Teeth of the Wolf

Teeth of the Wolf ebook-13-2

“It’s what I can afford,” she says, unclipping her seatbelt. “I know who your parents are, Matiu. You’ve grown up with privilege, and you must’ve made a bloody hash of it to even know me. But don’t go being the judgemental b***h about where I live and how I get around, all right?”

He winces. “You want me to walk you to your door?”

Erica smirks. “Why? So you can catch the bus as well? This car won’t last a minute in this neighbourhood.”

“Erica, I’ll find out what I can about your sister.”

“Do that. I’ll call you. Have some answers.”

She gets out of the car and stalks towards the apartment block without so much as a goodbye. Matiu takes a long breath and pulls into the street. Damn her! Messing with his day like this, screwing with his head. s**t, even if she didn’t have the whole Do what I tell you or I can send you back to prison where you belong, you sexy thing routine going on, Matiu would feel obliged to do something. If his sister was missing, he’d stop at nothing to find her. And Charlotte could be pregnant, but what? Was she too scared to tell anyone? And what the hell was going on with all the grass growing inside her house? He shouldn’t be getting involved in this sort of s**t, but he can’t walk away now. There’s more to it than just some weird hippie diet thing going on. Erica needs his help, and somewhere low in his gut he has an unexpected urge to co-operate with her. He’s been resisting her as long as they’ve known each other, fighting like dogs, and now suddenly, from that one moment of regrettable contact, his outlook has changed. She’s playing him, of course. He’s not stupid. She wants him to do this for her, and the kiss, that suggestion of something more, is meant to hook him in. He doesn’t want to bite, but there’s a woman missing, and he might be able to connect the dots, given the headspace to work it through. f**k it all.

It’s another fifteen minutes across town to Screech’s workshop, and the gloom of evening has set in by the time he hacks the roller door open. Parking the Porsche back in its space while the door drops behind him, Matiu lets Cerberus out and walks up the dimly lit aisle between the rows of covered cars. “Yo, Screech?” An eerie silence greets him. The old fluorescents throw a sallow, fizzing glow, casting everything into carved shadow. There’s music playing somewhere out back but no sound of tools clanking. The Commodore’s still where he left it, the airbag draped across the front seat like an abandoned wedding dress. “Crap man, you’re not done yet? You’ve had all day!”

Cerberus lets out a low moan as they move around the car, past the Camaro, and head for the office behind the workshop. “Maybe he’s ducked out to eat,” Matiu mutters, as much to the dog as to himself. Cerberus whines in reply, tugging against him as he moves deeper into the garage. “What’s up, boy?” He pauses beside the creeper. It’s halfway across the floor, and if Matiu had ever given a flying f**k about health and safety he’d be writing it up as a slip, trip and fall hazard as well as a slapstick routine in waiting. Then he notices the scattering of tools, wrench handles and socket heads lying haphazardly over the concrete. Maybe Screech had stepped on the creeper, gone for a tumble, taking his tools down with him. Maybe he’s laid up in the office with a broken wrist or a bad back. Matiu takes a step forward, avoiding the creeper.

Then he sees the blood.

In the bad light, and against the ubiquitous grease-stains that cover every surface, it hadn’t been obvious, but as soon as he sees it, Matiu realises why Cerberus is dragging his nails across the floor. As his eyes adjust to the dark, he traces the lines of spatter along the floor, up the walls. There’s a good s***h of it up the side of the Camaro, the same red as the paint-job. Suddenly his arm is itching again, something fierce.

“Screech?” Matiu steps gingerly over the detritus, ears alert for any sound, any hint of movement. Something scrapes in the room beyond the workshop. The sweat running down his neck turns chill, the shadows jumping with his spiking pulse.

Matiu steps around the corner and looks into the office. Screech is in his chair, and for a second Matiu wonders why a two-bit crook like Screech even needs an office when he sure as s**t doesn’t do any taxes, before he’s struck by a memory of another wheeled office chair, back at Hanson’s farm, a man no longer a man creaking forward from the darkness to breathe ice into his world. But Screech isn’t Hanson. Screech has been cut, and cut bad. He’s strapped to the chair, which sits in a slag of blood and body parts. His overalls are sodden, but it’s the face staring back at him that holds Matiu’s morbid attention. Suddenly Screech strains against his bonds like there’s lightning running through him, thrashing, feet lifting the chair off the floor and slamming it back down. Matiu expects him to be screaming but he can’t, because…

