Breeds (3 page)

Not one for giving up, Ross crossed and descended the other side of the road, approaching the treeline some twenty feet back. He went right, seeking any sign of someone passing through, before turning back to the starting point and going the other way. The treeline led him to an open brook baring ice fangs, drawn back over a chilling rush of water too wide to jump. The sight of the stream flowing into deep woods forced Ross to halt. He sighed. Thus ended the hunt. The only thing he could do now was phone it in and alert the Mounties. Just in case it was a missing person. Or a crazy.

Or just strange shit.

Ross hoped whoever the person was had parked their ride alongside the road, returned after their little jog, and simply driven off. He hated seeing good taxpayer’s money go to waste looking for crazy people.

With plump snowflakes falling all around, Harry Shea made his way to the rural block of red-and-white mailboxes near the top of the hill. The inhabitants of Upper Amherst Cove had fought for the delivery service, else they’d have to drive down to Bonavista to get their mail. And with his fixed income, it was a challenge every month to keep the house warm and the scattered bit of food on the table. Politicians didn’t have that particular worry, not with their fat pensions. Just the thought of their campaign-smiling asses, all understanding when they were looking for the senior citizen vote, only to reveal their true self-serving interests once in power. It made his scrotum and asshole pucker up in a tug-o-war on either side of an angry taint. Soon, very soon, if cutbacks to regular pensions continued, and everything else kept rising, it wouldn’t be a challenge of heating the house and having food on the table––it would be a choice. The thought of it made his blood boil all the more and he scowled his angst at the falling snow.

Standing in front of the mailboxes, he got out his key and unlocked his own. Grocery flyers, cable bill, which he’d have to cancel this month. Nothing more, so he slammed the mailbox shut with a muttered curse. Still nothing on his damn colonoscopy either, and that riled him anew. The Canadian health system was another victim of government cutbacks and, while once proudly heralded as being one of the best, was now reduced to shit. A year he’d been waiting for notification––always sent by mail, never over the phone––of his turn to head into Clarenville and have his shit chute plumbed with a camera. A simple cautionary procedure for men of his age, and one he despised having done, but to wait nearly a year on something three years already overdue was something else. His doctor sympathized with him, citing a lack of resources. Shea knew it wasn’t up to him, but it didn’t make the anger and frustration go away.

Flyers in hand, he took a moment to gaze past the mailbox, where the hillside fell away into an enormous ice-filled bay. The other side of the water lay hidden this morning, lurking somewhere behind a thick, calming snowfall. The view always relaxed him, vented the rage of his memories of seemingly unheeded protests to local municipal town officials, and he stood there and just mentally linked flakes with lowering his blood pressure.

If it didn’t work, he had roughly a hundred and fifty liters of homebrew sitting in his basement which sure as hell would. Thirty of which had just reached the bare minimum four weeks of aging, making it just ripe for chugging.

“Lovely day, Harry.”

Harry Shea turned and saw an elderly man with a blue snow shovel in hand, a pinched cone of a bright red, homemade stocking cap on his head, and a black-and-yellow snowsuit replete with a reflective orange-and-yellow vest. The figure ambled along a thin path, some fifty feet long, trenched between the porch of a white, two-story house and the main road.

“Lovely day, Sammy,” Harry greeted back. Samuel Walsh was another of the twenty homeowners of Upper Amherst Cove, and probably the only true friend he had in the small community.

“Gray, though,” Sammy said, poking at his thick bifocals. The brutes almost completely shielded his face from the weather.

“Gray day, yes sir, gray she is,” Harry agreed, and studied the red cap with disapproval. “Y’look like a fuckin’ simpleton with that.”

Sammy shrugged. “Sally knitted it for me, so I wears it. What can I say? If I don’t wear it, well, I don’t wanna think about that bit.”

“Even if it makes ye look like a retarded elf?”

“S’pose so.”

“My son. She’s got you by the balls, don’t she?”

“She does. She does.”

“She’d skin ya.”

“She would.”

“Skin ya proper.”

“Yeaup,” Sammy agreed again, stretching the colloquial mashing of ‘yeah’ and ‘yup.’

“Whattaya up to today?” Harry asked his friend, to which Sammy held up the shovel. “Gettin’ started early, ain’tcha?”

