Bewere the Night (33 page)

The gunshot takes him in the chest and he drops to the ground. He rolls, howling with the pain as his extracts the foreign object, spits it out and begins sealing the wound. His opponent recharges the gun.

“You like that?” he shouts, in a voice where fear and glee mix uneasily. “You want some more of that? You want some
lead aspirin
, boy?”

But lead won’t cut it, not with a full-grown werewolf, and an angry one to boot. Oz rolls over and stands up on all fours. Growling. Grinning with teeth as large as blades. Yes, he wants some more of that.

Slowly, he advances on the man.

INT. CLUB WICKED—NIGHT

OZ opens his eyes. The winged monkeys stand above him, grinning and jabbering in their own, incomprehensible flying monkey tongue. OZ tries to sit and finds that he is trussed up. His eyes focus and he sees a small, elderly woman sitting hunched on a huge throne, her hair in pigtails, an eye-patch over her left eye. In her hands she holds an umbrella.

OZ:

Westerna.

WESTERNA:

Are you really so stupid you thought you could just waltz in here like this was Munchkin Country? Or Kansas?

OZ shakes his head. He tries to shape-shift, but can’t. WESTERNA smiles.

OZ:

Do you have her?

WESTERNA:

Do I have her? Your lady love? Your darling?

WESTERNA laughs.

WESTERNA:

You poor, deluded fool.

WESTERNA:

I guess every wolf needs a bitch.

From the barn, a scream. “Kill him!”

Later, much later, when they had gone to the city, when the money ran out, when she began working down in the valley, making the money she had always wanted, getting high on the high life, it occurred to him to wonder which of them she’d meant.

But that was later.

He tenses, jumps. His heavy sails forward, hits the man in the chest.

The sound of a shot. Yet he feels no pain. His jaws come down and find the man’s neck and
tear.

There’s a scream from inside. An old woman, her aunt, crying. Hitting him—he barely feels her. He tears chunks of flesh and chews and the blood fills his mouth. He swallows, and howls, a terrifying, keening sound that makes the old woman cower away from him.

When he is done he goes outside. She is waiting for him, her eyes wide, her lips trembling. She is flushed. She wears only her thin night dress.

“Oh, Oz,” she says.

He growls and then he is on her, licking at her wounds, his tongue rasping across her soft, delicate skin.

“Oh, Oz!”

He doesn’t know if he is man or wolf. He only knows that she’s with him.

INT. CLUB WICKED—NIGHT

WESTERNA:

I could kill you right now and be done with it.

OZ:

Why don’t you?

He feels sleepy, later, with the feeding and the sex. It’s the first time they had gone all the way. “Get up,” she says. She is already dressed. “We need to bury him. It’s a shame you didn’t kill the other one.”

“She’s just an old woman,” he says, shocked. Dorothy shakes her head. “Sometimes I just don’t know about you,” she says. She had gone through the house, he saw. She shows him what she has—she has taken everything, jewelry and money and the old couple’s bank book.

“We have to go,” she says. “We have to hurry.”

They tie up the unconscious old woman and lock her in the bedroom. They bury the old man in a shallow grave by the barn. With the first rays of light they are at the bus station, waiting.

EXT. EMERALD CITY—DAYBREAK

The three flying monkeys drag OZ outside, onto the street. Wizened WESTERNA follows. Behind her comes a figure he barely recognizes, a woman he had been looking for.

But she is changed.

She wears high-heeled, spiked boots, a short skirt, tank top, gold bracelets, paint. She’s had a boob-job, a nose-job, a tummy tuck and ear reduction and liposuction. She is almost luminous in the light. She looks at him for a long time without saying anything.

OZ:

Dorothy.

DOROTHY:

We had something good between us, Oz, but now it’s gone. The city’s too big and too wild and no two people can hope to stay together when there’s so much to see and do and be. We had something going for a while and it was good—it was very good. But I am not the same girl and you’re the same guy you’ve been, Oz. You’re a small-town boy with a small-town mind and you’ll never make it big. Go back to Kansas, Oz. Go back to your garage and your bikes and your full-moon runs through empty fields. I’ve got a future, Oz, a bright and Technicolor future, and you’ve no part of it no more.

OZ:

Dorothy . . . 

DOROTHY:

Forget it, Oz. It’s Emerald City.

She turns her back on him and, slowly, walks away, disappearing behind the doors of the club.

WESTERNA looks down at OZ with a look almost of compassion.

WESTERNA:

You’ll mend.

WESTERNA:

Young hearts heal quickly.

She nods to her monkeys and they swiftly untie OZ.

WESTERNA:

But don’t ever come back.

WESTERNA turns to leave, her monkeys following. OZ stares after her, making no move to get up.

WESTERNA:

Don’t come looking for the woman behind the screen.

As the sun rises over the sleeping town the bus pulls to a stop at the station. It picks up two passengers.

As it drives away Oz look through the window, at the small town receding behind them in the distance. But Dorothy doesn’t look back: she looks ahead.

Later, she holds him tight. Her smile is dazzling. “We’re going to the city!” she says, almost breathless. “It’s going to be so wonderful, Oz, so—so glorious!”

She seems delighted with the word. The world. He smiles. They kiss. Ahead of them the yellow brick road stretches, like a promise, into infinity.

SEVEN YEAR ITCH

LEAH R. CUTTER

Mama first put me in a cage when I was seven. I tried to get away, yanking and pulling on Mama’s hand, yelling how I didn’t wanna be going in there, how I’d be a good boy now. I stopped walking up the dirt path toward dark cave and the wooden bars, sitting back on my butt, but Mama dragged me forward, throwing me into the cage so hard I hit the back wall.

“Mama, why you doing this?” I kept asking as she put the biggest lock I’d ever seen through the loop in the door.