SPREADING THE DISEASE
by Rycke Foreman
On this night the moon is full, dripping its silver terror into the hearts of the werewolves, the howling werewolves, who raise their voices and bay at it in fear. Its lunabright light strikes hatred and loathing into their fevered brains, makes you crazy and want to run and rip and tear and bite and scratch. Oh, but it feels good, too, good and comforting and soothing, and alive, so alive...
...and the blood...
In the township, the monsters’ cries are scarcely heard. Their vulgar ululations are only things on the edge of bad dreams; happy dreams turn sour, but their lives will go on. Those that live upcountry, though, they snuggle up closer to their wives or husbands as the chorus of insanity grows, changes, becoming frenzied disorder instead of haunting lullaby. Some get up to check the children; others check their deadbolts and windows, such as Ned Wilkes; still others think, dimly, through their bloodstained dreams, of the Winchester mounted over the mantle, the Mossberg stashed in the closet. Josh Atkins grunts. Young ones kick and thrash at their shadowed, lumbering dreamland bogeymen, intensified nightmares brought on by the supernatural cries.
But the moon will not go away, mocking them in its laziness, its power. The screaming wolves froth and snap and chase their tails. Canis Lupus is slaughtered as it sings its sad song to the moon; slaughtered by a thing that is half-man, half-brother; slaughtered, as it was not wise like its true brothers, wise enough to hide away on this crazy winter’s night when the wind carries scents both familiar and alien, interloper and sibling. Then their own blood rides the wind, and the young ones understand the elders’ wisdom, no longer anxious to leave shelter.
Through the window of Mark Grainger's Ford Fairlane, the outside world seems foggy and surreal...distant. But Carol Oats murmurs her fears to her lover, anyway. No, baby, nothin’ gonna get between us tonight, he whispers as the beasts close in. Ned Wilkes will hear the lovers' screams, but Josh Atkins will not.
These creatures--made bold and rabid by the glowing moon--slink toward shacks and farmhouses, their hunger aroused, cannibalism floating amiably in their yellow-green eyes. Josh Atkins, who sleeps alone and has for a long time, is drawn from his slumber by the shattering of glass. In the darkness he is only vaguely aware of the teeth, the coarse fur, the burning eyes...until he is touched by them. But his screams cannot stop the beast that is upon him, just as the beasts’ cannot stop the lunar cycle of madness.
Two werewolves attack each other fiercely, tempers raised by the blue-silver nightsun. Lunging, hooking into solid, gristly meat, ripping, savaging, frenzied bloodlust awakened like neither opponent has ever known. The victor releases its cry to the moon; the other metamorphizes slowly back into Ward King, as sometimes happens during the death throes. His body is found the next day, but it is not reported. It is eaten.
Little Charlie Nelson awakens to the shrill whinnying of his parents’ horses. Using the corner of his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle curtains to wipe away the condensation, he looks out his bedroom window to see why the horses were screaming--really SCREAMING!--like Sis did every time he jumped out from behind the corner with his teeth bared and his hands hooked into deformed claws, growling and spitting the fake blood Aunt Myrna bought him for Halloween. Still dreaming, he thinks fuzzily, as two wolflike things claw and bite and rip at the screaming horses’ flanks. Like wolves, yes: they are hairy, and they snarl, and their maws are long and canine, and they act like animals; but these wolves stand on two legs just like he does, just like his pa does. Little Charlie Nelson gawks at the savagery--That’s even more than they show on TV!--as an eerie, disembodied voice, weeping, filters into his room. Then a second voice joins in (both of which he knows just as well as his own), and suddenly the atmosphere is heavy, so heavy and thick and hard to breath, but Charlie knows that this is just the sights and sounds of Nightmare, ‘cos there aren’t really no monsters...until his father’s harsh quiet-loud whisper: “Get away from that window, Charlie. Go get in with your ma.” His pa is holding his weepy young sister in one arm, and in the other, Pa cradles a shotgun. There are no lights on in the house. The Nelson family gather the few necessaries they need as the horses shriek, then fall silent. By the morning, the only clue to the whereabouts of Little Charlie Nelson and his clan, tire tracks, have been long since erased by the blood-thick wind.
Shapes. Shapes dancing through the trees. Ned Wilkes eyes these shapes uneasily. He counts six or seven of ‘em through the large picture window he and Stella had installed two years back.
