Wrapup

“They’re all gone?” Maureen said worriedly. “You’re sure?”

“As can be,” Ewan assured her. “Shaggy and Agent Mulder—I guess that’s Barry and Lowenstein—got run out of town days ago. Jumbo Dumbo’s been sent to a place he won’t be coming back from. Cochrane won’t be back if he knows what’s good for him. Your friend Pete, or whatever he is now, was seen headed for the tiger compound. They’ll deal with him, one way or the other. Zhere Ghan likes to keep a low profile. I think that’s everybody.”

Finally. Now maybe he could stow all this save-the-day scat and get down to the important business of courting his lady. Starting with this romantic breakfast at the Bighorn Diner. The place was packed as usual, but somehow a table for two had materialized when they’d come in. The perks of being a hero.

“Not quite,” Maureen said, still worried. “I wish I knew what happened to—”

“You two ready to order?”

“Ted?” Maureen leaped out of her seat and threw her arms as far as she could reach around the massive bulk of Comic Book Guy. “You’re still here? You’re okay?”

“Yep. Still here and better than okay. Atcheson dumped me here in town, so I figured screw it and went to breakfast. Best decision I ever made. The food here is incredible. And they have all you can eat days. I didn’t want to leave. So the owner, Miss Elly, gave me a job. I work here through lunch, then help out at her husband’s place for a couple hours.” He nodded toward the window, and the Grease ‘n’ Grill visible across the square. “Shifters have been better to me than humans ever were. I’ll be damned if I’ll hunt ‘em any more. I’m out of the cryptozoologist biz. You better be okay with that.”

“Hey, me too.” Maureen returned to her seat. She looked at him critically. “Have you lost weight?”

“Ten pounds,” Ted said proudly. “Miss Elly’s got me on a veggie diet. That’s the only downside. Her boys want me to start working out, and they’re relentless. She’s even got her husband in on it. I’m not allowed to eat over there.” He gazed longingly out the window toward the other diner and its enticing greasy odors. “Vern says he wants me to drop at least a hundred pounds because the way I am now, it’d take a pack to pull me down. He’s joking, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Ewan said. “That’s us. Born comedians.” Except for wolves, who had no sense of humor. No reason for Ted to know that. “We’ll have two specials. Blueberry for me, strawberry for the lady.”

“You betcha. Anything to drink?”

# # #

Eons in the past, in what would one day be Lapland, the mutant creature that had once been Wesley Atcheson surveyed his vast domain. He liked this place. It had the abundant food his mutated metabolism required, plenty of land to roam in, and puny little hairy hominids several hundreds of thousands of years away from inventing the gun. Their arrows and spears couldn’t penetrate his hide. He could stomp them with impunity. And gleefully did, as often as opportunity presented itself.

Best of all, this land was home to a herd of woolly mammoths. They also posed no threat to him, as he was clearly the largest, most powerful male in the territory—a fact not lost on the females. Within weeks he acquired an entourage of cows. Life was good indeed.

Roughly a year from the present day a team of Swedish paleontologists will discover the remains of a monster mammoth preserved in the frozen earth. Their findings throw the world of science into chaos. The human elements in the mammoth’s DNA are attributed to contamination in the lab. The wolf genes aren’t so easily explained. At least one scientist’s career ends in disgrace. The remains are locked away in the hopes they’ll be forgotten.

Reading about the debacle in a scientific journal, Morloxian ponders the discovery, then shakes his head. “Naw. Couldn’t be.”

# # #

“Lord Ghan.” The head of the Tiger Yakuza knelt on the floor before Zhere Ghan’s desk. “We have captured a … creature attempting to enter the compound. It appears to be one of the hated Hancock’s mutant werewolves, but it speaks. It says it is your servant.”

“Indeed?” Ghan’s brain sifted information. He could think of only one “servant” with even a tenuous connection to Hancock’s mutant werewolves. “Where is this creature?”

“Outside. Shall we kill it, Lord?”

“No.” Ghan stood. “Show it to me.”

The mutant werewolf had been bound with ropes and whips. It was ringed by Tiger Yakuza, many with guns. Yet when Ghan approached it, it turned its attention to him and him alone. It bowed as well as it was able. “Lorrrrrrd Ghan.” The Yakuza muttered.

Zhere Ghan stood before the beast. “What is your name?”

“Rrrrrranjeet, Lorrrrrd.”

Ghan considered this. “Leave us,” he told his Yakuza.

The mutters grew in intensity, but Zhere Ghan’s word was law. The Yakuza agents withdrew. Ghan himself removed the werewolf’s bindings. “Report.”

“This one was unsuccessful in securing Dr. Morloxian,” the werewolf growled in Urdu. “I attempted to bring you the mutant mammoth, but I was overcome and the beast was destroyed. I have failed in my mission, lord. I failed you. I offer you my life, and this, my mutant body, as compensation.” Ranjeet bent his head, awaiting execution.

