Chapter One

            It never really occurred to me that I could be at the center of great events. There were always those like Musk, or Putin, or Drake—the domains of importance vary—that occupied regularly places of great importance in the collective human psyche. Maybe I could be a father, a lover, a mentor, a coach: someone who meant something to somebody. But no one known any more widely than that. Maybe in some niche corner of life, if I devoted myself to something. But all was set to change, and my mundane life would take on the hue of myth that colored my imagination and tinted the lives of those vaunted few to whose ranks I might someday rise.

            The change that would alter not only my life but that of billions started as a slow cataclysm. One day, a coyote, or some other odd little undomesticated dog in Southern California attacked a middle-aged trophy wife on her mile-and-a-half walk to Whole Foods. She walked so that she wouldn’t be fat, and therefore ugly, and unworthy. She was discovered, her white tote tainted crimson with blood from her neck wound, in a state so shocking that the news, already exclamatory and dramatic by nature, could hardly find words to describe the trauma wrought upon her pilates-conditioned body.

Barbara Park of West Hollywood was the first in a long line of deaths referred to as the “WeHo Horrors,” a rather uninspiring tv-tagline for what amounted to a string of mutilations in the area that were at first decided animal, then politically motivated serial, then freak-animal again. It was unexplained. But it was interesting. Something unconventional: a small part of history that I was living through, like the view of the city burning during the black riots my dad used to talk about, or the way he and his friends would hide in their school busses during some serial killer scare. Covid was earlier, the BLM movement. There were broader, more global occurrences in my lifetime of which I was present for, if not a part. But they didn’t feel close, or personal. I lived in Orange County, not even part of Los Angeles to anyone from the state. But still, it was a noir-reale that was happening in my own backyard. Ish. I’d been there for work a handful of times, at least.

It wasn’t until the maps that tracked the locations and range of the mutilations began tracking southeast that I began to really take an interest in the occurrence. Their frequency was increasing too. It wasn’t once a week now, but every day. The police had been mobilized. Officers had died. Probably because they were underfunded and had nothing but pistols and shitty training. A wolf had been found and taken down. A one-hundred-and-fifty-pound wolf, whose species could not be identified, and took twelve rounds to the head to kill. In its stomach was the DNA of three different people. What really caught my attention, though, was what was being said about the incident on other-than-mainstream news outlets, like UnderGroundTruthPod. And Reddit.

The officer who’d killed the weird ass wolf, Sergeant Draper, had resigned. This wasn’t reported on CNN. Or Fox. His wife and their daughter had checked him into a mental institution. (I didn’t know we even still had those, but we do). According to Mrs. Draper, “Bobby couldn’t stop talking about hallucinations he was having. Flashing lights in his vision, and a voice in his head. He would ask if we could see them, hear them—It drove him insane.” This was my own backrooms nightmare-fuel rabbit hole, in real life. I followed it closely. Between shifts bartending and on my breaks before and after class, I’d scour the internet for anything I could find about the Horrors. For weeks, people were dying left and right. Then it dried up, just like that. Pop. All gone. Nada. Nothing.

            Bullshit. If I knew anything from movies, (and history) it’s that governments cover shit up. They didn’t shut down the “Horrors” quickly enough because it looked innocent, the same thing that’s been happening in SoCal for forever, a bobcat in an inconvenient place attacking somebody, but it turned out to be more than that. Draper wasn’t crazy. He was just the first. Well, that was my working theory. How I distracted myself. How I made my mundane life between sessions in the gym, English essays, and weddings more magical than what it was. Monotonous routine. I had one more semester left before I graduated. Maybe, If I was being honest with myself, I wanted something bizarre to happen. To free me from the inexorability of having to confront the dreaded “real life.” Of having to face responsibilities, and life after university. I was a joke of an adult. Or maybe I was just where I was supposed to be in my development. Who knows. But all of that stopped mattering on April fourth, twenty twenty-four.

            It was Thursday afternoon. I’d just finished up Journalism and was going to my car off-campus to drive home and eat before heading to the gym. I had a bartending gig in Desert Hot Springs Friday afternoon, so I wanted to wrap up at the gym early tonight. I stood with my left foot on my skateboard, the right planted on the sidewalk. Students flowed around me as I looked down at my phone, scrolling to the most recent episode of Truth Pod. My headphones sent the voice directly into my ears, into my brain, and despite the sea of bodies around me, I felt alone as I slowly pushed my way through the crowd.

