BONDAGE excerpt

Read "Werewolf," the first chapter of the new neon-noir thriller BONDAGE

WEREWOLF

One bleeding foot after another, Che crossed the open desert.

She had been walking for hours, through night and bitter cold, across earth with no end. Her throat dry as sandpaper with thirst. Her hands and arms stinging with lacerations. A crying wind cutting deeper—to the bone.

But the pain was a fire burning in the dark, driving her forward. And a voice spoke from the center of all that hurt.

Go, it said.

What she had run away from would soon come catching up to her.

Go. Go.

After a time, she arrived at a steep hill. She craned her neck to the house at the summit, floodlit by lunar light. A vision so strange after so many years locked inside.

Anything could be up there, waiting for her at the house. But as she looked back the way she had come, scouring her mind for any other path forward, she saw no other way.

They were out there in the dark, coming for her. And without a car or a gun, taking a gamble was the only edge she had. If she did not take a chance, if she was not willing to wager her very life, she would never save her sister’s.

* * *

When she came to the top, she took stock of the junkyard property. Porch light dead. Every window of the ramshackle house dark. Shards of glass snapping underfoot.

But there was an old Chevy pickup in the driveway, fresh tire tread and boot prints in the dirt. Signs of life. Of danger.

She approached the driver’s side of the truck and tried the door.

Locked.

She looked toward the house. There was no telling who or what she would find inside. She did not like her chances in putting up any kind of fight, given how weak she was beginning to feel, losing the strength even to stand.

Yet a voice spoke up inside her mind. A voice that she had heard first as her mother’s when she was a child, but which over the years had changed, become hers alone to hear.

Don’t be weak. Move forward.

* * *

The unlocked house door swung open.

The interior was graveyard dark. It took a tense second for her eyes to adjust. The dimmest of glows flickering at the end of the hallway. Television.

She considered prying her sneakers from her throbbing feet to dampen the sound of her footfalls, but if she had to run, she preferred to be ready with her shoes on.

Hoping the TV would be enough to cover her sound, she led herself by the wall down the dark hallway, stepping carefully on the creaking floorboards.

In the living room slept an old man in grease-stained coveralls, snoring through his open mouth on an old flower print couch in the glow of the television set.

You know what to do, the voice said. Do it. Now.

But Che shook her head. She knew what her sister Emma would do—what needed to be done, of course. The first and primary lesson their mother had taught them. But Che did not have the guts to kill an old man in his sleep. Not over nothing.

Your life is nothing?

Ignoring the question for now, she scanned the room. She was looking for the keys to the Chevy, but her eyes landed on an antique rifle hanging from a rack on the wall behind the old man. Bolt action and rusted steel. A stock of rich, dark wood. An antique that might not even work.

On the table next to the old man were two old hearing aids, connected by duct-taped wires to a dinged-up receiver box. He gave no indication of registering the sound from the black-and-white horror film that played on the television screen. A man with desperate eyes running through dark woods as he transformed frame by frame into a snarling werewolf. Che remembered faintly seeing this one once, a lifetime ago, on a fuzzy VHS in her mother’s desert trailer a hundred miles from anywhere.

She looked back at the snoring old man, lying there on the weather-beaten couch. An antique like everything else in the house. She convinced herself that she could lean over him and lay her hands on the rifle without waking the old man. Maybe she could.

But if he did wake, then she would need to follow the lesson her mother taught her. In her view, the ends always justified the means. It didn’t matter who you had to hurt if it meant protecting something you loved.

“Don’t you do it,” she whispered to herself.

She passed the living room and went into the kitchen. Leaving the light off, she turned on the tap and drank straight from the faucet, the best thing she had ever tasted in her life.

When she came up for air, she caught the ghost of her reflection in the window. Her jumpsuit shredded from the razor wire. A gash along her hairline and gore matted down one side of her face. Beneath her clothes, she knew she would be one bloody, smeared mess from her collarbone to her toes.

The pigs are coming, the voice spoke up again. Keep moving, stupid.

She found a can opener in the drawer and a can of baked beans in the cupboard. She downed it where she stood, barely chewing, letting the juice pour down her chin. There was nothing in the fridge but swill beer, condiments, a plastic sack of candy bars.

Something jingled up high when she shut the door. She reached up and patted the top of the fridge in the dark. Her hand came back with a key ring. A single key dangling between her fingers, a Chevy bowtie embossed in its center.

There was a rear door at the end of the kitchen. She could leave right then and there. But the longer she thought about it, the more certain she was that she could retrieve the rifle.

She did not yet know where Emma was or what she would need to save her sister. But whatever lay ahead, she needed to be armed.

As she turned into the living room, the old man was standing up, fitting a hearing aid in one ear while holding the rifle in his other hand.

“What are you doing in my house?” he said in a loud voice, his eyes bleary with sleep, his grease-stained fingers trembling as he pointed the rifle barrel at her.

She raised her hands and opened her mouth, but no words came. On the television, the werewolf lunged through the trees after a screaming teenage girl.

“I’m lost,” she stammered. “I was thirsty and needed help. I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“You got my Mars bars,” he said, looking at the sack of candy bars hanging from her raised hand. His eyes drifted to her other hand. The truck key dangling from her fingers.

