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Jerry Got Bit

By Richard Dansky

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There’s two ways people end up like me. Some get born, some get bit.

I got bit.

It was because of a girl, but pretty much everything that went good, bad, or sideways in my life around that time was because of a girl. This one, though, this one was different, and I’ve paid dear for it ever since.

Got some good things out of it, too, but there’s times when you can’t help but wonder.

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It was early evening, and it was thinking about raining, and I was walking down the main drag of a small town in northwest Georgia. I’d dropped out of college six years prior and been drifting ever since, much to my parents’ disappointment. They’d wanted me to be the first one in my family to get a degree and to make something of myself. Instead, I got bored and then I got drunk and then eventually I got out. I’d been on the road ever since, taking odd jobs and seasonal work and trying to figure out what the hell I wanted out of this life.

It had been maybe two weeks since I drifted into town, and I’d about exhausted its possibilities. The best options for work were bouncer or produce truck driver, and I wasn’t too thrilled with either. One last walk around, I figured, and then in the morning I’d get in my truck and make a call as to where to go next. Chattanooga, maybe, or I could head north. It didn’t seem to make a lot of difference.

The strip I was walking along looked like it had come right out of an old sepia photograph. It was all one-story brick storefronts with hand-painted signs. Town ordinances made sure they kept it that way, to be properly quaint for the drive-through tourists on the hunt for antiques and Americana. Two thirds of the stores were closed, and half of those were antique shops, and none of them held much interest for me. There was a bar at the end of the block that held slightly more, though largely by default.

But as I walked past an alley between a couple of blocks of those brick storefronts, I heard something.

It wasn’t a scream, and it wasn’t a cry for help. More the sound someone makes when they’ve finished running and started hiding.

I stopped. I thought about it for a minute. And when that sound came again, I turned down that alley.

“Hello?” I called out. “Anybody here? You need help?” The alley was about one and a half car widths across, with dumpsters and trash cans planted randomly along the sides. Bags of trash were stacked up near the cans as well, and in one of those stacks of Hefty sacks, something moved.

I headed for it, still talking, when it exploded in my face. Garbage went everywhere and a girl jumped up and started running. I didn’t get a good look at her, on account of my having a face full of trash, but I could hear her shout “No!” as she ran.

I didn’t chase her. A guy like me chasing a younger woman down an alley, it’s liable to be misunderstood on those rare occasions when it’s not being understood perfectly. Instead, I brushed away the trash and watched her go.

She was sprinting full out for the entrance at the other side of the alley, moving fast. I could see long brown hair in a ponytail, and a white t-shirt and jeans and that was about all. In a couple of seconds she hit the sidewalk, then she stopped. I could hear her curse, and then she started running back toward where I was standing.

After a moment, I realized she wasn’t alone.

There were five of them, guys in their late teens or early twenties, and they were hot on her trail. They were dressed the way dumbfuck boys that age usually are, jeans and t-shirts with stupid shit and band logos on them, and of course backwards baseball caps.

I was pretty sure none of them actually liked baseball.

I was also pretty sure they did not mean this young woman well. They were calling out after her, promising all sorts of nasty treatment and egging each other on. I didn’t see any guns or knives, but I wasn’t willing to bet they didn’t have either.

The smart play would have been to get the hell out of the way. Let the whole parade roll on past to whatever conclusion they found. The problem is, I’m not good at taking the smart play.

The girl was maybe ten feet from me now, wide-eyed and moving under full steam. I could tell she thought I was with the guys chasing her, and that she was trapped.

Time to prove her wrong, I thought.

“Get behind me,” I said, and took a step to the left to give her a clear runway. She blew past me and kept running. I turned to watch her go, then looked back at the charming young men now rushing at me.

“Out of the way, motherfucker,” the one in the lead shouted. He was short and wiry and pasty like a stale marshmallow, and he’d already raised one fist in anticipation of impact.

“Say please.” I stepped back into the middle of the alley. Didn’t raise my hands, didn’t reach for my piece. There was no sense escalating, at least not yet. These boys, I didn’t think they were up for it.

I guessed right. The leader skidded to a halt just in front of me, and his buddies damn near made a five-punk pileup out of it as they tried to do the same. They stood there, panting, looking me over, while I just kept my arms folded and stared back.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“None of your fucking business,” the leader said. He puffed himself up to try to look taller, which meant that he was only most of a foot shorter than me and still way more ugly. “Get out of the way or we’ll fuck you up.”

