“Pierre! Grab it, don’t let it get away!”
Pierre took his eyes off the tank and saw the goat heading straight for him. He waved his arms around and shouted at the terrified animal, causing it to swerve around him, straight into a couple of youths who had been forced by their parents to attend the village festivities. One of the boys threw himself nimbly on the goat and wrapped his arms around its neck, bringing it to the ground, where the villager who’d been made responsible for looking after it retrieved it and stroked its head gently, whispering in its ear until it calmed down.
The village elder concluded that it was time to wrap up the speeches for the time being, and invited the villagers and the visitors to join him for dinner later that evening. Slowly the villagers drifted chattering back to their huts, and the aid workers followed their allocated hosts back to their accommodation. Only Pierre and one of the aid truck drivers remained. Jim had noticed Pierre’s fascination with the old tank, and he wandered over to the blacksmith.
“Centurion Mark 3,” Jim smiled at Pierre and patted the rusty tank. “Never thought I’d see one of these outside a museum. Figured they’d all been converted to Olifants or Semels in these parts.”
Pierre nodded enthusiastically, happy that the driver spoke English—one of the few languages in which Pierre could do more than just quote lines from ‘The Exorcist’.
“I bet she’s seen some action,” continued Jim. “Korea, ‘Nam— there’s no telling where she’s been.”
Pierre was finding it a little hard to follow the lesson in world tank history, but he certainly recognised a fellow enthusiast when he saw one. “You like tanks?” he asked the driver.
“I used to be in the army,” Jim explained. “I spent some time in tanks...”
Pierre’s eyes opened wide and an excited flush spread over his face. “You know drive tank?” he asked, his childlike enthusiasm making the driver smile.
“Yes, I can drive one of these.”
“You teach me?”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea—”
“Why?” The disappointment in the little man’s face affected the driver in a way he hadn’t expected. There was a naivety and innocence about the blacksmith, which made Jim feel like he had given a sweet to a child, only to take it away again.
“Well, for a start we would need some diesel.”
“Diesel?”
“Fuel— for the tank to run on.”
“Oh— yes,” Pierre looked crestfallen for a while, but quickly perked up. “You have?”
“Excuse me?”
“You have diesel?”
“Well, we have some in the trucks.”
“We put in tank?”
“Well—” the driver looked down at the little man and thought for a moment. “We do have considerably more than we need. I guess you could have a bit of it—”
“Oh thank you! Thank you!”
* * *
The rumbling sound split the balmy afternoon like summer thunder, waking the villagers from their siesta and bringing them out of their huts, eyes wide with fear and curiosity. The foreigners came out too, equally fearful, but less curious—the unpleasant sound was nothing new to those of them who had spent time in combat zones.
“Pierre!” The village elder did nothing to disguise his anger, but the blacksmith was in no state to pick up on the emotions of others. He was riding high, head in the clouds, the rest of him sat firmly in the Centurion Mark 3.
“Pierre, what the devil are you doing?” Pierre responded to the elder’s exclamation by waving happily. “It works!” he cried, “It works!” His smile faded as no one apart from a couple of children waved back.
“You get out of that tank right now, blacksmith! Or there will be hell to pay!” The village elder looked ready to explode.
“Okay, I’m going. I’m going.”
Everyone looked on in astonishment as Pierre turned the tank around carefully and disappeared into the scrub beyond the village. That was the last they would see of him until dinner that night.
* * *
“What do you mean, you haven’t started yet? You’ve been gone all day and the least you could have done after your performance earlier today was to start stripping it down. You may think that the planting season is a long way away, but it will be on us faster than a hyena on an abandoned antelope calf, and what will we do if we haven’t got tools to till the earth?”
They were all sitting in the large canvas dining-tent specially erected for important village occasions such as this.
Pierre was taken aback by the village elder’s outburst, but he wasn’t giving up easily.
“We can till the earth with sticks and sharpened stones—like we did last year and the year before that. And the kind people of Europe and America have sent us plenty of grain and dried food, and food in metal tins. We don’t need to destroy the tank—you never know when the village might need it.”
The village elder was speechless for a moment, turning a deep purple color that rather worried both his foreign guests and the other villagers. No one had seen him turn this particular shade since his son had informed him that he was marrying a girl from the neighboring village—a girl that everyone knew was most definitely not a virgin. Finally the elder spoke:
“How dare you speak for this village, and how dare you mention the people of Europe and America?! You have betrayed everybody’s trust, and you insult our guests who have come a very long way to bring us the tank so that we can till our land and feed ourselves, and not so that you can ride around in it making a spectacle of yourself!”
The foreigners had no idea what the village elder was shouting, but knew that the little man he was yelling at, was not going to get off lightly. Jim picked at his plate of rice distractedly, feeling guilty and uncomfortable about his role in the blacksmith’s disgrace.
“Blacksmith,” the elder continued, “you leave this table now, and you go and start converting that useless piece of junk into farm tools for the people to use, or I will personally cast you out of this village and make sure that you never return!”
