6.

Two hours later, an insidiously annoying ringtone blares into my ear.  Startled, I practically jump out of bed, grab my cell phone – and see that Eddie is not on the bed.  My heart drops like a stone.

A quick glance around the room shows that he’s not in the room.  I get up, head to the bathroom.  The door’s wide open, he’s not there.  I rush to the short balcony on the other side of the room.  The sliding glass door isn’t open, and when I open it, he’s not outside.

“Eddie?” I call.  No answer.

I check under the beds.  Nothing.  The closet is also empty.  My mouth has become very dry.

Entering the hallway outside our room, I quickly check both sides.  So far, nothing but housekeeping knocking on doors.  I rush to the one closest to me, an older Hispanic woman with lots of life experience etched into her facial features.  “Excuse me,” I say, “have you seen a small boy around here?  Five years old?  Brown hair, brown eyes?”

She thinks for a moment.  “No, señor,” she says, seemingly a little afraid to speak any further, not out of fear of me, but more of the English language.  I forgive her and run down the hallway, checking doors, seeing if he’s hiding in any of the rooms housekeeping is cleaning.  My heart is eager to rip itself out of my chest, and my senses are heightened even past their already superhuman ability.  I feel like I can see through walls.  I smell the lotion the housekeeping staff is wearing.  I sense every grain of dirt on the floor with my bare feet.  But none of these gets me any closer to Eddie.

My brain spins with thoughts of what happened to him.  Are humans involved in this somehow?  Did the vamps send their apprenti to come snatch him away from right under my nose?  Or was it another clan?  Whatever it is, it’s starting to burrow a deep pit in my stomach.

I pass by a small room with the ice machine, heading to the door outside – and stop.  Take a few steps back.  Look into the room.

Standing in front of a soda vending machine, dollar bill in hand, is Eddie.  He is trying desperately to get the dollar bill into the slot, but just can’t reach it.  If I weren’t so worried sick I’d take a picture, it’s so cute.  He notices me, lowers his hand, and says, “Hi Sam!”

I run up to him, give him a big bear hug, lifting him into the air.  “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” I say.  “We have got to establish some rules here, buddy!  What are you doing?”

“I wanna soda pop,” he says.

“I notice that.  Let me help.”

I angle myself so that he can easily slide the dollar bill into the machine.  “What kind of soda do you want?” I ask.

Eddie puts a finger to his lips, as though thinking intensely.  I love it when kids emulate adults.

He points to the orange soda button towards the bottom.  “I want or’nge!” he happily proclaims.

“Orange, huh?”  I say.  “You sure?”

He nods intently.  So I lower him down to the button and he pushes it.  The soda machine clicks and whirrs, as internal devices snatch the soda from its podlike status, sending it through what I can only assume are a series of tubes into the collection crevasse at the bottom.  I set Eddie on the ground.  He eagerly grabs the soda.

Kneeling beside him, I say, “Hey, Eddie, I need you to do me a favor.  Can you do me a favor?”

He responds by shoving the soda can in my face.  “Open!”

I narrow my eyes at him.  “What do you say?”

He lowers his face, instantly ashamed.  “Pleeeeeeese?”

“That’s better.”  I take the orange soda and pop the top, handing it back to him.  He slurps the drink, holding it with both hands.  What was tiny in my hand is massive in his.

“Eddie, will you do me a favor?” I repeat.  He nods and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

“I need you to stay by me at all times, okay?  I don’t want you to ever be out of my sight.  Do you understand?”

He nods.

“What do I want you to do, Eddie?”

He stops, stutters, then thinks, not as though he hasn’t listened, but because his developing brain is struggling to figure out how to say what I just said.  “You want to see me,” is what he finally says.  I smile.

“Close enough.”

++

Driving carefully but quickly, we make it back into the City just in time for rush hour traffic.  We’re somewhere in Manhattan and I’m getting nervous.  I’m not originally from NYC.  I was born and raised in the deserts of Idaho, so big cities kind of freak me out.  I call the safehouse and ask for someone to pick us up.

I park the motorcycle in an alleyway so as to not alert people that I may be a vampire.  I realize this is ludicrous, since vamps only come out at night, but humans can easily get frightened of anything.  Eddie and I walk to a nearby deli, where we order food, him a grilled cheese sandwich and me as sub with as much meat stuffed into it as possible.  We sit outside at a table and listen to the roar of the city.

