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Next day Avy called lunch in Sunland and stood looking over the freeway railing at some old overgrown and half-collapsed warehouse district and ate rehydrated mac and cheese. Chay had killed a raccoon with a rock and as he dressed it with a filleting knife he asked her what it had felt like when she changed.
You’d get hungry as shit a couple days before, she said. Dad said it burned unbelievable calories when you turned.
Calree?
Like wood your body burns to keep it going. He said just changing could starve you to death if you didn’t eat enough before. We used to have to stock up like crazy every month. And then after you changed you were starving again. I don’t really remember much about what it was like after I changed or what I did or anything. It’s like trying to remember when you were a baby or something. Like the parts of your brain that do the thinking and remembering aren’t there any more. The human parts. But I remember being really hungry. Half our runs were looking for food.
Runs.
That’s what we called it, because we’d just run and run. All over the hills up around where we were living. I remember it felt really good. Like this is what I’m made for. I can sort of remember stuff like that. Feelings. We’d hunt. Coyotes would run from us. Wolves would howl. We were like them but we weren’t like them at all. They didn’t know what to make of us. And the nights were bright because the moon was always full when we changed. And the moon was—
She stopped. Looking off the freeway into some invisible distance.
It was like you could hear it. Like the light made some kind of sound. The second it came up you knew it was there. You didn’t have to see it. It didn’t matter where you were. And it wasn’t hearing really because it happened in your head. Like you felt it. The color and the light and the sound and the weight and it all just pulled at you. I really miss it.
The centaur swallowed the raccoon and the girl swabbed out her cup and tied her backpack and hoisted it. Come on, she said.
Late that afternoon they passed the Ventura Freeway connector and the 5 turned due south to parallel the sludge of the concrete-banked and -bedded Los Angeles River. Great berms of garbage and rusted frames of shopping carts half submerged in a kind of narrow bog. Miles of concrete embankment painted over with spraycans or brushes or rollers in a dense scrawl of pictoglyphs as if some dying race had struggled to reclaim the act of writing itself in order to set down some paltry hurried record that in all its myriad manifestations along this declining borderline of corralled waterway said entirely, I was here. We were here.
Downtown was a dozen miles away by the map. Full night would fall before they got there and there was no way in hell she was going into any downtown in the dark. They were passing the eastern end of the Hollywood Hills and all about their right side lay the wilded mass of what had once been Griffith Park. What remained of the Los Angeles Zoo just off the freeway somewhere in that thicket. The wasted sprawl of Glendale to their left.
They were in the shadow of the hills and dark would be upon them soon. She told Chay they should make camp soon and he said okay. Half a mile past the Colorado Boulevard exit they set up as they had the night before. Around them a stakebed truck with the wooden stakes collapsed, a phone company van with ladders on the roof, a FedEx tractor trailer, a rusteaten yellow schoolbus with steps caked and filthy past the foldback door aslant in its frame. Half the windowglass stove in. She did not look inside but instead folded down the back seat of a Scion and swept out the dirt and cobwebs and dead leaves with the edge of her hand and then unrolled her bedding there.
She ate her MRE directly from the foil pouch and cold. Chay taught her several words for things and tested her by saying them at random times and making her point to what they represented. She was wrong often as not. The guttural and phlegmy speech all but indistinguishable to her, one belch from the other. But Chay seemed to approve.
He left for his evening ritual while she ate her tasteless thirty-year-old cookie and downed it with bottled water. She thought about downtown and what might be there. She drew her bowie knife and practiced with it. A beautiful weapon for someone two feet taller than her. The handle banded with ebony, leather, and brass, brass-ended and with a curled brass fingerguard. The grip large in one hand and small in both. The blade itself looked a small companion to a cutlass, broad with a large and upswept cutting fore and curved cutback in the lead third. Both edges shaving sharp. Bloodlet on both sides alongside the thicker keel. The metal spotless and no rust anywhere. A deep cutaway blade trap just before the guard. The whole thing nearly a foot and a half long and heavy enough to tire her arm with wielding. You could hack off a branch with it, or an arm. The cutback gave authority to a backslash and made stabbing more effective. She loved the bowie even though it really was a lot of knife for her.
She sheathed the knife and gathered the empty MRE packets and carried them to a car a hundred yards away and threw them in. On the way back she walked slowly by the schoolbus and eyed it warily. The square blind windows necklaced in glass chunks. The chassis lowered on dryrotted tires. A faint urine stench as she passed downwind. The whole interior probably some massive rodent den.
