I fought the pain but unless I stopped resisting, the zombies were going to pull my head off.
I relaxed and hoped they’d do the same.
The zombies quit pulling but they held on to me.
Everyone knew what happened.
I had surrendered.
The zombies carried me around the house. They climbed the stairs to the platform in front. The female zombie ran the cable through a metal cage on the platform. She dragged me inside.
When they’d pushed me into the cage, the door was shut. The female zombie made the cable loop slack and slipped it free.
Zombies stood around me, their eyes empty of life. I smacked my mouth to clean the foul taste from my tongue. I couldn’t believe that these simple, disgusting creatures had captured me.
I studied the wire cage. A real wolf could bend the metal door apart and rip it loose. As a supernatural I should be free without much trouble.
I growled at my captors. However nasty they tasted, I was going to rip the lot of them into pieces.
My neck and legs were stiff and clumsy with pain. Every ache told me how much I was going to enjoy destroying these zombies.
Cowboy zombie poked me with a long, smooth club. I snapped at the club and crunched it to pieces. He staggered from the cage, still grasping the other end of the club.
I flexed my shoulders and stretched my legs to ready myself. I raised my tail in alpha defiance and backed up to lunge.
An electric jolt punched along my spine. I jumped forward, and when my muzzle touched the metal door, another electric jolt snapped though my body.
I backed into the middle of the cage, surprised and worried.
The zombies made a gasping ghaw, ghaw-flinging spit from their disgusting mouths-that was as close as they could manage to a laugh.
What had happened? I looked around. A second cable connected the cage to the house. When I had touched the wires, that was when the electricity had gone through me.
The electric shock was too much even for my supernatural powers. One bite on the wires and I’d be flung on the floor, paralyzed from the electricity. How could these stupid creatures be so clever?
I paced in a tight circle within the cage. Barren ground and rocks surrounded the deck down to the gulch. Rabbitbrush and juniper grew around the boulders sticking out from the surrounding hills.
A layer of fresh smells wove through the zombie stink. Animals on the move: mice, hares, doves in flight. And the scent of morning pollen.
Morning.
The skies to the east faded to lighter blue. Yellow light touched the summit of the big mountain.
The dawn was coming.
And I was out here in the open in this cage.
I stared to the eastern horizon. When the sun made its appearance, its rays would burn me to ashes.
I growled in frustration and fear. I barked and howled. I circled left, then right.
The zombies stepped closer, lifting axes and clubs with nails in them.
One by one, the stars twinkled for the last time and disappeared into the gathering light.
The sky to the east flashed green and became yellow. It would be light soon and then the sun, the great destroyer of vampire flesh, would take me.
If I had no way to escape as a wolf, I’d do it as a vampire.
I lay on the plywood and tucked my legs close. The trick during transmutation would be keeping my writhing body from touching the electrified cage.
I cleared my thoughts of fear and let my mind expand into the stillness. The transformation came to me like water filling an empty shell.
A great force pulled from the inside of my skull to flatten my snout. My leg and arm bones felt like they were crushed by enormous stones. My senses were smothered by a storm of pain. Fur receded into skin and my flesh burned with the sensation of being dragged through smoldering brush. My paws molded themselves back into hands and feet in agonizing spasms.
The pain lifted and for an instant my mind was a smooth pool devoid of thought. My senses had turned dull and the complex smells simple. Staring into the landscape, my mind clutched at the names and purposes of the objects. A wire cage that rested on a wooden deck. Juniper. Rocks.
Zombies.
Someone clapped. A man cheered, “Very good.”
My muscles throbbed. My joints unfolded like they were breaking through glue.
I drew onto my naked butt and sat on the plywood sheet, careful not to touch the wire grid. I turned toward the clapping.
A red aura surrounded the man who stood between the house and me. His psychic shroud undulated with pleasure and the fuzzy, sparkling penumbra betrayed his curiosity.
He had the broad shoulders of a lumberjack. A fleece sweater covered the top of a white lab coat.
His proud jaw and the cowlick curling over his forehead made him appear like the superhero in a comic book. Only we weren’t in any comic book and he was no superhero.
He crouched beside my cage.
I focused my gaze into his. I’d zap him and order him to let me out.
His irises opened like the apertures on a camera lens. Usually the irises pop wide as fast as a bubble bursting. His aura brightened, but it didn’t blaze as I expected.
My hypnosis powers were weak.
The man’s expression went blank. He staggered from the cage.
Cowboy zombie grasped his arm and pulled him away. Why did the zombie protect this man? Was he their master? The reanimator?
The man gave his head a groggy shake. He rubbed color back into his face. Snakes of malice lashed from his aura. His forehead wadded with deep furrows of anger. He motioned toward cowboy zombie and beckoned for the club.
The man took the club and smacked it across the cage. “What the hell did you do to me?”
The cage rattled. I feared the wires would snap loose and shock me.
I couldn’t break free. I couldn’t hypnotize him. I was trapped.
The man eased the club through the wire grid. “What the hell are you?”
I was certain he was going to jab me with the club, and when he did, I’d shove it back into his chest.
Instead the man wedged the club in the grid and tipped the cage. I slid across the plywood toward the electrified wires.
I grabbed in panic for the plywood sheet to arrest myself. My fingers touched the wires under the plywood, and the next instant, blasts of mule-kick pain shot up each arm and exploded in my armpits.
My hands tore from the wires and I tumbled backward against the grid.
The sensation was like getting impaled on a red-hot iron bar. Every synapse fired between every cell, and the universe within my head was scorched of everything but pain.
The cage rocked back and settled on its bottom. I curled on the plywood to save myself.
The man levered the cage again, and again I fell against the wire grid.
For the next minute I lived inside a lightning bolt, my being consumed with white pain, every thought obliterated by a tumbling fire that wracked my body.
The pain abated, like the crackling embers of a dying fire. I smelled burnt flesh-my own. My eyes gradually came into focus. Wisps of smoke drifted by my face.
I lay on my side in a clenched fetal position. My kundalini noir trembled, exhausted by the ordeal.
The man slapped the club against the cage. “More?”
I couldn’t speak. I put my hand against my face-my numb fingers were hard as icicles-and tried to force my mouth to move. My lips were rubbery and cold like those of a dead fish.
He yelled, “You do that hypnosis thing again and I’ll fry you like sausage. You understand?”