Wolf Land

by Jonathan Janz

  Just before the impact of Duane’s body against Weezer’s, she heard Duane shout, “Now, Savannah!” and knew she had only moments before her escape route was closed off. So she raced for the dressing room door. Just before she darted inside, she saw Duane leap into the air. Then she heard a muffled oomph and lunged inside the door.

  And immediately sprawled into a sea of corpses.

  Savannah landed facedown, her mouth unfortunately open, so the pooled blood on the floor squirted over her teeth, triggered her gag reflex. The blood was fresh—Jesus—the bodies still warm. Whatever had happened in here had happened very recently, and she had to get out, had to escape this squishy, nightmarish abattoir, but every time she planted her hands on the floor, they slipped in gore, her feet scrambling about as though attempting to scale an icy incline. Outside the door she heard the sounds of a struggle, a cry of pain that belonged to Duane.

  Dammit, why had she hidden in here? Why had she taken refuge like a coward?

  Wanting to live isn’t cowardly.

  Yes, it is, she thought. And with tears in her eyes she crawled over the mangled bodies, one of which twitched and coughed when she trailed over it. The blood slime and reek of shit was everywhere.

  Savannah was most of the way through the dressing room and nearing the exit leading to the water park when she heard the sounds emanating from the shower area. She froze, not wanting to give away her whereabouts, then realized if the thing in the shower hadn’t heard her by now, it wouldn’t hear her if she kept her ass moving. She clambered over more bodies and had almost reached the door when she heard a blood-freezing growl from the shower.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. But she couldn’t make her body move.

  The growl echoed off the shower tiles, deep and guttural.

  With a whimper, Savannah lunged forward and landed right on top of a corpse.

  Chugging breath from the shower, the thing coming for her.

  Savannah lurched ahead, reached up, snagged the hooked bar that opened the door. But even when she hauled herself to standing, she couldn’t yank the door open. A corpse was blocking the way, as if to spite her for still living. Behind her, heavy footsteps clumped through the dressing room, very close now. Savannah reared back on the door with both hands and the corpse slid reproachfully aside. The door opened a foot, sixteen inches. Savannah turned sideways and knifed through.

  Made it through, her shoulders breaking into the night air. She hopped sideways through the aperture, all but one leg now.

  Something seized her foot.

  Savannah screamed, went down. She wriggled in the thing’s grip, but its hold was implacable. She was hauled backward, her sundress riding up to her hips. The leather belt prevented it from rising even higher, but her crotch was exposed. Ridiculously, she covered herself with a bit of blood-wet fabric, but then the creature poked its head through the column of darkness in the doorway, and she felt her scream coagulate in her throat.

  Glenn leered down at her, his grin maniacal.

  As horrible as Weezer had been, as ghastly as the little worm had looked in his new form, the sight of Weezer as a werewolf had been nothing compared to the horror of seeing Glenn this way. Glenn was even larger than Weezer was. Even more disturbing, Glenn’s features appeared to have been altered to a greater degree by the transformation. Where before Glenn had appeared brooding, almost taciturn, his face now blazed with unholy need, his eyes alight with the desire to rend and kill.

  With a sense of doom, Savannah finally connected the beast leering down at her with the horror in the dressing room.

  That had been Glenn’s doing, she now realized. Glenn, whom she’d known since junior high. Glenn, who’d always carried a torch for her. Glenn, who…who…

  He jerked her toward him, his leer hinging wider, the hot saliva dripping like acid from his scimitar teeth.

  “Don’t,” she begged.

  Glenn’s yellow eyes blazed. He bent at the waist to take a bite out of her foot.

  “Please, Glenn! You don’t want to kill me.”

  He paused and met her eyes. A deep chortle sounded in his throat. The pressure on her ankle increased, his filthy fingers compressing her ankle like it was made of Styrofoam. Glenn’s yellow eyes crawled up her body. He grinned.

  “Meat,” he said.

  She opened her mouth, but the sadism in his gaze prohibited speech. Her ankle compacted in his grip, lightning bolts of pain sizzling up her calf.

  “You’re Jake’s father,” she said.

