8.

The house in Jersey is pretty fantastic.  A two story in the hills, four bedrooms, three baths, a huge kitchen, and right now it’s five o’clock (somewhere) and I’m dozing off in a bubble bath with a bottle of Crown Royal half-empty on the floor and the soothing sounds of Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” on an iPod dock right above my head.  I think everyone deserves a bubble bath sometimes, even a rugged werewolf like myself.

People ask me why I drink so much.  A lot of people, my parents included, think I’m an alcoholic.  I’ve been through two interventions and one stint in rehab when I was 24.  But all of these people are middle class blue collar workers who have never ran wild through the woods on a full moon, or found himself naked and alone the next morning, wondering where the hell his clothes went.  They’ve never been surrounded by two hundred brainhungry zombies grabbing at your flesh and hair.  They’ve never shot in a crowd of civilians.  Never took a bullet for another man.  Never killed another man.  Never had to spend years of meditation and personal journeys alone in order to channel their natural energies so that they could be able to focus during their shapeshifting, becoming one with their werewolf form instead of forgetting it entirely.

I drink because it quells a lot of voices in my head.

And maybe I drink too much because there are too many voices.

++

“You’re drunk,” Kacey says.  Me, wrapped in a towel, hair still wet and clinging to my face.  I’m holding the bottle of Crown in my hand.

“How did you guess?” I ask, raising he bottle like a toast.

“Put it away.”

I walk past her, into my room, where I close the door to a sliver and start changing.  “Kacey, no offense, dear, but I need this,” I say, slipping into a new pair of jeans, fresh out of the laundry and warm against my skin.  “I had a really bad night, and a long day, and I just want to pass out.”

“You could pass out without drinking,” Kacey replies.

I fling the door open.  Fresh white t-shirt, clean jeans – I feel like a new man.  “No, Kac, I couldn’t.  That’s the problem.”

Downstairs Eddie is watching some children’s show where the characters are all loud and as obnoxious as possible.  And parents wonder why their children grow up with ADD.  Across from him, sitting in an uncomfortable looking chair, is Irving Davis, the man spoken of earlier in the zombie raid.  He’s a small muscular guy with a buzz cut and an earpiece connected directly to the Clan’s central network.  He is also watching this absurd television show, and gives Kacey and me a brief nod as we walk past, before returning his gaze to the TV.

In the kitchen, Kacey grabs my arm, spins me around on the faux-granite floor.  She reaches out to take the Crown Royal bottle from me, but I jerk my arm back, holding it out of her reach.

“Give it to me,” she says.  I shake my head, stumbling backward until my back hits the enormous stainless steel fridge door.  Kacey wrestles with me, ultimately getting her leg involved, twisting it up with my legs and knocking me to the floor with one quick motion.  The bottle of Crown flies into the air, and lands with a loud crash against the faux-granite.  Davis is in the room immediately, weapon drawn, eyes alert.  He sees us and lowers his gun.

“Everything alright?” he says.

“Yes,” Kacey says.  “Just dealing with my retarded brother.”

“I’m not retarded,” I say.  Davis logs this one in as “sibling quibble” and goes back to his kid shows.

“You’re cleaning this mess up,” she says.

“I am not,” I say.

“Yes, you are,” she says.

“No, I’m not,” I say.

Kacey heaves a sigh so loud it pierces my eardrum.  “Samuel James Lawrence, we are not eight years old.  Clean up your own goddamn booze.”  The cut in her voice means business.  She storms out of the room and I’m lying on the floor, a broken bottle of Crown a few feet away.  Briefly, a thought passes in my head: Should I lick it up off of the floor?  Maybe get a straw and – oh boy.  I put my hand over my eyes.  I refuse to turn into my father, I refuse to turn into my father, I refuse...

Kacey returns with a towel.  She plops it onto my face.  “Here,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, muffled by the towel.

“Don’t apologize.”

Sitting up, I start crawling over to the mess.  “I know why you’re mad,” I say.  “I know this is the kinda shit Dad would pull—“

And suddenly she’s right in front of me, her face in my face, her breath hot and slightly minty.  The tip of her nose touches mine.  “Don’t you ever,” she says, “talk about that man in front of me again.  You understand?”

Rebelliously, I say, “I’ve heard that before—“

She slaps me across the face.  Hard, and with enough force that it knocks her onto her ass – and, unfortunately, onto the broken glass.  She yelps and sits up.  I try standing but my legs refuse to work accordingly.  Kacey is twisting around like a dog trying to bite its own tail, attempting to get a glance at how bad the scene is on her butt.  I can see it, though: a big ol’ shard of glass jabbed in to her right buttcheek.  She’s wearing flowy yoga pants, too, so there was virtually no protection.

“If you were wearing jeans that would not have happened,” I say.

Kacey looks at me and starts laughing.  “Would you just pull the fucking glass out of my ass,” she says, laughing harder.

“You made a rhyme!” I say.

++

Having a deadbeat, alcoholic father is so cliché these days.  It’s like every other family has one.  Ours was no different.  Beat our mother, got in trouble with the cops more than I can remember.  Eventually went to jail, and was stabbed twenty-five times by a mentally unstable neo-Nazi with a shiv made out of a plastic spoon he carefully whittled to a point.  The stab wounds didn’t kill him outright, but the shit that the guy smeared on the tip of the shiv gave him such bad infection that it, plus shock and loss of blood, keeled him over.

When asked about how to handle the funeral, Mom said, “Burn him and toss him.”

