Fiction

Two Excerpts of Punk Tooth an Novel In Progress

PROLOGUE

The trees drip with dew, and the forest floor is damp and soft underfoot. It's an early May morning in the woods, near Donner lake. Denni has been running for a while, dipping between trees, and breathing in the fresh earthy scent of the thawing forest.

He stops for a moment to catch his breath, and watches the steam rise from his mouth. Carri is up ahead and Mike somewhere off to his right. He can smell them, so he knows they’re close by.

But he catches another scent too. Not a real wolf, there’s a difference to the smell of werewolves, almost like there’s some thread of humanity left, perhaps the lack of animal instincts, that makes them easy to recognize. He hasn’t smelled this one before though that doesn’t say much, he hasn’t ever met another besides Mike and Carri. The scent is intertwined with fear, and blood, grime, and wet fur.

Denni’s hackles go up, he can feel each follicle prickle like goosebumps. His lips stretch back above his teeth as he lets out a sharp huff that stops Carri and Mike in their tracks. They sniff, catching onto the scent. It’s getting closer. They wait as the other wolf tracks them too, listening as it crashes through the woods.

Mike sits back on his haunches, hoping it won’t be a fight, Denni and Carri take a more cautious approach. Denni stands in front of Carri protectively as if he isn’t the smallest of them.

Then the other wolf appears, half-changed, stumbling, and crawling out of the trees in front of them. He takes a couple of steps, trips on a root, and falls, too exhausted to get back up, and just like that, the smell of wolf is gone as the kid fully shifts back, replaced with the stench of panic and feverish sweat. The boy is naked, dirty, and afraid. He has long scratches on his arms and legs from brambles and rocks, and mudd, and gunk covering his hands and feet. He’s thin and his skin is bruised and bloody in places. He’s clearly new to this, no one changes uncontrollably unless they’re new.

Poor guy.

Denni approaches him slowly. Sniffing him out, feeling the fear and pain radiating off of him while he shudders.

Mike and Carri follow, circling him, keeping their distance.

Denni allows himself to change, contorting painfully back to his usual old bipedal self. He covers himself with one hand and kneels to try and help the kid on the ground. The kid barely even notices his touch. He shakes uncontrollably, and mutters pained words under his breath, begging to be woken up from the nightmare, begging for the pain to stop, begging for it to be a dream.

Denni turns to the others, “Run back to the car, get clothes. I think there are extras in the trunk.” Mike hesitates, eyeing Denni, nervous to leave him alone with the out-of-control kid. But they do as they’re told, running back to the car, about a mile back through the woods.

The kid begins to stir, shivering, his movements pained.

“Just stay there for now.” Denni says, “We’re getting you some clothes. We’ll get you cleaned up and take you home.”

The kid stays silent, likely scared shitless. As they wait, his feverish sweat turns cold on his skin, and he shivers as much from cold as from fear.

Mike and Carri run back a while later, now human, and dressed. Denni pulls on a pair of sweats they've brought, and helps the kid stand up. Mike hands him an extra zip-up and some basketball shorts. He’s so delirious from dehydration or fever or fright that they practically carry him back to the car, stopping every once in a while to re-adjust his weight.

When they get to the car Carri gives the kid water and a granola bar and asks him where he lives. He directs them to a van parked near a grocery store in Old Town. The kid has managed to travel one hell of a long way on foot. Denni can only hope he wasn’t spotted along the way. News of a wolf in Truckee would not go over well.

Denni writes his number on a receipt from the floor of the car. The kid climbs onto the mattress in the back of his van, and pulls a blanket around himself.

Denni hands him the phone number, and a bottle of water. “Call us when you feel up to it. We can help you.”

FIRST ENCOUNTERS

When I wake, it is dark. It has snowed a couple inches since the morning, and I have to clean off the van before leaving.

