Lovebites & Sunguns

                The first time Larry Hardemeier met the Duncans, he was lying naked in a small cage, in the back of a moving sport utility vehicle. His head was pounding and his mouth tasted like blood and vomit. It felt like the worst hangover of his life, compounded with a growing sense of shame, a knowledge that whatever the hell he had done the previous night, it hadn’t been good. He lifted himself up onto his elbows, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. A blurry blue blob danced before him in the early morning light, and as Larry’s vision cleared, the blob resolved itself into a familiar, but still decidedly strange, form: it was the Sesame Street muppet Grover, hanging from the SUV’s rearview mirror by a string embedded in his back.

                Larry lay back down, feeling not quite ready to deal just yet.

                He had been sleepwalking again, he knew. It was a very new and very troubling situation. It had first happened three nights ago. Larry had woken up the following morning on the roof of his Murray Hill building, stark naked. A pigeon feather had blown into his mouth while he’d been sleeping, and he’d spat it out, wanting to retch. Climbing down the fire escape back to his apartment, he found that to get out he had broken the window, instead of opening it normally. He’d also found that his whole apartment was a mess; it looked like a hyperactive chimpanzee had been through it.

                Larry had cleaned up as best he could, then spent a good two hours Googling “sleepwalking” before deciding to just pretend it never happened, unless it ever happened again. It happened again that very night. He had been on his way to a date, walking west on 26th Street towards where he was going to meet her at Madison Square Park, watching the sun set behind newly-constructed glass-and-steel condominium towers, and that was where his memory of that night ended. He didn’t know if he’d actually made the date, though he doubted it. He had woken up – again, completely naked – in the middle of Central Park. He’d had to steal a blanket from a sleeping homeless person to cover himself up as he hurried home, and he considered it a minor miracle that he had been able to make the trip without getting stopped by the police.

This time, when he got home, Larry had made an appointment with the best therapist his firm’s health insurance plan would pay for. Something was clearly very wrong. Unfortunately, the earliest he could get an appointment was the day after, so Larry vowed to stay home, eat healthy, not drink any booze, and take a sleeping pill or two before going to bed.

                Clearly, that plan hadn’t worked.

                Larry opened his eyes again, and watched Grover swing back and forth from the rearview. Grover’s presence led Larry to believe that this probably wasn’t a police vehicle, though whether that was a good thing or not was a very big question mark. The radio was tuned to a ‘90s rock station, but neither the driver nor the person in the passenger seat seemed to be paying any attention to it. The driver was male and very tall, the back of his head almost fully visible over the SUV’s headrest. He had short, black hair flecked with gray, and seemed to be wearing glasses. Larry couldn’t see the passenger at all, but her voice was clearly female. They were chatting, from what Larry could gather, about brunch.

                “Apparently,” the woman was saying, “they do a beet omelet…”

                “Beet?” the man interrupted. “Like the vegetable?”

                “Exactly, the vegetable, the red vegetable,” the woman continued. “They mix it in with the eggs somehow, and it makes the whole thing purple, but it’s apparently fantastic.”

                “Awesome, I guess we’ll just have to check it out,” the guy said. “Oh, speaking of eggs: You remember the gargoyle, from up on the Freedom Tower?”

                “Oh, you mean the one that almost dragged me off the roof of the Freedom Tower? The one that came pretty, pretty close to dropping me one hundred-some-odd stories to my screaming, squishy death? Why, yes, Nathan, as a matter of fact, I do remember that particular gargoyle.”

                “Yeah, well, its eggs hatched,” the man, apparently named Nathan, said. “Rudy emailed me this afternoon; I completely forgot. There’s pictures, too, check my phone.”

                Larry saw the woman’s hand as she picked up a smartphone from the center console. She was white, with short fingernails partially covered in chipped, black nail polish. She had a thin gold band on her ring finger, and was wearing a dark denim jacket.

                “Aww!” she said, looking at what Larry had to assume were pictures of newly-hatched gargoyles. “Look at their ears! And their little teeth!”

                Larry cleared his throat. “Um, excuse me? Hello?” he said.

                The woman turned around in her seat. She was in her mid- to late twenties, with short black hair only slightly longer than what would normally be considered a pixie cut. She had pale freckles and bright green eyes, and Larry suddenly felt very, very conscious of his nudity.

                “You’re back!” she said to him, smiling. “Good morning.”

                “Hello,” the driver said, glancing at Larry in the mirror. “You’ve had quite a night. Do you remember any of it?”

                “No,” Larry admitted.

                “That’s okay,” said the driver. “That’s perfectly normal.”

                “I’m Genevieve, and this is Nathan,” the woman said. “What’s your name?”

                “I’m, uh, I’m Larry. Larry Hardemeier. Where are you taking me?”

