raised by wolves

When I come to, it’s all sterile white sheets and a curtain and the buzzing of complicated machinery. Hospital. Haven’t been to one of these in a while.

Someone’s talking.

“Well, Mr. McGinnis, welcome back to the world of the living,”

It’s a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. He’s wearing glasses and looking at a clipboard.

“Legs,” I grumble. He raises an eyebrow.

“No, you were shot in the head, Mr. McGinnis, your legs are fine.”

“My name. My name is Legs.”

My head hurts. It’s hard to think. Not that it was particularly easy before. This doctor is making my head hurt.

“Oh,” he says, finally understanding. “Well um…Legs. You’re very lucky. The bullet took off a chunk of your ear and part of your skull, but your brain was untouched. You’ve already been through surgery and you’ll make a full recovery in just a couple days,” he smiles and takes a step closer to me. He snaps his fingers in my ear. I flinch reflexively and glare at him. He nods.

“And you haven’t suffered any hearing loss, either. Very lucky indeed.”

He taps his pen against the clipboard and says he’ll come back to check on me in a couple of hours. He tells me there’s a little button to push if I need anything, food or water or maybe a newspaper. I ask when I can leave and he tells me tomorrow.

“Oh, and one other thing,” he says. “You’ve got a visitor. A Miss…Partridge? Perkins? There’s a little blonde girl here to see you, I didn’t catch her name.”

“Parker,” I tell him. It’s Gracie. She came to see me. I can’t help but smile.

“Right, Miss Parker. Would you like me to send her in?”

I nod, or try to, but my neck is very stiff. I wonder how long I’ve been here. The doctor winks at me and says he’ll send her right in.

A little while later, there she is.

“Look at you,” she says. “They fixed you up good, huh, you big lug?”

Gracie. What a doll. Five-five, a hundred and twenty pounds. I could lift her up with one arm like you’d lift a bag of groceries. She’s got her hair pinned up in a cute little bun with chopsticks stuck in it. She’s wearing a brown fur overcoat and black heels. I smile.

“Hi, Gracie,” I say, but my voice cracks like it used to when I was a kid, before my growth spurt. I cough and clear my throat and she smiles.

“Easy, killer,” she says and comes to stand next to me. She takes my hand in both of hers and it reminds me of Russian dolls. “You don’t have to talk or anything, I didn’t expect you to be awake. I hear you’ll be fine in a couple days though,” she says and smiles wide, full red lips peeling back like curtains on ivory piano keys. I nod and tell her I feel fine now, even better with her there. She squeezes my hand and smiles.

“Yeah, well, you aren’t going anywhere, least not til tomorrow.”

When she smiles, she shows her dimples, the left one with a tiny black speck in the center.

“You’re very lucky to be alive,” she says after a pause. “I’m glad they only grazed you. You can hardly tell there’s anything wrong with your ear,” she goes on, but stops and then blushes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it at all, I mean…You know what I mean, Legs.”

She purses her lips and slightly narrows her eyebrows. I smile and tell her I don’t mind. Not like I’m the one who has to look at me.

“Who put the nasty idea in your head that you’re so ugly, huh?” she asks and gently strokes my hand. I shrug. No one, I tell her. That’s just the way it happens.

She frowns. “You’re a silly fool, Legs,” she says just above a whisper.

I tell her I know.

“And you’re not ugly. Whoever told you that is the ugly one,”

Normally I don’t take to people talking to me like that, insults are always out of line; coming from Gracie, though, it doesn’t sound unreasonable that I might be a fool. I try to think, though my head still hurts and my ears start to ring, to prove that I’m not a fool, about the first time I heard someone call me ugly.

“It was the Boss,” I say.

“Who?”

“The Boss. Mr. Cosmo. Mr. Cosmo told me I was ugly. But he didn’t mean it bad or anything,” I hesitate. It never occurred to me that he could have meant it as anything but a statement of a fact. I didn’t mind being ugly. That’s just how things were.

Gracie’s turned red again.

“Well that horrible man got what he had coming,” she says. I ask what she means and she looks at me, eyes suddenly wide and round and mint green, like lifesavers caught in headlights.

“They didn’t tell you?”

I ask, tell me what? And she covers her mouth with her hand.

Back on the surface, it’s pretty obvious our cover is blown. There is a horrible black vortex ripping down the hall in front of us. People are screaming and running, just like Santiago and I. We don’t have time to be discrete, and so we join the throng and hope that they picked the right direction. The floor behind us gives out and crumbles away into that magical void that things don’t come back from. A man running behind me loses his footing and vaporizes before he can hit the floor. He opens his mouth to scream, but the sound is sucked out of him. I keep running. I notice Santiago is gone. I call his name but, blind with panic, I can’t convince myself to stop running.

