Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1)

by Wilson, David Niall; Lamio, Michael; Newman, James; Maberry, Jonathan; Everson, John; Daley, James Roy

  “What’s this about, officer?” she asked, continuing to run in place.

  Floyd ignored the question. “May I see some ID?” he asked again.

  The woman’s complexion was becoming deeper red, now more from irritation than from exercise. “It’s in my purse,” she said shortly, unzipping her tummy pouch and extracting a wallet, which she handed to Perusquia. “What right do you have to interrogate me, anyway?” she asked.

  Perusquia flipped open the wallet and scanned the hologram within. “Ms. Silvestri,” he said, “could you please account for your activities during the past two hours?”

  “Account for my activities? Just how stupid are you? What does it look like I’ve been doing? I’ve been jogging, for Christ’s sake. Some of us like to keep fit. We don’t sit at home all day plugged in and getting fat. Fat? Excuse me, officer,” she went on, looking Perusquia deliberately up and down. “I misspoke. Obese is more like it.”

  They encountered six other people before nightfall and three more before nine o’clock—two joggers, a vagrant who didn’t even own a personal cortical interface, a couple doctors, four VNYNEX technicians stringing wire—none of whom, by the longest stretch of imagination, could possibly be lobo. The other teams reported similar results, and as he and Sergeant Floyd approached the rendezvous below Washington Square, Perusquia began to feel discouraged, doubting himself and the chain of reasoning that had led him out into the material world. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe lobo really was content to hunt the Net. Maybe digital blood and virtual flesh were still sufficient to sate his hunger.

  Then shots reverberated through the night.

  Perusquia thumbed on the radio. “Report.”

  “Diakite here. It’s south of us, Loo.”

  “Brown here. Me and Navas—we’re okay.”

  Then Hennessy came on the air. “It’s got Rashid, Loo. Sweet Jesus, it has Ed!”

  “Where are you, boy?”

  It was hard understanding what Hennessy was saying. Rashid’s screams and the snarl of the wolf were drowning out his words.

  “Hijo! Tell us where you are.”

  “I hit him, Loo. I swear to God I hit him twice. But it didn’t do any good.”

  “Hold on, boy. We’ll be with you. Just give us your position!”

  Sergeant Floyd was already on his way, the stubby muzzle of his ancient semiautomatic pointed skyward as he ran, heading downtown at a pace that Perusquia matched briefly but couldn’t maintain. Unable to go on, he staggered to a halt at Eighth Street, leaning against a lamp post and swallowing great gulps of air as the sergeant proceeded on alone. Hennessy’s voice continued issuing from the receiver, an incoherent jabber overlaid by the fury of the wolf. Then there sounded the stutter of a full clip being emptied, the noise coming from the radio and through the night air simultaneously. The shots couldn’t have been more than three or four blocks south.

  Hennessy fell silent.

  Stifling a groan, urging his body onward, Perusquia started off again as fast as he could, praying that it would be fast enough. For the first time that evening he noticed that the moon had risen. Somehow it seemed appropriate that it was full.

  “I have them in sight, Loo.” This from Grevenberg. “Rashid is down. Hennessy’s down.”

  “Where’s Floyd? The sergeant?”

  “I don’t see him. No—wait—there he is. Shit. Shit.”

  Again Perusquia heard shots being fired, this time in methodical sequence rather than in a panicked spatter.

  “What is it, Art? What the hell’s going on?”

  Grevenberg didn’t answer. Perusquia turned the corner of Seventh Avenue. There, not a short block ahead, where Grove Street met Bleecker at an acute angle, was the wolf.

  The moonlight joined with the sodium glow of a street lamp to illuminate the area in a wash of pale color. Three bodies sprawled on the pavement, two on the sidewalk, the other in the center of the narrow street. Only one displayed any motion, a painful twitching. Even from a distance Perusquia could make out dark stains of blood around the bodies. On the other side of the intersection, Diakite and Grevenberg were cautiously approaching the scene.

