Unfriendly Puppy Who: Brian and Hanna What: Shared Beer and Trauma Bonding When: Present (Before Full Moon) Where: Lucky’s, Searchlight Ratings: Low
Generally, the last place Brian wanted to be when he wasn’t pulling a shift was Lucky’s. He got enough of those walls when a paycheck was attached to them. But for every rule, there was a good exception, like when a construction vehicle hit a power line down the street and knocked out electricity to his trailer. He checked the utility company’s website. Service restoration wasn’t expected until the next day. It was gonna be a bad night. He moved his most expensive food into a cooler, dumped bagged ice on top, and left for cold beer and whatever sports were on the TV screens.
Brian settled in near the slots, where it was least likely he’d be asked to pour somebody a drink.
Though Hanna had chosen to live in the city, sometimes the noise of the place got to her. She’d considered getting a place in Henderson, almost but not quite in the suburbs, decided against it. It was a bit of a drive, but Highway 164 was quiet except for the occasional semi heading elsewhere, the stars offering a clear path in the dark sky overhead.
Lucky’s wasn’t quite a working-man’s bar, but there were a few older men sitting at a table drinking beer and muttering among themselves. She ordered a brew from the tap and carried it to a seat near the pinging slot machines. It was so hard now to figure out where to put herself if she wasn’t working, which was why she’d taken to late night drives. Trying to get outside of her own head, the barely-there memories. It was like punching at shadows.
The beer was cold and good, even for a non-import. Hanna pocketed one of the heavy cardboard coasters, a circle with the bar’s name stamped on it and an image of the building below it. For her collection, because she’d been picking them up randomly during her move west. Maybe later, she’d put them together in a collage, but right now they were in a shoebox under her couch.
There was only one guy who was close to her age other than the bartender. Probably a transplant, like her. She made something that passed for eye contact, picked through the bowl of peanuts and pretzel sticks on the table in front of her. When had they started putting individual bowls out instead of one big one for everyone to paw around in?
Brian was leaning back on two legs of his chair, watching a replay of an MLB game on the wall-mounted flatscreen. He noticed the woman sitting nearby. It was one of those accidental eye-contact moments, when he was looking around, rubbing his bicep in his short sleeve, taking in his surroundings at the same time as somebody else, and they happened to lock pupils. That always freaked him out in a bar, like he’d been accused of shoplifting when he was just reaching into his pocket for a phone. He gave her a polite lift of his chin and went back to what he was doing.
Or tried to. The chair legs he’d precariously balanced on slipped past the tipping point. “Shit!” Brian grabbed the edge of the table and just barely managed not to bust his ass on the floor. His beer sloshed all over the table.
Embarrassed, not just for him but for herself, Hanna directed her attention to the bottom of her half-filled mug as beer puddled on the other table, and an abashed chuckle escaped from her throat. A slightly rusty noise, as if she didn’t use it very often. She took another pull at her beer, then snagged two white napkins from the container. Lightweight, just good enough to wipe foam from her upper lip, and she folded them together next to the glass before pulling half a dozen more from the dispenser. Then a few more.
“Sorry.”
Offering him the dry napkins while focusing on a point just beyond his right shoulder. He looked a little older up close, but not much.
Brian put up a hand, a ‘hold the apology’ gesture. “That was all me.” He couldn’t meet her eyes as he took the napkins and used them to mop up the mess on his table. In action movies the werewolves always had preternatural reflexes. If that was a thing in real life, it seemed to have skipped him, unless catching the table counted. Maybe human Brian would be sprawled out unconscious right now.
The wet napkins made a soggy centerpiece on the four-top. “I’d laugh, too,” he said, reaching back to mess with his hair. “Actually if you could trip on the way to the bathroom, it’s the right thing to do.”
“Maybe after a couple more beers.” She hovered there for a minute, in that state between awkwardness and amusement, still not quite looking right at him. She had twenty dollars in cash on her, her walking around money after putting most of her paycheck into the bank. Hanna worked on commission - everyone at Sin City Portage did - but she was pulling in over fifty dollars a week just in tips.
