Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “I’m Rene.” Then he smiled. “See you around, Mahiinkan.”

  Mitch had sometimes used the word; there were elders in the pack who were Ojibwe. Wolf.

  Now the snow was thick and hard packed, but even so he broke though a few times and had to swim through the powdery crap to get back on top. Maybe it was being pissed off about that, or the fact his hearing wasn’t back to normal after practicing, but he didn’t even hear the guy with the gun. He was downwind of Horst, so he didn’t smell the oil and gas from his snowmobile either. But he sure as hell felt it when he shot him.

  Pafff! went the rifle, and at the same time a needle jabbed into Horst’s left haunch. He kept running. When in wolf form, his instincts weren’t exactly human. Then his muscles started slowing down by themselves. The snowdrifts seem to slip up to the right, and the sky down to the left. The human part of Horst knew he couldn’t outrun this. He twisted around and saw the trank dart dangling from his fur. Fuck. He tried to get his incisors onto it, but missed. Tried again, snap, missed again. He could barely concentrate, but he hunkered down, tried to change. With fingers he might have a chance. He shifted.

  One: now he was fucking cold.

  Two: the trank dart fell out.

  Now I should be good, right? But he couldn’t get up, his legs wouldn’t move, and the moon seemed to be almost below him now, with the northern lights rippling underneath. The crunchy, broken drift seemed to eat him up like a Slurpee. It was so cold he couldn’t feel his skin. What’s that they say about falling asleep in the snow? Oh yeah: don’t.

  A fog of being dragged, then the high-pitched whine-growl of a snowmobile. Other stuff, a woozy darkness, then…

  Snap!

  A searing pain in Horst’s paw bit the world into focus. He howled with all his throat, but no more than a moan came out. The world felt fuzzy and kept spinning, as if he’d just stepped off one of those rides at the Red River Ex. The air was warm and smelled of vinyl and drywall and the dry dust of furnace air.

  He felt the long, thin hardness of a metal cage against his face. Damn it, I’ve been locked up. Wait, against his bare skin? Shit, I’ve been shaved. His stomach lurched and his heart rate kicked up to a “Run to the Hills” pace. Fuck, I’m inside.

  He was human, naked, in a huge dog cage.

  The index finger of his left hand was missing.

  Blood spewed all over his skin, the floor of his cage, and the linoleum-covered concrete beneath it.

  “Damn it, I thought that might do it,” said a man with a high, nasal voice.

  Horst clamped his good hand over his missing finger and felt more than heard a huge roaring in his ears. He scrambled to the farthest corner of the cage away from the voice and the metal rattled like the clang of broken high hats.

  Blood seeped between his knuckles and he tried not to hyperventilate. Always keep your head, Mitch said. He usually meant that when trying to take down a moose without getting clocked by its antlers.

  A tall, thin man in his late twenties with a wispy red beard and wearing black, dirty ski pants stared at him from the other side of the bars. In one gloved hand he had a huge wire-cutter, smeared red on the snippers. In the other he had Horst’s index finger. “Go ahead,” he said. “Change.”

  The fact he wanted him to got Horst’s back up. “Fuck off. Let me go, you psycho.”

  The other grinned, as if listening to a horsefly arguing with a windshield. “It’ll stop the bleeding, won’t it? Don’t you guys heal fast?” He looked at Horst’s severed digit then dropped it into a small cooler full of ice on the floor. “Ah well, your choice.”

  Horst stared at his finger before the man flipped the lid closed. “What the hell do you want?” Horst said.

  The man stood, took a rag out of his back pocket and wiped off the wire cutters. He removed his gloves and tossed them into the corner of the room, along with the rag; the cutters he put on a fold-up plastic table. The walls were drywalled, but apart from that and the veneer of flooring over the cement foundation, the basement was unfinished. Furnace ducts, wiring and joists ran overhead. If he’s trying to soundproof the place he’s doing a shitty job. When he’d taken up drumming, his parents wouldn’t let him bring his set in from the garage until he’d scrounged a bunch of trash-heap mattresses, Cloroxed them all to death, and covered the walls with them (and insulated the basement ceiling—which had been a huge, itchy pain in the ass). The price you pay for being the next Peter Criss. (Who ranked about number three in his top five. As far as Horst was concerned, you hadn’t heard a drum solo until you’d heard the live version of “God of Thunder.”)