I feel the floor giving out under me. I leap and dive and tuck and roll, back on my feet. At the end of the corridor, I see something that looks suspiciously like daylight. I pray the comet hasn’t fallen from the sky. Not yet.

I feel a cold wind on the back of my neck like fingernails made of ice. I stumble at the last moment on a dislodged piece of ceiling, and drive my face into the mud just outside the complex. By the time I roll over to get my bearings, it’s as though the complex was never there. There’s a sound like a vacuum seal being broken, and then simple nothingness. What an odd sight, hundreds of vampires standing by the sea in the morning. I don’t see Santiago. I lay flat on the ground and stare up at the wretched blue sky. I have a vision of a cigarette burning all the way down to the filter without a single drag being taken. I wish for the simple annihilation that the sun could have brought me before this whole mess. It’s true what he said, that old monster. Not existing would be much easier than dealing with this.

But nothing worth doing is ever easy.

I’m roused from my nihilistic daydream by strong hands gripping me around my shoulders and pulling me to my feet.

“Is this him?” one of the guards asks. I don’t bother looking up. I feel so drained.

“Yes, it’s him. Put him down unless he can’t stand.”

Her voice sounds so far away. The heavy grip eases up off my arms, and I feel my knees wobble, but I stay standing.

“Sergei? Earth to Sergei, come in cosmonaut,” she says and there’s a white hand like a feather tickling at my forehead, running fingers through my hair. It’s Sophie.

“Sergei, you saved us.”

This is the last thing I was expecting. Torture, vilification, execution maybe. Certainly not “you saved us.”

I look up at Sophie with tired disbelief. She says it again, that I saved them. I shake my head.

“Santi’s gone. He didn’t make it out.”

Her eyebrows shoot up so fast I think they’re going to fly off her face.

“Mon Dieu,” she says and shakes her head. She puts a hand on my shoulder and pulls me close to her. I can’t stand it. I don’t want to be touched. My skin feels like a prison. I want to tear at myself and explode outwards, out of this horrible undead shell. I rest my face in the crook of her neck and she strokes the back of my head comfortingly.

“Come,” she says, releasing me when she realizes I’m not going to break into tears. “Sit.”

We walk to the car. She sits on the hood and explains what happened after I got the axe in the head.

The guard hit me and Santiago took him down. He then ripped Solomon’s insides out and threw Sophie face first through the nearest wall. She assures me she’s fine, not that I asked or cared at this point. Solomon is fine, too, she says.

After we disappeared, Solomon began calling his own abilities into question. He had never had any experience with or talent for magic until comparatively recently. Being a vampire, and a simpleton, he never questioned that his influence and ability were never any effort. When he tried to move the meteor of his own accord and nothing happened, he realized I was right and that, whatever it was, we were heading for a trap. Then the complex started collapsing. The sun turned red in the early morning sky, and the howl of ancient demons flooded everyone’s ears.

“I don’t know how you did it,” Sophie says. “I don’t know how you knew, but you were right. We’re in your debt, Sergei. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

I sigh. “Don’t worry about it.”

I get in the car and turn the key in the ignition. “See you around,” I say to Sophie and unceremoniously peel out to meet what might be the last stretch of daylight I ever see.

I stop in a coffee shop. No one sees me. I drink three cups and eat a donut and leave without paying. No one says a thing. I drive all day, back to the city, back to my hole. I stop at a Mexican corner store and buy a portrait of the virgin. When I get home, I draw a mustache on it and hang it on the wall next to my book case.

That night I have dream that I’m a fly caught in a web. I hear the old witch cackle. In my dream she says, “I don’t know how you did it, little Cyril. You escaped both traps, his and mine. You are a special lad, little Cyril. There is a place for you yet in this world of men and monsters. You have earned it.”

In the dream the spider sinks its fangs into me and sucks me dry.

When I wake, the sun has gone down.

I find myself overcome with a terrible, familiar thirst.

The pause, the words, the look are imperceptible to everyone in the place but me, it seems, and the hollering only gets louder as the dance continues.