  The wolf threw its head back, ears flat to the skull, and howled. Its call rang through the night, a rising and falling siren, a sound so atavistic that Perusquia shivered—not from fear or apprehension but from a surge of reciprocal emotion.

  He edged nearer the thing. Its attention snapped toward him. Its gaunt black lips tugged back from its gums.

  Perusquia crouched and flicked on the Glock’s laser targeting system, aiming carefully; a tiny red dot appeared on the wolf’s chest.

  But he held his fire.

  Perusquia tracked the wolf as it stalked toward him, sensing something anomalous about the situation yet not knowing what it was. Keeping his sights centered on the beast, suspecting that his survival depended on it, he groped feverishly for clarity.

  From the other side of the street Grevenberg and Diakite fired. Several rounds tore through the wolf, entering its body on the left, erupting from the right in a spray of blood and fur. It screamed, healed itself, whirled and leapt toward them.

  That was when Perusquia knew.

  The simple truth was that they weren’t in the Net. Nevertheless, a wolf faced them, not a man.

  He stood up, crossing himself with one hand while discharging the Glock into the air with the other, recalling the wolf’s focus onto himself. “Hey, lobo,” he shouted. “Get your ass over here, hijo de la gran puta. We’ve got business to finish.”

  The thing stopped less than a meter from Diakite and Grevenberg. Ignoring their fusillade, it spun around and started back toward Perusquia.

  This time he understood what he was looking at. Instead of the perfect wolf that he had wrestled with in the Net, the flawless child of will and code, the faultless image made real in every detail by the compulsion of a madman—instead of such an immaculate creation of mind and software and electronic circuitry, Perusquia knew that he was now facing something at once less fully realized and yet far more marvelous.

  Somehow—perhaps because of practice gained exercising its will in the Net, perhaps because of its psychosis, perhaps because of a more subtle process—the thing had achieved authority over the automatic processes of its physical body, allowing it to reinvent itself in the real world.

  What he had thought was fur was body hair grown long. Its paws were the hands and feet of a man unnaturally fitted into an animal mold, its muzzle a human jaw elongated cruelly, its tail a coccyx stretched like taffy, its teeth tame dentition turned feral, its ears the round cups of a man’s honed into points.

  Will had done this. Will had created the thing before him. Will must destroy it.

  “That’s right, lobo,” Perusquia said. “Come on over. You know who I am, don’t you? Well, I know what you are.”

  He reached beneath his shirt and took out the small silver crucifix he’d worn for so many years in both the virtual and the real worlds, and held it to his lips.

  “Hey, lobo, who would have thought we’d need a silver bullet out here? Out in the material world, verdad? I mean, there isn’t any such thing as a werewolf. At least outside of the Net there isn’t. Not until now.”

  Perusquia slipped the silver chain into the barrel of the Glock, fitting the end of the cross into the muzzle. The wolf’s amber eyes followed his every motion.

  “And we all know how to kill a werewolf, don’t we?”

  The question was rhetorical but the wolf provided an answer.

  It was upon him before he could aim the pistol, its canines sinking into his wrist, grating on bone. Perusquia dropped the gun. He smelled the iron essence of his own blood. Yet he felt no fear, the pain summoning forth only rage, reminding him of what it had done to Salisbury and Rashid and Hennessy and Floyd, and Perusquia threw himself upon the wolf, locked his elbow across its throat and his legs around its waist just as he had in the Net, letting his weight wrestle it down. Madre de Dios! The th
ing was strong, agile, incredibly lithe. It twisted around and clawed at him, ripping his shirt, leaving long red scratches on his stomach.

  In the material world Perusquia was too fat to be shaken off.

  Maintaining his hold around its windpipe, he groped with his good hand for the Glock. His fingers brushed against the pistol but it lay just out of reach. The wolf made another attempt to dislodge him, shaking back and forth, and Perusquia lunged toward the weapon, snatching it up by the handle.

  He brought the gun to its head, burying the exposed cross in its hair, and placed his lips to its ear.

  “We all know what kills werewolves, don’t we?” Perusquia repeated.

  The wolf writhed in a savage spasm.