“Naw,” Sammy replied. “Exercise. Although I don’t know why. All of this’ll melt in the spring.”

Harry Shea smirked at that little nugget of Sammy logic and looked down over the continuing hill, until he saw white land blur with ice. The whole community had grown on the side of a large hill, almost a stunted mountain, that faced the waters of the Atlantic. Once a small but thriving fishing and farming town, it was now populated almost entirely by the same folks who grew up here, who watched their children move into St. John’s, out to Fort McMurray, or elsewhere, leaving the old folks behind. It wasn’t that Amherst Cove folks didn’t like the cities, it was more like they preferred their little bayside village. It was remote, quiet, and eternally home.

“Snow seems to be pickin’ up,” Sammy observed.

“Fuck the Jesus snow. All white and shit.”

“Gotta clear it, though.”

“
You
gotta clear it. On Sally’s orders. All I gotta do is watch.”

“Hm.” Sammy grunted, long desensitized to his friend’s bluntness. “Just wonderin’. Why couldn’t snow be, I dunno, more green? Or purple? Or even… polka dot?”

Harry made side eyes at him.

“Or even,” Sammy continued, “or even white with women’s breastuses on it? Just think. If it were like that, every guy’d be out shovelin’ it then. Be lookin’ forward to it. Course then, it’d only open up another problem.”

“Yeah?”

“We’d be all playin’ with it.”

Shea shook his head in dismayed amusement. “The women folk wouldn’t be playing in it.”

“Some might.”

Harry conceded that point. “Could ye date the snow?”

“Maybe.”

“Wedlock?”

“Might be possible. Hmmm, might be a stretch, though. Especially in the summer. Unless you had a freezer.”

“Oh, well.”

“Best t’keep at just snow tits.”

Harry shook his head again. Where on God’s earth did Sammy come up with this stuff?

“Perky little snow tits,” Sammy said dreamily.

“All right, stop it now.”

“Milky, too.”

“There’s a hockey game on tonight,” Shea threw out, trying to change the subject.

Sammy paused and turned his huge, white-flecked bifocals onto Harry. “So there is. Well, anyway, gotta shovel.”

“Yer probably gonna make a couple sets of snow tits now, aren’tcha?”

“No, probably not. Sally’s got the window open there and she’ll be checkin’ on me. Don’t want to haveta explain it all to her. She doesn’t appreciate our little conversations. Or the humor.”

“She’s a big girl. She can handle it.”

“Naw,” Sammy whispered as he leaned in. “Most women don’t have the same humor as guys do. No matter how funny the shit is.”

“Perhaps,” Shea said, but he didn’t wholly agree.

“Sammy!” a woman’s voice bawled, cutting the coolness of the scene. “I told you to clear the driveway so I can get on the road! I gotta be in Bonavista by twelve thirty.”

“Yes, me love,” Sammy called back. Then to Harry, “I’ll be over later on.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“You got that batch of Pilsner ready to drink, don’tcha?”

Shea started and shook his head once again. “You remembered that?”

“You thought I forgot?”

“I did.”

“Well, now, I didn’t. Can’t have you drink all that beer alone. What kind of neighbor would I be? You just have the mugs and beer ready. Be over this afternoon, while Sally’s in Bonavista. I’ll even bring over the nachos and dip.”

“What’s she doing over there?”

“Gettin’ her hair done.”

“Ah. Fair enough. All right. Seeya then. You got any of that cheese sauce?”

“Yeaup. The mild kind, too.”

“Ah, good. That medium is too damn spicy for me. Wicked heartburn last time. And me ass was on fuckin’ fire for half the day.”

“No worries of that this time. I’ll bring over a tub of sour cream, too.”

That did sound good, Harry mulled. “Seeya, then.” And he muddled off, heading for the top of the hill where he crossed the only road leading out of Amherst Cove.

Behind him, Sally’s high-pitched vocal chords speared the air once again.

