Carl Wilson
All my life, I have had to lie about my true nature to protect myself and so many others like me, which is a lie that I’m usually comfortable with. At the back of my mind, though, I have always wondered what it would be like if Ivy and I ever had gotten together. I can’t imagine that I would have been able to keep that secret from her for long. For starters, I’m not sure how I would ever explain a cage in a soundproofed cell in the basement for when I needed to rage out.
Kate’s interest in me has brought those thoughts to the fore again. I can tell by her scent every time I’m near her that a kiss is mine for the taking. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Honestly, I’m still hurting about Ivy, but more of it is that I can’t bring myself to pursue something with her while I’m lying to her about her best friend. And then, I have to decide what to do about the wolf. There are just too many things going on, too much I have to hide right now. For all that she’s teased me over the time we’ve known each other, she still deserves to have me as straight and honest with her as I can actually be.
It’s been more than a week now that I’ve been covering for Ivy and Ben. It’s starting to wear on me, beyond my budding feelings for Kate. Every day, I slip one falsehood or another a dozen times or more, as people ask me if I’ve heard anything from them or from Grandma. I am still doing my best to trust her that she truly is safe, but it’s hard.
Grandma and I haven’t seen each other since we met at the truck stop. I know she’s been back home for a couple of days, but we haven’t been in touch. Also her idea, part of her drive to keep me as far from Ivy as possible. The one thing that lets me keep all of this anger and frustration under control is Ben’s warning that the Negre would find her through me if I didn’t back off. I know there’s absolutely no way Grandma would be conspiring with Ben to deceive me, so the fact that both of them independently have warned me off of her trail is a truth that I must grudgingly accept.
But I am also incapable of inaction. For the past three nights, I have gone down to the cage and let the wolf out, because he is running so hot and so close to the surface. By the time I leave school every day, I swear that if one more person asks me about Ivy, the wolf is going to go for their throat.
As a compromise with myself, after school I drive to Ivy’s house. Grandma is deep in the engine block of her semi taking care of something. “Grab a couple of cold ones for us,” she says as I approach, without extracting herself from her work. “And that spare pair of coveralls from the garage.”
I grab a couple of beers from the fridge in the kitchen, and put the coveralls on over my school clothes. I open a bottle and set it on the step of the truck next to Grandma.
“I’ve already got the clean side,” she says, finally pulling her head out of the engine. “Guess what that means?”
I know exactly what that means. I pull the creeper over and lay down on it, wheeling myself underneath the truck.
“I knew I should have called you before I started on this,” she says.
Once I’m down there, I know exactly why. There’s a bolt she needs to loosen to adjust the timing belt that is in a truly awkward place. The easiest way to get to it is to have one person underneath the engine guide the socket, on a long extension rod, to the bolt, while somebody else turns the ratchet from above. There is already one socket on the ground next to me, and I can see the bright chrome of another one glinting at me from the top of the oil pan. Once I’m in position, she starts to snake a third socket down toward me. I guide it to the bolt and hold it in place while she cranks.
I’m still pretty clean, just a little bit of grime and dirt shook free while we got the bolt loosened. The dirty part comes when Grandma starts the truck. More of the gunk the truck picks up on its thousand-mile days rattles free while the engine shakes from so many moving parts being out of synch with each other. Since I’ve got a shorter reach to the adjustment screw for the timing gear, it’s up to me to shoot a strobe light up at the belt and slowly turn the screw, tightening and loosening in increasingly small increments, until a couple of indicator lines synchronize perfectly with the flashing light. The light makes it easier to figure out which way to adjust the timing initially, but the final setting is done completely by feel. As I zero in on perfect synchronization, the engine stops vibrating and shaking things into my face, and instead starts to hum like a purring kitten.
“Nice work,” Grandma says, and starts to thread the socket down to me so she can tighten the one difficult bolt. “Took you longer than usual, though,” she says.
She won’t admit it, but there is one bracket attached to the engine that’s worn out and needs to be replaced. That bracket is the reason we have to adjust the timing belt every couple of months.
“You know I’m less than relaxed these days,” I tell her, turning the adjustment screw a tiny bit to compensate for the bolt she just tightened.
