Immortal Lycanthropes - By Hal Johnson Page 0,12

fortunate to land on nothing harder than the deep mud. He was breathing hard, and, in the precious seconds he spent prying himself out of the ground, he could sense his lead evaporating. Indeed, no sooner had he begun to run than he could hear the metallic clanging of a bison ricocheting off the upside-down body of half a minibus. Myron’s mud-sodden shoes were making their own noise, a grotesque sucking sound with every step.

“A cheetah, a cheetah,” Myron tried, but in vain. He remained a biped, and the bison was gaining.

But there ahead were the railroad tracks, and between him and them the broad ditch. Myron pitched down into it, through the filthy morass at the bottom, and began to mount the far side. Surely a bison would not be able to follow. Maybe Benson could turn into a man and climb around in ditches that way, but, frankly, Myron figured it was better to be pursued by a man than by a solid ton with horns. All these hopes flashed through Myron’s mind in the moment he scrambled up the side, but then, with a palpable burst of air pressure, a train came whistling by, less than a foot away. It was a freight train, and boxcar after boxcar sped past, with no end in sight. Myron was cut off.

“All right, it was a nice race, but you’re trapped now.”

Myron turned at the sound of the voice. There, separated from him only by six feet of ditch, stood, naked, the man who had terrified him in Westfield.

“What do you want?” Myron asked. The din of the rain and the hammering rails meant that he had to shout to be heard.

“The boss is curious about you. So you’re coming with me to meet him.”

“Is he going to hurt me?” Myron asked. The train was still going, still rumbling past.

“What do I care?”

Myron was desperate to keep Benson talking. Once the train was gone, maybe he could start running again. “How did you find me? What did you do with my parents?”

“You don’t have a choice in this, you know,” Benson said. And taking a step or two back, and then forward, he launched himself across the ditch, landing close to the speeding train. In the mud he slipped for a moment, and Myron caught his breath, but Benson righted himself. He was now standing right in front of Myron.

“Is it true,” Myron asked, “tell me first, is it true that we’re immortal lycanthropes?”

“I don’t know, or care, what they told you, but I can kill you, you know. I can gore you.”

“But you’d have to gore me, right? You can only kill me in animal form.”

Benson put his hand out. “Make this easy. Just give me your hand, and we’ll go back to the car.” Benson’s face, and his hand, lit up for a moment as a bolt forked across the sky.

Myron at that moment launched himself sideways, directly at the train. He bounced off the side with a horrible squelch, landed back on his soggy sneakers, tottered a moment, and fell directly back against the train. This time he happened to fall between cars, and with a series of cracks and a great outpouring of blood the front of a boxcar slammed into him. He fell down, as loose as a rag doll, gushing blood, but he stayed where he was, stuck on the coupling, as the train dragged him away. Benson stood wet and dumbfounded. Myron’s limp body was out of sight by the time the thunder sounded.

III. John Dillinger’s Legacy

“He’d make a good boy for our business,” said Smith,

musingly.

Martin shook his head.

“It wouldn’t do,” he said.

“Why not?”

“He wants to be honest,” said Martin, contemptuously.

“We couldn’t trust him.”

Horatio Alger, Rufus and Rose

1.

Shoreditch, Pennsylvania, was founded as a mining town, and tried, when the coal ran out, to reinvent itself as a manufacturing town. The broken windows of factories and the innumerable corrugated tin shacks, many collapsed into lean-tos or stacks of tin sheets, offered the evidence of this plan’s failure, and of a chronology of decay. A Heinrich Schliemann of the future would find the layers of this Troy, the layers of splendor and squalor, coexisting and overlapping—with squalor, as it always does, gradually taking over. And there in Shoreditch central stood the Grand Lafayette, four glorious stories of memories of better times, or at least better times for some. The doorman still dressed like an Austro-Hungarian admiral, and the remaining crystal prisms in the grand chandelier