Then Mr. Huffman rose up and snarled at me.
The exposed brain matter pulsed back into his head, and with a crunching noise the plates of his skull rejoined. The creature stood on his hind legs somehow, even with knees twisted like a canine's. With one taloned finger he speared a chunk of tissue from his fur and tossed it into his maw, chewing his own discarded flesh. Returning gracefully to all fours he shook himself like a giant dog, splattering the blood from his wounds on the white walls and motivational posters in the hall.
The monster howled again, long and high-pitched, and the sound ignited some primal survival instinct buried deep within me. I turned and ran faster than I ever had before. Somehow I kept my wits, and rather than trying to outrun the creature to the elevator, I twisted hard to the right and through a doorway, slammed the door, locked it, and shoved a heavy desk in front of it. A computer monitor fell to the ground and sparked. I was in the marketing room. A poster with a kitten forlornly holding onto a clothesline had the caption: hang in there. Thanks for the advice, buddy.
There was no time to think. I kept moving, hoping that the door and the desk would slow Huffman down. It did, for a few seconds at least. In a cloud of splinters the werewolf began to tear the door apart, snarling, grunting, gradually pushing the desk out of the way. There was another doorway at the end of the office that led to a side corridor. I slammed the door behind me, but there was nothing there to block it with. Weapon. Need a weapon. My gun was still in hand, but it was empty, and a lightweight snub was definitely lacking as a club. I had a concealed weapons permit for defense against muggers and assorted scumbags. I had never thought I would need it to fight a creature from the Sci-Fi channel. There was a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall so I pulled it down and took it with me. It was better than nothing.
Down the corridor was the door to my department, if I could get through it and I had a shot at the elevator. Legs and heart pumping, I heard the door behind me crash off of its hinges. Not sparing the time to look, I yanked open the door to Finance and rushed through, trying to pull it closed behind me. The door slammed into Huffman's claws and muzzle. I tried in vain to close the door but he was far stronger than I was. He swiped his talons down across my chest, tearing cleanly through my clothing and into me. Pain. Unbelievable pain. Screaming, I fell on my back and activated the fire extinguisher, directing the spray into the werewolf's gaping mouth and eyes. The creature howled, reared up on its hind legs, and covered its face. I lashed out with my foot, kicked the creature in the ribs and knocked it back into the corridor. Scrambling to my feet, I pulled the door closed and locked it.
My chest burned from the lacerations. The injury looked bad, and blood was soaking across my shirt, but the pain was now just something throbbing in the background behind the wall of adrenaline rushing through my system. The hurt would come later. I had a monster to worry about right now.
The werewolf punched through the wooden door, talons narrowly missing my flesh as he searched for me. I raised the fire extinguisher above my head and lashed out at the hairy arm, smashing it again and again with blows that would easily have broken ordinary bones. Finally the forearm shattered with an audible snap, but Huffman was not deterred. The claws kept swinging, and within seconds the limb had seemingly healed. Shouting unintelligibly, I continued bringing the extinguisher down on Huffman, the metal echoing with each hit.
We were at an impasse. He could not push through with me crushing his arms. His animal mind must have come to that same realization. As fast as it had appeared, the arm disappeared, leaving nothing but a gaping hole through the heavy oak door.
My breath came in ragged gasps from the exertion. Nothing seemed to hurt him. I had to think of something… Silver. That's what always worked in the movies. Where was I going to get silver in my office? But I knew the answer to that one immediately. Nowhere.
If I could make it to the elevator I would be home free, but to do so I needed to cover forty feet of Finance, and then about a hundred feet of hallway. Cradling the fire extinguisher in my arms I stumbled for the door. In the darkness, the green light from the exit sign was my beacon. The blood running down my stomach was warm and slick. I made it as far as my cubicle before Huffman got a running start and crashed into the room. There was no way I could escape before he would be on me, claws and teeth flashing, and I would be a dead man.
Flight wasn't working, so now it was fight time. At least I was on my home turf.
"Huffman, you son of a bitch! Come and get me!" I roared as I sprayed him with the fire extinguisher. "This is my cube!"
The werewolf swatted my improvised weapon away, breaking my left hand on impact. He rammed into me and hurled me straight into the air. The ceiling tiles barely slowed my flight and I rebounded off of a heating duct with a resounding clang. I fell onto the top of my cube wall. It was not designed to take the impact of a three-hundred-pound man. It collapsed and I slammed onto my desk.
