Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

  Savannah craned her head to see the book. “‘Bumptious’,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  She studied his smooth brow, his soft cheeks. “It means he’s rowdy. He likes to bump into things and cause trouble.”

  Jake grinned.

  She reached down, tickled his armpit. “Do we know anybody like that?”

  Jake squirmed, grinning widely now. “Short Pump.”

  “Not Short Pump,” she said, tickling with both hands now. “I’m talking about you.”

  Laughing, he wriggled to free himself. “I’m not bumptious!”

  “Yes, you are,” she said, laughing too.

  It ended with her relenting and hugging him to her. He pretended not to be able to breathe, but his struggles were feigned. When she finally drew back, he was staring up at her, his hair mussed and his eyes shining happily. “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know. Are you worried about staying with Aunt Barb?”

  “She’s nice. But when will you be back?”

  “You’ll be asleep by then,” she said, finger-combing his hair. “But I’ll be here when you wake up.” She leaned over to kiss him.

  “What if you aren’t?”

  Savannah tightened. She could see the incipient panic in his eyes. “Honey? What’s wrong?”

  He hesitated. “Is it true about the people dying?”

  Be calm, she told herself, though her heart was galloping. If you’re calm, he will be too.

  “Yes, honey. At the bonfire, people died.”

  He frowned. “I thought it was at the movies.”

  She swallowed, chiding herself for divulging too much. “Well, yes. There were…” She exhaled shuddering breath. “Everything’s fine now, honey, so we don’t need to worry—”

  “Then why aren’t we staying at our house?”

  Would you quit being so perceptive? she wanted to ask. She riffled through a half-dozen responses, but they each boiled down to two unhelpful options: either tell the truth and scare the hell out of him or lie to him and claim that nothing was wrong.

  “Honey,” she said, taking his hand. “You’re safe. That’s all you need to know.”

  Jake watched her with large eyes. She thought of his father, wondered for the thousandth time why she’d never told him he was Jake’s dad.

  “And you’ll come back?” he asked.

  “I promise.”

  She kissed his head and left the room.

  Her tears didn’t come until they were on the way to Beach Land.

  Barb poured her coffee and wondered what kind of person Dave Garner was. Or rather, the kind of person he’d been. She’d never studied shape-shifting before—she’d always been more of a nonfiction, biography type of reader—but she wondered if he’d been a decent person before the change. He obviously loved his daughter, so there was that. And he was heartbroken enough to go on this vengeful rampage. Barb couldn’t respect a cold-blooded killer, but she did understand how much a heart could hurt. Dave Garner had obviously known pain. Still did, or he’d have given up his mission by now.

  Barb walked into the living room and there was Garner, sitting on the couch. She wasn’t a person who startled easily, but she came very close to dropping her coffee mug. As it was, the mug joggled slightly in her grip, the steaming hot liquid searing her knuckles. But she didn’t react. At least not much. Her lips formed a tight line and her fingers clenched the ceramic handle hard enough to crush it to powder, but she didn’t cry out and she didn’t show Garner how much the burn was hurting her.

  He still seemed to pick up on her thoughts. He was leaning back on the couch, a knowing grin on his face. She didn’t know what she expected from Garner, but what she didn’t expect was this:

  In almost every respect, he looked normal. Khaki pants, short-sleeved white button-down shirt, brown loafers with light tan socks and the merest bit of pale shin showing between the cuffs of his pants and his socks. Interestingly enough, Garner’s legs appeared hairless.

  But his face…that’s what was bothering her. It appeared a bit formless. Hearing Duane tell it, she’d expected sharkish white teeth, protuberant cheekbones, a harsh, saturnine brow. But Garner featured none of those things. In fact, other than his pale blue eyes, Garner’s face bore no distinguishing characteristics at all. He wasn’t fat exactly—Barb was carrying as much weight as he was—but he was an imposing presence, even lounging there on the sofa.

