Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

  Somehow, though she wasn’t even looking at what she was doing, the key found its way into the ignition. Joyce twisted it, willing the engine to turn over. It had never failed to work before, yet a peculiar species of fatedness had descended on her. It was like watching herself in a movie. The hapless woman, a minor character really, about to be killed off by the bestial antagonist.

  The Corolla’s engine started.

  Joyce moved the gearshift into reverse and began to back the Corolla down the long gravel lane. If the werewolf hadn’t heard the engine start, he’d no doubt notice the red brake lights flashing on and off as she eased toward the road. But Joyce refused to act rashly. She remembered how once, during the onset of a violent storm, she’d been driving on a country road and the winds had begun to rocket at her. The trees had bent and thrashed, and for a dreadful instant Joyce had been certain a tornado would appear and send her spinning to her death. She’d panicked. Meaning to perform a U-turn, Joyce had stiff-armed the maneuver, veered wildly across the road at a drunken diagonal, and crashed into a telephone pole. Since she’d only been going fifteen miles an hour before the impact, the damage to the Corolla had been in the hundreds rather than the thousands, but it had still taught her how dangerous a thing fear could be.

  If she crashed now, it would mean death. Not the actual accident, of course—she wasn’t reversing the car that rapidly—but the aftermath. The werewolf discovering her crippled car and flensing her like an animal.

  No. Her arm draped over the seat back, Joyce peered out the back window and guided the Corolla toward the road. There were pine trees on either side of Glenn’s lane, but she would easily clear these.

  Joyce passed unmolested through the pines, hooked her back end onto the country road. With a glance in the rearview mirror—no one coming—Joyce shifted into drive and motored through the loose gravel.

  She exhaled shuddering breath. She’d made it. Other than the brief, uncontrolled urination, she’d kept her composure. That was no easy task, considering the danger that had threatened her. Glenn was a werewolf. An honest-to-goodness werewolf. She couldn’t believe it. Even though she’d known what he was, the reality was still difficult to wrap her mind around. Even more perplexing was how he’d let her slip away. Was it possible there was enough of Glenn even in his transformed state to show compassion toward Joyce? Was this a sign that he really had feelings for her? The notion she was starring in some cut-rate horror film began to dissipate. In a horror film, she’d already be dead. Or prey to some jump-scare reveal. The werewolf crashing through the windshield.

  Or the werewolf staring at her from the backseat.

  Holy Mother of God!

  She whirled, expecting to find the Glenn-creature, but the seat was vacant. Glenn was nowhere to be found.

  She blew out harried breath, stared out the windshield. She needed to get back to town. Maybe use the library to decompress. She could read, get some ordering done. Anything to take her mind off the creature prowling the night.

  She was thinking this when she became aware of a shape in the cornfield, a figure keeping pace with the car, off to her right and perhaps fifty feet from the road.

  She wouldn’t have believed it if she weren’t seeing it.

  Glenn—or what Glenn had become—was racing through the night, moving with a weird combination of human strides and wolflike bounds.

  Joyce depressed the accelerator. A glance at the speedometer told her she was doing forty already, but she nudged it up to forty-five, careful to keep a steady handle on the wheel. She’d add ten or fifteen miles to her speed if not for the loose gravel of the country road; she had enough experience to know it only took a millisecond of negligence to end up in a ditch or worse. Flipped upside down and awaiting death in a smoking car.

  The Glenn-thing ran apace with her. Thirty feet away now.

  A T-road was approaching. This both chilled and heartened her. On one hand, the last thing she wanted to do was to slow down, but slow down she must unless she wanted to barrel right into the forest awaiting her at the end of the road. But if she could navigate the turn, manage to maneuver the Corolla onto the paved asphalt, she’d stand a good chance of escaping the Glenn-thing.

