Linnea flashed a smile full of pearly whites, eyes closed, stripped to a dance that played in her mind while the nameless one-night stand unzipped his jeans as if he’d learned how to use his hands yesterday. Anticipation wafted off him in a rotten stench. She threw her bra to the side, dropped her panties, pushed him against the bed. A light burned in his eyes. He licked his lips.
“Oh, love,” she moaned. “You’re all mine.”
“Yes, yes, all yours.”
He gasped as she took him inside her. Already her teeth were as long and yellow as her eyes. Drool dripped onto his chest beneath her. She afforded a few thrusts for his pleasure. Filthy man-thing.
“Oh, woah, watch the nails, lady. Getting close to my—ow, fuck, fuck!”
She popped the skewered eyeball into her mouth and swallowed it whole. Distress salted flesh in a way best described in a book about a killer clown she’d read in college. A transforming clown who had also been a leper, a large bird, and a werewolf like herself A werewolf performing the dance which was sex as she segued into devouring her partner’s living yet paralyzed body.
It was over in minutes. She threw up everywhere from the bed to the bathroom. She vomited even more on her way out of the house from the sheer amount of chunky sulfur juice in her way at each turn. Exactly zero movies or novels informed her clothes tear during a werewolf transformation. Shoes included.
Sloppy slaps against the tile churned her stomach until she pushed through the man’s door who was named Jim or maybe Joe. He gifted her one last favor in the form of a power-washing from his hose. This must’ve been how men felt during their refractory periods after they fucked a woman they didn’t care about.
She cursed herself the entire ride home for not collecting leftovers. This wasn’t sustainable; couldn’t be. Eventually the police or worse would finish her—and hell, since her werewolf self existed independently like some modern Jekyll and Hyde, there had to be others out there afflicted in the same manner.
Bile threatened to spew from her mouth again. One encounter with another and she’d be the meal.
“Fuck that,” she said, checking her teeth in the mirror. “No silver bullet or anything else is taking me out that easily.”
She took a long pull from a vodka bottle. The wolf’s mouth and throat spared her a viscous glob of liquid as it often did during perfunctory foreplay blowjobs. Fucking men. She downed half the bottle in thirty seconds.
“Fucking men. Hate fucking men, and hate fucking men.”
Claws scratched the steering wheel. All the fucking men she’d fucked left her fucked—and never well, just mentally—long before she’d become what Little Red Riding Hoods the world entire feared. Yellow eyes surveyed for lonely men through the windshield. Just an unhappy couple in a screaming match. One man, one woman, enough spittle flying to fill an Olympic swimming pool. She parked a few feet away, rolled down the windows.
“Because I already told you I hate that shit. How fucking thick is your skull?” the man screamed.
“I’m sorry. Okay, there. Drop it already, or is this the one thing in life you couldn’t fumble if you tried? Be a man. Fuck, dude. Whatever happened to sticks and stones; thought we learned that shit in, like, kindergarten. Think about all the times you’ve crossed my boundaries anyway.”
The man’s shoulders slumped, and he rubbed his chin. “Well, I thought you said it’s okay to grab your ass when we’re out.”
“So you wouldn’t start throwing a literal tantrum in public again. Yeah, so, yeah I probably did, Chuck.”
His fist connected with her head. “Don’t ever call me that again. My name is Charles. Get in the car. We’re going home.”
She stumbled a few steps. Shook her head. Fell, slapped her hand against his car. He rushed to slam her knee against the car door. The glint in his dark eyes elicited a guttural cry from the wolf behind him.
“Yeah, maybe that’ll keep your hands off my shit without permission. I’m not askin’ again. Get your ass inside. There’s coyotes out here. Pretty sure I just heard one. So unless you wanna—what the fuck?”
The hand on his shoulder spun him around. Linnea considered his tender, anxious flesh with eager eyes that would’ve devoured him by themselves were they capable.
“So you like beating up on women, Chuck?” the wolf snarled.
She lapped up his tears, nibbled on his cheek, pulling back when his pants stiffened against her leg. Too much dopamine tainted the meat in a way she didn’t understand. Animals that died while distressed tasted horrible as a human, yet as the wolf she wanted to flood each man she ate with all the cortisol in the world.
“Delicious man-thing,” she said. “I could just huff and puff and blow your fucking brains out.”
She ran a claw along his chest, until she dug deep enough to break skin and drink the flowing blood. No more left for his penis, she thought, and would have giggled were she capable. Her other hand squeezed his knee.
“Stop, stop, let go already,” Chuck cried.
“A knee for a knee feels fair, but then what would your greasy ass know about that word outside of a carnival?”
Crunch. She sliced his face a few times, and tossed him onto the ground with painful, yet non-lethal wounds—granted he received hospital care in the next twenty-four hours. This time she wasn’t hungry, although the desperation wafting from him made her wish she had an appetite still. Such wasted meat.
Her inebriated human self took over. Here ended her memory of the night.
