Monsters in the Midwest (Book 2): Northwoods Wolfman Read online

  Northwoods Wolfman

  Monsters in the Midwest, Book 2

  Scott Burtness

  For Liz.

  The koozie to my beer can.

  All places and characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual places or persons living, dead, or in Wisconsin is purely coincidental.

  Also, reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. As in, don’t do it. It’s bad.

  ***

  Copyright © 2015 Scott Burtness

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN:

  B00X2VB5E4

  ***

  Acknowledgements

  There are a lot of great people (and a super cool dog) that deserve a huge shout out. Sincere thanks to:

  My talented and amazing wife Liz, my wonderful folks and big sis, Author Jeanie Grey, Author Shay Ray Stevens, Greg at 2 Book Lovers Reviews, Author Lindy Moone, Ben Kosel, Guy Norman Bee, my little boxer-pitty Gorgeous Frank the Velvet Tank, the baristas at all the cafes I write at, the many wonderful book bloggers that have showcased my work, and most importantly…

  You!

  I really appreciate that you’re reading my book and hope you have fun with the folks up in Trappersville, Wisconsin.

  Please consider posting a review and telling your friends about “Northwoods Wolfman.” Reviews for writers are like applause for actors. We love ‘em!

  And now…

  Acknowledgements

  It Had to Start Somewhere…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  The Final Chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  It Had to Start Somewhere…

  The egg hatched, releasing the young Dermacentor variabilis larva upon an unsuspecting world. Wriggling away from the nest into the surrounding grass, it had no thoughts, no plans, no aspirations. Those were the burdens of more evolved creatures. Only one desire occupied the tiny ganglion of nerves that served as the wood tick’s brain. It was time to feed.

  Six legs pushing it up a blade of grass, it waited with a spider’s patience for its first meal. A field mouse happened by, munching hurriedly on small seeds scattered amidst the brush. The tiny larvae’s outstretched limbs snagged its side, and soon it was working its way through the fur to the warm skin beneath.

  About four days later, the tick dropped back down to the grassy field. Digesting its meal, the maturing tick molted, sloughing off its skin to reveal an eight-legged nymph. Climbing a fresh blade of grass, it quivered in anticipation of its next host. An unsuspecting ground squirrel passed by, stopped, and scratched, its hind leg a blur of movement. Despite its efforts to dislodge the sudden and unexpected itch, the nymph had already sunk its head in deep. Eight legs gripped, flattening its body tight against flesh as it filled its slowly expanding abdomen with rich, warm blood.

  The squirrel carried its parasitic passenger on a haphazard path across the prairie until chemical triggers prompted the tick to drop back to the ground. Saturated with blood, it molted again, growing to its full adult size. The persistent hunger, all it had ever known, pressed it onward. Despite its limited awareness, the tick knew the days were growing shorter, and cooler weather was settling in. Only a few of its siblings would survive the coming cold. To survive, it had to feed.

  ***

  The man paused in the clearing, savoring the feel of the setting sun that warmed his brow and the crisp autumn air that cooled it. Searching for an elusive serenity, he stood quietly as the day drew to a close. He hoped that he had trekked far enough into the state park to prevent anyone from getting hurt. Soon, the full moon would come and with it the now-familiar horrors. For a moment though, he set his worry aside and simply enjoyed the sunset. Lost in his reverie, he didn’t feel the wood tick climb his shoe, work its way over his sock, and bite into the skin of his calf.

  ***

  Jason and Reggie made their fifth left-turn. While persistence is usually a virtue to be admired, in this case it has simply made them lost. When looking at a map, Illinois’s Moraine Hills State Park seemed like an old wilderness long tamed. Color-coded paths and helpful sign posts ensured that even the most suburbanized of hikers would safely find their way through the rolling fields, lakes, and wetlands.

  What the trail guides and sign posts didn’t show was that buried deep inside the orderly arrangement of scenic lookouts and convenient port-o-pots were winding deer trails and coyote runs that could confound even the savviest of Kicapoux trackers. Rather than emerging from their impromptu shortcut through the wooded hills to where their friends waited at the picnic site, Jason and Reggie instead found themselves in an unmarked clearing. Shadows cast by the surrounding trees swelled as the full moon rose. Catching the fading rays of the setting sun, its unnaturally bright silver glow was tinged with hints of orange and red.

  “Told you we should’ve turned left,” Reggie deadpanned after a long drag on the mostly-smoked joint. The ensuing giggle-fit had the two friends doubled over, tears streaming down their cheeks, when an unexpected voice leapt through the dusk.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Jason gasped in surprise while Reggie yelped, burped, and laughed in rapid sequence, inducing a sudden and violent case of the hiccups.

  “Oh, um. Hic. We, ah, just hic… should’a turned left,” Reggie choked out, laughing and trying to take a quick hit between hiccups. Walking toward the stranger through the darkening shadows, Reggie held out the joint in invitation.

  “There’s a party near the, hic… McHenry Dam, dude. Trade you a toke for, hic… directions.”

  The stranger shook his head vigorously from side to side and pressed his palms against his eyes.

