Barewolf
DANIEL PYLE
As the Case-thing padded through the woods, his paws sank into the moist earth all the way to his dewclaws. Shallow pools of mud filled the bottoms of the prints he’d left behind. Many prints. He’d been hunting all night. He walked under a dead pine and saw the moon in the empty space above. Not full, but close enough. He resisted the urge to call to it.
His stomach growled. Saliva dripped from his jagged fangs, and he licked his muzzle with his long, black tongue.
Less than a mile to the north, a man-snack moved from inside a den to outside. The Case-thing stopped and sniffed. His nostrils flared, and he lifted his snout higher. The saliva in his mouth stopped dripping and started pouring.
He licked his muzzle again and ran.
He stopped in the bushes just shy of the man-snack, poked his head between two bunches of leaves, and flared his nostrils. His stomach growled again, but he doubted the man-snack could hear. Men-snacks usually only responded to the growls that came from the Case-thing’s throat.
The man-snack walked across a wooden platform and stepped into a box filled with hot water. He wore no clothing. His dangling parts slapped against his thighs as he moved. The Case-thing could smell the dangling parts. They smelled very chewable.
Once inside the water-filled box, the man-snack leaned back and closed his eyes.
A woman-snack exited the den through a sliding glass wall. She was also exposed. Her hairless teats bounced a little but didn’t sway. The Case-thing could smell plastic inside, beneath the real meat.
She carried two containers filled with liquid that smelled both sweet and salty. It wasn’t the same liquid that filled the box. He wondered why they needed anything but water.
The woman-snack brought the containers into the water box and handed one to the man-snack. He said something to her in a language the Case-thing could almost remember, and she laughed. She moved around the box and sat beside the man-snack. She was in heat. As was the man-snack, of course. Men-snacks were always in heat.
The wooden platform stood a whole jump above the ground. The Case-thing eased between the bushes and slunk toward the snacks.
The woman-snack laughed again, and then the two snacks were sharing saliva. They were both sweating now, and not just from the hot water. Even through the water, the Case-thing could smell the blood rushing into the man-snack’s dangly bit.
When the Case-thing came close enough to the platform, he put all his weight on his back paws and sprang into the air. His saliva trailed from the sides of his muzzle and streamed back across his head. He cleared the railing on the side of the platform and landed paws first on the wooden planks.
The snacks separated and screamed. Their screams were pathetic things: quiet, weak, gurgly.
The Case-thing’s snarl echoed off the house to the side, the platform below, and the snacks ahead. The man-snack emptied his bladder as the blood moved from his dangly bit to his thumping heart. The Case-thing listened to the woman-snack’s heart, which was also scrambling like a trapped animal. She held on to her urine, and he reminded himself to drain her before he snacked. There was nothing worse than a mouthful of pee.
He sprang onto the edge of the water box. The woman-snack tried climbing out over the opposite side, but the man-snack didn’t move at all. He stared at the Case-thing. His wide eyes looked delicious.
The Case-thing swiped at the woman-snack’s neck, severed her spinal cord with his scythelike claws, and nearly took off her head. She slumped over the side of the water box, her smooth hindquarters pointing up at the sky, one arm caught beneath her body, the other swinging through the arc of blood jetting from her neck.
After he’d turned to the man-snack, the Case-thing licked his lips. He leaned forward, sniffed the snack’s face, opened his mouth wide, and with a single, lightning-quick chomp, bit off the top of the snack’s head.
Bone and hair and brain dribbled out of his mouth and fell into the water as he chewed. The man-snack’s body drooped to the side and splashed into the water, which had gone from clear to pink to red. The Case-thing crunched bone, swallowed throatfuls of half-chewed remains. He stuck his snout in the water and bit into the man-snack’s arm. He pulled the rest of the snack out of the water and dragged it out onto the wooden platform. The snack dripped water, dripped blood. The Case-thing buried his mouth in the snack’s guts and scarfed up chunk after chunk of his innards. He smelled the woman-snack’s flowing blood slow to a steady drip and growled satisfactorily as he sucked up a long string of intestines.
In his frenzy, he almost didn’t smell the approaching she-thing. She was halfway to the platform before he looked up from his snack and sniffed at her. She was wet and muddy, of course, but also starving. He could smell the drool in her mouth, hear her gurgling belly.
She jumped onto the platform near the water box and lowered her head submissively. The Case-thing chewed for a moment and watched her. He took one more bite of the man-snack’s guts and then backed away from the kill.