“I can buy you a refill, though. Shame to let half a glass go to waste.”
“I can’t let you do that,” he said. “I mean, I would, but I haven’t paid for a beer here in a year so it’d be a dick move.” Brian didn’t know why he avoided looking at her after his near-disaster; she was looking at everything other than his face. Maybe she was socially awkward.
Brian used his foot to nudge the other chair outward. “I wouldn’t say no to company. You’d be doing me a favor. If I don’t look busy, they’ll ask me to clock in.” He leaned his elbows on the table and tried to ignore the distinct sensation of dried beer sticking to his arm hair.
Her mouth pulled into something easier, something closer to a smile, and she finished pulling the chair out after picking up her unfinished beer to move it to the still damp table. And a few more napkins. An unexpected invitation, but a benign one.
“So it’d be pointless to ask you if you come here often?”
Now she was looking at him, and it was social awkwardness. A strange combination of the broken thing that lived inside her chest now and the cold determination to do what she must. Remember, don’t remember, it hardly mattered. But she’d seen his eyes when he asked her to join him, could sense no danger or harm in him. A certain weariness, maybe, but no malignancy. “They must roll up the streets here pretty early. It’s barely ten and this is almost the only place open.”
Brian nodded. “Yeah, the Roadhouse, the coffee shop, the truck stop, the bar in the truck stop — that’s a thing — and Lucky’s are pretty much all that’s open late, because that’s all somebody would get off the highway for.” He slid two fingers into a black cord on his wrist and twisted. “But if you’re thinking that’s all there is to it here, you’d be surprised.” He gave her a curious look. “Where’re you from? I noticed the accent. Midwest, right?”
The werewolf wondered if she was a transplant or passing through on her way to somewhere.
“Chicago. South Deering.”
There was pride in how she said it, the pride of place, and some of the starch melted out of her shoulders as she leaned against the chair’s straight back. The fidget on his wrist pulled her attention away from his face for a moment, and she wondered if it was a good luck charm or just something to toy with.
“I saw the thing on the news a couple of weeks ago, about the explosion. Get a lot of that around here?”
Brian’s mouth opened. “Ahh.” He winced, gave his bracelet another tug and let it go. “Explosions specifically? No.” The hesitation and upturn said all he needed to about the town’s strange frequency. “Batshit weird? Yeah. It’s Nevada, the government's probably experimenting on us.” He picked up his beer and took a sip. If she wasn’t already picking up on the vibe in Lucky’s she wasn't sensitive to it. The werewolf ate a handful of pretzels. “I guess it didn’t scare you away.”
“I don’t scare that easy, I guess.”
One shoulder went up and down in a shrug, and she’d felt...something when she’d reached the plain door of Lucky’s, somewhere between a tickle and an itch, and she’d tucked it away for further study. One of the old guys got up from his chair and shuffled to the men’s room. He did not trip on his way. “Area 51’s not that far off from here, though. Maybe some of the aliens got loose and are plotting something.”
Brian popped another pretzel in his mouth. He pointed to the swinging bathroom door. “That’s probably one of ‘em. He’s calling for back-up.” This was Lucky’s. If somebody told him the automatic paper towel dispenser in the men’s room doubled as an extraterrestrial phone, he wouldn’t blink. He wiped a couple of grains of salt on his jeans and reached out a hand to the woman. “Brian.” There was a belated look of hesitation as he glanced between his hand and her face, wondering if somebody who had trouble with eye contact was going to shake hands. This might get awkward.
“Hanna.”
She saw the artwork first, the tattoos inked into the flesh of his arm, but it wasn’t until the handclasp that she saw the end of the scar on the inside of his elbow. A whitish mark that could have been a year old or ten years old. Could have come from anything.
Or not.
Because sometimes? Sometimes there were teeth involved.
