Once Bitten; Twice Shy

The asphalt outside the 7-Eleven on 2nd Avenue cooked under the late August sun like a skillet left too long on the burner. Heat shimmered off the cracked blacktop in waves that made the gas pumps look like they were melting. Aaron Michael sat on the low concrete curb with his back against the warm brick wall, a half-empty Big Gulp of cherry Coke sweating between his knees and the newest issue of G.I. Joe open across his thighs. His denim jacket hung open, the hand-drawn Iron Maiden logo on the back already sticking to his T-shirt. Blond hair kept falling into his eyes no matter how many times he shoved it back.

Clinton Korchinski sprawled next to him, long legs kicked out into the parking lot, thick plastic glasses sliding down his nose. He flipped through his own comic with one hand and stabbed at the ice in his cup with a red straw. Jason Leonard sat on the other side of Aaron, walkman headphones draped around his neck like a scarf, mullet damp with sweat. Timothy Steinback, the runt of the group, crouched in front of them on the hot pavement, carefully arranging a line of G.I. Joe figures so they faced the automatic doors like a tiny security detail.

“Snake Eyes is totally gonna smoke Cobra Commander this time,” Timothy said, voice high and fast. “I read ahead at the drugstore. Wicked fight scene. Like, totally nuclear.”

Aaron took a long pull from his Big Gulp. The ice had mostly melted, turning the soda into pinkish water, but it still beat the heat. “You always say that, Timmy. Last month you said the same crap about the Transformers comic and Optimus still bit it.”

Clinton snorted. “Dude bought it hard. Ratchet couldn’t even fix him. Total extinction event for the Autobots.” He pushed his glasses up with one knuckle. “My dad says comics are a waste of money. Says I should be stripping starters at the yard instead. Whatever. This is radder than smelling like transmission fluid all day.”

Jason didn’t look up from the comic spread between them. His fingerless gloves made soft rasping sounds as he turned a page. “You guys are loud. I’m trying to figure out if Duke’s plan actually makes sense. Feels like they’re just throwing bodies at the problem.”

Aaron grinned. “That’s half the fun, man. Bodies and explosions. Same reason Ivory Beast is gonna rule. Loud and stupid and fun.” He tapped a guitar pick against the edge of his cup, a nervous little rhythm he couldn’t shut off. The parking lot smelled like hot tar and spilled soda and the faint chemical tang of the ice machine inside. Cars drifted by on the avenue, windows down, radios bleeding out hair metal and Top 40. Somewhere a kid yelled about losing a quarter in the Pac-Man machine. Normal Churchill Downs summer noise. The kind that usually made Aaron feel like the whole neighborhood belonged to them.

Timothy lined up a Jetpack Trooper behind a Dumpster. “When Mike gets here we should do the big siege. I brought the Skystriker. Well, most of it. The landing gear broke.”

“Mike’s late again,” Clinton said. He squinted toward the sidewalk that ran past the auto body shop. “Second day in a row. Kid’s gonna get grounded until Christmas if his mom catches him.”

Aaron shrugged and turned another page. Storm Shadow was mid-flip, sword out. “He’s always late. Probably stopped to watch the high school guys play ball at the diamond. Or he found a dead raccoon or something. You know how he gets.”

The automatic doors whooshed open and a blast of air-conditioning rolled out, carrying the smell of nacho cheese and floor wax. An old guy in a seed cap walked out with a pack of Camels and gave the four of them a look that said he remembered being fifteen and didn’t miss it. Aaron stared back until the guy looked away. Small victory. In Churchill Downs you took what you could get.

Five more minutes slid by under the weight of the heat. Aaron’s shirt stuck to his spine. He was about to suggest they bag the comics and head for the schoolyard early when he saw the figure coming up the sidewalk from the direction of the coulee path.

Mike Lerat moved like somebody had poured cement in his shoes. Stocky frame hunched, flannel shirt buttoned wrong, dark hair matted to his forehead. Even from across the lot Aaron could see the way his eyes kept cutting left and right, checking the hedges, the alley mouth, the shadow under the delivery van. He carried no comic, no Big Gulp, nothing. Just himself and a heavy-duty flashlight clipped to his belt like he expected the sun to die any second.

“Finally,” Clinton called. “What, did your mom chain you to the radiator?”

Mike didn’t answer until he was close enough that Aaron could see the color of his face. Pale. Not summer-pale. Sick-pale. The kind of pale you got after you threw up everything and then some. A bruise darkened the skin under one eye, fresh enough that it still looked angry. He stopped a few feet short of the curb and just stood there, breathing hard through his nose.

