And all of the voices together stopped as George’s words rang out through the cacophony.
Scott spoke first, his eyes wider than usual and his voice shaken by the words he’d just heard from a long-time friend. “Wait a minute. Wait a goddamned minute! Who got killed?”
Just a few words at the wrong time can put an awkward spin on a situation. The Viking looked at everyone at the surrounding tables and shook his head: Can you believe the lack of tact from some people?
The people around their joined tables suddenly decided they had better places to be. Four couples and at least two families got up and headed to the cash register to pay for their meals, several of which were barely even touched.
The six men who had called Scott and his friends to the diner stood looking pointedly at the people who’d had their meals interrupted until they left the building.
There was a long few seconds of silence until the last of the diners left and then the guy with the ponytail spoke again. “Would one of you like to tell Mr Lassiter what happened? Or would you prefer I do it for you?”
None of the three men looked at Scott. The big guy finally shrugged his shoulders.
“I guess it’s me then. While you were driving on your way and these three were doing their own thing, they hit something on the side of the road. They ran over a wolf.”
“We didn’t see it.” That was Cullie, who was whining.
“You had your chance. Shut up.” The man skewered Cullie with a glance and then went back to his tale. “Now, accidents happen, I’m the first to acknowledge that. They’re unfortunate, but they really can’t be avoided.” Scott was fascinated by the man’s face. The features were all where they belonged, but the way his eyes moved, the way his lips worked as they formed words, seemed just slightly off-kilter somehow.
“What would you have done in their situation Mr Lassiter?”
“I would have stopped to see what I could do to help and I would have called emergency services.” That was, to Scott’s way of thinking, the only thing to do in that sort of situation.
“You see? That’s where you and I are on the same page. You render aid. If aid is not possible, you might even get a guilty conscience and just scamper on your way. It happens from time to time. I spent twenty-five years with the Highway Patrol. I saw more accidents than I ever want to think about.”
The strangers around the table were all looking at Cullie, staring hard, their silence filling the air with tension.
“What your friends here did, however, was first check to see if the wounded animal was alive, and then torture it to death.”
Eric looked at his three hunting buddies, his normally stoic face showing disgust. Scott looked at them and shook his head. “That’s not possible. They wouldn’t do that.”
“Didn’t go so well for all of you guys on that hunting trip, did it? I believe you and your friend Anthony were the only ones who managed to bag a deer.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So all I can figure was that they didn’t want to go home empty handed. They backed their car off of the wounded wolf.” And here he paused and looked at each of them men who were in the hunting party before he continued. His face when he stared at Eric and Scott was calm and conversational. His expression changed substantially when he stared at the other three, as if the only thing stopping him from killing them right then and there was the lack of a handgun.
“When they saw what they’d hit, George actually wanted to call 9-1-1. He reached for his phone and he started dialing.” Those deep blue eyes stared hard at George, who looked down and shook his head, blinking his eyes against tears. “Before he could finish, Cullie Landers said he had a better idea.” And again the eyes moved, staring hard at Cullie, who stared back defiantly. The two men locked gazes and while it took several seconds, Cullie finally looked away. “Cullie thought it would be fun to play with the poor thing, to make it suffer a bit more and then to take the pelt home with him.”
The man turned and looked at Scott again, his features once more softening from what looked like homicidal rage. “There are laws against it, of course, but what the hell, maybe he could get it treated.” A shrug of broad shoulders. “It might have worked out that George won the argument. Your friend George seems like a decent enough man. But then Mark Loman decided he wouldn’t mind having a prize himself.”
The man moved across the side of the table until he was inches away from Mark. Mark was hyperventilating. He was sweating enough to look greasy, his dark hair was plastered to his skull, and he trembled.
“What was it you took, again, Loman? The head, I believe?”
Cullie roared when he opened his mouth again. “It was a fucking dog! Who cares?”
All six of the men around them did something completely unexpected. They growled. Not a little low noise like clearing the throat, but a deep rumble that came from their chests as their lips peel back from the teeth.
The leader spoke again. “Show them, John. Show them why we would care about a ‘dog’.”
One of the men with him stepped forward and quickly unbuttoned his shirt, setting it aside. Scott and his friends all watched while the man disrobed completely, down to nothing but his underwear.
The man was lean and hard, athletic enough but definitely not a body builder. Scott, who tended to work out regularly, was about the same height and had him by easily thirty pounds of muscle.
John stared directly at Cullie, his face still set in a sneer, and started breathing fast. His breaths were almost silent at first, but then there was a light whimper followed by a full-out groan.
Scott watched it happen, every last second of it, his mind frozen, his eyes bulging.
The man threw his head back and gasped and as he did so, his skin split, tearing like thick paper and revealing a different shape beneath its surface. There was no long drawn out process as he’d seen in several movies, there was simply a sudden growth spurt as the average sized man became something entirely different.
What shook off the shredded remains of a human being was a werewolf, one that stood easily seven-and-a-half-feet tall, and had to weigh at least a hundred pounds more than the man it had replaced.
The guy with the ponytail kept speaking, while every one of the hunters who’d been called to pay a debt scrambled away from the beast looming over Cullie.
“Wolfmen, werewolves, lycanthropes, whatever you want to call us, gentlemen, we’re very real.” He moved forward and looked the beast in the eyes. Scott could only stare in awe, but his friend Eric had a different look on his face. Eric looked like a man who’d just had an epiphany.
“Sweet Jesus,” Mark spoke softly, his voice shaking.
“Keep your gods to yourself, thank you.” The man staring at the monster in front of him stepped back and the werewolf fell forward, onto its hands and knees, even as it once again became the man named John. John very calmly put his clothes back on, leaving behind the shredded underwear.
“Hate when I forget the briefs,” John muttered almost apologetically as he got himself back into his jeans.
“Would you like me to tell you the rest of the story now, gentlemen?” The obvious leader of the group settled down against one of the tables and crossed his arms. “This is the part where things get grisly, and since you wanted the truth, you’ll get it.”
He looked over at George when he spoke. “George wanted them to stop, but I guess he didn’t feel too strongly about the situation. Instead of making them leave the wolf alone, he lit a cigarette, grabbed himself a beer and went into the woods.
“So he didn’t get to see everything that Cullie and Mark did. He didn’t watch while they took turns cutting at the crippled animal on the ground.” The rumble was back in the man’s voice, a sound unsettlingly like a dog growling as it ate. “He was busy leaning against a tree and then puking his guts out when he heard the animal’s cries change.”