Fang & Claw - Tooth & Nail

By Douglas Christian Larsen and Rodolphus

Rodolphus and Larsen, together in one book for the very first time. Although very different writers, these two storytellers stir emotions, produce chills, and introduce people we soon know and love (and sometimes hate and fear). Collected here are such singular works as Fearsweat, wherein a supernatural stalker threatens an entire town. In My Father: The Killer, we meet a young man who has always believed the worst about his father, a famed terrorist. Interstate Chimes accompanies twins completing their separate destinies outside of time and space. We enter an amazing little girl's creative genius in Four-Leaf Clovers. And for a dark laugh (and scream) we ride along with The Dread Cowboy. Included herein is the unfinished Rodolphus master-work, the novella Contest Darkly which taps into the incredible world of Larsen's Vanya Song (a novel 40 years in the making). Rodolphus and Larsen, like coffee and cream, or hemlock and wine, we experience a world incredibly dark, yet vividly bright.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781105116605

Book preview

Fang & Claw - Tooth & Nail

Fang & Claw - Tooth & Nail

Rodolphus and Douglas Christian Larsen

Wolftales UNlimited

www.WolftalesUNlimited.com

Also by Rodolphus

Storyteller’s Last Stand

The Wolf Doth Grin

AnimalHeart

Also by Douglas Christian Larsen

Deceiving the Elect

Think Tales

Vanya Song

Tamer of Horses

The Dragon & the Wolf

Wolftales UNlimited

©Copyright 2011 Rodolphus and Douglas Christian Larsen. All Rights Reserved by the Author. No part of this book may be reproduced (except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews) or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Wolftales UNlimited.

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

Fang & Claw – Tooth & Nail

ISBN: 978-1-105-11660-5

Dedication

for Alicia Kathryn

the girl with the golden eyes

with all a Papa’s love

The Dread Cowboy

RODOLPHUS

Standish doubled back and wedged himself between a dumpster emanating stink and a stack of rotting cardboard boxes equally smelly. He put his hand into his spanking new Day-Glo yellow windbreaker and withdrew his stainless steel .44 Magnum Colt Python from the shoulder holster beneath his right arm, rechecked the modified chamber containing a full load of seven hollow-point slugs (special sweet surprises!), then sighted down the eight-inch barrel. Satisfied—at least for the next few minutes—Standish replaced the weapon.

He had eight complete identities packed in his wallet, with eight matching permits allowing him to carry his arsenal through any airport in the world—it never hurt to hedge your bets, and decorated cop or no, Standish had always known this day might come. Much of his traveling arsenal was present today: the modified .44, of course, plus a compact 9mm Beretta in a butt holster, and the two-shot .32 derringer strapped to his ankle.

Enough was enough, and he meant to end this horny-goose chase, put a bullet or two into the shambling nightmare which had pursued him across the breadth of the United States. The thing after him had tracked him from plane to bus to stolen car to plane to taxi to bus to plane—a lot better than the frigging feds or bumbling state die-hards and bungling county yokels, whose dicks were baffled before his second United Airlines trip—the thing after him defied logical reason; however, Standish was positive it would not as well defy a few well-placed hollow points.

It was time to face his pursuer and his fears—if a man like Bert Standish could ever even be considered as a candidate for fears—and this out-of-the-way alley was a better place than most to face the ominous tracker. Standish would have a clear seventy-five-foot bead on the man—an easy shot for Standish, fifteen-year veteran plainclothes detective of the New York City Police Department, before that a five-year beat cop in Los Angeles, and two tours a weapons expert in Vietnam.

Some lucky bounty hunter or talented hired dick would not even have the chance to be sorry for exercising such skillful tracking. Standish meant to plug him cleanly from seventy-five feet—or, Bert Standish thought, grinning wickedly, he meant to unplug the bastard, for good, forever, for better or worse.