Aaron closed the comic. “Jesus, man. You look like you lost a fight with a garbage truck.”

Mike’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. When the words came they were low and tight, nothing like his usual joking bark. “She spanked me. Hard. Belt. Because I was late yesterday. She didn’t believe me.”

Jason pulled one headphone off his ear. “Believe what?”

Mike’s eyes flicked to the street, then back. He swallowed. “I saw a wolf. Big as a pony. Bigger. It was in the coulee when I cut through after school. I hid. I had to. It… it was watching me. Sniffing around where I’d been standing. I waited until it moved off toward the drainage ditch. That’s why I was late. That’s why she lit me up.”

Silence dropped over the little group like a dropped amp. Then Clinton laughed, sharp and loud. “A wolf? In Hammerville? Dude, the only wolves around here are the ones on the high school jerseys. You got chased by a big dog and freaked.”

Timothy’s eyes went round behind his taped glasses. “Was it like the one in that movie? The howling one? With the fog and everything?”

“It wasn’t a movie,” Mike said. His voice cracked on the last word. He rubbed at his left shoulder like it burned. “It didn’t move like a dog. Too quiet. And its eyes… they were wrong. Like coals or something. I swear on my hockey stick.”

Aaron felt a little twist in his gut, the same one he got right before a power chord went sour. He looked Mike over again. The flannel was torn at the shoulder seam, a ragged three-inch rip that showed pale skin underneath. Mike caught him looking and yanked the fabric closed, fingers clumsy.

“Nice try,” Aaron said, forcing a grin that felt stiff. “You’re just mad because you got busted and now you’re spinning a yarn so we feel sorry for you. Classic Lerat move. Next you’ll say it had laser eyes and drove a Camaro.”

Jason folded the comic carefully. “Wolves don’t come this far into the suburbs, Mike. Not without animal control all over it. You probably saw a coyote. Or Old Man Brennan’s shepherd got loose again. That thing’s the size of a couch.”

Clinton slapped his knee. “Pony-sized wolf. That’s gnarly, man. Did it ask you for a cigarette first or just go straight for the throat?”

Mike’s face flushed dark under the pale. “I’m not lying.”

“Sure you’re not,” Aaron said. He stood up, joints popping, and offered Mike the last inch of his watery Big Gulp. “Here. Sugar helps with the trauma of getting your ass handed to you by your own mom. We’ve all been there.”

Mike didn’t take the cup. He stared at the ground between his sneakers. Timothy looked from face to face, clearly torn between wanting the story to be true and wanting his friends to stop picking on the new arrival.

“Come on,” Jason said, voice even. “We’re burning daylight. Playground’s waiting. Bring the wolf story if you want. We can make it the bad guy in the battle.”

That broke the weird freeze. Clinton scrambled up, stuffing comics into his backpack. Timothy gathered his figures with both hands, yellow poncho tied around his waist even though the sky was clear and brutal. Aaron clapped Mike on the uninjured shoulder, felt the kid flinch hard, and pretended not to notice.

They cut across the lot and down the side street that led to St. Michael Elementary. The school squatted behind a chain-link fence, red brick and tall windows, playground equipment baked the color of old blood by a summer of sun. The blacktop courts still held the faded lines of hopscotch and four-square. Beyond the swings and the monkey bars, a strip of thick brush and young trees marked the edge of the property where the land dropped toward the coulee. Perfect place for imaginary wars. Perfect place to lose track of time until streetlights hummed on.

Aaron dumped his pack near the basketball hoop and started unpacking. The heat still pressed down, but a thin breeze had started, carrying the smell of cut grass from someone’s yard and the distant diesel cough of a bus. Timothy claimed the sandbox as Cobra Island. Clinton jury-rigged a fort out of his denim jacket and two milk crates somebody had left behind. Jason paced the perimeter like he was measuring it for a stage plot, muttering about sight lines and escape routes even though they were just playing with plastic men.

Mike sat on the edge of the merry-go-round and didn’t unpack anything. He kept one hand pressed to the torn shoulder and watched the brush line like it might grow teeth.

Aaron dropped into a crouch beside him and lowered his voice. “You okay for real? That bruise looks fresh.”

Mike’s jaw worked. “She used the belt. Said I was making up stories to cover for hanging out at the arcade. I tried to tell her. She didn’t want to hear it.” He glanced at the others, then back. “You don’t believe me either.”

