The Last Werewolf

the sweats. Jake says shoulders and wrists feel it first but for me it’s the line from the back of my skull to the end of my spine. In the deliriums (deliria? deliri?? Jake would know) the yellow-toothed wolf from the Little Red Riding Hood book I had when I was a child comes to me—purple jacket and all—shimmering out of the wall or the fire or the carpet or just thin air, comes to me and wraps his bigger weightless body around mine and tries to get in.

The motorcyclist made cups of instant black coffee which I drank because it was better than nothing. My clothes hurt my skin. There was a pendulum wall clock in the kitchen that went toonk … toonk … toonk and the soft sound was almost unbearable. Jake came in and out of the fever. Sometimes he was the Red Riding Hood wolf, or the wolf spoke with his voice. You’ll be seeing me very soon. I could feel you close all day. Me too. Sometimes he was just himself, invisibly next to me on the couch, the source—as in heat source or light source—of unloneliness. The way sometimes he’d put his hand in the small of my back. It was as if my consciousness was there, in my sacrum, not in my head. Or at least the bit of my consciousness that was terrified of having to go back to being alone.

Sometime in the small hours Poulsom was brought indoors so he could go to the bathroom. He was given water, then taken back to the van. He must have been freezing in there.

At dawn the Hunter and the Securicor guy came in looking raw. The motorcyclist cheerily fixed breakfast from what was in the fridge, eggs, bacon, bread, cheese, tinned fish. The smell of the fried food was nauseating. I sat in the bathroom with the extractor fan going, wafting an open bottle of bleach under my nose. There was no window to even think of climbing out of, and in any case they’d left the Guantanamo restraints on.

My escort was visibly relieved to have got through the night without incident. The Hunter opened the curtains in the lounge. A morning of low cloud and weak light. Last night’s impression of the landscape had been accurate: It was empty, crossed here and there by low pale stone walls. East, the fields undulated very slightly into a distant stack of hills. West, maybe three hundred yards away, they were bordered by a forest.

I’d assumed daybreak would bring some development, but apart from the men’s air of having survived the worst of an ordeal, nothing changed. I saw the Hunter standing fifty yards off talking into a cell phone. The Securicor guy took the cold breakfast leftovers to Poulsom in the van.

At four in the afternoon the motorcyclist and I smoked the last two of his Marlboros. I began to wonder whether the impossible was true, and they didn’t, in fact, know that in a little over two hours I was going to turn into a monster. In which case all I had to do was request a bathroom visit as close to transformation as possible, Change—and kill them. I wondered if I was up to that. The Hunter, surely, would be armed with silver.

Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t they all be?

“Okay,” the Hunter said, having wrapped up another fifty-yards-away cell phone call. “It’s time. Get her hooked up in the van. No, wait …”

He walked over to me and pulled the duct tape out a second time.

58

THEY MUST HAVE given Poulsom another shot because he was unconscious when I resumed my place with him in the cage. I had to work hard not to let the tape over my mouth drive me crazy. Incredible the difference it made, being denied speech. In combination with the restraints (this time both hand- and foot-cuffs were attached to the cage) it felt like being buried alive.

The journey wasn’t long but it wasn’t easy. Standing was the best position, but with the short length of cable from my ankles to my wrists I could only hold on to the bars at navel height. Jolts and sudden turns flung and yanked me. Poulsom, tossed around, as the motorcyclist would have said, like a lettuce, would be covered in bruises when he woke up. If he woke up.

Five minutes before we stopped, the terrain got rougher. What had already felt like a primitive road turned into what can only have been a dirt track, full of ruts and potholes. Keeping my balance was impossible. Poulsom was the better off, loose-bodied, out of it.

We stopped. Executed a cramped three-point turn. Stopped again. The rear doors opened. The Hunter stood with his hands on his hips, looking at me. Through the bars I saw we were on a dirt road barely bigger than a bridleway that threaded between thinning trees before curving to the right about twenty feet away to run parallel with the bank of what I could hear and smell was a stream. On the opposite bank a narrow strip of grass, a few lilac bushes, then trees again. There was no sign of the motorcyclist or the Securicor guy.

“Getting hungry?” the Hunter said.

I looked past him. Concentrated on breathing through my nose. The air was loamy and damp. The cloud cover had broken and the evening star was out. My nostrils were hot and tender. Moonrise was less than two hours away. The first inkling of animal clarity was already there, a kind of vicious joy in the power that would come up through the soles of my feet into my ankles, shins, hips, elbows, shoulders. If I lived that long.

“Come on,” the Hunter said. “You’ve got meals-on-wheels in there. Couldn’t be handier.”

Poulsom, he meant, obviously. Poulsom says they’ve got it covered, I’d told Jake when we’d discussed full moon, the Change, the need to feed, whatever that means. Whatever it had meant to Poulsom, it hadn’t meant this. It cost me a lot to hold on, teeth jammed together, the tape on my mouth still imprinted with the heat and weight of the Hunter’s hand.

I looked directly at him. Very slowly gave him the finger. He laughed, quietly. Then slammed the van door shut.

59

POULSOM WOKE UP, shivering, in a sweat. As far as I could tell in the little light that made it through the frosted glass his night and day in the van hadn’t agreed with him. He murmured behind his strip of tape, pointlessly. Then looked at his watch.

I didn’t need his reaction to what he saw to tell me how close transformation was. The last hour had taken me into the penultimate phase, the wolf looking out through human eyes with quiet blazing animal alertness. My wrists and ankles were bloody from where Hunger spasms had cut me against the cuffs, but my limbs had calmed in spite of the pain.

Had calmed. The penultimate phase was passing. Any moment the final phase— cramps, sickness, hot and cold, half an infinite minute of casually ripped-up muscles and rearranged joints—would begin. The cuffs would either burst or slice clean through me. I had an image of myself Changed but with four bleeding stumps. I knew just the sound the stumps would make, knocking against the floor and walls of the van.

I looked at Poulsom. He was shaking his head, no, no, no. Very soon, when things began visibly happening to me, he’d start thrashing and screaming into his gag and all his life would rush to the surface of his flesh and be there sweetly for the taking. It was a relief, the Hunger, its refusal to negotiate, something solid to hold on to in the uncertainty.

Suddenly I caught Jake’s scent. My legs nearly buckled. I twisted myself as close to the rear door as I could get. Overrode the impulse to make as much noise as possible. It’s me! I’m in here! Jake!

Wait. Be smart. Listen. There were voices.

“I thought you said we’d be alone,” Ellis said.

“I know,” a second voice said. “But something occurred to me after we last spoke.”

Poulsom, presumably at the recognition of Ellis’s voice, began kicking about.

“Who’ve you got in there?” Jake said. “What the fuck is this?”

The van’s rear door opened. Standing twenty feet away were Jake, Ellis and a third man in Hunt fatigues. Mid-forties. Dark hair flecked with grey. Broad cheekbones. He looks like a Native American, I remembered Jake telling me—and realised I was face-to-face with Grainer.

The other Hunter, to whom Grainer, it dawned on me, was “the boss,” stood close to the cage with the automatic pointed directly at me.

“Nothing silly, Jake,” Grainer said—then something extraordinary happened.

Grainer took a pace backwards and another half pace to his left. He did it as if woodenly executing a formal