Young Writers Society

It was already six o’clock in the evening and the sun was on its way out over the city of Portland. The bus pulled up, sounding its hydraulic brakes. Hermes wheezed to his feet, reflecting bitterly that by the time he got home, his dinner would already be cold.

As he shuffled onto the bus on feet sore from a long day of work, he flipped a finger to the pass that hung around his neck. The driver merely nodded imperceptibly, or maybe he didn’t at all; a lot of bus drivers in the city seemed to be springing personality leaks.

Hermes found his seat with a sigh of contention. He passed a haggard glance around at the other few passengers.

It was the same old lot one sees every day on the bus. Some thin, haggard faces, others plump and educated. There was a man in a loud shirt near the back looking over his acoustic guitar case as if it held some special secrets. An old woman smiled thinly at nothing in particular, lost in memories no doubt. One could expect to see everything from street riff-raff to college professors on the bus, people varying from every race and creed. There were fewer passengers than he was used to, less than ten by his count, but that was most likely because he was late getting off and had missed the rush.

He sat back as the bus pulled away from its stop and began on its merry way, reflecting on the disappointments of the day.

These newest boys the company had outsourced had finally succeeded in snapping something in him. Their total and unapologetic incompetence had brought him screaming beat red so many times that when the goofy skinny one--Reimy was his name-- nailed his bloody boot to the floor, something in him just snapped. His anger suddenly disappeared completely, his eyes took on a dead glazed quality. His patience had been run so taught that it had snapped, apparently.

He fired both of the boys in complete deadpan.

“Get the fuck lost before I slip up with the nail gun and trepan you,” he had said. Boy that felt good. What didn’t feel good was staying behind and making up the work himself over an extra hour.

So maybe he was a little harsh on Jackson, the short guy with the tan. He seemed to be dumb as a brick and couldn’t follow direction worth fly’s snot, but he didn’t really cause any catastrophes like Reimy. Maybe he’d call in the boy’s paycheck; give him half-pay.

The bus driver announced some street name he couldn’t catch. He snapped to and decided to start paying attention to where he was. Enough brooding on the stresses of his day.

The bus was pulling into a stop. He craned his neck to see a handful of Asian teenagers disembark, passing a very dirty man in a heavy tattered army surplus coat, as he boarded the bus. He was completely unshaven and his face could hardly be seen. Hermes knew the type: can collector; washout; bum.

The bag man stumbled almost drunkenly down the aisle, trailing something dark and viscous behind him that looked like it could have been motor oil. The bus driver didn’t seem to notice, and Hermes was no snitch. He simply put a finger across his nostrils and tried not to furrow his brow too noticeably as the man sat on the side-seat directly across from him.

Once the bus started rolling again the bum began to scoot in towards Hermes. To his utter revulsion the man leaned forward and spoke to him with breath that reeked of stale meats.

“It bit me, ya ken?” he muttered conspiratorially, he nodded to Hermes like he was supposed to know what he was talking about, eyes wide.

“Oh?” replied Hermes, attempting suddenly to be very interested in the passing street signs.

The bus rocked to a stop again and a puddle of the same dark liquid that the bum had trailed in suddenly began to slide off in snaking rivulets towards the door. Whatever it was, it was pooling very thick at his feet.

In disgust Hermes once again turned his attention to the window. The sun had nearly set, the sky; a shade of sepia, littered with clouds that fractured to partially reveal an expectant full moon.

Leave me alone, leave me alone you fucking bum. Today is not the day.

The tension that had begun to leave him once he’d left work was slowly starting to build up again. He clenched and unclenched his fists.

Close your eyes, count to ten, and breath. One… two… three--

“Look, brother.” Stained fingertips clasped his shoulder offensively, interrupting his calming technique. He jumped in surprise and revulsion. He had the sudden impulse to punch the bum in the face, followed by the irrational notion that his fist would later be un-washable.

“I‘m not your brother, so just back off!” He yelled assertively, turning to face the vagrant. He choked back his anger as suddenly as it had sprung up. What was left on his face was nothing less than astonishment bordering on pallid shock.

The bum had opened his army surplus coat to reveal the source of the leak. Between the tattered and infinitely sullied material beneath, he could clearly see two ribs, peeking through a ragged hole about a square-foot across his abdomen, framed by strings of dripping black flesh.

“--The fuck…”

“Radioactive bobcat or sommat.” The bum mumbled, casually letting his coat drop over the wound again. “Courtesy ol’ mistress.” he pointed a black fingertip over Hermes’ shoulder.

Before even having time to think of how or why this old bum was sporting a wound like that as if it were a mosquito bite, he felt compelled to follow the direction of the finger. It seemed the bum was pointing at the full moon that had freed itself from its cloud prison, and gained some color.

