The second half of the drive up to West Virginia was much less eventful than the first, which the boys weren’t too beat up over. Goober — Robin — healed quicker than anybody expected. He still couldn’t walk more than a few yards without help, and the steps he did take were slow and clumsy, but it seemed he would be able to walk right again within a couple of weeks at the rate he was healing.


    He’d also proved his usefulness already, when he shot them two squirrels each to have for dinner the night they left Granny’s house. None of the boys had brought guns that were low-caliber enough to kill a squirrel without sending its meat in twelve different directions, and shooting one would’ve scared all the others for miles around. But Robin shot eight of them within half an hour while leaning against a tree for support. That night the boys ate squirrel stew until they were about to pop, and Chuck acted a little less ornery towards the child for a little while.


    Then it was only a morning’s drive before they were in West Virginia. Woodrow felt like it had been years since they left, with all that’d happened on the way.


    Now the real work could start.


    They pulled up into a small town filled with old buildings that caved in on themselves, strip malls with strip clubs right next to grocery stores, and a plain little church every ten yards or so. The town was an infected wart on the majestic green landscape. Looking from the Food Lion/Planet Mammary parking lot, the mountains rolled on forever in every direction, cradling the small town and shielding it from the outside world. In a perfect world, this would have been a place where fairy tales took place, or at least peaceful tales where farmers hummed while they drove tractors and kids ran around in their own little fantasy world. That might have been how it was, long, long ago. But Woodrow didn’t see any kids, and he didn’t see any farmers. All he saw was poverty.


    “How’s the head doin’?” Woodrow asked Robin after he climbed out of the truck. Robin, still in the back, pulled a big white box towards himself and opened it up. White mist from the dry ice floated up towards his face, and he quickly slammed the cooler back shut.


    “Looks fine, I guess,” he said, though he had a look on his face like he’d just huffed a paper bag full of turkey droppings.


    “Sorry.” Woodrow blew air out of his nose. “Guess you don’t like seeing that little fucker.”


    “Little?” Robin asked with a rising voice.


    “He ain’t so big now, at least,” Woodrow replied.


    Robin shrugged and pushed the Hexenwolf head as far away from himself as he could. Woodrow and Chuck grabbed an arm each and helped him out of the truck bed. The four of them shoved everything else that was in the back seat into the front and locked the doors. They were going to be leaving the truck there until tomorrow morning and didn’t want anyone to snatch anything. They each only took their tent tolls, their handguns, and a couple of those pit-making pellets they bought from Big Dale — just in case — and they walked around to the back of the strip mall.


    They’d seen a hint of red polyester peeking through the trees behind the Food Lion when they pulled into the parking lot, and going behind the building confirmed what they thought it might be. Twenty or so tents were put up in a circle in the woods only a few feet from the asphalt. It was a homeless community.


    “Guess we found where we’re stayin’ for the night,” Chuck said. He looked at Robin for any signs of fear on his face, but he didn’t find any.


    The people in the encampment were causing a ruckus until they saw the boys approaching; then the ruckus faded out until only one or two men were talking quietly amongst themselves. A gruff man with a bald head covered in tattoos and a black beard that went down to his belly button stood up and came out of the woods.


    “We ain’t on the private property, see?” He pointed to the asphalt and then to the tents that were not on it. “And we ain’t diggin through the trash or nothin’, so just leave us be, alright?”


    His voice was low and pleasant, smooth like a well-made bassoon. It was clear he wasn’t trying to intimidate them. There was a pleading in his voice that suggested to Woodrow that these people had been looking for a place to put their tents down for a long while and they were tired.


    “We don’t work at the Food Lion,” Woodrow said.


    “I don’t doubt that, lookin’ at you,” the man replied. “Your bouncers, ain’t you?”


    “Nope, don’t work at the titty bar neither, if you can believe it. We just need a place to stay for a couple days.” Woodrow shook his tent roll. The man eyed him suspiciously.


    “You got a disease or somethin’?” he asked. Woodrow was baffled by the question until he remembered his eyes.


    “Nope, just ugly,” he smiled. But the man didn’t smile back.


    “Now, we’re just lookin’ for a place to stay for a couple of days, and we’d rather be in good company than alone in the wilderness. We can pay for our stay.” Woodrow reach into his pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. A smile spread across the tattooed man’s face and he snatched the money out of Woodrow’s hand so quickly that his hand was a blur.


    “Alright, go find a spot.”


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    The boys set up their tents next to the tattooed man’s, which was full of holes patched with scraps of old t-shirts and used hand-sharpened sticks to anchor it to the ground. The smell of unwashed armpit emanated from it and made itself at home in Woodrow’s tent, even when he zipped it up.


    Everyone else hung out outside, not doing much in particular. Two gangly men laid out in the grass and snored like chainsaws. A scraggly woman with the face of a twenty-year-old and the eyes of an eighty-year-old smoked something from a metal pipe that Woodrow couldn’t recognize the smell of. The rest of the tent owners were gone, out hustling people for food and money. The boys all came out sat around a pit full of white ash and smoking embers that hadn’t quite died yet, and that tattooed man’s sat right next to Woodrow and stretched, revealing the source of that unwashed armpit smell.


    “So, what are you money havin’ motherfuckers doin’ out here?” he asked, then yawned. “I’m sure you could’ve pooled your money together and got a room at the Motel 6 down the road.”


    “They don’t have what we want there,” Bill Jones said.


    “What do y’all want?”


    “You.”


    “Uhhhh, it’s gonna take a lot more ‘n twenty bucks if you’re tryin’ to get up in my —”


    “He means we want to ask you questions,” Chuck interjected before the conversation completely went off the rails. “Jesus.”


