AWOO: Chapter Four
In which our werewolf hero and his new cyborg friend go for a simple coffee. What could go weird with that?
Chapter 4
Robert took a quick but necessary shower, which was made a little bit awkward with this strange half-metal man he barely knew twiddling his thumbs in the living room. He brushed his teeth, drowned himself in mouthwash, and started to feel human again. Emerging, dressed in a fresh Henley and jeans, he greeted Clyve.
“Ready?”
The half-metal man nodded and smiled at him, and Robert tried his best not to stare too closely. Not just because of all the metal, but because something else had started to stir in Robert when he looked at Clyve, something he hadn’t felt – at least, not for a man - since a few awkward fumblings in college.
As they waited in line at the coffee shop, Robert’s mind wandered. Clyve the, what, cyborg? Cyborg sounded like a good descriptor of Clyve’s situation, and it beat describing him as “the half-metal man.”
Clyve the cyborg stood behind him in companionable silence. At the front of the line, someone was clearly having trouble figuring out how to order. Robert could hear the conversation.
“Please sell me one coffee,” said the man for the third time, in a voice that sounded to Robert like a digital assistant that had been programmed in another language, translated into English, translated back, put through a scrambling machine, and then flattened out into something that was almost right.
Robert looked more closely at the man. He looked normal, right? Or did he? A shimmer at the edges of Robert’s vision, as if something were being hidden from him. He tried looking through his periphery.
The man having trouble ordering had blue skin. The vision of blue skin flickered in Robert’s peripheral vision.
The man having trouble ordering had three fingers on each hand. And blue skin. And an oversized, completely bald head.
Then he looked basically normal again.
“Are you seeing this guy?” Robert asked Clyve.
“What?”
“The guy in front,” said Robert. “He’s really strange looking.”
“I mean, I don’t know, he looks fine to me. Why do you say that?”
Meanwhile, the blue man’s troubles with the barista continued.
“Yes, but you have to tell me what kind you want,” said the barista. “We have lattes, espressos, cappuccinos, regular drip coffee. We have all these different sizes – see? You can have a petit, a grand, a gros, or a magnifique.”
Someone else in line perked up, “Dude, just order something, would you? You’re holding up the line.”
“I would like one…coffee,” said the man again. “A…large…coffee. With…sugar…please.”
“Fine.” The barista rang the man up. “$4.25. What name for the order?”
“Otis,” said Otis.
Otis walked away, and the way he walked looked wrong to Robert in ways he couldn’t really describe properly.
“Did you say you’re an astronaut?” asked Clyve once they’d ordered and found a table.
“Yes,” said Robert, studying Clyve’s face, trying to be unobtrusive about it, but noticing how smoothly the metal was fused to the skin right on the bridge of Clyve’s nose. His cybernetic eye glowed with a soft blue light, unblinking and steady, and his human eye sparkled cerulean with delicate lashes. The flesh side of Clyve’s head was clean-shaven, and the line of fused metal continued all the way around to the back. Clyve’s head must’ve been blown clean in half for him to have required this level of intervention.
“How long you been doing that?” asked Clyve.
“All my life, really,” said Robert. “I grew up staring into a telescope in my backyard, and my parents encouraged me, sent me to space camp, helped me get into M.I.T. I applied to NASA after getting my master’s in physics and I’ve been working my way up. Right now I’m working at the new Le Guin Research Center outside of town. I think I’m pretty close to being assigned to a launch, especially once the new spaceport is up and running near Seattle.”
“Wow,” Clyve said, and Robert heard the awe Clyve was trying to be too cool to show. “Where you going?”
“The new space station. It’s supposed to be up and running in two years,” Robert said. “But enough about me. You’ve been my knight in literal shining armor, so I want to know more about you.”
“Not much to tell,” said Clyve. “Grew up dirt poor in Texas, joined the army ‘cause I had no other choice, got my whole ass blown off, livin’ it large ever since.”
“How’d you get to Portland?”
“Drove here,” deadpanned Clyve. “Sorry. I moved here some years ago. Know my way around machines, so a friend hooked me up with a job. Decent pay and let me get my shit sorted out, you know? Now I’m a foreman at an auto parts factory, and it’s all just peachy.”
“What do you do for fun?”
“Well, you know, lotsa things, but I guess my main gig is I sing and play bass in a synth-metal band called I Robot.”
“Synth metal?” Robert didn’t know what the heck that would sound like, but he knew it’d be loud.