And then as quick as it took to take his glimpse, a sound like wet tearing leather came from the bum’s seat. He turned his head back to face a monumentally more horrifying sight.

The bum was staring incredulously at his own hand, which had sprung a rack of knives, the skin of his fingers hanging off the edge like an inside-out glove.

Hermes shrieked, causing the bus driver to glance worriedly at him in the overhead mirror. He couldn’t see the bum sprout claws from where he was sitting; shedding skin like paper mache. He didn’t see his knee caps shatter and elongate either, or the clumps of matted fur that began to spring from bloodied crevices in his face, his eyes seemingly melting and receding into his lengthening skull.

Hermes shrieked again and leapt from his seat for the driver, imploring him to stop. The few stragglers left in the back of the bus were now beginning to panic as well, witnessing full well the bag man’s transformation

“Stop the bus, oh God!” Hermes began to blubber and sob hysterically at the driver, snot running from his nose into his mouth. The driver, still trying to navigate the two lane traffic gave another worried glance at the overhead mirror. This time he saw something that made him want to stop:

One, two, three bloodied teeth being spat from behind the handicap space, into the middle of the aisle, and then six more in rapid succession.

“--The fuck…”

“Stop the bus!” Hermes cried. Somebody screamed in the back. A hulking shadow, impossibly fast, rushed the front of the bus. A face like hell took the full view of the overhead mirror; eyes like far away burning coals, incisors dripping the remains of a mutilated human palate sprung from a lupine snout.

Hermes didn’t have time to loose another scream as the thing howled in multiple frequencies, taking the driver’s face in its incredible jaws. As it bit down, blood ran in thick dark rivers down his face, drenching his driver’s uniform a dark crimson. The bus swerved violently, hitting a curb. As the impossible wolf creature finished the one devouring bite that would take the driver’s entire face off, the bus suddenly began to topple onto its side.

Even as the world turned on its head in a cacophony of metal and concrete, the wolf beast was on all fours, leaping towards the back of the bus where the four or five other passengers were huddled in mortal terror. As it left the ground one of its claws caught Hermes in the side of the head from where he had fallen on his backside, paralyzed in mortal dread.

And then the bus slammed onto its side. The wolf beast easily corrected for this, leaping onto the row of windows that had suddenly become the floor.

The world, as far as Hermes could tell, had suddenly degenerated into a swooning nightmare, the interior lights of the bus flickered hellishly, showing the beast at the far end through blood stained sight, whining and decorating the metal box with human confetti.

He felt the wound on his head; his fingers slipped on the glistening bone of his own skull. The beast had already finished with the four or five passengers at the far end. He could see its hulking mass bent over, chewing on the leg of an old woman, human remains dripped from the walls around it.

Suddenly the beast turned its head, focusing its inset hell-fire eyes directly on him. It snorted, ejecting a spray of thick red mist. He suddenly realized in supreme existential impotence, that he was alone with the beast, and there was no escape.

The beast began to approach him in no particular hurry, its shoulders rising and falling in powerful jerking motions, as if fully aware that there was no escape for the poor blubbering, bloodied man at the front of the bus.

“Oh Christ, Mary, God, Mother of--” The wolf cut his blubbering short with a powerful snort, blowing bloodied snot into his face. He froze as it approached him, it’s snout inches from his averted face. It sniffed him once, twice, and then settled on its haunches. He waited for it to devour his face, or pull his arms from their sockets. He waited for it to tear out his entrails and string them about the interior like organic tinsel. He imagined a dozen terrible deaths in the span of seconds.

And yet, it did none of these things. It simply sat a few feet from him, breathing heavily.

He finally chanced a peek at the monster, and to his utter surprise the beast simply hulked, staring at him curiously. And then it did something totally unexpected: it pointed a razor sharp claw over his shoulder, signifying an intelligence that had lain unnoticed under the impious murder it had thus forth portrayed.

In complete shock and obedience he directed his shaking gaze to where it was gesturing. What he saw was the moon through the cracked and bloodied windshield, full and bright in a cloudless sky. The moon in all it’s splendor, his mistress.

His mistress? Where in God’s name had that come from? He barely had time to ponder it before the wound on his head began to throb. He felt the bones in his skull begin to shift and grate, the skin on his face began to slough off, revealing newly formed tufts of fur.

Images of the hunt ran through his mind; primordial, archetypal images. Wide eyed and flailing elk in the midst of being brought down melted into the faces of screaming men. The feel of human bone snapping between jaws entered his mind, fields darkened with blood in flashes of ancient, collective memory.

And just like the bum that had not been his brother, he began to shed his human form; fingernails, teeth, and skin. And as his mighty incisors pushed their way inconsiderately through his shattering, useless human jaw, he unleashed an earth shattering howl, signifying his initiation into the brotherhood of the wolf.