Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan Page B

of a hero cop broke through his age-old mammal-shock, and he thought: the gun .
    He didn’t know where it had fallen. It had been in his right hand. It must have flown off to the right. He didn’t know if he could find it. He didn’t know if he could reach it. He didn’t know if he could move at all, with his midsection torn apart and the gore still burbling out of him. Even his cry of effort gurgled with blood—but he did cry out—and he rolled.
    The monster roared. It sprang at him. Zach reached desperately across the clearing’s floor, his fingers scrabbling blindly through the leaves. The beast was on him. Its huge claws sank deep into the flesh of his lower leg, spearing his calf through and through. Zach shrieked in wild agony—and his palm touched metal. His fingers clutched the .38.
    The wolf-beast dragged him across the earth. He twisted his bleeding body round. He saw its eyes—enormous, and a color like no other thing: viscous yellow depths of extinction. The beast’s mouth was wide, its fangs were bared and ready to clamp on Zach’s throat. Its other paw was already swinging down to swipe the last life out of him.
    Zach brought the gun to bear. He didn’t even know he was pulling the trigger until the third shot fired and the fourth and fifth. He screamed in pain again as the beast’s claws were wrenched out of his leg, ripping away chunks of him—and the enormous creature staggered back, reared up again, and wavered in the broad, mellow swath of moonlight.
    Zach steadied his gun hand with the other and fired his last bullet, aiming center mass. The monster took one more faltering step backward, then stood still and swayed. It looked down at the meat-man on the earth beneath it. The great yellow eyes blinked, and Zach thought for all the world he saw some recognition in them, some bizarre ecstasy of feeling that he couldn’t begin to name.
    For what seemed forever, the beast swayed there above him. He thought it might—he thought it must—pounce on him again, and him now weaponless. Finally, though, it began its slow collapse. It sank down almost gracefully, one hind leg bending under it until the knee-joint planted itself in the leaves, one forepaw bracing itself against the earth. It panted rapidly, its huge tongue hanging over its fangs.
    Coughing up some last bits of something—some essential organic matter from his deep entrails—Zach pushed himself off the forest floor, propping himself on one hand, so that, for a second or two, he and the beast were in almost the same position, the man rising, the creature sinking down. Their eyes met on a level, and Zach could’ve sworn that he saw something human there, some tenderness or gratitude in their savage depths.
    Then the great wolf fell, toppling onto its shoulder with a thud that Zach felt in the ground underneath him. The creature made a high, weak, and sorrowful noise like the yip of a wounded dog. And as Zach watched—too badly wounded, too badly shocked, too thoroughly amazed to think much of anything—the thing began to change again.
    Its substance seemed to shrink into itself. It made a strangled noise of human anguish. The sounds of tearing muscle and splintering bone repeated themselves in a weird inversion—a damp congealing noise—a clattering of reconstruction. The black fur of the beast seemed to retract into gray, aged, naked flesh—until, in the shadow and moonlight, there lay the old professor, Gretchen Dankl, her wrinkled white body settling onto its back, her old dugs sinking into the outline of her ribcage, her taut, anxious features pointed at the sky.
    The wolf-creature was gone as if it had never been there at all. Zach could only stare at the professor, his mouth open, his mind in a muddy fever of denial: this was not happening. This could not be happening. Had he killed the woman?
    Gretchen Dankl’s lips moved weakly. She whispered up