Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

  No!

  Glenn turned away. He had to get away from the women, had to escape this overcrowded bar. If he didn’t pass out soon he’d lose control.

  “Look,” Joyce said.

  Snapped back to his senses, Glenn looked.

  The bathroom door was opening, the blond going in.

  “Now what the hell is that lady doing?” Billy asked. But rather than concern or wonderment in his tone, Glenn detected nothing but jealousy. “You don’t suppose she likes Weezer, do you?”

  Weezer opened the door not because he knew who was knocking but because he’d resolved to leave the Roof. He should have known it was too good to last. For the first time in his life he’d felt strong, in control.

  So what if he’d taken a few lives? Were the lives taken really such catastrophic losses anyway? Mya and Rebecca were a couple of sluts no one outside their own families would mourn.

  Jessica Clinton and her kids? Jessica deserved worse than she got, the stupid cunt. She’d had as much to do with Weezer’s miserable adulthood as anybody, save Weezer’s own folks. If Weezer could, he’d kill her again, only this time, he’d devour her children in front of her, see how she liked that.

  He felt little compunction about killing the Clinton children. They were too young to know was happening anyway.

  All these thoughts unfurled in his mind as he stood perched over the sink and staring at the mirrorless tile wall. It was odd that most men’s rooms in bars didn’t have mirrors. Short Pump had once explained how bar owners refrained from mounting them because of men’s tendencies to punch mirrors when they were inebriated. According to Short Pump, severely drunk men were sometimes infuriated by the sight of their own reflections, so placing a mirror in a men’s room was inviting trouble. Previously, Weezer had believed that theory to be one hundred percent bogus, but now…yeah, he could see it. He was thankful he couldn’t gaze into his own lost eyes.

  The knocking on the door persisted.

  Weezer splashed some water on his face and didn’t bother to towel off. He slid aside the bolt and pulled opened the door.

  And was driven back by a tall, voluptuous blond in a yellow halter top. She thrust him backward like he was made of paper, and before his shoulders collided with the metal stall divider, she swung shut the door. He rebounded off the divider and fell against her, the entire room so small the two of them were practically connected already. She didn’t seem fazed by the way his face mashed between her breasts, nor did she seem to exert any energy as she supported his weight. In the moments before he regained his balance, he heard the sliding door lock snick shut again, inhaled the exhilarating perfume of her skin. There was something maddeningly familiar about the scent, something that carved away at his self-possession. He recognized the stirrings within as the onset of the transformation, but before he could judge whether this was a good thing or a hideous thing, she righted him with an effortless nudge and said, “Down.”

  Weezer swayed on his feet, unable to process the word. He wasn’t drunk, not really, and he’d considered himself capable of driving his truck home without incident. But now, in the presence of this goddess, he was not only struck mute and dizzy—he was so perplexed by the situation that his synapses refused to fire.

  Down, she’d said.

  Down. Now how, out of the million ways he could interpret that, could he possibly discern her meaning? He was opening his mouth to ask her when her arm blurred and her fingers flashed by and the tug on his cheek told him he’d been grazed. But the whole side of his face began to burn because she’d torn his cheek off, the entire flap of skin hinging open and the blood spraying everywhere.

  “Down,” the goddess repeated.

  Through a glaze of shock and pain, Weezer tried to meet her unblinking stare, but one moment her eyes looked blue and another yellow and then a strobing mélange of colors, Jesus, like a psychedelic music video where the spiraling shapes made you feel like you were spinning down a bottomless vortex, and because he couldn’t face those eyes anymore, would rather die than gaze into their vertiginous depths, he sank to his knees, his new khaki trousers instantly soaked in his own blood. And maybe it was instinct that guided him lower, his palms squelching on the bloody floor, but at some point she’d removed her sandal and proffered her left foot, and the toes were long and delectable, and though Weezer had never been a foot man, had only heard of such fetishes on porn sites, he needed to fit his mouth over her toes, needed to let his tongue slick over them. He licked the goddess’s little toe, forced his tongue into the cleft beside it, and as he did he felt her hot flesh respond. He was responding too, God yes, and he began lapping at her middle toe, teasing it the same way he’d teased Jessica Clinton’s clitoris those many years ago.

