If you’re new here, welcome to Sleep Tight, the section of Kindling where I post short stories and serial fiction. Buffet Line is a prequel to Chattel, a two part short story I posted a few weeks ago. To get caught up on that, start with It Ain’t a Coyote. Thank you for reading. Your support means the world to me.
How does a wolf choose its prey? The woods are sparse places. A pack might wander fifty miles and not find one doe. A wolf has to take what she can get. Especially in winter. So he wasn’t a hunter, he decided. Not this far south. Down here it was a buffet line. Be patient. Wait your turn. You get your pick of chicken or beef. The people were dotted for miles in every city in every direction. Even between the cities there was opportunity. Restaurants and rest stops with vending machines positioned along snaking black highway.
That was a double edged sword. The numbers. If they noticed you, that could cause problems. Phoenix had taught him that. The screens with the girls’ faces. The herd grew touchy. Smelled his sweat on the air. Since then he had kept moving.
On the long stretches of highway it was usually easy, but today was different. He was in the black truck, warming in the sun while Gil was inside. Picking the meal from the restaurant out of his teeth when he heard the first sirens. The cop cars, there were three, whizzed past in the direction of the old diner. South.
In the early days he hadn’t known what that meant. The sound was enough to get his heart going, but any animal used to the quiet scares easy. The hot Arizona summer had taught him to watch. When the squad cars were roaming, the people walked straighter. Drivers slowed on the highway. The uniformed men inside were dangerous. Armed.
In Phoenix he had stuck to the night. Waited until dark to head out to the streets. See if he could find a fix. It was a night like that he had gone out walking. Hungry. The air was still. It was hard to pick up a scent. He went searching for something to eat anyway. It was past midnight on a Monday and the bars were emptying. The regulars poured out in dots of twos and threes, wandered into the street. Their breath was sour, their sweat poisoned with liquor, so he kept his distance.
“Hey!”
It was a man’s voice that called to him from the other side of the street. He had stopped to look at him. Watched him sway in neon light.
“Who the fuck are jzshyoo?” he slurred.
His movements were interesting. The sway of a cobra hypnotizing prey. A tactic not seen in snakes in the deserts he had wandered. A woman came up behind the man. Her skin dark. Her skirt short and tight blue against her legs. She whispered to him.
“I’ll go when the fuck I want to go!” he yelled to her, swaying, the vibration of his voice pushing him back.
The man was big like him. He wore dark jeans and a plain white T-shirt. A flicker of the American man from time immemorial. A Mexican John Wayne with grizzled jaw and white teeth that flickered orange flame. His eyes, balls of fire lit and sustained by the burn of so many shots in the bar. He looked down to the man’s side. Saw something black and swaying hanging over his forearm. A leather jacket.
The scent of it drifted, and he smelled cool leather. Smelled the animal that had made it. Two of them. Large brown spotted cows. Dead a long time ago. Still, their skin, the thought of meat between his teeth, pushed him forward. Just two steps, but enough for the other man to respond.
“Jay!” The woman called after him. He waved her off and stepped off the curb. His ankle folded and he sidestepped. His body moved impossibly, the way green plants in a river danced in rushing water current. He caught himself, straightened, then took a few hazy steps into the street.
He waited and watched the man sway. Put his nose to the air and drew in the smell of spoiled sweat. Of sex. Days without water and soap, covered by musky perfumes and oils. He focused his eyes and observed the grizzle on his neck. The prickle of goose flesh leading down to his chest, exposed just above his collar bone. Sweat dripped from his forehead. The smell of it permeated his mouth with ocean water. Saliva filled the space between his cheek flesh and molars, spilled over onto his tongue.
“Zhyoo gonna come over here or what?” he had said, hand outstretched. He had stared at the man curious, head tipped sideways like a dog. Then the man’s fingers had gestured Come Here, and he had stepped into the invitation in rhythm with the motion.
The man had stumbled back, the vision of prey at the end of a long chase. He hadn’t thought about it, whether to run or not. A pulse of electric strength filled his limbs, and he pulsed forward. In a motion of one, then two strides, he was on the man, rolling in the street. Tearing at his limbs. The woman screamed, and the sound only strengthened him. Furthered his resolve.
“Get off of him!” she shouted. Then her claws were on him, sinking into the soft flesh between collar bone and neck muscle, shredding.