  “Silver,” Perusquia whispered. And pulled the trigger.

  Propelled by the bullet, the cross shattered the thing’s skull, exiting from its temple in a cloud of blood, bone, and tissue.

  The wolf jerked explosively in his arms, then become still. Perusquia felt a warm liquid spread against his legs as its bowels and bladder relaxed.

  He rolled over and sat up. He stared numbly at the wolf, drained of all feeling except for a dull amazement that he had survived their encounter.

  He was still alive when material EMS technicians stabilized him. They loaded his physical body onto a stretcher and delivered him by ambulance to St. Vincent’s, where he received seventy-three stitches. Flo Salisbury, heavily sedated, was in the next bed. A huge swaddle of bandages hid her reattached fingers. She had even more tubes in her than Perusquia.

  Rashid was dead. Hennessy was dead. Sergeant Floyd was expected to recover in a couple of months.

  The name of the wolf was Charles Turner. He was single, thirty-three years old, and had lived on West 10th Street. He had worked for the same company since college as a data administrator. He possessed more acquaintances than friends and no family. By all accounts Turner was an unassuming man with an unremarkable life. Nowhere in his personal history was there any indication of the wolf that had gestated within him.

  In death he retained the semblance of the beast.

  Perusquia jacked into the Net from the hospital bed, leaving the aches and hurts of his recuperating flesh behind, pausing momentarily to delete a few kilos and to put on his gray pin-stripe suit and the crucifix. Two giant steps took him to the station.

  The SIIU was meeting as usual in the Sixth Precinct detective offices despite the grumbling of the local operatives. Two new faces, temporarily on loan from downtown, brought the unit up to strength. Perusquia stood before them, scale models of Turner, as both a wolf and as a man, floating in a window behind him.

  “Analysis has supported my assumptions,” he said, looking from one to the other of his squad. “Application of his will, in combination with his psychosis, allowed Turner unprecedented control over his personal physiology. The professors at John Jay, Columbia, and VNYU are going loco over the data. They believe we have a new kind of human on our hands, or at least a new kind of criminal. As far as I’m concerned, they can speculate all they want. What we have to do is figure out appropriate procedure to follow if we meet up with any more scumbags like him.”

  “Loo? I thought it was silver that did the trick?” Today neither Brown nor Navas wore mustaches but instead were clean-shaven and bald.

  Perusquia shook his head sadly. “I wish it were true,” he told Brown with a rueful smile. “But that’s only superstition. What happened was that I convinced Turner that silver was fatal to werewolves—to him. He believed it, and he died. Essentially, amigos, I think we can conclude that Charles Turner killed himself.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  T.J. MAY ~ has been writing professionally since 1998. He is an active member in the Horror Writers Association and the Director of the Events Committee for the New England Horror Writers. T.J. and his wife raise three sons in Massachusetts.

  DOUGLAS SMITH ~ has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies in twenty-four languages around the world, including Tesseracts6, Cicada, Weird Tales, The Third Alternative, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, InterZone, Baen's Universe, Amazing Stories, On Spec, and anthologies from Penguin/Roc, DAW, and others. I was a John W. Campbell Award finalist for best new writer and have twice won the Aurora Award for best short fiction by a Canadian. My first collection, Impossibilia, from PS Publishing was a finalist for the 2009 Aurora Award, and my second collection, Chimerascope, from ChiZine Publications was published in March 2010.

  ANNA TABORSKA ~ was born in London, England. She was first caught reading horror at age ten, when a teacher, impressed that Anna was sitting at her desk during lunch break and reading rather than playing with other children in the school playground, found that Anna’s science book was actually hiding Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs. Brainwashing at a posh girls’ school didn’t succeed in suppressing Anna’s horror obsession, and, alongside William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Anna avidly studied such classic authors as James Herbert and Stephen King. Following a misguided attempt to wean herself off horror by studying Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, Anna went on to gainful employment in public relations, journalism, advertising and the BBC, before throwing everything over to become a filmmaker and horror writer.