Finally stripped bare, Sophie stands and twirls herself around a metal pole jutting out of the stage. She moves like a feather, or like water, fluid, weightless. Sublime. And then, she’s grinning down the bar at me and she’s asking for a volunteer. The previously unseen emcee, a short man in an untucked button-up shirt and tie, hands her a mic and she says over the techno-garbage excuse for music: “I need a volunteer from the audience,” and her black-painted lips turn themselves up at the corners, pointed like a flick-knife.

“I need a volunteer from the audience who would like an experience that they will remember for the rest of their lives.”

She says it breathily, heavily, enticingly. She says it the way that makes you excited, and the way that lets you know she’s the one that will be calling the shots. The roar of the attendees reaches a feverish pitch. Sophie winks at me and walks once more to the end of the stage and on to the bar. Every man at the bar is clamoring for her attention, some of them even going so far as to stand up and wave their arms. She passes them all, one by one, looking them up and down, running her fingers through their hair as she passes, discarding them like spent napkins. A perverse game of duck-duck-goose. Then she comes to me, and it seems like I’m the goose. An image of a fried duck in a big black pot flashes through my mind. Her black-painted lips part to show a hint of pointed pearl, and a flash of pink tongue running over them like a slug sliding down a razor.

She picks the man sitting next to me.

She pulls him up, just a regular guy. Dark hair, collared shirt, khaki slacks. He’s had a few and his face is bright red. He can’t believe his luck. I know what’s happening now. I know this song and dance, and when I look over at Santiago, it’s clear he’s got a pretty good idea, too.

Sophie speaks again into the microphone:

“Tell me your name,” she asks the man. He answers: “David.”

“David, how do you feel, being here, seeing me at Rodrick’s for the last time ever?”

He stammers: “I uh uh uh I feel honored uh I guess?” like he’s asking permission.

Sophie smiles and puts her hand on his chest and guides him like a tugboat towards the metallic pole. “Very good, David. I’m glad you feel honored,” she says breathily, moving him slowly and gently, like one moving an antique chandelier. Once his back is to the pole, she slinks around him, never breaking contact, never taking her hand off of him. She pulls his hands behind his back, and he doesn’t protest even a little, just turns a darker shade of red.

“Now David, I’m going to ask you a personal question. And I want you to be honest with me. We’re all friends here, right? This won’t ever leave this room. Will you be honest?”

She puts the microphone up to his face, reaching around from behind him, pressing ever so slightly against his back, soft pink nipples on soft cotton fabric. I’m sure he can feel her. Darker and darker red.

He stammers that yes, he’ll be honest.

“David, do you like it rough?” she asks like a mousetrap flying shut. He falls to his knees then and cries out.

There’s blood pouring out of his neck, but the crowd never saw Sophie take the bite out of him. They’re too busy laughing to see Sophie spit out a piece of neck flesh. They haven’t seen the blood dripping down her chin and onto her naked chest.

The sound of grown men screaming in abject terror is one that is wholly unique. It never sounds the same twice, but it is always unmistakable and it will always bring a smile to my face.

Like lightning, quick, I leap to my feet. The sight of blood, the hiss of severed arteries, it dries my throat intolerably. The thirst. Hunger so abject, so hollowing, so complete, it nearly overwhelms me. It’s all I can do to rip out the neck of the man standing closest to me. The cascade of red flows through a dying gargle, a gasp of terror drowning quickly. The spray hits my face and I lick my lips and sink my teeth into the soft wet esophageal hole and drink. And drink. And drink.

I move onto the next one in short order. A distant corner of my cognizance registers the image of Sophie tossing aside her victim, the man David. Her lily-white skin has turned entirely ruby red. Only her black-painted lips, still smiling sinisterly, give any impression that she was ever any other color. She is beautiful in only the way a woman partaking in wholesale slaughter can ever be. And then she’s gone into the crowd, sending men flying in all directions, their windpipes dangling down their chests from torn necks. I follow suit, wading in like a buzz saw through a butcher shop.

Time passes as in a dream. Days go by as the showers of red turn into a pool at our feet. No one makes it out, though not for lack of trying. One courageous patron attempts to defend himself with a chair, only to have it placed firmly into his middle, impaling him on three of the four legs. I lift him up and open my mouth as blood pours out of him. I drink until my stomach hurts and all the screaming has stopped.

Sound and time and my senses shift back to working normally as the sound of a familiar belly laugh breaks into the silence like a burglar. It’s Santiago, covered in blood, the girls he had on his arms before now strewn about the floor, mangled, drained. He’s laughing.

“My god, Sergei,” he exclaims, motioning to the carnage around us. “I didn’t know you had such wonderful friends.”

