Wild (12 page)

“No, you haven’t told me anything,” she agreed bitterly, inhaling a lungful of sweet smoke. “What are the Kurtadam and why would they be here?”

“They’re the fucking werewolf royalty,” he said, blowing a smoke ring at her. “Kurtadam is Turkish. I think it just means ‘wolf.’ Really all it means to werewolves is, ‘We’re the flash arseholes who got lucky,’” he added wryly.

“Got lucky how?” she asked, inhaling the rich scent of weed on his breath as he talked.

“They’re hereditary wolves, born into it. They never lose control, like we did, because they’ve got each other to see them through it all, explain it and keep them safe.”

“So they’re like a club? A werewolf club?”

“I suppose so. I do my best to avoid them. And you should too,” he warned. “They don’t take kindly to wolves like us.”

Paranoia threaded through her. “Wolves like us? What kind of wolves are we?”

“Vargulf. Outcasts.” He gestured to the living room. “Killers.”

Her stomach flipped and she grabbed the joint back, desperate for the dopey calm it would bring. “You think they might know?” she whispered, glancing round the kitchen as if a whole pack of werewolves might be hiding in the cupboards. “You think they know what I did? Already?”

“All I know is you can’t trust the bastards,” Nick said grimly. “I’ve heard some messed-up stuff. Vargulfs going missing, Kurtadam doing experiments …” He shook his head. “Like I said, avoid them. Just stick with me, Lizzie. We’ll be fine. Me and you. Together.” He squeezed her hand to reassure her.

She wanted to believe him. Wanted to cling to him and let him take care of everything. But she remembered how he’d run off that night in the Krazy House, leaving Hannah to die in her arms.

A low moan from the living room interrupted her chain of thoughts. She stiffened, dropping the joint onto the stained tiles. “Is that –” She stared at Nick, waiting for confirmation, her heart thundering with panic. He nodded, pressed his finger to his lips, and edged towards the kitchen door. She followed, almost choking on her own fear. She didn’t want to see this. She didn’t. Wasn’t it bad enough to have killed Harris in the first place, without having to watch him come back as a fucking zombie?

And yet, she couldn’t not look. It was like trying not to look at a car crash, or a mugging victim. Your eyes just went there, ignoring your brain’s frantic cries. She peered over Nick’s shoulder, hanging onto his arm for dear life. She owed it to Harris to look, didn’t she? Owed it to him to accept what she’d done.

In the living room, Harris’ feet were twitching. The low moan rising from his throat grew louder, more strained, as if he was struggling to push the sound out. Lizzie squeezed Nick’s arm until he shook her off, shooting her a glare over his shoulder. She ignored his black look though, entirely transfixed by the sight of Harris rising from the dead.

He sat up stiffly, eyes rolling back in his head. They were yellowed and blood-shot, like he’d been on a massive bender. His skin was pasty, gleaming with sweat. She tried not to look at his chest, but once again her eyes disobeyed her brain, and she found herself staring at the gore-crusted, shredded mess of his torso. Slashes of white gleamed through the blood and torn skin – ribs, she thought, feeling dizzy. Those are his ribs. When he exhaled, blood bubbled up around the gashes; sucking back in again when he inhaled.

“Jesus, what a mess,” Nick remarked. She could have hit him.

Harris clambered to his feet with painful slowness, like an old man, clinging to the settee for support. That awful moaning subsided as he gained his balance, looking around with watery, blank eyes. Some of Lizzie’s fear subsided. He looked so pathetic, so helpless. Nothing like the man she knew.

“Is he dangerous?” she asked Nick.

He shook his head. “You saw the old lady outside the Barfly. Once all his faculties come back, he’ll just carry on like normal. Well, not exactly like normal. Like a lobotomised version of himself. We should get him cleaned up and out of here while we still can.”

“Out of here? We’re just going to throw him out on the streets?” she exclaimed, horrified.

“You don’t want him hanging round here, do you?”

“People will see him!”

“Lizzie, you probably see half a dozen ghouls every day,” Nick said patiently. “Begging for money or fags, or rooting through the bins. Selling the Big Issue, for fuck’s sake. You don’t look at them and think ‘oh, there goes one of the living dead,’ do you? It’ll be fine. Trust me.”

