Life With A Werewolf

Suicidal Power Play Part 2 - Parking Lot Tragedy

          At first what Crash had told me didn't register. My entire brain had stopped and started again. Who would want to attack Zack? He's quiet and shy, kind to a fault, and says nothing to anyone. I had to ask Crash to repeat himself. "Yeah, two thugs jumped him outside of the factory. Didn't say a word to him. Several of his co-workers chased them off and called 9-1-1."
          Pain could wait. I stood, and grabbed my pistol. "What did they look like," I demanded.
          Crash shook his head. "No. No, Jason. This is for the police. I'm not even allowed to intervene, as much as I'd love to sink my teeth into those bastards, I can't."
          I wanted to punch the wall. I opted to throw down a pill bottle instead. The blue bottle with the label that promised to stop knee and back pain exploded and white pills scattered across the floor. Crash didn't look at me. He just glared down at the pills like me. He didn't say anything for a minute. He didn't have to. "Damn things don't work anyway," I snarled.
          His eyes raised up to me then, as if seeing my pain for the first time. "What happened, Jason?"
          "I was attacked in the store." I explained to Crash then about the greased up guy, about the pistol, the fight. "Damn tweaker," I snarled. "It's on TikTok. Cop watched the entire video, complete with laugh track and smiley faces over the heads."
          "Wait a minute," Crash said. His eyes were lit up as if he had a sudden revelation. "Tweakers?"
          My phone rang, interrupting him. When I answered, Kris began shouting frantically before I could even get a word out. It came out in a panicked mumble. It had all the echoes of someone stepping into a battlefield the first time without any experience or training.
          My own instincts kicked in. I spoke in even measured tones, while motioning to Crash. He leaned in to listen while I put the phone on speaker. "Take a deep breath. I know it's going to be hard, but try to calm down. Start at the beginning. What's going on?"
          "They're attacking Sean! They're trying to kill him!"
          "Where are you now?"
          I could hear the sounds of flesh impacting flesh. Of grunts and snarls that could only come from a violent fight. "Outside of Sean's work. We were gonna do a date night."
          "Where are you," I asked.
          "I'm in my car, doors locked."
          "Good, me and Crash are on the way. Call the cops." I started shuffling to the door while Crash bolted for his car. "are they tweakers?"
          "I think so, yeah. Skinny, meth mouthed guys."
          By the time I made it to Crash's car, he already had the engine running. "We're on our way. Keep the doors locked and call the cops."
          As we moved down the road, I checked my load out. Only magazine I had was the one I kept loaded in it. Was seventeen rounds of silver going to be enough to deal with what was going down over there? How much of an ambush was this? Would my fry grease tweaker be back with reinforcements? Perhaps one guy covered in burger grease and one covered in chocolate syrup?
          typically, it's about a twenty five minute drive to Sean's work. We made it in twelve. Sean worked in a locally owned T-shirt shop. It was in a prefab metal building with a gravel parking lot on the edge of the largest city nearby. Thick, old trees grew at the edges of the parking lot, hiding a large farmers field on one side. It had highway access on the other. The perfect spot to beat someone to death and then drive away without anyone seeing or stopping you if you weren't all that concerned with modern security cameras. Next to Kris' car was a beat up car of some kind that might have been one of the ones circling the block. But I didn't spend a lot of time, staring at it, I was more concerned with the three guys beating the crap out of Kris and Sean.
          By the time we got there, Sean was on the ground, covering his face, while two guys repeatedly kicking him. He was bruised and bloody. His face looked like Rocky's after a twelve round fight. Kris, not listening to anything I'd told him, had tried to use a tire iron to help his man, and was being beaten against the building by a third thug. The tire iron sat in the dirt behind the skinny thug, who kept wailing on his gut, while Kris was doubled over, trying to protect himself.
