Breeds (8 page)

3AM.

3:15.

3:36.

Sleep.
Kirk closed his eyes and emptied his head of troubling thoughts. They nagged at him like tiny, biting mouths.
He knows we’re comin’.
Morris nailed that piece of truth.
He’s got time to get ready.

He’s got
plenty
of time to get ready,
Kirk’s mind corrected him. The old wolf already had Kirk underestimating his chances and he didn’t like it in the least. The others no doubt had taken Borland lightly as well. Seconds passed and Kirk realized he’d opened his eyes again. He forced them shut, struggling with the tension in his chest, convincing himself two wardens could do the job. Borland knew they were coming. They’d be careful going in. They
had
to be careful.

“Hey. Dickhead.”

Morris.
“Yeah?”

“Time to get moving.”

Kirk blinked and rubbed his face. The sun clock showed a little after seven in the morning. Cloud cover prevented the sun from getting through. Morris struggled to his feet and faced the day.

“Shit,” Kirk heard, prompting him to twist around in his seat.

Underneath a gray-black sky, snow fell in a slant and plastered the wall of glass and the parking lot beyond.

“Shit,” Kirk agreed.

His eyes fell upon the information booth not twenty paces away and the young man just depositing a steaming cup of java on the counter.

Despite the weather, the two men were in luck. Neither Kirk nor Morris carried cell phones, perhaps the one thing they had in common besides their
Were
affliction. The guy at the info booth answered Kirk’s questions and gave him access to the booth’s land line. A woman answered the phone, took Kirk’s information, and promised that Perry––the taxi driver––would indeed be heading out of town later in the day. Perhaps even earlier if he could manage it, to beat the incoming fury of the storm, but that depended upon how many locals would be heading out that way. She informed Kirk that, at the time of the call, there were only two other bookings.

The two men from Nova Scotia went back to their chairs and waited.

Airport staff walked into work and stomped their feet free of snow, but the display boards glared cancelations in red as St. John’s battened down the hatches.

Two hours and a couple of mini-shop sandwiches later, Perry’s cab service pulled up to the arrival doors. The all-white, ten-person carrier van smoked exhaust in the frosty air, while heavy beards of slushy ice hung off the vehicle’s mud flaps. A wooden storage unit for extra luggage sat on the roof and, as far as Kirk could see, they were the only ones waiting for the rig.

Perry appeared around the rear of the van wearing only jeans, sneakers, and a plaid insulated jacket, the kind woodsmen wore in the fall. He checked his tires before walking to the sliding doors and entering the airport. A Winnipeg Jets stocking cap covered his head.

Perry zeroed in on the two men immediately, stopped in his tracks and near yelled, “Youse headin’ out to Amherst Cove?”

Kirk and Morris got moving.

Alvin Peters woke to the sound of snow scratching at the window. Dread filled him; he didn’t want to leave the comfortable cocoon of blankets he’d heaped on his bed the night before, which his considerable body had heated during the night. The clock stoically stated the time as 12:11 PM, which pulled a groan from deep within his throat. He stretched under the layers of cotton, creasing the blankets with his feet before they popped out the bottom end. Cold air made contact with his massive frame.

“Awww shit,” he muttered, the fat rolls on his throat giving his voice an interesting treble. With effort, he threw back the mounds of quilts handmade by his deceased mother. Exposing his naked self to the cold air, he labored to a sitting position with a grunt and went through his morning ritual of scratching at fleshy crevices, bulges, and danglers. He pulled the oxygen tube from his pug nose, and jammed a finger up a nostril, performed a quick but vigorous cleaning, and wiped it off on a bedside tissue. He repeated this for the other nostril before he replaced the tube.

Alvin peeled back a curtain and gazed outside, grimacing at the implications. More snow meant more shoveling. Alvin fucking
hated
shoveling. These days it took forever to clear his walkway and driveway. If Santa was ever listening, he’d probably long since zoned out Alvin’s incessant chant for a snow blower. Sighing at what appeared to be a day of ball busting, he scratched again at his chin, pulled a loose blanket around his shoulders, and drifted off into a morning stare.

