Chapter 1: Wolves of the Abyss
The stocky figure lumbered down the alley. A still photograph might have persuaded someone that Jeffrey Kirby was jogging, but seeing him in motion would have instantly disabused them of that notion. He wore new running shoes, gym shorts, and a T-shirt, but however one might categorize the movement of his thick legs, “jogging” was not a description that leapt readily to mind.
Sweat poured off the stocky man as the Oklahoma City heat oppressed him. It soaked his T-shirt, his underwear, his socks. It ran in streams down his shaved scalp and in rivulets through his bushy beard. It was nearly eight-thirty P.M. on the twenty-first of June and the sun was still out. The temperature today had reached 101 degrees and the approach of twilight held no promise of relief. He could feel the heat radiating up from the ground through the soles of his shoes.
“So. Damned. Hot,” he huffed, turning from the alley onto a downtown sidewalk relatively free of pedestrians. Those who witnessed the barrel-chested man’s attempt at jogging wisely avoided his anticipated path. Some may have worried about being knocked aside by his plodding momentum, or being pulverized beneath his massive, tramping feet. Others might have been more concerned with avoiding contact with his trunk-like arms and legs, thickly furred and dripping with perspiration.
“Fitness,” he huffed to himself on an empty stretch of sidewalk, “S’all about the fitness.”
Even to himself it sounded unconvincing. As he turned another corner, he transitioned to a walking pace, slightly ashamed and hoping that no one had seen him abandon his quest for fitness that evening. He tried to catch his breath as he walked and met with partial success. Finally, he leaned against a lamppost and panted. His balls ached. He should have picked up a jock strap at the sporting goods store where he had bought the fancy running shoes.
He thought about sitting on the ground, but if he started cramping it might be difficult to get back up. No, better to walk it off. Some water would be nice. He felt dehydrated.
“Maybe I over-did it,” he mumbled to no one but the deep shadows. He started walking again. Never having ridden the city bus before, he had caught the bus a block from his apartment, planning to get off after a mile and jog back. It seemed a reasonable use of public transportation. The bus had not cooperated, however. It had, in fact, been the wrong bus and its next stop had been downtown. He figured he had another mile and a half to walk before he got home.
The sun set before he covered even half that distance.
The part of town in which he had found his cheap apartment, while run-down and entirely lacking in charm, was not considered one of the dangerous parts of town. Unfortunately, he was going to have to walk through one of those dangerous parts of town to get there. He briefly considered adding a mile to his trek homeward to avoid it, but quickly rejected the idea. He was tired and wanted to get home. He would take his chances, even if it happened to be after dark.
At least it’s not humid, he thought. Not like Houston. The crime’s not as bad either, he mused. Crime? He looked around. He had not quite reached what he thought of as “the bad zone,” but he was only a couple of blocks away. There weren’t many streetlights along this stretch of road. It was dark and slightly spooky, made spookier by the knowledge that the creatures that went bump in the night around here were all human.
“BWEEP! BWEEEE! BWOOOOOP!” said the siren in short, alarming bursts that caught Kirby entirely by surprise.
He hadn’t noticed the patrol car easing up behind him until the cop driving it hit the siren and the flashing lights, giving him a fright that nearly caused him to trip over his own feet. Eyes wide and with his hand on his chest in shock, he turned to face the officer driving the car that had pulled up beside him.
“Out jogging, eh?” the cop asked through the open window.
“T-trying to,” he said. “You gave me a scare.”
“Sorry ‘bout that,” said the cop, not quite sniggering. “Don’t get many joggers in this part of town.”
“Well, I took the wrong—”
The cop cut him off with a gesture as a garbled, almost incomprehensible message came over the patrol car’s radio at high volume. “Gotta go,” said the cop. “You get home safe!”
With that, the patrol car accelerated away from the curb and Oklahoma City’s finest vanished around a corner.
“Damn it!” Kirby cursed. I should have asked for a ride, or something. It took effort to swing his legs back into motion, to resume the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other cadence that he would have to rely upon to carry him home. Once he got them moving however, he kept the rhythm going.
Briefly, he thought about accelerating back into a jog again, but then thought better of it. He still had at least a mile to go and he might need the energy to run if anything happened when he crossed the dozen or so risky blocks to get to his neighborhood.
A night breeze picked up as he walked and, block by block, the neighborhood grew worse. From a street or two over he could hear the nearly subsonic base of someone’s busted-out car audio system as it slowly patrolled the streets. Many of the buildings seemed abandoned. The blown-out bass got closer and louder as the car it erupted from turned the corner ahead of him, then headed away and into the night.
