Unbound (36 page)

“Was it made this decade?” asked Marti.

“Yes,” said the man, looking amused. “It was even made this year. I’m Chuck, by the way.”

“Jude,” said our squad leader. She pointed at the rest of us as she listed, in turn, “Marti, Colleen, and Heather. Our fifth Fighting Pumpkin should be here shortly.”

“If she didn’t fall in,” said Chuck, and laughed at his own joke before starting toward the counter. “Come on. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

The beef jerky was kept up at the front counter in a variety of old apothecary jars. Anywhere else, they would have looked charmingly antique. Here, they fed right into the overall horror movie décor, making it seem even more likely that a man with a machete was going to spring out at us at any moment.

“Oh, look, teriyaki,” said Colleen happily, and removed the lid from the first jar of jerky.

The smell hit me immediately, blunted by a heavy coating of teriyaki, but unmistakable all the same. I actually moaned, the sound rising involuntarily from the depths of my throat and causing all three of my teammates to whip around and stare at me. Jude, especially, went pale. She extended one hand like she was going to take my arm, only to pause and pull back, unsure of what she was supposed to do.

“Heather?” she said. “Are you . . . feeling all right?”

The man in the overalls raised his eyebrows. “Your friend sounds hungry. She a big fan of jerky?”

“Actually, she’s a vegetarian,” said Marti smoothly. She plucked the lid from Colleen’s unresisting fingers and clamped it back down over the jar. The smell of teriyaki jerky stopped invading the store, although it lingered in my nostrils, dreadful and cloying, like smoke, or permanent marker.

Jude frowned, eyes still locked on my face. “Heather?”

I struggled to make my jaw unclench. My heart was hammering, and my lungs ached—I hadn’t exhaled since the jar had been opened, freeing that terrible, wonderful scent. I tried to focus on my heartbeat. It meant that I was still alive. Living people had choices. They could choose whether to moan or not. They could choose whether they were going to stuff their faces with jerky or kick some terrifying gas station asshole in the balls. They were
alive
. But in the moment, I didn’t feel like I had any choices at all. I couldn’t move.

The door banged open behind me and footsteps pattered into the room, followed by Laurie demanding mulishly, “Aren’t you guys done
yet
? The bathroom was
way
gross. I had to raid the glove compartment for wet wipes. By the way, we’re out of wet wipes. Do they sell those here?”

“Just a second, Laurie,” said Jude. Her eyes remained fixed on me. “Heather? Are you feeling all right? Do we need to step outside? Because we can step outside, if that’s what needs to happen. We can always come back in and make our purchases after you’ve had a chance to take a few deep breaths and maybe sit down.”

“Maybe she just needs to eat some jerky,” said Chuck. “In my experience, most vegetarians are just people who haven’t had enough beef jerky in their lives.”

That was the last straw. My jaw finally obeyed my orders to unclench. As soon as I could move again, I grabbed the nearest arm, which belonged to Jude, and yanked it—along with its owner—further from the jars of jerky. “
Human
,” I hissed.

Jude, who hadn’t risen to leader of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad by being slow on the uptake, gasped. Marti and Colleen looked at me blankly. And Laurie skipped over to the counter and reached for the nearest jar.

“This looks delicious!” she chirped. “Sorry about the, um, you-know from before. I just really had to
go
.”

Marti’s hand clamped down on Laurie’s wrist before she could take the lid off the jar. “How about you
reverse
the you-know so that we can all leave, hmm?” she said. “I don’t think Heather’s feeling much like jerky right now.”

Chuck, who had been looking increasingly confused by the ruckus we were making, frowned. “Now, hang on,” he said. “We enforce a strict ‘customers only’ policy with our bathroom facilities.”

“Oh, like what, you’re going to shove it back up her ass?” snapped Marti. “How about we leave a dollar on the counter, and you call it all good?”

“Wait, why is my ass involved?” asked Laurie, sounding alarmed.

I found my voice again. “It’s
human
,” I said. “The jerky is made from people.”

“Are you sure?” asked Jude.

“I know what human flesh smells like,” I said, letting go of her arm. “I know what it tastes like too. None of you need to know that. We need to leave. Laurie?”

“Um,” she said, pulling away from the jerky jar. Marti released her wrist, enabling her retreat. “No one has to buy anything, let’s just leave.”