  To collect her thoughts and give her racing heartbeat a chance to decelerate, she placed the coffee on one of the bookcase shelves and took her time about it. Breathe, she told herself. Remember to breathe. Assess the situation.

  Her back to him, Barb did.

  The couch was about halfway between where she stood and her bedroom door. Which meant he could get to Jake faster than she could. He could also bar her route to the kitchen, where there were knives; her bedroom, where there were guns; or the driveway, where her Subaru Outback was parked.

  In short, the situation looked bleak.

  She knew she had to turn around, had to face him again, because not to do so was to admit that she was frightened of him, and that was tactical suicide. Garner’s grin had communicated how accustomed he was to intimidating people, how much he reveled in their terror.

  So turn around, she told herself. Turn around and show him you’re not afraid.

  She faced him and saw how he’d changed and she was very afraid indeed.

  The alterations were subtle. So subtle she supposed that many observers would have missed them. But not Barb. There was hair on his legs now. Not a lot, just enough of it to suggest his bestial self. And his features were sharper. Almost aquiline.

  She knew he was waiting for her to speak, but she had no idea what to say. He’d broken into her house. He’d surprised the hell out of her, and he knew it. She couldn’t very well demand he leave because such a demand would be met with derision. Nor would threatening him help her situation. Or Jake’s.

  Garner finally spoke. “You’re the one they chose.”

  There was no point pretending she didn’t understand his meaning. “Savannah knows I care about her boy.”

  Garner spread his arms on the couch back, as though cuddling a pair of invisible concubines. “You’d know all about that? Having a child?”

  “I won’t let anything happen to Jake.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Oh, you won’t?” He nodded, studying the darkened windows. “Well, sometimes we can’t control what happens to our children, can we?”

  “You won’t get sympathy from me,” she said.

  He glanced at her, ran his tongue around his mouth. “Is that right? I suppose you don’t think losing a child is much of a tragedy.”

  Barb felt the heat build at the base of her neck, forced herself to let it go. “You killed how many people at that bonfire, Garner? Seven? That’s fourteen parents who’ll never see their children again.”

  Garner looked away. “I didn’t start this.”

  “No, a reckless driver started it. He was a screwup, and he took your daughter from you, and you killed him for it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then you went about ten steps further and slaughtered innocent people.” She noticed his forearms, which were hairier now. And the hue of his skin, which had darkened a tick. “You maybe even spread whatever the hell it is you have.”

  He chuckled, a jagged, deranged sound. “We are a highly developed species. You make it sound like a disease.”

  “Sadism is a disease.”

  He looked at her with renewed interest. “You think so?”

  “You’re a jackal.”

  “Why not appeal to my better nature? Maybe I’ll spare you if I see the error of my ways.”

  “I don’t need spared.”

  Garner threw b
ack his head and laughed. When he regarded her again, he was wiping a tear from his eye. “You really think you’re going to survive the next five minutes? I crushed your cell phone and severed the landline. No one’s coming to help you.”

  Barb didn’t want to break eye contact, so she riffled through snapshots of this room in her mind. Behind her was the bookcase. If she were a packrat or maybe more kitschy, like her customers, there’d have been two dozen pieces of bric-a-brac on the shelves. Plates she could break into shards, pewter statues with which she could brain Garner. Ceramic sculptures of birds she could hurl at his grinning face. But Barb hated having the spines of her books covered up by useless junk and therefore kept the shelves clear. She could select one of her heaviest tomes—the family Bible she’d inherited from her grandma maybe; that thing weighed at least ten pounds—and try to bludgeon him with it, but that would mean getting close to him, and close to him was the last place she wanted to be.

  Garner’s smile grew triumphant. “It seems you’ve run out of words.”

  Barb said nothing, shifted her inner eye to what lay to her right. That was where the TV was. No hope there, unless she planned to hoist the flat screen off the wall, trudge over to where he sat and drop the damned thing on his head. There was a potted plant—a miniature palm tree—but that was too heavy. Maybe she could grasp the tree by the trunk and clobber him with the root ball. Or maybe she could grow antlers and gore him to death.

