Strays (7 page)

“Hey there!” Rhino shouted, shaking his head wildly like a bull.  “Where’d you run off to, girlie-girl?”

He was not wearing his glasses now, and he had ditched the Seattle Seahawks cap.  His massive splash of hair hung in his eyes and about his face and neck, but she could still three of the awful letters (
LAY
) tattooed across his Adam’s apple as he thrust out his chin and bared his teeth in an ugly grin. 

“Shouldn’t run off like that,” he said.  He stepped into the stream, his gray sneakers splashing in water about two inches deep.  “We never got a chance to play.”

Rhino tucked his thumbs in his belt loops and affected an exaggerated saunter like an old farmer surveying crops.  His legs swung forward in sluggish arcs, splashing on the wet rocks.  He was in no hurry to get to her.  His eyes, which Sarah saw were as gray as his sneakers as he advanced, bore an ignoble arrogance, the eyes of a predator that had trapped its prey and was savoring the final moments.

Sarah tucked her clothes under her arm.  “You better not come any closer.”

“Whatcha going to do, girlie-girl?  Call the cops?”  He leaned his head back and cackled.  “Fifteen’ll getcha twenty.  That’s what you said.  Well, they gotta catch me first.”

Sarah spun on the rocks and leapt up the embankment, springing into the woods.  Somewhere behind her, Rhino’s laugh ripped through the woods, a dark spirit in its own right, swirling and pinballing off the trees as it tracked her.  She could hear the splashes of his sneakers pick up rhythm as he charged across the river after her. 

“Tom!” she screamed.  “
Toooommmm!
”

The slap of Rhino’s sneakers on the cold earth could be heard right behind her, drawing closer with every stride.  He was fast, much faster than Sarah would have thought, and that laugh, that awful laugh like the soul of a madman, chuttered and chirped behind him!

“
Tooommmm
!” she screamed.

“Tom!” cried Rhino behind her, sounding not the least bit winded.  “Where are you, Tom!  Let’s play, Tom!  Let’s
plaaayyy!
”

Sarah felt the smack of a truck hitting her in the back.  She fell forward, thudding hard on her elbows as Rhino followed through the tackle and drove her to the ground.  His weight was on top of her, pressing her chest into the earth, and then a thick-fingered hand was in her hair, pushing her face against a bed of pine needles.

“There you go, girlie-girl?” Rhino said.  “How you like that?”

Sarah tried to scream, just as Tom had told her to do, but Rhino had pressed her face into the ground, stuffing her mouth with dirt and needles. 

“We’re gonna play now, girlie-girl,” Rhino said.  “And you’re going to like it, aren’t you?”

Sarah thrashed against the forest bed, trying to throw him off.  A second fat hand grabbed her left arm and twisted it back.  Something screamed inside her shoulder joint, threatening to break her, and she screamed even harder into the ground.

“You keep fighting,” said Rhino, “and I’ll pull this arm right out, yes, right out of the socket.  You want that girl?  You want that?”

Sarah bent her legs and arced her hips, bucking like a wild horse trying to throw off the rider.  She could hear Rhino’s laugh, right behind her ear.  The hand that held her arm tugged ever so slight, and the pain in her shoulder burned harder.

“Listen here,” Rhino growled.  “You got fight, and I like that, but this has gotta stop now.  I hate to do this, girlie-girl.  But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He pulled back even further on her arm.  The pain was like someone injected fire into the joint.  Sarah could feel the tendons, the muscles, the ball of the joint crying out in protest.  She bit the earth and waited for it to happen, but damned if he wasn’t doing it slow, taking his time with it, dragging her into hell an inch at a time.

“Here it comes, girlie-girl,” he whispered, his voice right in her ear.  “Here it is.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Don’t say I didn’t.  Here it is, baby, don’t say I did—”

A familiar shriek shredded its way out of the sky, a tuning note for a choir of screams.  Rhino’s own scream joined the chorus, and Sarah felt his fingers loosen their grip on her arm.  The second hand in her hair disappeared completely.  The beefy weight that had pinned her to the earth now lifted itself from her back, and she had the leverage to push now, to pivot him off of her.  She thrashed her hips and flipped, and Rhino bounced backward, and she rolled over to her back and stood up in time to see the carnage.

The cat—that crazy, wonderful, ginger cat—had attached itself to the back of Rhino’s head, digging itself in like a big red tick.  Its forelegs and haunches were buried deep in Rhino’s mane of hair, and she saw its head come up and down, jaws wide open, fangs borne and wild, gnashing at the top of Rhino’s skull.