  But he knew this wasn’t a fleeting thrill. The goddess would not abandon him the way that bitch Jessica had. Jessica was dead, her kids were dead, her asshole husband was a pile of ashes. And the goddess was getting off on it as much as he was, and Weezer found the fourth toe, the longest, and he began sucking on it, not like an infant with its pacifier, but like a man—no, greater than that. An immortal! And as he graduated to her big toe, his tongue swirling and flicking over its broad, resilient surface, he understood what this was about, what this ceremony heralded. A new life. A new existence. He’d merely glimpsed the pleasures his recent gift promised. Desire and joy and lust and aggression like he’d never known coursed through his veins, brought forth the shimmering, transcendent being from within its pitiful human shell. Weezer growled and huffed as he cleaned the goddess’s foot, his scrawny shoulders swelling, the matchstick arms becoming brawny. Weezer lapped at the goddess’s heel, luxuriated in the removal of the grime. His hypersensitive tongue reveled in the dirt, the grains of sand. His frenetic, dripping tongue gave gladly to the goddess, purified her of man’s taint.

  As he neared his climax, he was seized by the goddess, who’d become while he was purifying her, who was taller and broader than he was, Christ, nearly nine feet tall and corded with muscles that jittered and pulsed with preternatural anticipation. And golden-haired too, almost as blond as she’d been in human form.

  Weezer transformed.

  “Take me first,” the goddess demanded, and Weezer moved forward knowing what the last word meant. This was merely prelude. This was but a foretaste.

  He’d begun to enter her when she shoved him back. Despite his hulking body, she handled him like a child. He crashed into the divider, the whole thing caving backward, and as he scrambled to his feet, he became aware of the hammering from outside, a chorus of male voices beseeching him to open the door. Yet he allowed these to fade because the goddess was watching him sternly. He was her pupil now.

  “Not like that,” she snarled.

  It only took a moment to click. Weezer strode forward, grasped her broad, sinuous hips, and spun her around. Heat blazed through him. Saliva squirted from his mouth, glistened on her hairy back. Her ass, half human and half beast, was pushed out for him, offered up to him. Weezer squeezed her glorious hips. She lifted her ass, exposing her engorged sex, and he moved in, spreading her wide.

  “Good boy,” she rumbled, and Weezer sank his burning spear inside her. He rutted wildly, feverishly, and the explosive heat of her sex made him clench in ecstasy. He roared his pleasure, howled into the mirrorless wall.

  When he was spent, she turned and met his panting gaze. He saw madness in her eyes. The blood fever. Weezer saw she was ready and he knew he was ready.

  When she tore open the door and the pitiful bar lock snapped, Weezer beheld the faces outside.

  Saw them and celebrated their terror.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Glenn suppressed an urge to grab Joyce and run, but the same fatalistic aura had permeated the bar as had spread over the bonfire, and he knew he was bound in some way to remain here and see this through. He’d had a fleeting suspicion when he’d seen th
e tall, voluptuous blond approach the bathroom, and in the few minutes since she’d gone inside, that suspicion had morphed into a full-blown certainty.

  The women were werewolves.

  When Sheriff Cartwright—whom Glenn hadn’t even noticed—began hammering at the bathroom door, Glenn understood how events were about to spiral out of control again, only this time would be much worse. Because there were, at minimum, four werewolves rather than one this time. And if the women were as ferocious as Glenn had been when in thrall to the change, every man and woman in the Roof—hell, everyone in the park—was in mortal danger.

  “Glenn?” Joyce said. She stood very close to him.

  Glenn looked down at her and wondered why she hadn’t changed yet. Did that mean the beast inside her was simply waiting? A latent monster biding its time, or perhaps awaiting the right trigger to unleash its power?

  He didn’t know, and he didn’t consider it any longer because at that moment the noises sounded from within the bathroom, the growls and roars and howls only half-diminished by the unceasing noise issuing from Dance Naked. The song they were eviscerating was, he thought, one of AC/DC’s, but it was impossible to tell. If they’d only shut up for a couple minutes he might be able to figure out what was happening in the—

  The door swung open.

