Free Bestial by William D. Carl Page A

it.
    Naked and barefoot, her husband, Karl, walked into the kitchen from the backyard. He closed the slashed screen door behind him, raising his eyes to hers. He appeared tired and wary of her, and she realized she was wielding the broomstick like a lance.
    “Cathy …,” he said, and he took a few steps into the kitchen, placing his hands on the back of a chair and inclining himself against it.
    “Karl, are you okay?”
    He shook his head. “No, I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”
    As he sat down in the chair, she observed the specks of blood around his mouth and hands. A zigzag of crimson had dried across his chest during the night, a bizarre superhero emblem. She stepped to the sink and ran some cold water over a towel, thanking heaven that there was still running water, even if it wouldn’t get hot.
    “Here,” she said, handing him the towel. “You’ve got blood on your face and chest. Please, wipe it off before we start talking.” Her formality, her manners-before-all-else attitude was downright Noel Coward–ish.
    He clutched the towel in his hand as though he were uncomfortable with it, unaccustomed to the very notion of cleaning with a cloth. Slowly, he patted his face, looked down at his chest. Wiping with small, clumsy, circular motions, he eventually removed most of the blood, leaving red blotches where he had rubbed too hard. She took the filthy rag from him and tossed it into the garbage can.
    “Oh Christ, Cathy …”
    “What happened?” she asked.
    “It was horrible. I … I did things … terrible things. …”
    Taking a seat across from him, still holding the broom in case he made any sudden moves, Cathy looked at him and tried to see her husband. She kept imagining animalistic traits in his motions, his little tics. It was hard to regard him as the man who had shared her bed for nineteen years.
    “What happened, Karl? Start from the beginning, and tell me everything you remember.”
    “You’ll hate me for it. I hate myself. I’m … sick from what I did.”
    From what you did this time?
she thought, then chased away the seditious notions. She needed to concentrate on what had happened last night, not months ago.
    “Do you remember changing?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “No. There was some itching. We were in bed together, and I started to feel this itch. Then there was pain and the smell of blood, all copper and sweet. That’s all I remember. Pain and blood … I think it was your blood, Cathy. But I was in a place where you didn’t matter, where nothing mattered but the smell, and the hunger, and the sheer sexuality of it.”
    “The sexuality? What are you talking about?”
    “Oh, Cathy, that’s what drove me. I wanted to insert my mouth into a body, to drink the blood, lap it up like a dog. It … compelled me to do it. I believe it was you I went after, but it could have been anyone. I wanted my face inside of you. . . . Can you understand that? Inside of you? I wanted the blood in my mouth, in my eyes, my face inside your rib cage, to be elbow-deep in the gore. I wanted to cover my body in it, then have it licked off by someone else—anyone else.”
    He was getting aroused just speaking about it. Embarrassed, Cathy hurried upstairs, telling him to wait a minute. She returned with his robe, which had miraculously survived the night in one piece. Karl had started a pot of coffee. He smiled at her and slipped on the thick cotton robe, tying it at his waist.
    “Thanks,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
    “Do you know you tried to kill me last night?”
    “Yes. I suspected as much.”
    “You turned into … some sort of monster. Right in front of my eyes, you became some … I don’t know, werewolf or something.”
    “Apparently, there were a lot of us that changed. You should see the city. I woke up in a gutter near the Milford movie theater. Everything’s so fucked up.”
    “A lot of others were the same? Changed?”
    “Yeah. There are tons of dead,