~~~
A dumpster wasn’t the worst place she’d ever woken up it certainly ranked in the top five. Linnea pushed her sore, swollen body up with more effort than she’d given anything in the last six months.
“You know, doll, this whole human thing kinda sucks,” she said, struggling to the ground. “And killing bad people is pretty cool. Maybe it’s time to ditch the old and let the new take over.”
She entered a philosophical, life-changing debate that ended in about thirty seconds before she transformed into the wolf for the last time. Flesh exploded off the bone, replaced by stronger muscle and fur. She howled at the sun.
“And people paid to watch Jason get an upgrade. Such a tease. Made us wait ‘til the last twenty minutes,” she said.
Her nose twitched.
So much desperation in the air. So many scared men in need of mercy killing. And there was nobody better to provide one than the monster they’d created. So long and goodnight. Hunger was no longer a concern. She wanted a corpse mural.
She pounced on the first skittish man walking down an alley by himself. This led to her taking a bullet in the shoulder and more cautious methods. It’d do no good if she were in constant pain from wounds, and Christ did she scream when she extracted the crumpled metal from deep inside herself. Just a little penetration, forced as she ever remembered it.
Her next victim was another run of the mill scumbag boyfriend. She watched the couple from outside the restaurant. They all looked the same after a while. Mr. Macho towered over his Lady—lovely and weak—with fists meant for beating those brainwashed into submission. Or so was the world according to Douchebag, not to be confused with the milquetoast Garp who at least treated his woman with a modicum of respect, if only because he didn’t possess the ability to cause true harm outside of aspiring too hard while being too mediocre.
MR. DOUCHEBAG WAS unzipping his pants while he forced his Lady out by the back of her neck. “It’s gonna be hella quick. ‘Kay, gotta—just gotta make sure yous really sorry, ya know. That’s how it gotta be.”She growled in the shadows. Douchebag spun in all directions looking for the source. He spit a brown glob onto the concrete and replaced it with a dry black wad of what she assumed was tobacco. She slunk on all fours towards him and sliced the back of his leg. He spun around again, still finding no scapegoat; other than his girlfriend, of course.
Douchebag’s hand was cut clean off when he raised it to strike his Lady. Well, clean as one could hope for since there was definitely some bone sticking out of his stub. She sank her teeth into it and snapped the bone in half. His Lady was little more than a speeding blur in the distance.
“Aw, guess that means you’re all mine now,” Linnea said.
Her abrasive tongue scratched either eye until they bled and he was surely blind as the layman assumed bats were—if that was still such a myth. She lifted him by the back of his neck and smashed him face-first into the dirt.
“God, this reminds me of a song, but if only I could remember which,” she said.
The battered pulpy mess lifted an arm towards her face. She knelt beside him and rubbed what remained of his scalp.
“Shh, darling. I promise it won’t happen again. Why, I—I just lost control, sweetheart. This isn’t the real me. You know that. Let’s talk about this more in the morning.”
She spent a solid few minutes slurping at his remains like a dog combing through a stew dropped by a god. This was life, this was purpose, this was good. She’d become one with nature in a sense, become the great equalizer, a force that cared not about balance but achieving the highest toll.
A few weeks passed before she killed again. Her vocal cords weakened from disuse until they were completely useless. Her own thoughts weren’t worth much by then. Her nose followed the scent of desperation, and she pounced on those most soaked in it. Eventually she made a house of bones that kept the elements at bay.
~~~
Her fur grew gray over the years, although she never slowed or weakened in her attacks. Always steady, always strong. She rarely thought—when regular human thought was available to her—about her demise. There would be nobody to mourn her. Which wasn’t unreasonable. Plenty might even rejoice the end of the big bad wolf.
She could feel when the end was near, truly well and near. This saw the largest assault she ever unleashed in one night. Oh, her favorite was a man she bifurcated diagonally. The desperation clung onto him badly, was so sweet she nearly vomited, and only granted him such a swift death for her own mercy. She stomped on heads, ate eyeballs, sliced limbs with purposeful imprecision. Only one man ever died in her eyes no matter who really occupied that space when she hacked and slashed and bit.
Her rapist died over and over, and no amount was ever enough. She killed him in quite possibly every way a wolf might with her hands, claws, or teeth.
Whether or not it really was him, the man whose touch had made her this hideous wolf, she saw him. Couldn’t remember his name, but recognized those horn-rimmed glasses from anywhere, that handlebar mustache, the pleather jacket which screamed Punch me in the face.
She pounced on him, and punched him senseless, bloody. Not once did she use her claws or teeth. Just a good old beating, fists to the face, hands inserted in places they certainly did not belong or desire to be. At the end she ripped his head off and tossed it aside with as much effort she might consider a dirty sock.
She rolled over onto her side, coughed something awful, and curled into a ball as she transformed into a human for the last time. What a life well lived, she thought as she closed her eyes and died