He cried out and let go of the man momentarily. There was blood pouring from somewhere. He could smell it first. Then he saw it, turning the man’s white shirt crimson. He did a once-over, looking for a piece of missing flesh. The bite punctures that were causing him to bleed. He was crying, hunched in a fetal position on the ground. He rolled over with a groan and moved his hands to the sand pocked asphalt. His face glowed in the light and he could see where the red spout was coming from. It was just his nose.
“What is wrong with you?” the woman screamed at him. She reached down, tottering on gazelle legs made longer by red heels. She hooked a slender arm behind the man’s shoulder and under his arm pit. “Come on!” she shouted as she pulled him up to his feet. His jacket was laid out on the road, a pile as pathetic as he was. She helped the man get it on, moving his arms through the sleeves tenderly.
He looked down at his hands and saw warm red liquid on his finger tips. He pressed a pinky finger gently to his lips and licked. The copper penny taste sent waves of pleasure through him. He closed his eyes and felt the lifeblood energize him. It was the closest thing to meat he’d had in days. He opened his eyes and watched the pathetic hulk of a man slink away leaning heavily on his girlfriend.
“Hey!” he shouted. His voice came out husky and hoarse from disuse.
The woman turned, looking back between the window created by his head leaning on hers.
“Give me the jacket.”
She looked down, her mouth open in a disgusted O. Then she stepped in front of the man and began pulling, first at his left arm, then his right, wriggling the leather off of his body. He cried harder at that. The white back of his T-shirt was streaked, red soaking through in wide lines.
When she saw it she smacked her lips open. She turned and faced him as she spit onto the street. She threw the jacket onto the black road.
“You’re an animal. He wouldn’t have done nothing!” Then she walked the wounded man to the end of the street, and turned right towards home.
He picked up the jacket and held it out in front of him, the leather arms stretched in the shape of a cross. He whipped it around his back and slid it on, first the right arm, then the left. He pulled at the front of it to heave it over his shoulders. It hung loose but the length was right. It hit him just above the waist.
That was when he first heard sirens. The high pitch squealed from somewhere close by. It rolled to a lower tone before climbing a few octaves. His ears pounded and ached with the squeal. He put his hands to his head and covered them to muffle the wails. It was a dying calf. A crying baby. He jogged back to the square of sidewalk he had left when he stepped out into the street.
Bright lights flickered at the corner of his eye. Red and blue swirling against black buildings and shadowy road. He stopped and watched. The screech of tires. The smell of brake dust. He heard muffled voices around the corner. Saw the shadows of people in the whirling red blue glow of police lights.
He put his hands down at his sides, mesmerized and terrified at the commotion. He walked towards the siren call. He couldn’t see what was happening. Could only hear shouting drowned by the high pitched wail. When he reached the corner he could see three cars. They were parked haphazardly. One of them was diagonal, blocking the two lane road.
The stop light changed for no one. He stared down the long dark street. The man, the one who’s blood he had tasted, was sitting on the curb. He held his head in his hands while two men in blue shirts, blue pants talked to him. One held a white light. It was pointed down on the man’s head. Black hair slick with sweat. Speckled with sandy asphalt. The girl was talking with two other officers. Her arms crossed her chest, grasped at the soft meat of her biceps. She glanced his way and saw him. She tottered back on those heels, one arm flying out and pointing.
“There,” he heard over the sirens. “There he is! That’s the guy!”
His heart pounded suddenly, forcefully. Then that electric feeling that had pushed him into the street and onto the man pulsed through him again. He turned back in the direction of the bar and ran. He could hear shouts and heavy footfall behind him, but none of them could catch him on foot. He knew that.
He had made his way through tougher terrain than city streets. His legs were long like an elk’s. His heart pounded, but the effort did not tire him. It energized his body. He licked his lips and tasted blood. A dizzying strength pulsed through him, and his legs pounded faster.
“Get back here!” It was a woman’s voice behind him. Close, but fading.
A smile spread across his face. He pushed his legs harder. Their voices grew quiet. So faint he didn’t know if they were still on him. He slowed and turned, a little disappointed that the chase had ended so quickly. His breath was coming in hard. Heat radiated beneath the leather coat. Sweat dripped down the small of his back. He bent over a little, eyes turned toward the end of the street, so far now that it was a blip of black between towering buildings in the night.
Headlights appeared then from around the corner, easing slowly at first as a car turned. He stood straight and backed out from under the dome of orange street light.
Woop woop!
It was high pitched, two siren calls in quick succession. The car at the end of the road was dead still. The white headlights stared at him, a giant ungulate in the night. He sniffed. Smelled metallic and burning rubber. The engine revved. The sound cut against glass windows and concrete walls. He stepped back, unsure of what was happening.