Alvin Peters was the poster boy for a nuclear-bomb-sized heart attack. At six-foot even, he wore perhaps two hundred pounds more than he should’ve, most of which hung off his gut, forcing him to walk with his spine arched ten degrees backwards, which also lent the façade of pretentiousness. When he was in public, that massive paunch usually jutted over a dam of a leather belt, hanging awkwardly over near non-existent hips. At times, it was said the man didn’t need suspenders––he needed an airlift. Townsmen would mutter behind Alvin’s back that there were a couple of whole roasted chickens in him not touched.

With a grunt, Alvin got mobile and shuffled across thick mats and cold linoleum, walking a groove to the bathroom. A length of plastic tube snaked along behind him. He moved with all the grace of ancient arctic ice falling into the sea, and if one paused to listen, his joints cracked with the same intensity. Alvin took his time voiding, not seeing his tackle at all when he looked down, taking care of matters by feel alone. When he finished, he slapped water to his doughy hands and face and left his thick turf of black hair uncombed. When he emerged from the washroom, the urge to appease his monstrous belly occupied his thoughts.

He got dressed, pulling on a comfortable pair of sweatpants that stopped somewhere below his gut, and hauled a triple-X t-shirt over his head. His upper arms were like thighs, while his thighs could have been mistaken for stacked tires. He believed, one day, the friction from his thighs rubbing together would produce smoke. Alvin wondered if he should carry around one of the little portable fire extinguishers, just in case. All he needed was a brush fire between his hams.

Breakfast. One of Alvin’s eight favorite meals of the day, not counting snacks. Alvin hadn’t always been such a meatball. In high school, he’d been a track athlete and bodybuilder. Had a girlfriend but lost her to university. Alvin didn’t need university. In his mind, it was a money racket. He got by just fine with his high school education, and, for anything he needed to learn, he ordered the books online, and read them in a week.

He knew he was intelligent. An internet junkie at ten, he quickly taught himself to type, reaching a speed of two hundred words a minute. His aunt, who took on work transcribing medical notes from busy doctors, took him under her wing and introduced him to the self-employed online profession when he was only eighteen. Alvin took to it right away, reading and absorbing the lingo from a medical terminology book in a week, and later transcribing medical notes and research papers with an unprecedented ninety-nine-point-seven percent rate near perfection. He admitted that listening to recordings while his fingers made his keyboard chatter was oddly comforting. Hypnotizing.

It was then that he started smoking in earnest.

He took up the habit at fifteen but, upon graduation, only seriously started converting his lungs into shriveled raisins of tar when he discovered that smoking made him work faster and
longer
. The words truly flowed while he puffed, and after eight years of sucking back three to four packs a day, he chain-smoked his way into the ICU ward in Clarenville. His lungs rebelled with an infection which almost claimed him. When he regained consciousness a week later, a young doctor from Iraq inspected him and gravely informed him that his smoking days were over. He had come so perilously close to flat-lining. The bad news didn’t stop there. His weeping aunt sobbed as she revealed that while he was unconscious with a foot of plastic tubes down his gullet, both of his parents had died on the way to the hospital from a head-on collision with a moose, and had been buried only two days earlier.

Looking back, it was the roughest time in his life. Drinking had never interested him, and his doctor forbade him to smoke again, so he coped with his losses the only way he knew how.

He ate.

Alvin walked over to his garbage-can-sized oxygen concentrator (which he called C-Cup), adjusted the flow from a three to a four, and hardly heard the puffing beat as the filtration system drew air in, purified it, and sent it up the plastic highway to his nose.

As a parting gift, his smoking had robbed him of most of his lung capacity, leaving the still young man with only twenty-seven percent. Alvin didn’t mind the gray concentrator that ensured he received the purest oxygen. Didn’t mind wearing the tubing wherever he went inside his home. And after years of packing on weight, he didn’t mind living his days in the house he grew up in, which he inherited from his parents. The house had a wicked view, peering out over the hillside, past black-shingled rooftops, to the pristine blue-green waters of the bay where, in the summertime, whales played.

But Alvin missed the workouts of his youth. Watching instructional videos online, he had trained in the evenings to become a more than capable practitioner of Kempo Karate (at least in his mind) as well as certain ninja techniques. A dented punching bag hung in his workout room, while his high school free weights lay about in an optimal training circuit. He figured he was black belt level before everything changed, and despite his current dismal physical shape, he still lashed out at imaginary foes with straight jabs and elbow smashes. Just to keep an edge.