  Though it made her chatter to do it, Joyce eased the Corolla down to thirty, the T-road perhaps fifty yards ahead. The Glenn-thing raced along very near the car now, its clawed hands harrowing the strip of grass dividing the shallow ditch from the field. She didn’t linger on the sight of Glenn’s new body—she didn’t want to crash the car out of simple distraction—but what she glimpsed both awed and horrified her.

  His arms were rippling mounds of muscle, the hair thicker but not so thick you couldn’t make out the striated muscles beneath. His legs were narrow, but they gave off an aura of tensile strength, of metal coils about to spring. But what finally made her turn away was his facial profile. Still more human than animal, but enough intimation of a wolf’s muzzle to make her want to scream. And, of course, there were the eyes.

  Fingers white on the wheel, Joyce slowed as much as she dared, prepared herself to swerve. Twenty yards away now. Ten.

  Joyce began to turn the wheel.

  The Glenn-thing catapulted over the ditch and crashed into the passenger’s side window.

  Chunks of glass pelted her right side. The jagged shards nicked her cheek, snagged in her hair. The Glenn-thing had an arm hooked over the inside of the door. The back end of the Corolla fishtailed, slewed wildly toward the woods. Joyce fought the spin, twisted the wheel to the right, though that meant skidding them precariously closer to the waiting forest. The Glenn-thing was snarling, growling, his immense body mowing down fence posts, the wiring between the posts snapping with a series of rusty twangs. Joyce got control of the Corolla, swung back toward the middle of the road, but the Glenn-thing remained fastened to the door. She made the mistake of glancing over at it, and in that moment she forgot all about who this was, forgot all about her feelings for Glenn.

  The face glaring back at her was an abomination. Yellow-eyed, almost human, but with no humanity at all in its fiendish gaze, the long teeth tapered to vicious, saberlike points. It grinned at her with diabolical anticipation.

  With both feet she stood on the brake. The Glenn-thing tore loose of the door, tumbled down the road, the creature blurring in a flurry of somersaults. The car came to rest before the creature did.

  Joyce didn’t hesitate. She floored it. The creature had ended up perhaps ten feet beyond the car, but it was dazed, bloodied. So when the Corolla burst past, the Glenn-thing only made a foggy, halfhearted grab for it. Joyce pushed the Corolla up to fifty before she glanced in the rearview mirror, and by that time the Glenn-thing was merely a tall shape growing out of the sable ribbon of road.

  She didn’t slow down until the figure disappeared from view entirely.

  Joyce drove around for a couple hours, relishing the mist that had descended on the countryside. Her terror gradually waned, and in its place came wonder. She’d proven her theory. Whether Glenn would accept her findings was another matter.

  She crunched back up his drive at a quarter past eleven. She didn’t think he’d have returned yet, not because the change would still be upon him, but rather because the change, having exhausted itself, would have rendered him strengthless and far from home. He would have to slog back through fields and forests, his body a snarl of aches from his transformations.

  So Joyce sat and gazed out at the swirling mist. Her thoughts drifted to tomorrow night. The night of her friends’ class reunion.

  Savannah hadn’t asked her to go, nor had Glenn. But Joyce would find a way to join them. She was beginning to trust her gut feelings, and she had a strong feeling that momentous things were afoot this Friday night. She wanted to be there to witness them.

  When Glenn finally staggered up his driveway at midnight, she was waiting for him on his side porch. He was naked
and winded. His hair was askew, and his hands were crusted with mud. But he didn’t look bloody.

  “What’s…” he said, panting. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Jealousy,” she said.

  He stood there, arms akimbo, his shriveled penis dangling before her like a flesh-toned jalapeño. “You put us both in danger.”

  “Clark Lombardo Coulter says—”

  “I don’t give a shit what he says,” Glenn snapped. “I’ve heard enough of that pretentious fuckstick over the past twenty-four hours to last me a lifetime. Just tell me what you think.”

  She stood up, as much to get Glenn’s penis out of her face as to have a normal conversation. “Why did Weezer change?”

  Glenn looked away. “I don’t want to talk about Weezer.”

  “You have to.”