Her attention moved back to his face, as casual as she could manage, and her grasp tightened a single notch. Just one, but all of the Pulaskis were built solid. When she smiled at him, though, the suspicion was touched with sympathy. Because if there had been teeth involved, he’d pulled through it.
“Unfriendly puppy?”
Strong grip. Brian’s eyebrows went up in surprise and he looked down at his elbow. “Yeah, she got me twice,” he said. When they let go, he touched his opposite rib cage through his shirt. “Not really a puppy. Just territorial.” The tone of his voice shifted whenever he thought about Kacey. He picked up his beer and took a long swallow to cover it. “I try not to hold it against dogs, generally.”
He set down the pint glass. She was observant. Brian paid a bit more attention to her to see what he could pick up. “You still live in Chicago or you around here now?”
“Nah, up in Vegas, a little ways off the Strip.”
Dogs. And he’d been bitten. Twice. But there was no ‘Brian’ on her list and he hadn’t even taken offense at her question. Hanna looked down into her mostly-empty beer, left the table long enough for a refill.
“My old man had a St. Bernard named Doofus when I was a kid,” she said once she sat back down. “Head of solid bone, but the biggest lovin’ drool machine ever. Most dogs are unpredictable, but a lamp post would have given you more trouble.”
Her right shoulder went up, a light gesture of acceptance. “Nice ink, though. I almost missed the scar. Must be an old one.”
Brian’s ankles were crossed beneath his chair. The right foot started to bounce. He wasn’t ashamed of being bitten or self-conscious of the scars -- every wolf in his old pack had them -- but if he thought about them much, sometimes they burned. A phantom pain. His fingers drifted to rub his side. “Five years. Had to get rid of the dog,” he said.
He adjusted his posture and gave her a curious look. “I’ve been thinking about getting a Pointer. I googled dogs that can handle the heat and that’s supposed to be a good one. When I was a kid, I thought I wanted one of those dogs like the one in Turner and Hooch, but that’s a lot of drool.” He gestured at his mouth. “That movie put me off noodles for weeks.”
He turned his glass in a circle on the table. “I meant to ask, why Vegas?”
“Came out to see a man about a dog.”
It was the way his fingers pushed around on the spot close to his ribs, she decided, and she had no answering scars of her own, no marks to speak to what had happened. If only because after Riley went down the sky opened up and poured rain onto the clearing where they’d been camped, the clouds that had obscured the sun for most of that day finally doing her some good. She’d stumbled through the sudden deluge until she found a sturdy enough tree, then climbed to the third branch and held on with scared-shitless hands hoping her grip didn’t slip. There was something...something trustworthy in it, as if they both knew what they were talking about.
“Do I detect some Jersey in your accent, by the way? You’re almost as far away from home as I am.”
“Farther, I think,” he said, giving her a sideways smile. “Born and raised. I moved out here last year.”
Brian tried to sort through what he was getting from Hanna. She wasn’t a therianthrope, from what he could smell, but there was too much coded language for innocent conversation. The only other wolf he knew was Nesryn, other than the one he wounded two months back. Every other Were on his radar was a cat. He slouched back in his seat, but the grip around his glass tightened. “The man you’re looking for, he’s in Searchlight or Vegas?”
“Relax, Brian.”
In response to the way his free hand grasped the glass of beer a little more firmly, Hanna sat back in the thinly padded chair, her ankles curling around the wooden supports. The regular drinkers here must have had asses made out of saddle leather, because there was almost no cushion under her backside. Her mouth pulled into another smile, one that was almost friendly, if a little sad.
“You might be in trouble somewhere, but not from me. I doubt the one I’m lookin’ for would have invited me to sit down. I’m not…”
She held her hands up, palms outward. “If I’m right, you probably remember a lot more than I do, though that’s a low bar to jump.”
A muscle moved in Brian’s jaw. “I’m not in trouble. I’m…” He searched for the right words. “Noticeably absent. You could say it left a hole.” One day it might come to a head, but the situation with Nesryn’s old pack worried him more than his.