  Glenn froze. His head was tilted sideways, his mouth open. But his eyes were riveted on hers, the yellow ovals narrowing with either suspicion or anger or something else. Savannah couldn’t tell. She was crying, though that hardly mattered.

  She said, “That night…when I got back from visiting Mike…you stayed with me.” Her face twisted, but she fought it off, knowing this would be her only chance at reaching him. “And the next year Jake was born.”

  Glenn began to growl, the whites of his canines showing.

  “Do the math!” she cried, then realized how foolish that was. This…this thing could no more employ reason than a mongrel could reject a fresh morsel. Even now…his lips were trembling, the growl reverberating in a fiendish vibrato.

  A howl split the night.

  It came from below, on the other side of the dressing areas.

  Where Duane and Weezer had been.

  At the noise, Glenn whipped his head around and released her foot. His posture was wary. For the first time he was unsure of himself.

  Savannah began to retreat, scuttling backward as noiselessly as she could on her elbows and heels. When Glenn’s heaving chest and leonine head remained fixed in the opposite direction, she ventured to gain her feet, to backpedal away.

  A strident bellow sounded from the same direction as before.

  The voice sounded like Duane’s.

  Too late now, she thought. If Duane was dead, Weezer would soon be coming for her. And there was Glenn to deal with, Glenn who at any moment might—

  Glenn turned to face her.

  Savannah sucked in breath, bolted down the stone stairs to the water park. She was halfway down the steps when she heard the clatter of toenails behind her. Gripping the central handrail, she swiveled her head in time to see a huge black shape rocket out of the dark and swoop toward her. Savannah took the stairs three at a time, nearly sprained her ankle, recovered and stumbled onto the sidewalk. A millisecond later the Glenn-thing landed behind her, the muscular limbs instantly in motion, bearing down on her. Savannah’s legs screamed, her bare feet numb and heavy. There was nowhere to go, no chance to escape. Beside her, tall bushes loomed, before her the chest-high cement of the Lazy River. Jesus Christ, she was going to die.

  She thought of Jake and compressed her lips. No!

  With a last burst of speed she scampered toward the Lazy River, the breath of the beast right at her back. Fifteen feet away, ten…

  Something snatched at her hair, tore away a clump at the roots. Two strides. Savannah leaped.

  Her stomach hit the rounded cement barrier of the Lazy River, her momentum carrying her forward. Her feet swung up, and as they did something whickered through the air behind her. Savannah went under headfirst, the water fractionally cooler than the air. The swift current took her right away, propelled her around a curve. Savannah breached the water’s surface, saw she’d entered a straightaway of perhaps a hundred feet. She heard a plopping sound, Glenn’s burly form pounding the water. Savannah dove forward, stroked for her life. Her momentum slowed, the jets underwater here gentler than they’d been on the curve, and behind her she heard the churning tumult of Glenn’s pursuit. She imagined his hulking body thrashing through the waist-high water, knew he’d overtake her. And even if she did make it to the end of the straightaway, then what? On the other side of the wall, there was a narrow c
atwalk and then the lake, and neither one provided shelter from the beast pursuing her. To her left was a lifeguard station, but there was no help there, only a folding chair, a life buoy and a long steel rod with a blotch of red paint halfway up, the tool the guards used to judge a child’s height.

  Savannah chanced a look behind her, saw whatever gains she’d made had been halved. Glenn was closing fast. He was so big, his legs so long and muscular that he seemed to traverse the shallow channel as though it were a mere puddle, while Savannah had to lurch and swim, shove with her legs as well as she could while her sodden dress trawled through the water like a heavy second skin. Glenn was nearing, nearing, and she was only halfway to the barrier. And it was pointless, futile, the beast would rend her to shreds. The father of her child. She never would have guessed—

  Savannah swam forward, a fatalistic caul shadowing the night around her, sealing her fate, stealing the final, paltry vestiges of hope to which she’d clung. Behind her—right behind her—Glenn snarled in triumph.

  In front of her, Joyce launched herself out of the water.

