HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (77 page)

Suddenly he dropped
his prize and fell to all fours, listening again.

It was the train
whistle, calling of far-off places, and the wash of cool wind and of
freedom from the killing land.

Joey turned, a
phantom of fur of a deeper shade than midnight, and leaped toward the
door, blasting it outward and down. He moved like smoke across the
seared grass. He rattled the Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod in his
swift passage at the edge of the yard.

Across the next
field waited a dell of trees and on the other side, through a ditch,
he knew lay the tracks, coal black and glistening. Beckoning. Wind
and blood mingled on his tongue that lolled from his mouth like a
flag. Rocks rolled aside from the pads of his feet.

A cow lowed, sensing
danger, and Joey stopped. Not an enemy, he knew. He padded forward to
the cattle tank, a man-made pond rank with algae and mosquito larvae.
He paused, testing the water with one impossibly long finer, watching
the ripples circle out. In the reflection from the water he knew
himself and lifting his head high, he howled in celebration.

He was no more a
poor man whipped by a sadistic father, ignored by a silent and
ignorant mother, taunted and tortured by a fat, heartless sister. He
was Other. He was a Thing.

The land, bright as
day in clear moonlight, was cluttered with stacked tires, rusting
hulks of farm trucks and forty-year-old cars, butane tanks that had
outlived their usefulness, and fallen trees left to rot.

He carefully circled
the pond, passed the hog pen, disregarding their rooting grunts
through the swill, and finally made it into the stand of trees.
Mesquite armed the perimeter, their weapons the sharp thorns. Joey
brushed through them, hardly feeling the pin-pricks or the leakage of
blood that trailed out to the tips of his long fur before dropping to
the ground. He heard the rattle of pale khaki mesquite bean pods
shiver at his passing, tiny skeletons of October.

The green shawls of
muscadine vines draped and hung in ropes from water oak and maple and
sweetgum. Dwarf cedars bristled with hard green seed clusters and
smelled of a holiday in some dim past.

Joey waited in the
wood, instinct instructing that another change was to take place,
that silence and vigilance was called for. New-found vigor, the like
of which he had never experienced, coursed through his veins, welling
first from his abdomen. Strength flowed from shoulder to paw, from
hip to foot. He perceived a darkness that came slithering from
inside, deep in his bowels, and it spread, along with the strength,
permeating his entire being like ink spilled on a sponge. It blotted
out summers working endless hours in the burning sun--back-breaking,
soul-killing summers. It blotted out winters sunk in bottomless
despair before the fireplace while the wild wind scurried around the
eaves. It took his past and nullified it forever, saving him from a
young melancholy that would have clung to him through all his days.

He roared with life,
rising to his full height, towering over the stunted cedars, reaching
up toward the sky with raised arms for heaven's approval. That it was
not forthcoming meant nothing to him, nor ever would.

And now through the
remaining wood and to the ditch, tangling himself, sweeping aside
brambles and waist high cattails nodding brown heads at his crossing
making for the railway, and a journey away from all that was dead,
from all that had tried so diligently to bring him to his knees.

The passenger cars
shined with a silver gleam as they slowed to pass over a wooden
trellis bridge skirting Joey's farm outside of Arville, Texas, that
October night.

Joey lay low in the
ditch, his yellow eyes fastened on the conveyance that would take him
into the starry distance. As the train cars rumbled past with a noise
that stormed his sensitive ears, he shifted his gaze to the last car
coming toward him, rose from the grasses lining the track, and
readied his haunches to send him airborne.

He sprang from
cover, air singing past his flattened ears, and latched with all
fours onto the stainless steel handles of the last passenger car.

He was finally free,
moving now with a dizzying speed beneath the trellis bridge timbers,
shadows and light flickering in and out of the crossbars. He rocked
back and forth in the cradle of the transport he had spent years
dreaming about taking him from the poison of the farm life, the
hatred of his family, delivering him like a chariot drawn by a
thousand steeds to the heart of a new beginning.

He squatted, his
back against the wall, relishing the wind nipping at his muzzle and
ruffling the fur of his appendages. He had much to contemplate if the
hunger spared him the time.

The first of his
victims opened the sliding train car door not an hour after he had
boarded. Joey little understood the compulsion that gripped him as
involuntarily his claws extended from their sheaths. He stood,
swinging around in a blur, and took the man up and over the safety
rail, flipping him headfirst to the metal floor. Reaching back with
one paw, Joey clanged the door shut again so the other passengers
would not hear the death throes.

"Don't...!"
the man cried. "I'm not...!" They were his first, last, and
only words before Joey ripped into the tender area just below his
chin with jaws so strong they snapped his neck upon closing. Joey
fed, the blood as warm and comforting as water from a hose left lying
in the sun all day. The flesh was as good as sunshine spilling down
his throat.

He threw the carcass
overboard and watched while it bounced and tumbled like a huge rag
doll down an incline and into a grassy grave.

Squatting again,
Joey licked his lips with a rough tongue, felt the howl of triumph
sliding up his windpipe and over his great pointed teeth. He opened
his mouth, arched his neck, and bayed just as the train blew its
whistle at the scudding clouds overhead that limned the edge of the
moon.

No one else came to
the door at the train's end for hours. Joey sat quietly, fierce joy
flooding all through him as the landscape changed from farmland to
town. He was beyond Arville and on his way west. In the neon bloom of
the passing town he caught the scent of mankind in a flock. He could
smell the car exhaust, the disgusting scent of smoked meat from the
vent of a barbeque restaurant, and the stench of a chemical plant
belching acidic smoke. Why did they live this way? How did they live
this way? What had happened to take them from the dense jungles and
open plains to gather in hovels, to ride in closed coffins, to eat
their fresh meat burned to a tasteless crisp? Because he knew them
intimately. He had been one himself--a man mired in a prison of
walls, feeding on old, dead animal carcasses.