            Finally, I broke free and began taking bigger pushes, propelling myself forward on the sidewalk, weaving around pedestrians as I made my way to the intersection ahead. “He kept talking about his ex, someone named ‘P,’ but I’d never heard of her. We’ve been together for sixteen years. We have three kids. He said I was his first girlfriend, but come to find out, there was another woman. Bobby kept saying that he had ‘thousands of points’ about her. I couldn’t take it.” It all seemed a little forced to me. The podcast host’s voice-acting could use some work. I crossed the street, lifting a hand to acknowledge the cars that’d stopped to let me pass, bracing for the bumps at the start of the sidewalk. I always wondered what those were for. Was it like braille, telling blind people that there was a street crossing? That had to be it.

            Ahead on my right was the blind corner. Sometimes a biker would be coming towards me and I’d have to dodge. Or other students just ahead of me also leaving campus, going to their cars or to the Target across the street. Rarely did I come close to running into anyone, but I always made a point to be alert. That’s probably the only reason I didn’t die that day. Leaning into the right side of my board, I curved around the bend at a sharp angle, keeping my eyes peeled in front of me, searching the sidewalk for pedestrians as it was revealed to me.

            The smell of pine and clean grass struck my nose like a pick-ax, then a blur of brown and white filled my vision. At first I thought it was someone’s dog escaped from it’s leash, but when I landed hard on my back, the air vacated from my lungs with emergency haste, what stood atop me was only canine in vague comparison. Two large, emerald eyes, with smaller eye-slits half their size beneath them glared down at me, hate dripping from their gaze like the drool slipping down the corner of its mouth. The beast’s black lips were peeled back in a smile of sadistic, near erotic anticipation. Hot breath heaved into my face in putrid puffs, thick and odorous, exactly the opposite of the scent I smelled when I turned the corner.

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            My heart thudded in my chest, the beating hammer of a terrified blacksmith trapped beneath my bones, desperately trying to break free and escape. Clawed paws pressed into my sternum, crushing me into the hard concrete sidewalk. The wolf-like monstrosity leered over me, all hate and pleasure and promise behind its green eyes and pristine, pearly fangs. Saliva glistened on them, and my mind, in a state of panicked shock, wondered what diseases this clearly extra-terrestrial wolf would carry within it. Would I be the subject of scientific post-mortem dissection? Would I be the next feature on UnderGroundTruthPod, photos of my disemboweled corpse filling the NSFW channel of every conspiracy discord channel for weeks to come? I thought about the school just a block away, and how many people this thing would kill. I didn’t think our campus even had SROs. At least I’d never seen any in my four years of attendance.

            I couldn’t breathe. My vision constricted to the wolf’s mouth. Its eyes. Teeth. A black fog swirled around the edges. There was little pain, mostly numbness, and disbelief. I think I had a concussion, but that hardly mattered. Something tasted funny in my mouth. Like iron. They say blood tastes like iron, but I’ve rarely tasted blood. My mind grasped at anything, anything at all to distract itself from the impossible, inescapable unreality that I was about to die. I never even got to have a real girlfriend. I never wrote a book, or solo-backpacked the Rockies, or did anything noteworthy at all. And now I was—able to breathe again.

 The enormous weight that’d been crushing my chest, suffocating me, was gone. The black fog at the periphery of my vision receded as I gulped greedily for air. Blood filled my mouth, rushed up and out of me. I scrambled to my feet. Pain exploded in my chest, my hips, my back. Tears sprang to my eyes, blurring my vision. I did my best to ignore them, and the pain. Something had happened to the wolf. I was free, and I had to escape.

I had landed on the edge of the sidewalk where the wolf had tackled me, just a few unlucky inches from the grass. In front of me was the metal-pole fence that separated the sidewalk from the parking lot to the VA hospital adjacent to campus. Before me was the wolf, on its side, snarling and getting to its feet. It was huge. Larger than a moose, larger than any wolf was supposed to be. A bike lay on its side, front tire spinning, fur and dark rouge blood staining the silver alloy of its handlebars. Its rider, a pale, goth girl in black ripped jeans and a black blouse lay on the ground against the fence, screaming, blood oozing from a scrape on her elbow, fighting to disentangle herself from her backpack straps.