                “We’re going to take care of you, Larry Hardemeier,” Genevieve said, turning back around to face forward. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

                “I’m supposed to see a shrink later this afternoon,” Larry said. He meant to imply that if this was some kind of kidnapping, he would be missed, but instead Nathan and Genevieve just laughed.

                “Oh, buddy,” chuckled Nathan. “Oh man, that’s some good planning ahead, Larry. That’s some really good planning ahead.”

                He made a turn onto a residential street, then parallel parked the SUV. Nathan and Genevieve got out, and Nathan came around to the back, opened the door, and unlocked the cage Larry was in.

                “Sorry about having to lock you up,” Nathan said with a smile. The rectangular, thick-rimmed glasses he wore gave him an undeniably geeky vibe, except the nose those glasses rested on had clearly been broken and reset more than once. He took off the black trench coat he was wearing and handed it to Larry, who put it on and climbed out. The coat felt heavy, every pocket filled with stuff. There was something rigid and rectangular in an inside pocket, like an old graphing calculator pressed against Larry’s chest. And there was definitely something heavy and metal in the right outer pocket … a gun? Nathan was holding firmly onto that arm, gently discouraging Larry from exploring the contents of that pocket, or really moving anywhere at all.

Larry looked around. They were in a residential neighborhood that he didn’t quite recognize. Quaint, two-story houses lined one side of the street, while on the other side stretched a narrow, wooded park. Beyond the park was a river, crossed off to Larry’s right and up above by an arched railroad bridge.

                “Where are we?” Larry asked.

                “Astoria,” said Nathan.

                Larry stared out, through the park and across the river, trying desperately to remember anything from the previous night. He remembered being in his apartment, trying to relax. The TV had been on, tuned to Bloomberg. All very normal. And then… what? He could dimly recall feeling ill, panicky. Like the one time he had tried mushrooms in college, and freaked out because, as his friends later told him he’d said, “reality was liquid.” And then nothing, just a complete blank until waking up in the cage.

Nathan held Larry’s arm tightly, with more sure strength than Larry would have expected from someone who looked like such a bookworm. Genevieve, meanwhile, was unloading bags from the back of the SUV. There was a canvas messenger bag, and a briefcase-sized rigid plastic case. And there was a long, thin, triangular bag that Larry recognized as the kind normally used for a hunting rifle.

“Am I, um, under arrest in any way?” Larry asked.

Genevieve hoisted the rifle bag over her shoulder and smiled at him. “We’re not the cops, dude.”

“Honestly, Larry, we’re the people you’d much rather be dealing with right now,” Nathan said. “You know the police, if they can’t lock it up or shoot it dead, they’re lost. We, on the other hand, can actually help you.”

“But I’m free to go whenever I want?” Larry pressed.

Nathan smiled again. “Please don’t?” he said, inflecting it like a question, though the hand still gripping Larry’s arm let him know it wasn’t a question at all.

“Come with us,” Genevieve said. “You can get yourself cleaned up. We’ve got coffee inside. And then we can answer all the questions that I know you’re asking right now. Like who we are, and how you came to be locked in a cage in our car.”

“And what I’m betting is the big one,” Nathan said: “What you’ve been doing the last couple of nights, and why you can’t remember any of it.”

                Larry thought about it for a second. “Okay,” he said.

                They led him up to the old brick house in front of which they had parked. The house had little to distinguish it from the others around it. Two stories, with a small fenced-in garden in front and a cracked concrete driveway leading to a back garage shared with the neighbors. There was a small garden in front of the house, not particularly well-tended, but not the worst on the block by a long shot.

A brass sign on the front door caught Larry’s eye. “Paranormal Consultation and Investigations,” it read.

Genevieve unlocked the door and Nathan guided Larry inside. They walked past a stairway and into the living room. “Have a seat,” Nathan said, gesturing toward an old, comfortable-looking couch. “I’ll grab you some clothes you can wear.”

                “And I’m doing the coffee,” Genevieve said, setting down the stuff she was carrying and continuing down the hallway to the kitchen.

                Larry sat down and looked around the room. Every wall was covered with shelves and every shelf was filled with old books, along with various relics and talismans from all manner of cultures, and numerous odd devices whose purpose he couldn’t even begin to guess at. Yesterday’s New York Post lay spread out on the coffee table, its puzzle section completely filled out in blue pen. Larry put his hand in the jacket pocket again, feeling the gun there. He had been to a shooting range out on Long Island a couple of times, so he felt like he kind of knew about guns, but something felt off about this one, not the least of which was how Nathan could have forgotten about it when giving Larry the coat.

                Larry pulled it out, to take a look. It wasn’t like any gun he had ever seen. It was much more rounded, for one thing, a thick black cylinder with a smaller silver cylindrical barrel, and another gold-colored cylinder as a handle. The opening at the end of the barrel was tiny, far too small for a bullet or any real projectile Larry could think of. It looked more like a prop from an old sci-fi movie.