Keep going. Groaning and trying to catch my breath, I tried to think of something, anything, that I could do. The werewolf's head rose at the base of my desk. I kicked him hard in the face. Huffman bit my shoe off.
With leg muscles like coiled springs, the werewolf easily hopped up beside me, claws clicking on the hard surface like fingernails on a chalkboard. I felt the instinctive twinge down my spine. I tried to roll off the desk, but Huffman effortlessly sunk a claw deep into my thigh, pinning me down. I screamed in pain as the talon pierced through the muscle. Grabbing the back of his hairy claw with my one working hand, I tried to pull it out. It wouldn't budge.
He had me. I lay there bleeding with my leg pinned to my desk. The werewolf seemed to be enjoying himself, taking his sweet time, savoring my pain. I wondered if somewhere deep inside that animal Mr. Huffman was there, enjoying this, loving the power, finally being able to strike back at the world he hated so much.
My fear was replaced with anger.
The shooting pain in my leg was unbearable, and all reason told me that I was a dead man, but I would be damned if I was going to die at the hand of that fat piece of shit Mr. Huffman.
The werewolf opened his jaws slowly, impossibly wide, and lowered them toward my face. His breath was hot, and stunk like rotting meat. He was going to eat me and somehow I knew he was going to do it as slowly and painfully as possible. Trying to be inconspicuous I reached into my pocket. Huffman licked my face. The tongue was damp and rough and I cringed in revulsion. Bastard probably wanted to see what I tasted like first.
My pocketknife opened with a snap the instant before I jabbed it into his throat. The three-inch Spyderco was not really a fighting knife, but I put it to the test. Twisting and pulling, I tried to do as much damage as I could. Blood geysered across my cube as I severed his jugular. He jerked his claw out of my leg, and I almost fainted as blood flooded out the gaping hole. I pulled the little blade back and stabbed it into his eye. My knife, slick with fluids, slipped out of my hand as Huffman pulled away, and it remained stuck in his face. He lashed out, striking me in the head. The claw tore down to the skull, opening my flesh, dragging down across my face. I felt it in almost clinical detachment, knowing it was bad, but beyond the point of feeling or caring. My whole life had dilated down to one simple thought: Huffman must die. Lights flashed in my eyes as my enemy roared.
"Regenerate this!" I bellowed as I grabbed my letter opener off of my desk and stabbed it repeatedly into his chest. Reversing my grip, I thrust it up through his bottom jaw, lodging it deep into the roof of his mouth, pinning his muzzle shut. Then I kicked him in the balls and smashed my chair over his head for good measure. He hit me with a backhand that knocked me across the room like a human cannonball. I crashed through a potted plant and rolled across the carpet.
Disoriented, I left Huffman swirling about like a tornado of death while I limped away, trying to staunch the massive bleeding from my leg. The werewolf thrashed, trying to pry one little knife out of his eye socket and a letter opener out of his palate. I had landed near Huffman's office so I pulled myself through the door. Options were running out. I was going to pass out soon from blood loss. The only thing sustaining me was anger and determination, and that wouldn't last much longer. I needed to think of something, and I needed to think of it quick. Taking stock, I saw filing cabinets on each side of the door. Chair. Desk. Golf magazines. Some lady's hand. But nothing that I could use as a weapon.
I could hear the werewolf raging, smashing apart my cube, destroying anything within reach, ripping and snarling, then gradually quieting as he caught my scent. He was coming for me again. I was waiting for him.
But not where he expected. As Huffman charged in, led at this point only by instinct and pure animal fury, I jumped from the top of the filing cabinet onto his back. We collided with a great deal of force and he crashed snout first into his desk. Wrapping my arms around his neck, I choked him, straining as hard as I could. "Let's see how tough you are without air!" I screamed in his pointy ear. We flipped over the desk but I stubbornly held on. His jaws snapped shut but I was safely under them. He reached over and raked razor claws down my back. We spun crazily and crashed into the already damaged window, shattering it and sending shards raining to the ground below. By some miracle we did not fall. Keeping my damaged left arm around his throat, I grabbed his muzzle with my good hand and wrenched it to the side with all of the strength and anger and fear that I had left. I grunted under the strain and roared. The beast's spine was like rebar. Somehow I pulled harder.
