Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

  Savannah turned and saw Weezer rising from the floor.

  Weezer’s whole body trembled with rage.

  I’m dead, she thought.

  Something exploded behind her, and the side of Weezer’s left shoulder evaporated. Whirling, she discovered Barb Callahan striding forward, a shotgun held out before her. The shotgun roared again, and Weezer, who had somehow not gone down from the first shot, did fall this time.

  A hundred or so bar patrons who had swarmed toward the exit now dropped to the floor to take cover.

  Barb turned her weapon on the blond werewolf. Behind the beast, Adriana Carlino stood frozen, a look of mute terror on her sullen face.

  “Get down, dammit!” Barb shouted. From Barb’s position, Savannah could see, there was no way to fire at the huge werewolf without endangering Adriana.

  It didn’t matter. The blond beast whirled, swung and tore off Adriana Carlino’s head. Then it was loping away through the crowd. In moments the blond beast neared the railing that overlooked the boardwalk, but before it leaped over, it seized the lead singer of Dance Naked and dashed his brains out on the dance floor.

  With the discarded singer’s body lying broken under the strobing disco ball, the blond werewolf vaulted over the rail. Moments later, two more shapes followed: the auburn-haired beast, whose body was slathered in blood and viscera, and the black-haired werewolf, which still clutched a severed arm in its immense jaws.

  “Look out!” Barb screamed, and Savannah spun just in time to avoid Weezer’s clipping jaws. In spite the shoulder wound, the Weezer-thing moved with appalling grace. From the corner of her eye, Savannah saw Barb tracking him with her shotgun. A moment before Weezer hit the dance floor, Barb squeezed the trigger. The blast caught Weezer in the side, but despite the breathless growl he emitted, he kept chugging toward the railing. Moments later, he leaped over too.

  Some childish, irrational hope arose in Savannah that the horror had ended. After all, she saw with a quick glance around the bar, the beasts had already murdered more than ten people. Wasn’t that enough?

  But when the screams started below, she realized the atrocities had only begun.

  Savannah moved over to Short Pump, who was leaning against a booth and looking like he might be sick. Several bar patrons had risen to their feet.

  Savannah hovered over Short Pump, placed a hand on his back. “Did you get bitten?”

  He shook his head. “Is Glenn dead?”

  Savannah frowned. “I…” She turned and gazed over at Glenn’s body, which was utterly motionless. Joyce was hunched over him, sobbing.

  Savannah realized her eyes were welling too. She drifted over to Joyce, knelt beside her.

  “I know you’re hurting,” Savannah whispered, then realized how inadequate that was. “Is he…you know…”

  Though Joyce’s shadow kept Glenn’s face in semidarkness, the stillness of his body, the glassy look in his eyes…Savannah already knew. She was surprised at the way her throat began to clench, the way her chest had started to burn.

  Savannah stroked Joyce’s back, fought off a selfish surge of anguish. “He really liked you,” she said. “I could tell. I wish I’d introduced you two earlier.”

  “But you didn’t,” a voice that was nothing like Joyce’s rumbled.

  Savannah jerked her hand away and gazed in horror at the savage face that stared at her from atop Joyce’s body, which was twitching, each limb and sinew a hopping bed of spasms, the satiny skin threading with black hair, the muscles stretching, bulging, the face becoming less and less like Joyce’s as this new being rose to its feet. Savannah scuttled away on her elbows and heels, and then Short Pump was at her side, his arms around her. Joyce quaked, her back popping, ropes of bloody slaver drooling from her lips.

  “Come on,” Short Pump said at her ear. “We have to go…”

  Savannah nodded, but on some level she thought his words preposterous. Go? Go where? The four beasts were rampaging below—even now she could hear the shrieks of terror and the sustained caterwauling of someone in extreme pain—so leaving the bar and entering the warzone below made little sense to her.

  Then Joyce loomed over her, and all thoughts of safety fled Savannah’s mind.