Aaron almost said the easy thing, the group thing. Instead he looked at the rip again. The edges were clean, like something sharp had caught and pulled. Not a belt mark. “I believe you got scared. I believe something was out there. But a wolf the size of a pony? That’s comic-book stuff, man. We live in Hammerville, not Transylvania.”

Mike didn’t argue. He just nodded once, slow, like he’d expected exactly that answer, and slid off the merry-go-round to join Timothy in the sand.

The battle started the way it always did: loud arguments over who got to be the good guys, elaborate speeches delivered in bad accents, sudden explosions made with mouth noises and flying plastic. Aaron lost himself in it the way he always did, the real world thinning out until the only things that mattered were who held the high ground by the slide and whether the Skystriker had enough fuel for one more strafing run. Sweat ran into his eyes. His voice went hoarse from yelling orders. For twenty minutes, maybe thirty, the wolf story sat in the back of his skull like a bad song he couldn’t quite forget.

Then the light changed.

It happened without warning. One second the sun was a white hammer overhead. The next it seemed to drop behind a bank of cloud that hadn’t been there, turning the sky the color of dirty brass. The breeze sharpened and carried a chill that raised goosebumps on Aaron’s arms under the denim. He paused mid-charge with a Cobra officer in each fist and looked up.

“Anybody else feel that?”

Clinton wiped his glasses on his shirt. “Feel what? My crushing victory?”

“The cold, dumbass.” Aaron turned a slow circle. The air had teeth now. Not evening cool. Something thinner and meaner. Across the playground, the swings stirred although the breeze didn’t seem strong enough. A thin ribbon of fog, pale as milk, snaked out of the brush line and crawled across the asphalt toward the sandbox.

Timothy scrambled backward, figures clutched to his chest. “Uh, guys? Weather guy said clear all week. Totally clear. No fog.”

Jason stood very still, headphones forgotten. “Localized. Look how low it is. That’s not right.”

Mike was already on his feet, flashlight in hand even though dusk was still an hour off. His face had gone that sick pale again. “It’s starting,” he whispered. “Same as yesterday. Right before it showed up.”

Aaron wanted to laugh it off the way he had at the 7-Eleven. The sound stuck in his throat. He felt a prickle climb the back of his neck, the exact feeling he got when someone stared at him from across the cafeteria. He turned toward the thick brush at the school’s edge. Nothing moved. Just leaves and shadow and the new white mist threading between the trunks. Yet the feeling stayed, heavy and specific, like eyes the size of headlights tracking every twitch he made.

“Pack it up,” he said. His voice came out rougher than he meant. “Sun’s going. My mom’ll kill me if I’m late for dinner two nights running.”

Nobody argued. Comics and figures disappeared into packs with none of the usual haggling over who owed who a Duke or a Bumblebee. Clinton kept glancing at the brush. Timothy’s hands shook so hard he dropped a figure and left it. Jason took point without being asked, leading them toward the gate that opened onto the residential street. Mike walked in the center of the group, flashlight beam already cutting pale cones through air that didn’t need it yet.

They were halfway across the blacktop when the dogs started.

It began with one lonely howl from the direction of the apartments behind the school, the kind of long rising cry dogs gave when sirens rolled past. Then another joined, closer, from the fenced yards along Maple. Then a third, a fourth, until it seemed every dog in Churchill Downs had thrown its head back at the same moment. The sound wasn’t the usual bored barking that filled summer nights. It was higher, rawer, edged with something that made Aaron’s back teeth hurt. Some of the howls broke into frantic yapping, then cut off sharp, like somebody had clamped a hand over a muzzle.

Aaron stopped walking. The fog had thickened into a low carpet that swallowed their sneakers and made the playground equipment look like it floated. The brush line was a solid wall of white now. Somewhere inside it a branch cracked under weight that didn’t sound like wind.

“Keep moving,” Jason said quietly. “Don’t run. Just walk.”

They walked. Aaron’s heart hammered hard enough he could feel it in his tongue. He thought about the torn flannel, the way Mike had flinched, the coal-bright eyes the kid had described and then refused to describe again. He thought about every monster comic he’d ever read and how the dumb kids always stood around joking until the thing stepped out of the trees. He shoved the thought down and focused on the gate, the sidewalk beyond, the familiar shape of the streetlights that would soon flicker on and make everything ordinary again.

Behind them the howling climbed higher, a ragged chorus that seemed to circle the school grounds once before fading toward the coulee. The fog kept coming, slow and steady, claiming the blacktop inch by inch like it had all the time in the world.