  Shit.

  “They’re coming, you know.”

  Barb’s attention snapped back to Garner. “Who’s coming?”

  “The Three,” he said.

  “That some sort of boy band?”

  “I wouldn’t joke about them.”

  “Why not?” she asked, glancing to her left. There were some old family pictures on the wall. The largest one, taken when she was an infant, featured her whole family.

  “Because,” he said, “the Three have been here longer than any of us. And they are vengeful beyond anyone’s worst nightmares.”

  “So you guys kill,” she said. “And you kill some more. Sounds like a highly developed species to me.”

  “I’d expect someone like you to scoff. Fallow and plagued with a masculine body. I’ll bet the other kids made fun of you on the playground, didn’t they?”

  “They tried.”

  “We enjoy the taste of children,” he said.

  That stopped her. She didn’t want to say it, but it came out anyway. “You’re a vile excuse for a man.”

  “I’m not a man, Miss Callahan. Not anymore. And I do see the irony in it, my taste for young flesh. But there’s something about its purity that appeals to the refined palate.”

  “How many kids have you killed?” she asked, her voice going hoarse. Anger was good, Barb decided. Anger might endow her with courage, and she needed courage right now. Anything to chip away at the mind-freezing fear. “How many children have suffered because of you, you ugly cocksucker?”

  “Many,” Garner answered. “Before my Cynthia was born, I killed indiscriminately. It necessitated more than one relocation for our little family. After Cynthia was taken from me, I killed her mother in a rage. It was her fault Cynthia was out driving that night. But that’s because my wife was an idiot. You see, Cynthia and her mother weren’t lycanthropes. My son was, though I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your family.”

  “Then why don’t we bring this to a conclusion?”

  “Fine with me.”

  Barb seized her hardback copy of The Brothers Karamazov and hurled it at the family picture. The spine nailed it dead center, the glass splintered.

  Garner launched himself off the couch.

  If Barb hadn’t moved when she did, Garner would’ve crushed her against the bookcase. But she was already halfway to the broken glass when Garner slammed into the bookcase and sent three dozen books tumbling to the floor. The whole case would’ve overturned on top of Garner if she hadn’t bolted it to the wall as a safety measure in case any little kids tried to climb up onto it. That’s what she got for being so safety conscious.

  Barb reached the spill of glass shards. Behind her, she saw with a fleeting backward glance, Garner was snarling and scrambling around to face her. Bastard had disarranged half the books on her case. He had also altered appearance dramatically. She knew exactly what a shape-shifter was, had in theory accepted all Short Pump and Savannah had told her. But actually seeing Garner transform was a different matter entirely. As her fingers closed around a long, thin shard of glass, Barb realized she was more frightened than she’d ever been in her life.

  No time to stall. Barb spun, crouched with the blade pointed up. Garner was coming at her. He was a good seven feet tall now, his eyes no longer pale blue but an incandescent yellow. His maw was wide open and crammed with teeth as sharp as rapiers. His claws were three inches long. Yellow, ancient-looking. They were reaching back to swipe at her.

  Barb couldn’t allow him to get close. He was only six feet away now, and if he got any nearer, he’d simply shred her like pulled pork. The shard of glass felt absurd in her hand, and she was dripping blood from grasping the sharp edge. She needed a gun, but the guns were in the bedroom with Jake, locked in a safe at the rear of her closet, and this wasn’t how she’d imagined it. Garner had taken her by surprise in her own home, and she was going to die if something didn’t change. She was going to—

  “Aunt Barb?” a voice asked.

  Barb turned and saw Jake in the doorway of her bedroom.

  Four feet from her, the Garner-thing halted, glanced at Jake. Its canine features attenuated in a look of hideous longing.

  Barb slashed at its eyes.

