Mongrels

Give it a mile, you tell yourself. Just another mile to reel things back in. No, there’s no way to unsplit your favorite shirt, to save the tatters your pants already are. But you’re not going to wreck another motherf—

But you are, you just did. Scraping the passenger side along a guardrail, for the simple reason that steering wheels aren’t designed for monsters that aren’t supposed to exist. You can hardly grip on to it, much less the gear stick, and the shoe your foot’s burst through now, great, it’s wrapped in the gas pedal in some way you couldn’t make happen again in a thousand tries.

This is the time that matters, though. Heading down the road at eighty, now ninety, not really in control, having to hang your new head out the window like a joke, just to see, because the windshield’s all shattered white from you punching it, and, though you run out of gas every time you go anywhere, now the tank’s sloshing full, of course.

It’s only a matter of miles until the semi crests at the other end of the road. The one with your name engraved on the bumper you know is your headstone. Or maybe it’ll be a long drop off the road, into some culvert you’ll never walk up from, werewolf or not. Even just a telephone pole.

Werewolves, we’re tough, yeah, we’re made for fighting, made for hunting, can kill all night long and then some. But cars, cars are four thousand pounds of jagged metal, and, pushing a hundred miles per hour now, the world a blur of regret—there’s only one result, really.

And, if a bad-luck cop sees you slide past the billboard he’s hiding behind, well, then it’s on, right? If he stops you, you’re going to chew through him in two bites, which, instead of making the problem go away, will just multiply it, on the radio.

So you run.

It’s the main thing werewolves are made for. It’s what we do best of all.

Every time I see a chase like that happening on the news, I always say a little prayer inside.

It’s just that one word: run.

And then I turn around, leave that part of the store because I want that chase to go on forever. I don’t want to have to know how it ends.

Another one of us dead.

Another mangled body in a tangle of metal and glass. Just a man, a woman, two legs two arms, because in death the body relaxes back to human bit by bit. In death, the wolf hides.

But cars and highways aren’t the only ways we go. The modern world, it’s custom-designed to kill werewolves.

There’s french fries, for one.

The idea, Libby said, switching hands on the Delta 88’s thin steering wheel and staring straight ahead, boring holes into the night with her eyes, the idea is werewolves think they’ll burn all those calories up the next time they shift. And they’re not wrong. You burn up your french-fry calories and more. But calories aren’t the dangerous part of the french fry. The dangerous part of the french fry is that once you have a taste for them, then, running around in a pasture one night, chasing wild boar or digging up rabbits or whatever—all honest work—you’ll catch that salty scent on the air. If you still had your human mind, you’d know not to chase that scent down. You’d know better.

You’re not thinking like that, though.

You run like smoke through the trees, over the fences, and, when you find those french fries, they’re usually on a picnic table in some deserted place. Which is the dream, right?

Except for the couple sitting on opposite sides of that picnic table. They can be young and broke, having had to dig into couches for enough change for this weekly basket of fries to split out at their favorite place, or they can be the fifty-year-anniversary set, indulging themselves on exactly the kind of greasy fat they’re under strict orders to stay away from.

What they should really stay away from, it turns out, it’s eating those french fries out in the open.

They don’t know they live in a world with werewolves. And by the time they do know, it’s too late.

Blind with hunger, you barrel up onto that table and snatch the fries in a single motion, have eaten them bag and all by the time that picnic table’s two leaping bounds behind you. At which point you register that distinct flavor of salt on this couple’s fingertips as well. Around their lips.

Your paws skid in the gravel, the dust under that gravel rising in a plume you’re about to rip open, explode back through.

The newspaper the next day won’t show crime-scene photos of the remains, or the blood-splashed picnic table.

You won’t need them. You’ll have those photographs in your head already, in those kind of visual flashes Darren says you get in the daytime, like half-remembered dreams.

And you’ll think french fries.

And the next time you follow that salty scent in from the pasture, an honest rabbit dangling limp from either side of your jaws, that two-lane highway you have to cross to get to that tanginess, maybe this time there’ll be a semi hurtling down the near lane, its grille guard thick and purposeful. Or there’ll be men on the roof of the cinderblock bathroom, their scoped rifles waiting, obituaries folded in their tall leather wallets.

They’ll shoot you like they always do, and you’ll run off like werewolves always have, but, like with wrecks at a hundred miles per hour, there’s only so much the wolf can do to knit itself back together. At least when you’re made mostly of french fries.

Maybe your human body turns up two years later in a drainage ditch, mushroomed lead slugs pushed out all around it, but the rest of that body will have been starved down to the bone—coming back from gunshots takes a lot of calories, and you can’t hunt when you’re laid up like that—or maybe the buzzards got there first, for the eyes, the soft parts, until you turn up as another drifter, another vagrant, another tragedy. Unlabeled remains.

Werewolves, we didn’t come up eating french fries through the ages.

It’s taking some time to adapt.

Maybe more time than we’ve got, even.

We’re not stupid, though.

We know to stay mostly to the south and the east. I mean, we’re made for snow, you can tell just by looking at us, we’re more at home in the snow and the mountains than anywhere, but in snow you leave tracks, and those tracks always lead back to your front door, and that only ever ends with the villagers mobbing up with their pitchforks and torches.

That’s one of Darren’s favorite ways to say it: pitchforks and torches.

Like what we’re in here, it’s a Frankenstein movie.

Frankenstein didn’t have to worry about Lycra, though. Or spandex.

Stretch pants are just as dangerous to werewolves as highways.

Libby’s always careful to wear denim, and Darren wouldn’t be caught dead in anything but jeans.

Me either.

The good thing about jeans, it’s that they rip away. Not at the seams like you’d think—that yellow thread there is tough like fishing line—but in the center of the denim, where it’s worn the thinnest. It sucks always having to buy new jeans, or finding ones at the salvage store with long enough legs, but that’s just part of being a werewolf.

A pair of tights, though, man.

Panty hose are murder.

Libby’d only heard about this, never seen it, but supposedly what can happen is you’ve wriggled into a pair of hose or tights—except for color, I really don’t understand the difference between the two—and then, over the course of the day, they’re such a constant annoyance that you kind of forget them altogether.

Enter night, then.

Begin the transformation.

Where pants will tear away, split over the thigh and calf, burst at the waist no matter how double-riveted they are, your fancy panty hose, your stretch pants, they wolf out with you. I’d imagine you look kind of stupid, with your legs all sheer and shiny, but anybody who laughs, you just rip their throat out, feast on their heart. Problem solved.

At least until morning, when you shift back.

Just like that tick that impacted itself into Grandpa’s skin, a pair of panty hose, they’ll retract with your legs. Except, instead of one tick embedding itself in your skin, flaring into some infection, this time every hair is pulling something back in with it.

What happens is your skin, your human skin, it’s part panty hose now. Like the hose have melted onto you, but deeper than deep. And, because you just used all your calories shifting back—it’s not easy like on television—and because you’re hurt, now, you probably can’t go back to wolf yet, can’t get tough enough to sustain this kind of all-over injury.