I shrugged. Maybe he was right. I don’t know, the way I lived my life was the way I thought life was meant to be lived, Poptart or not.
“You should name him,” Maddie said.
We stopped on the corner of the street. A low brick wall to the side of a building was our cover. Wasn’t very good cover, though. Still, I felt no eyes on us.
“Eh,” I said. “If I name him then it’ll be harder if we have to give him back.”
“I think Norman would be a good name, yeah?” Maddie said. “Like Norman Osbourne, the Green Goblin in Spider-Man.”
“I got the reference. He doesn’t really look like a Norman to me.”
Or a bad guy, I hope…
I leaned forward and peeked around the corner at the church. Still no sign of anyone besides the cars. That was good. Also a little scary.
“Let’s get closer,” Zack said.
I was apprehensive, but Zack didn’t wait for an answer. Dumb as he could be sometimes, I had to admit he was brave.
We crossed the street at a blur, looking more like hoodlums than BEAST-employed monster hunters.
Zack walked right up to the closest window and peered in. Maddie and I waited by the sidewalk.
“Nothing,” he said. “No one’s here.”
I didn’t believe it for a minute. Maddie didn’t, either.
“Let’s go around back,” I said. “Look at the cars. Maybe see if there’s a basement window. The file said they ‘congregated’ in the basement.”
We did. The wind started blowing hard, making a whistle through the trees. Jagged branches bounced and waved their skeletal hands at us.
I thought it was a perfect night to get murdered.
Around back, I started looking at the cars. They were the typical rust buckets you’d see in Woodhaven. I placed my hand on the hood of an old Honda Civic and it was still warm. Someone must’ve just gotten here before we did. The other engines weren’t. I told this to Zack and Maddie. They thought it was odd.
“Where’d everyone go?” I asked.
The back of the church offered us no answers, not even a visible basement window and I had already felt like we were pushing our luck. It was darker here, too. As I was walking along the building, ready to go back, I heard something.
An unmistakable sound.
A howl.
My heart felt flattened by a train, its spraying, bloody matter sent everywhere in my body but my chest.
“Did you guys hear that?” I asked.
Maddie and Zack had their faces pressed up against the windows of a Jeep and an old Ford pickup truck.
“Hear what?” Maddie asked.
I waved them over.
They came.
We strained our ears, listening for that sound again. It didn’t come. I decided that I’d probably imagined it. My mind was so amped up from what I’d already been through, that the slightest sound would go in my ear as one thing and reach my brain as the howling of a werewolf.
Then I was like Screw it. I knew what I heard. So I got on my hands and knees in the mulch and patted around the building.
“Dude, get up,” Zack said. “We’ll have to check somewhere—”
Then the howling came again. This time, loud enough for all of us to hear. We froze. The howl sounded like it belonged to a werewolf in great pain.
“There!” I said. “I’m not crazy!”
“Quiet,” Maddie hissed. She pointed behind me. “What’s that?”
I turned. There was a window with a bit of light streaming out from it, obscured by overgrown weeds. I guess my rooting around wasn’t completely useless after all.
Zack dropped to his belly, bumping me out of the way. We jostled for a moment, and as we did this, Maddie snaked her way between us and peered into the window.
“Guys,” she said. “You might wanna see this.”
8
Werewolves Anonymous
If I’m being honest, I didn’t really want to see it. But I did see it and there was no unseeing it.
Unfortunately.
A circle of metal chairs lined the room. There was maybe a dozen of them. I don’t know, I didn’t count. It really wasn’t the chairs I was focusing on, either, it was the men sitting in them.
They were all naked. They were all hairy, hairiest guys I’ve ever seen.
“Why are they…nude?” Maddie asked. It was an answer she already knew, but seeing it made you wonder. Changing into a werewolf was a lot less expensive when you weren’t constantly ripping your human clothes to shreds.
Zack scrambled to the glass and bumped me out of the way.
“A little too eager there, buddy,” I said.
