The Introduction #3
Dave paused before he answered the stranger and looked around suspiciously. He panicked when he turned to see two huge, over six feet tall, guys standing between him and the door. Terror tagged at him knowing his family was on the other side of the door. He hoped they hadn’t seen them.
“Take what you want from me just let me walk out of here.” He extended the hand that had the Blackberry in it to Joe.
“We don’t want your money,” Joe pushed Dave’s hand away.
Before Dave could speak again, Joe picked him up by the collar and threw him behind the counter. He hit the floor hard on his side. Blood trickled from the cut on his head where it had met with the corner of the counter. He was dazed and confused. He stumbled a bit on his knees as his head was spinning. Before he could stand up, the door opened and three pairs of footsteps walked in.
“Hi Ash, Baku has a message for you.”
“What’s that?” A heavy coarse voice answered.
The next thing Dave heard was six loud growls and the furniture breaking. There was a shadow as something large blocked the light. He slowly rose to take a peek over the counter.
There were six large wolves, all paired up attacking each other with paws and teeth. Dave was frozen. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It looked like a one hundred-twenty inch 3D TV with a wolf documentary on.
Was it shock or fear that kept him rooted there?
One of the wolves was thrown through the window into the parking lot. Dave was shaken awake when he realized the danger his family was in. He stood and ran out the new exit toward his car.
“Doggy! Big doggy!” Alice screamed at the top of her voice pointing to the back of the SUV.
“Mum, Dad doesn’t have our pizza!” Merilee yelled sulkily, when Dave appeared on her side of the car.
“Honey, what’s going on? We heard glass shatter—” Martha stopped when she saw the blood dripping from Dave’s forehead. “Are you okay? Why are you bleeding?” Her voice was raised in alarm.
Dave didn’t answer her. He didn’t want to frighten her. He started the car and drove away like a mad man.
The pizzeria was in rubble after the fight. Ten minutes ago, it was a beautiful room with the walls covered with pictures of pizza and an Italian fat chef holding a pan of pizza sauce and a mouth-watering lovely aroma of Italian herbs sailing in from the kitchen.
Now the walls were smeared with blood, and the smell of wet fur dominated the air.
Ash and Joe were back in their human form, naked. They were going to have to pay for the damage, right after they burned the place down. The staff had heard the commotion and had run out the back door. It was a good thing none of them were brave enough to go see what was going on.
They had managed to kill two, one ran off as soon as he freed himself from Billy’s grip. For once, he had wished he were completely sober.
“Guys, we have a problem. Dave isn’t here anymore.” Joe reappeared from the back of the counter. He now had a red and white-boxed tablecloth tied around his waist.
Ash turned towards the parking lot. The SUV was gone. He was in awe at Dave’s effort to save his family. But he knew more than anyone that Baku would never let him live now that they were exposed. They had to find Dave’s family before he did.
“It’s decided. We must have a packed bag in the car. That was my favorite shirt!” Billy whined, now in his human form and searching for something to cover himself with.
Completely ignoring him, Ash turned to Joe. “Did you catch his scent?”
Joe nodded.
“Let’s go home, get some clothes and a packed bag, and then find them before he does.”
A dark foreboding feeling settled in the destroyed room. They all knew to whom Ash was referring. They knew how grave the situation was and how fast it could go bad for Dave’s family.
Martha stood by the bed. Her attention divided between her husband, who stood still at an interval of five seconds in the middle of their room before he paced again, and her three children tucked in their bed. The stern look on her husband’s face scared her more now that it seemed he was trying to protect his family from something.
“Dave, talk to me. You’ve been pacing up and down for the last three hours! It’s already two o’clock in the morning!” She was agitated and scared, and it echoed in her voice.
She waited for Dave to say something, anything. Instead he walked toward their bedroom door and tried the lock.
“Will you stop that? You’ve locked all the windows and doors in the house and double-checked them. You made the kids come and sleep in our room, but you still won’t say a word to me. What the hell is going on?”
Dave turned to his wife. He could see he was scaring her. She had placed a protective arm over Alice now. She was trying so hard to be patient but whatever ghosts her husband was afraid of was tormenting her, especially since he wasn’t forthcoming on what was scaring him so much.
He walked to his wife and held her tight. “Nothing’s wrong, let’s go to sleep.”
He lay on one side of the bed, so that the kids would be sandwiched in the middle, and watched his family sleep. He knew there was no way in hell he would be able to close his eyes.
At the first hint of dawn, Dave woke up his family. Right after Martha had fallen asleep, he got out of bed and packed their bags and loaded them in the car.
“Everybody up! We are leaving in five minutes!”
Dave pulled the cover off the children. They curled up into balls when the cold air hit them. Dave lifted them out of bed one by one and placed them on the floor. Merilee sank to the ground and curled up back to sleep. Alice followed her sister and curled up next to her. Jayson stood there with his eyes closed and his body drooping still very heavy with sleep.
Martha struggled out of bed and stood by her husband. She hadn’t slept very well and now she was up going… Where were they going?
“What’s going on, and where are we going so early?”
“To the airport. The bags are packed and loaded. We are going on holiday. Kids get in the car. You can continue sleeping on the plane. You’ll take your bath, change clothes when we get there. Martha, will you please change your clothes, I’ll go strap them in their seats.”
Dave picked up his two daughters and tucked them under his arms and tagged Jayson forward with his fingers. Jayson looking like a little zombie dragged his feet and made his way out the door.
Dave made for the door but Martha grabbed his shoulder and stopped him. She didn’t like being left in the dark and was about to demand for an explanation when she saw the scared look in his eyes. She looked at her sleepy daughters hanging like dead fish on Dave’s arms. There was no other way around it, she had to let him do things his way.
“I’ll be down in a minute.” She reached up and kissed his cheek then headed for the bathroom.
Ash, Joe and Billy got out of the car and walked up the driveway of the cream colored house with red and white roses bordering the path. Joe had tracked them here, to Dave’s house.
Billy reached to ring the doorbell when Ash stopped him. “Don’t bother, no one's home. They left, I hope for good.” Ash was relieved. He could now go back to hunting Baku without worrying about the humans. “Let’s go. We have a bigger fish to fry.”
“Ash, could we get some pizza on the way?” Joe said sounding relaxed, “Too bad we can’t go back to that place, the sauce smelled pretty good.”
Ash turned and looked at him, a perplexed look on his face. “What?”
“Only Joe can think of food at the oddest of times,” Billy said flatly as he walked back to the car.
“Joe, when I first met you, you were a pretty serious guy, what happened?” Ash asked Joe who was staring at him with an amused look on his face.
“I’ve been alive for over a century, being care free is a better way to live.”
“Women, booze and care free, the three essentials for an immortal life,” Billy called out from the car.
“So what’s the difference between you and me?” Joe asked Billy walking back to the car.
Ash looked at the two guys as they squabbled over something nonsensical as they usually did. He envied the stride the two had taken with their immortal lives. They had easily gotten over watching their families die while they stayed alive.
But it was different with them. Their families had died from old age or disease. Ash’s family was murdered. They were brutally killed out of spite and jealousy. Ash was constantly tormented by the memory of his dead family.
Rosa’s pale, bloody and pregnant body... her arms wrapped around Kiowa’s cold and blue body.
Ash felt a tight squeeze around his heart. The pain was still there, a constant reminder of his punishment—his slow, lonely painful death. But once Baku was dead, he would finally end his misery. Five hundred years was already too long to keep suffering like this.
Baku would pay for what he did and Ash intended to make it a slow painful death.