The werewolf's neck broke with a sickening pop. Severed from the impulses firing in his brain, the creature's body spasmed wildly. The claws dropped away from my ravaged back and he lay under me, flopping violently. I rolled off and dragged myself away, barely able to stay conscious. Pulling myself along with one arm, shoving with one leg, the other leg limp and leaving a wide trail of blood, I made it to the other side of the desk and collapsed.
I heard the scraping of bones again as Huffman's vertebrae realigned. In a second he would be back up, and I would not be able to fight him off again. With my good hand I struggled up so I could see over the desk. There was Huffman's dinner, and in my brain that was running dangerously low on blood and oxygen, it struck me as funny. "Need a hand?" I asked nobody in particular and giggled.
The werewolf was starting to sit up. In another few seconds I would be providing him nourishment. Then he would be off killing innocent people at every full moon. On the other days of the month I was sure that he would just keep being the worst boss in the world. I don't know which one made me angrier.
Huffman swiveled his from head side to side as he regained his senses.
"Not this time, asshole!" I said as I heaved all of my weight against the heavy desk. With a groan of protest it moved from its depression in the carpet. Desperately shoving, my one good leg straining for traction, made even more difficult because I was missing my shoe, I pushed the desk into Huffman, knocking him over, and before the werewolf realized what was happening I had pushed him and his damned desk out of the window.
I could tell I was dreaming. Everything had that fuzzy, disjointed dream feel to it. First I had flashes of dragging myself toward the elevator, my belt being used as an improvised tourniquet on my leg. However, in my dream it didn't hurt a bit. Movement was slow as though I were underwater. There were glimpses of an ambulance and men sticking me with needles and pounding on my chest.
The next scene was weird, since I usually dreamed in a first person perspective. I floated weightless as I looked down and watched people in masks shock my heart with a defibrillator.
Back in the first person again. Now I stood in a field. A good, strong, green crop of some kind. My feet were bare and I could feel the wetness of the dew as I wiggled my toes. The sky was dark blue and the air smelled fresh and clean like after a summer rainstorm. A herd of cows grazed in the distance.
A man stood nearby. He was old and bent. His white hair was wild and he had a kindly smile, but hard eyes behind small round glasses. He leaned on his cane and waved.
"Hello, Boy." The old man had some sort of heavy Eastern European accent.
"Are you God?" I asked.
He laughed hard. "Me? Ha! Is good one. 'Fraid not. I just friend."
"Am I dead?"
"Almost. But you need go back. You have work to do. Yes, much work."
"Work?"
"A calling. Is hard, but is good."
"A calling?"
"From before you born. How you say?"
"Preordination?"
"More like you get short straw. Now go. No time. I send you back."
"Will we meet again?"
"Only if you are slow-witted boy and get dead again."
The nice dream ended and my world exploded in pain.
There was a steady beeping noise. It matched pace with my heartbeat. Bump-bump. Two black shapes stood over me.
"I say we waste him now."
"Not yet."
"No way he's clean."
"You know the rules."
"The rules are wrong. I could smother him with his pillow and nobody would ever know."
"I would know."
I went back to sleep.
I awoke to the smell of hospital antiseptic. My eyes were matted shut, my mouth was horribly dry, and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I had that weird, tingly, high on painkillers feeling, which I had not felt since the last time I had surgery years before. Forcing my eyes open and gradually adjusting to the muted light, I could see that I was in a hospital room. Hospitals make me nervous and uncomfortable, though right now it sure beat the alternative.
Trying to sit up, I realized that I had an IV running into my arm, bulky bandages placed on my chest, legs, and back, and my left hand was in a cast.
Wincing at the tightness in my scalp, I gingerly reached up and touched my forehead. There was no bandage there, and I counted at least fifty prickly stitches that ran from the crown of my head, right between my eyebrows, across the bridge of my nose, and ended on my cheek. I was thankful that I did not have a mirror. Being naturally curious, and of course fearless on a morphine drip, I lifted up the edge of the big bandage on my chest. They had used staples to close the deeper lacerations there. In my drug-induced stupor, it struck me as funny that the doctors had shaved my chest. That would probably itch bad later.