I gave him a smile. “Is that a fact. Five of you, one of me, those look like pretty good odds, right?”

This was not the reaction the kid was expecting. He started nodding, caught himself agreeing with me, and visibly shook himself back into hard-ass mode. “Yeah, I mean, we will totally fuck your shit up. Now get out of the way.” He reached down to his pocket and pulled out a nasty little knife. I didn’t think they still sold mail order switchblades, but there his was, all shiny and clearly never used on anything tougher than a cardboard box. He waved it in front of himself like he’d learned knife fighting from a straight to video movie, and I’m pretty sure doing that gave him a major hard-on.

I stared at him, nice and even. “Tell you what. Why don’t you give me until the count of five.”

He blinked, and stopped waving the knife. “What? Why…fuck. Fine. Five, four, three, two—“

I reached behind my back and grabbed the pistol I had tucked inside the waist of my jeans. “Thirty-eight,” I said, and pointed it at the center of his forehead.

He dropped the knife. The rest of them edged back. I could see a few of them thinking about reaching for something of their own and decided to cut that off at the pass. “Don’t even try it. I can drop all of you before any of you can draw down on me. Unlike you little fucks, I have actually killed someone, and I’ve got no problem doing it again if you make me.” I hadn’t, but I’d at least drawn down on with intent a man who’d come at me with a tire iron at a rest stop one late and ugly night. I figured that was close enough, and they wouldn’t know the difference.

“Come on, man,” the leader whined. “It’s none of your business! We just want the girl.”

“She don’t want you,” I replied. “Now git. And don’t you go anywhere near her, or we’re going to have another conversation.”

The short kid shook his head. “You don’t understand, man. You don’t know her. She’s one hard-ass bitch.”

“Why do I have trouble accepting your assessment of an actual woman? Now scoot.”

He took a couple of steps back, still looking up at me. “This ain’t over,” he promised, like the movies had taught him to do. Then they all broke and ran.

I didn’t put the revolver away until they had cleared the other end of the alley and nearly gotten themselves pancaked by a semi crossing the street behind. Satisfied, I tucked the .38 back where it came from, kicked the knife into the strewn garbage, and turned around.

She was standing in the mouth of the alley, like I figured she’d be. “You want to tell me what’s going on here,” I asked her. “Or you can just say ‘thank you’ and we can go our separate ways. Up to you.”

“Thank you,” she said, but didn’t move.

I said “You’re welcome,” and since she was just standing there, I looked her over a little more closely. She was a little older than I first thought, maybe mid-20s, and built like a distance runner – muscled but lean, with no fat on her. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her face was too long and too sharp to be called pretty. She turned her head slightly, and I could see she was wearing silver earrings in the shape of a cross.

Something about the package didn’t quite add up, but I figured it was none of my business. Instead, I made small talk. “You OK?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Might have been different if those guys had caught me. Might not have been, but that wasn’t my kind of fight. Again, thanks.”

“Glad I could help,” I told her. “Why were they after you, or was it just the usual awful dumb shit?”

Instead of answering, she just stood there, motionless, like she was waiting for something. After a minute, I realized it was me.

“Uh, do you want to go get a beer or a cup of coffee or something?” I asked. “Maybe go someplace we can sit down and you can tell me what happened? If you want, that is.”

At that, she nodded. “Let’s get a drink, and I’ll tell you as much as you want to hear.”

“Sure thing,” I said, and moved to where I could point to the bar at the end of the block. That had been where I’d maybe sorta kinda been heading in the first place, so I figured why the hell not. “And rumor has it, I’m a pretty good listener.”

“You’re gonna have to be.”

We started walking, not too close but obviously together-ish, and headed for the bar. My mind wasn’t flooded with questions, but there was at least a slow leak of them. Why I was being chattier than normal with this total stranger, for one thing. I mean, I sure as hell wasn’t trying to impress her or get into her pants, but I’d already used up two days’ worth of words on her and I didn’t even know her name. And then there was the larger question of what the hell I had started to get myself into, and if it was too late to get myself out.

Deep down, I already knew the answer to that one.