The shadow of the hills stretched well across the Valley now. The breeze grew chill and she changed to her much-worn flannel hoodie. As dark came on, strange cries rose from the enjungled hillside. Shrieks and squawks and chittering. Sobbing peacocks and enraged macaws. Chittering monkeys and obscene toads. Once a roar and a trumpeted reply. In the hills coyotes barked accompaniment. Soon the whole was riotous and strange, a great odd menagerie settling in for the night. She was accustomed to odd animal noises and had slept outside nearly half her life yet she had never heard anything like it. She had no qualms concerning creatures out there hunting creatures. Often she’d been one of them. But some of these creatures sounded large and the sounds were mysterious and a little worrisome.
She turned to fetch more water from the pack she’d left in the lowered tailgate of the Scion and she stopped. A hyena stood watching her from the roof of that very car. Spotted like a leopard and built like a madman’s nightmare of a dog, it appraised her steadily. Rear legs short and front long and all blackfooted. Close-set eyes and wide muzzle black.
She stared back only long enough to be sure it was not about to leap and then looked around for the others. It would call them soon and they would flank her. She saw nothing but continued to look because she would soon need shelter or a place where she could fight. She had broken her lifelong habit of noting what fully windowed cars or other protected spaces were at hand wherever she made camp and now here she stood and there stood the smartest and most remorseless predator she had seen aside from human being or centaur and more on the way. She had seen them bite through leg bones and they were better strategists than most people knew.
The decoy on the Scion roof was bristling at the mane now. Her head went low to just before her paws and she grinned down at the girl. Nothing but ten feet of air between those teeth and her.
Avy unsnapped the sheath strap and drew the bowie and grinned back and sang out a long fuuuck you. Then she glanced around once more and threw her head back and yelled Chay’s name as loud as she could.
The hyena grunted softly several times and then began to whoop. Highpitched and upbending. Avy grabbed the bowie in two hands and felt herself relax. The wolf in her was gone but mind and body remembered.
She realized that she already knew where they’d be coming from and she turned toward the schoolbus and yelled Chay’s name again as the clan leapt from the doorway one at a time. One looked out a broken window at her and lifted its nose to the air and withdrew and emerged in its turn a moment later. Now a dozen of them paced the road in strange half-upright postures, eyes on her and heads swiveling on long thick necks to stay in place as if on gimbals as their slopebacked bodies turned and turned impatiently. Each a match for her weight and probably her knife.
She yelled out again and this seemed to incite them. A group of three came toward her and another group of three moved to circle round behind her. Loping in their peculiar bearish gait and batlike faces stern. Grunting as if exasperated. The remaining six stayed where they were. These would rush to help if the others could not bring her down or they would rush to feed if she did fall. The two groups approaching would pause just long enough to take her measure and then come at her singly from either side, the first in front to busy her and the other behind to hamstring her. She had seen a group of less than this coordinate to bring down an armed man twice her weight and gut him with their teeth even as he grabbed at them and kicked and beat and looked on in flateyed voiceless terror. Unable even to scream because fascia and diaphragm had been torn through and bloodsoaked muzzles already worried at his guts.
The telephone company van was nearby and she sidled to it and stood with her back to it. The decoy on the Scion roof was puffed up now and whooping pure hilarity. The shag of her dun mane all on end. Avy kept her gaze
fixed at a point between the two approaching groups and shifted her knife to her left hand and groped behind her with her right until she found the side door latch. She pulled and felt it disengage but nothing happened and she pulled harder and it moved but grudgingly. The rusted chassis becoming all of a piece. The flanking groups stopped ten feet away all of them whooping and appraising her and she knew she had only seconds before the first came at her. The door shrieked in its track and yielded a foot of entry that was all she needed. She kept the knifepoint to the fore and turned sideways and ducked into the van and hit the back of her head on the top of the frame hard enough to see pinprick explosions of light just as the first of them ran at her. She pulled the knife in after her and then pushed it out again as the hyena leapt to follow her in, and the hunter’s jaws clamped on the blade entire. Their very force opening him up palate and tongue. The impact drove her back into the crowded van heaped with corroded gear. The upturned bowie point still lodged in the hyena’s palate and the lower jaw snapping at the edge. Black eyes bright and fevered to get at her. The front paws scrabbled and she braced a hand behind her and pushed her upper body forward and then pushed the blade again. The creature laughed maniacally and tried to backpedal and she let it. The second attacker crowding the doorway now to snap beside the injured creature’s bleeding snout. She jerked the handle left then right and the impaled head followed and she yanked back and the fingerguard caught the thick and bloodsoaked fangs to pull the animal toward her. She almost lost the knife in its head. She twisted the other way and pulled back and kicked out and the hyena backed out of the van. The second attacker snapped at her in the doorway now almost on top of the first and she rolled sideways and grabbed the door and slammed it against the fangbared muzzle and it laughed as had its partner. The muzzle withdrew and she shut the door completely and backed into the crowded van and looked around at where she’d make her stand. The sides arranged with arcane devices in decline on racks and stacked bins of cable and connector. Nowhere to go and nowhere to fight but also no room for their lethal teamwork. She shifted the knife to the other hand and wiped her palm against her pants and shifted the knife back as the next one leapt up on the snub hood and pulled itself up and looked at her in a kind of ludicrous surprise. It turned its head and whooped. She threw the nearest thing at hand, some metal box with dials, and it hit but all the animal did was flinch and then keep coming. A second leapt to knock glass chunks from the bottom of the windshield frame with its front paws and then leapt again to hook its paws on the cleared frame and haul itself in.
