"Now you're human," she said.
Isaac stared into the mirror. He had white stubble all over his face.
"Come to bed," she told him. He lay down next to Margaret Tolstoy. She rubbed the fur on his chest.
"My little Wolf Man," she said, and she made love to him until most of his melancholy was gone.
DAY OF THE WOLF
Craig Shaw Gardner
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THE animals knew.
In the city, he didn't have to worry about that. Cats, birds, rodents: all stayed out of his way. Dogs would go wild sometimes when he was near, especially as it grew close to the full moon. But other dogs, small nervous things that yipped at the heels of anything that moved, were so domesticated that they were almost as blind as their human masters.
In the city, he could be one of those famous faceless millions. No one needed to know his name, or his business. And if there was a little extra violence on the streets, no one came looking for him. It was easier, these days, for his sort to survive.
But the violence became so bad that even city people had to pay attention. There were too many dying in the wrong ways, too many bodies found with claw and teeth marks. Even those bored by drug turf wars and drive-by shootings took notice. And, once they noticed, they started to ask questions.
He had known he would have to leave the city eventually. No place was safe forever. But he had lived within the tall buildings for too long.
He had forgotten about the animals.
▼▼▼
He was going by the name Sam now. Not that anybody had asked his name.
There was a gun pointed straight at him. The gun barrel glinted in the early morning sunlight. The moon, still visible above the horizon, was perfectly round, perfectly full. The first of three nights, he thought. Two more nights to go. If only it could be night again, and everything would change.
Sweat poured down his face. He was breathing so heavily from his exertion that his mouth was open. He could taste the salty drops of sweat on his tongue. They had him cornered, against the back wall of a neighbor's garden. There were maybe a dozen of them, spread out in a half-circle. He had nowhere else to run. He thought the revolver was a forty-four.
"Wait a moment," said one of the well-dressed men. His hunting jacket alone must have cost hundreds of dollars. "You can't shoot him."
The man holding the gun started to shake. "What do you mean, I can't shoot him? Jenny's dead!"
"You can't kill him," said the first man, his voice still calm. "Not with that."
But the man with the gun got more upset with every passing word. "She had her throat ripped out! She was only twelve, goddamn it. That thing over there only looks human." He glanced down then at the revolver in his hand, almost as if he couldn't believe it was there himself. For a moment his voice became quieter, almost resigned. "It has to die."
"I'm not arguing with you, John," the first man said. "That thing has to die. But if that's what we think it is, regular bullets won't kill it."
Someone laughed nervously in the crowd. And the way John looked at Sam, he knew the gunman wasn't buying the argument.
"To hell with your silver bullets!" John screamed, his voice shifting to the falsetto as it again filled with emotion. His gun hand shook with his rage. "I'm going to shoot his fucking face off!"
He cried out as he pulled the trigger, as if the bullet came not from the gun but from somewhere deep inside him.
Sam flinched as the first bullet flew into the trees over his head.
▼▼▼
If he was careful, he didn't have to hurt anyone.
That was the first of the lies.
He had tried so hard to believe that, after what he had become. He had wanted so desperately, despite everything he saw in front of him, despite all the blood and all the death, to have some sort of control.
But no matter how hard he tried, other people came, and were touched by him. And other people died. So many now, that there was no way to count them all.
The only thing that made it worse was the second lie. Like the first, it was a lie he had told only to himself:
He could stop himself at any time.
The two times he had gotten up the nerve to kill himself, he'd learned a single lesson. It didn't matter if he had slits in his wrists or a hole in his skull. He could bleed for hours or writhe for days in semi-conscious agony. But this thing that lived inside him would always make him whole again.
Not that it made him well. He could never be well again, after what had happened. But, as much as he could hurt inside, he could not die.
So he lived, and tried to keep to the edges of society, where nobody looked you straight in the eye, and he hoped and prayed no one would ever come close enough for him to jeopardize again.
But that was the first lie all over again.
▼▼▼
There was a long silence after the gunshot, the kind of quiet you never hear in the city. It was as if the explosion had frozen everyone in shock. Sam had been through this before. He could guess what went through all those normal minds. Before that gunshot, every person in that mob probably had thought of himself as a good soul, a good neighbor. What were they doing here? What were they doing to another human being?
A woman's voice broke the silence. "Arnie? Joe? Carl? Mr. Rein- beck? What's going on here? What's the matter?"
Parts of the mob shifted. Some men turned their heads to watch the woman run toward them across the lawn. Others looked away.
"Debbie," a man in the crowd called, "I thought I told you to stay at home."
"You can tell me a lot of things, Arnie," Debbie answered defiantly. "But when people start shooting guns, I want to see what's going on in my neighborhood."