Coming toward the house. Gooseflesh creeps over his body as this thought and a scream--a human scream--grow intertwined. Another, more timbrous voice rises with the first, for a second he can hear it, then Stella asks what’s going on. Wilkes does not answer her. He now recognizes the dark, sleek forms that steal through the trees--as if he didn’t already know from their maddening howling. He hopes these are just coyotes, but they’re big, too big, almost twice the size of the members of the local packs. A cold sweat rises to join the goosebumps. Wilkes shivers as his mind flows backward to the carnage he’d seen at the Childe’s cabin the day before last, the four bodies and a torso, strewn from basement to front door, fingers and toes missing, disemboweled, bones splintered...
From a faraway place near the back of his mind, a tiny voice reminds him that his job is to protect and serve, and he’d just heard--teenagers? up near Miner’s Hill?--someone screaming bloody murder. Yet Wilkes doesn’t move. Can’t. Because the craziest thought just entered his mind, just came waltzing right on in, uninvitedly, and dropped an atomic-sized bombshell deep inside his gray-matter. He watches the shadows that gather at the edge of the forest while he turns this idea over in his addled brain. With a growing sense of unease, he fishes a clip of a movie he’d seen just recently, one of them horror movies Jacob likes to watch on the late-night TV, fishes it from out of his subconscious, and concludes that his irrational, nearly insane little notion just might not be so insane. What if the other six bodies that should have been in the carnage at that cabin just got up and walked away? Stupid and insane as it is, damned if it don’t seem to make the most sense right now. Doc Hollis said at least eight people had been killed inside that house, and probably something more like ten, if Doc knew a single damned thing about the practice of medicine. And Booker’s body hadn’t yet been accounted for, either, though he’d probably been murdered an hour or more after the first massacre. All the paw prints and hair fibers that Manni Forster said couldn’t be exactly matched to any known--
But his wife is calling to him, pleading to know if everything is all right. Wilkes turns to inform her that everything is indeed alright, just fine and fuckin’ dandy, whaddaya think? but he loses that thought because, just as he took his eyes away, those shadowy shapes had sprung forward, out from between the trees, and as his head whips back around--slowly, oh so slowly!--he finds that they are still coming, but he can see them now because his porch light is on and the stars and the moon are shining so bright, and he thinks they look like rabid, adult versions of the pups he’d seen on that horror show with Jacob. Wilkes’ bladder lets loose and he shrieks, shrieks like a woman to get the gun, get the fuckin’ sawed-off, Stella, and then she screams and he can hear their son suddenly begin screaming and the werewolves scream at the silver orb in the sky and the picture window screams as it shatters, glittering, into a myriad of crystal moons...and then the family’s pleading screams die out. First, father’s. Then son’s. Finally, wife’s.
Hours later, when Ned Wilkes regains consciousness amid four coagulated pints of his own blood, all of his wounds are healed. His body is covered with a tangled mass of scar tissue that grows visibly smaller by the minute. His stomach, which the werewolves had so heartily dug into last night, itches maddeningly, as do his biceps and forearms, and his thighs, and his legs. And his crotch. Wilkes looks in upon his son, who is also still breathing, though his bedsheets, pajamas and the walls are gory and flaked with hunks of skin and muscle. He tours the rest of the house, and finds his wife, her glazed, lifeless eyes still fixed on the light at the end of her tunnel. She is sprawled across their king sized bed. Stella Wilkes has no throat. Her breasts, once ample and firm, are pulpy nubs, her torso a gaping, empty crater. Her legs have little flesh left, some sinew, cartilage; the bones crushed and the marrow greedily extracted.
Wilkes looks down at the woman he’s spent damn near thirty-five years with and feels no sorrow for the woman, no sense of loss or grief.
Just a kneading hunger in his belly.
His eyes mutate from brown to yellow. Soon, something that is only partially Ned Wilkes begins to feed. Later, its son joins in.
But the night is getting tired, and, with it, the moon, which soon allows itself to be chased over the horizon. Eventually, the creatures’ blood slows, becomes docile, and the bloodbath abates. A few revert to their true forms; most, though, are trapped in their animal state, or simply refuse to be the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Through the course of the night, another dozen have survived to be inducted to the circle...