She watched as Harris staggered around the living room, crashing into the walls and furniture, moaning in frustration, leaving a trail of sticky, bloody footprints behind. No, she didn’t want him hanging round the house. Especially not if Harris was just going to turn back into old Harris. She could feel sorry for this shambling mess, but the old Harris … No.

“Okay,” she said, heart sinking with the inevitability of it all. “Let’s get him cleaned up.”

****

She couldn’t handle the actual clean-up part. She tried, she really did, going so far as to take Harris by the hands – cold, clammy hands – and lead him upstairs while Nick ran a warm bath. But when Nick peeled Harris’s blood-sodden clothes off to reveal his mangled greyish body, Lizzie was violently sick, so Nick put her in charge of finding clean clothes for the ghoul.

She dug out Harris’s favourite football shirt and a pair of new jeans, wondering if he’d be warm enough, then wondering if ghouls even felt the cold. While Nick rinsed an unresisting Harris off in the bath, she paced the hall, chewing her nails and scratching her arms. How the hell had she got here? Werewolves, drugs, and dead men – it was all so wrong. She was supposed to be sorted by now, back in London, doing physiotherapy and maybe engaged to a rugby player or something. Although her mum always wanted her to marry a doctor or a lawyer. Someone respectable and well-bred, like Piers’ wife. Sportsmen didn’t count.

Surely all this was just a sick joke, a cosmic mistake?

“Lizzie?” Nick called from the bathroom. “You got his clothes?”

She scooped up the clothes and slipped into the bathroom. Harris sat in the tub, dripping wet and still looking utterly unaware of his surroundings. There was a dumb, happy grin on his face, the kind he normally wore when high, and he was splashing his fingers in the water like a child. Lizzie’s heart cracked.

“We can’t just let him wander the streets like this,” she said to Nick.

He shrugged, reaching for a towel and vigorously drying off Harris’ hair. “He might look vulnerable now, Lizzie, but he’s the same guy who used to hit you. He’s still an arsehole. You keep him around and sooner or later, the Kurtadam will find him. And you. They don’t look kindly on Vargulfs, Lizzie. They’re not going to care that he beat you up, or whatever. They’re just going to see a dead human and a rogue werewolf.”

Nick pulled Harris none too gently to his feet and manhandled him into the footie shirt Lizzie handed him. “Besides,” he continued, “he treated you like shit, didn’t he? Knocking you around and all that. Maybe this is justice.”

Justice. Lizzie turned the thought around in her head. Maybe it was. Harris had ruined her life, hadn’t he? All her careful plans were blown to pieces the minute she met him. But that wasn’t just his fault, was it? She seemed to remember liking the drugs and the partying a whole lot at the beginning. She seemed to remember dropping out of school because she just couldn’t be bothered going, not because Harris had made her. Because
she
decided.

“Alright.” She steeled herself, trying to look at Harris not as a person anymore, but as an object to get rid of, like a broken bed frame or a punctured tyre. It hurt, but she could do it. “Where are we taking him?”

Nick flashed her a feral smile. “Good girl. Let’s get him in the car.”

****

By the time they were driving out of Wavertree and into Liverpool, Harris had started to come round. He reached through the front seats to tug at Lizzie’s hair, demanding cigarettes and beer over the crushing volume of Nick’s stupid prog-rock mix-tape.

“Lizzie,” Harris rasped, “dying for a fag, babe.”

She shuddered at the touch of his freezing fingers, and tried to resist slapping him away. As much as she told herself to see him as temporary inconvenience, she couldn’t help thinking of him as a flesh-eating monster who might slurp her brains out through her ears at any second. “Not now, Harris,” she said, shifting slightly in her seat to dislodge him.

“Give him a joint,” Nick advised, passing her his weed tin. “That’ll keep him quiet for a while.”

Not sure whether to laugh or cry at the surrealness of it all, she rolled and lit a joint, then passed it to Harris. He took it greedily, lapsing into wheezy silence as he smoked.