One at a time she had a chance but not if she waited. The first was between the bucket seats now and coming back and she swung another metal box by two feet of power cable and clouted the hyena on the muzzle and followed with a slash of the bowie that garroted the thing so fully that its head half peeled from its neck. Blood engulfed her knife hand and sprayed a bright graffiti on the close walls. The body fell kicking. The other already behind it and not even pausing to examine its fallen partner. She backslashed and nearly lost the heavy knife again for the warm blood covering her hand and again she swung the box on its cord but the swing had nothing behind it and the hit meant nothing. The teeth popped so close to her wrist she felt the wind of it. It was on her before she could swing again and her hands came up to ward the head and met its throat as it knocked her back amid the gear. Its hind legs scrabbling to drive itself into her and front paws digging at her chest for purchase enough to open her up. Her right hand gripped matted fur with the bowie handle pressed between and the blade flat against the neck and she could feel its breath rasp through its windpipe against her fingers and she smelled rank dead meat breath as it snapped above her straining to nod down toward her and she thought about the flat beseeching look in the eyes of the man she’d seen killed by this creature’s kin and she yelled and let go the fur in her right hand to grip the knife as she pushed with the left and turned the edge toward the throat and brought the handle toward herself so hard the brass cap hit her just under the ribs and knocked the wind from her. The claws against her had no will behind them now and the shrill laugh had liquid in it and she was blinded by a gout of blood in one eye before her hands slipped in the blood now jetting from its severed jugular and windpipe. It fell whole atop her snapping still and gurgling. She cradled it like a crib toy until the legs stopped kicking and the teeth stopped popping beside her bloodsoaked face and then she shoved it boneless off and tried to stand and could not breathe.
Already another hung in the passenger window like some spectator that had wagered on the outcome. Avy wiped her hands and wiped her face but this only spread the blood around. A heavy smell of shit and iron in the van now. She tried to yell at her next combatant but the breath for it would not come. Sparkling black edged her vision. Not now. Fuck you. Not now.
She grabbed the gear rack with her free hand to hold herself up and stepped between the two dead hyenas and brought her knife toward the third at the window. Its claws scraped metal as it hoisted itself up. Blood flung from her hand as she beckoned it with the blade. Come on. It was halfway in the window like some horror being born into the van and she grabbed the bowie in both hands and crouched and then the hyena’s head exploded. It dropped to drape across the windowframe like an empty duffel and the near eye hung down by the stalk against its muzzle like a grape on a vine.
At first she did not understand what she had seen and stood there waiting still to meet it. She heard loud trumpeting and wondered what other animal had come to join the fray and then knew what animal it was. The clan’s calls changed from whoops to frenzied highpitched laughter and she stumbled forward past the bodies still warm at her feet, holding herself up with left hand braced against the rough and flaking wall. She readied the knife and leaned forward to look out the window and past the rock-killed body still kicking at the doorpanel as if caught in some primal dream of hunting. As perhaps it was. She sank to her knees with the breath still not coming. The window a yard away and beyond reach. She put a hand to her chest and realized some of the blood on her was hers. The hysterical cries intensified and she heard several thuds and then something in her gut unclenched and she drew a great long wheezing breath and fell backward into the van. Head pillowed upon the first of her slain predators.
Of course Chay had a first aid kit. Injuries among his kind were no different in nature or in treatment than injuries among her own.