Instead Zhere Ghan rested his hand on the werewolf-creature’s shoulder. “You’re a loyal servant, Ranjeet. I’m sure you did your best. You are to be rewarded. You are now a member of my Tiger Yakuza. The grounds and the forest beyond are yours. You will patrol them and keep us all safe from intruders. Any creature you catch, you may kill. But not eat, unless it’s a true beast. Drive off any shifters you come across, without too much violence if you can. We don’t want any unnecessary problems. Not unless I order it.”

Ranjeet quivered all over like an excited dog. He even dared to lick his master’s hand. “I live to serve you, Lord Ghan.”

“Then get to work. You’ve a territory to guard. You’d best get acquainted with it.”

The wolf-creature bounded off happily. Zhere Ghan smiled, watching him go. Such loyalty. You couldn’t even buy devotion so strong these days.

So he didn’t have Morloxian. Neither did Hancock. That counted as a victory in Ghan’s ledger. Those idiots in town never would have let him keep the mammoth anyway. This was better. He had his own mutant werewolf now, loyal only to him. And soon …

He opened his hand and regarded the long, loose wolf hairs resting in his palm. He bankrolled his own set of Indian scientists, well-schooled in both science and respect to the ancient tiger lords. They’d assured him they were making incredible strides in cloning.

All Hellephant Breaks Loose

Ewan and Deuce made it out of Morloxian’s lab without trouble. By now the place was practically deserted. Even the Tiger Yakuza had vacated the premises.Everybody, it seemed, had heard that weird roar from behind the metal doors. Nobody wanted to stick around to find out what had made it.

Ewan charged outside, back onto the mini golf course, and stared around. “Which way’s the—”

Oh.

The sod covering the old swimming pool had scrunched back to reveal a metal hatch, now almost completely open. Loading dock, Ewan thought. So that’s how they got all the big stuff in there.

Suddenly a huge furry trunk and a pair of curved ivory tusks thrust up through the opening. That horrible trumpet/roar sounded again, this time with no doors to blunt it. This was accompanied by the shriek of metal as the rest of the impatient beast shouldered its way out of its underground holding pen and into the light.

Behind him, Deuce swallowed a howl of alarm. Ewan, who saw stuff like this at the movies every weekend, just stared.

The thing that thrust itself to freedom wasn’t quite a mammoth, in spite of the trunk and the tusks and a giant bulk that made the statue of Godzilla look like the Geico gecko. Its huge ears came to points and sat too far up on its skull. Its feet, the size of manhole covers, had claws. A wolf’s tail sprouted out of its backside. Its shaggy pelt was brownish blond. It looked like something out of Ice Age, if Manny and Diego had a kid.

It had blue eyes. Human eyes

Ewan’s gut dropped into his undies. All of a sudden he knew what had happened to Freddy.

Even that wasn’t the worst of it. Freddy had passengers. A mutant werewolf crouched on his neck. The fella with the mismatched limbs and bad body haircut had to be the Doctor.

Between them, clutching at the mammoth’s pelt to keep from falling off, was Maureen. Her scream was lost beneath another roar from the mammoth.

The beast paid no attention to them, or to the humans currently fleeing Uncle Fuddy’s Funland. It swung about and lumbered toward the highway, picking up speed as it moved.

“Lupa help us,” Deuce moaned. “What do we do?”

Ewan’s hard stare never left Maureen. “We bring him down.”

“With what? I doubt if Dante left a bazooka in his car.”

“Then we improvise. Is there a gun store around here?”

Deuce shrugged. “It wouldn’t be Montana if there wasn’t.”

“Let’s go, then. I’ll drive. You call Dante, tell him we got us a big problem.” Screams and the squeal of brakes told them the Freddyphant had reached the highway. “I don’t think we’re going to lose him.”

They ran for the car. Behind them, a shaking human teenager was recording it all on his cell phone. “Dude,” he said, “you won’t believe this. This course has some serious hazards.”

# # #

Maureen dug her fingers into the mammoth’s pelt all the way up to the knuckles and still didn’t hit skin. She lay flat across the monster’s back and tried not to think about what kind of loud, wet noise she’d make if she tumbled off. It had started off at a gut-shaking lurch, but its gait seemed to be smoothing out with practice. This was a positive thing. The beast sounded really pissed off. She didn’t want to annoy it further by ralphing into its hair.

“Whooo-HOOOOO!” Morloxian pumped a fist in the air. “Look at my baby go! Can I cook, or can’t I? By the way,” he added, much less enthused, “where are we going? You’d better not be taking me to Hancock. I’m guessing my unannounced defection left him a little perturbed.”