Because his tongue is one of the hunks of meat on the floor, discarded there along with an ear, one eye, several fingers. Half of Screech’s left cheek is missing, and Matiu can see the ragged stump inside his mouth as it hangs open, a muted hiss of air streaming from his lungs devoid of the howl Matiu can see in the man’s remaining eye. But he knows what he’s saying, this bloody ravaged thing, this corpse who hasn’t accepted he’s a corpse yet. He’s cursing Matiu for an oathbreaker, for selling him out when he promised he wouldn’t. Kingi came here, found Screech. Kingi did this to him, shredded half his body, in some twisted parody of human art. The chopped-up man in the chop-shop. But was it revenge, or torture for the sake of finding out whatever the hell it was Kingi was looking for earlier in the day? Finding out where Matiu Yee was at, or his sister, or the body from the park? Or all of the above?

He backs away as Cerberus growls low under his breath. He ought to get in there, untie Screech, get him to a hospital. Scoop all the dismembered flesh from the floor into a chilly-bin and hope some doctor can work a miracle, but he doubts he’ll get that far. Screech still has his teeth, and his face is a twisted mask of insane rage. If Matiu cuts him free, he could go mental, clawing and biting and f**k-knows-what. He’s better off getting out and calling 111, leave this s**t to the professionals. Matiu is turning away when the shadows move. Cerberus yanks him forward, off his feet. If not for the dog, Matiu might’ve been struck by the thing that swings from the ceiling. A shape swoops through the light, legs and arms outstretched, hanging from something long and sinuous. Tentacles. The fluorescents swing madly on their chains. Matiu scrambles to his feet and slides across the blood-slick floor, skidding on loose tools. One foot finds the rogue creeper, which scoots out from under him, and he goes down again. Drops the leash.

The air explodes from his lungs, head slamming into the concrete floor. For a second, there’s a silhouette over his head, Kingi, reaching for him, twisting limbs writhing black against the swinging lights, then Cerberus leaps over Matiu, and both dog and monster tumble from view. Groggy, ears ringing, Matiu staggers to his feet. The bandage on his arm is sodden with grease and blood. Cerberus is rolling on the floor with the man he’d once called Si. Brothers of a sort, once, him and Simon Kingi. What the f**k had happened, that here they were now, soldiers on opposite sides of some f****d up, invisible war? Dimly, he hears Screech slamming his feet on the floor.

“Cerberus!” Matiu yells, and spins towards the Commodore. Remembers the exploded airbag, the seats covered in powdered chalk. No way can he take that back to Dad. He whips open the Camaro door and Cerberus leaps in without hesitation. Matiu drops into the driver’s seat, turns the key and throws it into gear. Kingi stands, flicking a hand, spraying more dark spatter across the floor. With barely enough room to get the car out, Matiu lurches the dragster forward, locking the wheel hard over. Tyre smoke and exhaust fill the tight space. The car was built to burn rubber. It spins up a storm without any help from Matiu. He pulls it into a tight turn to line up the roller door. He won’t have time to f**k around with his phone. Matiu lets the clutch out and the Camaro squeals like a banshee towards the closed door.

Kingi moves, faster than blinking. Tentacles lash out, catching the rafters and hurtling him across the workshop, feet catching and tipping over barrels and stacks of tyres as he rushes in. The Camaro’s bonnet hits the roller door right as Kingi drops onto the front windshield. The roller door explodes outwards with a shriek of torn metal, and Kingi is dragged backwards out of sight. The car bounces down the driveway and onto the street in a spray of sparks. Matiu hauls the wheel around, showering the street with shattered steel. Oversized rear tyres fishtail in a cloud of black smoke. Then the car leaps forward, the front tyres clearing the road for several seconds before gravity reasserts itself. Matiu watches the speedo rocket higher. He’s driven cars before but never a f*****g rocket. This is the s**t.

“f**k bro, that was too close,” he says to Cerberus, who’s laid out in the well behind the driver’s seat. “Too f*****g close.” He dares to take a breath, glad that Screech had the good business sense to locate his dodgy little chop shop in a part of town where the CCTV stranglehold hasn’t quite reached yet.

The rear windscreen explodes. Tentacles swarm into the car, hunting.

“s**t!” Matiu yanks the wheel over hard and cranks the handbrake, throwing the car into a spin. The tentacles vanish through the hole as streetlights sweep viciously through Matiu’s burning retinas, his head screaming with the pressure. Blackness creeps in. He lets off the gas, and the car slews to a halt. The V8 purrs on, unperturbed. Blinking away the darkness, Matiu looks at the street, where a body moves, getting up. He hits the gas again. The Camaro loves this s**t. The bump of the crumpled bonnet pounding Kingi into the road would’ve almost been satisfying, if what was happening wasn’t so f*****g terrifying.

