Howler Part Three
Title: Howler
Word Ct: 1333
Genre: Supernatural Thriller
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A chill breeze met Jaime as he stepped off the bus. Clouds had begun to gather, turning the world into a patchwork of light and dark shadows. Before him, Gleason Street rolled out in a long strip of cracked asphalt perched along the ridge of a weedy levee. Grass grew up through the cracked and long-neglected pavement.
Set back off the south side of the road sat three or four crumbling brick warehouses and a handful of abandoned-looking low industrial buildings. Shattered and missing windows stared blindly from the upper floors of the nearest warehouse. On the north side the embankment fell away to a marshy area choked with hissing cattails and reeds. This merged into the silvery gleam of a small lake, the far shore rimmed with deep green conifers interspersed with the bright orange and gold of fall that circled around to the north, meeting the marshland.
Once the bus pulled away with a cough of diesel smoke, Jaime waited, listening for any sound. All he could make out was the whistle of the wind through the buildings and brush, and the distant calls of waterfowl. The wind coming off the march carried the thick, green scent of stagnation.
Tangles of cockleburrs and greenbriar crawled over a handful of weather-beaten cars and tired trucks, abandoned amid the buildings and sinking into the earth on flattened tires. An ancient harvester, tines dark and frozen with rust, slumped against one corrugated tin storage barn. No other vehicles came down the road from either direction. The silence after the rumble of the bus was almost eerie as Jaime began walking, looking for street numbers on the buildings.
Number 714 turned out to be a row of stainless steel storage units, each partitioned into A and B, with roll down doors facing the street. Feeling too exposed, Jaime circled around to the back where he discovered a standard door in the back of each unit.
The key to 308-A opened into an unlit 12’x10’ space. Jamie stood outside, glancing over his shoulder, the prickly sensation on the back of his neck telling him something, though he had no idea what. Peering inside the stall through the gloom, he could see it contained mostly a few odd pieces of furniture. Some kind of skeletal steel structure, support beams or something, built of vertical shafts occupied the back third of the space.
Standing in the open doorway still left him vulnerable and far too visible. Jaime stepped into the unit, closing the door and sealing out the light and air. It smelled close inside, thick with dust and disuse. Jaime was surprised at how well he could see in the sudden darkness, and then alarmed by the fact, because he knew what it meant. His body was still amping up, gathering itself for the big show that would come with moonrise the following night.
A roll-top desk sat against one wall. Three mismatched chairs, wooden crates, a standing lamp and several boxes full of books and magazines were piled up along the sides. Jaime spotted an envelope on top of the desk and, even before he read his name on it, a frisson of awareness electrified him, heightening every sense that was already on high alert. He knew. Frustratingly, he just didn’t know what he knew. Again his hair stood up and threatened to grow, seemed to press against his skin from the inside, the sensation rolling like a thick, dark wave over his body. With shaking hands he picked up the envelope.
“Jaime”, written in thick, black Sharpie, made the envelope glow white in the dark. He opened it and withdrew two airline tickets: one-way flights out of Buch’s Two-Acre Airport to MBS International, and from there to Burlington International in Nova Scotia. Departure time was 1:00 am, in roughly twelve hours.
A plastic debit card was tucked behind the ticket labeled Air Shuttle Pass. The phone number for the airport shuttle service was printed on the back below the magnetic strip.
“Great,” Jaime said out loud, because the sound of his own voice helped dispel the bizarreness. “Someone wants me out of town tonight.” The question was who. He tucked the envelope with the tickets into the Grisham’s Compendium and squinted again at the vertical bars at the back of the unit.
A chilling realization doused him like a bucket of ice water. The shafts weren’t any part of the storage unit’s support structure. He was looking at a cage built into the back. A heavy padlock held a thick steel chain that wrapped around what had to be a barred door. On the floor, lumpy black shadows resolved themselves into shackles, attached to the back wall with more heavy chain.
With a flash of unequivocal intuition knew the cage was meant for him.
Jaime nearly fell over in his backward retreat. His shoulder hit the door and he heard the latch click into place. He frantically reached for the knob and twisted it the wrong way before sorting it out and flying out through the door, into the wind and the open air.
He had less than a moment to collect his thoughts and try to understand why the sight of the cage had felt so terrifyingly personal. Breathing hard, he hugged the leather bound book to his chest, gazing at the half-opened door swinging in the wind, when the blast of rifle fire ruptured the air.
Jaime dropped to his haunches, covering his head with the book, and heard the bullet ping into a steel wall close by. A second shot rang out and to his left he saw the Overcoat Man fall out from behind one of the units and hit the ground. A rifle dropped from his hands, clattering to on the asphalt. Jaime spun his head around to see to the on his other side, the shooter.
“Over here! Right now!” It was a woman’s voice. Jaime barely registered that the person clad all in black and aiming a high-powered hunting rifle at him, was female.
Jaime dropped and rolled between 308-A and its identical neighbor.
Thundering adrenaline brought an amazing clarity. Running for the closest warehouse would mean being trapped, no matter how sheltering and tempting the lumbering structure looked. Half a dozen crappy movies featuring people running around inside old warehouses, shooting at one another, came to mind. All well and good if both sides had guns.
He knew darting in and out among the smaller buildings would eventually get him shot. Probably even quicker.
The most insane option was to bolt out across Gleason Street, and plunge down the shallow embankment and into the tall reeds of the marsh. If he could make it to the shadowy northern border where the tree line met the wetland he knew he had a chance. The woods beckoned with a voice that drowned any reason or argument.
Safety here.
He flattened against the warm steel wall and crept toward the street side. His attacker was making no effort to conceal her approach. Why should she? She had the gun. Her black leather boots crunched ever closer on the gravelly surface of the broken asphalt.
“Hey!” She was at the corner of the storage unit, peering around at him. An impression of dark hair, goggles, black leather, rifle.
Jaime threw himself away from the wall and ran for the street, angling so that the buildings were between him and the shooter. Across the road, over the berm, and flying down through the tall wind-whipped grass to the water’s edge.
The deeper water would slow him. He wouldn’t plunge in and take shelter in the reeds and thick swirling duckweed until the last possible moment. Skirting the edge of the lake, Jaime splashed through the shallow, muddy water, amid thick cattails that towered over his head, his eyes on the trees ahead.
He could hear his pursuer somewhere behind him, crashing through the grasses and cursing in a very unladylike fashion.
The dark tree line loomed ahead, deep and inviting.
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