  Joyce’s face was like the others, only infinitely more horrible because Savannah could still see her friend in there. In the shape of the eyes. The lips. And of course the shredded clothes. Joyce was still inside this creature somewhere.

  Movement from her periphery drew her attention.

  Barb raised the shotgun, leveled it at Joyce’s face.

  “Stop!” Savannah shouted.

  She thought she was too late, actually saw Barb’s trigger finger whitening as it squeezed.

  The shot sounded.

  Another.

  But they were too muffled, too remote.

  Savannah realized Barb hadn’t fired at all. The shots had come from below, from the boardwalk.

  “Guess a couple of tourists came armed tonight,” Barb said.

  Savannah started to respond, but before she could, Joyce had bounded toward the railing, taking roughly the same path the other four werewolves had taken.

  Was it self-preservation, Savannah wondered, or a desire for revenge that had fueled Joyce’s flight? Or maybe it was neither of those things. Maybe the region of her brain that still registered human emotion knew if she didn’t escape now, she might kill Savannah or other innocent people.

  Savannah watched the thing her friend had become leap over the railing.

  Savannah turned to Short Pump, whose face was fish-white.

  “I thought Barb was gonna kill her,” he said.

  “I did too,” Barb answered.

  “They don’t like guns,” Short Pump said.

  Barb set the shotgun on a table, pulled out a handgun. “Who does?”

  Savannah swallowed. “What now?”

  But Barb was moving toward the bathrooms. Duane watched her, confused, but then she returned carrying two handguns. They looked identical. “Smith & Wessons,” she said, handing them to Savannah and Short Pump. “At least Cartwright had good taste in guns.” Barb chambered more shells in the shotgun and started toward the exit. “I hope you two are ready to use those things.”

  “Not on Joyce?” Savannah asked, her pulse quickening.

  “Uh-uh,” Barb said. “The other four.”

  They’d gotten almost to the stairs when Barb stopped. “But if your friend comes anywhere near me, I’m not going to spare her just because she waived a couple of my late book fees.”

  And with that, they all three headed down to the boardwalk.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Melody gasped, her eyes fluttering wide. There were implacable fingers locked around her throat. Her windpipe creased on itself like a slice of ham. She was aware of a tremendous pressure on her jaws, the base of her skull, but it wasn’t until her vision clarified that she noticed the rope tethered to the attic rafter. She began to kick, the joist from which she hung groaning, and though she still couldn’t breathe, she realized something was different now, something had changed.

  Her temples tightened. Of course, she thought.

  She had changed.

  Growling with determination, she worked her powerful fingers under the noose, contracted her throat muscles until she could grip the rope. But once she’d gotten hold of it, she couldn’t gain the necessary leverage to rip the noose apart. Her fault for choosing such a sturdy rope. There was blood in her throat from the compression of the noose; she could taste it. But she was confident of her escape.

  The change had saved her.

  With one clawed hand between the noose and her skin, Melody began sawing at the rope with her fingernails, and though the individual strands were snapping and curling, she was still choking. Angry now, she began to hack at the rope, the stran
ds twanging and giving way several at a time. Soon she was halfway through the rope. But even this wasn’t fast enough. The blood in her throat enraged her, the raw, scored feeling of the soft tissue. Like the world’s worst case of laryngitis.

  Savagely, Melody gripped the rope and began to climb upward, hand over hand. When she reached the joist to which the rope was attached, she assumed the pressure on her throat would slacken, and to an extent it did.

  But not enough. Her throat still burned. Her breath still came in fugitive gasps. And goddammit, she wanted to live. For the first time in her life, her father and brothers would not be around to plague her, to terrorize her, to haunt her every moment and make her hate herself. Fuck their everlasting souls. She wished she could rip their throats again, indeed might do that very thing. Desecrate their bodies or drag them into the road, where they’d be run over, feasted on by carrion crows, publicly humiliated as the maggots squirmed in their putrefying eye sockets.