In the locker room of the ski area, I pull on my snow pants, resort jacket, and boots. I sign in on the outdated paper clock-in sheet and head out to the snowcat barn. I check the equipment and drive out to the mountain. This job is a bit tough, it is hard to stay stable in the snowcat, and you have to constantly be aware of your surroundings and every little move you make, how much snow you have in front of you, etc. But if you can get past all of that, it’s the most beautiful time to be on the mountain in my opinion. The nighttime is special up here; no one is around to talk to you, the only sound is the mechanical grinding of the snowcat as it creeps uphill. Sometimes I stop just to enjoy the quiet of it all; the muted tapping of the snow collecting on my work jacket, and then the absolute silence. Snow, the best sound dampener, muffling even the air itself as it falls, so that no sound travels far up here in a storm.
The lake spans out below me, a huge black pit of dizzying nothingness, looking like it could swallow you if you take one wrong step. Lights dot around its maw, small as pinpoints. The snow, glowing blue as if it creates its own light, becomes smooth and perfect behind me as I drive.

This is a small ski area, small enough that each driver does the whole area on their own on each of our respective shifts, so it feels like even more of an accomplishment to hear the compliments I get on my driving days.
As I reach the highest and last groomable run, I notice an animal to the side of the run. Another great thing about being out here at night is seeing all of the rare winter wildlife. I’ve seen bears, bobcats, stoats, and coyotes. I can barely make out this animal through the sheets of snow, so I slow to a stop to get a better look, and the silence envelops me. My ears begin to ring.

In the lights of the snowcat, a deer is illuminated. It doesn't make any sense, why in the world would a deer be so high up in the mountains in the middle of winter? Plus this deer just looks wrong. Wrong in a way I can’t even pinpoint, like the antlers are too wide, or the legs uneven, or the face just… off. The eyes set a little too forward on its head, instead of on the sides like any prey animal’s eyes should be.

The moon makes long shadows, which ripple and blur, distorted from the snow. Its eyes glow in the headlights, staring at me, waiting. I am as still as I can possibly be, my breath makes soft clouds in the cold cabin of the snowcat.

I can’t even bring myself to move to start it up again, to drive away. Every instinct in me is going haywire, telling me I should run, back away slowly, that I should not let it know that I’ve seen it, all at the same time. But I know it’s too late for that, it’s looking right at me, like its predatory eyes can see right through the headlights and into the cabin to me. Its face contorts into anger.

We stay like that for what feels like hours. Then it moves, and it gets even worse. Its knees bend the wrong way, and it seems to grow taller as it moves towards me. I am frozen to the spot, telling myself it can’t get into the snowcat. Even as it grows larger, hulking, and spindly.

Then the smell hits me like a bus. A familiar smell, like when another werewolf is near. Like when I’m with the others during a change, but this smell is so different from theirs. It is rotten, and foul, and much more animalistic. You can always tell with the others that they aren’t really wolves, you can smell their humanity lingering on them, just like you can smell the wolf lingering on them for a short while after a change.

But there is no humanity in this smell, no discernable smell at all, just a jumble of animal scents, and something like decay or rotting flesh. I wonder how I didn’t smell it before, it’s so strong and putrid, filling the whole cabin as it gets closer, circling the cat, passing to the side of me. It sniffs my window, raising its lips, showing its sharp, not very deer-like teeth. Its breath is hot on the windowpane, fogging it, and flecking it with moisture. I still can’t move, only looking at it in the corner of my eye. I can hear the sharp huffs as it sniffs around looking for a way in, and the long slow screech of its antler scraping up against the metal door.

Then it passes, walking back into the tree line, and disappearing.

I sit in the cold for a few minutes, watching the place in the tree line where the creature disappeared. I thank whatever higher power is out there that this was my last run to do anyway and head back to the barn.
I still don’t want to get out of the snowcat. I’m terrified of opening the door and coming face to face with whatever terror could be waiting for me. I call Mike as I walk back to my car, as if being on the phone would help me in any way if that thing came back.