Rhino was on his knees now, flapping his hands at his head trying to ward off the attack.  His screams were crazed and guttural like a wild bird.

The cat kept clawing deeper, burying its face in Rhino’s hair, shaking its head side to side as it worked teeth into Rhino’s skullcap.  Rhino howled, too blinded by pain to process, and he thrashed his torso up and down, back and forth snapping about at the waist in an effort to whiplash the cat off of his head.

The cat only howled and growled as it tore into the thin connective tissue of Rhino’s scalp.  Rivulets of blood could be seen flowing from out of Rhino’s hairline, pasting his disheveled bangs to his forehead.  Rhino hopped about on his knees, waving his arms madly.  Sarah watched, sickened with herself for feeling such fascination, and she pushed herself to her feet, standing over him.  Rhino flopped over on his backside, and he twisted his head and turned it up to her, his eyes now wide and pleading.  If Sarah had felt an ounce of mercy, the cat did not give her the chance to act on it. 

A final screech issued from the cat’s throat, shredding its way from some black place of torture in its chest.  It snapped its head back, a bloody chuck of hair and flesh dangling from its jowls.  With a shake of its head, it flipped the gruesome treat from its mouth and began to howl again, its forelegs stretching deeper into Rhino’s hair, its neck muscles tensing and popping as it strained to extend its body.

Rhino arched his head back and cried, his voice pitiful and small, and Sarah saw something that made her stomach crawl.  On either side of Rhino’s face at the level of the temples, two orange cat paws jutted out from his ample mane.  It was impossible, Sarah thought.  There was no way the cat’s forelegs were long enough to wrap around the skull of a man, least of all a fat skull like Rhino’s.  And yet, there it was, the cat’s twin paws, digging their way out Rhino’s hair, the pad’s widening and claws extending.  Like a pair of twin mousetraps, the paws clapped down over Rhino’s eyes.

Whatever last bit of will Rhino had, it escaped like steam from a broken valve.  His scream reached a whole new level of inhuman, long and squealing, gurgling in the throat, sounding strangely to Sarah like the fingernail of God dragging across a chalkboard the size of a continent.  The cat’s claws flashed and curled into Rhino’s eyelids, and with bullet quickness snapped outward.  For a single snapshot in time, Sarah saw one of the claws hook the outer corner of Rhino’s right eye, curling all the way through and ripping, widening the socket just a centimeter or so before the cat pushed off with its back paws, made a high back flip in the air, and landed on all fours no more than a yard behind its wounded prey.

Rhino flopped on his back now, his palms pressed into his eyes.  Fresh blood was oozing from all sides, down his cheeks, around his temples.  Sarah stood over him, staring down in the shattered face, and for a moment she felt something like pity.

“Sarah!  Move!”

She glanced up to the direction of the voice, the direction where the cat had landed.  The cat was gone, but in its place, crouched on the forest floor, was her new friend Tom.  He was completely naked, bent on his knees, pale buttocks jutted in the air, arms stretched and extended into the pine needles in front of him like the yoga stretch the ginger cat had done earlier.  Tom’s exposed back was drenched with a splash of gleaming orange hair that extended from the top of his spine down to the anal cleft.  His eyes were wide, shimmering, the color of onyx.  Breath hissed between his clenched teeth, spraying drops of blood and bits of skin and hair on the ground before him.

“Move,” he whispered.  Sarah stumbled backward, back away from Rhino, and Tom leapt, his sweating body springing into the air.  His right arm came up and back behind his head, fist clenching, a large biceps muscle twitching.  As Tom came down, the pointed right elbow snapped forward, leading the way on the drop.  It landed hard on the bridge of Rhino’s nose.  There was a crunch like a cockroach under a boot, and more blood flowed, but in the end, Rhino lay still.

Tom sucked in huge slugs of air.  He jerked away from the unconscious Rhino, planting his elbows on the earth, arching his back high, the muscles continuing to twitch and tremble.  Sarah watched as the back buckled, the vertebrae of the spine seeming to flow like a bony bullwhip, popping and rippling.  The rash of copper fur that had graced his back only a moment before was now twitching too, thin fronds that slithered and sucked back into the flesh, revealing a back now hairless and pale with splatters of freckles across it that matched Tom’s tender face.