  Horst’s throat burned to scream for help but he didn’t want to give this asshole the satisfaction.

  Then the man said, as if they were having coffee together, “How does it work? There’s no way you should have enough energy to do it, no matter how much you eat.”

  Horst blinked. The roaring in his ears still made it hard to hear, much less think. His heart had settled to thumping out big bass beats in time with Ozzy’s “The Ultimate Sin”—though he would have preferred something even slower, like the intro to “Iron Man.” Relax.

  “What?” he said.

  The man walked over to a table where his .22 lay. “Never mind. There’ll be time, where you’re going, to figure all that out.” He picked up the rifle and fitted it with another tranquilizer dart.

  Horst’s mouth went dry at the thought of what he might mean by figure things out. “Hey, uh, wait, I don’t know you, I don’t even know where you live. Just let me out of here. I won’t tell anyone.” Except Mitch, of course, who would come back with his entire pack and nail the bastard. But, at the moment, Horst even believed himself.

  He took aim down the sight of the rifle at Horst. “Right.”

  “Can I at least have my gitch and my shirt back?”

  He chuckled. “You’d be warmer with fur on, wouldn’t you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  The man put the gun down, but didn’t take his hand off it. “Doesn’t sound like you really want to get out of here.”

  “Sorry. Fuck.” Horst’s toes curled around the bars on the bottom of the cage. There wasn’t even a blanket in it. He shivered, more from discomfort than cold.

  “You can be knocked out for the trip—or be a wolf. And, for all I know, maybe you’ll even grow that finger back. Or claw. Would you? Like a gecko?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Horst’s hand throbbed. One thing was sure, he’d never twirl a drumstick with it again. Like that even matters! So far, his life wasn’t flashing in front of his eyes, but he wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  The man kept silent, so Horst said, “It’s only the reptiles that do that.”

  The man’s mouth twitched one side of his beard up. “Really?”

  As far as Horst knew there weren’t any cold-blooded things that could do what he did. But before tonight he hadn’t known there wasn’t anyone collecting pieces of werewolves, either. “Yeah, there’s some caiman assholes in, like, Cancun. Mayan or something.”

  The man scratched his armpit. At least he’s not touching the rifle anymore. “What about mass? I saw you out there on all fours. Easily three hundred pounds—maybe more. But look at you now. One ninety, soaking wet.”

  Horst grimaced and held up his scabbing-up hand. “Missing a few grams now.” He didn’t feel inclined to tell this shithead about the energy to change coming up from the earth itself, that it was just the trigger he carried around inside since Mitch had first bitten him.

  “And?”

  His gone finger knuckle was starting to itch like crazy. The scab was slowly shrinking and covering with skin so pink it was neon. He kept his other hand over it. “This your secret lab?”

  The man coughed and then folded his arms. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Don’t you mean my ass, where you shot me?”

  He shrugged then turned to a row of big plastic tubs along the wall. Horst felt his right shoulder. T
here was a part that ached a little inside, but no mark on the skin—not anymore. He’d stuck a needle in there. “What do you need my blood for?” he said.

  “Do I look like a doctor to you? The people I can sell this to know how to extract all kinds of strange stuff from, ah, samples. When I told them what I’d seen you do out there last month, they were interested.” He smiled at Horst’s gaping mouth. “You really think no one out here keeps an eye out for wolves? Course, when I saw one melt into a scrawny shit like you I didn’t call Conservation. I had a better idea.” He opened a tub and pulled out a canvas bag at least six feet long. He laid it out on the cement floor in front of Horst’s cage and unzipped it. He tapped the cage, rattling it. “Now, this’ll be a lot easier on me if you don’t change. But you’ll be a lot more comfortable if you do.”

  He stood up and went back to the line of tubs and started unpacking another, pulling a big backpack out of one and unzipping it.