I was sixteen when this happened.  Kacey was twelve.  I think it hit her a lot harder than it did me.  Though, I was already running with the wrong crowd at the time, a crowd that would eventually get me involved with the werewolf clan that would save my life.

++

It’s later in the day.  I’m sober and annoyed, Kacey is forcing me to drink water, and we’re in a car on the way to a meeting with Oscar and the heads of some regional clans, to discuss what we’re going to do for the next week.  Obviously Eddie is our top priority, and he is sitting with me in the back seat, playing video games on some new-fangled game machine that fits in his back pocket.  I don’t follow those kind of trends, and frankly, I don’t want to.  Atari was enough for me.

Regardless, however, I am still staring at the tiny guy on the screen as he runs around, grabs coins, shoots monsters that look more like things I would eat, and generally causes havoc wherever he goes.  Eddie’s thumbs are like lightning on the controls, rapidly pressing buttons and moving the character around the virtual world where he is doomed to do the same thing over and over and over.

At some point this little guy is killed and the words “GAME OVER” appear on the screen.  Eddie gives a labored sigh and plops the machine onto his lap, tilting his head back, apparently trying to control his frustration or something.  It’s amusing.  I look down at the screen again and then notice Eddie’s hands.  He’s a pretty tan kid, having gone on a lot of hiking excursions with Kacey or myself.  We even let him start walking on his own about six months ago, but that was when we learned how important he was, and had to keep him locked up in houses on the east coast.

Eddie’s hands are facing palm up, and I can see his thin forearms.  There are small marks on his right forearm.  I take a closer look, half-expecting them to be a birthmark I had never seen before.  But upon closer inspection they are definitely not birthmarks.  If anything, they look like teeth marks.

“Eddie,” I say, taking his arm and raising it my eye level.  “What are these marks on your arm?”

“Got bit,” Eddie says, which immediately makes Kacey turn around to look at us.  Davis, who is driving the car, glances through the rear view mirror.

“Who bit you, Eddie?”  I ask.

Eddie frowns as he is forced to relive a memory he would rather not.  He says, “A zombie.”

“What?” says Kacey, and she starts climbing over the seat.

“Hold on,” I say, putting my arm out to stop her.  “These don’t look like zombie bites at all.  There’s no infection, no congealing of the blood stream, no purple of black veins.  Are you sure a zombie bit you, Eddie?”

He nods.  “Yesterday when we were in the pile.”

I run my finger over the teeth marks.  There are small lines of scarring, normal for a severe bite, but there is no sign that it was from a zombie.  And Eddie has shown no symptoms of being bit.  No convulsions, no slurring of speech, lethargy...

“Kacey,” I say, “call Oscar.  Tell him to get a blood test ready at the meeting.”

“Do you think...?” Kacey starts.

“I think one of two things right now, and one of those things is miraculous.  Call Oscar.”

A half an hour later we’re on the twelfth floor of an office building in the middle of Manhattan, amongst the clan leaders of half a dozen of the largest clans in the New England area.  Eddie is in another room with a doctor who was summoned quickly and paid generously for her time.  Oscar is pacing quietly, one hand stroking his facial hair, the other propped underneath his arm.  He doesn’t look worried, just ... curious.

The doctor enters, clutching a small vial of blood.  Behind her is Kacey, who is clutching a frightened Eddie, bright blue gauze wrapped around his elbow, tears running down his face, hiccupping, and just looking miserable.  Everyone turns to the doctor.

“I’ll send it to the lab with the highest priority,” she says of the vial of blood, “but that’ll still take 48 hours.  Initial diagnosis is that he wasn’t bitten by a zombie or a vampire or anything like that, but ...”

“But what, doctor?” says Oscar.

“The teeth marks on his arm are ... irregular.  There are deeper indentations in some parts than others.  Not like vampire fangs, but more like ... well, it’s like the teeth were broken and jagged before the bite.”

“What does that mean?” says Kacey.

“It means he was bitten by a zombie,” I say, walking up to Kacey, ruffling Eddie’s light brown hair.  “Probably one who had his teeth busted by a baseball bat prior to the bite.”

The doctor says, “But there is no infection, not even trivial bacterial infections from lack of hygiene.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” I say.  “Eddie couldn’t get even the most basic of bacterial infections.  I’ve never seen him with a cold in my life.”  I turn to Kacey.  “Has he ever had a cold?  Flu?  Fever?”

“No,” says Kacey, and I can tell she’s on the same wavelength with me.

“What is your point, Sam?” says Oscar.

“My point is that Eddie is immune to zombie bites.”

A hush settles over the room as this sinks in.  This news doesn’t surprise me; I’m more surprised that it surprises everyone else.  We already know that Eddie is special, and while most of us don’t know exactly why he’s special, this could very well be one of the reasons.  Immunity to zombie bites may mean immunity to vampire bites, which, if it’s true, means that Eddie is a big threat to both the zombie and vampire community.  It also means he is a potential threat to the werewolf community, if he is immune to werewolf bites.

But he also could be a huge asset in the destruction of any other community, were Eddie to eventually align himself with ... someone.

Oscar takes control of the situation, as always.  “We all know how special Edward already is, so this news should not come as a shock.  Of course, we will wait for the blood results to come in before we make any official announcements.  You are free to go, doctor.”

We all wait for the doctor to make her exit before continuing – or starting, rather – the meeting.  Oscar takes his seat at the head of the table.  Kacey, Eddie and I are bunched up at the other end, feeling a little awkward and small compared to the “big” clan leaders.

The next hour consists of two parts: one, a general “state of the werewolf” address by Oscar, and two, a new significant bit of information – that Jason Philips, the head of the zombie hive, can be killed.