“Half Breeds,” Paige corrected. “Let me see your palm.”
Grudgingly, Waggoner leaned back and stretched out his wounded leg to show his callused but relatively scar- free hands. “That’s right,” he said. “Half Breeds. That’s what Bill and Jesse call them. You looking for scars like they have?”
“You’re not a Skinner,” Paige mused. “If we get out of this town in one piece, we’ll have to talk about offering you a membership. Now which way to Mississippi Avenue? We should check on some survivors and see if any of them have some plastic wrap.”
After spending so much time in Atoka, there weren’t many medical supplies left in the green truck. Still winded from running back to the pickup, Paige sifted through the supplies to find a baby bottle filled with a few squirts of the light blue fluid used to sterilize Half Breed wounds. The bottle was from Jesse and Bill’s supply, and there was barely enough left to drizzle on Waggoner’s hip. From what she could see, the creature’s teeth hadn’t gotten down to the bone, but it was better to be safe than sorry. If they were closer to the spot where the Amriany were hiding, she would have raided their medical kit to heal him up even better.
After dressing his wound as best they could, Waggoner was feeling good enough to support his weight on a hastily bandaged leg. Paige didn’t need to examine the wound to know it was bad. When they arrived at a small ranch style house on South Mississippi Avenue, Waggoner refused to stay in the truck.
“You’ll need me,” he told Paige. “Last time I checked, there were three families in there, and they ain’t about to open the door for a stranger.”
“We just need to grab a few supplies and make sure they’re alive.”
“And they need to protect their loved ones. Besides,” he added while pulling himself from the truck, “I told them we’d come along to look in on them, and that’s what I’ll do.”
“Are they protected in there?”
“They got one of them panic rooms in the master bedroom. Bet they didn’t think it would come in so handy, huh?”
He knocked on the door to announce their presence as they entered the house, shouted through a reinforced wall and mentioned four people by name, but still he and Paige found themselves looking down a trio of shotgun barrels when the panic room door swung open.
“You guys need to come up with a secret knock,” Paige said as she helped Waggoner sit down inside the cramped secret room. “That would cut down on a lot of grief.”
“You don’t know what grief is, lady,” said a man in his late fifties with a salt and pepper beard and skin tanned to a dark bronze. “For all we know, you could turn into one of those things.”
Barely taking notice of the guns pointed at her, Paige looked at the people in the room and focused on what she could feel in her scars. “Seriously, a secret knock isn’t that hard. Two quick followed by three slow. Or what about the ol’ shave and a haircut?”
One of the people not holding a shotgun was a short woman with cropped red hair and a kind, soft face. “Shave and a haircut?” she asked with a distinct New Jersey accent.
“You know …” Paige stretched out a hand to strike the first part on the wall.
All of the shotguns were pointed at her as the man with the beard snapped, “Don’t make a goddamn sound!”
She knew it was Mongrels passing nearby, but still waited another couple of seconds before saying, “Two bits. You guys have any Tupperware?”
The panic room was roughly half the size of the adjacent bedroom. Fourteen people were crammed inside, along with boxes of food, crates of bottled water, two flashlights, three cots, four shotguns, and a small television set. There was barely enough room for anyone to move, and nobody wanted to speak loud enough to be heard over the chugging of the air circulation system. The bearded man broke the uneasy silence with a single question.
“What the hell did you just say?”
“I need Tupperware,” Paige told him. “Or any container with a sealed lid. I know that seems strange, but —”
“I have Tupperware,” the redheaded woman said. “In the kitchen. I can show you.”
“You’re not leaving this room, Ginger,” the bearded man said.
She leaned over to look around the man’s bulky frame so she could make eye contact with Paige. “Far right cabinet in the kitchen. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks. What about some water, something to drink, maybe some food?”
Before anyone could object, the redhead held a hand out to the man and said, “These people are out there fighting those things, they can take whatever they can find.” To Paige, she said, “Anything.”
“Thanks. Is there room for one more in here?”
Waggoner looked at Paige. “You ain’t abandoning me!”
“And you aren’t about to run anywhere with that leg. If you come with us, you’ll either slow us down or die alone. If you stay here, you’ll be safe until we can get you patched up for real. Besides, it you’re going to join the big leagues, you need to stay alive and healthy through this.”
Returning her wary smile with one of his own, Waggoner looked over to the bearded man and asked, “So you got room for one more or not?”
Looking down at Waggoner’s bandaged leg, the bearded man grunted and stepped aside. “I suppose, since it’s you.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” With that, Waggoner eased back and stretched his wounded leg out in front of him. “I’ll just need a little time to heal up,” he told Paige. “Then I can be right with you again.”
“You’ve got a phone?”
“Of course. And now,” Waggoner said, and tossed his keys to her, “you’ve got a truck. Don’t bust it up too bad.”
Paige went into the kitchen to look for the Tupperware. The redhead was right, she couldn’t miss it. At least four piles of the colorful plastic containers were piled high in the far right cabinets with lids stacked neatly beneath them. After she found a piece that was just the right size to hold the pound of flesh she’d extracted from Kawosa, she popped the lid shut and said, “I’ve got to get me some of this stuff.”
Collecting some bottled water, chips, and snack cakes to stuff into her pockets, she returned to the panic room just as the bearded man was closing the door. “Here,” she said, handing the container to Waggoner. “Keep this for me. It’s important.”
“I ain’t out of this fight yet and I sure as hell ain’t sitting it out just to guard some leftovers.”
Crouching down so he could hear her whisper, she tapped the container and asked, “Do you know why you believed what Kawosa told you and I didn’t?”
Although obviously not proud of that instance, he replied, “No, but I was wondering about that.”
“It’s because I finally made something that works.” She held up her hand and showed him her scarred palm. “I met up with that coyote before and he almost got me and my partner to kill each other. I clipped him back in Canada. It wasn’t a bad wound, but it drew blood. Have you seen Bill’s weapons and what they can do?”
Shooting a cautious glance to the others in the room with him, Waggoner nodded.
“We can use those weapons to sniff out things like these werewolves,” she explained.
“I know. I’ve seen that too.”
“Well, I got enough blood to modify my weapon to sniff out that lying shapeshifter. Maybe it’s because I trusted that more than anything else, but when he spoke to me, I didn’t buy what he was selling.”
“If we can put this stuff to use—”
She silenced him with a hand placed gently on his shoulder. “All I got was a warning, and even then it was tough to fight it when he tried to manipulate me. We need his blood to do the trick, and this,” she said while placing her hand reverently on the orange plastic container, “won’t even be enough to treat everybody’s weapons. When you’re feeling better, I think we should see about getting a weapon for you. A real one.”
“I don’t know,” Waggoner sighed. “I like my bow. But I’ll watch this for you. That skinny prick is just a lying little scumbag who cuts and runs.”
“He’s survived worse than us, so there’s got to be more than one trick up his sleeve. This’ll help, though.”
Waggoner’s arms closed around the Tupperware container until it disappeared within his grasp. If anything was going to get to it, they would have one hell of a fight on their hands. “Where are you headed?”