The wheels started to spin, the car held in place by something he couldn’t see. Hot white smoke began to tear at the fabric of the street. The back of the car bounced slightly from side to side. He took two more steps back. Then it dawned on him. He was now the hunted. He turned in slow motion, his feet steadying, the right one forward, the left behind. His calf muscles tensed. Power building up in the sinew of his muscles. A rubber band pulled back ready to launch.
When he heard the tires screech loose, the engine ripping into the night air, he pushed off. Lightning energy pulsed through his glutes, found their way down hamstring and calf before the release. He pulled his right leg up high, bent perfectly at the hip, the knee balled as his calf touched his hamstring before he let it drop. First his toes hit the ground, then his heel as he lept off of the leg again. They went in turn, the left leg then the right, pushing like engine pistons as he ran.
The sirens ticked on again, and the high pitch rattled his ear drums painfully. He grimaced, and pumped his legs faster, desperate to get away from whatever fate was waiting behind the wheel of the car. The city lights were growing sparser. Long stretches of dark gave him somewhere to hide until the moonshine of headlights bumped and pulsed behind him.
When he saw the long shadows his legs cast in the road, he would tuck his chin, puff his chest, and run faster. There was an end to that, the explosions of speed. He was meat starved and thin. Minutes went by, the engine the only sound louder than his breath, the pound of his footsteps on pavement. Then, a voice.
“Stop! This is the police! Stop!”
The police. They were the police. He said the sentence in his mind again, but the word, police, held no meaning. He figured it was those men in blue shirts and pants. The ones with the light, and the loud light buzzed cars. He didn’t know what all it meant. But he had seen enough in the forests and canyons and desert lands to know that the police were no good for him.
A break in the buildings (those empty spots were growing longer now) revealed treed darkness. He pumped his legs and tuned his ears to that black place. Crickets. The squeak of bats. And behind the walls of brush and cottonwoods, he heard the trickle of water.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!”
He turned back briefly, in time to catch the face of a man. His eyes glowed under the red hot street light. He held a black square of metal in his hand. When he spoke into it, his voice boomed out from the mouth of the car, reverberated against the hardness of his bones, the slick of the pavement.
He looked to his right. A new building, a long concrete shopping center was approaching. The cool damp of the woods beyond would disappear. Be a bygone by then. His legs were running out of steam. Now when his feet hit pavement, he could feel a wobble in his knees. He took a hissing breath, held it, then leapt right. His feet lifted off sidewalk, sailed in space, then hit tall brown grass.
The patrol car behind him screeched to a halt. He heard the siren wail for the first time. Had it been on all along? The flash of blue and red on the tangles of grass and dirt heaps played mind games with him, revealed obstacles that weren’t there for a flash before disappearing the one he was trying to avoid.
He hopped through the grass like a football player through tires. Right, left, right, trying to avoid a sprained ankle. He breathed with each jump, a hiss into his mouth. Hold. A balloon of breath out. Then again.
The first shot cracked the sky. His vision went white with the sound. A strange high pitch rang in his right ear. Again, the sky broke. Only this time, the sound was drowned out in static. He ran, the feeling in his legs gone, his brain tuned only to his breath. In—and hold—out. More shots cracked off, over twenty when it was all said and done. But by then, he had rushed behind a curtain of trees, and made it to the stream.
Gripping as usual, Shaina. You write so vividly. I'm a bit confused about the character though. He thinks like a wolf, obviously looks like a man, can talk, etc, but doesn't know what police or sirens are. He could be partly feral, or mentally handicapped, or some kind of mutant but I can't get a clear idea of what he is. The description of how he runs is really interesting, like he's manipulating parts of his body like a machine.
Shaina, this is a delicious puzzle you have dropped as a prequel! My theory goes like this...The present day opening it seems is to set a reference point in this creatures evolution since coming out of the desert. This is beautifully executed to slide deftly into the key section with the flashback. Where ever the creature first originates, it encounters human civilization first as an intelligent cunning wolf then rapidly adapting and assuming the characteristics of the most lethal and cunning animal in this world. Also we get an indication of its current level of confidence in his superiority and we learn that there is likely more than one of them by now. Thru all of this evolution is one constant, the blood lust. I think that in Chattel we may be seeing the continuing evolution of the creatures killing eating efficientcy. The world should be terrified! Of course I maybe completely off base here?