  Melody lunged and snapped at the gnarled rope. She clipped through most of it with her formidable new jaws. The rage was building inside her, boiling over, fulminating. She lashed out again, this time shearing through the pitiful fibers, and then she was dropping, landing on her footpads, the claws piercing the dusty plywood floor. Melody clambered over to the open trapdoor, dropped through.

  Racing toward the stairs, she thought of the reunion, of her old classmates, the ones who’d jeered at her. They would know terror tonight. They would know suffering.

  They would never mock her again.

  Never did he think it could be this way. His heart full of joy, the very air like cool, slaking water, Weezer marauded through Beach Land, ripping and tearing and spilling blood wherever he went. At times one of the others was beside him, and though he frequently glanced at the red one’s glorious muzzle or the black one’s rippling leg muscles, there was no need for him to. Because their mental communion was something more intimate, something felt so deeply he could predict each wolf’s movements seconds in advance.

  The ride operators didn’t understand what was happening. None of the humans did, with the exception of the very young, perhaps because they were willing to surrender to their atavistic reactions, to be ruled by terror. Or maybe they simply lacked the sophistication to rationalize the creatures bounding down the boardwalk toward the rides. The yellow wolf—their leader—moved on two feet, as did the red and the black, but Weezer preferred to race along on all fours because of how childlike it made him feel.

  Perhaps this was why the child flesh tasted so delicious to him.

  Last night at the Clintons’ he had saved the infant for last because he knew it could not escape him. Yet what a wondrous surprise it had been when the succulent pink flesh had filled his maw. He could feel the child’s vitality suffusing him with its potency, its pure, glowing energy. He was power. He was force. He was bristling, ineffable perfection, a highly evolved machine with all the toxic accouterments of man stripped away from him, leaving only strength, sinew, fang and claw.

  And hunger.

  My God, the hunger.

  Weezer bounded toward the rides. He spied a pregnant mother. She was watching a man who might have been her husband, and a boy of perhaps four years as they were whipped about by the Scrambler. The man probably saw Weezer take down his pregnant wife, but because the ride was jerking him and the boy so frenetically, he might not have believed his senses.

  But the woman believed. Oh, did she believe.

  The pimple-faced boy operating the ride had begun to panic, and to silence his ululating scream, Weezer longed to tear his throat out. But the meat of the pregnant woman—and the delicacy within her womb—was so ethereal that he couldn’t be burdened with other matters.

  In moments the scream stopped anyway, as his sleek pack mate, the red wolf, separated the pimple-faced boy’s head from his body and, embracing the headless corpse like a lover, guzzled the vermilion spray that issued from the neck stump.

  The Scrambler was still spinning its mindless convolutions, but had begun to decelerate. All the rides, the human part of Weezer remembered, were on timers. This meant that soon every ride in Beach Land would grind to a halt. There would be no merriment along the boardwalk, no moving attractions in which the lambs might take quarter. He imagined Turtle Cove—oh, how he longed to run wild among the bleating, defenseless children! He thought of the water park. The lambs would take refuge there, no doubt because the water park was closed at night, and they would think themselves safe in the darkness.

  But the darkness was where his kind ruled.

  The Scrambler had nearly stopped, but the man who’d come here with the pregnant woman was out of his seat and leaping onto the wooden platform. The man had left his boy behind, and wasn’t that like human beings? To act thoughtlessly? To forsake logic on some frantic whim?

  The man vaulted over the rail and landed a few feet from where Weezer feasted. The man was reaching for Weezer, and despite Weezer’s position—kneeling like a penitent beside the twitching corpse, her half-eaten heart in his hand—he could sense the man’s sneakered foot swinging toward his head.