The she-thing raised her head and stared. He dipped his head toward the carcass and took another step back.
Have some.
Never lowering her eyes from his, the she-thing took a hesitant step forward. When she seemed to be sure he wouldn’t attack her, she rushed toward the fresh meat and pulled out a muzzleful.
He watched her eat. Her fur was lighter than his own. A blond coat that looked brown and might have been downy fine if it hadn’t been thick with mud. Her long, wide muzzle sported dozens of teeth that gnashed and clicked as she fed. She was a little scrawny, but still well-muscled. Her tail wagged as she dipped her head back into the flesh crater the two of them had made.
A few swallows later, she looked up at him and dipped her own head toward the meat. He guessed she’d staved off the worst of her hunger and went to join her. Together, they picked the body clean and then dragged the she-snack from the hot water. They finished half of the second snack before the she-thing accidentally chewed into one of the plastic nonteats and hacked little bits of it back onto the platform.
When neither of them could eat another bite, the she-thing lowered her head in a kind of bow.
Thank you.
She wasn’t in heat yet, but she was close. Close enough.
The Case-thing moved in and licked a streamer of blood from the she-thing’s muzzle. She returned the gesture, and the two of them bathed each other for a long while. When his blood had completely filled his own dangly bit, he rubbed his head under hers and began to move along her side. He would circle around to her rear and take her from behind. He could smell the hormones coursing through her body—telling him to do it, to do it hard—as well as his own thick musk.
Except he never got around to her tail end. Halfway there, she growled and pulled away from him. Her hormone smell disappeared. He looked at her, saw that she was looking at his back. She took another step away and wheezed at him. Hyenalike.
The she-thing’s laughter infuriated him. He crouched and growled at her. Spittle and blood sprayed from his mouth as he bared his teeth.
Instead of getting into a defensive stance, the she-thing wheezed again and jumped off the platform.
The Case-thing considered giving chase, hunting her down and ripping the laugher from the bitch’s throat, but in the end he stayed with his kill and let her go.
He knew what had driven the she-thing away. He’d first noticed it two or three cycles ago. It had started as a thin patch, but was now a hairless swatch of back skin that no doubt shone in the near-full moon.
His bald spot.
The doctor was an old man with thick glasses and a stooped gait. When he came shuffling into the room, he had his nose buried in a chart and squinted his eyes like a kid trying to see Mars through a pair of toy binoculars.
“Mr.—” He blinked at the chart. “Oswald.”
“It’s Case,” said Case. “Jerry Case.”
The doctor squinted harder and Case was afraid the old geezer was going to burst a blood vessel or something.
“Uh . . . are you going to be doing my procedure?”
“Oh, yes,” the doctor said. “I perform all the intricate surgeries here.” He looked up at Case, smiled, and winked a too-large, magnified eye.
Case was glad to see that at least the doc’s sense of humor hadn’t totally shriveled up with the rest of him.
“I’m Dr. Abrams.” The old guy offered the five liver-spotted digits at the end of his arm and Case shook carefully, afraid that if he squeezed too hard, the wrinkled fingers might turn to dust in his hand.
“Jerry Case,” he said in case the doc had already forgotten.
The doctor pulled a stool from the other side of the room to a spot just beside the table on which Case was sitting and plopped down on top of it. He closed the file and held it on his lap. “So,” he said. “You need some more hair?”
Case nodded.
The doctor brought a hand up to the side of his mouth and whispered, “Pubes?”
“Wha—” Case floundered. “What? No . . . I . . . no. Gross.” He wrinkled his nose and scooted away from the old man.
“Some guys like a hairy thatch,” Abrams said. “You wouldn’t be the first.” He squinted up at Case’s head. “Anyway, you can’t want it on your head. I know I don’t exactly have a pilot’s vision, but I can see well enough to know that you’ve got a full ’do up there. The hairline might be receding just a smidge, but nothing a man your age needs to worry about.”
The doctor’s own hair was a wispy spider’s web draped across his gleaming scalp.
“I don’t need it for my head.” Although he doubted the doctor could really see him even from just those few feet away, he lowered his gaze. “I—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “I need it for my back.”
He looked up in time to see the old man cock his head and furrow his brow. “Your what?”
“Your back?”
Case nodded, realized the man probably only saw a swaying blur, and said, “Yes.”
Abrams wheezed, brought a fist to his mouth, coughed into it, and then wheezed again.