  DAVID BERNSTEIN ~ is a writer, mostly of horror and the plain ol' weird. His first novel, Amongst the Dead, is a zombie tale. His second novel, Tears of No Return, is an Urban Fantasy Horror tale. He also has novella entitled, Jane 76.

  DAVID WESLEY HILL ~ is an award-winning science fiction writer with more than thirty stories published in the U.S. and internationally. In 1997 he was presented with the Golden Bridge award at the International Conference on Science Fiction in Beijing, and in 1999 he placed second in the Writers of the Future contest. Most recently, in 2011 Mr. Hill was invited to his third residency at the Blue Mountain Center, a writers and artists retreat in the Adirondacks. Mr. Hill studied under Joseph Heller and Jack Cady and received a Masters degree in creative writing from the City University of New York, as well as the school's highest literary honor, the De Jur Award. At various times he has been an executive chef for major hotels, a management consultant, and a website designer.

  DAVID NIALL WILSON ~ has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. An ordained minister, once President of the Horror Writer’s Association and recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for poetry and short fiction, as well as being nominated for long fiction and non-fiction, his novels include Maelstrom, The Mote in Andrea’s Eye, Deep Blue, the Grails Covenant Trilogy, Star Trek Voyager: Chrysalis, Except You Go Through Shadow, This is My Blood, Ancient Eyes and the upcoming supernatural mystery novel Vintage Soul: Volume I of the DeChance Chronicles. The Stargate Atlantis novel Brimstone, written with Patricia Lee Macomber was published in 2010. He has over 150 short stories published in anthologies, magazines, and five collections, the most recent of which were Defining Moments, published in 2007 by WFC Award winning Sarob Press, and the currently available Ennui & Other States of Madness, from Dark Regions Press. His work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines. David lives and loves with Patricia Lee Macomber in the historic William R. White House in Hertford, NC with their children, Billy, Stephanie, and Katie, David’s mother Jean, and occasionally his boys Zach and Zane.

  JOHN EVERSON ~ John is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13th and Siren, and the short story collections Creeptych, Needles & Sins, Vigilantes of Love and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. He shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker courtesy of Charlee Jacob, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son Shaun likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife Geri is surprised to find him shuffling through more
public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he holds down a regular job at a medical association, records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs photo collage art book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of '70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle. For information on his fiction, art and music, visit John Everson: Dark Arts at www.JohnEverson.com.

  JOHN GROVER ~ John is the author of Feminine Wiles, Whispering Shadows, A Beckoning of Shadows, and Tandem of Terror. Residing in Boston, Massachusetts, he previously studied creative writing online at Boston’s Fisher College. He is also a member of the New England Horror Writers––a chapter of the Horror Writers Association. His short stories can be found in Northern Haunts (Shroud Publishing), Zombology (Library of the Living Dead), Alien Skin Magazine, Morpheus Tales, Wrong World, The Willows, and Flesh and Blood Magazine. For more information, feel free to visit his award-winning website, shadowtales.com.

  JONATHAN MABERRY ~ is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator and writing teacher/lecturer. His books have been sold to more than twenty countries. His novels include the Pine Deep Trilogy: Ghost Road Blues (Pinnacle books; winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in 2006), DEAD MAN'S SONG (2007) and Bad Moon Rising (2008); the Joe Ledger series of action thrillers from St. Martins Griffin: Patient Zero (2009, voted one Best Zombie Novel of 2009; winner of the Black Quill Award and a Bram Stoke Award finalist), The Dragon Factory (2010; now available), The King Of Plagues (2011), Assassin's Code (2012), Extinction Machine (2013); The Wolfman (NY Times bestseller from Tor and winner of the Scribe Award for Best Adaptation, based on the Universal Pictures film starring Benecio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Sir Anthony Hopkins); the Benny Imura series of Young Adult dystopian zombie thrillers from Simon & Schuster: Rot & Ruin (2010) and Dust & Decay (August 30, 2011), Flesh & Bone (2012) and Fire & Ash (2013); and the zombie thriller Dead Of Night (October 2011).