by Pat Cunningham, Savanna Kougar, Rebecca Gillan, Solara Gordon, Serena Shay
“Stuff it, Rover.” Ewan recognized that voice as the van driver’s. He was a big, Aryan blond in a pullover sweater who obviously considered himself this mob’s alpha dog. Ewan named him Freddie. “Save your breath for talking. You’re going to tell us every last detail about your ‘Doctor’s’ operation.” He pulled out a wicked-looking silver dagger. “I guarantee it.”
“Uh huh. You’re gonna spill my guts and I’m gonna empty my bowels on your only bed.” He watched that realization sink in and the consternated looks flash around the room, to finally settle on Freddie. Freddie got red in the face. “You really didn’t think this whole hostage deal through, did you?”
“Don’t mess with us,” Mr. Surly said. Ewan dubbed him Agent Mulder. “We’re professionals.”
“Of course you are.” Ewan jabbed his chin at the active screensaver. “You do know Bigfoot hangs out in Colorado, right? You’re looking in the wrong state. “
“We’ll get back to Bigfoot later,” Agent Mulder said. “Right now you’re our freak of the week. You’re going to talk, or else.”
“Then you’ll be washing sheets till Judgment Day. Tell you what: you let Velma here work her feminine wiles on me and we’ll see how much I spill. That work for you, darlin’?” He winked at the woman.
Her eyesâ��a warm summer brown, he saw nowâ��flashed with unexpected fire. “My name’s Maureen.”
“Ewan. I’d shake your hand, but â�¦ ” He tugged his wrists against the ropes and offered up a shrug.
The woman bit her lip. Poor gal, she probably thought these sorry apes were the best she could do. That wasn’t true, and under different circumstances he wouldn’t mind telling, and showing, her so. If she put on a few pounds and padded those bones, wore a tighter set of jeans, grew her hair out a couple of inchesâ��and washed it more oftenâ��she could hop off the Velma shelf and into Daphne territory. He’d bet his tail she’d never been touched by any of these clueless mooks.
She had a brain behind those eyes; he could see it working. He’d always liked Velma better than Daphne anyway. Velma’d always had more smarts than the rest of the gang put together. Coyotes set high store on smarts. In the coyote worldview, anyone without a brain might as well have a target on their back.
Ewan smiled easily and sorted through the targets in the room. Besides Agent Mulder and Freddie, there was a redheaded kid in a “Free Weed” T-shirt, a stocky, dark-skinned guy in glasses who had yet to say a word, and a wide load in a ponytail who reminded Ewan of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. They all gave off that earnest vibe of folks who know they’re right, the kind one little jab can jostle into fanaticism, with a side of violence attached.
Except for Velma. She wasn’t wearing perfume, and her natural scent was earth-toned and homey. He wouldn’t mind a good howl at the moon with her, if he could get her and himself away from the Spooky Brigade.
“So, which of you is Nick Fury?” he asked. “See? We watch TV just like you guys.”
“Go get Mr. C,” Freddie ordered. The guy in the glasses left, still without a word. “Don’t dick with us,” Freddie said to Ewan. “We know all your weaknesses. We’re all armed with silver. It’s new moon. You won’t be changing any time soon.”
Velma opened her mouth, then shut it again. She looked at Ewan doubtfully. He could figure what was going through her mind. Werewolf lore and shifter reality didn’t always match up. Shifters didn’t need a full moon to go canine. She knew this; she’d seen “Twilight”. Yet she wasn’t in any hurry to share with her brothers in slayage. Interesting.
“Okay, you got me,” Ewan said. “What do you want to know?”
Agent Mulder snatched a photo off the table and thrust it at Ewan’s face. “What’s this?”
He crossed his eyes at the picture in front of his nose, and his gut tumbled. Scat in a hat.
The pic was standard cryptozoologist quality, blurry and off-center and clearly taken from a long, safe distance away. It showed three giant creatures that could not be mistaken for bears or wolves or Tiger Yakuza, even with the bad focus helping. Nothing about the beasts said “normal” in any way, shape or form.
Somehow these hoots had snapped a pic of Damien Hancock’s mutant werewolves.
Chaos bite my balls, he thought. Why did luck always fall into the hands of little cubs and the monumentally stupid?