                “It’s a jet injector,” Nathan said, coming into the room with some clothes. “Basically a needle-free syringe. It uses a high-pressure inert liquid to pierce the skin. International aid agencies have used them for decades to do vaccinations, and they’re used by veterinarians all the time on animals.”

                “And that’s something you normally keep in your jacket pocket?” Larry asked.

                “Yup,” said Nathan. “Here, put these on while Gen’s still in the kitchen.”

                Nathan deftly plucked the jet injector out of Larry’s hand and gave him the clothes he was carrying. There was a pair of old gray sweatpants, a white tee-shirt from a four-mile running race that had taken place in Central Park the previous year, and a gray zippered hoodie with a faded brown stain on one of the sleeves. They were all slightly too big on Larry, but at least he didn’t feel like a flasher anymore, he thought after he’d put them on. He gave the coat back to Nathan, who casually draped it over a chair.

                “All right, he’s decent,” Nathan called, and Genevieve came in with a coffee pot and three mugs. She set them down on the table, then went back to the kitchen and returned with a half-pint carton of milk and a small bowl of sugar packets. Larry helped himself to a mug of coffee and sat back down on the couch, while Nathan sat in a nearby armchair and Genevieve perched herself on one of the couch’s arms.

                “So,” Nathan said, “I guess we should start by telling you who we are.”

                “I saw the sign out front,” said Larry. “Paranormal…”

                “…Consultation and Investigations, yes,” Nathan said. “That pretty much sums it up. There’s a lot of, for lack of a better word, weird shit in the world. There always has been. And a long time ago, some very smart people figured that it would be better if most of it was kept under wraps. A small group of guys would, in secret, deal with all the weirdness, while the rest of the world could just believe that stuff wasn’t real, that they were just, like, scary ghost stories.”

                “Do you believe in ghosts, Larry?” Genevieve asked.

                “No, not really,” Larry said.

                Nathan nodded. “And you probably don’t believe in leprechauns, demons, mermaids, or Bigfoot either, right?”

                “No,” said Larry.

                Genevieve reached down and plucked the Post off the coffee table. She quickly flipped through the pages until she found the article she was looking for and showed the newspaper to Larry.

                “You see this?” she asked.

                Buried in the back half of the paper, just before the celebrity gossip, was a headline, “Monkey Business,” with the sub-headline, “Escaped Ape Runs Loose in Midtown.” Larry looked up at Nathan and Genevieve.

                “Give that a read, Larry,” said Nathan. “See if it jogs any memories.”

                Larry quickly scanned the article. Witnesses reported a black, hairy, fast-moving gorilla-like creature with cat’s eyes running around the streets the previous night. There was one man, not too far from Larry’s building, who claimed the creature had pushed him, sending him flying almost completely across the street. There was a halal cart vendor who claimed the creature had knocked his cart over and run off with all his gyro meat. There was the heartbroken old lady who had been out walking her two corgis, and who claimed the creature had stolen her dogs, and a jogger who had claimed to see the creature in Central Park, its face smeared with blood, eating a corgi-sized, furry animal. While many people had tried to photograph the creature, the darkness and the speed at which the animal moved prevented anyone from getting anything better than a dark, gorilla-shaped blur. Surprisingly, the article concluded, none of the city’s zoos reported any apes missing from their pens.

                “What does this have to do with me?” Larry asked.

                “Last night,” Genevieve said, “we tracked that quote-unquote ‘gorilla’ down. We found it, we shot it with tranquilizer darts, and then we loaded it into a cage we set up in the back of Grover.”

                “Grover?” Larry asked.

                “Grover the Land Rover,” she said. “That’s our car’s name. It’s stupid, I know.”

“It’s funny, it’s totally funny,” said Nathan. “Here, check this out, we’ve got pictures.”

Nathan reached into one of his trench coat’s pockets, pulled out a small digital camera, and flipped it over to show Larry the screen on the back.

Sleeping in the cage in the back of their SUV – the same cage in which Larry had just woken up – was a monster.

It wasn’t a gorilla, although Larry could see how someone might think so on a quick glance. It was human-shaped and covered in thick, black fur. Its ears came to points, and its mouth, hanging open and drooling, was filled with sharp, pointed teeth.

But the shape of its face, underneath the fur, was very familiar to Larry.

“About a month ago,” Nathan began, “you were bitten by some kind of wild animal, right?”

                Larry nodded slowly. It made sense. Well, no, it didn’t make sense, it was impossible, it was something straight out of gothic teen fiction. And yet…

“So what are you saying? That I’m … that I’m a werewolf?”

                Genevieve nodded, but Nathan said, “No, werewolves don’t exist. There’s no such thing.”

                “Nathan, come on,” Genevieve scowled. “There’s no need to get all nitpicky about it right away. I mean, for all practical purposes...”

