Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) (31 page)

“You must excuse our blacksmith,” the elder had calmed down following Pierre’s departure. “He’s always been a little eccentric.”

Alicia devoured several helpings of the oily meat, but still she was ravenous—ravenous and nauseous at the same time.

The shaft of moonlight falling into the tent had crept its way across the floor and reached the table. It now touched Alicia and bathed her in its silver radiance. As it caressed her face, Alicia’s body started to tingle. Every nerve, every sinew, every cell of Alicia’s body tingled and glowed; it was as though she were dissolving and merging with the moonlight. For a moment she felt at peace, but then a light breeze stirred, bringing with it the smells of the night outside—the chickens, the goat, and other, larger, sweeter-smelling prey. Her head spun, and she had to get out—had to become part of the dark outside. She hastily made her excuses and left the tent, declining her colleague’s offer to escort her to her hut.

Once outside, the night hit her with all its splendor. Alicia moved soundlessly over the dusty ground, savoring the slight chill in the air now that the sun had gone down, and the sounds of insects and small animals moving around in the scrub beyond the villagers’ huts. She kicked off her shoes and felt the gritty, sandy earth beneath her feet as she wandered aimlessly through the small village, marveling at how textured the night was, how full of colors despite the unifying silver of the moonlight. How strange that all her life she had never walked in moonlight. How strange that she had built her self-worth on what others thought of her—others like her ex-husband, who had sapped all of the love and youth out of her, then threw her away. How strange that she had ever cared about anything other than the night on her skin and the moon in her hair. The moon—that was when Alicia saw it—burning in the sky above the scrub, melting away her doubts and inhibitions, dissolving her thoughts and memories until the old Alicia was no more.

Eyes still turned up to the shining orb, the new Alicia pulled off her clothes and flung them aside, intending to head for the scrub, but then a mouth-watering scent made her turn back towards the village. Sweet and inviting, it drew her relentlessly to a small hut, her excitement growing with every step she took. As she neared the hut, she felt a stabbing pain as muscle and bone shifted and transformed beneath her skin. Her skin itself seemed to burn and blister, breaking out in thousands of new hair follicles, each one sprouting a tiny black hair that grew with unnatural speed. As her spinal column and limbs recreated themselves, what was once Alicia slumped into a half-crouch. The smell emanating from the hut was irresistible now. All other sensations faded away, and there was nothing but the smell of the sleeping child waiting for her. A brief and final flash of memory—of the miles she had traveled to help the starving children. Of how they’d been waiting for her, waiting for Alicia, to come for them.

“I’m coming for you,” she called out to the sleeping child, her voice a low howl emanating from deep within, silencing the insects in the scrub and piercing the delicate fabric of the moonlit night.

* * *

“What in God’s name was that?” the village elder stopped mid-sentence as the bone-chilling howl came again, unfamiliar to the villagers, but a sound instinctively to be feared nonetheless.

“It sounded just like a wolf,” one of aid workers finally broke the silence that had settled like a shroud upon the dining-tent.

“There aren’t any wolves in Africa,” Jim’s fellow driver responded quietly.

“Well, it sounded just like one.”

As the villagers exchanged frightened glances and everyone wondered what to do next, the howling came again, this time even lower in pitch and ending in a growling, roaring sound that was wolf, but not wolf. This time it was accompanied by a child’s terrified screams—one, two, the third one cut short.

“Paulie! Paulie!” one of the local women leapt from her place at the table and ran shrieking out of the tent. Jim ran after her, followed by the village elder and the rest of the diners.

The sight that greeted them defied belief. Loping away from one of the huts was a huge creature, wolf in all but the fact that it moved on two legs. In its jaws it carried a bleeding child, gripped clumsily by its throat. The child’s mother swooned for a moment, falling into Jim’s arms, then shrieked and ran at the beast. The beast lashed out with a hideous paw-hand, its long razor-sharp claws catching the woman across the throat and flinging her to the ground, where she gurgled for a moment, then bled out.