The mutant werewolf grinned at him over his shoulder. Maureen tried not to look at his fanged and furry face, tried not to remember he was Pete. “Not Hancock,” he rasped in his rough, bestial voice. “I am to deliverrr you to my lorrrrd.”

“Oh shit. There’s another one? I was afraid of that. I guess that accounts for all those tigers. Well, you tell your lord he can bite me.” Morloxian scrambled up. Before Pete could stop him he leaped for the mammoth’s lupine tail, swung himself down to the tip, and let go.

Maureen didn’t bother to scream. As far as she was concerned, he was now one less problem to deal with. She couldn’t hope for Ewan to rescue her. What could he do against this monster? For that matter, what could she?

Her stomach did a somersault. She clamped her jaw shut and hung on and told herself not to think about Pete’s hideous transformation, or how far below her the ground was, or how much worse things were liable to get once Dumbozilla here finally stopped. It really, really sucked to be the group girl in these circumstances.

# # #

Morloxian timed his fall perfectly. He landed in the moat surrounding Dracula’s castle. The scummy water was just deep enough to save him from serious injury. Almost. He tried to stand and his ankle buckled. He went down butt-first in the water.

“Son of a bitch,” he said philosophically. Now he’d have to find another sponsor, build another lab. Great-Uncle Franz’s hidden catacombs had served the family well for generations. No chance of salvaging anything now, thanks to that idiot mutant mutt running off with a giant hairy, walking billboard. If Hancock didn’t come after him, some other shifter was bound to.

Maybe he’d head for New York, for the Catskills. He still had family out there.

“Well, well, ladies. Look what we’ve got here.”

He jerked his head up. His captive harem had apparently made it out of the lab intact. They’d also armed themselves with the iron putters ditched by the mini golfers. They moved into a ring around him, smiling.

He didn’t like the look of those smiles. No sir.

“Hi, Morry.” Candi bounced the shaft of her putter in her palm. “Mind if we play through?”

He looked at their implacable faces and swallowed. “Oh, bugger,” he said.

The ladies lifted their putters and closed in.

# # #

Ranjeet grumbled to himself, but only briefly. True, he had lost the scientist, Lord Ghan’s primary target. The Yakuza would be following at a discrete distance. They would have seen the Doctor drop off. No doubt they had collected him already. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was returning to Lord Ghan empty-handed.

The Atcheson wolf-mammoth paused to challenge a tour bus. Ranjeet tugged on his ear until he turned. “Not here,” he crooned in Urdu. “There will be bloodshed and destruction aplenty for you. But not here.” Atcheson trumpeted his frustration, then turned in the direction Ranjeet guided him.

The Ghan family had trained him well. He had learned how to control elephants in his native India, and knew how to manipulate Atcheson from his undercover stint in the group. This hybrid creature was easily steered.

Lord Ghan would be ecstatic. The tiger lord had his own crew of scientists. They would surely glean something from this mammoth offering, and from Ranjeet’s own mutated body, and that of the woman who smelled like a she-wolf, the unexpected prize.

He glanced back at Maureen, her hands knotted desperately in Atcheson’s pelt. She smelled different to him now that he had a wolf’s nose. Enticing. Exciting. He’d never viewed her in that way when he was human, but this new body had other ideas. Feral, primal ideas. Perhaps Lord Ghan would see fit to reward him for the gifts he brought.

The quickest way to his lord’s stronghold was up Route 15, directly through Talbot’s Peak. The beast beneath his feet hungered for destruction. Perhaps it might be wisest to let him run rampant through the shifter town. Drain off some of that massive energy, slake the bloodthirst a bit. Then he’d be more tractable by the time they arrived at the Ghan compound.

He tugged on Atcheson’s ear, and dug his foot-claws into the mammoth’s skull. Atcheson barked and bolted forward, leaving the exit behind, aimed for Talbot’s Peak.

Missed It By That Much

Morloxian had Maureen strapped down on the table and was reaching for his hypos when the sound of the first crash reached them. It was followed quickly by others, plus screams. The semi-werewolvan doctor shot a glare toward the door. “Not again,” he grumbled. “The mutants,” he explained to Maureen. “I can’t let them run loose like I could in Colorado. Too many civilians with cameras. So they attack the cafeteria.” He shuffled toward the door on bare, taloned paws. “Don’t go anywhere.”

The moment he left the lab Maureen attacked her bindings. On TV the heroine would grab a scalpel in her teeth and saw through the straps. Unfortunately, the Doctor hadn’t left any scalpels within reach. She had to settle with wriggling her scrawny body out from under her bonds. The buckets of sweat pouring off her helped immensely.

She had one arm loose and was working on the other when Morloxian returned, on the run. “Time to go,” he said. He ripped the straps loose himself. “Goddamn welcome wagon.”

