metastasis.”
“You’re a one-man party,” Bobby said.
“Just being realistic.”
Turning right into a new street, Bobby said, “What good did being realistic ever do anyone?”
More shabby bungalows. More dead hedgerows.
“Got a headache, too,” I said.
“You’re giving
“One day maybe I’ll get a headache that never goes away, from neurological damage caused by XP.”
“Dude, you’ve got more psychosomatic symptoms than Scrooge McDuck has money.”
“Thanks for the analysis, Doctor Bob. You know, you’ve never cut me any slack in seventeen years.”
“You never need any.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
He drove in silence for half a block and then said, “You never bring me flowers anymore.”
“What?”
“You never tell me I’m pretty.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Asshole.”
“See? You’re way cruel.”
Bobby stopped the Jeep in the middle of the street.
I looked around alertly. “Something?”
“If I was wrapped in neoprene, man, I wouldn’t have to stop,” he said, neoprene meaning the wet suit that a surfer wears when the water temp is too nipple for him to hit the waves in only a pair of swimming trunks.
During a long session in cold water, while sitting in the line waiting for a set of glassy, pumping monoliths, surfers from time to time relieve themselves right in their wet suits. The word for it is
If surfing isn’t the most romantic, glamorous sport
Bobby got out of the Jeep and stepped to the curb, with his back to me. “I hope this bladder pressure doesn’t mean I’ve got cancer.”
“You already made your point,” I said.
“This bizarre urge to relieve myself. Man, it’s…it’s mondo malignant.”
“Just hurry up.”
“I probably held it too insanely long, and now I’ve got uric-acid poisoning.”
I had switched off the spotlight. I put it down and picked up the shotgun.
Bobby said, “My kidneys will probably implode, my hair’ll fall out, my nose’ll drop off. I’m doomed.”
“You are if you don’t shut up.”
“Even if I don’t die, what wahine is going to want to date a bald, noseless guy with imploded kidneys?”
The engine noise, the headlights, and the spotlight might have brought us unwanted attention if anyone or anything hostile was in the neighborhood. The troop had hidden at the sound of the Jeep when Bobby had first driven into Wyvern, but perhaps they had done some reconnaissance since then; in which case they were aware that we were only two and that even with guns we were not necessarily a match for a horde of peevish primates. Worse, maybe they realized that one of us was Christopher Snow, son of Wisteria Snow, who perhaps was known to them as Wisteria von Frankenstein.
Bobby zipped up and returned safely to the Jeep. “That’s the first time anyone’s been prepared to lay down covering fire for me while I peed.”
“You feeling better, bro?”
He knew me well enough to understand that my apparent attack of hypochondria was actually unexpressed anxiety for Orson.
I said, “Sorry for acting like a wanker.”
Releasing the hand brake, shifting the Jeep into drive, he said, “To wank is human, to forgive is the essence of Bobbyness.”
As we rolled slowly forward, I put down the shotgun and picked up the spotlight again. “We’re not going to find them like this.”
“Better idea?”
Before I could respond, something screamed. The cry was eerie but not entirely alien; worse, it was a disturbing hybrid of the familiar and the unknown. It seemed to be the wail of an animal, yet it had a too-human quality, a forlorn note full of loss and yearning.
Bobby braked again. “Where?”
I had already switched on the spotlight and aimed it across the street, toward where I thought the scream had originated.
The shadows of balusters and roof posts stretched to follow the beam of light, creating the illusion of movement across the front porch of a bungalow. The shadows of bare tree limbs crawled up a clapboard wall.
“Geek alert,” Bobby said, and pointed.
I swung the spotlight where he indicated, just in time to catch something racing through tall grass and disappearing behind a long, four-foot-high boxwood hedge that separated the front lawns of four bungalows from the street.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Maybe — what I told you about.”
“Big Head?”
“Big Head.”
During long hot months without water, the hedge had died, and the quenching rains of the recent winter had not been able to revive it. Although not a lick of green could be seen, a dense snarl of brittle branching remained, with wads of brown leaves lodged here and there like bits of half-masticated meat.
Bobby kept the Jeep in the middle of the street but drove slowly forward, parallel to the hedge.
Even stripped of new growth, the dead boxwood was so mature that its spiny skeleton effectively screened the creature crouched beyond it. I didn’t think I was going to be able to pick out the beast at all, but then I spotted it because, although it was a shade of brown similar to the woody veil in front of it, the softer lines of its body contrasted with the jagged patterns of the bare hedge. Through the interstices in the many layers of boxwood bones, I fixed the beam on our quarry, revealing no details but getting a glimpse of eyeshine as green as that of certain cats.
This thing was too big to be any cat other than a mountain lion.
It was no mountain lion.
Found, the creature bleated again and raced along the shielding deadwood with such speed that I couldn’t keep the light trained on it. A break in the hedgerow allowed a walkway to connect a bungalow with the street, but Big Head — or Big Foot, or the wolfman, or the Loch Ness monster in drag, or whatever the hell this was — crossed the gap fast, an instant ahead of the light. I didn’t get a look at anything but its shaggy ass, and not even a clear view of that, though a clear view of its ass might not have been either informative or gratifying.
All I had were vague impressions. The impression that it ran half erect like a monkey, shoulders sloped forward and head low, the knuckles of its hands almost dragging the ground. That it was a lot bigger than a rhesus. That it might have been even taller than Bobby had guessed, and that if it rose to its full height, it would be able to peer at us over the top of the four-foot hedge and stick its tongue out at us.
I swept the spotlight back and forth but couldn’t locate the critter along the next section of boxwood.
“Running for it,” Bobby said, braking to a full stop, rising half out of his seat, pointing.
When I shifted my focus beyond the hedgerow, I saw a shapeless figure loping across the yard, away from the street, toward the corner of the bungalow.
Even when I held the spotlight high, I couldn’t get an angle on the fast-moving beast, whose disappearing act was abetted by the intervening branches of a laurel and by tall grass.
Bobby dropped back into his seat, swung toward the hedgerow, threw the Jeep into four-wheel drive, and