His grin grew fierce and ugly, stretching across his face like a rotting banana peel. Unplug the dike, tap a kidney, aerate the lawn, turn out the lights. Oh shut up, Standish told himself and laughed. Concentrate on the task at hand.

Of course, Bert Standish knew, it could be neither of those: lucky bounty hunter or talented hired dick. His grin faded. It was something more, or something much less, coming on, pursuing, relentless and deadly and unnatural and cold-blooded and righteous—and it was after Bert Standish and, like the Terminator, it would not stop until it ripped his fucking heart out of his body. He licked his lips and forced his grin back into place, a vicious rictus snarl, his teeth glittering brightly and his cheeks scrunching his eyes into slits.

Daddy—Daddy! Donnyo hurt my daddy! the voice cried, so true to life Standish had to think of the Memorex commercial. Is it live, or is it Memorex? It still hurt, that memory, so he knew he still had some conscience left, he was still human, damn it, damn it, what the hell had he done.

Is is live, or some stinking cassette tape commercial. Or, if it had anything at all to do with Bert Standish, is it dead?

With a fluid, almost supernatural dexterity, Bert Standish drew his revolver without even disturbing his coat, snapped open the firing chamber. Looked at the bright ring of bullet butts. Nodded. Snapped shut the firing chamber. Snapped it open. Inspected the bullets carefully. The rictus of his face slowly subsided.

Standish gently secured the weapon and returned it to holster.

He had glimpsed it, the thing, kalumping on the airport tarmac in New York. Again from the window of a taxi, charging at him from down an alley in Cincinnati. Impossibly, again, down Key West way. If a lucky bounty hunter or talented hired dick, that sucker shoa did nohow be ridin’ hossey-back, shoanuff!

Standish had first sensed the tracker when he vaulted the security (ha, security) fence at the tenement slum—it sounded like hoofbeats, some horse running loose in the middle of Harlem —and he paused, speckled with the blood of three separate people (none of it his own), breathing hard, foam upon his lips, his sportcoat ripped from the barbed wire at the top of the fence, his highly modified .44 revolver smoking inside his jacket beneath his arm.

Kalump, kalump, kalump.

Some crippled nag charging down a garbage-choked alley. When Standish, eyes dazed and glassy, but rolling slyly even so, glimpsed the thing mounted upon the thing that kalumped along like a horse—

—it was time to make like a dog collar and flea, make like a toe and jam, make like Joan and Jett, like a tree and leaf, like a banana and peel, like a—

I’m being chased by the lost episode of Bonanza, Bert Standish breathed and grinned a more natural grin. He chuckled. Right, he nodded, the episode where Hoss goes on a crash diet and loses weight so fast he dies and Little Joe and Adam take his shriveled body down past the saloon to the local taxidermist who does his best to make old Hoss lifelike, and Joe and Adam put the stuffed Hoss at the dinner table and hope Pa Cartwright won’t notice—only, when Hopsing serves dinner, poor taxidermitized Hoss begins to load in the food—see, Hoss isn’t really dead, but only in a dieter’s coma, and all it takes is a sensible meal and a thick rich chocolate milkshake, but now, oh but now —

—now old poor stuffed-yet-skinny Hoss had formed a one-man posse and aimed to bring back rogue-cop and murderer Bert Standish, dead or alive.

Only, thought Standish, licking sweat off his upper lip, that kalumping horse must have been on the same diet and suffered the same fate as poor old Hoss. Standish did not know what was worse, the horse or its rider.

Standish rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. It did not one damn spit of good to cry: unfair! unfair! not my fault. And it did no dern-nabbit good to whine: not possible! ridiculous! horror story drivel! Stephen King fart!

Because the kalumping thing with its weathered, shriveled—and yet impossibly huge—rider were coming. They were coming and they were dead-set on doing a Terminator on Bert Standish.

Standish swallowed hard. They were coming —

—and they were DEAD.

Just relax, Standish breathed. You’ve got the guts and have always been a man, you’ve always been tough, and nobody’s plugged you yet. Correction: nobody’s unplugged you yet!

