by T L Barrett
***
I drove by Gracie’s house. Seeing that she was not home, I drove up her driveway. I figured, if she arrived I could say that I was turning around. I took a few deep breaths and got out of the car. I saw something white and scattered just beyond the far corner of her little ranch house. I walked over quickly and saw that Gracie’s chicken coup had been raided. Bits of chicken lay all about. A chicken head looked up at me from the grass, its open eye an accusatory marble. I got back to the car in a hurry and drove home.
I spent the rest of that day at the shooting range.
***
On the first night of the full moon, I came home to Marcy sobbing in our dark bedroom. I went in to see what was wrong. She told me to go away. She didn’t want me to come in.
“I need to know what is wrong,” I told her.
“I don’t want you to see me like this,” Marcy blubbered. I walked over to the bedside table and turned on a lamp. In the soft light I could see Marcy weeping into her hands. Above her hands, her scalp had shed most of her hair.
“When she looked up at me, I nearly jumped. Her face was strange and nearly porcine.
“I think this is a reaction to the inoculation,” she said. “I look horrible!”
“No,” I lied. “It’s probably just temporary,” I amended.
“It better be! I should have listened to you!” She wailed. I didn’t gain any satisfaction hearing her say that. Marcy opened up her arms for me to comfort her. I went after a moment’s hesitation. She wrapped her beefy arms around me, and I let her blubber into my neck. I hated myself for thinking it, but I would have given my left arm not to have had to hold her like that. She smelled, different, meaty.
I gave her some Benadryl and she eventually snored so loud it nearly shook the window casings. I went to the study and looked up Kripke and his miraculous discovery. I got an image of him, and I understood right away.
Kripke was a balding fat, nerd of a man. He had a stubby upturned nose, like that of a pig. He looked like someone who would snort when he laughed, someone who couldn’t bear to have his picture taken. Kripke had stripped the virus of its lupine genes, and heroically injected himself with the weakened version of the virus. He did not however create an antibody that destroyed the thing. He gave the virus a new set of genes to carry forth into the world. Kripke had been able to fulfill two lonely wishes in one squirt. He had never, I imagined, been on a date. His chances of finding someone willing to reproduce with him were zilch. Now he had spread his genes across the continent. And he had been able to heroically leave the world behind, the world that had always snickered at and rejected him.
***
The change was temporary. As the moon waned, Marcy and her friends began to look more like their old selves. They still snorted, however, and began to talk about the oddest things. I came home to find them in the kitchen one day arguing about the latest theories in astrophysics. I stood their grinning at them, thinking how hard they had to work to put on this little charade. After a while they turned to give me stares through their glasses. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about that. The optometrists made a killing that year.
***
I dreamed that pigs in Nazi uniforms showed up at the house and told me I had to get an injection. I tried to say something stately, like I imagine Jean-Luc Picard might say, but I must have been drunk in the dream, because I just ended up mumbling at them. They grabbed me and a pig doctor advanced toward me with the needle dripping with genetic poison.
“One of us!” the pig-Nazis squealed in unison. “Make him into one of us!”
***
Month 3:
If May had been hot, July was a scorcher. I was mowing my lawn with my shirt off, sweating buckets. A group of kids drove by and slowed as they passed. All of them were balding, and fat. They looked out at me with disdain from behind their bottle thick glasses.
I gave them the finger.
***
I no longer recognized television. There were a lot of documentaries and how-to shows. I had a hard time recognizing the news anchors. They spoke to lots of experts who gave advice on monthly cirrhosis and bunions. The audience snorted when the still remarkably pretty, pig-nosed co-anchor was fitted with a sleep device to cut down on snoring and apnea.
***
A group of middle-aged fat men showed up at my house on the first night of the full moon. They eyed me suspiciously through the screen door. A lot of animals had disappeared, they said. A child had spotted a hairy individual running across Old County Road the night before. Had I seen anything unusual?
“No, I haven’t, gentlemen,” I said. I was trembling through the entire exchange.
“You know there’s still plenty of the Kripke shot available at the hospital in town,” one of the men offered, while the others glared. “They keep a clinic open from nine to five.”
“Thanks, I’ll take that under advisement,” I told them and assured them that I hadn’t seen anything unusual. I wasn’t about to hand over Gracie to these monsters. When they left, I had to sit down, I was trembling so badly.
***
Later that night, a creature killed a deer in our back yard. The deer screamed once before it died. For a moment I thought that a child was being murdered. A great growling commenced shortly after, and then the cracking of bones and the wet sounds of hungry slaughter.
“Get up, Ian!” Marcy hissed at me. “Get your gun. Kill that thing!” she said.
