The End of Never (19 page)

Officer Marion Scott was inside his police cruiser, idling at pump two. The officer nodded his close-shaven, blond head at Rhonda as she retreated into the convenience store. He was slumped down in the driver's seat. He felt a twinge of guilt for being thankful that Rhonda did not approach him to chat. A swarm of bees had built a nest in his head and his ringing ears and aching brain could not take the pressure of one of her long conversations about how her kids never called her. He imagined that with just one word, his head would split right down the middle, as if he had been whacked by a psycho killer in a horror movie.

He cupped a handful of baby aspirin in his palm. Raising a bottle of water to his parched lips, he swallowed. He considered that Rhonda was nice enough, just ugly. He regretted the thought immediately and closed his eyes. The static from his police radio scratched his ears. The toll of double shifts ached in his weary bones, but he kept a cure in the locked glove box. In the middle of the night, a sip of moonshine from his flask helped him to pass the time. He never drank enough to make him howl at the moon, only enough to ease the tension, and he desperately needed the overtime money.

His fiancée had announced their first baby would be arriving in February. How was he supposed to support a family on his salary? He had already trashed the FBI application that had taken him months to complete.

The stiff vertebrae in his neck cracked when he raised his head from the seat and stretched his arms and chest. In the corner of his eye, he saw Rhonda waddling toward the car.

Be nice
, he reminded himself crankily and rolled down the window.

A pair of doll-sized, buttercup-yellow socks fell into the passenger seat. “Booties for the baby,” Rhonda said with a toothless smile. “I knit them myself,” she said proudly.

Officer Scott fumbled with the tiny pair of socks, smaller than his palms. “Thanks,” he said flatly.

“Coffee?” Rhonda asked, her face shoved inside the patrol car and her arms resting on the window sill. “You look like you could use some.”

“You shouldn't have,” the officer told Rhonda and dropped the baby socks back down on the passenger seat. He did not want to touch them, because he knew he was not ready to be a father. Sometimes he forgot to feed his dog.

Rhonda grinned at him, her body pressed against the passenger door. “You're welcome,” she said, beaming. “Now how about that coffee?”

Officer Scott shook his head no and reached for a notebook lying on his dashboard. He pretended to read the scribbled writing.

“You should have stopped by here last night,” Rhonda said, slapping her palms against the window sill.

“Last night?” he asked, quietly staring at his handwriting in the ticket log. He had tried all morning to remember last night, but his twenty-five-year-old memory failed him. The freckled-faced, auburn-haired girl and the man in the cape were the last people he remembered pulling over before he blacked out and woke up in his patrol car behind the Gas 'n' Go dumpster at sunrise.

“That storm really walloped us,” Rhonda said. “First, it got real dark. Second, the wind started to shake all the windows,” she explained.

A loud yawn escaped the police officer's tightening throat.

“Third, the power went out.”

With her focus on rehashing the thunderstorm, Rhonda failed to notice the white, boxy truck that approached behind her. When the screech of soft brakes pierced the air, she whipped her head around toward the dumpster.

Thumpety-bump. Bumpety-thump.
The truck rattled to a stop in the back of the parking lot by Big Bertha.

When the driver's door swung open, a brown, barefoot old man jumped to the ground. Thin and wiry, the white-haired man had hips that barely kept up a worn pair of baggy, mud-stained jeans. His ragged t-shirt had once been white and it was ten sizes too big for his hollow chest.

Peeking from behind Rhonda's back, Officer Scott spied a gun tucked into the driver's waistband.

The man scrambled around to the back of the truck. When he swung open the cargo door, the raucous rattle of sliding metal tore through the silence. His stunned audience stared in confusion.

Cyrus gauged the height of the truck bed with his black eyes and leaped straight up on the bumper with the accuracy and strength of a pouncing lion.

“No way,” Officer Scott marveled quietly. “Maybe you'd better go inside, Rhonda,” he said, his thumb poised over the siren switch on the dash.

On the dusty plywood floor of the truck, an unconscious body lay limp at Cyrus's gnarled, bare feet. Crouching on his hands and knees, the shapeshifter sniffed the trickle of blood oozing from the man's nose. A soft whimper of feral excitement eased from his throat.

