Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

It is time.

Billy leads the charge. Loping again, straight toward the red door. Somewhere in the back of his mind the part of him that is Billy wonders how, exactly, they’re going to open the door: it would be his typical luck for them to get this far, this close to saving the world, only to be undone because none of them could work a doorknob.

But the wolf knows what to do. The wolf stares at the door, focuses on its surface, and something demonic rises in it. Something with powers .

His vision goes tunnely at the edges.

He intensifies his glare and channels hellish force out of the holes in his skull. It is as though his vision is a blade. It is as though his vision is a cold steel push knife being punched into the door again and again. The thought that a door could stop him seems ludicrous. It’s just wood. It’s just base matter, crude, destructible. The door trembles and warps and creaks and splinters. The red paint pulverizes; flakes of it now coat his shaggy muzzle. The brass knob smokes slightly, deforms, pops free. It takes all of ten seconds for the door’s hinges to give way.

The second door is made of metal but it yields even easier. And then Billy’s in the Starbucks. His jaws are open. It is fair to say he is slavering . Billy watches alarm crack through the blank look of the entranced employees. They scatter, their aprons billowing, the spell broken, apparently. But Billy doesn’t care about them. He’s here for Ollard.

And Ollard arrives, emerging from the back corridor, swollen with fury, eyes wild, teeth gnashing, shrouded in wreaths of crackling black energy. Billy turns the hate-stare on Ollard at the same time that Ollard directs a sheet of deadly-looking violet light toward Billy. The counter, caught between them, detonates. Broken glass and scones spray everywhere. Even though he has all four feet on the ground, the force of the blast still skids Billy away, into the floor plan, tables and chairs catching him painfully in his ribs.

He prepares to leap but Ollard is too fast; he strides from the wreckage first, his left hand held in the gang-sign configuration that freezes Billy, gets him aloft in the air. It’s the same trick Ollard used the first time he met Billy. But it takes more effort now; Billy flexes against the spell with all the wolf-might at his disposal and can feel Ollard struggle to maintain.

And then the dark wolf that is Elisa comes out of the vestibule, leaps at Ollard from the side.

Ollard gets his right hand up, freezes her also. Billy rears his body again and nearly gets free, the force around him beginning to flicker and fail. He watches Ollard’s face contort with the effort of holding them both, scans it for a sign of when the grip will finally give. Veins bulge in Ollard’s forehead; both his nostrils have begun to leak blood. Yet his facial expression is a grin, the grin of a man who still has the advantage.

And then the white wolf that is Jørgen enters the room and leaps at Ollard, jaws snapping, and it is then that Ollard’s grin goes away. He drops his left hand, throws it up again, freezes Jørgen in place.

But Ollard only has two hands.

And so Billy is free.

In a second he’s on Ollard, knocking him down to the floor. Ollard’s head bounces off the broken concrete and his throat slides into Billy’s jaws like it was the final piece of a puzzle, designed to slot there.

And all Billy needs to do is exert a particular amount of force.

Which he does.

Ollard gets no final words. Instead his throat gives one horrible throb and then bursts in Billy’s mouth, gushing fluids. Billy’s teeth sunder the entire network of crucial vessels and tubes in there. He crushes vertebrae. He takes a human neck and reduces it to rupture and spillage.

He’s larger. He’s stronger. He’s more powerful.

He doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.

He drinks like a quart of Ollard’s blood. He drinks it until Ollard’s heart stops pumping it.

That’s it, then , he thinks. It’s over .

And then he thinks, Oh my God, you killed a man .

If he’s having these thoughts, if they’re at the forefront of his brain, then he must be changing back, and sure enough he is. His tail retracts and his skull shortens; his thumbs come back; he loses his fur. And then he’s there, naked, hunched over Ollard’s mutilated corpse, a quart of hot human blood swimming in his stomach. He moans, rises to his feet, turns away.

In the wreckage, Elisa is beginning to change back as well. Billy doesn’t like watching her twist, doesn’t like the disturbing way her form surges, so he looks back at Ollard, at the sobering sight of Ollard’s wounds. Billy wonders what new conception of himself he’ll need to come up with in order to manage the knowledge that those wounds were a thing that he himself caused.

You saved the world , he tells himself. You should feel happy. Ollard was a bad dude. He wanted to die anyway. You did him a favor .

And maybe you’ll even get your book published .

None of these thoughts seem to make it okay to have made the mess that he’s looking at. He begins to run through them a second time, but before he completes the litany Elisa shouts “Billy, look out!”

And Billy turns, and sees Anton Cirrus, standing there with a small duffel bag in one hand, and a gun in the other.

“Hands up, fucker,” says Anton. Billy complies. He wishes he had his orange jumpsuit: it can’t stop a bullet, but being naked in front of the barrel of a gun doesn’t exactly make him feel less vulnerable.

“Everybody just hold still for a second,” Anton says.

These are clear instructions, and even though Anton’s voice is choked with rage and maybe even something like sorrow, he nevertheless says them loudly enough for all to hear, and if everyone in the room was human everyone in the room might even be willing to obey. But Jørgen is still a massive hell-wolf, and massive hell-wolves don’t particularly care for human instructions or for the nuances of hostage situations. He gathers himself up and prepares to spring.

Anton, for his part, is smart enough to perceive that shooting Billy won’t protect him, so he turns the gun onto Jørgen.

He fires twice.

The first shot misses. The other shot hits Jørgen in the joint of his right shoulder, causes him to lose his footing for a second, although he still looks like he might leap.

Anton fires two more times.

Both hit Jørgen in around the same area, which is enough to cause his front legs to crumple. His eyes flash angrily: it looks like he’s trying to muster the hate-stare, but Anton has taken advantage of the moment, has sprinted through the vestibule and is already out into the streets of Chelsea.

Jørgen’s wolf body leaks blood, shudders, begins to undergo the weird flesh-morph that changes it back into a human body.

Elisa finds a dish towel in the rubble and tries to maintain pressure on the wound while Jørgen’s body shifts shape. She looks up at Billy. “Call an ambulance,” she says.

Billy looks around, finds the phone mounted to the wall. He lifts it and is a little surprised to find that it has a dial tone. He dials 911 and gives the dispatcher the address of the tower, hopes the EMTs will be able to find the door now that Ollard is dead and the cloak has, presumably, fallen.

“How is he?” he asks, once he hangs up.

“Hard to say,” Elisa says.

“Okay,” Billy says. He feels worried for Jørgen, but the sensation is distant somehow, abstract; it is as though some mechanism in his psyche has lost a pin during the long battering of the day’s events. He tries slowly to assemble an argument for doing something — anything — and it’s then he remembers that his obligations to Lucifer are not yet concluded.