He pushed the glass away and put his hands on the edge of the table. “What do you remember?” If she wasn’t bitten, he was having trouble piecing together why she was looking for a wolf. Maybe she was a hunter, like Tasha.
“The sound of shots. That it was the start of fall, the leaves just starting to change. Tyler was on sentry duty, they got to him first. Brown and black fur. That they were bigger than dogs. Meaner, too. That they can’t climb trees, though I half-thought I’d end up with pneumonia from being out in the rain all night.”
She twitched away from the quicksand of it, the white noise of the memory, took a fortifying drink of beer. “I’ve blocked most of it out, probably so I can get up every morning and do what needs doing. I don’t know what happens if I ever do remember. But there were ten of us when we bunked down for the night, and by the time it was over I was the only one left.”
Brian’s eyebrows shot up. He ran a hand over his face and was quiet for a minute, movement resuming when he scratched idly at his stubble. “Shit.” He thought about the farmhouse in the mountains, the squabbles his pack would get into over territory or resources, or who bit whom, or who thought it was a good idea to rub elbows with vampires. But it was never blanket carnage. Wolves didn’t need people for food. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “My pack was rougher than most packs, but tearing that kind of path, that’s… I mean that’s… that’s not something that happens a lot. None of them turned? That means it was personal or for sport, which is fucked up”
“Both, maybe. Trying to see who has the bigger dick.”
Hanna smiled again, but it was like the winter sun, brittle and short-lived. “They were my friends, or most of them were. And there’s no box big enough and no hole deep enough to put it. Maybe not ever, but…”
She studied Brian where he sat across the table from her, the sodden napkins having turned into a mushy pile. “You left? On your own? I don’t know much about it, but I thought once you were in you couldn’t get out.”
You couldn’t, not really, but Brian didn’t say anything. Nobody had ever asked him about it. People in Searchlight took a lot at face value. The only time it ever came up, he offered up that his pack of bitten wolves was kind of disorganized, his Alpha was killed, and they fell apart. He was taken at his word. He had learned that if you acted casual, like you didn’t come away with any baggage other than “I got bitten and it sucked”, people believed it.
“Yeah well.” He found himself looking at the same stack of soggy, brown-tinted napkins. “I’m not exactly hiding but I didn’t leave a forwarding address.” He picked up a paper coaster and tapped the disc on the table. “I’m sorry about your friends.”
“So am I. Every day. Right afterwards, that first month or so, I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if I was dead too, if I wasn’t the only one who made it out. In group they call it survivor’s guilt, but it was more like stupid luck that it started to rain and I was close enough to the treeline to find a branch that could keep me off the ground.”
Hanna pulled in a breath, looked at the coaster in Brian’s hand. He, at least, was not a monster, she’d already determined that. If he’d broken with his pack or not, she could see the humanity in him. She considered grasping his wrist, decided against it. Too much familiarity, though she could guess how much of his story was like hers.
“Neither of us got a choice in how things turned out,” she said instead. “And I don’t know what I’d have done if they had turned me. I’d have left too. They screwed with the wrong person as it is.”
“Yeah?” He looked at her, curious, and wondered what being ‘the wrong person’ meant she was capable of. “Well, I stayed for four years,” he admitted, thinking back to the long haul of climbing ranks, that endless cycle of fighting and clawing to maintain what you had because there wasn’t a born hierarchy. He wasn’t a violent person by nature but he figured it out fast, and that on switch was still there if he needed it. “If you don’t stay long enough to learn how to survive, you won’t.”
Brian lifted a shoulder. “The only male wolf I’ve seen around here was about… a month and a half ago? I ran into him when we were both shifted. Nothing since.”
“They’ve scattered, I’m pretty sure. One here, one there, the others wherever else. I’m still kind of surprised I haven’t seen reports of other incidents.”