I did not remember how I had gotten here, or even how long I had been out. My watch could tell me what day it was, but it was missing, as were all my clothes. All I had on was a flimsy gown and a medical supply store's worth of bandages.
As my senses gradually returned, I started to remember what had happened to put me here. I had to admit that at first I blamed my strange memory on the drugs. Killer werewolf boss? Yep, whatever they gave me, it sure was some good stuff.
You imagined the whole thing, the logical part of my brain told me. You must have been in some sort of accident, and woke up here. There's no such thing as monsters. Mr. Huffman didn't turn into a werewolf. You didn't push him out a window. Those can't possibly be claw marks. They're from a car wreck or something. The whole thing is a bad hallucination. Everybody at work will laugh when they hear your crazy story. Huffman is probably there now, complaining that you are out and running up workers' comp.
Screw you, logical brain. I know what I saw.
There was one way to find out what put me in here. There was a call button attached to the IV. I pushed it and waited, trying not to dwell on the image of Huffman's face turning into an incisor-filled muzzle. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the door opened. Unfortunately, it was not a nurse.
"Mr. Pitt. I'm Special Agent Myers and this is Special Agent Franks. We're with the government." The two men flashed their credentials in my general direction. One agent was a dark brooding type, obviously muscular and grim of attitude. The speaker was older and looked more like a college professor than a Fed. They were both wearing off-the-rack suits, and neither looked very happy. They pulled up chairs. The professor crossed his legs, steepled his fingers, and scowled at me. The younger one pulled his gun.
"Move and I'll kill you," he said, and I did not doubt him for an instant. It was a Glock, and it had a sound suppressor screwed onto its muzzle. I did not know what caliber it was, but from where I was sitting the bore looked freaking huge. The suppressor did not waver. I did not move.
The professor spoke. "Mr. Pitt. Would you care to tell us what happened at your office?"
Speaking was difficult with my bad case of cottonmouth. "Msssph umm suh…" I told them. "Wah um fa?" They could probably tell that I was either asking for water or speaking in tongues. The professor hesitated and then obliged, taking a cup off of the dresser and pressing the straw to my lips. The cold wetness was the best thing in the world. The agent called Franks leaned slightly forward so he could still shoot me if necessary. That guy obviously took his job very seriously.
"Ahhh… Thanks," I croaked.
"You're welcome. Now tell us what happened before Agent Franks here gets cranky."
I paused, not really wanting to tell the FBI that my boss had transformed into a monster and tried to eat me, before I managed to snap his neck and shove him out the window. They would lock me up for sure if I said that, so I improvised.
"I fell down the stairs." Hey, I was on morphine. It was the best I could come up with on short notice.
The professor frowned. "Cut the crap, Pitt. We know what happened. We watched the security tapes already. Five days ago, your supervisor, one Cecil Huffman, transformed into a lycanthrope, a werewolf in this case, and attempted to kill you. You fought him off, and pushed him to his death."
I was shocked. The FBI agents seemed to not have a problem with the idea that my boss had turned into a werewolf. I was also surprised that I had been out for five straight days. But mostly I was surprised that Mr. Huffman's first name had been Cecil.
"It was self-defense. I'm the good guy here. Why the gun?"
"You know how people become werewolves, don't you, Mr. Pitt? That's one thing that the movies get right. If you're bitten by one you, too, will be infected. The DNA-altering virus lives in their saliva. If you're clawed there is a smaller chance that you can be infected, but it's still possible. If we had found a single clear bite mark on you, we would be disposing of your body right now. Under the Anti-Lycanthrope Act of '95 we're supposed to terminate all confirmed were creatures immediately. I'm sorry."
"I don't think he bit me," I squeaked. But I felt a lump of dread in my gut. He had mauled me pretty badly. Was I going to turn into a werewolf? Or was the FBI just going to shoot me first?
"Silver bullets," grunted Agent Franks. He kept the Glock centered on my head. I don't know what kind of Jackie Chan move he was expecting me to pull, but I wasn't planning on going anywhere. I could barely move. "Just in case."
"So now what?" I queried.
"We wait. A sample of your blood has been sent for testing. If it comes back positive you will have to be put down. If it comes back negative, you're free to go. We should be getting a call shortly."
He said "put down" like I was some sort of dog. This encounter was just strengthening my already strong anti-authoritarian tendencies.
"You'll just let me go?"