The monster threw down the dead child and confronted the crowd of humans that had spilt from the mouth of the tent. A growl-roar rose in its throat, and then it hurled itself forward, ripping, biting, tearing. The crowd scattered, villagers and foreigners running screaming for their lives. Jim ran to his truck and returned carrying a loaded revolver.

“Hey, over here,” he shouted at the creature, drawing it away from the body of a male villager it was disemboweling. As the creature ran at him, Jim discharged several bullets, each one hitting the thing point blank in the chest. Jim’s determined expression turned to one of fear as the creature kept coming at him. It hardly broke pace as it slashed the driver across the throat with its claws, veering away from the mortally wounded man to confront a couple of village youths armed with makeshift spears.

Jim fell to the ground, near the scrub, clutching at his maimed throat, trying to stop his life from draining out of him. Then a hand was touching his shoulder gently, yet urgently, and the driver heard a familiar voice through the pounding noise of blood in his ears.

“Mr. Jim! Mr. Jim!” Pierre crouched down in front of the driver, distress and sorrow in his eyes.

“Pierre,” Jim managed to gurgle.

“Mr. Jim, you hurt bad.”

“Listen Pierre—” Speaking made the blood squirt out of his wound, but Jim was experienced enough to know that nothing would save him now anyway. “Told you how the tank was fired...”

“Yes Mr. Jim.”

“—Still can be—Ammo—in my truck—In back—under blanket—”

The blood was spraying out from between Jim’s fingers, and his words were coming out as little more than gurgles, but Pierre’s determined nod told him that somehow the blacksmith understood.

“I use them, Mr. Jim. I use them.” Pierre kept his hand on Jim’s shoulder until the light went out in the driver’s eyes, his hand dropped from his throat and the last of his blood spurted out onto the earth.

* * *

As quickly as it had appeared amongst them, the creature disappeared, loping into the scrub and trees behind the village. Everyone—everyone who was still alive, that is—knew instinctively that it was coming back.

The foreigners left immediately, saying that they would send help, and taking Jim’s body with them. The villagers wished that they too could leave immediately and say that they would send help, but they had nowhere to go. Centuries of living in a war-torn country left them in little doubt that the help the westerners would send would not arrive in time to make the slightest difference to any of them, so they buried their dead and made plans for surviving the following night.

* * *

Alicia had fed well the previous night, but now the hunger was back and stronger than ever. She could smell the goat as though it were standing right in front of her, but she could smell the humans too—despite their best efforts to hide themselves away. She would have them all—the goat and the humans—and then the hunger would subside and she would be able to rejoice in the night and the light of the moon before it waned again to nothing.

As she approached the village, the enticing smells intensified and Alicia began to drool. She quickened her pace, the hunger inside her lesser only than the rage that accompanied it.

She burst out of the scrub and threw herself at the goat that was tethered to a stake in the middle of the village square. Just then something long and thin glanced off her side and fell to the ground next to her—it was a wooden spear with a sharpened stone tip, thrown by one of the villagers. Alicia roared and leapt at the man, her fangs ripping out his throat before he had a chance to scream. The other humans were all around her—pelting her with stones, spears, clubs and anything else they had managed to assemble in the way of weaponry. Alicia hardly felt a thing as the puny projectiles bounced off her thick hide. Then there was a small sting—like a mosquito bite—on her back. She span round and saw the village elder pointing a revolver at her—one of the youths had found it lying next to the body of the dead truck driver and the elder had taken it upon himself to pull a couple of rounds of ammunition out of the dead man’s pocket. Alicia felt a couple more mosquito bites as the man discharged the remaining bullets at her chest. She roared and was about to leap at him, then stopped as a loud rumbling sound caught her attention.

* * *

The creature span round, its slanted yellow eyes staring into the scrub. Despite their terror, the villagers momentarily lowered their weapons, following the creature’s gaze.

The rumbling grew louder and then a long metal tube broke through the scrub, followed by the rest of the vehicle. The tank emerged fully from the bushes, gun barrel loaded and pointing dead ahead. The vehicle came to a halt, the lid in its top opened and the village blacksmith stuck his head out.

