Pippi’s tail is between us. It wags against me if I hug my arms too firmly around her body, so I try to touch as little of her body as I can to prevent this.
This is the closest I’ve ever been to a wolf girl. I’ve seen them, of course, interacted with them sometimes, but I have never been wrapped around one like this. While sitting behind Pippi, I’m able to get a closer examination of her wolf parts. Her red fuzzy ears are just like that of a German Shepherd’s. They flop backwards in the wind, sometimes perking upwards or twisting to the sides when she hears something.
Her red fur isn’t just on her shoulders. It grows from her head down the back of her neck, her shoulders, and down the majority of her back like a cape. It probably goes all the way down her ass. Beneath the fur I can see a collage of freckles. She must have been a real red-headed freckled girl before becoming wolf-like.
Upon closer examination, I notice that some of the specks beneath Pippi’s fur are not all freckles. Some of them are fleas.
Two hours down the highway, we arrive in an old city. The buildings have crumbled to all but their skeletons. Vines and trees have taken over the town, growing over and through most of the streets and structures.
The caravan finds an open lot that is surrounded by buildings. They create a circle with their vehicles, and set up camp within the middle.
It seems that these wolf girls do not have a permanent home, but live like nomads. If they’re being hunted by the Fry Guy army or the mammoth wolves, it would make sense for them not to stay in one place. They also seem to live like scavengers, which makes even more sense.
When Pippi gets off her bike, she doesn’t uncuff me from her back. She grabs her gear and machine gun from the side of her motorcycle and then struts around the camp as if she’s showing off the guy she captured. She’s either trying to humiliate me, make the other girls jealous, or both. It’s incredibly childish.
“Look, I got another one,” Pippi says to some of her hairy friends, pointing at me with her thumb.
“Great,” they say to her.
They don’t seem to care.
“It’s the tenth one this year,” she says, giggling as she brags.
“So what are you going to do with this one?” asks a blonde girl with a beard.
I’m beginning to get the feeling that Pippi’s prisoners do not last very long.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I was thinking of feeding him to Tessa, because she didn’t get anything to eat today.”
“You have to stop feeding our big sisters,” one of them says. “They’re going to follow us around, expecting to be fed all the time if you keep doing that.”
“But Tessa was my best friend,” she says. “I just want to look out for her.”
“Tessa can take care of herself,” they say.
From the tone of their voices, I can tell that Pippi is a bit of an annoyance to a lot of the wolf girls around here. She continues to bother people as they are setting up camp, dragging me along with her, until Talon confronts her.
“Get that thing off of your back and put it with the others,” she tells her.
Pippi’s ears fold backwards.
“Okay,” she whines, like a kid who doesn’t want to clean his room.
As she’s walking me to the cage, a little girl runs up to Pippi and tugs on her skirt. The girl is completely human and must have been born outside of the walls of McDonaldland illegally. Judging by how wolf-like the women of this camp appear, they must be having sex. Most likely, it is with their prisoners.
The little girl says, “Pippi, Pippi.”
Pippi looks at her with an annoyed face. It is the same annoyed face that the other wolf girls were giving her.
“I got one too,” she says, pointing at the cage.
She is pointing at my brother.
“The blue one,” she says. “I found him under a truck.”
“Ashley,” Pippi says, “what did Grandma tell you about lying?”
“I’m not lying,” she says. “Ask Grandma. I pointed him out and Grandma said I could keep him.”
“You’re not old enough to keep him,” Pippi says.
“Grandma said so,” says the girl.
Pippi storms away from the girl as if she’s jealous. The expression on her face is saying, “Letting her have a man is such a waste.”
I saw the same expression on all the other wolf girls’ faces while Pippi showed me off.
When she puts me in the cage with the others, she looks at me through the bars.
“If Tessa comes by tonight, you’re dinner,” she says. “Otherwise, I’ll have to think of something else to do with you.”
In the cage, Krall is tending to Guy’s wounds. Although he is beaten up, he appears to be in one piece. The wolves weren’t able to get to him while he was in the Fry Guy van, but they must have crushed him inside the vehicle and tossed him all around the street before they had given up.
“How is he?” I ask Krall.
The scientist appears to know what he’s doing while stitching up my brother’s wounds, so he must have at least some medical knowledge.
“He’ll survive,” Krall says. “For now.”
This cage is different than the one on the back of the pickup truck. It is more like a pet mouse cage, but large enough to accommodate half a dozen men. A tarp covers the top so that we don’t bake in the sun. The floor is a bed of soft dead grass and leaves. There is a bowl of water in the corner. It is exactly like we are in a pet cage.
“Who are they?” Pete says, hiding in a corner. “What are they going to do to us?”
Even though the question was directed at him, Krall ignores the fat man and focuses on my brother.
“Judging by the fact that there aren’t any other male prisoners,” I say, “I don’t think they’re going to keep us around for very long.”