“You lookin’ for that demon?” a voice asked from the shadows to his left.
Jumping and twisting with remarkable awkwardness, Kirby let out a startled sound. Deer caught in the headlights had far more composure than he. “Huh?” he asked, startled, puzzled, and clueless.
Kirby hadn’t seen anyone in the shadows by the dilapidated wooden fence, but someone was there. That someone lit up his face as he lit a cigarette. “I said,” explained the speaker, an elderly black man in a white T-shirt, stick-thin, but for a paunch the size and shape of a basketball overhanging his belt, “are you lookin’ for that demon?”
“Um, no. No, sir,” replied Kirby. He felt like a fool to have been so startled by the man. He felt like an even bigger fool because he thought he had been keeping a keen eye on his surroundings.
“Don’t get many white folks ‘round here these days,” said the man with an accusatory tone, “unless they lookin’ for that demon.”
“I’m just trying to get home,” Kirby responded. “I’ve got about another mile or so to walk.”
“Well, best you get on, then. This ain’t the safest neighborhood after dark,” the old man advised, his voice was rich and deep.
“Uh...yes, sir,” was the only reply Kirby could vocalize.
“Good night.”
“Um...good night,” he said as he quickly started putting some distance between himself and the old guy.
Over the next three blocks he was approached twice more by men younger than the first, scrawny men, one black and the other Hispanic, who were both dressed in oversized T-shirts, saggy-baggy jeans, and expensive athletic shoes. Both asked if he was “looking for something.” Kirby thought that it was safe to assume that they were selling some flavor of illegal narcotics. He declined both offers as politely as he could, explaining to both men that he was “just walking home".
Two blocks after the second dope entrepreneur, the sidewalk ended and he found himself walking on the edge of the road, unmown weeds behind a chain link fence to his right and the quiet street to his left. It had been a while since he had seen a car. Not much traffic here at night, he thought.
That raised a question. What time is it? With no pockets in his shorts, he had left his phone on the kitchen counter before heading out to what had started off as exercise, but now could only be described as an odyssey. If his bank account had been a little healthier, he would have purchased an arm band to hold his phone while he jogged, but the shoes were all he could afford until his next payday. Relying on an Oklahoma City Public Schools paycheck to survive meant that he had to do without quite a few things.
The vague noises of the city, the buzzy thumping of the automotive bass speakers several blocks behind him, and the scattered chirping of hardy urban crickets were the last things he heard before the shotgun blast roared in his ears and knocked him off of his feet.
He lay on his side on the road’s shoulder, confused and dizzy. Shot? Am I shot? Who shot me? he wondered with alarm. His side hurt where he had landed on it but, no, he did not think that he had been shot.
Sitting up and trying to get his bearings, he groaned as he looked around. The scene was just as it had been—with the exception of the yellow Cadillac that had quite obviously just ploughed into the dumpster across the street, its rear tires still turning but failing to gain traction in the rutted dirt at the side of the road.
From where he sat, the dumpster had gotten the worst of the collision. The big yellow Caddy’s bumper and front fenders had crumpled from their impact with the dumpster and were going to need replacement but, except for the shredded-looking front right tire, the car might be drivable. Drivable? Driver!
Kirby hauled himself to his feet and jogged across the street and around to the driver’s side door. A car this old had no air bag, but he could see the driver had her seat belt on. A streak of dark blood ran down her forehead and across her face. She was slowly blinking, a dazed look to her.
He knocked on the window and she calmly shifted the Coupe DeVille into park and turned to face him. Meeting his eyes through the window, she raised her eyebrows with an expectant flourish, as if to ask, May I help you?
“Are you alright, ma’am,” he asked loudly, his ears still ringing from the sound of what must have been her right front tire blowing out and trying to make himself heard through the glass.
She mouthed something that he could not hear through the window and he put his cupped hand behind his ear, miming trying to hear her. She rolled down the window of the forty-year-old car and it receded into the door as smoothly as you please. “Yes, young man,” she repeated, “I believe I am.”
“Umm,” Kirby gestured to her face and added, “you’re bleeding.”
She touched her hand to her face, then examined the blood on her fingertips. “Perhaps I’m not as ‘alright’ as I thought.”
He helped her out of the car. The Coupe DeVille had a driver’s side door bigger than the hatchback on his Prius. She staggered as she tried to stand, and he took her arm. The look she gave him said, Very well, I shall forgive your presumption. You may assist me.