The bar was called The Strand, like it was aiming for some weird association with something English to give it some class. It was dark inside and everything was made of wood, and there were more beer signs on the walls than televisions, which I appreciated.

She snagged us a two top table just inside the door and sat down, facing the entrance. I said “I’ll get us something. What do you want?”

“Bourbon, Buffalo Trace if they’ve got it. If not, I don’t care.” That surprised me a bit, but I took it in stride and headed over to the bar. The bartender, a guy I knew slightly named Fritz, shot me a look. “On the hunt tonight?”

“The exact opposite,” I told him. “Just saved her ass from getting roughed up or worse by a bunch of dumbass punks. Gimme a Buffalo Trace, one cube, and a bottle of Sweetwater IPA, no glass.”

“The night is still young,” Fritz replied. “You never know how things are going to go.”

I slid some money across the bar at him. “Yeah, but I have a good idea of how they won’t.”

He gave a half-shrug but grabbed the money, then moved off to get the drinks. I waited until he came back, told him to keep the change, and carried the order back over to our table. She was still there, which surprised me a little, but her eyes were fixed on the door.

“Here you go.” I put the glass down in front of her, then sat opposite and set my beer a little off to my right. “I make it a habit of not drinking with total strangers. What’s your name?”

“Linda,” she answered.

“Linda what?”

“Just Linda’s all you want to know.” She picked up her glass and raised it as if for a toast. “To the guy who saved my butt tonight.”

I clinked my bottle against her glass and we both took a drink. “Well, just Linda, do you want to tell me what was going on back there? I’ve got a few questions, but they can wait until you’re done.”

Linda leaned forward. “You sure you want to hear this? You’re not gonna be able to unhear any of it.”

I nodded. “Price of the drink. Hit me.”

She took another sip and shrugged. “Your funeral. OK, you want the real deal, or the comforting lie?”

“The real deal, always. No sense wasting time with bullshit first.” I drank more beer and stared at her. She stared at me, then looked at the door, then looked back at me again.

“Fair enough. Just remember, you asked for this. I hunt werewolves.”

To my credit, I did not shoot beer out my nose when she said that. Nor did I choke, laugh, or otherwise react in a way that might have suggested to Linda that I took her less than seriously. My eyes may have gotten a little wider, but under the circumstances, I feel that was a reasonable response.

“Do tell?” I asked, after swallowing my beer. “Does it pay good?”

I got an annoyed shake of the head. “I’m serious.”

“Me, too. I’m trying to figure out my next move, and what you just said was more interesting than anything I’ve heard in ages.”

Truth was, I was not in fact serious about wanting to hunt werewolves, or really anything, but I figured it was a good way to keep her talking. My mistake, really.

She gave a long, slow exhale. “Jesus, you boys are all the same. Let me start at the beginning. Yes, werewolves are real. Don’t know about vampires, pretty sure about ghosts, and Bigfoot can fuck right off, but I can tell you that werewolves are 100% real. I know this, because a couple murdered my daddy right in front of me.”

I said nothing, just took another sip of beer and let her continue when she was ready.

“I was sixteen. He ran a local moving business. Wasn’t necessarily the best man in the world, but he was my father, you know what I mean. Anyway, one day he got a call out to a rural address and took me along because he thought we’d have some bonding time along the way. We got there and there was no move, just a couple of werewolves who’d decided to order takeout, hiding in the bushes. No one was waiting when we pulled up, so Daddy got out, and that was when they rushed him. He lasted long enough to tell me to get out of there, which I did. Slid over to the driver’s seat and gunned in reverse all the way back to the road, then got the hell out of there. I had to turn the radio up to cover the sound of Daddy screaming.”

“I’m sorry,” I said after a long silence. “Apologies, that’s a hell of a thing to take in. Werewolves, huh? So, I guess that’s what made you decide to hunt them down? Revenge?” I was pretty sure I didn’t believe her, even with that serious face she was wearing, but sometimes the only play is the cards sitting in front of you. I could ride this, or I could walk away, and I knew I wouldn’t feel good about leaving her on her own.

Linda shook her head, then finished her drink. The glass got slammed down on the table, hard. “Not at first. Momma had died years ago, so I was on my own. Called the cops, of course, and they went out to the site but didn’t find much except some blood in the grass. They called it an animal attack and closed the case, and there I was at age 16, with a moving van and a house and my whole life turned upside down. It took a while to get everything straightened out. All that kind of helped, to be honest. It kept my mind off ‘holy shit, werewolves ate my dad!” At least, until I was in a better place to deal with it.”