Matiu takes the next bend and puts his foot down. Hopefully he’s left Kingi behind this time, but he doubts it. If only he had a shotgun handy. One more stop to make before he can get out of here. Two more corners take him around the block, back into the seedy industrial side road where Screech’s workshop now lies open to the general public, the roller door a snarled mess of twisted metal, detritus covering the road. He pulls over, yanking the keys from the Camaro and throwing them into the gutter. He and Cerberus jog back up the drive and through the remains of the roller door. Sirens echo somewhere in the distance. Better make this quick. Get Screech, get Dad’s car, get the hell out.

Inside, there’s a reek of methane. The floor is awash in high-strength corn-based biofuel from an upturned barrel. Matiu holds his shirt over his nose and runs in, past the Commodore and over the scattered tools to the office. Screech isn’t moving, his head hanging down. Matiu doesn’t waste time figuring out if he’s alive, he just wheels the chair from the office. Screech slumps. If he’s not dead, he’s playing some good possum. Slipping through blood and fuel, Matiu skids up beside the Commodore and jerks the back door open, hunting for his jack-knife to cut the cable ties holding Screech’s wrists to the chair.

He’s got one arm free, the body falling forward into Matiu’s arms, when Cerberus growls again, low and loud. Matiu looks to the broken roller door. There’s a figure standing there, and for one awful breath he thinks it’s Kingi, back already, but it’s not. No tentacles. It’s a dark silhouette, broad, imposing. Like a statue drawn out of shadow, a flicker of a shape glimpsed over the shoulder, from the corner of the eye and then gone, but this time the figure remains.

“Matiu,” the figure says, and he lifts his hand to his face, the incarnadine glow of a cigarette briefly brightening his sculpted, dour features as he inhales. Smoke wreathes around his face like ghosts in the wind. “Got a sec?”

Matiu’s blood runs cold. He wants to throw Screech into the back and get the hell out of here before the cops arrive, but he can’t move. Can’t breathe. “What do you want, Makere?”

“All I’ve ever wanted, bro. To help.”

Matiu snorts, a bitter sound. “Bullshit. Get the f**k out of my way.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Makere says, taking another ominous drag on the smoke. “We’re whanau. Used to be real close, you and me.”

“You’re not real. You can’t even be here. You’re in my head.” The itch under his bandage flares up again, maddening.

Makere chuckles. “It’s like this, bro. I’m not in your head, never was. That was just a handy place to watch the world from. But now I’m here, not there, and things are out of balance. Someone needs to go back, take my place, or it might all get out of hand, and I can’t make any promises that people won’t get hurt. So, you’re the obvious choice, right? It’s your turn.”

“I dunno what you mean,” he lies. Fear spikes his innards and he wrestles Screech’s inert body, his fingers, grimed with blood and oil, slipping on the knife. Screech flops around uncooperatively. Cerberus growls and paws the floor, fuel dripping from his nails.

“You’re going to find me someone to send back there, bro, or I’ll take you. Or maybe our sweet little tuahine, Pandora. We clear?”

Matiu stops. A lead ball sinks through his guts, and he straightens up, dumping Screech back in the chair. He glares at Makere, adrenaline trembling his fingertips, as he judges the distance between them. Weighs the knife in his palm. “Don’t you threaten me, and stay the f**k away from Penny.” He’s tensed to jump, ready to cross the workshop and put Makere down like the dog he is.

“Your choice, bro.” Makere takes one last drag on the cigarette.

Matiu’s eyes widen. He’s seen enough action movies to know what’s coming next. He shoves the chair aside, grabs Cerberus’ collar and throws him into the car, rips the driver’s door open and slides in behind the wheel. Makere, languidly, flicks the glowing cigarette butt from his long, lean fingers to arc end-over-end towards the fuel-soaked floor. Matiu guns the engine as the cigarette lands, the fuel erupting with a whoompf, the air suddenly super-hot. Impossible to breathe. He finds reverse and accelerates through the flames, Makere in his rear-view mirror before the Commodore jounces out of the hole left by the Camaro. Flames boil from the doorway, but as the car slows, there’s no sign of Makere. Just like the old days, there one moment, gone the next. The sirens are getting closer. Matiu hits the gas, making himself scarce. He has to get to Penny. This s**t just turned ugly.