"Your neighborhood!" Arnie exploded. "Since when does freeload- ing in my spare bedroom make this your neighborhood?" His eyes jerked back to Sam, his expression half anger, and maybe half shock that the anger could make him forget what he was here for.
"Arnie, it doesn't matter about the neighborhood," another man interrupted. "She's right." It was the same man who'd asked John to give up the gun. "We have no business doing this ourselves. Let's get the sheriff."
"The sheriff?" John demanded. "He'll never believe what happened!" He waved the gun at his target again. "He killed my Jenny! He ate part of her, for god's sake. How many more are you going to let him ' murder?"
The gun went off again. Sam felt a shot of fire, then clear, cold pain, as the bullet entered the soft flesh of his upper arm.
The woman screamed and ran to his side. He realized he had lost his balance when he saw she was using her weight to help keep him on his feet.
"Debbie!" Arnie screamed, his face almost as deep a red as the fluid pouring from Sam's arm. "If you get in the way one more time, I swear—"
"What are you going to do, Arnie?" She called out to the crowd: "What are all of you going to do? You're all animals!"
He couldn't help himself. He started to laugh.
It was always the animals.
▼▼▼
So he moved on before they came for him. It didn't matter that they never ever knew exactly what they were looking for. There was always the chance that they'd stumble upon him anyway. He always moved on when he felt that shift coming, like an animal who senses a change in the weather. In all the years since this had begun, he had changed. Most of all, he had learned how to survive.
And he'd learned, after a time, to savor this new life. He had managed to make certain investments over the years—some monetary, some personal, some legal, some not so legal—but all of them kept him comfortable. After a while, he had grown to appreciate his solitary , existence as he watched the world go by, so close to all the others, yet so different from every one of them. He had started to collect things, some relating to his childhood, so long ago, others that commented on his curse. And he had started to make little changes in the world around him.
He was careful, for a time, to only go
after those who he felt deserved his touch: pushers and pimps and the like. Once, when he was feeling foolhardy, he had taken a particularly obnoxious small-time politician.
He might live forever—he hadn't aged since it happened, close to fifty years ago—but he held death in his hands.
Then the world changed again, and even the city became dangerous. So dangerous that people started to take back the streets in order to survive, and the police started to count the corpses. But where could he go next?
He had tired quickly in his early years of living out in the wilds, far beyond civilization. And now even the jumped-up pace of the inner city seemed to pale. He'd grown restless with both extremes. It was time for something in the middle, someplace that had never seen the likes of him. Not a mountain resort, nor farm country; they'd expect wild animals in places like that, and there would be people who knew how to handle the unexpected.
But where else was there? Perhaps his years of survival had made him reckless, but he knew where he wanted to go.
So, before the next full moon, he grabbed his Big Bad Wolf Big Little Book—a cornerstone to both his collections—a suitcase full of clothes and bank books, and headed for one of the bedroom communities outside of town.
No one expected his sort of thing in the suburbs.
▼▼▼
The woman's presence changed the chemistry in the yard, but it didn't stop the violence. He had yelled out at the pain. Some might have mistaken the sound for a growl.
The others rushed forward. He felt a dozen hands on him. Some lashed out, connected with Sam's stomach, his chin, his groin. Some tried to pull their neighbors away. Debbie shouted at them to leave him alone.
He no longer had the anger to strike back at them, or the energy to tell them to stop what they were doing. He had used up everything he had in trying to escape them. Now he was nothing but tired, and all he could do was wait for this latest drama to end.
"Look, there's one way to prove this thing!" one of the men said in a louder voice. "The moon is still full tonight. If what John says is true, we'll know then, right?"
"Yeah, right," other voices agreed one after another. "Lock him up. Reinbeck's tool shed. We'll see tonight."
John had stayed behind the rest of the crowd. "Maybe you're right," he said now as he walked forward. "I'm not a murderer. But I'm staying outside the shed until we know." He grabbed Sam's chin, and lifted his head so that he looked straight into John's eyes. "And I'm holding on to my gun."
They pushed Sam into the dark shed as the summer sun rose over the subdivision, and slammed the door behind him. He heard something heavy clank and bang against the other side; probably a padlock. He decided to sleep. There was nothing he could do that would change tonight.
▼▼▼
He woke to a sound of a key in the padlock outside.
The door swung open, and Debbie stepped inside. The door slammed shut behind her, propelled by other hands.
"I thought you'd like something to eat," she said, waving a picnic basket at the prone Sam. A picnic basket? Just like Little Red Riding Hood. He wondered if she saw the humor in that. He'd laugh all over again if he wasn't feeling so lousy. "Besides, somebody should look at your arm." In her other hand she held a damp sponge and a first-aid kit.
This Debbie, then, actually cared what happened to a stranger. He looked up at her. She was dressed simply, in worn jeans and a blouse with a faded floral print. Her clothes didn't speak of money like the wardrobes of the other women he'd seen in the neighborhood.