As the moon rode the
sky, reached its ultimate zenith, and began to slip toward the
horizon, Joey felt his power, jubilation, and certitude of the
rightness of his deeds waning. Dawn held the sky hostage, tinting it
on the eastern edge a dry and aged parchment yellow.

Falling rapidly into
despondency, Joey was not as quick to respond when next the sliding
door opened and a human appeared at the safety rail.

When he did manage
to move, he was not nearly as swift grabbing the victim as he had
been before. He had her, a female, over the rail, reached to close
the door, and when he turned again to attack her most vulnerable
flesh near the neck, she threw herself from the clutch of his arms,
and commanded in a loud voice, "BE STILL, YOU LOATHSOME BEAST!"

Startled into
inaction, Joey hesitated, watching her. Her words had reached through
his dark mind clouded as it was with animal instinct, and he knew a
command when he heard one. He sniffed and found her scent different
from the enemies he had killed on the farm. She smelled nothing like
them.

"So this is
what happened to Bernando? He came for a smoke and you did away with
him. Haven't you any control? Are you mad with the change? Bernando
was my friend."

He turned his head
to the side to show his confusion. What did she mean? Why was she not
afraid?

She glanced at the
sky and saw the moon lying low over the land. "It's almost
dawn," she said. "You'll change back soon. Do you
understand me?"

He nodded, slowly,
and it felt odd, as if he was not supposed to communicate in this
manner anymore.

"I am Marta and
I know what you are; that's why I'm not frightened. I come from
Austria. Before that I was in the cold emptiness of Siberia caring
for my sister. She's what you are now. That's why I know when the
moon dies, so does your craving for the feast. Just wait. Fight it
and wait."

He stared at her and
his gaze softened. She knew him as real, as wolf-thing, as beast. How
many like him were there in the world? There must be many for her to
happen upon him this way. Was she, too, a beast, a Thing? She didn't
look changed.

"My sister is a
wolf," she said. "Bitten when she was a child, bitten and
not devoured. I took her with me away to the north country where she
wouldn't stalk whole villages while under the curse of the moon. She
lived well on wild things and, with my help, her secret was
preserved. How long do you think your secret will keep if you murder
this way? Poor Bernardo, I told him there were many wolves loose in
this land, but he was not careful enough, was he?"

Joey sank to the
floor of the platform and turned his head to watch the tracks as they
disappeared mile after mile behind them. They crossed an open plain
now, dry and dusty and barely covered over with rustling grasses.

She came down to sit
beside him. She said in a soft voice, "It's an epidemic."
He did not understand. He didn't know if he wanted to.

"This bite of
the wolf, it's spreading across continents, infecting too many for
counting. No one believes it, that's why it isn't talked about. It's
made into a myth, a boogeyman story to tell children. To keep from
coming into the cities, some of your kind have taken cattle and
disemboweled them. The silly Americans, they blame it on aliens, on
starships! Inside the cities there are cases of violent crime that go
unsolved. Again, it's your kind, the wolf rampaging, incapable of
mastering their wild animal urges. The authorities think these deaths
are caused by other men, but they're wrong."

Cattle. He had
cattle on his farm. It was probably what had drawn the Thing to them.
And he--he could have gone after them when he'd been raging with
hunger and left his...his family? Had he truly done harm to...his
family?

"There's a wise
saying..." She placed a hand on his arm to make sure he would
listen. "'There are no intruders or strangers in the world. A
man at times is a shapeless pygmy that walks asleep in the mist.'
That's what your kind does. I had to teach my sister to wake from her
sleep, to dispel the mist so she could decide between right and
wrong. So must you, my friend."

He saw the moon now
kissed the edge of the horizon. It was sinking fast, taking with it
the night, taking away his courage and replacing it with regret,
taking his strength, and giving him back the weak limbs of a gangly
boy. He raised an arm and saw his long delicate fingers emerging from
the rounded paw. His fingers were small in comparison to the great
claws that had been his only hours earlier. He felt his muscles
shrinking in his arms, and the cover of fur vanishing even as he
watched. He felt of his face and found it smooth, hairless, flat and
small. Human again.

He hung his head in
overwhelming grief. Not for the killing he had done. But for the
freedom and animal thrill he had felt for so few scant moments of
time.

"I'm sorry,"
she said. "I know the sorrow morning brings. You see, my sister
accidentally made me a beast the same as she. Would you come with me
to meet my sister and the others? There's a group of us on the train.
About every six months we migrate from the lower Americas northward.
We're on our way to Alaska where it's sparsely populated. And there
are still wild things to eat."

Joey looked at her,
at Marta, and saw the faintest layer of dark down on her cheeks. It
slowly disappeared as the light of dawn changed from dim yellow to
rose in the sky.

"Will you come?
Will you join us or go on living this way, taking down the innocent
along with the guilty?"

He should go with
her. Maybe it would be all right, after all. He had found another
family, a better one. As the engine whistled a warning up ahead and
the land blew past the train, Joey took Marta's arm and climbed over
the safety rail into the cabin of the passenger car. In there he
would find others escaping their pygmy selves lost in the mist and
learn from them how to do it, how to control the rage, the
destruction, the indiscriminate killing.