“Oh, shit,” Zack said. “They are. They really are.”
“And you couldn’t take my word for it why?” Maddie said.
“They’re chained up, too. Chained to the chairs,” Zack said.
He was right. I’d noticed that, but really the nakedness was the real shocker. Thankfully, they were so hairy, most of the meatier parts were obscured.
“Well, look above us,” I said, pointing. The fat moon shined down.
“This is their rehab,” Maddie said. “Chain themselves to a chair and lock themselves in a holy basement and then they won’t be able to wreak havoc. Didn’t you learn that at the Academy?”
“I must’ve missed that day. Why haven’t they changed yet?” Zack asked.
“Yeah, I mean, the least they could do was transform before we peeped on them,” I said.
“Peeped?” Maddie repeated.
I shrugged.
“The night is young,” she said, answering Zack’s question.
“Do you see Buddy or Lucky?” Zack asked.
“I don’t particularly wanna study them that close,” I said. “But I didn’t see ‘em. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Well, look again!” Zack hissed.
I cringed at how loud he was. Then I figured the guys hadn’t changed yet so their human ears probably wouldn’t have picked up his whispers. At least, I hoped.
So back to the window I went. I scanned the group. They seemed to be in good spirits, smiling, laughing, chatting it up as if they weren’t sitting around chained to chairs with their balls dangling between their hairy legs. Then again, what did I know? Maybe there was something freeing about the whole ordeal. Maybe they felt this great sense of camaraderie, like a group of people at a book club or an AA meeting.
Werewolves Anonymous. Now, that was an odd thought.
One of them howled. It was a werewolf’s howl, but came from a man’s mouth. The change was imminent.
Then something else happened. One of the men lifted their legs up and began scratching themselves behind the ear like they were a…dog. Their leg moved fast, almost a blur. It was so odd yet so natural. I had to move away from the window but I could still see. Another man leaned over and licked his shoulder, saliva dampening the long hairs standing at attention. None of the other men took notice or cared. It was as casual a movement as sneezing or coughing and covering their mouths.
“Wait!” Maddie said. She fished the file out from her back pocket, opened it, and pulled a picture out of it. The moon was bright enough to illuminate this photo, and I saw what she saw as she held it by the glass. One of the men, though his profile was only to us, looked like the one they called Lucky. “That’s him, isn’t it?”
“Let me see.” Zack tore the picture away from Maddie, squinted. “Yeah, I don’t think so, Maddie.”
“Look at the brow and the jawline,” Maddie was saying.
“Too Neanderthal-ish. I don’t think that’s the one. We can wait until they change and maybe see if his lycan-form matches up with the picture,” Zack said.
As they debated whether or not one of the naked men was Lucky, I looked back through the window. I noticed none of them were moving much at all. No scratching, no licking, no tilting the head up and sniffing. They were stone still. Then, with my eyes glued to the weirdest basement party I�
�d ever laid eyes on, their flesh rippled. It was really noticeable on some and not as noticeable on the others, but was still happening. Like worms were squirming beneath their skin.
I’d known what was happening, of course. I’d seen it before. It was the transformation, the changing from human to werewolf. And no matter how many times I’d seen it, it was never something I enjoyed viewing.
I was glad I wasn’t in the room though, like I had been before in the Academy. In the room, you’d hear their flesh ripping and sprouting fur, the groaning of their skeletons as bones extended and changed, the piercing screams of agony; you could smell it, too, this terrible smell of death and wet dog. So I guess we had that going for us, not being in there.
The whole transformation thing was a collision of trains, a horrible accident you couldn’t look away from. And right now, I couldn’t. I did manage a squeaky voice that said, “Guys? The party’s starting.”
“Huh?” Zack said.
“They’re changing,” Maddie said.
“Oh, snap. Awesome! I’ve never seen one in person.” He must’ve missed that day at the Academy, too. Then he fell on the ground again and muscled me out of the way. As I tumbled from the window, I realized I’d been hypnotized, and now that I was no longer watching it, I’d felt liberated, clear-headed.