"Yes. Though if you ever speak of this in public you will be in violation of the Unearthly Forces Disclosure Act, and you'll be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
Franks nodded and muttered, "Lead bullets." His conversation skills seemed rather limited.
Myers' eyes betrayed an emotion that I thought might have been pity. "Look, Mr. Pitt, this is for your own good. If you're infected, we're doing you a favor. Otherwise in three weeks you'll be eating little old ladies and babies. Hopefully the tests come back negative, and we forget this ever happened."
"So what now?"
"Just chill for a while," Agent Franks said.
"Easy for you to say."
A doctor came in and took my pulse and blood pressure. A nurse changed my IV and checked my bandages. The staff seemed intimidated by the Feds, and left without talking. Flowers were delivered. They were from Hansen Industries, with a card wishing me a speedy recovery. Along with the card there was also a letter on Hansen Industries stationary that informed me that I was fired for violating the Official Workplace Safety Code No Weapons in the Workplace Rule. If I did not want to risk an interruption to my Workers' Compensation, I had best not protest the firing. Hugs and kisses, Human Resources.
I pushed the button on the motorized bed so I could sit upright. Myers turned on the little TV and we watched Jeopardy. Watching television kept my brain occupied, and more importantly kept me from dwelling on the possibility of ending up dead, or even worse, like Huffman. Myers was pretty good, but I was destroying him. I'm a Trivia King. Franks kept the gun in his lap and sipped a Diet Coke. I tried not to think about the fact that the nice men from the government were here to shoot me in the brain with silver bullets. The feeling of helplessness was horrible. Alex Trebek had all of the answers. I just had questions.
"What is Constantinople? So, Myers, how bad was I injured?"
"You lost a lot of blood and technically died on the operating table for two minutes. No brain activity at all. You have about three hundred stitches and staples in you and some broken bones. If we don't have to shoot you, you should heal up just fine. But you won't ever be pretty. What is the Great Wall of China?"
The thought that I had actually been dead was interesting. That was kind of cool. I wondered if I could use that as a pickup line.
"Who is Ghandi? What happened to Mr. Huffman?"
"He landed on a Lincoln Navigator. The desk landed on him. He was pulped. Nobody else got hurt." He was frustrated. I was tearing him up in the Famous History category. I could tell the professor was used to winning. Ha ha sucker, eat hot trivia death!"What was the Magna Carta? Huffman didn't pull back together or anything did he?"
"Damn, you're fast. Nope. Lycanthropes can regenerate from just about anything other than silver, but it takes energy to restore tissue. There's only so much energy stored in one body, so if you inflict enough damage on them, they die."
"Fire," grunted Franks.
"Indeed, fire works great. Wait, I know this. What is uranium!" he shouted.
I made a buzzing sound. "Wrong. What is beryllium? Damn, Myers, I thought you had to have an education to be a G-man. You suck."
The senior FBI man changed the TV channel to CNN and sulked. Well, at least I had the satisfaction that if they were going to kill me, I had defended my honor on the field of useless knowledge. The news was saying something about a huge pipeline explosion in a remote part of Russia apparently caused by Chechen terrorists. I tuned it out and went back to harassing the Feds.
"Does this kind of thing happen all of the time? How did Huffman become a werewolf? Are there many more out there?"
"You ask too many questions," Franks said.
"My associate is correct, Mr. Pitt. This subject's on a need-to-know basis. You just need to know to keep your mouth shut."Fine. I figured I would just go back to sleep. Stupid Feds.
There was a knock on the door. It must have just been a mere courtesy knock because whoever it was immediately barged in. Franks barely had time to hide his Glock under an issue of Martha Stewart Living.
The man was of average height and lean, with short-cropped, sandy blond hair, probably in his mid-forties. With no really remarkable features, he was not a memorable-looking guy, but emanated an old-school toughness when he strutted into the room, an attitude like a Bogart or a Cagney from the golden age of movies. A cigarette hung lazily from the corner of his mouth in clear violation of hospital rules.
Myers grimaced and it looked like Franks gave some serious thought about pointing his gun at somebody else for a change.
"Well, if it ain't the junior danger rangers. How's the murdering witnesses business?" the man asked, reaching into the pocket of his leather bomber jacket and pulling out a business card. He stuck the card into the edge of my wrist cast. It stuck there, vibrating slightly.