New Wolf: Yesterday’s Life — Part 5

Archy
Archy
Nov 4 · 12 min read

Missed Part 3? Read it here!

The den was eerily quiet. Normally our big bunker of a house was bustling with activity, but not tonight. It was halloween. The others in the pack were out partaking of the fun and craziness. It was the one night a year we could be in public in our wolf forms without starting a panic. If anyone asked, we were in the world’s most intricate costumes. Some in the pack were at parties, others were actually trick or treating (even paid to go with Trick or Treaters). There were always at least two together, some looked like wild wolves, others were in the half-way state, looking like a two-legged wolf-man.

I was just about home alone. I could feel a few others scattered around. Two of our wolves were professors in University, they were trapped here working on grading assignments. A few older wolves were getting together in one of the lounges, watching halloween movies from their youth. It was actually tempting to go join them. There was something to be said about the classics, except that I laughed during most of them when I was supposed to be screaming.

Given the crazy day, I wasn’t willing to risk doing the werewolf for Halloween thing. A peaceful night in was going to be a better experience. It sounded perfect already. Me, myself, and I, watching TV or reading, and having not a single care in the world.

The TV clicked on in the Setting Great Room. We had two rooms like this, one on the east and one on the west. Sandwiched between them was the kitchen and dining room. They were here more for symbolism than anything else. We entered as people, and left as wolves. Either side was decorated accordingly. The Rising Great Room had artwork and literature, the Setting side had pictures of wolves, the moon, animal skins, and so on.

Talking heads appeared on the TV. Someone had bought a block of TV for an infomercial, almost. Someone was literally paying to air their conservative hate show. The hostess smiled over to her guests, “if there were such things as werewolves, or vampires, or anything like that, they’d be creations of the devil.” She was blonde, wearing a red suit jacket, and acting like the friendliest person alive. I expected she was waiting to stab someone like me in the back.

The guests nodded, one was a man dressed in a suit, with graying hair. The other was a middle aged woman with faded red hair. She was starting to go gray but hadn’t yet. “You’re right there,” the man spoke up, “the devil has no power over us. Man is a holy creature, created in the Lord’s image, but I do wonder if maybe someone truly wicked could cave to the devil? Might that make such creatures?”

“That might be something.” His companion chimed in. “Live by the sword and die by the sword. Imagine someone so sinful, wicked, and evil? Perhaps they get what they deserve, a life of forced torment, where the sun burns them alive. The virtues of this world are their punishment.”

“What about the wolves?” the hostess asked, “what is their punishment?”

“You know, I’ve thought about that before. Silver and Gold are the rewards of heaven, and now they’re the punishment of the wicked. Poetic justice, you know? They’ll spend their days toiling, unable to be human, to be with the world as we are. The mark of Cain is on them. Exhiled as the wicked ought to be. Maybe they exist, but they cannot even come near us? As beasts they were and so beasts they are.”

“That has a certain sense to it.” The hostess paused, dead air on set before getting back to topic. “Now, I suppose the question is, can these people be saved? You always see those tabloids talking about the wolf man, vampires, and other oddities. You know, I think there’d be stories about a cure for these people, but even the Lord has turned his back on them, for they chose to turn theirs on him.”

“You see, someone has to be truly awful to be so beyond saving, but I think such people exist. Look at this Christian Nation, turning to wickedness. Homosexuality and all, the sins only add up. We’ll be seeing a resurgence in such wicked creatures, no dobut.” The man cut in.

“They would need to surrender themselves to salvation, but they are just too far gone to cosnider it. Still, pray for them. As the lord says, pray for your enemies, that they will be better. Maybe you too, can convince him to save these lost, wretched souls.” The hostess was moving on now, but it wasn’t making things any better. Their next topic was how people who had any interest in wolves and vampires were doomed to be damned for it.

These three clowns were somewhere between losing all faith in humanity and comedy gold. It’d be great to parody them, if not for the obvious problem they posed. How could someone hate me so much, as to go after my whole family? They listened to garbage like this. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it either. I’d only draw attention to myself. It was something I most certainly did not need. Attention ended badly.

It’d be nice to go on their show and shift in front of them, but then every nutjob in the world would be hunting me. This wasn’t something I’d asked for. Until I’d been bitten, my greatest sin was probably stealing a balloon.

A click and the channel changed. The screen showed a starship racing across the star system, the crew pinned down by heavy G-forces. They were on some sort of rescue mission it seemed. That was better.


Changing that channel was the best decision I’d ever made. I grew up with sci-fi and in general that was a happy-place even the werewolves and haters couldn’t take from me. There was something to be said for a show where the entire main cast was focused around the noble pursuit of knowledge and protecting others. At the moment, it was also really easy to relate to the show: they were scrambling after hints, clues, and finally the bad guys.