  Poor Billy Kramer. He’d sidled up next to Sheriff Cartwright, no doubt to get a better perspective on the action. But despite Cartwright’s entreaties for Billy to stand the hell back, Billy had insisted on leaning against the door, ear cupped against the painted steel in an attempt to eavesdrop on Weezer and the blond woman.

  When the door swung inward, revealing the two huge beasts looming in the doorway, Billy sprawled at the feet of the gigantic blond creature and lay staring upside-down at its hateful face. Billy opened his mouth, likely to beg for mercy, but before he could utter a single syllable, the blond werewolf stomped on his face.

  Billy’s head caved in like an egg carton.

  Sheriff Cartwright shouted something—in the commotion it was impossible to discern what—and opened fire on the creature. But the next moment an auburn shadow passed between Glenn and the sheriff, a powerful arm swept down and Lane Cartwright’s wrist bones were snapped like twigs. Cartwright turned and looked up at the beast that had ruined his forearms, and Glenn realized the red-haired woman had transformed too.

  So quick, he thought. So appallingly quick.

  The auburn-haired werewolf grasped Cartwright by the temples, squeezed, and before Cartwright could scream, his eyes had exploded from his skull.

  His head crushed, the sheriff slumped to the floor.

  The bar descended into bedlam.

  This is the moment, a voice declared in Glenn’s mind, that proves what you are. And just like Mike Freehafer, you’re going to fail. You got bitten, sure, but the core of you never changed. You’ve been taking from people all your life and adding nothing to the world. Nothing but misery.

  Glenn swallowed, watched.

  The blond werewolf tore down at a skinny younger guy and four deep stripes spread in the middle of his back, soaking his white muscle shirt, sending him yawing toward a table, where he cracked his head and lay without moving. The blond werewolf took two strides toward the skinny guy, reached down, and twisted his head off like a bottle cap.

  No, Glenn thought weakly.

  Yes, the cruel voice taunted. You can look cool, you can seduce. But you can’t fucking help people. And the worst part is, when the change comes upon you, it isn’t a change at all, Glenn…

  No, he pleaded.

  …it’s a reveal. Because you’re selfish to the marrow. And if you transform, you’ll kill. Just like before, just like the drive-in. You can’t escape what you are.

  Please!

  You’ve always been a monster.

  Some instinct made the hackles on the back of his neck rise. One of the werewolves had—

  Glenn turned and stared at the raven-haired beast, the one who’d snuck up behind him. Glenn started to throw up his arms to ward the raven creature off, but she swept up with a clawed hand, smacked his underjaw with such force that his teeth shattered. He was lifted into the air and hurled back, but the blow was so brutal his whole body had gone numb. Glenn landed near the bar, and beside him he saw two patrons beset by Weezer and the blond werewolf. Weezer had his maw buried in a man’s neck and was ripping and tearing like a frenzied shark. The blond werewolf merely seized her victim—a black man in his thirties—extended the hooked talon of a forefinger and popped the man’s jugular vein. Blood sprayed a fine mist over the blond beast’s hairless face, and as the blood thickened into a fountain, the blond werewolf began guzzling it out of the air, sometimes actually moving the man’s convulsing body left or right to improve her angle.

  Glenn heard screaming, but it was as though someone had stuffed his ears with cotton. He couldn’t see faces, just blurry, pale shapes. The raven wolf had cracked him so hard his nostrils were jetting scarlet. And the only thing he could hear now was Joyce, who’d splayed across him, who was sobbing and begging him not to die.

  Well, he thought, if it were up to me…

  A lump formed in his throat. He realized with horror he too was about to cry. Because finally, in the end, he understood what he wanted.

  He wanted Joyce.