Cyrus lifted his ragged fingernails to the man's throat and ripped the cheap plastic poncho from his chest. His claws caught on the thin, sweat-soaked undershirt that was stained muddy brown. He shook the shredded garment free from his grasp. Cyrus knew the birthmark must be somewhere, and he rolled the body over so that the man lay flat on his stomach.

Pushing away the scraggly, salt-and-pepper hair that dangled to the man's shoulders, Cyrus howled, his human voice cracking as the heinous sound tore from his throat.

From the nape of the unconscious man's neck, an eye socket, black rimmed and slanted like the eye of a slithering serpent, stared back at his face.

“Dat da sign!” Cyrus panted happily and wagged his hind end as if his tail could follow. His skin itched. The wolf wanted out.

“Nah,” he calmed the beast inside him.

Crates of rope and chain link strands littered the floor of the hardware delivery truck. Cyrus swaddled his prize securely in binds from which he was certain the injured man could not escape even when (or if) he woke up.

Inside the convenience store, Rhonda cowered under the counter as howls shook the glass windows. She kept Bobby close to her chest and hoped Officer Scott had called for back-up.

The officer climbed from his patrol car with his pistol locked and loaded. Carefully he approached the truck by the dumpster, his tread as light and sure as that of a stalking ninja. He peeked around the corner of the truck.

The sweaty stench of the nervous cop had already warned Cyrus that someone approached—someone familiar. He recognized the scent from the attic. The man had been in the attic before him. Cyrus waited patiently.

With the tip of his nose breaching the bumper, Officer Scott braced himself and counted silently to three. When the officer swung around into whatever waited at the mouth of the truck, Cyrus lunged and hit the officer in a blur of mottled flesh and whiskers. Officer Scott lay stunned on the ground, staring at the cloudless, blue sky, the wind knocked out of him. He roused only when diesel smoke stung his nostrils and he heard the rumble of the truck.

Scrambling for his dropped pistol, he spat a wad of blood onto the oil-stained asphalt. The gun rested against the bottom of the fence that enclosed the dumpster and his fingers wrapped themselves consolingly around the cold trigger.

But his shots missed the tires screeching over the cement curb and onto Tangle Wood Lane. Behind the steering wheel, Cyrus panicked, his claws fumbling to shift the clutch into the right gear. He had not driven more than a hundred miles altogether in his whole life. His bare toes struggled to grip the gas pedal. A Volkswagen Beetle swerved to avoid slamming head-on into the careening delivery truck.

Under the graceful magnolia trees that threw their long shadows across the street, Cyrus barreled forward down Tangle Wood. He could not have known that of all the directions he could have picked to drive, this one would take him to a dead end. The road tapered eventually into the entrance of Collinsworth Academy.

With his chest heaving, Officer Scott sprinted to his idling patrol car. He jumped in and slammed down on the gas pedal. His tires swore as he tore away from the gas pump. Chasing Cyrus onto Tangle Wood Lane, he left a quarter-inch of rubber behind.

“Collinsworth!” the officer figured. He switched on his flashing blue lights and siren. “I'll trap him there.”

He did not, as Rhonda had hoped, call for back-up.

18
Crash

Headmaster Sullivan licked his lips. There were still no lights, which he realized as soon as his fingers flicked a switch on the wall. No power meant no students. He might have to cancel the next day's classes. Drowsy and gorged from pudding, he staggered into the daylight from the dim cafeteria.

“What a way to start the school year,” he grumbled. Rumors had made their way to him that the Board of Trustees had hired a headhunter over the summer. “Faculty expansion,” they had called it in the e-mail he received before classes started. He knew that they would put his head on a platter if enrollment dropped again.

Roaming the empty, silent quads, he listened for the buzz of chainsaws. Glancing at his gleaming silver watch, he realized it was nearly two o'clock in the sweltering afternoon. “Long lunch,” he said in excuse.

Passing Drake Hall, he hastened his steps when he heard the bell tower strike the new hour. It chimed twice over the abandoned campus.

“Callahan,” the headmaster muttered and chose a cement path toward the main quad.