He led her over to a clean patch of ground and helped her sit. She might have a concussion, but it was so dark along this stretch of road that he could not inspect her pupils with any accuracy. He settled for asking, “How do you feel?”
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“I’ll be fine,” she assured him.
The poor light made it difficult to see, but she appeared to him to be a slender, well put together woman of about sixty. He could not tell the color of her dress without more light, but it looked expensive and so did the pearls around her neck. The pillbox hat that might have been the same color as her dress was askew atop her head, but that was likely the least of her worries.
“It looks like you had a blowout,” he told her. “If you’ve got a spare, I can change it for you—if I can back it away from the dumpster.”
She nodded, looking frail and weary.
The engine was still running as he slid into the driver’s seat. He put his foot on the brake and shifted into reverse. It only took a tap of his foot on the gas pedal to separate the car from the dumpster in a brief, but raucous, metal-on-metal exclamation. He backed a few yards away and returned the gear shift to ‘P’ before shutting off the engine and taking the keys. Except for a little blood on the steering wheel and the woman’s purse on the floor of the passenger side, its contents strewn about, the car’s interior was immaculate. He stuffed a lipstick, cell phone, wallet, and other essentials into the tiny, elegant handbag and carried it to her.
“Thank you,” she said. “There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment.”
The flashlight revealed the trunk’s interior, a space that seemed to Kirby larger and cleaner than his apartment’s tiny kitchen. No car’s trunk should have been this pristine—and certainly not a car that was more than forty years old. He would not have hesitated to have eaten off of the spare tire cover. It made him feel slightly guilty and inadequate when he compared it to the rolling compost heap that was his own vehicle. The trunk’s only contents, aside from the spare tire, jack, and tools, were a small wooden chest with brass fittings and a plastic first aid kit. With the flashlight and first aid kit, he returned to the woman and knelt beside her.
“The tire can wait,” he told her. “Let’s see if we can’t patch you up a bit.”
She nodded.
The first thing he noticed when he shone the light upon her was that she looked a lot sharper, more alert than when he had helped her from the car. She squinted as the light hit her eyes, but he noted her pupils contracted, responding to the light. Probably no concussion, he thought. The cut was in the center of her forehead and had bled quite a bit but seemed to have stopped. It was unusual; even small head wounds like hers tended to bleed and bleed. He used alcohol wipes to clean the blood from her face as best he could, smearing on antibiotic ointment before applying an adhesive bandage.
“Good as new?” she asked when he finished, the corner of her mouth quirked up in a smile.
“Well, I’d kiss it and make it all better, ma’am,” he told her, “but this is our first date—and I don’t want to seem fresh.”
The little laugh she gave was melodious, elegant. “Young man, you are quite the gentleman. What is your name?”
“They call me Kirby, ma’am,” he answered.
“Do they?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment. “Is that your given name?”
“My birth certificate says ‘Jeffrey’, but nobo—”
“I like Jeffrey,” she cut him off. The flashlight revealed an expression that indicated discussion on the subject was over. It seemed that, for the for the first time since the fourth grade, he was Jeffrey again.
He removed the spare tire’s cover and the bolts holding it in place. Locating the jack and the tire iron, he put them to the side before lifting out the big whitewall tire. Although Kirby would have been the first to acknowledge that he was out of shape, he also felt a certain pride in his strength. His thick arms, legs, and torso, while padded with a slight layer of pudge, were solidly muscled and he carried the tire easily around to the side of the car.
With the flashlight, he crouched and found where to place the jack. He took the lug wrench, an almost L-shaped piece of steel with a socket on one end and inserted it into the jack. Pumping his arm in an up-and-down motion produced a ratcheting sound. The Cadillac’s front end began to rise.
When the flat tire was barely in contact with the ground, he studied it with the flashlight. He was trying to see how to remove the wire hubcaps when he felt a touch on his arm. Turning, he saw the driver standing next to him, looking much better—more focused—than only moments before.
He held up the tire iron, “How do I get the hubcaps off?” he asked. “Am I supposed to pry them off with this?”
“We have bigger problems, Jeffrey,” the woman said, looking over his shoulder.
A deep growling came from behind him and he turned to follow her gaze. It was black and it approached on four legs. It was not a pit bull, nor a Rottweiler. It was definitely canine, however, and resembled a large, black German shepherd nearly the size of a mastiff. It did not seem at all to belong in this neighborhood—or even this world. The eerie way its fur absorbed the dim illumination of the ill-lit street and made Kirby wonder if it belonged anywhere but in his nightmares. It was the darkest thing in the dark street, the blackest thing in the black night.