A gasp went round the table. Pierre hung his head and stood up.
“Yes, elder,” he said quietly, and headed out of dining-tent, avoiding the eyes of the others – some pitying, some indignant, but all of them fixed on him.
“Your mother sucks cocks in hell,” he mumbled under his breath in Italian as he left the tent, passing through the shaft of light from the full moon as he went.
* * *
Alicia was feeling increasingly tense. The heady smells of the food set on the table before her, and of the plants and creatures outside the dining-tent were making her head spin. Some unfamiliar sense was telling her that flesh might alleviate her symptoms, and she reached out, grabbing a chunk of the pungent, fatty, non-descript meat from the large bowl that had been lovingly placed in front of her and the other foreigners. Alicia sniffed at the meat suspiciously, and immediately started to drool. She took a tentative bite, then stuffed the whole chunk into her mouth, reaching out for another.
Alicia’s colleague had been staring at her for a while before she noticed.
“What?” she asked, staring back.
“Nothing, it’s just that I thought you were vegetarian.”
“I was.” Alicia didn’t offer anything by way of an explanation, and her colleague mumbled an apologetic, “right,” and returned his attention to his own plate.
“You must excuse our blacksmith,” the elder had calmed down following Pierre’s departure. “He’s always been a little eccentric.”
Alicia devoured several helpings of the oily meat, but still she was ravenous—ravenous and nauseous at the same time.
The shaft of moonlight falling into the tent had crept its way across the floor and reached the table. It now touched Alicia and bathed her in its silver radiance. As it caressed her face, Alicia’s body started to tingle. Every nerve, every sinew, every cell of Alicia’s body tingled an
d glowed; it was as though she were dissolving and merging with the moonlight. For a moment she felt at peace, but then a light breeze stirred, bringing with it the smells of the night outside—the chickens, the goat, and other, larger, sweeter-smelling prey. Her head spun, and she had to get out—had to become part of the dark outside. She hastily made her excuses and left the tent, declining her colleague’s offer to escort her to her hut.
Once outside, the night hit her with all its splendor. Alicia moved soundlessly over the dusty ground, savoring the slight chill in the air now that the sun had gone down, and the sounds of insects and small animals moving around in the scrub beyond the villagers’ huts. She kicked off her shoes and felt the gritty, sandy earth beneath her feet as she wandered aimlessly through the small village, marveling at how textured the night was, how full of colors despite the unifying silver of the moonlight. How strange that all her life she had never walked in moonlight. How strange that she had built her self-worth on what others thought of her—others like her ex-husband, who had sapped all of the love and youth out of her, then threw her away. How strange that she had ever cared about anything other than the night on her skin and the moon in her hair. The moon—that was when Alicia saw it—burning in the sky above the scrub, melting away her doubts and inhibitions, dissolving her thoughts and memories until the old Alicia was no more.
Eyes still turned up to the shining orb, the new Alicia pulled off her clothes and flung them aside, intending to head for the scrub, but then a mouth-watering scent made her turn back towards the village. Sweet and inviting, it drew her relentlessly to a small hut, her excitement growing with every step she took. As she neared the hut, she felt a stabbing pain as muscle and bone shifted and transformed beneath her skin. Her skin itself seemed to burn and blister, breaking out in thousands of new hair follicles, each one sprouting a tiny black hair that grew with unnatural speed. As her spinal column and limbs recreated themselves, what was once Alicia slumped into a half-crouch. The smell emanating from the hut was irresistible now. All other sensations faded away, and there was nothing but the smell of the sleeping child waiting for her. A brief and final flash of memory—of the miles she had traveled to help the starving children. Of how they’d been waiting for her, waiting for Alicia, to come for them.
“I’m coming for you,” she called out to the sleeping child, her voice a low howl emanating from deep within, silencing the insects in the scrub and piercing the delicate fabric of the moonlit night.
* * *
“What in God’s name was that?” the village elder stopped mid-sentence as the bone-chilling howl came again, unfamiliar to the villagers, but a sound instinctively to be feared nonetheless.
“It sounded just like a wolf,” one of aid workers finally broke the silence that had settled like a shroud upon the dining-tent.
“There aren’t any wolves in Africa,” Jim’s fellow driver responded quietly.
“Well, it sounded just like one.”
As the villagers exchanged frightened glances and everyone wondered what to do next, the howling came again, this time even lower in pitch and ending in a growling, roaring sound that was wolf, but not wolf. This time it was accompanied by a child’s terrified screams—one, two, the third one cut short.
“Paulie! Paulie!” one of the local women leapt from her place at the table and ran shrieking out of the tent. Jim ran after her, followed by the village elder and the rest of the diners.
The sight that greeted them defied belief. Loping away from one of the huts was a huge creature, wolf in all but the fact that it moved on two legs. In its jaws it carried a bleeding child, gripped clumsily by its throat. The child’s mother swooned for a moment, falling into Jim’s arms, then shrieked and ran at the beast. The beast lashed out with a hideous paw-hand, its long razor-sharp claws catching the woman across the throat and flinging her to the ground, where she gurgled for a moment, then bled out.