“Yeah. You’re keeping everybody off her trail, though, right?”
“I am, Grandma,” I say.
She finishes tightening the bolt, and I gently release the socket so she can move on to the two bolts that she can reach easily from the top of the engine.
“Good,” she says. “I wish I could give you something to tell you it’s all worth it, but I can’t,” she says. “I know they haven’t been caught yet, so there’s that.”
I back off the adjustment screw a tad, as she tightens another and moves on to the last one.
“Would you know?” I ask.
“There’s a vampire in the Fersiu clan I know that lives out in Wisconsin. Not much happens with the Negre that she doesn’t know about. But seriously, Carl. Keep yourself ignorant on that count, alright? The less we know the less we can let slip. Now get your mind back on the task at hand.”
For the last bolt, I have to keep actively adjusting the timing while Grandma tightens it down. It is almost impossible to adjust the timing by yourself because of this, which tells me she was expecting me to come by right about when I did. Knowing that she can predict me like that frustrates me, and I keep on overcompensating with the screwdriver. Grandma, at least, doesn’t get on me about that. She just patiently backs the bolt off every time I mess up and we start again.
Once we’ve finally get that last bolt taken care of, I grab the couple sockets she’d dropped earlier and wheel out from underneath the truck. She gives me a damp towel to wipe my face and hair off with. “It’s getting warm,” she says, handing me my beer and leading me to the slop sink in the garage, where we both wash up properly.
I stick around for dinner, just for something to do instead of fret at home. It’s hard for Grandma and me to not talk about Ivy in the house she lives in, that is full of her stuff, but we somehow manage. I spend some time talking with Grandma about Kate and the wolf. It’s not a problem she has, but she at least understands. Being one of the few pinkies that knows about both us werewolves and the zombies, she has spent most of her life keeping secrets from people she’d rather not lie to. The one time we drift into talking about Ivy is when she needs to unload a bit about how hard it was for her to not tell her exactly why she was so against her getting involved with Ben.
At the end of the night, I drive home, happy that I’ll be able to sleep in my own bed instead of raging in the basement. Sharing a burden always lightens it. Even if Grandma and I each had to take some weight from the other, the fact that we each had the chance to unload a bit makes the total load between us lighter and easier to carry.
Unfortunately, I wake up the next morning feeling on edge again. I don’t immediately know why, but there’s something nagging at the back of my mind. When I get to school, I can see that Kate and Nathan are off as well. We sit down on the stairs in our usual spot, and none of us speak for a while. Kate leans in a bit toward me, but that scent on her neck isn’t as strong. I try to make a bit of small talk, but it goes nowhere.
Finally, Nathan breaks it. “I can’t believe she’s throwing so much away!”
“She’s got ten minutes to prove she isn’t,” Kate says.
That’s when it hits me. For the past couple of days, both of them have been trying not to mention Ivy as they prepared for their Honors Literature midterm. Ivy is in the running for a major scholarship if she can get an A in her Honors Lit class. If she fails the midterm or takes an incomplete for truancy, there’s no way she can get better than a low B for the course, even if she gets perfect marks on everything else.
The fact that she is not sitting on the steps with us, that her car is still not in the parking lot, makes it clear that she’s almost certainly not going to be in her seat in first period for the exam.
“Why didn’t you just smack him right on out of town that day?” Kate asks me. “I guarantee you, every one of us would say he started it if you had.”
That’s not what I need to hear right then. “I guess the one time I let my better nature guide my hand was the wrong time,” I say.
“If I ever see him again, I’ll tell you what will be guiding my hand,” Nathan says. “Are you sure we can’t go to Denver and knock on every single hotel room door until we find them?”
“If they’re even still in Denver,” I say.
“What?” Nathan and Kate ask in unison.
“Has she been in touch?” Nathan asks.
“I had dinner at the house last night.” It’s work to get the next words out. So many lies to protect that stupid zombie. “Grandma and she still share a credit card account. She says she’s not in Denver, but all of her spending looks kind of normal, whatever that means.”
“Where is she?” Kate asks.
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“We’re going over after school tonight,” Kate says to Nathan and me. “We’re sitting her down and making her talk.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“You can skip work for this,” Nathan says.
