Pack

Pack

By: Maura Fisher-Bernstein

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The beams of light tapered from the wax, flickering against the dilapidated walls of the singular room, and illuminating the dusty, dank, dingy mess that lay around it.

There was a makeshift bed on the floor, comprised of straw and some odd, mismatched pillows that had been spared from a clearly secondhand couch on the far side of the room. A small, broken-down kitchen had been improvised in one of the free corners and everywhere else there lay clumps of hair, piles of trash, and several busted pieces of what had presumably been wooden furniture.

Besides the horrible mess, there was a figure on the “bed” now - a woman of no more than 20 named Morgan. A few minutes passed and the candle burned patiently. Finally, she awoke with a heavy, sedated groan. Morgan blinked blearily and attempted to focus in on her surroundings with great effort.

She was on the ground, laying down - that was a start. Her head was splitting with pain and when she reached up, her fingers returned crimson. She was bleeding profusely from several wounds that had been caused by something or someone with intense brutality. As she lay there, unable to move her broken body, her brain registered that things did not look good for her. She tried to remember how she had come to be in this place and could only gain back snippets - mists and visions of what had happened to her. Someone had come to the bar, but had she gone home with them? That was unlike her. She took in her state and seemed to understand that whatever did happen was not because she had consented to it.

The fear began to mount. She needed to escape before whoever had done this came back and did worse. But the pain was excruciating and her attempts to move only further exhausted her. The woman closed her eyes, clicked her heels weakly, and resigned herself to a death that did not come.

~~~

Walking home in the dead of the night was not new to a dancer like Morgan, but tonight felt different. The weather had remained unchanged for the last week -- rainy and gloomy skies that gave way to long, endless, ominously dark days. Her routines had been uniform and well-kept as usual, even amidst the chaos that had happened to her only two weeks ago. But it wasn’t a change in weather, or a difference in activity, or an event looming on the horizon -- no, the change was within her. Morgan felt it, even as she stepped past a patch of trees and into a section of road that was flooded with moonlight. She looked up at the moon, an orbicular, spectral figure against the black tapestry of the night sky. As Morgan beheld it, she had the sudden thought and feeling that she was being watched. She refocused on the path ahead and continued walking, looking in all directions as she headed for home, now absolutely terrified and paranoid. She knew she should have asked Mike the bouncer to walk her home. It was later than she was used to, and ever since being abducted, she had been a little more than on edge at all times.

There was a sudden howling in the distance.

Morgan felt her brow collecting sweat as she began to walk faster, almost without meaning to. The same feeling that had told her she was being watched had now told her that she needed to hurry, that something was coming. Her feet began to pulse, ache, though she couldn’t remember having done enough activity to warrant pain. Then it was her back, crippled with sudden anguish, so she began to arch to relieve it, then she was doubled over in pain, her fingers clawing at the asphalt with particular viciousness.

There was more howling in the distance -- louder now, coming closer.

Morgan’s fingers split at their seams and new, hairy digits began to peek through the ruptured flesh, soaked in her own coagulating blood. She screamed through salty, sharp tears as her back cracked horribly, finally pushing a new spine through her skin and revealing a different body, coarse with hair and pointed with still-emerging, jagged limbs. She could feel every part of her changing, shifting, and thought wildly that nothing in her life had ever been this painful.

The howling rang through the clearing and stopped as a pack of wolves converged on Morgan’s position. But she wasn’t really Morgan anymore.

She arose entirely now from the husk of a body she had once inhabited, born anew with strength, power and agility she had never before even dreamed of. The moon lit Morgan’s new form, shaggy and blood-soaked. The wolves could sense her newness, and more importantly, the dying flesh before them.

The largest wolf lunged forward first and took a bite of the fast-decaying meat, then the others. Morgan stood, frozen and still shaking with pain, watching the wolves devour her dead, discarded human carcass. For a long moment she watched them, unsure and terrified of this change and what it meant. Then, all at once, she knew what she had to do.

Morgan shifted forward on unsteady, burning paws, dropped her shaggy head, and took a bestial bite of her forsaken flesh.