  Savannah went under as Glenn’s lethal claws tore through the air, and then the world was full of muffled roars and churning water, and when she came up she saw them tangled together, the claws ripping, the teeth clashing and tearing. Savannah was taken downstream another twenty feet before she stopped, her body trembling, and beheld the terrible battle. The wolf-Joyce was smaller than Glenn, but she fought with even greater ferocity. Glenn’s throat was torn and bleeding, a swath of flesh gone from the side of his face, revealing the lethal molars, a large section of his jawbone. Glenn roared, caught Joyce a ferocious blow to the forehead, and her face was drenched in a glistening scrim of blood. Glenn advanced, sensing the kill now, and Savannah moved toward them unthinkingly, knowing she couldn’t abandon another friend. Joyce stumbled back, nearly went down.

  Savannah veered to her right, reached toward the lifeguard stand.

  Grabbed the slender steel rod. Glenn had pinned Joyce under the surface, her limbs whirring, her blood roiling and blackening the water. Savannah whipped the rod at Glenn’s head, caught him in the skull. Glenn stumbled sideways, roaring in pain, and relinquished his hold on Joyce, who came up spluttering and grasping her gushing throat. Glenn rounded on Savannah, his great chest heaving, his muscles shivering with rage.

  “Come on!” she screamed and took a backward step. “Come on, you worthless bastard! Come on and fucking do it!”

  Glenn leaped.

  Savannah fell back, brought the rod up.

  His entire weight came down on it, drove the base into the crook of her arm, through her arm, shattering the elbow, the fire burst of pain indescribable. But his weight immediately left her. The bar slurped free of her arm, the scrape of steel on bone so appalling she nearly lost consciousness.

  Savannah got her legs under her, shoved herself toward the wall. Her arm dangled like a severed umbilicus, the blood coursing from the ragged hole in her elbow. Her vision going gauzy, she slumped against the wall, saw Glenn staggering forward, the steel rod having impaled him in the chest. Through the heart?

  It couldn’t have, she decided moments later. Because he still had the strength to seize hold of Joyce, lift her over the wall, beyond which was the lake and the framework of the adjacent roller coaster. Savannah took a step in that direction, but she needn’t have. As Glenn hoisted Joyce over the edge, Joyce’s talons sank into his biceps, and together they disappeared over the side of the Lazy River, into the lake below.

  Joyce twisted as they fell, thinking to return the favor, to plunge Glenn’s head underwater, to hold him there until he either died or came to his senses. But the place where they fell was too shallow, the water no more than a couple feet deep.

  Joyce landed on Glenn, but she came down hard on the steel rod. Gasped when it punched a hole in her belly. The pain was terrible, but she’d been in a wasted state anyway, the red wolf having shredded a good deal of her flesh, her side a stringy crimson mess. Glenn, goddamn him, continued to attack her, to tear at her arms, to growl and champ and writhe. Doing her best to blot out the pain in her punctured belly, she reached out, seized hold of his wrists and spread them so the killing talons couldn’t get at her. Still he snapped at her, his lethal teeth nipping her breasts, the son of a bitch doing his best impression of a monstrous, suckling infant.

  Hissing, she slammed his arms down, the movement forcing his head under. He gave off biting her immediately, his body bucking her six inches in the air. But no more than that, she realized, because they were fused together by this cursed rod, the damned thing poking out her lower back. She wanted to reach back there to see how far it protruded from her body, to gauge her chances of freeing herself, but that would allow Glenn to slash at her again with those claws, and she knew she couldn’t sustain many more wounds.

  Beneath her, underwater, Glenn writhed and thrashed. Large, bloody bubbles rose to the surface.

  But he wouldn’t die, she knew. Even if he drowned, it wouldn’t be permanent. She’d believed him dead before, up in the bar, his neck torn. But he hadn’t been dead. That took decapitation.

  She’d been such a fool.

  The water around them was splashing as though alive. Joyce realized she was weeping. Because this was horror. This wretched new existence. And she had invited it. Such a fool. She had longed for something different and exciting and had fallen prey to the allure of a legend, the notion of power and control and extended life.

  But what kind of life was this?

  Joyce remembered that poor worker behind the Devil’s Lair. She hadn’t meant to kill him.