This was probably the longest conversation she’d had with anyone in a while, and she’d finished her second beer. Maybe one more, then she should quit for the drive back home. And now she did touch him, putting one finger on the back of his hand, the one not occupied with the coaster.
“I’ve never told anyone else this, y’know? Even not remembering much, I know what it sounds like. I thought I knew what mean was, but I had no idea. Like you said, if you don’t learn fast, you won’t live. I learned fast.”
Brian looked at the finger on his hand. It was no wonder why bitten weres didn’t talk about this more often. Trauma might bond people, but they’d be liars if they claimed they didn’t have PTSD. “Yeah, you were a step ahead of me. At least you had the sense to climb a tree,” he laughed. “It’s better than being a chew toy.” He angled his head. He didn’t engage these memories often, but this conversation had brought sharp splinters of it back: a growl in the woods, fear for his dad, a gunshot, then being blindsided by fur and lots and lots of pain. He shifted his weight.
“It’s know it’s hard to dig this shit up,” he said. “I don’t take it lightly.” Brian gave her a gentle smile. “The full moon’s coming up. At least I do have the sense to get out of town. That’s one thing the desert’s got a lot of... empty space.”
She ducked away from the smile, but it registered, the unexpected kindness. Even without the exact particulars Brian got it, and that was more than she’d expected. Ever, not only so soon after the incident. She dug into her pocket, pulled out a receipt from a convenience store she’d stopped at that morning on the way to work.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m gonna give you my cell phone number.”
Though if he did take it the wrong way, that was something she could tuck away for further examination as well. This was the first time she’d felt close to the daylight world, though it was closing in on midnight now. Beer and shared trauma might not be a sturdy framework, but it was better than nothing.
“Nah, no worries. It’s good to know people,” he said, a hand absently rubbing at his upper arm as he straightened. Brian thought about getting up and grabbing a pen from the register, then remembered it wasn’t the nineties. “What’s your number, I’ll text you.” He dug in his hip pocket for his phone and pulled up his contacts. He waited for her to rattle off the digits and sent a text reading ‘Brian.’ “If you run into trouble, give me a call. I know some people.” He lifted his shoulders. It was too soon to disclose anybody else’s details, especially with someone who admitted she was looking to hunt down weres, but he had a feeling Hanna was trustworthy. It just needed time to bear that out.
If I don’t get myself killed in the next few weeks.
Because she knew where her advantages were; that the ones she was after had no idea she’d be the type to come after them, that she’d smartened up in record time considering she’d been dropped into the deep end with a weight tied around her ankle, and that her machinist’s training was coming in handy in unexpected ways. Her physical vulnerabilities aside, Hanna could bear down hard when she had to, and if they were stronger and meaner, they also seemed arrogant and maybe a little stupid. Or at least stupid enough. If she was fatalistic, that fatalism kept her honest.
“Thank you, Brian,” she said, tucking her phone into her back pocket. “I should probably hit the road. Long shift tomorrow, and I need a clear head for mid-afternoon traffic.”
“Yeah, be safe.” Brian put his phone down.
But what she had said about wolves messing with the wrong woman stuck with him, and as she got ready to leave, he wondered if she was really about to go on a Wick-style vigilante mission by herself. Scraping chair legs, Brian got up from the table and picked up his empty pint glass. “I meant what I said.” He made sure to make eye contact. “You don’t have to do it alone just because you can.” He grabbed the old napkins and lifted his hand on a wave. “See ya.”
Hanna blinked into the silence left by Brian’s departure, somewhere between bemused and troubled as he headed out. It was the first genuine offer of help she’d gotten, because she knew it sounded insane, the story she carried around with her now. Men who turned into wolves and attacked armed military personnel, even if they were just weekend warriors? Sure, if you were writing science fiction.
But he didn’t know about Provo, and he wouldn’t for a while. Because he wasn’t the only one playing some things close. For now, this was hers, the thing she needed to do to make it right. Call it revenge, call it payback, for her the only word that fit was justice.