Without taking his eyes or gun off her, he took a step towards an old rotary phone on a nearby table. “Now you stay right there, missy.”

This was it then. Her eyes searched the room for anything to use as a weapon, but she only saw the television. On the screen, the werewolf howled at the moon with red jaws, the screen washed in buckets of movie blood. Terrified teenagers being hunted and murdered in the woods. Superimposed over it, a tall and dark man dressed in Wild West mortician’s clothes beckoned to the camera with long fingers.

He reminded her of her father, killed weeks before she was born in a hail of government gunfire. Growing up, she had only the one photo of him. A thin, haunted-looking man from somewhere called Chiapas. In the picture he wore a long leather jacket and held a gloved fist above his head, a rifle proudly aloft in his other hand. He looked into the camera with the confident glare of a man who knew he would very soon be dead. She lost the photo years ago in a bloodstained Las Vegas motel room.

The old man’s hand was on the telephone. She scoured her brain for a compelling lie to tell him, but could not think of anything, so tried something completely different.

“I came here for your truck,” she told the truth. “I think my sister is in trouble and I have to get to her now. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Your sister, huh?” he said, as if not buying what she was selling. But he did not pick up the phone.

“She’s missing,” she kept on. “I didn’t hear from her in years. But then out of the blue I got something in the mail from her. It didn’t say anything, but… I know that it means she’s in trouble. So I’m out here looking for her. But there are people following me… dangerous people… and I got lost and came here.”

 “Well, hell,” he said, his eyes growing soft as he lowered the rifle. “I can drive you somewheres if that’s what this is all about. Where is it you need to go?”

The movie cut out. A loud musical fanfare played on the television as a breaking news graphic appeared on the screen.

Che’s face appeared on the TV. Her mugshot taken before she went into prison. Her eyes swollen and her face black and blue from how the cops had beat her head in.

A male newscaster read the text scrolling beneath the mugshot. Her full name. Che Guevara Horowitz. The murder they locked her up for. Her escape from prison. The manhunt underway.

“Che Horowitz is extremely dangerous,” the newscaster said. “Call the authorities if you see her. Do not approach.”

The old man’s eyeballs turned in his head from the TV back to her. There was no thinking about what came next. She threw the sack of candy bars at his face as he raised the rifle. He swatted at them and the rifle went sideways. She grabbed the barrel and they wrestled over the gun, dancing in a circle across the living room. She pushed him back into the television set, which crashed to the floor but kept playing on its side, as she wrenched the gun away.

She raised it at him. He threw his liver-spotted hands up and backed away, his legs hitting the couch and his ass falling back into it.

Kill him and be free, she heard. Kill him… kill him…

She pointed the rifle sight between his eyes. Put tension on the trigger and readied herself for the deafening sound.

But next to him, another man’s face flashed across the sideways TV screen. A smiling young man in cadet blues. The newscaster recounted the painful, familiar story of the dead young cop, just a few months on the job when he crossed paths with Che in a dirty Vegas motel room. The widow he left behind. The two young children. Girls.

If the old man had been spryer, he could have taken the gun from Che in that moment. But she could not look away as the news zeroed in on the young cop’s face. His bright blue eyes, which she had watched the light drain out of. They pierced right through her again.

She sighed. The old man winced. Through closed eyes, he said, “That gun’s ornamental, y’know. It ain’t worked in twenty years.”

She looked at the rifle in her hands. Then she pointed it at the rotary phone next to the old man and pulled the trigger. The butt kicked against her shoulder and the phone exploded in shards of plastic and red and blue wires.

She swung the rifle back towards the old man, who was hunched over on the couch clutching the ear that had the hearing aid.

“Do you have another phone?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“A cell?”

“A what?”

“Give me your wallet.”

He reached into the butt pocket of his jeans and held out a worn leather wallet. She snatched it from him, holding the rifle crooked in one arm as she pulled out about thirty dollars in loose bills. She threw the wallet to the floor, holding the gun on the man as she squatted and picked up the sack of candy bars.

The old man looked at her through bloodshot eyes, white-knuckling the armrest. She imagined the way she must have looked to him, half in the dark, the gun in her hands, what part of her that stood in the light stained blood red as if she had been baptized in it.

“I wouldn’t get up from that couch if I were you,” she said.

He nodded vigorously.

“I left you the beer. Troopers will be around the next day or two. But you should ration the beans just in case. Sometimes they’re slow in following the breadcrumbs.”

* * *

Rain beat against the windshield, mile after mile.

She drove through the night. Headed south across the barren Nevadan desert, her breath smoking in the dark cab, wind lashing the truck. Hunched over the wheel, chewing candy bars one by one and letting the wrappers fall to the floor.

Above the sound of the engine, somewhere out there in the darkness, she heard something like a werewolf howl, its heart wild with murder.

The terrain was empty and vast, as if she were the last person on Earth. But she knew what was lying in wait for her ahead. Roadblocks and checkpoints. State troopers. Federal marshals.

If she were still alive, her mother might be proud to see the fascists dispatching their pigs and thugs after her youngest daughter.

But deep down, Che knew what her mother would actually say. How she would rage at Che for letting the old man live so that she could live with herself. Che knew that she could not be that weak again.

She gunned the truck to 80, 90, 100 miles per hour, pushing for the horizon. She would be free or she would burn in bright flames.