“So what did you do?” I asked. “And do you need another?”

“One per night is my limit, unless I know I’m someplace safe. And you don’t qualify as safe, at least not yet. What’s your name anyway, Sir Galahad?” She picked up the tumbler, then turned it upside down and put it back on the table.

“Jerry,” I told her. “And my parents are both still alive. They’re just real disappointed.”

She shrugged. “Their loss, Jerry. But yeah, my life? Like I said, it’s hunting these things down. I sold everything, bought a truck, and hit the road to go hunt monsters, like in that TV show. Problem was, I had no idea where to look or what to do once I found them. I mean, my intentions were good, but I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Mostly I just drove around and ate bad takeout, and when I finally did find a real live werewolf, it nearly killed me.”

I finished my beer and considered another. “What happened? You kill it?”

Linda shook her head. “No. Another couple of hunters showed up just in time. They’d been on this thing’s tail for a few months. Apparently I’d slowed it down just long enough for them to catch up and put it down. They took me under their wing for a bit, long enough for me to learn the ropes, and then we went our separate ways. I’ve been hunting solo ever since.”

It was a hell of a lot to believe, and I gnawed on my lower lip while I considered it. I’d certainly heard women say stranger things to me over the years, and Linda at least got points for being original. Again, I considered my options, and staying in seemed like the most interesting. “I’m guessing those guys in the alley were werewolves, then?”

“No. Just dumbfuck losers. Five real werewolves, I would have been dead way before you showed up. No, those guys were just guys, hired by the werewolves I’m chasing to scare me off or slow me down or something. They don’t like doing their own dirty work in public, ‘cause they might get spotted and they don’t want that.” She shrugged. “I could have taken those boys, but that would have meant dead bodies, which means cops, which means questions.”

I contemplated the beer bottle for a moment. “So you let me deal with them instead?”

She gave me a wink that was probably intended to be playful. “I do believe I have your attention.”

“Yeah, well.” I looked over at the bar, where Fritz was giving me two enthusiastic thumbs-up. I ignored him, and turned back to Linda. “Okay then. Those guys weren’t werewolves, but the actual critters you’re chasing, they’re really here?” The questions came easy and natural, a little too easy to be honest. Even if she was full of it, she was sure as hell persuasive. More than that, her eyes had that seriousness to them that said that she sure as hell believed what she was saying, and if she believed, how could I not? At least, as long as we were just sitting in a bar, talking. Actually getting involved in whatever crazy shit was actually going on, werewolves or not, that was a whole other mess.

“For the moment, yeah. It’s the two who killed my Daddy. I’ve been looking for them for ages, and just my luck they turn up living outside this hick town. And before you ask, I traced the real estate purchase records. Same names on the deed as owned the place Daddy got killed. Learned that, went to scope the place out, and got spotted on the road. I headed back to town, but I guess they followed me and sicced the junior Rotary Club on me. Then you came along, and now you know everything.” She propped her right elbow up on the table and rested her head, a little crooked, on her hand. There was a crooked little grin on her face, too. “So, you want to come help me kill some werewolves?”

I stalled for a minute. “You never did tell me how well it paid.”

“It pays shit,” she said. “You can’t sell the pelts, and most of the time the local cops think you just murdered some upstanding citizen who just really liked their steaks rare. But you do get the knowledge of doing something good for people. That’s gotta be worth something, right?”

Pushing back my chair, I stood up. “Sad thing is, my bank account won’t let me take a gig that pays in gold stars and karma.”

I extended a hand to help her up, but she didn’t take it. “I figured, but it was worth a shot. Can I at least get a ride from you back to my motel? I’d rather not walk by myself in case those turkeys are still out there.”

“That, I can do,” I said magnanimously, and gestured toward the door.

Linda shook her head. “Oh no, You first. It might be dangerous.”

I laughed. I opened the door. And I got punched in the face.