  “You want to know what he was doing? He was ripping that poor girl’s chest open.”

  “Not during the murders,” she said. “Before.”

  Glenn shrugged. “I don’t know. Dancing?”

  She stepped closer. “But not just dancing, Glenn. You said they were grinding together. The three of them. The two girls thrusting against him—”

  “I got it,” he said, glowering at her. “Jesus.”

  “Lust.”

  “What about it?”

  “Weezer’s trigger is lust. Yours is jealousy.”

  “That’s your theory? The seven deadly sins? Is yours vanity?”

  “Glenn, listen—”

  “Don’t look in the mirror,” he said, a look of mock fright on his face. “You stare at yourself, you might transform.”

  “I didn’t say anything about the seven—”

  “Or is it gluttony, Joyce? Let’s head over to the Chinese buffet, fill you full of chicken lo mein. I bet you’ll be howling within minutes.”

  She seized his bare shoulders. “Powerful negative emotions,” she said, punching each syllable. “For Weezer, it’s animal lust. For you, it’s envy. For others, it might be rage or sorrow or…I don’t know. Fear?”

  Some of the sarcasm left his face. “You were scared earlier, weren’t you? When I was changing?”

  “I was scared to death,” she admitted.

  “Well, there you go. You didn’t change.”

  “I didn’t say fear was my trigger.”

  He rolled his eyes, started toward the house. “Could you use a different word? Trigger sounds so…I don’t know, political or something.”

  “How about ‘catalyst’?”

  “You’re full of shit.” He made his way up the steps.

  She watched his back muscles flexing, the curve of his strong buttocks. The scent of his exertion wafted down to her, tingling her nostrils and setting her imagination racing. Her catalyst definitely wasn’t lust, she decided. Otherwise, she’d have transformed two dozen times today. She resisted an urge to hurry after him and mash her body against his.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  He opened the screen door. “What’s it look like?”

  “Like you’re avoiding me.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” he muttered, the screen door banging shut behind him. “I’m tired, Joyce. Down to my bones. I want some rest. Plus, I think I ate a muskrat.”

  Six rings and she wasn’t picking up. Weezer knew he could wait for the voicemail to kick on, but what was the point? He knew Jessica was awake. She’d always been a night owl. He supposed she could’ve changed in the years since he’d gone to school with her, but people were typically wired a certain way, and that was how they stayed.

  Take Jessica Clinton, for example. Once a night owl, always a night owl.

  Once a bitch, always a bitch.

  Weezer chucked his cell aside, the old, cracked phone thunking off the armrest on the passenger’s door. Had the two bitches he killed last night carried with them more than forty bucks and change, Weezer might have used the money to splurge on a new cell phone, but of course they didn’t have any money between them because between them they barely had enough brain cells to survive.

  Rely on men, that was their way. You don’t need money when there are always poor, stupid saps around to buy dinner for you.

  Weezer had a brief vision of Jessica that night back in high school, but he shunted that aside as rapidly as it arose, not wanting the change to overtake him. Not yet.

  He flung open his door, hopped out. Maybe Jessica would be alerted to his presence by the slamming truck door. If not, he’d just have to ring her doorbell. Either way, she was letting him in.

  She’d had four days to mourn her husband, and that was more than enough.

  On the way up her walk—fancy lake house, two stories, built sometime in the late eighties probably, white with black shutters—Weezer recalled the way the beast had hurled Jessica’s husband, the ill-fated Dan, right into the raging bonfire, the way Dan had breakdanced atop the inferno. Weezer could still recall the scent of the man’s scorched flesh. Like bacon sizzling, but more piquant.

  Weezer’s mouth flooded with saliva.

  Not yet, he reminded himself.

  Reaching out, he depressed the glowing doorbell. Through the long, rectangular window bordering the door, he could see through the house all the way to the great room in back, the big picture window leading to the lake. There was a TV going in the great room. He could see its reflection in the window. It looked like some kind of reality show about dancing or singing.