“Are they going to feed us to the big wolves?” Pete asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Pete moves to the other side of Guy, so that the doctor will pay attention to him. He asks Krall, “Do you know who these women are? You knew about the giant wolves.”
Krall finishes stitching the large gash in my brother’s chest. After getting a look at it, I realize how serious it must have been. If Krall wasn’t here my brother probably wouldn’t have lasted the night.
“They’re obviously women who had broken the sex laws and were cast out of McDonaldland,” Krall says. “They must have banded together in order to survive. I didn’t know a group like this existed in the wasteland, but doesn’t surprise me. People are stubborn animals who won’t die very easily.”
“Even women?” Pete says.
“Especially women,” Krall says.
I’m stunned to hear Krall, one of the McDonaldland elite, say such a thing about women. The majority of men in McDonaldland culture are incredibly sexist. Ever since the parasite began infecting women, men began viewing women as dangerous, disgusting monsters whose actions and appearances must be restricted and concealed.
Pete is one of those men who are scared and disgusted by women. He was married once. When I first met him, he had recently been married to a nice plump girl named Becky.
While most people are excited and happy after they are married, Pete seemed incredibly nervous. Whenever his coworkers asked him about his new wife, a look of panic crossed his face. It was as if he married her only because that is what a good McDonaldlandian is supposed to do. He’s the type who believes you get a job at McDonald’s, get married, have kids, eat at McDonald’s, and that’s all there is to life.
But I believe Pete has a phobia of women. It is a common fear for men to have these days. Some men are terribly afraid that women are going to turn into wolves at any moment and eat them alive. Perhaps they have heard stories of fathers having their throats ripped out by their wolf-like mothers in the middle of sex. It is something that little boys tell each other at lunchtime to scare the pants off of the more gullible children.
; When Pete was trying to make a baby with Becky, he was incredibly paranoid. She really wanted children, but there was a problem. They weren’t able to get pregnant. They tried several times and obtained two sex permits, but all it did was make Becky become more and more wolf-like.
It was weird for a guy I barely knew to tell me these things, but I was the only one he could really talk to about it. He told me all about how horrifying it was to have sex with her. Not only did it feel like he was having sex with an animal, but he thought he was going to be killed at any minute.
When Becky wanted to get her rich uncle to pull some strings for her to get a third permit, Pete divorced her. Divorce is looked down upon in McDonaldland, but Pete couldn’t live with her anymore.
“It’s like living with a monster,” he always told me.
Now he’s the prisoner of an entire army of monsters.
I wonder if Pete lost his mom when he was very young, because I never really thought of wolf-like women as monsters. Being around my mom all the time, it seemed perfectly natural for women to be big hairy wolves. Perhaps the wolf features were unnatural side effects of the parasites in her body, but I didn’t know any better.
My mother actually died much younger than most mothers. She died while giving birth to her third child. It is not uncommon for mothers to die while giving birth a third time. After a woman has transformed so many times, it is perfectly reasonable for there to be complications during child birth. One in three mothers die during their third pregnancy. Two out of three third-born children die before birth.
When Guy wakes, he has no idea where he is or who he is with. All he knows is that he has a sticky substance in his mustache that he needs to comb out. Once he realizes that the substance is a mixture of blood and wolf slobber, his memory floods in.
“What happened?” he asks, feeling the stitches on his chest. I just realize that the stitches are baby-blue, so Krall must have taken them from Guy’s suit.
“You survived the wolf attack,” Krall says. “You are one lucky son of a bitch.”
He gets a look at his surroundings, “Where are we?”
“We’ve been taken prisoner by a band of wolf girls who have been surviving out here in the wasteland,” I tell him.
“The Bitches?” Guy says, going to the door of the cage to look out at the wolf women who are starting campfires in the center of the lot.
“No,” Guy grunts. “I am one unlucky son of a bitch.”
Guy tells us about the wolf women. They call themselves The Warriors of the Wild, but to their enemies they are known as The Bitches, or The Beast Bitches, or some just call them animals. Most of them were sent out into the wasteland because they were raped by men in McDonaldland, so they have a deep hatred for the men who run McDonaldland as well as males in general. For those young women who do not hate men when they are adopted into their clan, they are quickly educated to hate them. They convince the young women that it was the men who cursed them with the disease that turns them into wolves, so they must embrace this disease in order to use it against them. They capture men and have sex with them so that they will become more animal-like, so that they will become stronger soldiers in their war against McDonaldland.
In another section of the wasteland, there is an army of males who protect McDonaldland from these women and the giant wolves. It is the secret army of multi-limbed mutants that Pete, Krall, and I were supposed to join. They have been at war with the Bitches for decades, but they are a long way from winning. With the number of mutants and the number of giant wolves increasing every day, this war just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Although they have been trying to keep it a secret, it won’t be long before the people of McDonaldland get involved in this war.
Being a Fry Guy, my brother has gotten involved in the transportation of men and supplies to the mutant camp, but they have yet to take an offensive position against The Bitches. The only other thing they have done is stopped releasing women into the wasteland after they break a sex law. They can’t allow their numbers to grow anymore. However, this practice has only gone into effect recently so it will be quite some time before their numbers are decreased enough to defeat them.