From her window, Sally Walsh leaned back and pulled the kitchen window closed. She huffed, smirked, and rested both hands on her sizeable hips, keeping watch over Sammy as he made his way to his parked car. At sixty-four, she had remarkable hearing and picked up the conversation of the two men. Snow tits. She scoffed.
Men
. Talk to them all you want, but the moment you mention tits and suddenly,
magically
, you had the floor. It was Sally’s firm belief that the surest way to get a man to do something was to hang a pair of boobs on it. If she could put a set of knockers on the radiator in the house, she’d have to pry both Sammy and Shea off the goddamn metal.

Sammy turned around and waved to her with both hand and shovel, pulling an unwilling smile out of her. Like kids they were, and like kids, life would be questionable without them, if not downright miserable. She maneuvered around the kitchen, the air redolent of freshly baked bread, the buttery loaves laid out over the table. She stopped in front of the one mirror hanging beside the fridge and inspected the graying roots of her brown hair. Her one vanity was her mane. Always had been. The brewing weather wasn’t fierce enough to keep her away from her appointment, and she wanted to get it done before anything worse came down the pipe. The weatherman preached on about a blizzard two days away. A monster of a storm crept up the eastern coast after socking it to parts of the states and pummeling Nova Scotia, and was on a collision course with the island. The next few days might see Amherst Cove cut off because of the snowfall, and yet, the thought of
not
getting her hair done today terrified her more.

She could do it. Winter storms didn’t bother her. She liked the way the wind blustered off the ice pads of the bay and leaned into the house. The howls and the creaks of timbers lulled her to sleep without fail, and sometimes, if there was a gust on and Sammy was either upstairs or not immediately around, she’d turn off the television or put down the book and just listen to the fury outside, breaking upon the corners of the house, while she remained safe and warm inside her timberframe pocket of memories and dreams.

Winter storms didn’t bother her in the least.

But graying hair absolutely
poisoned
her.

It took some effort to wrench the Bowie knife free of the skull. Once Borland had the weapon out, he held it before his full black eyes and sniffed. Pure silver. Just holding the lethal blade in such close proximity to his face made his jaws ache as if lit up by a tuning fork. Borland held the knife at arm’s length and snapped his fangs, not bothering to withdraw them and perversely
enjoying
how they extended over his human jowls. Going half shape instead of a full-on transformation took many, many years to learn, but with a little concentration, a little willpower, he’d learned how to maintain his biped form while summoning the wolf inside. Something that the Elders probably didn’t want him to do, or have the others find out about.

Or anyone, for that matter.

The first time he effected the partial change, he actually gauged his success by feeling and studying his reflection in the bedroom mirror, smiling at the fright framed in glass. It took even more strenuous practice to change only parts of his body. The strength and power that came with the limited change was almost as seductive as if he’d completely gone over. Almost.

But Borland preferred being man-shaped at times like these. Even though he was nowhere near as fast or strong as a fully transformed werewolf, he was still faster than one in its man suit, and certainly much stronger.

As Blackbeard had discovered.

Borland hissed through fangs at his dead visitor. The
second
werewolf sent his way. He had no doubt that a third would be coming. Perhaps even more. That thought made Borland wrinkle his nose. More visitors. More disturbances. Not even the Elders could ignore this now. All Borland ever wanted was to be left alone. To die in peace. To die
his
way. But the Elders had their own ideas of how old wolves like him should exit the world. Cleaner, less newsworthy ways. Borland didn’t want that; he just wanted to run through the wild one last time and let the wolf free, to do as it would. Damn the consequences.

He knew the Elders wouldn’t allow that. Thus, they sent the wardens.

The wardens. Every territory had at least one guardian, depending on its size. Newfoundland had a pair. Borland regarded the dead form on his floor. Now the island had only him. This warden had been sent in response to the initial killer the Elders had dispatched to put the rebellious cur down quietly. Probably lied to. Probably was told Borland had gone crazy and butchered one of their own for no reason other than to satisfy a maddening bloodlust. The Elders would make up any story they liked to rally the troops, and they would send another warden with orders to kill him. That thought made Borland snarl at the cold air within his cabin, frustrated and ever so hateful of the lies and bureaucracy of his own kind. He despised their measured, conservative ways of attempting to exist behind a veil of untruths and subterfuge, beneath the human stock which they were far superior to in any form. The wolves of Borland’s father’s time would not tolerate the shit messages and forked tongued preachings being cultivated and spread across the territories. They’d rip the throats out of the speakers.