                “No, he should have it right, right from the beginning,” Nathan said. “A human being can’t turn into a wolf; they exist in entirely different taxonomic orders. Even for a metamorph it’s just completely, genetically impossible.”

                “So, I’m not a werewolf?” asked Larry.

                “No, Larry,” Nathan said. “You’re a wereperson.”

[X]

                In the end, getting her revenge was the easiest thing in the world.

                She knew which café was his favorite, the little place on the Rue Sorbier in Belleville where he drank at least one night a week. She couldn’t go in there herself; he would most certainly recognize her, and that would be trouble. But she could talk to the waitress, the buxom Belgian girl who wanted to be a singer, and who liked to take her cigarette breaks in the alley behind the café, where she would be left alone. She convinced the waitress to dissolve a powder into the oppressor’s drink, to call her when she had done so, and then to forget having done either.

She was very good at convincing people to do what she wanted them to. Exceptional, Ivor had said. A phenom. The best he had ever seen.

                So when the burly cook dragged the half-conscious oppressor outside, she was waiting.

                “I’ve got him,” she said. “He was supposed to meet me an hour ago, but of course he had to get himself a drink first, the useless pig!” Her French was nearly flawless, except for the slight American accent that she hadn’t quite managed to shake despite her years here in Paris.

                “Are you sure?” the cook asked. “He’s very heavy.”

                The oppressor was a foot taller and maybe twenty kilos heavier than her, but she was stronger than she looked, and had no problem at all supporting his weight as she took him from the cook’s shoulders and escorted him into a cab.

                He was snoring as she dragged him up the stairs to her flat in the 12th Arrondissement. Now that he wasn’t trying to kill her, she thought he was kind of handsome, with his shaved head and his gauged ears and his cleft chin. She lowered him down onto the floor and stripped him naked, emptying his numerous pockets as she removed each item of clothing. She set the clothes in one pile, weapons in another, everything else in a third. She smashed his mobile, pocketed his cash, left his cigarettes on the floor.

                His body was covered with tattoos. She knew that one of them was the symbol of the oppressors’ order, but not which one. She assumed it probably wasn’t the Charlie Brown on his left bicep, nor was it likely to be the name “Thérèse” written in script on his inner thigh, though she was amused to find that his head wasn’t all that he kept shaved.

                I could just kill him now, she thought. He was naked and defenseless. It would be over in a second.

                Then she thought about what he had done to her boys. What he had done to Ivor. It wasn’t enough for him to simply die. He needed to know who was responsible for his death. He needs to feel firsthand the pain that he inflicted. A good line to add to the manifesto, she thought.

                She went out into the hallway and pulled down the ladder that led up to the hatch to the roof. She dragged his unconscious body up, and then, using the supposedly unbreakable steel chains she had bought from the hardware store, she chained him to the chimney.

                And then she changed him.

                She’d heard that the oppressors put something in their blood to make it undrinkable, but that turned out not to be the case at all. It was actually quite sweet. Making him drink from her wasn’t a problem, either. She simply held his nose until his mouth instinctually opened, tore into her own wrist with her teeth and let the blood drip down his throat. Then she sat back. It was done.

                He sputtered and thrashed as the change took him. That’s when she had second thoughts. Dawn was still over an hour away. The change would most certainly nullify the effects of the drug, and he would wake up, stronger than he had been before. The chains were secure, but would they be enough?

                And so she decided to play it smart. It would be enough that he would die as they did; he didn’t need to know she had done it. He’d probably guess, anyway.

                She climbed back down the ladder and shut the hatch to the roof. It could only be opened from the inside, for security, so she wasn’t worried about him escaping that way should he manage to get out of the chains. She went back into her flat, gathered up his weapons and his wallet in her old knapsack, and left.

                She didn’t go far, though. She crossed the street and banged on the apartment building’s front door until an irate old man with an ancient shotgun answered. She convinced him to let her in and then forget she was even there, and went up to the top floor. There were two apartments up there; she went to the door of the one that would face the street, and again knocked on the door until the occupant woke up and answered. He was a Middle Eastern boy, probably a university student. She took him as a meal, then sat by the window with the curtains drawn, watching the roof of her building.

                Slowly, the sun began to rise, and she had to step back away from the window to avoid getting burned. The oppressor would be feeling the heat now, she imagined. She hoped the chains would be enough to hold him.

                And then she saw him, a naked, tattooed bald man, standing on the roof with smoke rising from his skin. He darted from one side of the roof to the next, frantic. There was no shelter up there, she knew. He was trapped, and dawn was breaking.

                Desperate, the oppressor leapt from the roof. His entire body was burning in the sunlight before he hit the ground. Safe in the university student’s room, she watched his still body smolder in the street.

                Feeling exultant, she cocooned herself in the student’s blankets, and went to sleep for the day.