The shock staggered me, and I took a few steps back. A big guy stood in the doorway, fists raised, and he was giving me the hairiest of eyeballs while I brought up my own. He was wearing a hunter camo sweatshirt and tactical pants with about fifteen pockets on each leg, and shitkicker boots besides. His face looked like he’d asked his plastic surgeon to give him the full Charles Bronson and then hit him with a 2×4, and he wasn’t smiling.

“Vic,” Linda said, stepping in front of me before I could start throwing hands. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Looking out for you, as usual. Who’s beefcake here and why are you trying to get his ass killed?”

“I was just taking her back to her motel,” I said. “And I owe you one.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Vic answered. “You can just run along now. I’ll take care of Miss Linda here.”

“Not unless she says so,” I countered, and tried to size him up. He was big and he was beefy, but a little older than me and maybe a little soft around the gut. It was clear he was packing, but this didn’t feel like a situation where someone would draw down. At least, not yet.

“I make my own decisions, Vic,” Linda said, and put one hand on his chest. Then she turned and put the other on mine. “And you, Jerry, chill out. Vic’s a dumbass, but he’s on the side of the angels.”

At this point, Fritz started yelling “In or out, but close the fucking door!”

All three of us exchanged glances, then trooped out into the street without another word. When we got there, I turned to Vic. “Buddy. I got no skin in this game. I helped Linda here out of a jam, and I bought her a drink, and I was gonna drop her off at her motel and then get the hell out of Dodge. So maybe you can give me an apology for popping me one, and then I can let you two hash your issues out in private.”

Vic opened his mouth to say something halfway to sarcastic, but Linda interrupted him. “Jerry knows, Vic. He saved my ass tonight and I told him the whole deal.”

Vic turned to her. “Well that was fucking dumb. He’s in now.”

“He can still get out.”

“Let’s hope that’s true,” Vic rumbled. He turned back to me. “Listen, Jerry, or whatever your name is, if you’ve got two brain cells to rub together, you’re gonna turn around and walk away right now. Once you’ve done that, you’re gonna forget everything Linda told you tonight about anything freakier than her personal habits, which you’ve already said you’re not interested in. Do that, and the rest of your life will probably be boring, but much longer than it would have been otherwise.”

I thought about what he said, and what he hadn’t said, and what that left behind. “So the werewolf stuff she told me. It’s all true?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. “It’s true,” he finally said. “And Linda here has a bad habit of getting people involved in it who ought not to be, and of them getting a bad case of dead in the process.”

“That’s not true!” Linda interjected. “I always give ‘em a choice!”

“But not enough intel,” Vic responded. “So, Jerry, look down the street. You’re gonna see a big red sign that reads EXIT, and you’re gonna walk towards it, right now, or you’re gonna be sorry the rest of your very short life.”

I looked at him for a minute, and then I looked at Linda, who was looking at her shoes. “OK,” I said. “I already told Linda that I wasn’t going with her. I’ll throw hands, but hunting werewolves, assuming they’re real and you two aren’t shitting me, is out of my wheelhouse. But I did tell her I was going to see her back to her place, in case those five numbnuts who tried to jump her before showed up again. That, I intend to do. Once I have done so, I give you my word I will ride off into the sunset.”

Vic spat out of the corner of his mouth. “I can take her back, and I’ll deal with those fools. Thanks for looking out for her, but your part in this is done.”

“I like to think I get a say in this.” Linda took a step closer to me. “You and me both know, Vic, that you ain’t taking me back to the hotel. I can see it in your eyes, you’re gonna drive me back home and dump my ass there ‘for my own good’. I’m not having that, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking you were even gonna try. I promise you this, on my daddy’s grave, I won’t try to talk Jerry into coming with me. But you know as well as I do who I’m hunting here, and why I’ve got to see this one through.”

“It’ll be the death of you,” Vic answered. “Girl, I’ve been watching your back since you started down this road, and I tell you plain, you go through with this, it’ll be your last hunt. I got an idea of what you’re gonna find in that house, and I swear to you, the best thing you can do right now is let me take care of it.”

“They killed my daddy,” Linda said quietly. “He’d want me to see this through.”

“Any father worth his salt would want his daughter to live,” Vic answered. “So here’s the deal. I’ll go deal with the assholes who came after you, Linda. They try something like that, they’re gonna answer to me. Jerry, fine, you do your little white knight thing and take her back to that shithole motel. You stay in your car when you get there.”

“Truck,” I corrected.

