Gail’s gun fired three more times while I was still finding the beast. It was ten feet away and racing toward me. Great clumps of earth and gravel were thrown behind it as it moved. I got off one more shot before it leapt, its jaws open, bloody drool dripping from between its sharp white teeth. I rotated the shotgun sideways across my body and extended it in front of me while I leaned forward to meet the coming impact. The beast weighed at least as much as I did and the collision drove me back, off my feet, and onto the ground again. The air rushed from my lungs as much of its weight landed on my torso. This time I couldn’t roll free. Its teeth reached for my throat, but I jerked the shotgun upwards and its jaws closed on the Mossberg’s barrel. The feral stink of decay overwhelmed my nostrils. The werewolf’s teeth ground against the barrel and splintered the wood of the forestock as it tried to shake the shotgun from my grasp.
Pain shot through my chest as the beast’s claws scored my ribs. I tried to throw it off me, but it was heavy and had the advantage of position. I pressed back on the shotgun, driving the creature’s head back and away from my throat.
I saw movement beside us and then Gail’s gun fired once again. Flames washed across my vision stretching from her Colt to the side of the werewolf’s head. The creature shuddered and went limp against me. I threw it to my right and rolled left away from it.
When I reached my feet, Gail was standing over the unmoving creature. She lowered the muzzle of her gun to its ear and there came a last report. The body didn’t flinch. I gasped for breath, lungs laboring to catch up with the sudden exertion that had happened so abruptly and ended just as fast.
I leaned my hands on my knees as I sucked in air and stared down at the body. It did look something like the horror movie werewolves, but bigger and nastier. It must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. It was barrel-chested, with arms that ended in more claws than hands. Its hindquarters were more wolf-shaped than human and had a canine’s reversed knees. Its head was not remotely human and was larger than any dog’s I had ever seen and in its open mouth were teeth that were more at place in a lion or a grizzly than a wolf.
As I watched, the body began to change. Bones shifted and moved. The fur melted back into the skin, the jaws receded until they were human sized and suddenly it was the nude form of a man, a man with multiple bullet wounds. The whole process had taken less than thirty seconds.
Gail bent and turned the man’s head until she could see his face. “Goddamn.”
“What?” I asked straightening. “Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t. Damnit!” She turned to face me, her gun held at her side. She looked me up and down, noting my torn and bloody shirt. “Did he bite you?”
“What? No, I don’t think so, just scratched the shit out of me,” Jesse said.
“You’re sure?” Gail said.
“Hell, the scratches are bad enough, but I’m pretty sure these are my only wounds.”
Gail holstered her gun and motioned toward her van. “Come with me. I’ve got a first-aid kit.”
I stared at the body. “What about him? Are we just going to leave him there?”
Gail didn’t turn. “No, we’ll dump him in with the ghouls, but let’s see to your injuries first.”
I followed her. I sat in the side doorway of her van while she dragged a heavy kit from the back of the van. “Take off your shirt,” she ordered.
I complied, trying not to wince at the pain. I felt like some kind of white knight, riding in to rescue a damsel in distress. It would be unseemly to show pain or fear, but that was all in my head. Gail looked like she was perfectly capable of handling both the ghouls and the werewolf. Then why had she asked me out here?
She flicked on the van’s interior lights. An adjustable lamp hung from flexible metal just above the opening. She gripped the end of that light and moved it until the LEDs highlighted my torn and bleeding chest.
While she studied my wounds, I glanced around the interior of the van. It contained a variety of metal boxes labeled with various tool logos, but something told me those logos did not match the box’s contents. I turned to Gail. “You carry a lot of tools?”
“Tools of the trade,” Gail said and popped the first-aid kit’s latches. She opened the folding sides outwards and took out a sterile package and a liter bottle of saline. After tearing open the gauze, she twisted off the top of the plastic bottle and proceeded to pour half the contents down my chest. It felt cold. She wiped down my wounds until they were clear of everything but the fresh blood that continued to well out of the gashes on my chest. Two weren’t bad, but the other two were wide and deep.
“Hmm, definitely claws, not teeth. You were lucky,” she said as she