  Something flopped against the side of her face, and she realized what all the splashing was from.

  The carp had found them.

  The legends about the fish were ridiculous, of course, because they weren’t carnivorous. But damn, were they huge. Joyce wanted out of the water, wanted away from this shallow area, which reeked of oil and weeds and dead marine life.

  She jolted as a hand fell on her shoulder. She half-twisted—as much as the steel bar impaling her would allow—and stared up into the face peering down at her.

  Savannah.

  Joyce reached for her.

  And gasped when Glenn’s face shot out of the water and snapped at her throat. Instinctively, she thrust up a forearm to obstruct his teeth. The awl-like points sank into the meat of her arm. She grimaced and shoved her arm against Glenn’s face, but Glenn held on, the teeth lodged in her arm like immovable pitons.

  Savannah was batting at Glenn’s head, and Joyce knew if Glenn bit Savannah, she’d either die or be infected, and Joyce couldn’t allow either of those things to happen. Joyce looked down at Glenn’s exposed Adam’s apple and knew what she had to do.

  Moaning, Joyce plunged her fangs into his throat. Beneath her, Glenn bucked and growled, but it was too late, too late, there was no choice anymore. Joyce ripped and chewed until she’d eaten through the neck, while around her the carp darted and tore at the flaps of Glenn’s skin, and then hands appeared at the top of her vision, Savannah’s fingers grasping Glenn’s jittering head. With a wrench, Savannah tore Glenn’s head off and tossed it into the lake. Joyce was choking on the blood, sobbing, and she only managed two words.

  “Kill me,” she croaked. “Kill me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Duane needed to coax Weezer into letting his guard down.

  Weezer wasn’t used to being the dominant combatant, so Duane figured on some extra arrogance from his former friend. He wouldn’t be surprised if Weezer monologued a little, recounted all the times Duane and others had done him wrong.

  What Duane hadn’t counted on was what Weezer actually did, which was strike him so hard he momentarily lost consciousness.

  One moment Duane was striding forward, feeling for all the world like Clint Eastwood. The next he was blinking up at
the wolflike visage, the face like something from a childhood nightmare.

  For a time, he lay there in a heap against the second-story railing and listened to the sound of music tinkling as though nothing much were happening in the park tonight.

  Duane moaned weakly, pawed his hip pocket for the gun. The Weezer-thing’s eyes shifted to Duane’s probing hand, and then Weezer’s fingers closed over the bulge of the gun, squeezed, and the pocket and gun and a couple scraps of Duane’s flesh came off in Weezer’s hand. Laughing demonically, Weezer chucked the gun aside and seized Duane by the shirt. He lifted Duane into the air, the lethal jaws opening wide.

  Duane realized he couldn’t reach back for the machete in time to stab Weezer, so he did the only thing he could do, which was to thrust out a hand toward Weezer’s face.

  So quickly he barely saw it, Weezer’s teeth clicked together, and the middle three fingers of Duane’s right hand disappeared. His index finger had been broken already, but he’d still been pretty fond of it. To discover the middle and ring fingers also severed at the second knuckle was a nasty shock.

  Slowly, luxuriantly, Weezer chewed Duane’s fingers. The sight of it wasn’t pleasant, but the sounds Weezer made…man, it made Duane sick. Perhaps Weezer detected some of Duane’s revulsion, for he lifted him closer, made a show of gulping down the meat.

  Duane jabbed his left thumb into one of Weezer’s eyes.

  Roaring, Weezer hurled Duane toward the rail overlooking the parking lot. Duane sailed through the air a good five feet before colliding shoulder-first with the steel rails. Had his finger stumps not been shrieking so loudly, the shoulder trauma would no doubt have felt awful. But all he could feel were the ragged stumps and the searing pain, and dammit, he was going gray. He reached down for the gun, then remembered Weezer had taken it. He still had the machete, or at least he hoped he had it, but Weezer was on him again, lifting him, and just as Duane turned to see Weezer’s virulent face, he felt himself floating into space, realized that Weezer had cast him over the railing toward the parking lot below. At that moment, as sure as he was that he was about to die, Duane realized where the music was coming from: the merry-go-round.