“Dirt bike, Big Wheel, whatever, you stay there until she gets into her room and closes the door behind her. Once she’s inside, you drive off and don’t look back. Linda, you stay in that room and don’t open that door for hell or pizza delivery. In the morning, you get your ass out of town. Go hunt anywhere else you want, anyone else you want, but leave this place to me. You don’t do what I say, either of you, there’s gonna be consequences.”

The last was said with a quiet finality. It sunk in that there was authority here, and power, and history I was no part of. Only a fool would push back against that.

I nodded. “I’ll drop her off, and then hit the road,” I said.

“Good.” He turned to Linda. “And you?”

“I’ll call you from the motel,” she said, and grabbed my arm. “Come on, Jerry, all of a sudden I’m real tired and want to get back to my room.”

I shot Vic a look that was really a shrug, and he gave me a slight nod. “Goodbye,” he said, and then me and Linda were walking back toward where I’d parked, a couple blocks off the other end of the drag.

Neither of us said anything along the way, but when we reached my truck I broke the silence with a heartfelt “Motherfucker.”

Someone, or several someones, had trashed it. The side windows were smashed, the paint job looked like it had been keyed by an octopus, both taillights were busted out, and one of the wiper blades had been snapped in half. Under the other one was a folded-up sheet of paper. I pulled it out and unfolded it, then read it out loud.

“This truck smelled like nosy asshole. Mind your own business from now on.”

It wasn’t signed. I held it up and turned to Linda. “Any thoughts?”

She gave a shrug. “You know what I’m gonna say.”

“That it was the werewolves you’re hunting?”

“One of ‘em, anyway. The line about smell’s kind of a hint, and that church youth group you scared off wouldn’t have known the truck was yours. Unless you have a better theory.”

Instead of answering, I checked the tires. At least they weren’t slashed. The truck was fucked up, but drivable. It was pretty clear I was being chased off, not being pinned down. And I had to admit, that rubbed me the wrong way.

I took a slow walk around the truck to assess all of the damage, and there was plenty of more. Whoever had done this had really gone to town. Then, I saw something wet, right in front of me. One sniff told me it was exactly what I thought it was. Piss, and a whole lot of it, running down the back left hubcap.

“Jerry?” Linda asked. “You OK?”

I came to a decision. “Get in,” I said. “We’re going back to your motel, and we’re gonna get your gear, and we’re going hunting.”

“But you told Vic—“

“Is Vic here? I said get in!”

She got in. So did I. We drove off, angry.

---

Linda’s motel was indeed a shithole, a long line of rooms off a gravel lot with a busted neon sign out front promising vacancies. The whole thing had been painted white maybe fifteen years ago, and it showed. Numbers had fallen off half the room doors, but when we rolled up, she said “Room number fourteen, down the end.”

I parked next to another truck that was in considerably better shape than mine. “Yours?” I asked her as we got out. She nodded, then headed for her room.

“Anything you need out of yours?” she asked. I told her no, then followed her inside.

The room was small, with mustard-yellow carpet that smelled faintly of cigarettes and mold. There was a single bed, unmade, and a whole mess of gear laid out on top of it. There was also a dresser with a $99 Walmart special television on it, but the remote was nowhere to be found. In the corner, the AC unit wheezed like an old man walking uphill, without doing much to actually condition the air in question.

There was a chair in the other corner. I sat myself in it while Linda moved over to the bed and started fussing with the guns. I waited for her to remember I was there.

Finally, she picked up a shiny hand cannon, examined it closely, and set it to the side next to a well-worn shoulder holster. Then she looked over at me, like she was surprised I was still there. “What’s your deal?” she asked.

“You want to tell me what I’m getting myself into here, so I can be some kind of useful when the shit hits the fan?”

Linda dropped down onto her haunches, looking up at me without pity. “I guess I owe you that. Here’s the deal. Werewolves ain’t like what you think,” she said. She sounded like she’d given this talk before. “They don’t stand there and make funny faces while they change, and most of them could give a rat’s ass about the full moon.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, and raised my eyes to the ceiling in supplication. For a minute I thought about all the stuff I’d read in crappy books or seen in crappy movies, silver and full moons and all that other crap that was mixed up in my head with vampires and zombies and God knows what else. If you couldn’t trust comic books and Stephen King novels for shit like this, what could you trust?