“Be silent!” I said. I sat then in the stench of my own sweaty fear and the meaty smell of Marcy mixed with skin cream lotion.
That next morning, Marcy insisted that we should tell someone about the event.
“It was coyotes. That’s it. Do you understand? Coyotes,” I said, glaring at the strange hulk of a bald woman.
***
That evening, Marcy held a full moon get together. Six fat bald women arrived with steaming casserole dishes for a pot luck dinner. All of them had brought a sauerkraut dish, but they all seemed to love the stuff, so nobody complained.
After dinner they fell to repeating to each other the entirety of Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail. Then, the real fun began: Sudoku. The ladies solved furiously in tournaments of math glory.
I went into the bedroom and got out my gun with the silver bullets. I loaded the thing and walked back out into the living room. I stood there watching the fat bald monster ladies snorting with amusement and scratching at their scabby arms. I felt the gun in my hand, and was surprised at how right this gun felt.
I will never put this gun down again, I thought. To die with this gun in my hand, would be a good thing. A glorious thing.
One after another, the ladies looked up at me and stared, their milky eyes roaming from the gun in my hand to my set, unshaven face.
“What are you doing with a gun, Ian?” Deb asked suspiciously.
“I’m going hunting, Deb,” I said.
“That’s right. We had a horrible time sleeping last night because of the coyotes,” Marcy said and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
I looked at them once more, feeling the weight of the gun in my hand like a need. Then I stalked across the floor and went out the door into the soft summer night.
“Are you sure they were coyotes, Marcy?” I heard Audrey ask as I made my way across the side lawn. I walked straight through the trees that separated our lot with Gracie’s.
The moon was just coming up over the hills when I turned to Gracie’s door and knocked. There was no answer, so I tried the door knob. It was not locked, so I entered.
I walked through the darkened kitchen. From the living room I could hear whale song and soft relaxing sounds from a stereo speaker. Incense filled my nostrils.
I turned into soft lamp light, and my eyes fell on Gracie as she sat on a sofa in her cozy little living room. She was bathed in sweat. Long strands of dark hair ran down the sides of her face. Her mouth opened in a pant and I saw the teeth there were sharp against her lip. Her eye
s went from my face to the gun in my hand.
“I thought you knew,” she panted.
“How long have you been like this?” I asked, no longer trusting the weight of the gun in my hands.
“Almost exactly three months, I guess. I went out for a walk in the woods. My sister is always begging me not to do things like that. I guess I shouldn’t have. A man came out of the trees and onto the trail ahead of me. He was… infected.” The women blinked her eyes, and I could see she was fighting the transformation. I could feel her strength in the room around her.
“I think he could have killed me, but he was enjoying the chase. I got to my shed and I had a gun with silver in it. My brother-in-law had insisted on me keeping it. Thank God I had refused to keep the thing in my house. The creature bit my left arm, and I shot him with a silver bullet right in the chest. It was horrible,” Gracie panted, and I wanted to run from the house as her nose began to darken.
“That’s the man that you buried out back?” I asked.
“Yes. Did you know that they- we change back into our old selves after we die? I thought I had murdered a man. Soon, I wondered if I should murder myself.” Suddenly she stopped and looked up at me with unearthly eyes. “You’ve known for a long time, since the beginning. You’ve never told anyone about me. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t kill myself,” she said. “Maybe I believed that I could beat it, keep it under control. Well, now I can stop. I’m glad it’s you that came. I always liked you. You are a sweet man. I know this can’t be easy for you.”
“How many people have you murdered?” I asked; I figured it would be an important fact to give the police after all this was said and done.
“None,” she said simply. “I’ve killed plenty of animals. They run from me, and it is such a delight to chase, you see.” I knew she spoke the truth. This woman was not capable of killing humans for sport or food. Even now, as her features continued to slide into the bestial, a calm nobility and tranquility flowed from her, however wild and alien.
I sat down in a chair across the room from her.
“Aren’t you going to shoot me?” she asked.
“No, I’m not. Are you going to eat me?” I asked in return.
“No, I would never harm a hair on your head,” she said. I put the gun on the side table and stood up.
“I know, Gracie,” I said. “I trust you.”
She stood as well, but gave no answer. Perhaps, her transformation was so progressed that she could not. I read enough in her eyes, though. There I found the thing that I had been missing in my life of late.
I took a step forward and put my hands on her hairy shoulders. Slowly I pushed the straps to her summer dress off her shoulders and let the dress slip to the floor.
She collapsed against me and wept. I held her for a long time, and then I scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom.
In the end, she let out a little strangled howl and bit down on my shoulder.
***
I was surprised at how short a time it was before I was lying transformed in her arms under the light of the full moon through her bedroom window. We growled soft, wild messages to each other.