The monster threw down the dead child and confronted the crowd of humans that had spilt from the mouth of the tent. A growl-roar rose in its throat, and then it hurled itself forward, ripping, biting, tearing. The crowd scattered, villagers and foreigners running screaming for their lives. Jim ran to his truck and returned carrying a loaded revolver.
“Hey, over here,” he shouted at the creature, drawing it away from the body of a male villager it was disemboweling. As the creature ran at him, Jim discharged several bullets, each one hitting the thing point blank in the chest. Jim’s determined expression turned to one of fear as the creature kept coming at him. It hardly broke pace as it slashed the driver across the throat with its claws, veering away from the mortally wounded man to confront a couple of village youths armed with makeshift spears.
Jim fell to the ground, near the scrub, clutching at his maimed throat, trying to stop his life from draining out of him. Then a hand was touching his shoulder gently, yet urgently, and the driver heard a familiar voice through the pounding noise of blood in his ears.
“Mr. Jim! Mr. Jim!” Pierre crouched down in front of the driver, distress and sorrow in his eyes.
“Pierre,” Jim managed to gurgle.
“Mr. Jim, you hurt bad.”
“Listen Pierre—” Speaking made the blood squirt out of his wound, but Jim was experienced enough to know that nothing would save him now anyway. “Told you how the tank was fired...”
“Yes Mr. Jim.”
“—Still can be—Ammo—in my truck—In back—under blanket—”
The blood was spraying out from between Jim’s fingers, and his words were coming out as little more than gurgles, but Pierre’s determined nod told him that somehow the blacksmith understood.
“I use them, Mr. Jim. I use them.” Pierre kept his hand on Jim’s shoulder until the light went out in the driver’s eyes, his hand dropped from his throat and the last of his blood spurted out onto the earth.
* * *
As quickly as it had appeared amongst them, the creature disappeared, loping into the scrub and trees behind the village. Everyone—everyone who was still alive, that is—knew instinctively that it was coming back.
The foreigners left immediately, saying that they would send help, and taking Jim’s body with them. The villagers wished that they too could leave immediately and say that they would send help, but they had nowhere to go. Centuries of living in a war-torn country left them in little doubt that the help the westerners would send would not arrive in time to make the slightest difference to any of them, so they buried their dead and made plans for surviving the following night.
* * *
Alicia had fed well the previous night, but now the hunger was back and stronger than ever. She could smell the goat as though it were standing right in front of her, but she could smell the humans too—despite their best efforts to hide themselves away. She would have them all—the goat and the humans—and then the hunger would subside and she would be able to rejoice in the night and the light of the moon before it waned again to nothing.
As she approached the village, the enticing smells intensified and Alicia began to drool. She quickened her pace, the hunger inside her lesser only than the rage that accompanied it.
She burst out of the scrub and threw herself at the goat that was tethered to a stake in the middle of the village square. Just then something long and thin glanced off her side and fell to the ground next to her—it was a wooden spear with a sharpened stone tip, thrown by one of the villagers. Alicia roared and leapt at the man, her fangs ripping out his throat before he had a chance to scream. The other humans were all around her—pelting her with stones, spears, clubs and anything else they had managed to assemble in the way of weaponry. Alicia hardly felt a thing as the puny projectiles bounced off her thick hide. Then there was a small sting—like a mosquito bite—on her back. She span round and saw the village elder pointing a revolver at her—one of the youths had found it lying next to the body of the dead truck driver and the elder had taken it upon himself to pull a couple of round
s of ammunition out of the dead man’s pocket. Alicia felt a couple more mosquito bites as the man discharged the remaining bullets at her chest. She roared and was about to leap at him, then stopped as a loud rumbling sound caught her attention.
* * *
The creature span round, its slanted yellow eyes staring into the scrub. Despite their terror, the villagers momentarily lowered their weapons, following the creature’s gaze.
The rumbling grew louder and then a long metal tube broke through the scrub, followed by the rest of the vehicle. The tank emerged fully from the bushes, gun barrel loaded and pointing dead ahead. The vehicle came to a halt, the lid in its top opened and the village blacksmith stuck his head out.
“Pierre!” cried the village elder, drawing the creature’s attention back onto himself. It growled and once more prepared to leap. .Pierre shouted as loud as he could over the rumble of the tank, “Here, over here!”
The creature turned back to Pierre and sprinted towards the tank.
“Run!” shouted Pierre. “Everybody run!”
The villagers scattered in all directions, running as fast as they could away from the village square. As the creature ran towards him, Pierre shouted at the top of his voice, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” Then he fired.
There was an ear-splitting noise, a bright flash pierced the darkness, and then blood and guts, fur and brain tissue, bone fragments and mucus showered all over the village square as the creature exploded into a million pieces.
Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) Page 24