They took them to Hotham Street, out of the way in a rundown part of town, not far from Lime Street train station. It was a bleak expanse of empty, chained-off lots alongside boarded-up buildings. The local papers were always reporting muggings and assaults round here, usually after gigs but sometimes not. Sometimes some idiot would cut through here to get to Lime Street and end up bloodied and battered just because another idiot took a dislike to him.

Nick helped Harris out of the car. Lizzie sat shivering with misery in the passenger seat, watching as Nick shoved a fiver in Harris’ pocket and pointed him towards the train station. She rolled down the window to hear him say, “you’ll be warm in there. Plenty of folks to lend you money and fags, alright?” Nick spoke slow and loud, like Harris was a foreigner who might not get it. Harris loitered, looking lost and miserable until Nick gave him a shove towards the station. Then he ambled off without a backward glance, gait uneven.

Lizzie shoved her jumper sleeve into her mouth to muffle her sobs as Nick got back in the car. Watching him shuffle off like that conjured a strange mix of emotions in her – relief and guilt mostly.

Nick patted her knee and smiled at her. “It’s okay. It’s done now.”

She nodded and wiped her eyes, not sure she believed him. This could be her whole life from now on. Killing, covering up, killing again ... She couldn’t handle that. She’d rather just die. She glanced at Nick, remembering something he’d told her before. “You said becoming a werewolf was the best thing that ever happened to you. Why?” She couldn’t think of a damn thing that would make this mess better, but if he had anything to offer, she’d snatch it up.

“It changed my life,” he said, reclining his seat back and stretching his long legs out. “Saved my life.”

“Oh.” Disappointed, she poked through his weed tin. There wasn’t enough for another joint. “What, you found Jesus or something Or … or … is this like some sort of werewolf rehab that helped you kick the drugs? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Nick barked with laughter. “Fuck no! I love drugs! Drugs make everything so much better. And I can take more drugs now than I ever could before. I can’t OD now – it’s physically impossible. I don’t get any comedown either, never sick a day since I turned.” He looked at Lizzie, his eyes shining maniacally.

“Seriously, Lizzie, you won’t believe how much better getting high is as a werewolf.”

She gaped at him, an insidious hunger taking hold of her. “Really?”

“Really.” He grinned, a wild light in his eyes. “I was a heroin addict before.” He rolled up his sleeve to expose a mess of thin, snaking track marks on his arm. “I was homeless, begging, probably about to die any day, and then this wolf attacks me one night. I thought that was it for me, but now I’m like … like …”

“A super junkie?” Lizzie suggested.

“Yeah! Right. Exactly!” He twisted in the seat to face her, catching her shoulder. “You want to try it?”

Hunger battled hesitation in her gut. Yeah, yeah. Of
course
, she wanted to try it. She wet her lips, back on that precipice again. Who cared? What was there to lose? Her life was already in tatters, already changed forever. She could start fresh later. This sounded like fun. She deserved some fun, didn’t she?

She met Nick’s expectant gaze, nodding decisively. “Fuck, yeah, I want to try it.”

fourteen

D
JANGO’S
R
IFF, A
few doors down from the Krazy House, was a small, narrow space that immediately set Lizzie on edge. It was early evening and the place was mostly empty, but the few customers drifting around looked like the kind of jazz-hands wankers she’d avoided at uni, all amateur dramatics and air kisses. A group of them huddled by the bar, sipping bright cocktails and squealing at each other, grating on her ears. The background music was just as bad – pianos and saxophones.

“We’ve got a gig here tonight,” Nick explained, guiding Lizzie to the bar. “After that, we’ll hit the town. Have some real fun.” He winked at her.

She couldn’t wait. The image of Harris wandering off into Lime Street, eyes vacant, haunted her. Drugs would take the image away. A few pills, maybe a few lines, and Harris would be banished.

Nick ordered himself a pint and Lizzie a vodka and orange. They both took a pill, just to take the edge off. They huddled together in a booth seat, watching the jazz-hands crew squeal and mince with increasing volume. “Twats,” Nick muttered. “You don’t miss anything being a werewolf, you know. You can see all these pretentious idiots for what they really are.”