  “Run,” the man growled, actually growled before an arm shot out cobra quick, hand grabbing Reggie’s neck.

  Something between a hiccup and a scream barely made it past Reggie’s lips before the stranger’s grip cut-off any chance of air escaping from his constricting throat. As the hand squeezed, its fingers and knuckles swelled. Nails yellowed and lengthened, sharpening at the tips until they pierced skin and drew blood. Dark, coarse hair sprouted from the back of the hand and crept up the corded muscles of the man’s partially exposed forearm. A series of pops and snaps split the otherwise silent clearing as joints cracked and bones stretched. Cheekbones and brow pushed forward while lips so recently red darkened to a muddy brown. The man’s nose turned up, his ears pulled to points, and brown locks of well-groomed hair lost their smooth gloss and curled into a pelt-like nap. Soon, his entire face was covered in coarse fur. Strangest of all though, were the eyes.
Bright, piercing blue with flecks of gold, they stared straight into Reggie’s, fully aware of the pain and torment being inflicted.

  The metamorphosis from man to beast took less than fifteen seconds. By its end, Reggie’s throat had been bloodied and crushed. Finally, the massive, clawed fingers relaxed, and the previously upright Reggie fell bodily to the blood-spattered grass.

  Frozen in uncomprehending horror, Jason watched his friend fall lifeless to the dirt. His only lucid thought as the beast grabbed his arms was to wonder why the park ranger hadn’t warned them. You’d think a well-tamed state park like this would let people know a werewolf was on the loose.

  ***

  Jerry was annoyed. His boss had scheduled him for three back-to-back sales calls on the same day, two in eastern Wisconsin and the third all the way down in Illinois. To make matters worse, he’d gotten a speeding ticket trying to make it to the state park on time, only to find that the park’s office manager was “busy.”

  “He’ll be back soon though?” Jerry asked the girl at the visitor center’s front desk, stifling his impatience. “I’ve got the glossed paper samples he wanted,” and a five hour drive to get home, he grumbled to himself.

  Shrugging noncommittally, the girl invited him to wait outside and enjoy the autumn evening. Since there was nowhere to sit inside, Jerry bought a small can of bug spray and headed out to the patio. Muttering about how homicidal mosquitoes and clouds of irate gnats were anything but enjoyable, he soaked himself with the spray, settled into a chair on the patio, and watched the sun slide down the western sky.

  When Horace Tulane, the McHenry Dam’s office manager and volunteer Park Ranger of the Moraine Hills State Park finally arrived, the sun had set, the moon had risen, and the gnats had yet to call it a day.

  “Sorry,” Horace offered. “I would have been back sooner, but some hikers thought they heard a wolf howl. Had to check it out.”

  Jerry looked worried as he asked, “Did you find one? A wolf, I mean. Are there wolves here?”

  “No,” Horace replied. “Probably just college kids at the picnic shelter. They’re always sneaking out there after dusk, smoking their dope and making a ruckus. One must’ve thought it’d be funny to howl at the moon. Rotten kids.”

  Nodding sympathetically, Jerry flipped open his briefcase and started to lay out samples and brochures. He supposed kids in rural Illinois weren’t too different from kids in his home town of Trappersville, Wisconsin. Nestled in the state’s northern woods, just outside the Nicolet National Forest and near the banks of the Wolf River, the small town was a tick-infested, cheese-infused, flannel-clad waiting room for the last train to boredom. Even the summer’s spate of murders and whispered claims of an honest-to-god vampire couldn’t change the fact that Trappersville was otherwise one-hundred percent Podunk.

  Waving away the persistent gnats, Jerry shuffled some brochures around, a clear indication that he was ready to get back on the road. Meanwhile, Horace rifled distractedly through the various samples of paper stock, anxious to head back into the darkening woods and bust some college stoners.

  ***

  The werewolf reveled in the feel of rubbery flesh between his gnashing jaws. Blood-slicked chunks slid down his gullet as he chewed and swallowed the unfortunate hiker one ripping bite at a time. Engrossed with trying to literally fill himself with humanity, he didn’t feel the miniscule parody of his own dark hunger biting deep into his flesh. He didn’t hear it when it screamed a tiny wood tick scream, or notice as it rippled and contorted, sprouting coarse hairs all over its previously bare arachnid carapace. The resulting abomination bit into its monstrous host with a fierce, unnatural hunger that would only slake with the setting of the full moon.

  ***

  Fed up with swatting ineffectually at the cloud of gnats, Jerry reached for his bottle of bug spray. Glancing up, he noticed a man jog out from the trees near the visitor’s center. Squinting in the dusk, he tried to figure out what the guy was wearing. It looked like a sweatshirt and jeans pulled over a gorilla suit.

  “Um, Horace?” he managed before the stranger was on them. Closing the last few yards, the thing Jerry had thought was a man crouched, leapt and landed directly in front of him. With a high pitched squeal, Jerry trained his can of bug spray on the thing and enveloped it in a cloud of DEET before he stumbled backward and knocked his briefcase from the table.