Her eyes shifted frantically from the wolf to her backpack to the wolf, faster and faster, her arms ripping and flailing, until the wolf was only a few feet away from her, and she cried out. No words, just a universally human sound of anguish, fear, and hopelessness. The wolf bent down, placed a paw on her bare shoulder, and engulfed her head within its jaws. Its teeth penetrated her skin and, as it reared back, pushing with its foreleg, it tore her head from her body. Blood spurted from the stump of her neck like wet, liquid ketchup squeezed from the end of a  bottle at high pressure. I’d lost my headphones in the fall, and the sound of flesh parting from flesh was horrifying.

My body reacted involuntarily. Acidic vomit burned my throat. My eyes watered, and my nose ran. The wolf stared side-on at me, and I swear it smiled. Its large eyes and the smaller ones beneath them flicked next to me. I felt the air beside me rush past, and a black blur in the corner of my vision. Another bike crashed into the wolf, whose massive body occupied the center of the sidewalk, then another, and another. A whole pack of them kept coming, one after another until there was a great pileup of metal frames and collegiate bodies, all shouting and cursing.

            Stumbling, I got to my feet. I had to run.

            “Get out of here, it’ll—” I spat blood and vomit and flem. My voice was hoarse, and worse, barely a whisper.

            “It’ll kill you. Run,” I managed.

There were five others besides the dead goth. They fought with their bicycles. One, an overweight guy in a baggy T-shirt and cargo pants was already dead, his side gored by a swipe of the wolf’s claws, intestines literally pouring out of the wound under his shirt, blood soaking into it and turning it a darker shade of grey before my eyes. Someone had crashed in front of me, and I tripped over them as I tried to run, smacking my shin into the side of their head and falling to my hands and knees.

            The wolf approached me, the glee that before animated its eyes gone, replaced by malice and determination. It had had enough. A hollow tube of metal stuck out from above the shoulder of its right foreleg. Dark blood gushed from it like a drainage pipe. The wolf limped on the leg when it stepped, and I realized that the rod was deep, at least a foot or more.

            “What the fuck is that thing?” Someone asked from behind me. I hardly heard them.

 To my right was the pile of bikes and bleeding students, then the fence. To my left was a small strip of grass that followed the edge of the sidewalk, then a five foot drop off to the main street below. I got to my feet slowly, eyes locked on the wolf’s. Their emerald gleam weighed on me like a physical pressure as it stalked towards me, angling to cut me off. But it was panting, its steps heavy and its breathing labored. It was bleeding out.

“Holy shit it killed Gabby, it fucking killed her! Tom, call 9-1-1!” A frenetic voice said, accompanied by movement and grunts of effort from the gaggle-fuck on the sidewalk corner.

            The wolf drew closer, its teeth bared at me not in the smile from before, but in a grotesque promise that transcended language and spoke directly to my lizard brain. Fight, flight, or freeze kicked in. I’d been running, but in that instant, a light switch flipped inside of me. My foot hit something, and I felt it roll over. My skateboard.

            I knelt to grab it, and in that instant, the wolf lunged at me. The same voice from before screamed out at me, but the words were drowned in the rush of the moment. I leapt to the side and swung my skateboard in both hands at the wolf’s torso. Grip tape scraped across metal. Wood reverberated in my hands. I collapsed, taking the fall hard on my shoulder. The skateboard clattered onto the sidewalk next to me, popped upright, and began rolling away, a circular stain of blood imprinted on its grey top.

            The wolf, a mountainous heap of fur and limbs, lay across my legs, unmoving. Its weight was crushing, and there was a sharp pain in my knee. But it wasn’t moving. I took deep lungfuls of air, then let them out. My heart was pounding again. Probably it had never stopped once I turned the corner.

            I was alive. The wolf, somehow, was dead. Slowly, my heart began to regain control of itself, and my senses crept back to me. My  knee and head throbbed. My arms were on fire with scrapes, and the deep ache of bruises and jarring impacts on hard surfaces that I knew all too well from skateboarding radiated throughout my chest, back, hips, and sides.

            Suddenly, I realized that there was no noise. The bikers were silent. The cars on the street just feet below were silent. As if I’d slipped from a dream into wakefulness, or from wakefulness into a dream, everything around me was replaced with whiteness. I hadn’t even noticed it happen. Everything was gone beside myself and the wolf still lying sprawled across my legs, its light brown fur matted with blood.

            Then my vision, my consciousness, my entire world constricted, flickered, and refocused. Words, or the intent of words, neither written nor spoken, but rather perceived by all my senses at once imprinted themselves upon my being.

*Congratulations. You have survived Initiation. Access to the System granted. Standby for calibration and relocation to planet A887: Earth.*