On the top of his head, a chocolate glob of pudding jiggled in the sparse strands of his thinning hair. His belly swayed back and forth over his leather belt. Onward he marched, unaware of the melting pudding on his bald spot until a brown trickle ran down the creases of his forehead and onto his eyelids. Momentarily blinded, he stumbled over a gaping crack in the sidewalk. The cement met his palms with a curt smack.

“Blasted pudding,” he cursed. Of course he knew that he'd put his head in the pudding bucket. But he reasoned he'd had no other choice. No one had seen him do it.

“YouTube that!” he shouted in vengeance, shaking his fist in the air, still resting on the cement. The infamous Booger Bash episode (as it had henceforth become known among the student body) would not be repeated this time. “One million views,” he spat, but he felt assured that the pudding escapade was still private.

“No one caught me this time with my fingers where they shouldn't be,” Headmaster Sullivan said, his head pivoting from side to side for trespassers.

“Callahan?” he asked into the air. A blackbird perched on the peak of the bell tower answered with a cackle before she flung herself into the air.

“Callahan!” the headmaster bellowed. The chubby caps of his skinned knees poked through freshly torn holes in his pudding-stained khaki pants. He finally picked himself up from the cement and brushed the dried leaves from his backside.

He huffed toward the main quad. It was not the same as he'd left it before lunch. There were no trees on the ground, no trucks in the parking lot, no chainsaws buzzing, and no Callahan.

In his ears, he heard the blood pump through his heart like drumsticks on a snare drum. A sharp, burning, electrical sensation spread from his left shoulder down his arm.

“Where did that man go, anyway?” he asked the empty quad. Finally, he went to lean against the side of the cannon called Bloody Mary.

The blue tarp that Callahan had erected over the excavation pit in front of Bloody Mary flapped loosely in a light breeze. One stray, gray cloud floated like a puff of smoke in front of the blazing sun. Dr. Sullivan wiped his brow with the back of his hand and lapped up a few drops of chocolate clinging to his skin.

“I give up,” he muttered in defeat, bracing himself against the black hull of the cannon.

His champagne Jaguar sat close by in the main parking lot. Dragging himself to the car, he clutched at his burning chest while his fingers fumbled to unlock the door.

Climbing inside, he turned the key in the ignition and glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “Madman!” the accusation stumbled from his gaping mouth, the only word he could think of to describe himself. He ruefully observed his chocolate-stained forehead and rumpled hair. Soaked with sweat, his stiff collar now drooped limply. His khaki dress pants had deteriorated beyond repair.

Warm air from the broken air conditioner blasted from the dash vents, raising the temperature inside the car to one degree less than the surface of the sun.

“I don't feel well,” the headmaster moaned. He rubbed his sore left shoulder, the heavy beat of his heart pounding in his ears. A chill shot across his clammy skin.

Laying his head back against the leather seat, he closed his drooping eyes. He could see that a desert with mountainous sand dunes loomed around him. Circling vultures spread their wings in the sky above his bald, sunburned head.

When he moaned and shifted in the seat, his rear end was abruptly confronted by the bulge of his wallet. He remembered that it held a credit card: the black American Express with gold letters. Normally, he did not carry it. She never ever let him hold it, unless he was buying a present for her.

He giggled like a school girl.

He had borrowed the card from his wife the day before to fill the empty belly of the Jaguar and she had forgotten to ask for it back.

“Tisk, tisk,” he scolded himself and wagged a fat finger in his own face. “You're being naughty.”

Laying his head back against the seat again, he closed his eyes and imagined a new future for himself. Snickering mischievously, he felt warm sand squish between his toes. A pink sunset illuminated the blue water stretching from the palm-lined beach to the far horizon.

He imagined an island beauty with cascading black hair asking him, “Can I get you another drink?” as she bent over his beach chair to adjust his sun umbrella with her bare, tanned arms. He believed that no one would find him and he began to snicker. The joke built up in his sore gut. His hilarity grew louder, spilling from his throat, until his guffaws shook the cabin of the sweltering Jaguar.

Behind him, the magnolias of Tangle Wood Lane swayed back and forth in a burly breeze. The black iron gate that separated the entrance of Collinsworth Academy from south Atlanta swung on its hinges.