Chapter 1
A young woman with a pink mohawk makes her way from her seat through a subway car as it pulls into a station. Her name’s Jess. She’s famous. Everyone in town knows she likes to ride trains, not in them, on top of them. She exits the train. A boy on the platform attempts flirting with her, but she walks past him with the slightest acknowledgement, and darts up a staircase and out onto the downtown street.
Nicholas waves off the cold shoulder, slips in his earpods and heads down another tunnel, and a few minutes later, walks out onto a street in front of a different station in front of his school. Here he meets with his film group, they’re nerds but they’re working on something great. It’s just the three of them. The guy is Jack and the girl is Phillipa.
After school, he invites them back to his dad’s place, he’s a pretty serious film guy in Silverwood, and has a whole studio set up. He and his mom aren’t together anymore, she lives in another city. He never sees her. She’s got a new family now.
They arrive back at his house, and the front door is open. He calls for his dad but there’s no answer, only a sudden clank from somewhere at the back of the house, but everything looks in order and he calls his friends pussies if they won’t go in with him, so they do.
They sit down at the console in his father’s studio, the buttons are all lit up and take out their laptops and start plugging in. The boy whose house this is, walks over to the door and asks if they want anything to drink. They cheerfully shout their answers, drooling over the technological machinery. Nicholas walks out into the hallway, but doesn’t see the black figure looming in the dark at the end of the hall, but it sees him.
“What is that?” Phillipa asks, pointing to the wall behind him. He looks up and notices three jagged scratch marks tearing their way through the wallpaper, lengthwise, down the hallway, and that’s when he sees it, but it is already on all fours and bounding towards him. He can only see that its eyes are embers and it’s covered in black fur as it passes in front of the street light pouring in from the hall windows between him and it.
As the creature lunges, he dashes into the kitchen and it misses him, and in the few seconds it took for it to stop itself and turn back around, he had already run out the back door. Jack wasn’t sure what he had seen fly past the door and curiously peers outside, only to be snatched up by the creature which sinks its teeth into his shoulder, crushing his collarbone, and tosses him to the floor, before turning back to the kitchen at the swinging open door.
Jack manages to drag himself back into the studio where Phillipa, having witnessed the entire thing and slams the thick, soundproof door of the studio shut. He is clutching the wound on his neck, it is spurting blood everywhere, but he can’t panic about that right now, he just saw a fucking werewolf. Phillipa presses down onto the wound, but can’t stop the bleeding, now they’re both covered in his blood. Nicholas was gone.
From the floor Jack looks up at the wall, everything is starting to go wonky. His vision is starting to fill with colorful circles and flashing lights. He sees a rifle mounted on the wall next to the big horned head of an elk the friend’s father had killed one winter hunting, and that’s when he feels it. He starts to sense an unfamiliar tingle in his chest. It spreads out to his fingers and toes from there. Phillipa is crying or screaming or both, but he can’t focus on anything except that he is sure that his fingernails are starting to grow. His eyes open as wide as they ever have, and he jumps to his feet and pulls the rifle from the wall, its loaded.
He pushes past her and walks around the other side of the couch to the door that leads to the bathroom, and finds the bathroom completely trashed and spattered with blood and fur. He sees himself in the smashed mirror, he sees the glow of his eyes and without another moment’s thought, puts the barrel into his mouth and pulls the trigger.
Phillipa screams in horror, and the thing in the next room hears her and comes running over to the studio. She backs away from her friend’s body as he lay bleeding on the floor, but he is still alive, he hadn’t had the gun right, and only managed to blow off half of his face and some teeth, and blacked out on the floor with blood pooling around him.
She backs away until she is pressed up against the inside of the studio door, both hands clasped over her mouth, tears streaming down both sides of her face, when suddenly the top of the door explodes. Splintering wood flies passed her ears and two giant furred arms reach in an grab her. She screams again, managing to break free, but her friend’s body is convulsing violently, and his mouth is foaming. She turns back to the broken door and sees the werewolf’s terrible face, but then something outside catches its attention, and it disappears.
She walks over once everything is quiet for a while, only to be grabbed by two arms, this time, belonging to a man on the other side of the door, and is pulled up off of her feet, out of her shoes, and through the gaping hole the creature had made. Then, all was once again silent.
