Romero tapped the screen. “This is a stone wall right here.” He pointed to a short white block that peeked through the blobs of trees. “Roll it back a few minutes, will ya, fella?”
The screen dissolved into a series of skips and lines and returned to the same grainy picture. “This is the crime?” I asked.
“Just wait.” Romero never took his eyes off the screen. “There!”
Another blob. This was so dark it was almost black and moving fast. It popped up over the fence and tore across the lawn. The juniper blobs seemed to tremble as it whipped by.
“What was that?” Alex wanted to know.
Romero moved to the next screen. “This is the living room. French doors open up from the backyard”—he motioned back to the first screen—“into this room.”
“Okay . . .” Alex said.
“Oh my God!” My heart stopped when I saw it. It still wasn’t completely clear.
But I knew exactly what it was.
I started swallowing hard, trying to quell the frenetic thump of my heart. No, I told myself, it couldn’t be. But even before I could continue on my personal reassurance effort, Romero rewound the tape again. The black blob bounded backward out of the front doors and across the lawn, and threw itself over the fence. Romero pulled his sausage-y finger from the button and the grainy line shot across the screen once more, as did the blob. I looked down at my shoes.
Alex nudged my shoulder and I looked up, my eyes locking on to his.
“Then there’s this,” Romero continued, completely unaware of my and Alex’s silent conversation. I held my breath, an anxious flutter rippling through my stomach.
The image on the next screen was a bit easier to make out. It was the living room, set up with a glowing fireplace, a coffee table as big as my bedroom, and two overstuffed couches that could sit an entire football team each. A woman was curled up on one end of the couch, barefoot, with a loose-knit afghan thrown around her torso. Her expression was blank and if it weren’t for her dark eyes that caught the flickering reflection from the television screen and blinked occasionally, I would have thought she was already dead.
It was less than a minute before the woman snapped to attention, sitting up on the couch. Even on the silent, black-and-white tape, her terror was clearly evident from the ramrod straightness of her spine, from the way her eyes went from lifeless orbs to saucer-wide and frighteningly alive. The blob from the other screen broke through the French doors. The glass seemed to explode more than shatter, the shards of glass seeming to stop and float on the grainy film.
I licked my lips and implored myself to look away—I knew what was about to happen. But it was impossible. My eyes felt physically drawn to the picture and I narrowed my gaze, trying to hide my wince as the blob—now more clearly an animal, hunched on all fours with shaggy, dark fur that was dotted with glass shavings, leaves, and dirt—tore across the room and went directly for the woman on the couch.
She reared up, trying to push her small legs against the hulking cushions, but her speed was no match for the animal. It cleared the couch in a millisecond, was on her a second later, and before I could let out a breath—or a cry—the woman was his. She swatted once and he grabbed her arm in his massive paw, giving her a yank that shook her entire body; she flopped like a rag doll. Her head lolled, long hair flying in sad, luxurious waves around her, her eyes directly toward the camera as the animal’s jaws snapped open, then quickly closed around her neck. I watched in terrified horror, my eyes locked on hers, as the life drained out of them. There was no reflection, no vision. Her eyes went immediately to cold, hard marbles that gazed, unseeing, into the eye that had caught her demise.
“It’s a wolf.” I’m not sure if I said it or if Alex did, but either way I felt both guilty and betrayed. Like I should have said something then, should have somehow apologized or stopped it, but I was still riveted to the screen.
The wolf dumped what remained of the woman’s lifeless body—clawed and blood covered—and looked directly into the camera as if he knew we were watching him—as if he knew I was watching him. There was no remorse, no wild hunger, no rabid fire in his eyes. He simply blinked as a droplet of tar-colored blood—her blood—dripped from his razor teeth onto her rapidly paling forehead. He shifted then and she flopped from the couch onto the shag carpeting, discarded, destroyed.
The camera cut out then, the image of the staring wolf and the broken woman seared into my memory forever.
It seemed like an hour passed as we all stood in the room, staring at the bank of television screens. The temperature seemed to rise with every minute and I felt the sweat bead above my upper lip, begin to prick at my hairline. My clothes felt immediately sticky and damp, and Alex swung his head to look at me.
“You okay, Lawson?”