Plus, Standish said, raising an imaginary lecturing finger before an imaginary audience, you can’t rule out the possibility that you feel guilty—that you’re a good person and that it is your guilt that is pursuing you so unmercifully!

Which means you are just a’wrigglin’ with shit.

I am an officer of the law. I serve the community. I am one of the good guys. I take out the trash.

Standish again drew his piece, his hand a blur. He aimed at the mouth of the alley. His thumb, lovingly, edged back the firing hammer. Got a sweet surprise for you, taxidermy dude—and this surprise is really very rude. Bert Standish puckered out his lips and kissed the firing cylinder. Then, with the same astonishing speed, he holstered the .44 Mag.

Daaa-Deeey! wafted the incredible is it alive or dead Memorex voice.

Standish closed his eyes. And, of course, it was there, vivid as cable zapped into a shiny thirty-six-inch Sony TV screen—

...the giant lummox, sneering, Thanksgiving turkey-sized fists upon tractor-tire hips, shoot me, whitey, ifyogots duh guts—‘moan, pig, yo whitey pig ass ain’t got duh guts... and the lummox, besides being an ex-con violating his parole, has allegedly put two cops in the hospital, and Standish, grinning, eases the hammer back, lovingly, and he just means to scare the shit out of the lummox, enlighten him a bit, but then the gangling boy is there screaming Daddy—Daddy! Donnyo hurt my daddy! and Standish screams at the kid, a long coltish kid—eight years old or so, with long wagging toothpick-thin arms and knobby-kneed toothpick legs—Standish screams at the kid to shut up, just shut the fuck up and of course the lummox comes forward cuz he be uh family kind’uh dude and no whitey pig is gonna be usin’ duh F word in front’uh his boy—and the lummox has arms and legs that can never be described as toothpick thin and a huge body that can never be called coltish, and Standish does something he’s never done before—not in two tours as a sharpshooter in ‘Nam nor in five years as a beat cop in L.A., or even in his fifteen celebrated Big Apple years—Bert Standish, in a very ticklish situation—the boy screaming before him, five feet away, the dangerous lummox looming close, maybe seven feet away—Bert Standish blinks his eyes, something he never came close to doing before in all his tense times—in that minuscule span of dark-warm oblivion, the .44 Mag hammer slips out from beneath his thumb, and the kid—a real cutey who under other circumstances probably could light up a movie theater with his smile—is rocketing backward, into the lummox, his father, and the lummox is rocketing backward, too, into the wall, which seemingly opens to catch both rocketeers, and the both of them, father and son, wear ridiculously large holes, and there is a ridiculous amount of blood on the walls, the ceiling, Standish’s face and body, and at this point it is probably still a salvageable situation—a very bad situation, mind you—but Standish is, after all, a highly decorated—even celebrated—police officer and these are, after all, expendable blights on the economy; but at that point—the echoes of the .44 Mag blast yet resonating—Officer Tim Trubon, a rookie cop three weeks on the beat, rushes into the room and Standish, eyes glassy, glittering—swivels—and his trigger finger seemingly takes charge, and three blasts later in the span of a half-second, there is not much remaining of Officer Tim Trubon, rookie cop with three solid weeks’ experience...

Shit, Standish breathed, massaging his eyes with the heels of his hands, I ran. I really did run. It was something else he had never done before—but hey, Berty-Boy, you must have figured this could happen, eventually—you must have planned on running, because why else would you invest nearly twenty thousand George Washingtons into fake IDs with extra-deluxe back-up documentation?

It happened so fast—bang-bang-bang—just wasn’t time enough for cutesy-pooh staging and expert back-up testimonial. Shit, a cop’s life could and sometimes did get very complicated at times.

