Gift of the Bouda by Richard Farnsworth

Author:Richard Farnsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

3

I was a good runner. As a man, I could maintain a hair over a five and a half-minute mile pace for about four or five miles before I started to break stride. As a hyena I could knock out five-minute miles all night long. A little harder with the twenty or thirty pounds of horse-guts I had consumed, but I was still making good time toward my ride. The truck was hidden under a tarp, off a gravel road in a lonely stretch of nothing.

The high desert north of Reno seemed to resonate with my beast. It didn’t look like the Africa I had been to, but there was something in the sparseness that felt familiar to the beast. Except for the presence of werewolves, I didn’t think they were found in Africa. There were at least five of them ranged behind me now. Compulsions being what they were, I still should have waited the week for a moonless night.

I crested a rise and broke through the low sage onto a bare strip. It took me a second to realize that it was the BLM access road I’d driven in on. Sudden lights and crunching gravel behind me and I leapt off the road. The guttural pop-pop-pop of a motorcycle went by. It slowed and stopped about forty or fifty meters down the gully-carved gravel stretch.

I tried to catch scent above the exhaust, the ozone and grease. It rumbled out there with the light pointing my way. Just waiting. I crept forward to the line where the road cut through high desert sage.

A sudden scent of wolf and I ducked and rolled to the left. The liquid lupine form snarled as its leap took it just over my flattened form. It twisted as it landed on front feet and fluidly reversed direction.

It was all ribs and lean angularity as it lunged, snarling at my throat. I tucked my head down, braced my hind legs and body-checked the wolf.

Mass is conserved when you shift. I topped out at two and a quarter, while my adversary couldn’t have been over a buck-fifty, dripping wet. He bounced off me and sprawled in an ungainly pile in the gravel.

I was on him before he could recover. I closed my still gore-encrusted maw around his neck. I had to open and close a few times to get around and enclose his entire throat in my mouth. I squeezed down and he scrambled at me with his paws meant for running, not killing. He twisted and tried to kick at me with his hind legs, cat-like.

I rumbled out a low growl and squeezed. I wanted that submissive whimper you get when you have a lone werewolf by the throat, but this one wasn’t giving it up. He gargled out a defiant snarl of his own, twisting left and right. He should have waited for the others, the silly wolf coming at me alone.

The beast in me wanted to rip out the trachea and feel the lifeblood geyser into my clenched jaws.

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