“You don’t want to,” I said. “Trust me.”
Zack didn’t listen, of course. I watched his face turn from curious and intrigued to utter terror and disgust. His skin glowed as white as the moon and he stopped breathing altogether.
From the basement, through the glass, a barrage of howls knifed through the air, loud enough, it seemed, for the glass to shatter. Of course, it didn’t. The only thing that shattered was Zack’s eyes. Witnessing the transformation from man to werewolf will do that to you.
“Told ya,” I said as Zack faced me looking more like a corpse than a man.
“Look! It is Lucky,” Maddie said. She’d seen this freak show many times before. It didn’t faze her one bit.
She was fortunate. I wished I had her iron stomach.
“My sophomore year of high school,” Zack was saying as Maddie now held up a transformed picture of Buddy, “I took this stupid class called Child Development and Family Planning, which was essentially just cooking. Why they mixed those two subjects into one course, I’ll never understand. Anyway, man, you took Child Dev the first half of the semester and Cooking the second half. I only signed up because of the cooking part. It seemed easy and like a bunch of chicks would be in it too—”
I motioned with my hand for him to get on with it. He had this way of dancing around the point like no one I’d ever met before.
“Guys, it’s him! Look at the slashes on his back. Four claw marks. Says here Buddy attacked him right before their pack disbanded.” Maddie said, utterly ignored by the both of us. She used words like that: disbanded. “That’s good. We know he’s here. Now we just wait until the sun comes up and he turns back.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s nice, Maddie,” Zack said. “So in the class we watched all these weird videos, stuff like how the sperm finds the egg, the forming of a baby’s brain and fingernails, how an ultrasound worked, useless stuff—to me, at least. I mostly zoned out. The first half was coming to an end and pretty soon I’d be in the next room with all the babes, baking cookies and cooking bacon.”
“Okay, man,” I said. “I feel like you were going somewhere with this.”
“I am, I am. Listen, dude. It’s called a monologue, okay? So, on the very last day, the teacher—whose name I don’t even remember—pops in this video. On the edge there’s a strip of white tape and one word written in Magic Marker on it. You know what that word was?”
A rhetorical question. I just raised my eyebrows until he answered it.
“Birth. That’s what it said. Birth. She pops it in and there’s this Asian woman with her legs spread on a hospital bed, surrounded by a bunch of blue masked people. The room looks steamy, like it smells like the Devil’s breath, and someone is saying ‘Push! Push’ and then a freakin’ head comes out of her vag, man. A freakin’ head. And her butthole is turning into this black hole and the whole class starts screaming and our eyes are getting sucked into that black hole. Then Dory Allen passes out in the back row. Jimmy Lampton grabs the trashcan and vomits. Me? I can’t even blink. The teacher is behind her desk, looking out at us with this smirk on her face, while this lady on the screen’s asshole tears and purple-gloved doctors are combing through her innards until they somehow find and pull another human being out of them. Then the tape cuts and a subtitle appears on the screen. C-Section. I got through it. Somehow. And I got to the second have of the semester, too, where we cooked. But I never ate anything. I don’t think I ate for a long time after that. And I still have nightmares about it.” Zack took a deep breath.
I said, “All right?”
“That’s what seeing these hairy men turn into hairy beasts is like,” Zack finished.
“I told you not to look,” I said. From the dirt, I rose, brushed off the knees of my pant legs.
Maddie closed the folder. “Zack,” she said, “birth is a miracle.”
Zack was looking back through the window. The glass actually had steamed up. I thought maybe it smelled like the Devil’s breath in that basement, too. “Yeah,” he said, “a miracle that I’ll make sure I never see again.”
“Such a guy,” Maddie said.
“Ready?” I asked.
She nodded.
“You seriously want to go talk to them?” Zack said.
“It’s our jobs,” I said.