Bert Standish sat back and lowered his hands into his lap. He took several deep breaths—luxuriated in the intermingled stenches: week-old diapers packed with baby pucky, assorted piles of shit grouped strategically about the dumpster (both dog and human)—there is nothing like some deep lungfuls of sweet shit scent to calm you down. Like the Coffee Achievers—smelling shit can pick you up (don’t be depressed if you’re a baby killer!) and calm you down (so what if a dread cowpoke is hounding you—life can’t be that bad, just smell that sweet mixture of man and dog shit!)!

His eyes drooped and his head dipped—then he jerked awake as if an electric shock had jolted his hair into a Raggedy Annie ‘fro. He shook his head and slapped his cheeks. His meaty chest was soaked, as was his face, and even his legs and butt were wet with that gun-em-down sweat.

Stay awake, he muttered. Just a wee bit longer. A little bang-bang, then you can take your chill pill and veg.

He checked his watch. Already twenty minutes had passed. The thing should be kalumping into the trap very soon. Twenty minutes since he wedged himself between the dumpster and the cardboard boxes. Twenty minutes plus two days since his thumb slipped off the hammer. Two days and twenty minutes without more than a few seconds worth of sleep—each millisecond he dozed he heard that thin wail of Daaa-Deeey! and that ominous, stilted kalump-kalump-kalumping. Approaching. Getting closer. Stalking him. Getting cloooooooooooooser.

Bert Standish cocked his head and listened. Could he hear something? Or was it his sleep-deprived brain juicing in the imagination? He swallowed, but there was no spit to lubricate his dry throat. He half-closed his eyes and honed his hearing. Nothing. Or was it? He clenched his eyes shut and his lips pulled back from his teeth. Damn it, could he hear it coming, or not?

Kalump. Kalump. Kalump.

Oh yupperoo, it was coming, all right.

Standish drew the .44 Mag and gripped it loosely in two hands. He blinked his eyes, hard, for clarity, and slowly extended his arms. He rested his elbows on the moldering cardboard and exhaled minutely, dragging out the last of his breath. Keeping both eyes open, he sighted until the sights on the pistol lined together dead-center of his vision.

Kalump.

Slower, they—the strange pair of taxidermitized things—were coming.

Kalump.

Close. Almost to the mousetrap.

Kal-ump.

Then. Nothing.

Standish held his breath. A little reserve oxygen sneaked out of his mouth which he promptly french-inhaled up his nose. No one ever said Berty-Boy Standish was a slouch at playing hide-n-seek!

Damn, where was it? Where was it?

Kah-luh-ump.

Shit, the thing had to be just around the corner. In fact, Standish could sense it—sure, he could feel it, just around the corner, about to enter the mousetrap of the alley—the thing had dismounted from the thing. The thing was down low, checking the ground, tracking, sniffing after Berty-Boy Standish.

Previously, Standish had glimpsed the thing full-bore charging, like a mad elephant with a hot VISA card. So why now was it standing still, kneeling down, checking his tracks, so carefully, so carefully...

—unless, of course, the thing, so carefully, knew something—that Bert Standish, baby-killer, bigot, ex-good guy and current rogue cop—that Berty-Boy was hiding like a cat with canary on its breath, just around the corner, sweating profusely, hands dead calm before him with a daughter of Big Bertha cocked and ready to sing her happy harpy song.

Standish swallowed and mentally enticed the thing forward. Come on Hoss, good old boy, come on to Daaah-Deeeey!

There was a new sound. Not kalump. The sound was nothing at all like kalump. This was a much worse sound. It sounded like a big foot in a wet sneaker, kind of squishaling forward, squishaling ever closer.

Carefully forward. So carefully you might think that whatever was making the squishaling expected that it might be walking into a mousetrap. Ambush. Standish could use a little bush, along about now, am or not.

Come on, I’ve got seven sweet surprises for you, you scarecrow motherfucker, Standish whispered sweetly. His hands steady, so steady.