          They were all meth mouthed, with faces wrinkled and pitted, cheeks sunk in from years of abuse. Their arms thin, one guy was losing his hair, a ring of blond peppered the edges. He looked thirty going on eighty. The guy next to him, kicking the shit out of Sean, had no hair, opting to either shave it or it simply had fallen out from undernourishment and drug abuse. Either could have been true. The third had greasy, short brown hair. All three of the attackers were drug addicts of one kind or another. Pushers and users, with clothing in varying degrees of cleanliness. Blue jeans, battered sneakers and whatever T shirts they found for free or could steal from Goodwill.
          As Crash's car slid into the gravel parking lot, all three turned to look at us. Crash was out before it had even come to a stop. He zeroed in on the nearest tweaker, the skinny guy with greasy short brown hair that had been attacking Kris, and sprinted over to him in his human form with surprising speed. The guy stepped to Crash as if to box him, but Crash punched brown hair in the face, the gut, then uppercut him in rapid succession. The uppercut was so violent and hard, you could hear the crunch of his nose as his head flew backwards, and his body crashed into the ground. Blood sprayed out like a squashed tomato. The guy cried out, grabbing his face and holding his nose while he rolled on the ground. While that was going on, I stepped towards the two tweakers who had been kicking the shit out of Sean on the ground.
          There's a magical spot on your knee. If you hit it just right, your football career is over, and all those fancy commercials that you did when your the star running back of the NFL and star outfielder in Major League Baseball dries up faster than a spilled drink in death valley. Just ask Bo, he knows all too well. The balding blondie took a swing, the I side stepped, and I stomped on his knee in this magical spot as hard as I could.
          It snapped and crunched like someone breaking celery. Screams echoed through the parking lot as he hit the ground, clutching his knee. While the first guy was falling, the second guy got a lucky shot on my side that sent a jolt of pain up through my back. I couldn't do anymore. I was on the ground next to the first guy, staring up at the sky, effectively out of the fight.
          Crash literally took two steps, grabbed and pushed him. He went flying backwards, sliding several feet into the gravel.
          "Kris. Where are the cops," I asked, gasping through some of the pain.
          "I didn't get to call them. One of them pull a knife," he had limped over to Sean and laid down next to him, holding him tight. I looked back skyward, and saw Crash standing over me.
          "Are you going to cuddle me, too," I asked.
          He rolled his eyes. "You'll be fine," he snarled as he pulled out his phone, and began calling the fight in. Somewhere in the distance, I heard tires squeal as a car left the parking lot in a hurry. The three tweakers had managed to limp away and make their get away it seemed. Concentrating on the guys, I hadn't had a good look at the vehicle, but it felt vaguely familiar, like one of the vehicles that had been circling our house the entire time.
          I looked over at Sean, and he had pulled Kris into a hug. I turned my head and pretended to not hear what they whispered to each other through their shared pain as they tried to console each other.
          "Crash," I said on the ground. "I missed all the signs. I'm sorry. Everything, every one of them..."
          He knelt down next to me. "It's alright. I wrote them off, too. I think we were supposed to write them off."
          "Tweakers. I thought Milton was dead. This is our fight now, Crash."
          He didn't respond, just looked out towards the woods. I recognized that face. Milton soon would be dead. It felt like the police had taken their sweet time to arrive. But really, it was probably just a few minutes. The ambulance sirens were in the distance. Crash had stood, I think to shift and race into the woods. What happened next will forever be burned into my memory.
          He took a step towards the road. The car, the beat up brown piece of crap car that we had originally saw, sped by. The pistol was out the window and before crash could do anything, the shots rang out.
          Four shots. Three missed everything but the trees behind us. One struck Crash in the shoulder. There was a puff of blood, then the shot echoed out. Crash yelped then hit the ground, clutching his shoulder. All three of us stared at him stunned as Crash lay on the ground, crying about how much it burned. "Silver..." I whispered. By the time, I sat up and pulled my own pistol, they were gone.
          Crash had a silver bullet buried in his shoulder. I could hear the ambulance, but not see them. God only knew how far out they were, or if they could get there in time to save him.