In the early morning dark we slipped out to the woods and climbed to high ground. I knew when we got to Canada we would find a safe secluded spot deep in the pine woods. There, we would someday start a little pack of our own. I dreamed these wild dreams as we paced together through the early morning dark.
We reveled in each other’s company, but we did not stop to fawn over each other too much. We had many miles to go before dawn.
The Way of Nature
Ben Higginson came in from hunting empty-handed only to be greeted by bad news at the door. Abby had her coat on and that look upon her face which told him he wasn’t going to get his consolation beer quite yet.
“Out with it, woman, what did the boy do, or was it the girl this time?”
“It was Cody, but it wasn’t his fault. Beau practically knocked him off his feet to get out the door.”
“Oh, you have to be kidding me! If I’ve told those kids a thousand times-”
“Ben, I let Beau out of the kennel. I felt bad for him being locked up all that time,” Abby wrung her hands. That drove Ben crazy; he felt like he was talking to her mother when she did that.
“Well, where’s Cody? He can damned well get his ass out here and look for the dog as well as I can.”
“He’s on the computer, Ben. He’s got homework to do, and it was trouble enough getting Kayla to give it up for him to use it. You know how she’s been lately. Besides, I don’t like him going far from the house during hunting season.” Ben sighed and nodded. “I’ll go with you, okay.” Abby backed him onto the porch. Ben glared at her, holding his rifle between them. Abby’s breath steamed up around her nose and plump cheeks. The Vermont November had been as cold as an ice box so far, but no snow to show for it. Snow would have made hunting a hell of a lot easier.
Ben looked right down the road a quarter mile to the next house. He doubted their black lab had gone toward Mrs. Pothier’s house. Turning left, he could just make out the drive to the housing development. Ben cupped his hands and called to the dog in that direction.
Nothing.
“He probably headed to the back woods, looking for you, Ben. He used to love it when you’d take him along,” Abby said.
“I can’t take him along anymore, Abby. He wouldn’t listen. Somebody’d shoot him for deer chasing,” Ben grumbled, but stalked off the porch and headed around their pre-fabricated ranch house.
Abby followed Ben across the frosted back field. Usually Ben had kept this mowed religiously, but this year he had given up on account of the kids never seemed to want to go outside anymore, so Ben didn’t really see the point. In the middle of the field, Ben called out again.
Beau’s familiar bark came from the woods.
“Come on, Beau! Come inside, doggy!” Abby screeched.
The dog screamed out in awful agony. There was a pause of a few beats. Beau let out one strangled yelp, and then dropped into silence.
“Jesus, Ben!” Abby breathed, she started to jog past him. Ben grabbed Abby’s arm.
“Hold on, you don’t know what’s got him. I’ve seen catamount tracks up over that ridge,” Ben said.
“Well, you’ve got your gun, don’t you? You’ve got to save him, Ben!” Abby tore her arm out of his grasp and scurried on. Ben swore and trotted to keep up.
They ran into the wide logging trail that Ben had used for the past four years. Ben squinted, trying to force his eyes to adjust to the gloom that had settled in early here.
“Beau!” Abby called. Ben grabbed her arm again. Abby struggled for a second, but then saw what had washed the color from her husband’s face.
Forty feet or so ahead of them stood the lean-to that Ben used to store the surplus cords of wood he had cut down and set aside in anticipation for another long Vermont winter. On a big stump of cut wood Ben used for splitting, the head of their beloved Beauregard lay. The neck showed a ragged mess where the head had been torn from the body. The remains of the body and legs lay scattered about the dead leaves and wood shavings.
“Oh, my God!” Abby gasped and jumped into her husband. Her ever-increasing derriere nearly knocked Ben over. “Oh, Beau!”
Ben took a couple of creeping steps forward and brought the gun to bear. They stood this way for a long moment, breathing but not moving, and scanned the area for any movement or signs.
“What could have done such a thing?” Abby asked.
“I did, Mrs. Higginson!” a terrible voice, deep as a gravel pit, spoke up from the direction of the shadowed lean-to.
A shadow stepped out of the gloom and walked up to stand beside the carnage. At first, Ben took him for a man wearing dark hunting clothes, so well did he blend in to the background. Then the shadow took another step closer, and Ben saw the thing for what it was: some shade from a n
ightmare, vaguely resembling a man in form, but was, for all purposes, a stretched shadow, a shadow with substance.
Ben felt his bowels loosen.
“I killed your doggy, Mrs. Higginson, or can I call you Abigail?” the shadow asked. “Abby? How about Sweet Tits?” The thing let out an awful chuckle which made both of the Higginson’s take a step backward. Ben swallowed and raised the barrel of his 30.06 to point at the shadow.