  Snarling, the thing turned and leapt again. Briefly backlit by the newly risen full moon, it landed on the roof of the visitor’s center, fluidly crouched and leapt a third time, vanishing from sight on the far side. Jerry’s mouth worked like a guppy, while Horace’s face turned beet red with a tinge of purple around the edges.

  “Goddamn stoners!” he yelled, grabbing the radio from his over-stocked utility belt. “Now they’re doing the PCP in my woods? No way! Not on my watch, they aren’t.” Jerry forgotten, Horace hurried inside, urgently calling in to report the hairy, drug-crazed teenager that had just leapt over a building in two bounds.

  For his part, Jerry was simply flummoxed by the whole affair. The rational part of his brain kept pinging his eyes, advising them that Horace was right, and they had just seen an unusually hairy teenager on drugs run out of the woods and leap over a building. A perfectly sensible explanation, reasoned Jerry’s brain.

  Unfortunately, his eyes kept sending a different story back to the brain. They felt quite strongly that it wasn’t a teenager at all but a six-foot tall dog appropriately dressed for the early autumn weather and running on two legs instead of four. While his eyes and brain argued, Jerry decided he’d had enough of the Moraine Hills State Park. He gathered up the scattered brochures and samples with shaking hands and returned them to his briefcase. Glancing nervously at the dark woods, he scurried to his car, unaware of the minuscule monstrosity seething with unnatural hunger between brochures and invoices in his briefcase.

  ***

  It was a long drive back to the tiny town of Trappersville, Wisconsin. At least Jerry’s boss had agreed to let him work from home the next day. The autumn nights were getting colder, and the furnace was on the fritz.

  Just one more reason to hate Wisconsin, thought Jerry. Sweat all summer and then we freeze.

  He’d called Dallas at That Blows HVAC before leaving on his sales trip, since it was really the only option in town for furnace repair, but regretted it the second Dallas picked up. Jerry could practically smell booze through the phone. The local bowling champ and Trappersville’s favorite son was known by all to be a bit of a drinker, but Jerry hadn’t seen him sober in weeks.

  A month or so prior, Dallas had supposedly stabbed Jerry’s neighbor, Herb Knudsen, with a pool cue at the local bowling alley’s karaoke bar. When no one could find Herb to confirm Dallas’s story, he swore that Herb was a vampire who burned right up to nothing after getting stabbed. Other witnesses had differing opinions. A few sheepishly agreed that Dallas was probably right, but most said they couldn’t be sure since a significant amount of alcohol stood between them and a clear recollection of what had transpired. One thing was certain though. No one had seen Herb since that night.

  When the sheriff’s department finally searched Herb’s rambler in the woods, they turned up a whole slew of dead animals buried in the root cellar, including Jerry’s pug. With that discovery, it didn’t take much to connect the unassuming line cook to a recent spate of murders. The general consensus was that Herb had killed the animals for practice before upgrading to a tourist, two strippers, and a couple of frat boys. After Dallas confronted him at the karaoke bar, Herb skipped town for fear of getting caught. Dallas, however, stuck to his story, insisting that he’d saved the whole town from a bloodthirsty monster. Since no one could prove him wrong, he’d crowned himself the Hero of Trappersville and had been soaking in alcohol ever since.

  “Better send Pam and the girls to the outlet mall in case he’s still drunk tomorrow,” Jerry decided as he pulled into his driveway. Sore and tired from a long drive, he groaned h
is way out of the car and headed inside. Slipping into bed with his wife, he closed his eyes, made an effort not to think of the strange events from earlier that night, and waited for sleep.

  Chapter 1

  Dallas’s alarm clock was a right bastard. A whiny, self-righteous twit. “Don’t get mad at me,” it buzzed. “Is it my fault that you drank a fifth of Wild Turkey?”

  He really wanted to come up with a truly devastating response. If the damn thing would just shut up, he’d think of a zinger that would put that bleating piece of plastic in its place. But no, the noisy little nuisance wouldn’t shut up. It just kept complaining and complaining and complaining...

  A hand fumbled out from under the covers and moved across the surface of a dark wood nightstand, knocking over a half-empty can of beer and getting tangled up in a pair of fuzzy handcuffs. A second, well-placed grope landed the hand directly on the clock/radio, fingers working to decipher the complex code of a snooze button. For a moment, there was quiet, followed by a loud snore.

  Dallas flipped onto his side to see what had made the horrible noise. Squinting in the dark and trying to bring his still-drunk eyes into focus, he made out the curve of a shoulder, back, and hip partially covered by zebra print sheets. Closer inspection revealed a nice display of side-boob and dark trusses spread across the pillow. For a moment, Dallas thought a little somethin’ somethin’ would be just the thing to get his day started, until the sleeping beauty’s mouth opened a little wider and sawed another log.

  Yeesh, that girl can snore! he thought as he turned over. Wait a sec.

  Rolling back toward the girl, he reached out and shook her shoulder.

  “Hey. Hey you. Wake up for a sec, would’ya?”

  The girl groaned and smacked her lips. First one, then both eyes cracked open to glare blearily at Dallas.

  “Wha?” she asked.

  “Um, who are you?”