“No, no,” I say. “It’s not about work. I just can’t. It was rough being at the house last night with her gone, and knowing who she’s with,” I say. “I just can’t go back tonight.”
Kate looks at me. “Still love her?” she asks, taking her fingers and gently pushing my gray lock of hair back behind my ear. It’s not an accusation she’s making. It’s driven by sympathy.
Nathan also reaches a hand out and puts it on my shoulder. I know he gets what I’m feeling.
I can’t speak at the moment. My throat is too tight. I just nod, very slightly.
“Well, if we manage to get it out of her, we’re recruiting you for the rescue party, alright?”
I nod again.
Kate runs a finger through my odd colored streak of hair again, and rests her hand on mine. “I understand,” she whispers, just for me. “Let’s both take our time, ok?” Her touch is extremely tender, I would say almost loving. And the erotic scent of desire is absent from the skin on her wrist.
The bell rings. Kate and Nathan shuffle to their Honors Lit exam. I vainly hope their concern for Ivy doesn’t cause them to do poorly. I don’t go inside right away. I call Grandma real quick to fill her in on my latest diversion in the hunt for Ivy and Ben, and to warn her that she’s going to have two furious people showing up at her house in about nine hours.
*****
Pushing the responsibility for Kate and Nathan off onto Grandma does very little to improve my mood, though. When I see them later in the day, they’re still horribly worried and upset. We have an awkward lunch together and they don’t say anything when I just start walking home at the end of the day.
When I get up to my house, I don’t even go inside to drop off my books, I just go right to my car. I sit there with the keys in the ignition, trying to talk myself out of what I’m about to do, but I fail. I have to sate at least a little bit of my curiosity. I remember the drive home from the movie with Nathan and Kate.
I had been too lost in thought on the drive to have marked how far out of town we were when I saw Ben skulking in the tree line. I started watching for landmarks right after that, though. Unfortunately, the darkness along that highway at night is pretty thirsty, and there are so many curves that none of them really stands out as significant.
I can at least guess which five mile stretch or so it was on, because I remember passing the intersection of the highway with Bela Lane a few minutes afterwards. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I drive up and down that stretch as slow as I can without being a traffic hazard, desperately looking for anything that seems familiar from the other night. I know that the easiest thing to do would be to park the car and let the wolf out to sniff around. But I’d never get it back on its leash if it caught scent of either zombie boy or Ivy. If the wolf gets close to Ben, one of us is done. Finished. I have a strong enough instinct for self-preservation that I choose not to start that fight, because if Ben is as good as I suspect he is, it’s not likely to go well for me.
I also love Ivy, still, way too much to put her through that. She doesn’t need to see it. A fight between a zombie and a wolf is a terrible thing to behold.
I allow myself one more slow drive down the stretch of highway where I think I saw Ben. I roll the window down, knowing there’s no way I’d be able to smell him in human form from a moving car, but it somehow makes me feel a little bit better.
I hit the end of the length of highway I’d targeted, based on a pair of white stones set near each other right off the road. They seemed to make a good marker for me to roughly guess where I should start looking for any sign of Ben’s hideout. A quarter mile later, I notice another pair of similar stones. This can’t be a coincidence.
I pull the car over at the next driveway and walk over to the nearest pair of stones. Each of them is big and heavy, about two feet square. Most of the rocks in this area are deep gray, so they stand out. They’re just bright enough that they’d even stand out at night.
Treading as lightly as I can, to not leave any tracks of my own, I start to examine the ground around them, looking for footprints or any other sign that the stones mark a path.
I find nothing, so if anybody is walking around here, they are at least as careful as I am with their steps.
One thing I do notice is that there’s a wrinkle in the land that runs downhill from where I’m standing, the kind you’d use if you want to walk around without drawing much attention to yourself.
I continue on to the other pair of stones, and sure enough, they are also not far from what looks like a game trail that runs along a fallen tree. I know the wolf wants to come out and test the air for me, but if I am where I think I am, nothing good will come of it.
I tell the wolf to back down and go back to my car. I’ve gotten close enough for now. If I feel I really need to go looking for Ben and Ivy now, I know where to start. It’s not much, but it’s enough for now.