“Pierre!” cried the village elder, drawing the creature’s attention back onto himself. It growled and once more prepared to leap. .Pierre shouted as loud as he could over the rumble of the tank, “Here, over here!”

The creature turned back to Pierre and sprinted towards the tank.

“Run!” shouted Pierre. “Everybody run!”

The villagers scattered in all directions, running as fast as they could away from the village square. As the creature ran towards him, Pierre shouted at the top of his voice, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” Then he fired.

There was an ear-splitting noise, a bright flash pierced the darkness, and then blood and guts, fur and brain tissue, bone fragments and mucus showered all over the village square as the creature exploded into a million pieces.

* * *

The months passed and the villagers tilled their land with sticks and stones, and ate the grain and dried food and tinned goods donated by the kind people of Europe and America. They did not look forward to the next convoy of Western aid, but they were ready for it.

In the lazy sunshine, a little man hummed Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ happily as he polished a large gleaming silver tank.

There was talk that the village elder might allow a traveling cinema to come to the village.

SQ 389

DAVID WESLEY HILL

“What is it?”

Kevin Hennessy, the newest member of the squad, faced Lieutenant Alphonse Perusquia nervously. “We’ve got another one, Loo,” he said.

“Where?”

“Christopher and Hudson.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Hanging up the phone without getting out of bed, Perusquia unspooled a length of cable from the headboard, plugged it into the slot above his left ear, and jacked straight into the Net. Once virtual, he paused a second to upload a gray pin-stripe suit and to delete a third of his hundred and fifty kilos. With a sure finger he sketched a small crucifix—the image of the one he wore in the material world every day since joining the force—colored it silver, and hung it from a chain around his neck under his shirt. Then he took five giant steps, which carried him from his apartment on West Fourth Street directly to the scene of the homicide.

Hennessy was waiting beyond the cordon. He led Perusquia through the press of uniforms to the alley that threaded between two cafés.

Forensic technicians were methodically extracting data files and graphic images, gathering the information from local storage as if plucking them from the air, and capturing them in black bags. Perusquia ignored this activity, concentrating on the broken thing that had been a man.

At his elbow, Hennessy asked: “What do you think, Loo? Wolf?”

“Sure looks like it from here,
hijo
.”

He squinted, calling forth his second sight, which stripped the scene of visual clutter, reducing the locale to a spare array of icons. To either hand floated complex three-dimensional polygons, flickering with color and energy, identifying the access nodes of the adjacent cafés. Immediately before him was a smaller symbol, flat and grayed out, robbed of significance and meaning. Perusquia restrained an impulse to touch it, amazed even after three decades on the force by the commonplace fact of mortality. Better, anyway, not to irritate the ME. He regarded Hennessy’s pale young face. A patina of sweat coated its dusting of freckles.

“Who called it in?”

“The lanOp. A Series XII by the name of Ralph Shakespeare. Salisbury’s taking its statement.”

Perusquia looked back at the body. “Anyone pull the string?”

Hennessy shook his head. “We were waiting on you, Loo.”

“Let’s do it.”

Squinting again, Perusquia was able to make out the incredibly fine umbilical cord—really nothing more than an interrelated array of coordinates—that connected the corpse to its hard address. Usually animated by the flow of data transfer, this one was sluggish, carrying only minimal automatic functions. He grasped it and through an effort of
will
sped back along the string’s length, an instantaneous whirlwind trip, coming to a stop where it ended at a personal interface port. Hennessy soon joined him. They used police overrides to unlock the phone and peered through the screen into the apartment.

“Christ,” Hennessy said.

“A bad one,” Perusquia agreed. “
Lobo
.”

The dead man was sitting in a recliner. His clothes, although bloodied, were untouched. His flesh was torn as if by an animal, half his face hanging by a flap of skin, his throat open to reveal the trachea. Hunks of meat had fallen to the floor beside him, severed from his body by his own mind, compelled by the
will
of the wolf, which had turned the victim’s nervous system against itself in a vicious psychosomatic attack.