Slowly, the thing moved into the alley. Bert Standish winced and the .44 Mag wavered, just a bit. Shit, the thing was worse than he had previously thought. He swallowed the lump in his throat. He suddenly felt strangely light-headed. He blinked his eyes and for a moment there seemed to be a subtle fading, as if all substance had drained of color.

But his hands steadied and he honed his aim, from the warped and hanging cowboy hat over a tangled skein of spiderweb hair, below the sloping shoulders to the center of the narrow chest. Good gravy, but the thing was filthy.

Standish grinned and lovingly eased the finger on the trigger back toward his palm. Silkily, so sweetly.

The thing began to look up, to look up the alley to precisely where Bert Standish huddled.

Standish squeezed off the first three bullets in nearly one explosion of thunder. And the first part of the sweet surprise was delivered home to papa: three bullets soaked in Standish’s own piss. If the thing survived, even for an hour, it was in for a pretty painful whirly-gig in the Rodeo of Life.

The thing was thrown backward, into the horse it was leading, and then it was down. Smoking.

Quiet.

Standish sniggered. There’s a bump for your kal-umph.

Hemingway couldn’t have dropped the sucker any better.

Yo! Pa! Little Joe! Yo! Candy! I think ole Hoss needs another visit to the taxidermist! Bert Standish roared, leaping from behind the dumpster and charging down the alley. He just had to have a look at this nifty thing, a real good long look at perhaps the most interesting thing Standish had encountered in his forty-two years.

The thing on the ground wasn’t moving but Standish burned half the soles of his shoes off stopping as he caught a good look at the thing standing quietly above and behind the thing on the ground.

It was a horse, or what was left of a horse—and in fact, Standish had the impression it must be a stuffed horse. But then its head moved a bit and it seemed to look at him with the dark crevasses which were its eyes. Standish swallowed hard. The horse’s eyes looked like the black Xs cartoon characters wore after they were bashed a mighty good one on the noggin.

The horse only had three hooves. Its right front leg terminated in a conical sliver of dark-yellow bone. Its back was swayed impossibly deep, and there were thousands of tiny holes in the cracked tarp of its hide. The only thing sprightly about the beast was the gleaming, well-oiled yellow saddle, which looked better than brand-spanking new.

Unholy son of a shit, Standish burped. He tasted the onslaught of vomit at the base of his throat. He slowly replaced his .44 Mag and nearly missed the holster, which definitely would have been a first.

Now son, yuh ain’t oughta’ve done that, said the thing which was stirring on the pavement.

Standish yelped, leapt back three feet, his .44 Colt Python magically returned to his hand. He fired three rapid shots into the thing which was slowly pushing itself from the ground. The thing tumbled violently backward—Standish caught the impression of flailing cowboy boots, spiderweb hair fluttering, dust flying everywhere, and a decrepit cowboy hat tumbling away.

There! Three more sweet surprises. Three .44 Mag hollow-points which weren’t quite hollow—these three were specially made, containing a lethal mixture of Vaseline and LSD, guaranteeing a one hundred percent volcano high for that special junkie on your Christmas list.

Guess that should make for an interesting entry in your diary, asshole! Standish barked, and actually let loose a laugh.

The thing didn’t seem to appreciate the joke, as it pushed itself from the ground, stabbing Standish with a baleful glare. Ain’t gonna tell yuh no more, son, you’d best just stop this’ere foolishness before yuh get my dander up.

Standish blinked hard, slowly returned his pistol to its holster. Running might be a pert idea, but then again all his foxy maneuvers to date had yet to keep this sad sack of shit from catching up in this alley, and six sweet surprises hadn’t done much to smooth the sandpaper rasp from the thing’s pissed-off tone of voice as it rose from the ground, taller, higher, and taller.

What do you want? Bert Standish said, and hated the quaver in his voice, his heightened breathing, the light-headedness which made him sway forward and backward like a leaning tower of pizza.