On screen the starship Valley Forge was blasting across the stars. The nefarious Consortium of Outer Worlds had launched an attack on Earth and the Inner Worlds Alliance. A kinetic warhead traveling at damned-near the speed of light was going to spear through the Earth, unless it could be intercepted.

“Time to intercept?” the Captain yelled from his chair, he was pinned by the G-forces, straining to force the words out.

“We’re not going to make it.” It was the pilot. His knuckles were white, muscles seized on the controls.

“Burn harder,” was the Captains order. A suicidal move. As the G-forces built up, their bodies would eventually reach the point where they couldn’t take it anymore.

“Captain?” A question from the XO, Executive Officer, second in command. This could be the end for them at any moment.

“It’s fifteen billion people, or us.” He didn’t need to elaborate further. The ship sped up. “Intercept?”

“Five minutes.” They just needed to inch a little closer. Every minute they were accelerating though, was another minute they could all die a horrible death. Five minutes was an eternity. It wasn’t the speed, it was that they were speeding up. It’s never the fall that gets you, it’s the suddeness of that stop at the end.

The screen flipped to a command room monitoring their progress. A General looked out on rows of soldiers manning equipment. “Will they make it?”

“Impossible to know sir. At that speed, we won’t know they’re there until after it’s done.” A sargeant near the front of the room was charting their trajectory. The communications systems couldn’t work as fast as the ships were moving. There was at least a ten-minute lag.

“Either they save us, or the next thing we see will be a ball of fire.” A second officer summarized the case. String instruments were playing in the background, one note after another, the tension ratcheting up, higher and higher.

The world blurred away, for me and the crew. The next shot was of the Captain, breathing hard. A cut, we saw from his view as darkness bled in at the edge of his bobbing vision. He was on the verge of blacking out, even with the sci-fi tech in the show forcing his body to keep functioning.

A target appeared onscreen as alarms sounded. The crew shouted over the chaos.

“Main drive overheating!”

“Target lock!”

“We’re tearing ourselves apart!”

“Reactor going critical!”

“Fire all weapons!” The captain’s voice boomed above them all.

“HEY ARCHY!” A high pitched voice blasted my ear. The couch rocked. I launched up like a startled cat. Werewolves are really good at jumping. It felt like a scene out of a cartoon, like I’d stick to the ceiling. Instead I just landed behind the couch, launching myself over it in shock.

Bryn sat there, smiling at me in her halloween costume. Unlike the other wolves, she adored making costumes. This year she had gone all-out, going as a heroine with power over gravity. I’d helped a little, 3D printing some bits of her costume last week. She sanded and painted them to perfection.

I glared back at her. “What the hell was that for!?”

“I was just saying hi,” she countered, trying to sound innocent. Crocodile tears. Lots and lots of crocodile tears.

“Uh-huh… Are you gonna share the candy supply?” I didn’t see her bucket or bag anywhere.

“And what if I have no candy?” She kept trying to look innocent. They were up to something.

“Says the wolf who hit every house twice last year?” I hadn’t been here to see that, but the story spread like wildfire. It was her first stable halloween. Her first pass was in costume, then in wolf. It meant for a particularly big haul.

“Maybe you’ll have to raid from the others? We’re having our own Halloween after party upstairs.” She got up and winked at me. In the back of my mind, I could feel the others, a group in a lounge room of sorts.

“Do I want to know what trouble you’re plotting?” I asked as I slowly got up.

“What trouble? It’s just a party. You have no proof of trouble.” Except that I’d been living here a few months already.

“Well, I can remember being lured into a hunt… tricked into baking a hundred cupcakes… waking up to a birthday party a month before my birthday… and one of you spiked my tea with mushrooms..” Not just any mushrooms, the ones we use to make our intoxicants. They didn’t make us trip, they just made us drunk.

“I had nothing to do with any of that, except maybe the cupcakes. I took you to the store for supplies, remember?” She smiled as we headed for the stairs.

“What’s the wolf equivalent to a wolf in sheep’s clothing?”


The lounge had been converted into a combination movie theater and party room. Ordinarily the room was a relaxed space with a fireplace and a TV. There was a little counter in back that was usually empty. A few tables and chairs sat behind the couches. Around finals season, we’d be in here craming together. A few older wolves might try to help. Apparently Astrid put up power points and repeated classes from her absurdly detailed notes.