“Oh, no, sugar,” said Chuck. His voice had dropped down into his chest, becoming dark and gravelly. I whirled, putting myself between him and the rest of the squad.

His overalls weren’t too large anymore. If anything, they were too small, clinging to his body like they had been painted on, seams threatening to split with every move of his densely muscled arms. Hair covered his neck and hands, and ran up the sides of his face in some of the most impressive muttonchops I had ever seen a man grow in under a minute. His eyes had gone from charming brown to piss-yellow, cold and somehow rancid, like they were windows for a soul that had gone bad.

“No, no, no,” he said, showing a mouthful of jagged teeth. “You agreed to the contract when you used the bathroom. Customers only. If you want to break it, you’re going to pay.”

“Oh, goodie,” said Colleen faintly. “We found a wendigo. I always wondered if they were real.”

Chuck snarled and lunged for her. Marti kicked him in the throat as Jude kicked him in the balls. I elbowed him in the side of the neck for good measure before I grabbed Jude again and hauled ass for the exit, trusting the others to follow. The wendigo, meanwhile, was in the process of folding in half and dropping to his knees, thus proving the old adage that you should never forget to wear a cup to a cheerleader fight. No matter what kind of junk you’re packing in your pants, a good boot to the groin is going to put you down if you don’t have protection.

The door hadn’t latched all the way. I hit it shoulder-first, bursting onto the porch in a shower of splinters and deeply confused termites. All I needed to do was get Jude to the car. The others could look out for themselves, or I could double back for them once I was sure that our captain was safe; saving her meant saving the team, at least symbolically. It was less than twenty yards to safety—

Twenty yards, and three more wendigo, their mouths bristling with teeth and their chins slick with drool. I came skidding to a stop, aided by Jude, who grabbed the doorframe with the hand that wasn’t clutching my shoulder. Her fingers dug in to both the wood and my flesh. We halted.

“What the
fuck
,” demanded Marti from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Wendigo #1 was still crumpled in a heap on the floor. He was going to be pissed when he recovered. Marti, Colleen, and Laurie were all standing there, ready to run, which gave them a clear line of sight on the new wendigo. “Why are we in a horror movie? I just had my nails done!”

“Because we’re always in a horror movie,” said Jude. She squirmed out of my grasp, grabbed Laurie, and shoved her in front of us. “Tell them to back off,” she ordered.

“Um,” said Laurie. She looked terrified. That showed more of a brain than was normal for her. Clearing her throat, she cupped her hands around her mouth and called, “Hey, monsters! Don’t eat us!”

The wendigo started laughing.

“I don’t think it worked,” said Laurie, dropping her hands. “Why didn’t it work?”

“Maybe because they’re mangy cannibalistic monsters, and not members of the Computer Club,” said Marti.

“It’s not cannibalism if they’re not human,” said Colleen.

“Should we really be standing here discussing this when we’re about to be eaten?” asked Jude, just before the wendigo we had left inside the shop—good old Chuck—slammed into her from behind and sent her sprawling into me. I slammed into Laurie, and all three of us went down in a heap, with the wendigo on top of us.

He didn’t stay there long. There was an enraged scream, and then he was fleeing from Marti, who was attempting to use his head as a kickball. Wendigo #1 fled to the dubious safety of wendigo #2 through #4, falling into place among his pack. He snarled. So did they. I picked myself up from the porch, grabbed Jude
and
Laurie this time, and fled back inside.

“Barricade the door!” I shouted.

“
Way
ahead of you,” said Marti, shouldering me out of the way as she hauled a shelf from its place in the middle of the room to prop against the door—which no longer latched, thanks to our earlier exit. “Okay, Colleen, you’re our genius. How the fuck do we get past these things?”

“I’ve never
seen
a wendigo before!” protested Colleen. “They’re supposed to be mythological!”

“Like zombies, mind-control, and attractive high-waisted jeans, and yet here we are,” said Marti. “Figure something out!”

Jude had picked herself up from the floor. Smoothing her hair with one hand, she asked, “What was that you said about the jerky before, Heather?”

“It’s human,” I said. My mouth flooded with spit. I swallowed it, trying to push back the memory of how
delicious
people had been, back when I was dead and they were my natural prey. “Teriyaki-flavored human, but still human.”