  More comfortable. Right. That must mean we’re going outside. Shit. Horst tried to clear his throat, but it was too dry. “They aren’t paying you enough.”

  The man froze, staring at the wall in front of him. Without turning, he said, “What do you know about it?”

  “Think about it. What they want to do, how much it’s really worth?”

  Still refusing to look at Horst, he muttered, “Who says they’re paying me?”

  Goosebumps rose all over Horst’s bare skin. “Fuck, you have a hell of a hobby then.”

  The man turned, eyes glistening and a muscle in his left forearm twitching. “Do you ever get sick?” he said.

  Horst huddled his legs in front of him and stared over his knees. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Yeah, I been sick.”

  “But when you change. Doesn’t it—” He waved his hand, gripping the front of his ski pants over his chest with the other. “—just, erase whatever is in you?”

  Horst paused a second. This is the real reason. “Depends what you’re sick with.”

  “Damn it!” said the man, “Don’t play games with me!”

  “I’m not, but what do I look like, a doctor? Go to the hospital, and let me go, for fuck’s sake.”

  The man was shaking, a barely suppressed rage bubbling out of him. “They don’t have a cure for everything, smartass.”

  Horst kept his mouth shut and breathed in through his nose. What did that leave, then? Cancer. Alzheimer’s. Hell, a lot of things, but you could still walk into the hospital and get treated for any of them. But this guy seemed to have a lot of that stuff here at home. Hell, he even had needles for taking blood samples…

  Horst touched the shoulder where the needle had gone in. “What do you have that’s so incurable?”

  The man turned to his backpack and began throwing a flashlight, bungee cords and a fleece blanket into it. “That’s not your problem, yet.”

  Of course, most of the diseases Horst worried about were thanks to the sex-ed unit in guidance class. While everyone else had made herpes jokes or giggled about the right way to use a condom, what had rung through Horst’s mind was the disease no one even seemed to understand, and nobody in the class bothered to ask about, since everyone knew only fags got it.

  Horst shifted forward in the cage. “You have it, don’t you?”

  “Shut up!” the man said, standing and grabbing the trank rifle from the table. He pointed it at Horst, who put his hands up. He stared at Horst’s hand. “Already healed.” He lowered the barrel and took a few steps closer. Horst’s empty knuckle was still itchy but not in a fuck-I’m-on-fire way. It was nearly done fixing itself. Except his finger wasn’t coming back. Would he even be able to hold his sticks right anymore? Still play? A sour mixture of horror and anger churned through Horst’s gut at the thought.

  Then: Hell, Rick Allen’s still in Def Leppard. I might still be able to get out of here. Horst wiggled his hand at the guy. “Take a look.”

  He came closer. Horst shifted his weight, as if about to raise his left hand to give him a better view. Then, when the man was two feet away from the cage, he jumped.

  Horst threw his weight onto the front part and tipped the cage forward with a shuddering clang. He scrambled upright while his captor tripped backward and landed on his ass. Horst leaned forward on it and brought his feet up again. The bearded man scooted backward, still holding the rifle but off-balance.

  The cage crashed forward a second time. Horst strove to get close enough to grab any part of him he could get his hands on.

  The man kept his grip on the rifle but was backed up against the table. He shoved the barrel through the bars, right at Horst. Horst deked to the side, grabbed the barrel with both hands, and shoved it hard back at him. The man hadn’t had time to brace the stock against his shoulder and the scope hit him in the face. He swore but didn’t let go. As he tried to get his feet against the cage to push back and get free, Horst pulled hard on the barrel and jerked it right back at him again. Crack, stock right in his nose. He yelled and let go. Horst hauled the rifle as far though the bars of the cage as he could but it got hung up on the body. The man grabbed the stock and that put his hand right where Horst could reach it.

  He clamped down on the back of the man’s hand and crushed it against the metal of the cage, pinning him. He might not have the stubby, brutal fingers of a bass player, but a drummer’s hands were nothing to sneeze at, either. And he was mad—and okay, a little scared too, fuck—so he squeezed until things inside the man’s hand started moving where they weren’t supposed to, and he screamed.