About thirty minutes later a black car approaches.  The two front doors open at once and I immediately see Kacey.  She runs to Eddie and gives him a huge hug.  They both start crying.  I stand, putting my arms on Kacey’s shoulders.  “I told you he’d be okay.”

She turns, kisses me on the cheek.  “I’m glad you’re okay too, Sammy.”

The driver of the car is Oscar Ritter, the chieftain of the Manhattan werewolf clan, and general liaison to all werewolf clans in the New York City area.  Somewhat of a legend to wolves and humans, Oscar is one of the few werewolves that has a place on the city council, as well as a strong voice in city politics.  He is a proud werewolf and is old enough (not certain, he estimates roughly 250 years old) to be able to control his shapeshifting specifically.  In other words, when he wants to be a werewolf, he becomes one.  Such power requires many nights of meditation and a “gift to the full moon,” as he puts it.  Few werewolves know what this gift is, and those who do refuse to tell the rest of us.

Oscar comes to me and wraps me in a great bear hug, lifting me off the ground slightly.  One of my favorite things about Oscar is that he likes to be in the center of the action.  If something is happening in the NYC area and it’s affecting werewolves, chances are he will be there, right in the middle of the action.

“Good to see you again, Samuel,” Oscar says, in that broad, booming voice of his, tinged slightly with a German accent his mother left him over two hundred years ago.  “I am glad that you have made it safely.”

“I thank you, Oscar,” I reply, my tone a little more formal than usual.  I’ve only met Oscar three times prior to right now, and while he is a congenial man, he is also a large figure, both literally and figuratively.  He is, in essence, a werewolf celebrity.  In the New York Post his nickname is “Wolf Man,” like the old Bela Lugosi movie.  When he sits at city council meetings he sometimes towers over the other councilmen, and his shoulders are as wide as they come.

Oscar ushers us back into the car, which he insists on driving, despite his huge frame barely fitting in the driver’s seat.  Kacey and Eddie take the back seat, and I hop in the passenger, almost shoulder to shoulder with Oscar, who begins the long, traffic-ridden drive to Eddie’s city safehouse.

“What news do you have?” I ask.

“The neighborhood in which the attack occurred has been combed over,” Oscar says.  “The citizens have been interrogated.  There are no zombies there.”

I probably shouldn’t be as surprised as I am.  “No zombies?!  That’s impossible; there were three hundred of them lying in a pile in the middle of the street!  They couldn’t have gotten rid of that many bodies so quickly.”

“They could very well have,” Oscar corrects, “and something tells me that they have also instructed the neighbors to keep quiet about the whole mess.  We won’t know until we interrogate them tonight.  Well, not we, but human ambassadors.  We are looking at this as an attack on the werewolf community in particular.”

“Because of Patrick?”  I ask.

“Because of a lot of things, Patrick being one of them.  Eddie being another, though he, nor your sister, are werewolves, they are still family in the clans and will be treated as such.”

We start a long drive over a bridge.  It looks familiar, and then I realize it’s the same bridge I just drove on.  We’re going back to New Jersey, which is in the opposite direction of Eddie’s safehouse.

“Where are we going?”

“Skyroad has been compromised,” says Kacey.  “We’re going to another house.”

“What happened,” I say, slowly becoming unsurprised about all the ridiculous shit that is going on.

“Can we..?” Kacey says to Oscar.  Oscar nods.

“The car has been thoroughly investigated.  You’re fine.”

“There were zombies at Skyroad,” says Kacey.  I adjust my position so that I can better look at her.  “Around 08:00, the place was just overrun.  We barely made it out.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this over the phone?” I say.

“We were in a bit of turmoil, bad stuff was going down, we were on the move, and I just wanted my son back,” says Kacey, her voice quivering a bit.  “That’s why.  Plus I knew you two needed your rest and I didn’t want to scare you anymore.  It was a bit of luck that got us out.  Davis was on watch but he had gone inside to go take a piss or something and plus we hadn’t had any problems for the past two weeks.  It was very quiet.  Well, it’s eight in the morning and everyone’s exhausted, worried sick about you and Eddie, and Davis wasn’t thinking straight so he walks off, leaves the front door unlocked ... and that’s when they arrived.  Not just one or two of them, like it was some random attack.  There were at least fifty of them, young ones, rushing through the door, breaking through windows.  So we were unlucky there.  We didn’t lose anyone, thank god.  Davis flushed the toilet and an arm broke through the doorway, he says, grabbing at him.  His first move is to hit the alarm and his second move is hacking at the arm until it’s on the ground.”