Case had a brief recollection of a female werewolf hyena-laughing at him. He gritted his teeth.
“I’m sorry, son,” the doctor said when his bout of coughing ended. “We don’t do that sort of thing here.”
Case asked him why not.
“Why would we?”
“Because,” Case said. “I need a transplant, and you’re a hair transplant specialist. What do you care where I put it?”
The old man wheezed again but managed to get hold of himself a little more quickly this time. “We’re in business to help people, Mr. Case, not make sideshow freaks.”
Case glared at him.
The old man coughed again, and Case imagined him hacking up one of his internal organs. The thought sent a hunger pang through his stomach, which rumbled almost immediately. Case licked his lips. They’d started to thin already. He felt his nose recede into his growing snout. His teeth stretched into wicked fangs, his ears flapped against the sides of his head, and his body began to rip its way through his clothes.
When the doctor realized what was happening, Case was no longer Case. He was the Case-thing.
The doctor screamed, but it was too late. For him, and for everyone else in the building.
Walmart’s rug selection was pretty sparse. Case wondered if maybe he should have gone to Target instead. While he browsed, a woman strolled into the aisle steering a wobbly cart with one hand and pushing the loose strands of hair out of her face with the other. A drooling toddler sat in the front of the cart, slobbering all over the handlebar and the woman’s fingers. A pile of food large enough to gag a whale filled the cart’s main compartment. The woman pawed through a couple of nasty-looking rugs that appeared to have been barfed upon—maybe to hide stains so you didn’t have to clean it as often. She passed on those particular monstrosities (from the dusty looks of the things, she wasn’t the only one who had) and wheeled her cart closer to where Case stood.
“Not much to choose from, is there?” she asked when she noticed him.
Case shook his head. He squatted and pulled out a thick, brown, two-by-three-foot number. The rug certainly wouldn’t have looked good anywhere outside a shrine to the ’70s, but the fibers were thick, silky, lustrous.
“What do you think of this one?” He held it up for the woman’s inspection.
She said nothing, but the eyebrows she arched spoke whole diatribes. Your call, the brows said. It’s your rug, but we wouldn’t put that thing in our house. Hell, we wouldn’t use it to wipe our shit. If eyebrows could shit.
“That bad?”
She shrugged. “It’s definitely not my style, but maybe it will go with your décor.”
Case’s décor was the last thing on his mind. “Yeah,” he said after studying the rug for another few moments. “Maybe it will.”
He thanked the woman, tucked the rug under his arm, and went off in search of some superglue.
In his shoebox of an apartment, Case used a pair of heavy-duty scissors to cut the rug to size. He stripped out of his clothes, kneeled on the floor beside the reshaped rug, and spread the entire 16-oz bottle of superglue (“SUPER DUPER-SIZED SUPERGLUE” the label proclaimed) on the rug’s underside. He sat down at the end of the rug and did a reverse sit-up until his back pressed against the film of sticky glue. When he was all the way down, he wriggled a little from side to side, back and forth.
He lay there for almost half an hour, giving the glue time to set, letting the rug meld with his body until the two of them were one and the same. When he stood up, he went immediately to the bathroom for a look in the medicine cabinet mirror.
The rug didn’t match his hair exactly—it was a few shades darker—but that was all right. That was perfect. When he became the Case-thing, he tended to get dirty. With mud. With blood. His normal chestnut-colored follicles became darker brown, almost black. Every once in a while he’d find clumps of the stuff strewn about his apartment after a hunt. Shed? Torn out? He could never quite remember, but he guessed more than a few of those clumps had come from the space between his shoulder blades and his ass.
He reached over his shoulder and gave the rug a tug. He was able to shift it around a little, but only as much as the skin beneath would allow. It was stuck fast. He smiled and headed for the front door.
The only way to know for sure was to give it a little test run.
The Case-thing burst out of the snack-den’s front doors and skittered to a stop on the cool concrete path. He breathed in the world around him, smelled dozens of snacks in the den behind, several more in the open, concrete-floored area ahead. There were no other things around—not yet—but once he’d spilled some blood, they’d come running. In a populated area like this, there’d be a whole pack.
He smelled a young woman-snack taking bagged food out of the back of her rolling metal box. It wasn’t the woman-snack his snack-self had met earlier, the snack he only vaguely remembered, the snack he’d barely been able to smell and hadn’t thought of as a snack at all. Not at the time. This was a new smell. A younger smell. And this snack had no child-snack in tow.