Aaron risked one last look over his shoulder. For half a second he thought he saw something tall and wrong standing just inside the tree line, a shape that didn’t match any dog or man he knew. Then the mist folded over it and there was only white.

He faced forward and walked faster. The others matched his pace without a word. Nobody laughed about wolves anymore. Nobody made a joke. The Big Gulps and the comics and the easy heat of the afternoon belonged to a different day, one that had ended the moment the air turned cold and the dogs remembered how to be afraid.

By the time they hit the sidewalk the streetlights hummed to life one by one, orange islands in a world suddenly made of fog and the memory of watching eyes. Aaron shoved his hair out of his face and kept his mouth shut. Some things you didn’t say out loud until you were sure. And some things you didn’t say even then, because saying them made them real.

Mike walked close enough that their shoulders almost touched. The flashlight beam jittered with every step. Aaron didn’t tell him to turn it off. He just kept walking, the taste of cherry Coke gone flat and metallic on his tongue, the torn place on Mike’s shirt hanging in his mind like a question nobody wanted to answer yet.

The neighborhood dogs fell quiet one by one. The silence that replaced them felt worse.

They didn’t look back again until the school was lost in the white behind them. Even then, Aaron couldn’t shake the feeling that something in the brush had watched them leave, patient as winter, hungry as the dark that was coming on too fast for August.

He flexed his fingers around the guitar pick in his pocket until the edge bit skin. Ivory Beast could wait. Right now the only rhythm that mattered was the sound of five pairs of sneakers hitting pavement, together, heading home before the fog decided it wanted more than just the playground.

Somewhere a final howl rose, long and lonely and cut short. Aaron pretended he didn’t hear it. The others pretended with him. That was what you did when you were fifteen and the world had just shown you a crack you weren’t ready to look through.

You kept walking. You kept the jokes ready for tomorrow. And you hoped the cold in the air was only weather, even when every hair on your arms knew better.

The fog followed them three blocks before it thinned enough to let the familiar houses reappear. Porch lights. Lawn chairs. The blue flicker of televisions behind curtains. Ordinary things. Safe things. Aaron made himself believe in them the same way he made himself believe a power chord would land clean if he hit it hard enough.

Mike’s flashlight finally clicked off. Nobody spoke until they reached the corner where their streets split. Even then the words were small, practical, the kind you used when the big ones felt too heavy.

“See you tomorrow,” Jason said.

“Yeah,” Clinton answered. “Bright and early. Scrap yard’s closed. Free day.”

Timothy just nodded, eyes huge behind the tape.

Mike looked at Aaron last. The bruise under his eye had darkened. The torn flannel hung open just enough to show a thin red line underneath that hadn’t been made by any belt. “It was real,” he said, almost too soft to hear. “I didn’t make it up.”

Aaron met his eyes and didn’t look away. “I know you didn’t.” He didn’t add the rest: that knowing didn’t help, that believing made the cold worse, that tomorrow they would have to decide what to do with a story the whole neighborhood would laugh at. He just nodded once, the same way Mike had nodded earlier, and turned toward home.

The street stretched ahead, half swallowed by mist that shouldn’t have been there. Aaron walked it with his hands in his pockets and his ears full of the echo of dogs that had known something the boys were only starting to learn.

Summer wasn’t over. School still waited on the other side of Labor Day. Comics still needed reading and chords still needed writing. But the easy part, the part where the biggest danger was a spanking or a grounded weekend, had ended on a stretch of blacktop while the fog rolled in and the howling started.

Aaron reached his front walk and paused with one foot on the first step. Behind the door his little brother would be watching cartoons. His mother would be setting plates. His father would be in the garage wiping grease off his hands and talking about overtime. Normal. Solid. Real.

He looked back down the street the way they had come. The fog hung low between the streetlights like it was waiting for full dark. Nothing moved inside it that he could see. That almost made it worse.

He went inside and shut the door harder than he needed to. The lock clicked. For a second he stood in the hallway smelling meatloaf and laundry soap and tried to convince himself the prickle on his neck was only leftover nerves.

It didn’t work.

Somewhere past the edge of the yard a dog started up again, one single rising cry that cracked in the middle and died. Aaron leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the door and closed his eyes.

Tomorrow they would laugh about it. Or they would pretend to. That was the deal. You got scared, you got home, you acted like the scare belonged to somebody else.

He pushed off the door and headed for the kitchen, guitar pick still digging into his palm. Outside, the fog kept its own counsel, thin and white and wrong for the season, and the night settled over Churchill Downs with the patience of something that had done this before and knew exactly how long the game could last.