  The shard was thick, so rather than snapping in half, the wickedly sharp edge split the leathery skin at the Garner-thing’s temple, sheared right through his eyeball, and slit deeply into the bridge of his snout.

  The Garner-thing bellowed.

  “Get under the bed, Jake!” she shouted, and made to dash past the bellowing beast. But a hairy arm flashed out, its paw smashing into the side of her head and propelling her toward the tall casement window.

  Barb was dazed, but not too dazed to notice how Jake was still standing there in his red Spiderman pajamas, how Garner was recovering from the shock of being blinded in one eye. Though hidden from her view, she could tell by the Garner-thing’s posture how fixated it was on Jake. In pain, yes, but still intent on tasting of the little boy’s flesh.

  Barb yelled, “Your daughter deserved to die!”

  The werewolf turned slowly toward her, a look of fathomless loathing on its blood-drenched face.

  “You failed!” she shouted. “It’s your fault she’s dead!”

  The werewolf sprang at her. Barb stretched out her arms, as if accepting the beast in a lover’s embrace, and as the creature’s incredible weight crashed against her, she pivoted, heaving the beast over her massive hip and allowing herself to fly forward with its momentum. Its claws sank into her sides, its teeth into her shoulder. But then they hit the casement window together, their combined weight shattering the glass and casting them in a tangled mass toward the mulch bed outside her house. Barb felt glass nicking her face, her hands, but the werewolf absorbed the worst of it. It was squalling, the glass having no doubt lacerated its back in a dozen places. They hit the ground, and Barb immediately shoved away from the creature. She thought she’d break its death grip on her, and for a moment she did. Barb had just landed in the dewy grass and begun to gain her feet when a taloned hand lashed out, swiped at her lower leg. White-hot agony blazed in her calf muscle, and the leg threatened to buckle. Barb shifted her weight to her good leg and lurched forward. She wanted to either beat the werewolf to the Outback or return to the house, where she might be able to hide Jake and retrieve her guns. But a whir of movement behind her told her she’d nev
er be able to outrun the beast, especially not with a bum leg. She glanced around frantically, realizing she hadn’t really improved their situation at all, had only made it easier for the beast to kill her.

  She almost stumbled over the shepherd’s hook. Four-and-a-half feet tall, the black steel rod ordinarily supported a hanging plant this time of year. But she’d been busy lately, and there was nothing hanging there now. Barb jerked up on the rod, heard the chuff of the werewolf’s breath behind her. The steel hook jerked loose.

  She pivoted and brought the shepherd’s hook around as hard as she could. It was a desperate move—if the creature were too far away or right on top of her, the blow would accomplish nothing—but for the first time since Garner sullied her house with his presence, luck was with her. The curved bar bashed the creature on the side of the head with a dull, meaty crunch.

  The werewolf went down.

  Barb didn’t hesitate. She straddled its muscled body and drove the double tines of the steel base straight into its chest. The tines only sank in about three inches, but werewolf or not, double stab wounds to the chest would have an effect.

  The werewolf was flailing on the ground beneath her. Its clawed fingers encountered the shepherd’s hook, but before it could dislodge it, Barb raised a foot and stood on the base’s crossbar. The tines sank in another inch. The werewolf roared.

  As she shoved the tines in deeper, she considered making a dash for her bedroom to fetch her shotgun. But that would draw the werewolf inside, and her overpowering instinct was to get the creature as far away from Jake as possible.

  Barb sensed Jake watching her from the shattered living room window. “Get back in the bedroom,” she shouted, “or I’ll tell your mom you were a bad listener!”

  Jake didn’t move.

  Smart kid, she decided as she set off toward her Outback. He knows an empty threat when he hears it.

  Barb’s keys weren’t in the ignition, but she kept a spare under the floor mat. She climbed into the car, cringing at the pain in her flayed calf. She bent, worked her fingers under the rubber floor mat, which was not easy in the slightest since her feet were in the way, and more importantly, her bleeding calf was in the way, not to mention how violently her fingers were shaking.