Chapter Four:
Yeah, Righto, Did He Shift to Human?
By Savanna Kougar
The rank smell of stale, over-fried food assaulted Dugger’s nostrils. Bugger! Humans doin’ the horizontal dance filled his nose, too. Yeah, just as he’d figured by the short ride, they now rolled through the parking lot at the Rocky Top Motel.
Dugger mindsent the info to his sheila, Symone. ‘Hoover,’ she telepathed the reminder, ‘Dante’s watcher at the motel.’
‘Yeah, got it, luv. Time for action jackson. We’re stoppin’ and the scumbags are about to get restless on Ewan’s ass.’
His sheila, being the trained warrioress she was, didn’t answer. She simply kept the dial tuned to their connection.
Dugger did his own tuning in, his ears high on his dingo head. Sensing Ewan’s decision to go coyote on the motley crew, and his dick-on-a-stick attraction to brainy gal, Dugger merely watched and listened as the wannabe monster hunters hustled their captured ‘werewolf’ out of the van.
With the slam of the van’s back door, Dugger focused his senses on the direction of their footsteps. Yeah, righto, did he shift to human? By the odor, there were clothes in the duffel bags he could hijack.
Or was it bloody smarter to stay dingo, and hunt down the big-muck blighter who was running this piss-for-grins show. Scat logic, and body language, told Dugger these drongo males were followers, not leaders.
Yeah, he’d seen this sort of catch-the-werewolf scene too many times before. Bugger, though, that didn’t eliminate the potential threat to Talbot’s Peak.
Instinct slid like a right knife through Dugger’s belly. ‘Wait. Stay a turtle,’ he told himself. Someone eyed the van. Yeah, a safari hunter type, a trophy killer by nature. The vibes sizzled Dugger to his toe pads.
No use exposin’ himself to the enemy. Dugger counted down the minutes automatically until he heard, “Mr. C., the target is secured. Givin’ us trouble, though. He’s got a big ‘f’ mouth. Needs shutting, until he’s willing to talk to us.”
An auto door opened, then slammed shut. A heavier tread made tracks in the same direction Ewan had been un-properly escorted. So, the bad boss man was this Mr. C.
Dugger trained his ears and his nose, inhaling the trophy killer’s rancid garlic stench. What? Did the buzzard-brain really believe in that made-for-human’s myth about vamps?
Grinning wide, Dugger dropped his blade, then snapped it back up between his teeth. Time to blow this van of clueless apes. Apes, monkeys, yeah, the common lingo in Dante’s biker bar. ‘Course, DNA-wise, that had proven to be mostly false propaganda by the global Big Badsâ��given the real genetic profiles were wider apart than the Nile river. Behavior-wise, now that was another ball of snakes.
Dugger squirmed his way out the duffel bag pile. Figurin’ dingo was safer, even with a blade in his jaws, he hopped into the driver’s seat. A deft pull of his untrimmed nails unlocked the door. Using his paw like an abbreviated hand, Dugger cracked it open, then slipped outside.
With his hind leg, Dugger kicked the door shut, then crawled beneath the van. He scanned for several moments before darting across the parking lot toward a sparse evergreen bush beneath the window where Ewan was likely being grilled. Yeah, maybe like a shrimp on the barbie.
Dugger grinned at himself.
‘Now for a mental photo ofâ��’ Headlights, the shouts of teenagers over-medicated on beer interrupted Dugger as he raised upward to peer between the crack in the heavy curtains. He slouched behind the cube-shaped evergreen right quick as a bushbaby.
Dugger heard the curtains pulled together sharply. Crickey! There
went his shot at an easy look at this cast of un-super villains.
By the walkabout gods, though, he had their individual scents. And from what Dugger was scenting now, Ewan didn’t need his helping paw. Not yet.
Yeah, speaking of the un-super, one of the motley crew was creeping up on him. Dugger figured the great monster hunter had seen neon lights flash off his large blade.
With a grin, Dugger burst out of hiding. He charged straight toward the hulking linebacker type. Before the bloke could help it, he briefly shrieked like a little girl.
“Hey!” the shout followed. “The monster’s got an effing buddy.” To his credit, the un-green hulk whipped out a silver blade, and stood his ground.
Dugger liked that bloody better. He increased his speed with each stride.