Linda just plowed ahead. “Sad but true, though some of them seem to think the full moon makes ‘em stronger. Hell if I know. But the thing is, you’re a werewolf, you’re a werewolf all the way. Normal stuff that would drop a human five times over, they can just shrug off. Doesn’t matter if they’re wearing the fur suit or not, you hit one with a truck, it’s gonna bounce off the hood, pick itself up, and smile.”

All this came out in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. She might have been talking about the weather, or how the Braves bullpen had blown another ballgame. I looked over at her pile of gear. It was shiny. “Silver do any good, at least?”

Linda nodded. “About the only thing that does. You hit them with it, and it don’t matter if they’re on two feet, four, or in between. It’ll put ‘em out of their misery. Fire’s pretty effective, too, but I don’t recommend it. Nobody likes the smell of burned dog hair.”

“I’ll try to remember that. Anything else I should know?”

“Don’t get bit,” she said, and looked away. “That happens and you live, you’re one of them. You get bit tonight, I’ll put you down myself.”

I blinked a couple of times, as I realized shit had gotten a whole new level of real. Finally, I found my voice. “I assume you’d want me to do the same for you?”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “It ain’t me who might get bit.”

---

Host Commentary

Now, I need to be a little bit careful here as, of course, I’ve read the whole story and you, dear listener… have not. Unless you’ve accidentally listened late and out of sequence, in which case you’re probably a bit confused. I recommend heading back to the very first ‘Jerry’ story, episode 786, ‘Licking Roadkill’, and starting all over again. See you in a bit…

Anyway, avoiding spoilers, I think it’s fairly safe to comment that this story – and indeed our anniversary – got me thinking about friendship groups, tribes, and found-family. It has been a rough few years in general. Covid, politics, wars, the increasingly alarming power of a handful of tech billionaires, and, of course, Ai.

And zooming in, more than one person in the speculative fiction space has been outed for unacceptable, horrible behaviour. I won’t name names – partly because I don’t need to and partly because it keeps the lawyers happy, or unhappy, depending on the side, I suppose – but I daresay you can name a few without thinking for too long. It’s difficult to say whether we hear these stories more now thanks to social media and other societal changes, or whether there really has been a rash of them in recent years, but either way, it feels like we’ve all been given a sharp lesson in not assuming that someone is decent just because they produce good work.

And this got me thinking about, well, directions. Points of view, and what any one person sees from where they’re standing, and Jerry, in this story, who is moving from – I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler – what he was to what he is.

We all start off moving through the world, trying to get from A to B, not really thinking very much – especially when we’re young – about the impact we have on others. And then at some point or other, we find ourselves faced with choices. Difficult, grown-up choices, where it becomes our responsibility to decide how we want to move through the world. What we buy, what we eat, what we say, what we do. No one does no harm. No one leaves the world entirely unmarked.

We all live in complicated, tangled societal webs. We probably all do things, every day, that someone else somewhere else would consider unconscionable. The question, really, is how important their opinion is to us and, of course, how much it impacts on our lives. It’s simple enough if the answer is, ‘not at all.’ It’s much harder when it’s, ‘quite a lot.’ Harder still if that other person has any kind of power over us, because then we start to feel that good is being called bad and bad is being called good. I’ve certainly felt like that a few times over the past few years.

I thought about Jerry in this context. He’s not what we’d automatically describe as a ‘good’ man. In ‘Licking Roadkill’ he does – again with an eye on spoilers in case you haven’t listened to that one – something pretty horrific.

But the thing is… he does it for Cecily, because she and her pack need it done, because for them, in that small piece of the world, it needed doing. Does that make him bad? Or good?

Perhaps it just makes him… relatable.

Perhaps these sorts of decisions are precisely where horror finds its heart.

If you find you’re hurting the people closest to you, you do have a decision to make, and it is one of those difficult grown-up decisions. Do you decide you have to carry on, even if it means losing them? Find a new group, who accept whatever it is? Is that the right thing to do?

Or do you change what you’re doing? Can you change what you’re doing? What if that means changing who you are?

Depending on the circumstances, either choice might be right.

But right is not the same as easy.

So we leave Jerry here at a pivot-point. One thing is for sure: he’s doing the best he can with what he has. Just like the rest of us.