I wanted to sit down and ask Lucky some questions. I’d had enough rolling around in the dirt tonight as it was. Plus, the goblin was waiting for us in the Cruiser, less time we spent here the better. I hadn’t come up with a name for him yet, but I’d work on it.
“Zack, c’mon,” I said.
He wasn’t coming.
I bent down and grabbed a handful of his jacket, pulled him up.
We walked around front where we would break into the church. How was that for a sin? I thought.
On our left were the stained glass windows and on our right was the encroaching forest. Blackness leaked toward us. Hungry.
Zack raised his arm, pointing at something, and as he did I saw every ounce of the good-natured fun so common in him wheeze to nothing.
His lips parted.
I saw what he pointed at.
No, I thought. This really sucks.
The sound that came from his parted lips was a scream.
From the blackness, a pair of dark yellow eyes bobbed. Coming closer. Closer.
Then the beast roared.
It seemed that Buddy Wolverton had found us.
9
A Dog Eat Dog World
Naturally, when I reached for the big gun on my hip, I fumbled it and the werewolf, already fast as hell to begin with, bounded across the parking lot, coming at us like a freight train.
I dove out of the way. Somersaulted into a pricker bush. It hurt. When I recovered, I’d noticed my gun was gone. I had lost it in the movement.
That was not good.
Zack didn’t hesitate. His shot, though, as usual, went awry. A flash of lightning cracked the sky above and the bullet hit nothing. Then the werewolf charged. Zack sidestepped, but the werewolf was a hulking mass of shaggy fur and corded muscle. His shoulder clipped Zack and sent him five feet in the air. He landed in the grass at the forest’s edge, thank God, otherwise I think he would’ve cracked his head open on the asphalt. He didn’t drop the revolver. Somehow. And he took aim again.
Buddy slashed at it.
His razor-sharp claws sheared the weapon in two clean pieces. The heavy muzzle hit the ground with a muffled thump.
“What the fuck?” Zack said, getting up, but I barely heard him as he stumbled back and tripped over a fallen branch. He took a seat on the floor with an equally muffled thump.
Opposite this scene, Maddie didn
’t fumble her gun, and she didn’t panic, either. She was more than a good shot—she was a great one—and had the best chance at blowing this creature’s brains out, but by the time she aimed down her sights and cocked the hammer back, the beast’s ears prickled at that slight sound. Damn that canine hearing. Damn it to hell. Buddy was already on her before she could pull the trigger.
He slashed with massive claws.
She jumped out of the way. The werewolf hit the building instead and left long, deep gashes in the brick. I was surprised that particular wall was still standing.
But Buddy didn’t stop there. He was determined to swipe Maddie’s head off. Spinning, he slashed at her with his other claw. A deep, rumbling growl escaped his throat, reminding me of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
This hit missed, too, but as Maddie dodged it she lost her balance. We were professionals (if you could call us that), yes, but there’s only so much training one can do to simulate a huge werewolf coming at you with dripping fangs. Especially one that had caught us off-guard. Plus, you know, we were rookies. Her gun fell out of her hand, winked with reflected moonlight, and tumbled into the brush.
The werewolf tipped its head and howled, like it was toying with us. That asshole.
The moon made no reply back, but the wolves in the church’s basement did. They howled like caged animals…which, I guess they were, even if voluntarily.
Then Buddy the beast was on all fours. He reminded me of a really hairy tank.
He could smell the blood, the kill. It was moving like a cat, though, all cocky and playful.
“Hey, dog breath!” Zack shouted.
I was standing on the concrete with my legs bent slightly at the knees, ready to spring at a moment’s notice, right by Zack.
The odds of me dodging a hungry, pissed-off werewolf twice in one night were pretty slim. Honestly, I wouldn’t bet on myself. So I knew I was playing with fire, but I’d rather it be me that died or got injured than Maddie or Zack. I was ready to dive in front of one of them, to take the hit instead. It was time to see if the vest Storm had given me would stand up to werewolf claws.
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