No matter that he was facing a cowpoke from Hell, a thing perhaps three inches towering over his own six feet two inches of bearlike stature. Bert Standish had always faced up to the bad guys, to the goons who outnumbered him in alleys, to the creeps who seemed to have him ever out-gunned (regardless of how impressive his own arsenal)—Standish sounded like a little boy with his Whaddayooo-waaaant whine.

Son, the thing rasped, bending down, creaking, retrieving its thrashed cowboy hat, Yer just gunna have tuh stop yer fussin’ and come along with me. Comprendez?

The thing, some hideous cowboy freak, was all flapping rags—what had probably once been a black boot-length duster, was now more a shredded cape, and its boots, split and sprung, seemed to overflow with some kind of wet-looking moss; however, as with the perfect better-than-new saddle on the horse, the cowpoke wore gleaming yellow chaps which glistened just as brightly.

Its face, like the sharp edge of a hatchet, was cancerous and onion-skin thin, and Standish thought he might be able to see more than a little of the yellowed skull leering through. Its hair was the nastiest nest of white medusa coils hanging below the sunken shoulders Standish had ever seen—he considered suggesting two bottles of Head and Shoulders, but figured the thing might not appreciate the joke. It sported a huge catfish moustache housing—Standish flinched—several creepy-crawly spiders.

Not going with you, anywhere, motherfucker, Bert Standish wheezed.

Its eyes, shit, its eyes, Standish mentally screamed—its eyes were painfully too real, too wet, too shining with intelligence and nasty life. Some Doctor Frankenrustler had stuck some very alive eyes into a rotting mannequin wearing a cowpoke suit.

T’ain’t a matter uh choice, son, the cowboy rasped, straightening its duster with a skeletal hand—loosing a cloud of dust and sweet-terrible smell—indicating something affixed upon the rotting rags inside the coat. Standish glimpsed an iron star-shaped thing, presumably a black badge. Yup, I’m the law in these parts, and son, yer in a heap’uh trouble. Yuh can keep the cannons if it’ll make yuh happy, but I don’wan no whimperin’ ner yappin.

The strange X-eyed horse nickered softly although it seemingly did not move. The three-hoofed horsey unnerved Standish more than Billy the Crypt, if that was possible.

Mosey along little dogey, this boy ain’t going with you, not now, not never! Bert Standish snarled. He cleared his windbreaker from his gun and angled his chest. One sweet surprise remaining. And this one, an expensive gag gift from Petey Ironwolf—Standish’s partner of eight years in the past, dead these last six years—could turn out to be more than just a joke. Old Ironwolf was half Apache, wasn’t he? And didn’t them Apaches practice magic every now and again?

The cowboy spat next to Standish’s shoe—chaw, Standish assumed, until he looked at the glob and saw it wriggling and white.

Yuh shot yer load, son, I counted ‘em—six shots, the cowboy said, and it was difficult to tell, but it seemed it grinned.

Reality check: if this was some overcharged spirit of guilt battening down the hatches of Berty-Boy’s widdle tugboat, then, physically, it would seem, this nightmare could not hurt him. And if this was something more than a psychological belch, Standish was going to have to be the bestest, strongest, gutsiest prickiest version of himself he could be.

Wrong, Standish said, his body and mind going easy, going fast. He hocked up a good phlegm ball and spat it between the cowboy’s boots. You miscounted, Marshall Dillon. I fired FIVE shots.

If I was in uh frame uh mind to count ‘em I’d imagine I’d find six holes. Save yerself the effort, sonny. I don’t mean t’exasperate yuh none, an’ I don’t expect yuh t’exasperate me none. I’m’uh takin’ yuh in.

I mean to draw on yuh, pardner, Standish drawled—he’d always had a talent with mimicry: he could do the blacks, the browns, and the yellows, and this Texas 89 IQ-level drawl was easier than sitting down in a big clump of warm bird shit—and Standish felt good.

This was kind of fun. He was way, way quicker than this staggering strip of beef jerky. And this last sweet surprise—from old Petey Tonto Ironwolf to yours truly