  Weezer shot out a hand, caught the foot and yanked. The man’s other foot skidded on the blood-soaked boardwalk, and the back of the man’s skull cracked on the weathered wood. His movements so quick they were nearly a blur, Weezer placed what remained of the heart on top of the corpse—he didn’t want the meat sullied by the grime of the unwashed wood—lifted the man’s leg with one hand and sank his talons into the meat of the man’s hamstring, just below the buttock. With an effortless tug he peeled the hamstring off the leg, the thick muscle curling like a bloody snail shell. The man gaped down at his mangled leg, but then his eyes shifted up to the Scrambler platform, where a round, shocked face was gaping down at the scene. It was the man’s son, Weezer knew, and for a fleeting moment Weezer was gripped by indecision—finish the man or go for the child? Weezer’s pride demanded the former; this pitiful man had dared to challenge him and deserved to suffer for his hubris. But the child’s flesh called to him…the savory young meat…

  In the end the red wolf decided matters for him. One moment the child was staring down at them from above, his pale face stretched wide in horror; the next moment a red blur took the child out of Weezer’s view. Runnels of blood poured down the side of the platform.

  Around them, the slaughter continued. In less than five minutes there were scores of corpses scattered along the boardwalk.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  They jogged hunched over, the gun in Duane’s hand feeling way too heavy. Of course, it was nothing compared to the heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Taking care not to fall too far behind, he fingered the deep trench in his shoulder, told himself it could’ve been a shard of glass that had gored him so deeply.

  Sure, a wheedling voice whispered. Glass.

  They were getting nearer to the gunshots, which seemed to be gathered near the center of Beach Land: the big open area by the fountain, the haunted house and the Viking ship.

  “Careful,” Barb muttered.

  Savannah started to speak, but Barb slowed, brought a hand up and quieted them both with a stern look. Duane glanced down at Barb’s bloody shirt and wondered how the woman wasn’t dead yet. Hunkering down behind a giant fake palm tree, Barb surveyed the boardwalk area ahead.

  “Barb?” Savannah said.

  “Dammit,” Barb growled, “you’re just like having a little kid around. You ask more questions than Jake.”

  “You’re sure he’s okay?”

  “Sure as I can be without actually seeing him locked inside the police station.”

  They all three peered through the deep green fronds of the palm tree. There seemed to be no movement, though Duane could discern several ominous-looking shapes on the concrete.

  “Something’s up there,” Barb said.

  He followed Barb’s g
aze to the roof of the Devil’s Lair, where a colossal pale figure stood gazing down at the boardwalk. It was the blond werewolf, Duane realized, assessing the situation, or perhaps reveling in the carnage it had inflicted. He became aware of the silence, the total absence of gunshots. The childish, delusive part of him wanted to believe everyone had gotten away, or that the battle had moved outside the borders of Beach Land. But a closer study of the blond werewolf’s body language revealed a darker story.

  It turned toward the southern border of the park, the suspension bridge entryway. It pivoted and faced the northern border, the entrance he and Savannah had used. There was a maze of cottages over there, but only one way into the park: through the tall, gated entrance that had always reminded him of some medieval keep.

  The blond wolf turned toward the lake, its all-encompassing gaze taking in the boardwalk, the murky brown waters that sloshed gently at the seawall beneath.

  “They’ve blocked all the exits,” Duane said.

  Savannah stared at him. “You don’t know that.”

  “He’s right,” Barb said.

  It was the first time Duane could remember the woman agreeing with him. He wished fervently she’d contradicted him instead.

  He noticed something poking from her lower back. “What’s under your shirt?”

  “Machete,” Barb said. “You want it?”

  “Not particularly,” he said.

  She eyed him. “Since we’re probably going to die, why the hell do they call you Short Pump? Is it because—”

  “No,” Duane snapped.

  “Shhh,” Savannah cautioned.

  “Well,” he said, “you’d get pretty sick of it too, you were me. Everybody making jokes—”

  “So stand up for yourself,” Savannah said.

  Duane opened his mouth to respond, but Barb cut him off by saying, “There he is.”

  Duane spotted the werewolf that had once been his close friend. Weezer was patrolling an outcropping wharf, one that offered a panoramic view of the lengthy boardwalk.