He lifted Maureen off the table. Her feet touched the floor. She steadied herself and then rammed her knee into the Doctor’s groin. His lupine howl cracked on a warbling high note. Maureen was out the door before he finished collapsing.

One quick sprint into the hallway later, she saw what he was talking about. The hidden lab, so quiet and orderly when he’d dragged her off to his workroom, was now a chaotic arena peopled by silent men in black coats and monstrous eight-foot werewolves. The men were armed and the wolves had claws, so they were pretty evenly matched.

Morloxian’s human staff took no part in the melee. They were wisely running for the exits.

As Maureen watched, one of the men tossed his coat aside and shifted into a tiger. He and a mutant werewolf charged each other. Their roars were equally inhuman.

Yeah, the exits were looking really good right about now.

A flash of pastel color caught her eye. The ladies of the harem were taking advantage of the invasion to vacate the premises. Candi, leader of the group, spotted her and waved. “C’mon, hon. There’s a way out through Dracula’s castle.” She and the women ran on without waiting to see if Maureen followed.

Whatever “Dracula’s castle” meant. Maureen dashed after the women.

She almost made it. Right at the doorway a mutant werewolf suddenly appeared. Its dark fur had made it nearly invisible in the shadows. It clamped its furry paw over her mouth before she could scream. “Don’t be afrrraid,” it rasped, in a rough, labored growl of a voice with an odd trace of a foreign accent. “All will be well, Maurrrrrrreen.”

Her blood temp went down to absolute zero. She whispered against his paw, “Pete?”

“There you are. Good, you got her.” Morloxian ran at them in a painful shamble. He stopped well back from Maureen with his hand cupped over his crotch. “Goddamn tigers. Who let them in? Get out there and help clean up the mess. I’ll take it from here.”

He reached for Maureen’s arm. The mutant werewolf grabbed the Doctor’s arm instead. “You come with.”

“What? Wait, what are you doing, you stupid mutt! You do what I tell you. I created you!”

“Perrrrrhaps.” The creature formerly known to Maureen as Pete snarled into Morloxian’s face. “But I serrrve anotherrrrr.”

He slammed his fist against Morloxian’s head. The Doctor went limp. Werewolf Pete caught him and Maureen under his arms and changed direction, heading now toward a set of double doors at the end of a branching corridor.

Maybe she was delirious. Maybe she was panicking. But as she jounced beneath Pete’s arm, she thought she saw a familiar blond head at the end of the corridor. Desperately she screamed, “Ewan!”

# # #

The underground lab was a mess of flying, bloody bodies, some of them human, most of them not. Ewan figured the real humans had skedaddled already. If the monkeys had any real talent, it was a healthy sense of self-preservation.

Ewan wasn’t interested in them, or the monster werewolves, or the Tiger Yakuza, or even Morloxian. His nose sorted through the mess of scents for that one special perfume that wasn’t quite human or quite a she-wolf but already said home to him. He hugged the wall and dodged raging wolves and silent, lethal tigers and sniffed every door he came near. Deuce, no fool, followed his lead.

He caught a whiff of her scent at the head of a dim-lit corridor and risked a look inside. Something big and hairy had two bodies clutched under its burly arms. One of them shrieked his name.

“Maureen!” Ewan raced full out down the corridor. He had no idea how he was going to take on a giant mutant werewolf without any weapons. He’d figure something out when he got there.

The werewolf didn’t even look around. It jabbed its finger at a keypad in the wall. The doors slid open. The monster and its captives ducked inside just as Ewan reached him. Maureen strained her hands toward him.

Ewan lunged for the door. It slammed shut in his face.

He was pounding futilely on the metal when Deuce finally caught up. “How are you with electronics?” Ewan said, and pointed at the keypad. “Can you get this damn door open?”

Something inside made a noise that shook the walls. Both Deuce and Ewan froze. The echoes had not quite died away before they were overridden by a second noise, this one a heavy grinding. It seemed to be coming from the ceiling.

“You sure you want to go in there?” Deuce asked.

Ewan wracked his brain. He’d done more thinking on this case than he’d had to do in his lifetime. They weren’t going to get these doors open any time soon, that was certain. There must be another exit inside. A huge one, from the sound of it. “Where are we?” he asked Deuce. “What part of the course are we under?”

“I don’t think we’re under the course itself any more. If my sense of direction didn’t get screwed, I think we’re near the swimming pool. They filled that in years ago.” His eyes narrowed, and he said what Ewan was already thinking. “Or made a bolthole out of it.”

Ewan gave the unyielding door a final useless blow with his fist. He shoved Deuce ahead of him. “C’mon. Back outside. We’ll have to catch ‘em out there.” He thought of that first gargantuan noise. That hadn’t been any kind of engine he knew about. It had sounded—he swallowed—organic. Living. “Let’s hope whatever they’ve got in there can’t fly.”