to behave.  Women looking the way every woman wants to look but no woman possibly could.”  He looked at Molly and smiled.  “Present company excepted, of course.”

Molly met his gaze but did not smile back.

“You go through life being told by these movies what you should be,” Kyle went on, “but where I come from you never get a chance to be it.”  He stopped to reflect on his own words, as if they had appeared in front of his face without his summoning them.  In that moment, something fell over him, he was back in time, rising in the early morning hours to roll and deliver his newspapers, over and over, every morning without fail, like the eternal rolling of the stone up the hill. 

“You do the same thing, day in, day out,” he muttered, “and no one outside your little town knows if you live or if you die.”

He glanced up at Tom to see if he was getting this.  He clearly was not—how could anyone with his powers possibly get it?—but it looked as if he was at least trying.

“It’s like this,” Kyle said.  “When you’re a guy like me, living in that place, and a pretty girl like Molly comes along and tells you you’re made for something else, that you have something special to do, well …”  He paused and looked at Molly again, and this time Molly found a smile to give back to him.  “A guy like me doesn’t ask questions.  He just goes, you know?  He trusts his heart and goes.” 

He looked about for more words, drumming his fingers on the table.  He found nothing, so he looked at Tom and nodded.  “Any of this making sense?”

“Maybe,” Tom said.  “Maybe.” 

*   *   *   *

Even if the window hadn’t been open to let a breeze pass through the house, Sarah would have caught every word Kyle said.  She wanted to ignore it, to shut out his voice (which was about as pleasant to her as squeaky hinge), but his words—his thoughts—had loped after her, hanging around in her brain like a lost puppy.  It wasn’t so much that she consciously heard what he was saying, but there was a sense of his essence now, sort of clinging to her like dust, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.  Sure, what he had just said was kind of nice, and maybe a part of her—the part that had tried to get lost in the magical high school of
Grease
so many years ago—felt the same way.  But still, there was something off about the guy, something that didn’t seem to fit with anything in the world, least of all with her.

She was grateful, at least, that the fight was diffused, not so much because she had worried for Tom’s safety (Tom could have taken Kyle out blindfolded, and he wouldn’t have to bare his claws to do it) but because she had no need for more violence.  Her whole life had been violence, be it a flying boot to her ribcage or something much worse, and she had run away from the Nightmare House to find a peaceful place.  Watching Tom engage in another fight, this time with someone who was claimed to be a friend, would not make such peace come to pass.

And then she saw the Datsun making its slow grind down the hill. 

There was no mistaking that weathered old truck, its hazy blue-gray finish that always reminded Sarah of the rainy skies of Tacoma.  It was as if a piece of that sky had fallen to earth and followed her here, a bitter reminder of the world she had just managed to escape.

Faux-Dad,
she thought. 
I knew you’d come.

In a way, she was
almost
relieved that the constant fear of Big Buddy finding her had now passed.  No more looking over her shoulder, no more nightmares of his thunderous gray boots.  Big Buddy Faux-Dad had bullied his way into this world, and in minutes he would be here, standing in the yard and demanding she return to the place of very bad dreams. 

She reached over to one of the posts supporting the roof over the porch and pulled herself to her feet.  She did not take her eyes off the road to the west as she eased over to the side of the house and tapped on the sill of the window.  The people in the kitchen stirred.

“He’s here,” she said. 

There was a noisy shamble of scooted chairs and footsteps as everyone bolted from the table and came tumbling onto the porch as if emerging from a clown car.  She could hear their feet tramping about, and Tom was at her side at once, hands upon her shoulders.

“You sure it’s him?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sarah. 

They all stood in silence on the porch as the blue-gray Datsun pickup rolled across the culvert and into Trudy’s large gravel drive.  Sarah could make out the shape of two people in the truck, the swollen head like a rotted watermelon that was Big Buddy, and a second person, possibly female but not Sarah’s mother because Mom’s hair was not as long and wavy.  For a moment, Sarah wondered if Big Buddy had taken up with another woman … and then she remembered the forest two days earlier and realized it was not a woman at all.

The Datsun’s croaking engine grumbled and died.  The driver-side door opened.  A pudgy, calloused hand Sarah knew all too well reached up and grabbed the edge of the door. 

And then out into the Oregon morning stepped the man Sarah feared most, the bulky, lumbering mass of a monster called Big Buddy. 

Face-Off

“What’s the plan?” Kyle whispered.  He stood behind Tom and Sarah, peering between their heads and above their touching shoulders at the thing in the yard. 

Tom turned his head slightly, never letting his eyes leave the creature.  “You tell me.  It’s your call now.”

“My call?” Kyle asked.  “I’m the last per—”

“I’m not interested in your excuses,” Tom interrupted.  “You’re calling the shots now.”

“I can’t do that,” Kyle insisted.  “You’re the one that got Sarah here in one piece.  Shouldn’t calling the shots be
your
job?”

Tom let his hands drop from Sarah’s shoulders and stepped back until he was alongside Kyle.  He nudged Molly back so he could draw close, and he spoke in low tones.  “I’d like nothing better,” he whispered.  “But you’re here now.  We take our cues of you.”

“No,” Kyle muttered.  “I can’t.”

“It’s the way that it is,” Tom said. “This is your battle.” 

He took the hem of his own t-shirt and peeled it up, flipping it over his head and tossing it on the floor of the porch.  He stood bare-chested and pale, every inch of his torso knotted with thick cords of muscle.  He reached down and unbuckled his belt.  A strange, buzzing electricity trembled in air.