Little Eddie’s fast asleep.  Kacey is running her fingers through his hair.  I can smell that she is calmer now than she was before.  Something about the lack of sweat, or the cooling of sweat, combined with indescribable pheromones that most humans actually can smell but don’t act upon as much as they should.

“Kycinzki is awake before I am,” Kacey continues, “rousing me out of bed, breaking the window completely out, hoisting me over his shoulder before I even have a chance to ask what’s going on.  Not that I have to.  I can hear the groans of the zombies downstairs and outside.  Pounding on the door.  A couple of gunshots.  I think Davis screams at some point, but like I said he came out okay.

“James unrolls the emergency rope ladder and starts climbing down the side of the house – with me still on his shoulder.  I’m too terrified to respond.  And once we’re on the ground we see the extent of everything.  Zombies everywhere.  It’s more like two hundred at this point.  And they’re fresh and they’re excited because they’re being whipped by a bunch of smarties.  I swear I saw Macaroni in there.”

“No way,” says Oscar, who must’ve just heard this.

“I saw his face, I think.  I know, it’s crazy, but they were coming in droves and they had a purpose.  Anyway, we’re on the ground and there’s a bunch of z’s around us, with no visible means of escape.  So how do we get out?  Well, apparently while we were defending ourselves, a small zombie brigade ... troop ... whatever, had started attacking nearby houses.  It was starting to become chaos, real Z War kind of stuff, and you could already hear the apaches in the distance.  A couple of z’s manage to break into this guy’s car – as he was driving it.  I don’t know, he must’ve panicked or something, slowed down, but they broke the glass and grabbed the guy.  Ripped him right out of the car.  Like, half of him, I mean.  The top half.  Really gross.  So then the bottom half is dead and his foot falls all the way on the gas pedal, screaming off the road – and plows right into the zombies in front of us.  I kid you not.  This all happens in, like, seconds.  It’s one thing and then the other, you know?”

I love Kacey when she starts telling a story.  Very animated, loves to move her hands.  And if you watch her eyes you can see her reliving the event in her mind.

We are officially Stuck in rush hour traffic.  Oscar makes liberal use of the horn.

“Right after that happens,” says Kacey, “Davis comes barreling through the ground level back door, z’s hot on his tail.  He opens the door and manages to jump out of the way just as the runaway car smashes into the house about ten feet away from us.  Zombie blood and gore splatters everywhere.  If Davis were two seconds late he would’ve been creamed.”

“It’s all in the timing,” I say.

Kacey has a sly grin.  “I guess.  So now there’s a big gaping hole in front of us and we scramble through it, find someone who isn’t scared shitless, and get a ride out of town.”  She eases back into her chair, fingers still in Eddie’s tangled brown hair, her breath slowing as the memory eases itself out of her immediate mind.

“Jesus,” I say.  “And Manhattan’s okay?”

“The Lower East Side is in lockdown right now,” Oscar says, his broad booming voice filling the car, “but all of the z’s have been eliminated.  We have spent most of the morning removing the corpses until we got the call that a new house in Jersey had been set up.  It’s really very gorgeous, much nicer than the old house.”

The sun is starting its long winding down period.  In three hours or so we’ll have darkness on what I can only assume will be one hell of a night.  The cars are thinning on the highway, and Oscar has started to speed up.  Soon we’re cruising, well on our way to wherever this house is.

“Oscar,” I say, “when the vamps got Patrick, they ... they ripped him apart and grabbed something.  Do you know what it is?”

Oscar shakes his head.  “I know nothing about that.  All I know is that I’ve got calls left and right from vamp spokespeople and clan leaders and even some really weird “zombieists”, all asking for retribution ... as though I’m the man to deliver it.  A memorial fund for Patrick has already been set up; there are werewolves at a vigil in Central Park.   Plenty of police there, of course.  And we’ve already got reports coming in of potential werewolf attacks around the city.  Most humans still believe that werewolves only come out during the full moon, so we’ve been trying to keep them thinking that, despite the fact that it’s not true.”

We’re driving in the country now, past the lights of the city.  The sun is nearing the horizon.  I feel my eyes start to get heavy.  It’s funny how quickly sleep catches up to you when there is no adrenaline coursing through your blood.  Like it’s waiting in the shadows for when everything’s okay, so that it can return and lull you back into its calm, comforting arms.  Kacey must feel the same way, because her head is against the window, her eyes falling shut, then flipping open quickly.  This repeats a few times.

“So,” I say, after a moment of silence.  “What’s going on.”

Oscar chuckles warmly.  “You’ve got me.”