He smiles a wide wolf-smile at Sophie, who is still naked and covered in blood. She smiles back, then turns to me and leaps clean across the room and into my arms. She kisses me, and I taste the blood of many on her lips.

“Sergei! I cannot believe it!” she says. “Where have you been all these years? It has been too long! And now, you show up here on this night of all nights! It is truly an auspicious sign.”

I want to ask what she’s talking about, but I’m distracted by the naked skin in my arms and the blood on my lips. Instead I say, “Sophie, this is my friend Santiago. Santiago—Sophie.”

They smile and nod approvingly of one another and Sophie daintily extends her blood-stained hand. They shake and Santiago says, “How do you do?” and, like a real asshole, bends and kisses her hand.

“Yes,” she says, looking down her arm at him. “You’re one of Sergei’s friends all right.”

I squinted and marveled at just how different everything looked in the full blaze of daylight. My street was nearly unrecognizable. The buildings seemed taller, the trees more numerous. I kept my head down and squinted at the sidewalk, also bathed in bright, harsh luminescence. I noticed after a few blocks that I was sweating. The sun gave off heat I remembered in an abstract sort of way. I struggled to recall the day, the month, even the year. I decided it must be spring, and supposed that it could get rather warm in the day time, though it was the cool, refreshing nights of spring that I remembered best. I took off my jacket and draped it over my shoulder, resisting the temptation to pull it over my head like a canopy.

After the initial shock, I slipped back into my routine like clockwork. First it’s down the street to the convenience store, buy a pack of cigarettes and then head to the bar. I was startled to see a different clerk behind the counter, and even more startled when she smiled and gave me a cheery morning greeting. Day shift, I remind myself. The clerks do change, even though it’s always been the same tired old black man every time I’ve gone in. The black guy has been under one of my charms as long as I’ve been coming here. He doesn’t see me. When I come in, he can’t help but obey the compulsion to put two packs of Stanton’s on the counter and then promptly forget about them. Vampires don’t pay for anything.

After the initial greeting, the charm took effect on the girl. I quietly wandered around, ate a donut and then took my cigarettes from the counter and left for the bar.

The bar was still closed. Jesus Fuck, I thought to myself. How early is it? I turned and looked for the nearest pedestrian and asked the time. He was a fat man of middle age wearing a baseball hat. “9:44,” he told me, then noticed my proximity to the front door of the bar and helpfully added, “A.M.”

I sneered and thanked him, then pulled him into the nearest alley and sucked him dry. Finally my thirst was sated, at least for the day, and I could start to wake up and think clearly. Like coffee, but brewed by ancient gods from the richest beans ever conceived, steeped to perfection in a warm, living human. I wiped my mouth and tossed the body in a dumpster to be forgotten, and then began thinking.

It took me ten minutes, but finally I came to the conclusion that my only recourse was to see the Spider Lady. I cursed my rotten luck, spat on the sidewalk and pulled the fat man’s baseball cap low over my eyes. I would have to see the Spider Lady, because it was extremely likely that she was the only person who had any idea why the hell I could suddenly go outside in the daytime. But that didn’t mean it was going to be pleasant.

so listen, i gave up on that last story while i was on my little hiatus.

the reason i went on the hiatus is this: the internet connection in my house is not one i pay for. it filters in through the walls of my neighbor’s house. we like to think that they got us the internet for christmas and were too shy to ever say anything about it. a few weeks ago, however, the signal vanished inexplicably. there were rumors that the neighbors were moving, and so we figured they’d had their internet disconnected to prepare for the move. this seems to not be the case, as our signal has returned, under the same network name and everything as before. so, until further notice, we’ve got the internet back.

the reason i gave up on The Voice is this: when i started this blog, i had a very clear idea to write shitty pulp-style horror, sci-fi and adventure stories because it was fun, easy and entertaining. by choosing to cut out super natural elements in the plot of The Voice, i think it became too real. another thing that contributed to it’s becoming too real was the fact that a young man in my community—a friend of a friend or an acquaintance, however you want to put it—died recently, very suddenly, of cancer. seeing people’s reactions to this event struck some remarkable paralells to the story I was trying to write, and seeing it in person made it too real and uncomfortable for me to continue writing it. it is extremely jarring to hear about young people dying.

this all said, i will start posting a new story on monday, and hopefully will be able to get back into the monday-through-friday update schedule i had before. i also hope that you will enjoy the story.

thank you everyone for your ongoing support of raised by wolves. thank you everyone for your kind and informative feedback on my zines. thank you for taking the time to read my silly stories. let’s do this shit.