Leaping as the blade slashed at him, Dugger clawed his way up the blighter’s treetrunk leg, then up his broad chest fast as a mad cat. Holy dooley!. Oh yeah, his light body weight, and his quick reflexes always served him right.
Before the silver blade could catch his hide, ripping away chunks of fur�and the hulk was certainly trying to slash him a good one�Dugger climbed up his beefy face. He sank his claws in deep.
Once on top of Sluggo’s head, Dugger sprang landing on the roof of a nearby car. From there his escape was a piece of cake, as his sheila was fond of sayingâ��yeah, when she aimed her rifle, and took out a practice target no one else could touch.
The question of the day: should he make contact with Hoover? Let the wolf know what was happening under his superior sniffer…
Chapter Five:
My Kingdom for a Spy Cam!
By Rebecca Gillan
“Marissa! Check this out!” Gloria exclaimed excitedly. Marissa eagerly put down her pencil, which she had been using to try to untangle the mess that were her 2013 tax documents. She’d made the quarterly payments based off projected earnings but now it was time to convince Uncle Sam that those projections had been accurate. The only thing that made tax season tolerable was that she was meticulous about record keeping. That didn’t make it fun, though, so she was more than willing to let her new assistant manager distract her.
“What’s up, Glo?” she asked as she rounded the counter to where Gloria was surfing the web.
“Look!” Gloria said again, jabbing her finger excitedly at her laptop’s screen. Marissa looked. Then rubbed her eyes and looked again.
“Is that Dugger?” she asked incredulously.
“Mm-hm.”
“Did he just climb that guy like a mountain?”
“Yep,” Gloria confirmed with a grin. “You missed it. A few minutes ago a bunch of scruffy looking people pulled Ewan out of that van and made a circle around him with their arms and herded him inside that motel room. Then Dugger jumped out of the van and tried to peek into the window, but the Belvedere boys went driving by, being all rowdy and driving crazy. And then this guy comes out the back and circles around the back of the building and confronts Dugger, which is when Dugger goes and charges him.”
“Oh. My. God,” Marissa said, watching the action on the screen. “What is this? How are you seeing this?”
“Oh, it’s Moon-Moon’s spy camera net. It started with him setting up a Santa cam on Christmas Eve. That worked out so well that Lex had him set up spy cams in a few select locations, like this one at the Rocky Top. “
“Are you recording this?” Marissa asked as she fished her cell phone out of her pocket, eyes still glued to the computer screen.
“It’s a live feed from the server,” Gloria answered, “but Moon-Moon showed me how to make a copy from the master file.”
“Good. Make a copy, will you. I’m going to call Dante about this. If Dugger and Ewan are involved, he probably already knows, but I bet he’d like to have video showing facesâ��Damn! Did he just pee on that guy after knocking him down???”
Chapter Six:
A Blast from the Past (is a bite in the ass)
By Pat Cunningham
“Well?” Agent Mulder demanded. He shook the picture, like that would bring it into focus. “What are they?”
“Fugly,” Ewan said. “The bears around here must’a got their paws on some really rancid pic-a-nic baskets.”
“Those aren’t bears.” Comic Book Guy had decided to display his meager store of knowledge. “Those aren’t any kind of creature that appears in nature. Those are werewolves, created in a lab. Humans mutated into monsters.”
“If you say so.” It might even be true. Dante had no idea where his sire had dug up his hairy goon squad, though he’d been trying his damnedest to find out. Ewan knew even less. “Or they could just be Texans. Hard to tell from this angle.”
Freddie stepped up to the bed. “Tell us about the Doctor.”
“Sure. My favorite of the oldies is the Tom Baker version. Always liked the scarf. David Tennant was a hoot. Never much cared for the new one.”
Freddie smacked him hard across the face. Velma flinched. “Geez, dude,” the kid in the Free Weed shirt said. He needed a name. Ewan picked Shaggy. “I know he’s a werewolf and all, but geez. Oppressive much?”
“They’re monsters,” Freddie said. “We can’t afford to treat them like they’re human.”
“You think I’m one of those?” Ewan nodded at the photo in Agent Mulder’s hand. “Hell, you might as well kill me now. I’d drink bleach before I’d let myself turn into something that unsightly.”
“Works for me,” Agent Mulder said. He pulled out his silver knife. Ewan tensed to shift .