“Wendigo are cannibals,” said Marti again, shooting a glare at Colleen that dared her to argue the definition of “cannibalism.” Instead, Colleen just looked thoughtful.

“So the jerky is probably other people who stopped here for gas or to use the bathroom,” she said. “That gives me an idea.”

“We’ll try anything,” said Jude.

“Just remember you said that,” said Colleen.

* * * * *

Cheerleaders naturally come in two varieties: the ones who throw, and the ones who get thrown. We gussy our roles up with lots of extras, like “who stands on the bottom of the pyramid” and “who does the big tumbling passes,” but at the end of the day, some of us had our feet on the ground so that the rest of us could get our heads as high into the clouds as possible. Jude and Marti were both bases. Colleen and Laurie were fliers. I was a switch—I could fill either role, as needed, although most of the time, I was too busy doing cartwheels for my teammates to fling me around.

Using me as a stabilizer, Marti and Jude knelt down and allowed Colleen and Laurie, respectively, to climb onto their backs, where the two lighter girls locked their knees around the ribcages of their bases. That left Colleen and Laurie with free hands, and the leverage they would need if they had to launch themselves into the air. Jude handed me her car keys. I handed Jude and Marti each a jar of jerky, which they passed up to Colleen and Laurie.

“This is a terrible plan,” I said.

“Go, Pumpkins,” said Jude, and kicked the door open.

The wendigo were still outside—true to Colleen’s supposition, they had decided to wait us out rather than destroy their own shack. It was always nice to deal with responsibly minded monsters. Jude and Marti screamed as they ran. I dove for the space between them, hitting the ground on my hands and going into a tumbling pass that would have been illegal in competition; I was pushing myself high and hard, without pausing to breathe or give my spotters time to adjust for my position. It was the sort of stunt that breaks necks.

Like the neck of the wendigo I landed on halfway across the yard. There was a sickening crunch as he went down, and the smell of blood and piss filled the air. Hitting someone in the base of the skull with a hundred and forty pounds of fast-moving cheerleader will do that. Another of the wendigo howled, swiping at me and drawing four lines of burning pain down the back of my thigh. The smell of
my
blood—human enough to trigger that maddening hunger, even though it was my own—filled my mouth and nose, obscuring the stink of wendigo. The wendigo howled.

“
Now
!” shouted Jude.

On cue, Colleen and Laurie opened their jars of jerky and began pelting the wendigo. The wendigo howled and snapped, grabbing the jerky before it could hit the ground. Two wendigo went for the same piece of jerky. Then they went for each other. Colleen spiked her jerky jar, hard, off the remaining wendigo’s head—and then I was too far ahead of the action to see what was happening any more.

Jude hadn’t bothered to lock the car in her rush to get inside and buy things. Thank fuck for that. I wrenched the door open, jammed the keys into the ignition, and hit the gas, sending the car rocketing toward the fray. Jude dove out of the way, taking Colleen with her. Marti and Laurie were a few feet away, still throwing jerky to the wendigo.

“Get in get in get in!” I screeched. Jude threw Colleen onto the roof and dove in through the passenger side door. Marti didn’t bother letting Laurie go; she just shoved her through the open window to the backseat and slung her legs in after her, leaving her own torso hanging over the edge. Reaching up, she grabbed Colleen’s arm, stabilizing them both. I hit the gas again, and we were off, accelerating away from the shack and toward the freeway, with one cheerleader on the roof, one halfway out the window, and three wendigo in pursuit.

“
I hate all of you
!” I screamed.

Jude put on her seatbelt.

We hit the freeway at just under seventy miles per hour, weaving as I tried to keep the car under control without flinging anyone off into space. Colleen was whooping with glee. Marti was screaming incoherent curses, her meaning clear only from her tone. The wendigo were hot on our trail, which was somehow more terrifying than anything else about our situation. Shapeshifting cannibal monsters were one thing. Shapeshifting cannibal monsters that could run at seventy miles per hour were something entirely different.

A convoy of big rigs was making its lumbering way down the other side of the highway. I said a silent prayer to whatever god looks after cheerleaders and fools, and jerked the wheel hard to the side, sending us careening across three lanes and cutting off the lead truck in the convoy. Horns blared. Tires screeched. Colleen squealed.