The nightmare-beast approached them slowly and Kirby could not shake the feeling that its slow approach was not due to an instinctual, animal caution on its part. He felt ridiculous even having the thought, but the thing’s movements seemed somehow calculated, the product of a wily intelligence. He turned the flashlight to shine directly on the creature and noticed that even its eyes were black, reflecting no light.
As it neared, its growl turned into a snarl. In the beam of the flashlight he could almost make out the black fangs in its snarling black muzzle. The sound of that snarl made his guts turn to water and his knees almost buckle with fright. The survival instincts in the primitive part of his brain babbled and begged, urging him to flee from this thing. The trepidation he had felt walking at night through the bad part of town was a pitiful thing next to the intensity of the terror he felt now. He literally trembled with fear—a thing he had not done since he was a small child—as he took half a step sideways and placed himself squarely between the thing and the woman.
Trying and failing to stare the beast down, he fought to keep his teeth from chattering. “F-fuck you.”
It did not charge at him. Instead, the nightmare-beast leapt from ten yards away, covering the distance in a single, uncanny bound, with jaws wide to rend flesh, to crush bones, to tear the life from anything foolish enough to be between them when those terrible black fangs closed. The tire iron rocked its head sideways with a blow that might have stunned a bull. The beast slammed into the fender of the Cadillac.
Kirby backed up a step, keeping the tire iron at the ready and the flashlight trained upon the nightmare. He was scared still, but the intense terror that had gripped him seemed to have slackened its hold. The thing rebounded off the fender and crouched. It came in low and fast with another vicious snarl. The tire iron slammed squarely down onto the top of its skull. The beast’s forward momentum, backed by its mass, would have taken his legs out from under him, but he used the impact on its skull to boost himself upwards as he hopped over the beast, straddling it as it passed beneath him. The maneuver lacked grace, but it got him out of its way.
He pivoted immediately upon landing to face the nightmare-beast again. He could see that the woman was no longer standing where she had been. She was nowhere to be seen. Giving him no time to ponder her whereabouts, the nightmare bounced up from the ground faster than he would have thought possible. It turned, orienting itself toward Kirby again, snarling with an unearthly savagery. He kept the flashlight trained on it. The thing was so absolutely black that he was afraid of losing sight of it in the shadows near the car.
The third attack came in low again. When he began to swing the tire tool for another blow, however, he saw its head turn and its stride shift into the beginnings of another jump. It was going for his arm. The idea that this thing was intelligent no longer seemed ridiculous. It was trying to disarm him. He checked his swing and withdrew his arm from the path of its jaws. Leaning to his left he let it leap past him, he rotated his shoulders and drove his left fist into its ribs with everything he could muster. The plastic flashlight held in that fist was crushed with the force of the blow. The thing bounced off of the front fender of the Cadillac again, rocking the car. Then, it rolled lightly to its feet once more.
The fear surged again within him. He understood now, down to the bedrock level of his awareness, that this creature was unnatural. It did not belong in any way to the world in which he lived. Terror drenched him like ice-cold water, soaking through his skin and into his bones.
The beast’s nonreflective black eyes and fangs had seemed eerie. The way it had shrugged off blows from the tire iron seemed incredible, but he had no basis for comparison. He had never hit anything with a lug wrench before. But he had punched someone in the ribs. This nightmare-beast had taken the punch—and the two blows from the tire iron—without a sound, with no hint of pain or injury. Like most people, Kirby feared death. Now, he feared that his death was before him, watching him with nightmarish black eyes.
The thing did not attack when it rolled to its feet. Instead, it started to circle, forcing Kirby to pivot and keep it in front of him. He felt his heart knocking rapidly against his ribcage. He watched the thing as it watched him. Then, against the dim light reflected from the street’s concrete, his eyes registered its shape, its profile. This was no German shepherd, no dog-thing. This nightmare was a wolf.
It approached him more closely. He readied himself. He had to be careful. The wolf-thing seemed to have learned from its mistakes and was now warier. It turned away to circle again. Suddenly, it lunged forward and in two strides had nearly closed the gap between them. It gathered itself to leap again. Kirby judged the timing as best he could without the flashlight’s illumination. He swung the tire iron. But the black wolf checked itself and let the swing pass before making its attack. Kirby’s desperate backhand blow caught it across the muzzle, deflecting its attack. Its shoulder collided with his and both went sprawling onto the concrete.