Guy says they have become vicious, heartless creatures who want nothing but the destruction of the peaceful McDonaldland way of life. He says that if we want to live we must try to escape as soon as we possibly can.
Krall and I tear holes in our clothes so that we can put our extra limbs through. Now that we’re out of McDonaldland, there’s no need to conceal them.
Krall tells Guy that there is no way for him to escape in his current condition, at least not today. Pete agrees that it is not a good time to escape, but it’s only because he’s too afraid to try to escape now. He surely will feel the same way tomorrow. Pete is the kind of person who feels safer in a cage.
I sleep for a couple hours, because I haven’t been to bed since yesterday. But I could only manage a couple hours. It’s a bit difficult sleeping on itchy weeds in a cage in the afternoon when the sun is beating down on you, and even though there is a tarp over my head it only seems to make the cage more like an oven. But worse than the light, the heat, and the discomfort, what really kept me from sleeping was the fact that Pete took a dump in the corner of the cage.
When I wake up to the smell and see the shit, I say, “What the fuck, Pete?”
But he just points at Krall and my brother, saying, “That’s what they told me I was supposed to do.”
“Damn it,” I say, swiping at the air in front of my nose.
“And there’s no need to swear,” Pete says.
I spend most of the day watching the wolf girls hanging around the camp. They don’t seem like vicious, heartless animals. They seem like normal girls, laughing and joking around with each other.
I watch Pippi and Slayer as they cook cans of food in a fire and then eat out of them like bowls. I can’t understand every word they are saying but they seem to just be having normal conversations, teasing each other from time to time. Slayer pushes Pippi playfully with her black paws, knocking Pippi off her cinderblock. Pippi giggles and shoves her back. Then they continue their conversation. They don’t seem like the types of people who would murder us just because we are men.
After watching Slayer and Pippi for a while, a wolf girl in a spiked metal bikini walks past them. She is probably the least wolf-like girl in the camp, and I wouldn’t have even known she was a wolf girl if I couldn’t see her glowing eyes from here.
Pippi turns around and says to the girl in the metal bikini, “Hey Nova,” and then tosses a spoonful of her food at the girl.
I’m not sure if I heard it correctly, because I can hardly hear anything from this distance, but I swear she called her Nova, as in November, as in my November.
Slayer laughs as the girl in the metal bikini kicks the cinderblock out from under Pippi, causing the childish wolf girl to fall on her ass again.
Although that is exactly what Nova would do in that situation, I don’t recognize her at all. It has been quite some time since I’ve seen her last, but there is nothing about this girl that reminds me of my old girlfriend. I wonder if I just heard her name wrong. I wonder if it’s just wishful thinking that I would actually find her in the wasteland.
I yell out her name, just to see if she will look. I yell Nova, and then I yell November.
All three girls hear me, but only Pippi and Slayer look my way. They stop laughing and give me cold growling faces to keep me in line. The girl in the spiked metal bikini just walks away.
It might have been my Nova, but it probably wasn’t.
I spend hours wondering... What if it really was my Nova? Could she be mine again? Would she be able to convince them to let me go? Would she save me from being killed by her friends? Or would she be a completely different person who was convinced to hate all men? Perhaps she will think I’m the enemy and let Pippi do whatever she wants with me, even if she feeds me to her giant wolf friend
, Tessa.
I keep watching the camp to get a better glimpse at the woman in the spiked metal bikini, but I don’t see her again. Even though it is still afternoon, most of the women are going to sleep, so maybe she is one of those who went to sleep early. I continue to keep an eye out for her, but she doesn’t make another appearance.
Awhile after it gets dark, we are let out of our cage. The wolf girls seem to sleep in the afternoons and wake up around dusk. Perhaps they are becoming nocturnal.
We are the prisoners/pets of Slayer, Pippi, and the little girl, Ashley, so it is up to them to take care of us. Slayer cleans the shit out of the cage as Pippi gives us our food. We are fed cans of McDonald brand dog food.
Although McDonald’s has not changed their menu in over a hundred years, they have added a pet menu. The pet menu features McDogfood, McCatfood, McBirdfood, and McMousefood. Although some poorer children will make pets of the wild lizards and snakes that they find, these four are the only types of pets that people are able to buy at the McPet Store.
We are not given utensils, so we must eat it with our fingers. McDogfood tastes surprisingly good. Kind of like a bunch of McDonald’s hamburger patties mashed up with some gravy, although I think the pet food is made out of the leftover cow parts not used in the regular McDonald’s food.
The little girl, Ashley, doesn’t say much. She shyly gives Guy his food and says, “This is for you.” Then she runs away. Her little dress is handmade, probably by herself, which I respect, but it is hideous. It was poorly sewn together from various other clothes and blankets. It also looks like it has never been washed before.
Pippi sits next to me and puts a leash around my neck.
Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland Page 6