“Hello?” He sounds groggy and I remember that it is only about five-thirty in the morning still.
“Hey Mike, sorry I just had a really weird thing happen and it spooked me pretty bad, can I just keep you on the phone until I get back out into civilization?”

“Yeah man,” I can picture the concern on his face. “Hey, what happened?”

I am not sure how to explain that experience to the guys. It feels wrong to speak it aloud. I doubt anyone would believe me anyway. We all love a good ghost story and they might just dismiss it as my mind playing tricks on me, and I can only imagine the jokes that Carri would start throwing around every time we see any deer ever again.
So I think better of it and instead, I say, “Just really creepy vibes up on the mountain tonight.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Mike says.

I know he does get it. We’ve all seen things up here that we can’t fully explain; cars pulled over on the side of the highway with all their doors open, and lights on and not a soul around, people in dark clothes walking up the mountain late at night, but nothing like what I just saw.

“Try not to overthink,” Mike sleepily tries to settle my nerves, “I’m sure you’re safe, you’ve got a giant machine protecting you while you’re up there, and all that.”

“Yeah,” I try not to sound too stiff, as I climb into the van. “I think I’m okay now, I'm back in the car. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

By now the early morning crew of Lifties, and ski patrol are arriving in the parking lot, sleepy, hungover, saluting me as I pass them on the way out. I can’t help but wonder if I should warn them, but there isn’t anything sane to say.
I get out onto the main road, and drive home in silence starting to wonder if I dreamed the whole thing. No such luck.

I get back to the house, and promptly flop onto the couch where Mike is waiting with coffee and cartoons. He doesn’t prompt me any further on my encounter this morning, though he can probably tell it’s still on my mind.
This raises more questions the longer I think about it, the more bits and pieces I remember.
The smell.

Foul and familiar. So like us, but so strangely separated.

Does this mean there are other things like us out there; other worse monsters, like demons, and evil beings? That thing didn’t exactly strike me as a positive force in the universe. Was the smell just a generic supernatural being smell? Or are we somehow connected to that thing?

“Do you think we’re the only ones?” I ask Mike, breaking the long silence.

“The only werewolves?”

“Well, the only… things, nonhuman things out there?”

“I don’t know, it’s possible. I’ve never run into anything to make me think so.” he trails off, searching my face for some reason for the question. “Have you?”

I have to tell someone. It’s going to burn a hole in my head if I don’t. Mike would be the safest bet.

“Mike, if I tell you what happened you have to swear you won't tell anyone else. I’m not sure what it was and I don’t want Denni and Carri to go down a rabbit hole with this.”

Mike thinks for a minute, he looks way more concerned than he did a second ago.

“Okay,” He says cautiously.

I only tell him half of it. I describe the creature, I tell him how it moved and how it changed, but I don’t say anything about the smell, or how it seemed to look right at me, like it had come there just for me.

Mike is silent, and when I finish he nods. “Could be,” he says, “there are so many legends out there, and especially with where we are. Native tribes around here have loads of stories of things like that, lots of creepy cannibalistic stuff, and with us right by Donner… I’ve thought about that a lot before. Like, if any of those stories were true it would make sense that it would be here. I mean, we all had to end up here together for some reason right? Maybe there's just some kind of weird creature energy here. ”

I think about that for a while. I’ve heard all of those creepy stories too but I figure they’ve been twisted all around and misshapen from their original folklore.

“Or it could just have been a really sick, mentally deranged deer, caught in some really bad lighting.” Mike says.
“That too,” I muse.

“Just don’t overthink it. If something happens again then we’ll look more into it. If there is something else out there we’re bound to find it on one of our runs.”

He’s right I hadn’t even thought of that. Encountering that thing in the woods on one of our runs would be terrifying, unable to communicate with each other, unable to really get anywhere safe…

“Emmerson,” Mike says bringing me back again and tossing me a gaming controller. “Stop overthinking it. Play some Mario-kart.”