The nightmare-wolf recovered first, lunging at him as he rolled to his knees. With both hands, he shoved the tire iron between the jaws that tried to close around his throat and pushed them back. It pulled away and bit again, this time at his left hand holding the tool. He quickly moved the hand, letting go of the tool, and the creature forced its way past and bit his left pectoral. Its jaws closed and tore the flesh from his chest. He screamed in pain. It swallowed the bite of flesh whole.
Moving his left arm brought more agony to the wound in his chest as he grabbed the beast’s throat as tightly as he was able, taking a fistful of fur and skin. It tried to pull away, but Kirby would not let it go. It lunged to bite out his throat, but he held it back. It tried to twist away, to bite the arm of the hand that held it. It failed. Its front paws kicked at him, shredded his T-shirt and left bleeding furrows on his torso. It clawed, trying to push him away, rend him, make him let go. He endured the pain, refusing to relinquish his grip.
The nightmare-wolf reared above him, throat held in a grip it could not break. He struck its hind leg with the tire iron and it toppled to its side. He fell with the beast, rolling his body, using his grip to get behind it and wrap his legs around its chest. The beast thrashed wildly. They rolled, then rolled again until they lay upon their right sides. Kirby locked his ankles together. He squeezed with his thick, powerful legs, to force the air from its lungs. It thrashed, snarled, tried to break out of the grip of his legs, turning its head from one side to the other, attempting bite and rend more flesh. The thing’s struggles did not slacken. It did not pant or gasp for air. With his legs wrapped around the beast, his hand on its throat, he understood for the first time that this nightmare did not require breath.
In the heat of the fight, his terror had been transformed into an adrenaline rush of energy and awareness. As he wrestled with the beast on the concrete, the futility of his efforts brought a renewed sense of dread. Nothing he had done had even slowed this thing down.
This thing should be dead.
The pain of the wound in his chest screeched so loudly through his nerves that it was almost audible as he struggled and forced them both to roll on to their left side. His right arm free, he struck its head another blow with the lug wrench. And another. It noticed the blows but did not seem harmed by them.
I can’t win, he thought. I am going to die.
Perhaps it sensed his flagging determination. Or perhaps the grip of his legs slackened. With a surge of terrific strength, it lurched within his clenched legs, making almost a quarter turn of its body. Kirby’s lost his hold on the nightmare’s neck, even as he swung another blow. Its head came around and caught the tool in its teeth. Without thinking, he reached around with his left hand to get another grip on its throat—and he felt his fingers grip the side of its mouth instead. His fist closed around its cheek. It let go the tool and, snarling, tried to bite the hand that had been placed almost in its jaws. Clenching his fist tightly, he felt the black teeth slide along the back of his hand. Its jaws opened and closed, but Kirby used his grip on its cheek to keep the teeth from biting him. He felt his saliva-slick grip begin to slip and, desperate to keep the thing from taking his hand, he thrust the end of the tire iron deep into its maw.
It yelped.
Kirby pulled back and rammed the tool in deeper, more forcefully and it yelped again and gagged. Fear turned to fury as he redoubled the grip of his legs and of his left hand on its cheek. Driving the tool into the thing’s open mouth with all his clenched strength, he heard the beast shriek. He felt the wetness of its blood on his hand. It struggled to free itself, desperate but weakening. And he stabbed the tool down the thing’s gullet, and it shrieked again, but not as loudly. His arm became a piston, forcing the tool with all he could muster deep into the thing’s throat again and again and again until it stopped struggling, stopped moving, until the only sounds it made were the wet sounds of the tire iron tearing into its corpse with each thrust.
Finally, he pushed it away and struggled to his feet. His shirt was drenched with blood, shredded in the front. An enormous hole exposed the gory wound where the wolf-thing had taken its bite. I might need a hospital. Dizzy and in great pain, he stumbled around the Cadillac with a vague notion of finding the driver.
She stood on the other side of the dumpster.
Two of the black wolf-things lay on the ground, unmoving. The woman crouched beside one of the creatures. The wooden box from the trunk was open on the ground next to her. As he watched, she removed a cleaver from the box, raised it, and chopped through one of the wolf-thing’s legs, severing its paw. Three more times she raised the cleaver and brought it down as she removed the corpse’s remaining paws. She placed the severed paws into a cloth bag and stood.
The world seemed to tip, first one way and then another. Kirby’s vision dimmed. He groaned, suddenly overcome with the dizzying feeling that the ground had decided to rush up and meet him. The last thing he heard before things went dark was the woman’s voice.
“Oh, Jeffrey!”