    “How’d you know my name?” the tattooed man grinned.


    “What?” Chuck asked.


    “My name — Jesus Luiz Tavares O’Connell…” he trailed off. “Guess you’re just a good guesser.”


    “Uhhh… right. Anyway, we need to ask you some questions, about the woods around here. You seen anything weird lately?” Chuck asked.


    “‘Specially at night,” Woodrow added. “Any strange creatures? Anything you can’t quite explain?”


    Jesus side-eyed Woodrow. “What are y’all gettin’ at, exactly? What are you doin’ here?”


    “Lookin’ for strange creatures. Lookin’ for things you can’t quite explain,” Woodrow explained. “Some big cats that are too smart for their own good, for example.”


    “Shit, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen ‘em around, maybe I haven’t. What’s it —”


    The woman who was smoking the mystery substance fell over and rolled around in the dirt. Gibberish spewed from her mouth in a hoarse murmur that spooked the two napping men awake. As if they had done it a million times, one of the men pinned her shoulders down and the other shoved a sock into her mouth.


    “To keep her from biting her tongue off,” he turned to the boys and said. This happens about once a week.” He got off of the woman and came over to shake the boys’ hands.


    “Thiago Fernando de Silva O’Connell. Nice to meet you.” Thiago was taller, more slender than Jesus, and didn’t have any tattoos, but once Woodrow heard the names, he could see the resemblance in their faces. They had the same hooked nose, the same womanly red lips, and the same high cheekbones that pushed the bottom of their eyes up and made them look like they were perpetually squinting. But the hardness he saw in Jesus was not there in Thiago. He looked friendly — too friendly to have been living the way he was.


    “Did I hear you guys say something about cats?” he asked. The woman was still convulsing behind him, but he didn’t pay it any mind. “We’ve seen some big cats around here. A lot of them recently.”


    “Shut up Thiago!” Jesus hiss-whispered. “I was just about to tell ‘em about it, but they haven’t paid up yet.”


    “What’s that in your pocket then?” Thiago asked, pointing to the twenty dollar bill sticking out from Jesus’s pants.


    “That was the entry fee.”


    Thiago pinched the bridge of his nose. “Você é brega,” he said under his breath.


    “Quit showin’ off for our guests here,” Jesus said. “You know I don’t speak that shit. Mom only taught her special little boy.” He said the last part with mocking disdain.


    “I said you’re a corn ball, you corn ball,” said Thiago. “Quit trying to scam these people out of money. They already paid you. Tell them what you saw. What we saw.”


    “Fine, fine,” Jesus said. “The other night, like two or three days ago, we saw damn near thirty big ass cats come out of the woods in the middle of the night and walk right down the street. They were lookin’ around for somethin’ — going behind buildings, flipping trash cans over, sticking their heads in the sewer grates. And they saw us, too — looked straight at me. But they didn’t seem to care we were here, just kept on lookin’ for whatever it was they were lookin’ for. I don’t think they found it though, because one of ‘em roared and they all left at once. He sounded pissed off, but I don’t speak cat, so what the fuck do I know.”


    The woman finally stopped convulsing and the other man got off of her. She sat up, yanked the sock out of her mouth, and packed her pipe with the mystery substance again. She lit it and took a long drag and started coughing dry, fruitless coughs followed by raspy draws of breath. Once she started to find her breath again, she put the pipe down and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. Woodrow thought she might have another seizure, but she just leaned her back up against her tent, sinking into it quite a bit, and giggled in a steady monotone.


    “… and that’s all I got,” Jesus continued, trying to regain Woodrow’s attention.


    “Oh, right, thanks,” Woodrow said. “Shouldn’t need to be here more ‘n a night then, I reckon.”


    “Hmmph,” Jesus grunted. “I ain’t even gonna ask.”


    The woman continued her monotone giggling like she was in a trance.


    “Should we maybe take that shit away from her?” Woodrow asked.


    “Nah, she’s fine. Tammy can handle her Goop,” Jesus brushed him off.


    “Goop?”


    “Yeah? Goop? Ya know, the shit that builds up inside those ray guns when they shoot ‘em? Gets you pretty good ‘n fucked up, and it’s cheap too, if you know anyone in the military.”


    “I believe that,” Chuck said, looking at Tammy lost in another world.


    “What is she seein’ right now?” Robin asked.


    “Whatever it is, it can’t be that funny,” Woodrow said.


    “She’s not laughing. The Goop just causes uncontrollable muscle spasms,” Bill Jones said. “She’s probably not seein’ much of anything right now. Or thinkin’ much either.” His eyebrows raised slightly — like they do when he has an idea.


    “Think she’d let me buy some off of her?” he asked.


    “The fuck?” Chuck said.


    “The catatonic state it puts someone it would be perfect for getting fresher specimens for Woodrow.”


    “The fuck?” Thiago said.


    “When she wakes up, tell her I’ll pay her a hundred bucks for an ounce of the stuff,” Bill Jones said.


    “Shit, for a hundred bucks you could get — nevermind, I’ll tell her,” Jesus said. “In fact, I’ll get it from her right now. Something tells me she’ll be fine that you took it at that price.”


    “Works for me.”


    Jesus dipped in to Tammy’s tent and pulled out a spoon and bag full of something that resembled gray and black toothpaste. He scooped out a spoonful from the bag and wrapped it in a piece of paper.


    “Don’t use it all at once,” he warned. “Shit’ll knock you out and you’ll never wake up.”


    “That might not be a bad thing, the way I’m using it.” He winked at Jesus, but the glare of his glasses obscured it almost entirely, and Jesus did not respond. Something in the distance distracted him.


    “Holy shit.”


    In the middle of the day, out in the open, a gang of Wampus Cats approached the encampment.