  But he couldn’t have her, would never have her. Because he was dying. The werewolf hadn’t needed to tear him limb from limb. In his human form he was as vulnerable as a kitten. A single barbaric blow had done it. That was why he couldn’t feel his limbs; he was paralyzed. But he did feel the hot tears leaking over his temples. Did feel Joyce’s tremoring body jostling his. Joyce was turned sideways now, hissing outraged words at the raven werewolf, and to his horror Joyce was remaining where she was, draped over him, and had he the strength he’d shove her off, tell the fucking monster to get it over with, to dine on his flesh and allow Joyce to live.

  The raven wolf raised a taloned hand. The yellow, hateful eyes glowed with maniacal need.

  And then everyone turned, even the raven werewolf.

  Short Pump, Glenn thought. And smiling, he watched his friend swing the chair.

  Duane’s first thought on seeing Glenn sprawled out on the floor was that he couldn’t possibly get to his friend in time. The massive black werewolf wasn’t approaching Glenn swiftly, but the beast’s progress was steady, inexorable, and Duane was a good twenty feet away. Duane grabbed the folding chair and hesitated. He was supposed to protect Savannah, he told himself.

  But Glenn was about to die.

  So Duane moved toward him, knocking over a pair of chairs and an entire table on his way. He even bowled over an older man he now recognized as his high school social studies teacher, Mr. Greene. But that was okay, Duane decided, because Mr. Greene had been a lazy, paycheck-collecting blowhard who’d bored the living shit out of him for an entire school year.

  Several bar patrons scrambled across his vision as he approached, but he could see well enough to know that Joyce had fallen across Glenn, and the sight of her there, so small in comparison to the werewolves, gave Duane courage.

  The black werewolf cocked an arm, ready to tear through both Joyce’s and Glenn’s bodies, but before it could, Duane said, “Your halter top’s ripping.”

  And so it was. It was amazing the garment could stretch so far, but the brown western-style top was holding on for dear life, the tassels mostly buried in a sea of wiry black hair. The werewolf’s eyes widened imperceptibly, some flicker of human emotion registering on its face, and then Duane was swinging the chair with all his strength at the beast’s head.

  The werewolf got an arm up—its reflexes were unspeakably quick—but one of the chair legs jabbed it right in the eye. It roared, stumbled back, and for a moment, Duane was confident they could mount some sort of challenge against these monsters.

  Then a
giant figure sprang onto the bar, and Duane’s hope fizzled like a defective bottle rocket.

  Weezer crouched on all fours and leered at Duane with a look of infinite malice.

  Duane froze, an icy gust of dread mooring him in place.

  Weezer’s leer broadened. He prepared to pounce.

  And squalled as Savannah emerged from behind the bar and smashed a vodka bottle against the base of his skull.

  Weezer tumbled forward, and Savannah clambered over the bar after him. Duane made to help Savannah, but before he could move two steps he was lifted and hurled into the air. He pinwheeled his arms, thrust out his hands in an attempt to catch himself, but he landed badly—right on top of a cluttered table—and went skidding over the top of it. He’d crushed maybe half a dozen beer bottles when he’d slammed the tabletop, and the front of his body was a shrieking agony. But before he could assess the damage, someone flew over him—or was thrown over him—and landed with a harsh thud against the side of a booth.

  It was Joyce, he saw. He got to his knees, wincing at the multitudinous cuts on his torso, belly, and hands, but then Savannah was screaming, and Duane was sure Weezer had gotten her.

  But that wasn’t right, he saw. What Savannah was screaming at was the blond werewolf.

  Who’d found Glenn.

  Who was reaching toward Glenn’s throat.

  “Get away from him!” Savannah screamed at the blond werewolf.

  The blond werewolf grinned at her, rose and stalked toward her.

  Think of Jake, she told herself.

  Savannah set her jaw, moved toward the blond werewolf.

  You’re being a fool! a voice in her head declared. You’re no good to your son if you’re dead.

  And I’m no good to him if I’m a coward either, she thought. She brandished the broken bottle neck, stood her ground. The blond werewolf’s eyes shifted to Savannah’s left, in the direction of the bar. Savannah resisted turning that way for a moment, but she realized this wasn’t a gambit of some sort. The blond beast was transfixed by something.