“We play at the Tooth and Claw sometimes. Why don’t I take you there so you can meet the pack, and they’ll set you up with the union, and then you can hear my music?”
“The union?” Robert asked.
“AWOO,” said Clyve.
Robert cocked his head. “Sorry, did you just howl at me?”
Clyve laughed. “No. AWOO. It’s the name of our union.”
“What does it stand for?” Robert asked, because nothing that silly wasn’t an acronym.
“The Association of Wolves and Oppressed Otherlings,” Clyve said. “So, you can join ‘cause you’re a wolf, and I can join ‘cause I’m an otherling.”
“What other, um, ‘otherlings’ are there?” Robert asked, his brain tingling with a strange kind of existential dread. He’d just had to come to terms with werewolves existing. What else was out there?
“You really want to know?” Clyve asked.
“Robert?” The barista called. Robert got up and grabbed their coffees.
Robert saw the strange man again, and his vision flickered. One second Robert was looking at a man with a pretty unremarkable set of features, and then - well, he wasn’t sure what happened, but the blue skin, bald head, and large eyes made Robert want to look quickly away.
“Robert?” The voice was Clyve’s. Robert shook himself out of whatever that was and sat back down at his table.
“One drip coffee,” said Robert, handing it over. Clyve grabbed the mug with his cybernetic hand, and Robert noticed how delicate and precise the mechanisms were. It was really good tech. Clyve lifted the mug to his mouth, which had a ragged scar running through it below where the metal started on the bridge of his nose, and drank.
“It’s ok to look,” said Clyve, “long as you don’t judge.” His voice was soft, vulnerable. Robert looked away, ashamed.
“Sorry…”
“It’s ok,” Clyve said, putting his metal hand on top of Robert’s hand. Robert didn’t pull away, marveling, again, at how warm and almost natural the metal felt.
“For the record,” Robert said, “I think it’s amazing work. I’m sorry if that sounds…whatever it sounds like. It just…I’m more impressed than anything. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nobody has,” said Clyve. “I’m one of a kind, far as I know. Like…you ever see that old movie Robocop?”
“Yeah,” said Robert. He used the excuse of picking up his coffee to gently remove his hand from beneath Clyve’s. It wasn’t that the touch was unpleasant - quite the opposite, in fact, but Robert didn’t want – well, he didn’t think it appropriate to – it just seemed like the right thing to do.
“Kinda like that,” Clyve continued. “The enemy kept using IEDs, so the army had to come up with new ways to keep us alive. They offered me this before I was hit, of course – they said, ‘hey, you might get blown to hell, here’s something we can try to maybe keep you breathin’, but it’s risky as shit and you might die anyway, but if you live, we’ll give you an honorable discharge and a stack of cash.’ I signed that paper quick as I could grab a pen.”
Robert nodded, unsure of what to say in response. It was a hell of a story. He sipped at his coffee, thinking.
“So, you asked me about otherlings,” Clyve said.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I mean—” Robert stopped, because he didn’t know what he meant, maybe to stop Clyve from telling him about all the other monsters that shouldn’t be real. Like werewolves.
“There’s lots of ‘em,” Clyve said. “Some of ‘em are bad, generally, so they’re not part of the union. Like vampires, wendigos, ghouls, skinwalkers, that kinda thing.”
“Those…are all real?” Robert asked, his mind spinning.
“Real as you and me,” Clyve said.
“Holy shit,” Robert said.
“But there’s good guys, too, right? Those that just want the humans to leave ‘em alone, so they join the union for protection. Sasquatch, faeries, yeti, werewolves, some others. Then there’s hunters, and they want to kill all of us, bad and good.”
“Right. So why are wolves called out in the name of the union and not the others?” Robert asked.
“Wolves founded the thing, a hundred years ago or so. I don’t know all the history, but that’s why,” Clyve said.
Robert stole a glance over his shoulder. The strange man with blue skin stared directly at them. Robert lowered his eyes.
“What’s up?” said Clyve.
“Dude over there staring at us,” Robert said. “The one who couldn’t figure out how to order coffee.”
Clyve looked over. “Yeah?”
“Did you look at him?” asked Robert. “I feel like I’m going out of my mind. Is he blue?”
“Blue?” Clyve cocked his head. “No? What you talkin’ about?”
“I don’t know,” Robert said. “Never mind.”
“He’s just starin’ at the metal man. Happens all the time,” Clyve shrugged.
Robert nodded. He felt the blue guy’s eyes on the back of his neck. What’s your problem, friend?
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