The Case-thing padded between two more of the rolling boxes and found the woman-snack with arms full of plastic bags, trying unsuccessfully to kick shut the hatch to her metal box. He growled at her and she spun toward him. The muscles in one hand loosened and the bagged food crashed to the concrete below. The other hand squeezed. He could smell the muscles working. He licked his muzzle.
As the woman-snack screamed, her bladder let go and the front of her pants were suddenly ripe with the stench of urine. The Case-thing tried to unsmell the piss and, of course, couldn’t.
The snack tried to run but slipped in her own spilled food and fell to her haunches. He was on her in a single bound. He tore a chunk from the side of her throat and flung the hunk of meat aside, trying to distribute the smell of the kill as widely as possible. Not that it would matter. If there were any things within five miles, they’d smell the carnage.
While he waited on the others, the Case-thing chose a few of the choicest bits of meat—the teats, the rump, the dangly-bit holder—and wolfed them down. There were other snacks nearby, all hiding. He saw one man-snack in a metal box a few jumps away. The snack stared through the box’s glass side, eyes wide and full of tears. Even through the metal and glass, the Case-thing could smell the snack’s fear.
The first thing to arrive was another he-thing. The Case-thing growled at the new, smaller thing and the small-thing backed away, also growling but very low in his throat, unassertive. The Case-thing had always been the alpha, and he promised himself that he would remain so despite his scanty pelt.
The small-thing looked at the man-snack in the metal box and took a step toward him. The Case-thing lowered his head.
You have my permission.
The small-thing leapt onto the hood of the metal box, rammed his face through the glass, and tore the snack out in less than a second. The man-snack screamed once before the small-thing ripped out his throat. The small-thing swallowed the meat after only a few perfunctory chews.
When the first she-thing arrived, she looked first at the small-thing and then at the Case-thing. The Case-thing gestured toward the woman-snack. He and the she-thing went through the ritual: share the kill, pick it clean, bathe each other.
When she approached his back, the Case-thing tensed. She rubbed her head against him, pulled away momentarily, rubbed against him again, and then pulled away for good.
She backed off.
The Case-thing waited.
She wheezed.
His growl started as a soft gurgle in his throat and escalated into an earthquakelike rumble that seemed to shake the whole world.
The she-thing began to revert back to her snack self. Her muzzle shortened, her teeth shrank, her hair retreated into her skin. Her large, glowing eyes paled. She stopped changing halfway through. Just enough, he guessed, to regain control of her vocal chords.
She said two words the Case-thing could almost understand. He let the words replay over and over in his mind. When he finally realized what she said, the earthquake of a howl became a nuclear bomb of a howl. He leapt at her before she could change back and gutted her on the spot. As her intestines spilled out across her half-formed body, the Case-thing stepped back to watch her die.
Nice rug, were the words she’d said.
Other things had come. A pack of them, as he’d guessed. The small one on the hood of the metal box took a final bite of his snack and then hopped down to the concrete.
Some of the things were wheezing at him. He turned to face them one at a time, growling.
What are you looking at?
The things turned from him and padded away. He was still bigger than them, still stronger. They wouldn’t test his temper.
When they were gone, and when the she-thing had breathed her last breath, the Case-thing clawed at the fur on his back. The fur that wasn’t fur. He jerked his head over his shoulder and chewed at the stuff. When he had dug away all the fake fur, chomped down through the hide to the raw meat beneath, he stopped and panted.
He looked up at the sky, saw the now-full moon, and wailed at it.
“It’s quite common,” the psychiatrist said, “for men to feel a sense of inadequacy when they begin to lose their hair.”
Case listened to her from the armchair on the other side of the small room.
“But I have to ask: do you think you might be blowing things slightly out of proportion? After all, you have very nice hair. Many men would kill for hair like yours.”
Case laughed.
“May I ask what you find so amusing?”
He shook his head. “Never mind. And anyway, it’s not the hair on my head that I’m worried about.”
“Not—” She looked at him for a moment before glancing down at his crotch. “Ahh.”
Case crossed his legs and said, “No. Jesus. What’s wrong with everyone?”
She looked him in the eyes again. She smiled but didn’t laugh. When her eyes flicked down to check her watch, Case felt his face begin to morph.
“—time is almost up,” the woman was saying.
“Yours is anyway,” the Case-thing said and leapt from the chair.