  He resisted the urge to shatter the window with his fists.

  Instead, he beat on the door, a steady, rhythmic concussion, and right away he saw a shadow scurry across the picture window, a dark shape hurrying toward him.

  Weezer kept pounding.

  The porch light spilled over him, a urine-colored glow that showed plainly all the dead bugs on the porch. Some live ones too. In the brief instant before Jessica ripped the door open, Weezer reached out and smeared a giant moth into gloppy, powdery nothingness. The brown streak on the white aluminum siding looked like some really tall dude had run out of toilet paper and wiped his ass on the façade. Actually, that’s what he felt like doing right now.

  Jessica jerked open the interior door, squinted at him through the screen. “Weezer? What in God’s name are you doing? It’s almost one.”

  Weezer smiled, unabashed. “I knew you’d be up.”

  She was wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe, but what was beneath it? She must’ve noticed him ogling because she cinched it tighter at the throat. “Were you the one calling me?”

  “I figured it would be polite to call first.”

  “Weezer. Nothing’s polite at one in the morning.” She brought her face right up to the screen, scrutinizing him. “Are you shitfaced?”

  “I’m utterly sober, Jessica. I just thought it would be nice to visit.”

  Looking troubled, she opened the screen door, moved aside so he could enter. In the dark foyer, she continued to scrutinize him. “You sure you’re not drunk?”

  Moving toward the great room, he said, “What makes you think that, Jessica?”

  “I don’t know,” she muttered. “For one, you never call me by my name.”

  Nice room, he thought. Other than the shitty singing show on the television, the room was sort of impressive. A wood-burning fireplace on the south wall. Nice furniture, pretty stylish. The picture window was the real attraction, though. A breathtaking view of the lake, the water like polished obsidian.

  “You want something?” she asked.

  He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Like a drink,” she hastened to add.

  “I’m okay, Jessica. I really just came to talk.”

  “So talk,” she said.

  He fixed her with his profoundest gaze. “I thought it might do you good to open up about Dan.”

 
That did it. Right away her eyes got red, and she sniffed back a trickle of snot.

  “You’re hurting,” he said.

  One of her hands covered her mouth, the other cupping her elbow. She was looking toward the window, but not really seeing, he could tell. Poor Jessica, he thought. Poor, twenty-eight-year-old widow. Six kids. No husband.

  A real shame.

  She wiped her nose, rubbed it on her robe, made a vague gesture toward the couch that backed up to the picture window. “You can have a seat if you like.”

  Weezer frowned. That wasn’t where he’d imagined sitting. The one and only time he’d been here—he and Glenn had stopped by a couple years ago, though Glenn had been the one Dan Clinton had invited—there had been a nice, cozy leather La-Z-Boy recliner along the north wall. But now the leather chair was gone, and in its place there was a stiff-looking ivory chair, the kind you’d see in sitting rooms in movies set back in the 1800s. Thoroughly uncomfortable. Girly.

  Still, he would’ve rather sat there than the couch because the view would’ve been better from the chair. But she was already sitting in the chair, next to which he noticed an end table with half a dozen empty beer bottles. Coors Light, which was like drinking cat piss.

  Grudgingly, he eased himself onto the couch, which was comfortable enough. Even if it did face him away from the picture window and the lake.

  Keeping his voice light, he said, “How are you coping, Jessica?”

  She’d drawn her legs up beneath her, had her eyes on the TV, which was blessedly on mute. “I’m not.”

  “I know it must be very difficult.”

  Jessica said nothing, and Weezer thought, You’re good at that, aren’t you? Saying nothing? You’ve practiced it for years, and when you want to, you just shut it down. Just ignore the other person, make like he doesn’t exist.

  “How are your kids taking it? It must be hard not having Daddy around.”

  Her face squinched up at this, and that was good. That was part of it. Purging her of the salty tears and the quiet, quaking sobs. It was harder maybe for a strong woman like Jessica to mourn a loss because she was unaccustomed to tears.