The Guns of Santa Sangre. Eric Red

nostrils.

      The attack must have happened last night, the borracho reckons, for the moon was full then as it will be again this evening. Casting a glance through his cell window, the old man sees the lowering sun in the sky. He knows in scant hours when the moon has risen the cell bars will no more hold the werewolf than tissue paper.

      It will eat every human being in the jail.

      After ripping them limb from limb.

      Except the borracho.

      No, it will not touch him.

      For he has protection.

      Even now, he feels its protuberance inside his worn boot beneath his foot, the obstruction pressing against the sweaty flesh of the arch. He always keeps it while traveling in these parts as a precaution. Nobody, not even the Federales who have him in custody, ever search his boots.

      Few men trapped with a werewolf would see that as an opportunity, the old man muses. But if his eighty-five years have taught him anything, it is that any situation can be turned to a man’s advantage and in every problem there is an opportunity.

      One must just have patience.

      So the drunk bides his time and sits and watches the poor soul in the cell adjacent, waiting for nightfall. Then, he knows, everything will happen quickly. The hours pass slowly.

      The borracho has his plan all figured out.

      Those hijo de puta Federales have kept him locked up behind bars for the past month, intending to let him rot and die here. They make no secret of it; the corrupt policia laugh when they tell him he will die in jail many times over recent days, tossing him table scraps to eat and not changing his overflowing slop bucket even once. Just because he had been drunk and taken a clumsy swing at one of them. The borracho had been riding through the area minding his own business when the bastards had accosted him and asked if he had money. Had he admitted he did, the old man knew those cabronas would have stolen it. When he said he had none, they arrested him for vagrancy. That’s when he took the swing. An old man deserves respect. These filthy crooks in their unwashed uniforms are nothing more than pigs, but he is their prisoner. Until right this very moment, the borracho had resigned himself to die in this tiny, stinking cell.

      Now he has hope.

      In the other cage, the laborer who robbed the new prisoner stands by the bars counting a few paltry coins in his hand. The thief is smirking but the old man knows when the moon rises he will lose that smirk and those coins will be on the eyes of his corpse, if his eyes remain in his skull at all.

      The last red glimmer of twilight fades on the windowsill.

      The drunk stares without blinking through the bars into the next-door cell. The two men inside are now dim shadows in the bluish glow of moonlight. His eyes are not very good anyway, so he hears it first.

      A choked cry of pain and surprise.

      The figure of the wounded prisoner suddenly goes stiff, and then suffers a body spasm.

      More sounds.

      A sickening snap of bone.

      A moist rending of flesh.

      “What’s wrong with you?” shouts the other convict, his darkened figure leaping to his feet to back away in alarm from the cellmate beginning to thrash spasmodically and froth at the mouth.

      “Help, oh God help me!” The afflicted prisoner shrieks in agonized, awful high-pitched cries. Terrible noises follow ... bones popping, skin tearing, rapid panting, the bristly sound of thick hair pushing through pores. Pale moonlight casts the seizuring convict’s shadow across the floor and the shape begins to distort and distend, the arms and legs twisting and elongating in black exaggerated silhouettes.

      In the next cell, the borracho has seen it all before. So he just watches. And makes himself ready.

      “Help me oh God Madre Dios!”

      “Shut the hell up in there!” booms the voice of one of the Federales in the other room.

      “Hey, something’s wrong with him!” yells the now genuinely frightened cellmate. “Get in here!”

      “I said shut up!”

      The jail is a deafening cacophony of unnatural sounds; scratching, pounding, flaying, splintering, smashing and splattering. In the lightless gloom, the shadowy figure of the new prisoner is changing, losing all human form, transfiguring in violently grotesque stages of anatomical distortion; becoming something other. To the old man’s failing vision, this is all half-seen in shadow; quick glimpses of wiry fur and stretching flesh as the wildly flailing figure falls in and out of a thin slash of moonlight. Leg bones crack and reshape into haunches. The man’s chest buckles inward with a sound like breaking chicken bones to become long and tapered. Talons punch out his fingertips like blunt knives through canvas. By now, the other convict is in a total panic, pressing against the bars, screaming to the policia federal to release him from the cell and the thing he is trapped with. “Get me out of here! You hear me?”

      In the dark shadows behind him, the pitiful wretch suffers through the last of his tortured transformation. His voice changes, becoming guttural, hoarse and animalistic. “Oh God Oh God it hurts it hurts it Oh GGGGGGGGGOO-OOOOOOGGGG-GGHHHHHHHH!!!” The words slur into the growling roar of a beast.

      A bushy tail flicks into the moonlight.

      Frothing saliva foams over jagged white canine fangs, impossibly huge, bursting through gums.

      The cell is small.

      There is nowhere to run.

      A new bad smell arises as the cellmate shits his pants, cowering in the corner as the abomination in the cage with him grows enormous, expanding to fill the cramped space as it towers against the ceiling. The silhouette of the furry chest becomes concave and narrow as a dog rib cage in a crick-a-crack of a spinal cord regenerating. The skull beneath the skin of the half-human face discombobulates as jawbones dislocate and break, an extended feral wolf-like snout punching out like a clenched fist. Hunched against the roof, the monster stands eight feet tall.

      The werewolf is fully born and it wants meat.

      The creature falls on the other man in the cell and tears his head and half his shoulder off the torso in a grisly wet splurge of chomped flesh with a whiplash crack of severed spine. It hungrily swallows the mouthful in one gulping bite.

      This only whets its appetite.

      The old man holds his sombrero in front of his face to shield himself from the tornado of gore and shorn flesh that explodes through the bars as the wolfman rips the convict’s carcass apart in its huge talons and teeth, chewing and swallowing, reveling with feral abandon in the bloodthirsty carnage. Gallons of blood blast over the ceiling and gush down the iron bars of the abattoir of a cell like shiny black paint, splashing the sombrero but the only thing the old man feels is regret that his beloved hat is ruined for it has been with him for as long as he can remember.

      All is going to plan.

      It takes those damn fool Federales long enough to get there.

      But now they stand in the doorway, eyes like saucers, frozen in place as they witness the monster filling the cage to bursting. The wolfman is covered with shags of flesh and ropes of eviscerated intestine, a severed half-chewed human arm in its gory mouth.

      The old man does not move a muscle, even though the werewolf is mere feet from him. It has not seen or smelled him yet.

      It just noticed the policia.

      Wait for it, he tells himself over and over.

      One of the ignorant cops fumbles his pistola out of its holster and opens fire on the creature behind the bars, the bullets hammering it back, as the other officer runs to the office and quickly returns with a bolt action rifle that he has to load and fire one big round at a time as if any of those bullets do any good.

      They simply punch holes through the monster’s chest that quickly heal.