Unexpectedly, Velma threw herself across the bed, and Ewan. “You can’t! We have to wait forâ��”
On cue, the door opened. Silent Sam in the glasses returned, with another male. Ewan tensed in a different fashion. This wasn’t some stupid kid chasing after noises in the dark. This was a grownup with mileage on him, a hard life spent on the never-ending trail of inhuman things like Ewan.
A hunter. A real hunter.
He stalked up to the bed. Velma scurried away. The hunter leaned in close enough for Ewan to smell the strong motel coffee on his breath, and peered hard into Ewan’s eyes. Wolf and coyote shifters tended toward yellow eyes. Being both, Ewan’s gene pool had got a double dose.
The hunter grunted, satisfied, and pulled back. “You kids did just fine,” he told his team. “He’s a werewolf, sure enough.”
“He mentioned someone called the Doctor,” Freddie said, in the weaselly tone of an omega wolf looking to advance up the ranks. “Beyond that, he wouldn’t talk.”
“He’ll talk to me. You kids take off for awhile. Grab some coffee or something.”
Shaggy was out the door before he finished the sentence. The others lingered. Freddie opened his mouth to speak, but Velma beat him to it. “I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t. We won’t leave you alone with a monster.”
“I’ve been hunting shapeshifters since before you were born. But if you insist â�¦ all right. You get to stay, but you stay out of my way. You got a knife?” Velma swallowed hard and produced a Taser. The hunter grinned. “Even better. The rest of you boys scoot. I’ll let you play with whatever’s left.”
Freddie, Agent Mulder and Comic Book Guy obediently filed out of the room. Silent Sam stood firm. His body language made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere. The hunter shrugged minutely. Silent Sam closed the door and planted himself front of it, arms crossed.
“Now let’s get down to business.” The hunter stood at the foot of the bed. He hadn’t shown off any hardware yet, but that was sure to follow. “My name’s Abel Cochrane. I doubt if that means anything to you.”
“‘Fraid not,” Ewan said. “We don’t get many hunters in the Peak. Most of ‘em know better. Last one we had â�¦ “
The sudden narrowing of Cochrane’s eyes gave the game away. “Was you,” Ewan said in realization. “I wasn’t there, but everybody heard about it. Vern and the Mayor got hold of you andâ��”
He snapped his jaws shut right about t
he time the hunter scowled. Stripped you nekkid, dumped a gallon of purple paint on you, and sent you outside in your birthday suit with a couple of fake fairy wings. Yeah, he could see why a human wouldn’t want to relive that particular Kodak moment.
The hunter growled down in his throat, like a wolf. “I spent a month in lockup,” he snarled. “Indecent exposure. Then there was”â��he shudderedâ��“the hundred hours of community service. The whole time I pondered on what I was going to do to you filthy animals when my life was my own again.”
“We have a new Mayor,” Ewan said. “That’d never happen now. Live and let live and all that. Bygones?” He smiled appeasingly.
“I don’t think so. I’ve got a score to settle with ‘Vern’ and ‘The Mayor.’ They can wait till last. Between now and then I plan to wipe out every clawed, hooved, feathered, beaked and furry freak in your misbegotten town.” He pulled out a pistol with an abnormally wide barrel and aimed at Ewan’s forehead. “Starting with you.”
Chapter Seven:
Yeah, Dugger Thought, Dog-Monkey Mutant.
By Savanna Kougar
The motley crew belonging to the ‘let’s exterminate all werewolves’ clubâ��a couple with cigs still in their handsâ��charged toward Dugger from across the parking lot. Crickey!
Contacting Hoover would have to be put on the backburner. Behind him Mr. Blonde Sluggo made grunting moans of pain. “Kill him!” he squealed in an unmanly shout. “Or get the fucker dog-monkey mutant for Mr. C.”
‘Yeah,’ Dugger thought, ‘dog-monkey mutant. Have to remember that one for me bar mates.’ Spinning around on top of the auto’s slick roof, he balanced, then sprang.
Dugger sent the full force of his dingo body between the bloke’s Hulk like shoulder blades. A bloody bull’s eye.
“Argh-shit!” Slugger choked out as he toppled forward and crashed face first onto the cold hard asphalt. Dugger rode him all the way down.