His doctor had warned him to take it easy. Sure, Alvin looked like shit. Looked like
doughy
shit. He knew it. But if he had to, if he were forced into a corner and before he started gasping for air, he was pretty certain he could fuck up someone’s day.

Kitchen. A black, iron frying pan the size of a hubcap slammed down on a propane burner. Ten strips of bacon were laid out with gourmet precision. The air sizzled with the scent of cooking meat. When the bacon reached the crispiness he liked, Alvin transferred every piece to a plate, left the grease in the pan and tossed in six eggs. A handful of sausages joined in the fun. An eight-ounce frying steak made things even more interesting. Two handfuls of hash browns landed on the side, and breakfast wasn’t quite breakfast without toast. Two slices of white bread were dropped into the toaster (butter and strawberry jam already on the table). With spatula in hand, Alvin was barely aware of his ogre-like grunting in anticipation of the first feeding of the day. He daintily maneuvered items through the grease pool with a fork, the spatula separating items where needed. The food popped and crackled. Some specks of grease flew from the pan and singed his meaty forearms, not that it distracted him from his task at hand. Alvin watched it all with predatory patience. His doctor would no doubt have a conniption fit if he saw the bubbling of this magnificent feast. Alvin didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on dying, but if his arteries petrified while eating, jammed up with cholesterol and trans-fat shit, well, then, he’d just have to forego the rest of his jolly life.

When breakfast was ready, he sat at the kitchen table, facing the wintry bay, and fed hefty forkfuls into his stubbly jowls. Snow fell. Winds cut themselves on the corners of the house. When he finished eating, he dumped the dishes into the sink and started washing. Even that minute expulsion of energy got him breathing hard until he was forced to stop and catch it.

Finishing the dishes, he peered out at the bay. This day, with the storm coming on, was a day to grab a few beers, sit behind his deck window, and just watch Mom Nature do her damnedest, while C-Cup thrummed and chuffed in the background. He might even give Ross a shout to see if he wanted to stop by. Of all the inhabitants of the little town, Ross Kelly was perhaps the only one to whom Alvin felt connected. Probably because they were the only two people around who weren’t collecting an old age pension.

He spotted Harry Shea and Sammy Walsh having their morning jaw session. Alvin didn’t particularly like the hoary bastards. Shea was far too sassy and he suspected Walsh of being a goddamn hippy. If a snow plow ran over both of them, Alvin wouldn’t shed a tear. Shea had also cussed him out once when Alvin was just a boy taking down squirrels with a slingshot, a hobby which had delivered him into Mr. Shea’s backyard. The crime scene, as it was later re-enacted by his father and the offended Harry Shea, consisted of an open window, Harry himself sitting in his rocker, head back, mouth open in sleep, and a young, impetuous boy suddenly bursting at the seams in angst at seeing a shot he
had
to take.

A fire-spitting Shea later wanted Alvin’s
ass
in a sling so he could lob him out over the bay. Many a time since, Alvin wondered how a ten-year-old boy could be so taken with the urge to shoot a dry pine cone into a sleeping man’s mouth. It wasn’t the deed he so recalled, but the furious indignant state that Shea, of Scot-English descent, had worked himself into as a result. It was a rage that stayed in the back of Alvin’s mind into adulthood, one which had made him wary of the man.

If it had been Sammy Walsh who’d been plugged with a few well-aimed pine cones––especially after a session of home brew––well. Alvin suspected his wife Mary would’ve handed him a prize and a handshake.

Alvin turned away from the window, thinking he’d put an edge to the katana he’d bought online.

And missed the police cruiser creeping along the curve of the road.

The cruiser pulled alongside Harry Shea and Sammy Walsh, making both men at once very conscious of their every movement.

The passenger window slid down.

“Morning, sirs,” the constable greeted in a raspy voice.

“Officer,” Shea greeted. Walsh only nodded, his inherent distrust of the law visible on his face. Both men stood in front of the mailboxes, very still, having seen enough nature shows to know that fear could be smelled.