Now, the back counter was covered in snacks, as if the wolves had raided half the pizza places in the region. There were four types of pizza, chips, fruit, pretzels, drinks, strange home-made deserts, popcorn for some reason, and of course, entire piles of candy. The fire place was lit, with the projector screen a little ways in front of it. It filled the room with hues of red and shades of deep shadow. THe screen was unaffected by the flames, Various Halloween specials were playing on it.

Bryn smiled as she tugged me through the crowd. I managed to snatch a piece of pizza as we worked towards the center of the room. A small tingle of excitement rippled through the room. Everyone noticed my arrival. Whatever this party was, they were doing it for me. Unfortunately, they’d picked up on one thing I loved about Halloween: the horror movies.

Astrid was soon on my other side, smiling, “so, what’s the scariest movie of them all?” she asked. That fast, Bryn was gone. It was just me and the long haired, blonde girl with the color-coded everything. She always made me smile.

“Scariest movie?” I had to think about it. “I think it’s always that first one you see, that’s drilled deep in your mind. Event Horizon still scares me, just because I saw the trailer when I was six.” She giggled at that as we approached the couches. “It’s not the scares for me. It’s the atmosphere. The creepy feeling and thinking something’s moving in the shadows.”

“So, you’re not gonna scare us tonight? You get to pick the movie.” She smiled at me and the world disappeared a bit.

“I get the feeling nothing on a screen is going to scare anyone here.” We were werewolves, damned near the top of the food chain. Killable only if you knew what weapon to use. The creatures in horror movies were a joke to the pack. We were the one that scared the boogie man.

A newcomer invaded from the side. Cody, smiling at me. “Why don’t you try something crazy and weird?” he said, “anything other than those stupid Paranormal movies.” They were found-footage movies, made great use of their budet and effects, but ghosts weren’t scary here.

“I’d settle for something just good. Maybe more story than scary?” Astrid’s idea made me want to do both.

Movies flashed forward in my mind. There was a distinction here between good movie and the right movie. Psycho was a classic, but not for this audience. There were TV specials from all manner of cartoons, but many of us knew them all. The monster had to be the right kind. It had to be something that we weren’t used to dealing with. There went Jason Vorheese, Aliens, and so much more. That is, until I realized something.

We were a pack of werewolves. A pack. There was always one of us there to rescue the others. IF you messed with one of us, you messed with all of us. It wasn’t an enviable position to be in. The ultimate werewolf nightmare was to be alone. Horror movies loved to prey on isolation.

I had my movie.

“Let me go set everything up. I know exactly what to show you.” I actually managed to give them a worried look as I disappeared into the crowd.

What was my brilliant movie? Coraline. It was the story of an only child who gets her dream family, only to discover all is not as it seems. The gras is just simply not always greener. Her new world is all a trap and she’s on her own to escape it. In some ways, I could relate to her struggles. I just didn’t have a demonic creature hunting me. Hopefully, I didn’t have a demonic creature hunting me. It wouldn’t be surprising at this point.

The movie started and I returned to Astrid. Everyone started to quiet down, filling in the couches and floor. I took my post in the spot next to Astrid and relaxed, ready to see how the others would react. This was a movie I’d seen a million times, it couldn’t disturb me. They all felt my thoughts, and knew to brace themselves. It was a kid’s movie, but that’s not the part that mattered.

I felt the others cringe and look away as the movie went on. The last scene in the circus and the final battle is what got them to the edge of their seats. Being pursued by the monster to the very end. Even Astrid held on a moment, the big rescue seemed to resonate with her, we all had someone to protect, like Coraline did.

As the movie ended, I smiled, “so, everyone scared?” The tension in the room was there, but it evaporated a moment later as a second movie played. Something more light-hearted, one of those cartoon specials. A sponge running on screen, all done in stop motion. It was pretty incredible to see a network actually investing in something like this.

The tension just melted away. They needed that extra push after Coraline. Even with a good ending. Cody looked up at me from the floor. “Ok, you don’t get to pick scary movies any more. They’re actually scary now.”

The sentiment spread in mumbles around the room as we relaxed to more of the specials. We had super heroes being frightened of monsters when the power went out, strange things in the middle of nowhere, and really weird things happening to the any-town of animation. As we watched, the crowd began to thin out. A few offering me extra treats from their own candy stashes, usually the Dots. I loved dots.

Things were looking up. I knew how people could be so awful. I had a plan. And I had my pack with me. Bring it on.


Read Part 6.

Follow along as Archy realizes this could be bigger than he thought before. It’s not just his family. It’s everything about his life that he’s built back up again, all at stake!

Missed the last section? Read it here! Subscribe for more as I work on this NanoWrimo story, piece by piece!

Follow @WolfInContext for updates as the story progresses.

Archy

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Archy

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