After a moment, Tom shook his head.  He groaned and arched his back concave, lifting his head into the air.  His face was soft again, sweet and boyish, and his eyes were closed.  He took in deep breaths through his nose.  The corners of his mouth quivered on the edge of a smile, and he twisted his face to keep them in place, as if ashamed to show Sarah how much he had enjoyed the previous carnage.

After a moment, he opened his eyes, and the onyx mist was gone, replaced by a soft hazel-green that went well with his ginger hair. 

“Now,” he said, allowing a small grin.  “Now we have to get out of here.” 

Part II:
Kyle/Molly

1980: Hero

“Warning:  To avoid fainting, keep repeating … it is only a movie, only a movie, only a movie …”

It was an unearthly caveat, uttered by the voice of what sounded like God Himself, and it had come to Kyle Winthrop sometime in the early 1973 when he was five years old.  He had been in a car somewhere on an old Kansas highway called 254, riding shotgun (because in those days a kid could) en route to another father-son camp-out hosted by the Christian Church.  Dad, who had been driving, quickly reached down and switched off the radio.

“I think we’ve heard enough of that,” Dad said.  “I don’t think we’re going to see that movie anytime soon, are we Kyle?”

“No, Dad.”

“But that’s a pretty good safety tip, wouldn’t you say?”  He looked down at Kyle and grinned that sly way when he was about to tell a bad joke that would nevertheless make his youngest son laugh.  “Next time we’re out camping and you feel like you’re going to faint, now you know what to say to yourself.”

“What’s faint?”

“It’s when you go to sleep all of a sudden.  You’re awake and then suddenly you’re asleep.  Something like that.”

Five-year-old Kyle had thought about this and remembered something from TV.  “You mean like when a coconut falls on Gilligan’s head?”

“Kind of,” said Dad.  “That’s something called a concussion.”

Little Kyle silently moved the word around his lips.

“Like being knocked out,” Dad said.  “When something hits you in the head and you fall asleep, they say you got a concussion.  The way Ali knocked out Bob Foster in that fight we watched awhile back.”

Kyle nodded, remembering.

“When you faint, it’s like …” Dad thought a moment, and then he got that grin again.  “It’s like what happens to Mrs. Howell.  You know how she gets upset sometimes and falls asleep on the spot, and Thurston Howell has to catch her and fan her face?  That’s fainting.”

“So you faint when you’re upset?”

“Upset, scared, angry … sometimes when it’s just too hot.”

Little Kyle considered this and remembered the radio spot again.  “Why would someone faint watching a movie?”

Dad shook his head.  “I don’t know, Kyle.  But as far as I’m concerned, if it’s
that
kind of movie, why would we want to watch it in the first place?”

*   *   *   *

1980 was the summer everyone had seen the second
Star Wars
movie but Kyle.  For a twelve-year-old who did not excel at sports, there was nothing else to do in a town like Landes, Kansas, but see movies on weekends and discuss them at the playground or swimming pool.  The tragic thing was, none of the movies that came to downtown Landes Theater were recent releases.  Most films did not arrive until
months
after their release, and so that summer when Kyle was twelve the only way for a kid to see the most popular movie in the world was if he got his parents to drive him to Wichita. 

Dad never got around to taking Kyle to Wichita.  It was nothing personal, and Kyle had certainly not done anything wrong to deserve such punishment.  It was just that Dad had no interest in seeing a movie about robots and spaceships and Jedi knights.  He much preferred heading up to KC for a Royals game, accompanied by middle son Tony, or attending the jazz concerts at the old band shell, accompanied by oldest son Eddie.  But when it came driving to the city just so youngest son Kyle could see the second
Star Wars
movie, well, it seemed Dad always had something else to do. 

He just didn’t get it. 

He didn’t even get it three years earlier when Eddie had taken Kyle to the
first
movie, and Kyle had spent the whole summer collecting comic books and magazines and trading cards that bore images of the likes of Chewbacca and Darth Vader.  Now at twelve, he had his own paper route, delivering the Wichita
Eagle
every morning before the sun came up, which meant he had his
own
money for the ticket.  All he needed was a ride to Wichita, which somehow never fit into Dad’s schedule.  And when Kyle, perhaps the most demanding of the three boys, stamped his feet and pouted, Dad would just drape his arm across Kyle’s shoulders and ruffled his hair like he was a baby.  “Remember that man on the radio a few years ago,” Dad would say through his trademark puckish grin.  “It’s only a movie, Kyle.  Only a movie, only a movie, only a movie …”