She smiled reassuringly. She didn't know what was going to happen.
She didn't deserve to be here like the others. But then, who was he, even now, to know what people deserved?
He had fallen in love with a woman once, soon after the change had come over him. It had shown him the true extent of his transformation, and it had been the biggest mistake he ever made.
And the woman? She still had to be alive, if you could call it that. She hadn't been able to handle what had happened. Somehow, though, he had learned from it, and survived.
He managed to push himself up to a sitting position. "You shouldn't have touched me," he said.
"Well, it's too late now, isn't it?" she said, taking his bloody arm. "Somebody had to stand up against all those men." She pulled the ragged cloth of his shirt away from the wound, and brought the damp sponge up to clean off the clotted blood. "I don't know what's gotten into them. You'd think this was the middle ages."
She stopped and looked more closely at the area of his skin she had just cleaned with her sponge. "This wound isn't as bad as I thought."
They never were, was his silent reply. Hie didn't have the energy, or maybe it was the emotion, for an explanation.
"It doesn't look like it was more than a scratch." She looked up at him. Her face was very close to his. She was young, maybe in her twenties. Of course, everyone looked young to him. She wasn't bad to look at, either. How long had it been since he had kissed a woman?
"That makes me feel a little better," she went on. "I can't imagine them locking you up like this, not even letting you see a doctor."
To his own surprise, he found he wanted to smile. "That sort of thing happens," he replied. "I seem to bring that out in people."
She continued to stare into his eyes. "Are you what they say you are?"
"No, not exactly," he answered as honestly as he could. "What about you? What brings you to this fine community?"
She blushed at the question. Yes, she seemed very young. "The story of my life is far too boring. A bad marriage, a job lost thanks to the recession. And here I am, trapped in the suburbs, living with my brother Arnie. I never should have moved in here. He treats me like a child, or his own personal maid! You're the first interesting thing that's happened in the six months since I got here." Her smile broadened then to show her teeth.
She considered herself an outsider, too, then; but she didn't know the meaning of the word. He shook his head. "I'm afraid you're a little bit too trusting."
She laughed softly. "What's to be scared of? Even if the whole world's turned upside down, and you're what they say you are, that won't happen until the full moon tonight."
There was something about her eyes, and that way she kept on smiling, that made him want her to be the first to know in a long time. "No, you don't understand. It's too late. Everything is already—"
He stopped. How could he possibly explain? He didn't have the words.
He looked deeper into the woman's eyes and remembered Lorraine.
▼▼▼
They were the liberators, a fancy name for a bunch of frightened kids who somehow ended up as soldiers marching through France, chasing the last remnants of the Third Reich.
It had been a great patriotic march, and it had been hell. When they weren't scared, they were tired. And if they weren't either of those, they were dead. They had lost half their battalion in nameless villages across the blasted countryside. And that day, that goddamned day, Stuart Samson was tired, and scared, and sick of nothing but K-rations. But he was also horny as a bastard.
And that day they had liberated a brothel.
Most of the whores had fled during the battle. The locals explained they had been good French girls, from the local farms, forced into service by the German occupiers. Stu and a couple of the other boys had joked about the women who were gone, wondering why they hadn't stuck around to show their gratitude. Even the Lieutenant had joined in on the laughter.
And then Stu had found that cell in the basement. And in that cell was Lorraine.
What had brought him to do it? What had he been feeling then? Even now, Sam remembered. He hadn't been angry. Or scared. Or happy. Or sad. He was nothing. That was what those endless weeks and months and years of war had done for him; killed the feelings inside. Or so he had thought then. He hadn't felt anything or wanted anything for a long time—until Lorraine.
And Stuart Samson knew what he wanted to do with her.
So Stuart Samson went in alone, closing and locking the door behind him. A hero needed to have a little fun, didn't he?
She screamed at him in German. Hell, he didn't understand German. He bet his lieutenant wouldn't, either.
There was something about her—he'd thought about this a lot in all of the years since—something primal. If he had had any doubts about what he was doing before he got in there, they were all gone when he got that close.
Sam remembered it even now. In that moment, he had realized that all his anger, all of his fright, all of the hundred emotions that he had thought he had lost had only been locked deep inside him, waiting for the right moment to burst out, and that moment was now. Maybe that sudden rush of emotion should have made him back away, but, somehow, it only served to increase his desire.
He had to have her.
He undid his belt, pulled down his fly.
She should be goddam grateful. It wasn't like she wasn't used to it. And this was the last time she'd ever have to do this sort of thing. But.
right now this liberator needed to liberate something from between his legs.
She fought him at first. But then she started to laugh. At first he thought the bitch was enjoying it.
The Ultimate Werewolf Page 12