  “You let me the fuck out of here,” Horst said.

  He just nodded and started fumbling for something in his pocket with his other hand.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  They both froze. Horst didn’t let go of his hand.

  After a long few minutes, neither wanting to look away from the staircase leading up from the basement, the bell rang again.

  “You expecting someone?” Horst said, annoyed his voice didn’t sound as threatening as he wanted it to.

  Then, a muffled voice from outside. “Horst? You in there?” It was Rene. Shit.

  For a split-second Horst’s grip weakened and the man yanked himself free.

  “No!” Horst yelled.

  The man dived for the open plastic tub, threw a bunch of camouflage clothing and ammunition cases out, and pulled a handgun from a foam-lined case. It was a Glock. He checked the magazine and glared at Horst. “How many are there?”

  “Don’t!” Horst shouted. “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. You’re dead, when I get back.” He pounded up the stairs, sidearm up.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  Horst grabbed the bars of his cage. “Rene! Run!”

  He hoped to hell Rene had heard him. His heart rate was already through the roof, like the staccato thunder of “Red Hot,” the only Crüe song Horst could even stand. It was fast and relentless, and it began to trigger Horst’s deepest instincts.

  Horst heard the door opening at the top of the stairs. The man didn’t even threaten Rene first.

  Blam!

  Horst let out a scream. And his body changed.

  Then blam-blam! and “Fuck, what the Christ!”

  Horst shuddered into his massive dire wolf form. All the vestiges of his human mind were overlaid with panic at the thought of Rene being wounded or worse.

  A deep, cavernous growl surged through the sound of wood splintering and glass shattering as shards of a door rained down the staircase.

  Horst gripped the cage door in his teeth and strained his hind feet against the opposite side. The metal tasted tangy on his tongue and began to give as he growled forward, massive shoulders and neck pushing. The metal began to bend, but it was the soldering on the latch that gave. With a snap the door flung open, lock and all.

  Horst plunged out of the cage and howled. You motherfucker I’m coming for you.

  Then a gasp came from the top of the stairs, just as Horst began to bound over
the debris littering the carpeted steps.

  Rene stood there, hand clasped over his bloody shoulder, completely naked. Horst paused, ears cocked forward. Why the hell aren’t you wearing any clothes? It’s minus insane out and it’s not like you have any fur—oh. Oh, wow, right, fuck! Rene nodded at him. “You okay?”

  Horst wurffed out a quick affirmative, tail wagging until he forced it to stop. Even as a wolf he realized he was acting like a puppy. Rene’s alive. Play it cool.

  “Asshole’s around front. I pushed his Ski-Doo over before I rang the bell but I bet that’s where he’s going. Gimme a second here and I’ll be right with you.”

  The heavy thud of machinery crunching onto snow came from the other side of the house, then the grind-click of an ignition not quite catching.

  Horst tore off, rounding the house just as his captor succeeded in getting the snowmobile started. The man glanced over his shoulder and fired the Glock at the dire wolf surging over the drifts at him. Horst took a bullet in his right shoulder and yelped. But he kept coming, crossing behind to the man’s left, so he couldn’t fire again without turning. Instead of trying to keep the wolf in his sights, he faced forward and gunned the motor. Horst sprang with hind legs powerful enough to throw him onto the back of an Irish elk. The snowmobile shot off over the sparkling white drifts—but not before Horst’s teeth sank into the thick foam-and-wood base of the rear seat. The machine slowed as Horst’s massive body was dragged through the snow behind it.

  The man glanced over his shoulder and gaped, inadvertently easing up on the accelerator just long enough to allow Horst to get his good foreleg under him; then, realizing his life depended on it, the man turned his back on the wolf and gunned it. Horst was pulled off his feet again, but his jaws held firm.

  Over the whine of the engine and the flurry of snow thrown up from the treads, Horst heard a deep roar from Rene. But then they plunged into the line of trees at the edge of the property, passing through the grasping bare branches and growling down into the ditch alongside the highway.