The Wolves of El Diablo. Eric Red

But in the end, it was a mere minute or two of agony at the beginning and end of the full moon on those three nights, a flagellation demanded by the trickster moon.

      The price of the beast.

      Tonight was different.

      This was more than a wilding—it was a reckoning. Tonight, they would kill and eat the men that murdered Azul’s brother and killed their comrades then shit them out for the flies. This would be a delicious kill. Oh yes. A very good, bad, bad kill.

      “They are mine!” Azul hissed, rubbing her own wet crotch with excitement. The bandita stared mad-eyed down into the gorge, her gaze riveted on the garrison of soldiers closing in on the cowboys as steady flashes of gunfire pinpricked across the theater of combat below. It was difficult to discern who was alive and dead in all the smoke but the bandita could count and there were a lot more army men than the three trapped cowboys. A sudden rare panic gripped the bandita—No! Her prey would be killed in battle before she herself could kill them unless she got to them now! Azul shifted her gaze to glare at her weak womanflesh she suddenly so detested, impatiently shooting glances up to mother moon above, so fatally full and immortally bright. Why was her skin not turning to fur? Enraged, Azul bit with her regular teeth into her arms and hands, drawing blood as if by self-mutilation she could hasten the process. The pain each time she changed was far worse than giving birth, this she knew for a fact, but Azul could not wait another second to turn for in moments the men who killed her brother would be dead at the hands of other manflesh, not by her own teeth and claws, and she would never have her revenge. “Turn!” she wailed, and at last the trickster moon granted her wish.

      The change came.

      Azul suddenly buckled over and threw up, vomiting on the rocks, her bandits puking their guts out near her, for this purging was the first thing that always happened when a man became a wolf because the belly needed to be purified and emptied for the meal of manflesh to come. They were all turning into werewolves now.

      The flagellation had begun beneath the approving eye of the full moon. Azul let out a guttural carnal yell of masochistic pleasure as she felt her supple female skin sprout wiry fur, her bones brutally snap apart and reset beneath her stretching muscles and flesh, teeth popping out of her mouth replaced by jagged tusks of fangs her elongating tongue lapped around already tasting manflesh, raw vengeance boiling her blood like bubbling acid, spine snapping and cracking like a whip, her entire twisted contorted body wracked in throws of ecstatic agony, a long swishing tail growing out of her buttocks like a bristly brush pushed out her asshole. In a final convulsive seizure, Azul looked out through still-blue eyes growing closer together in her collapsing skull as her mouth and nose punched forwards into an elongated snout in a sickening crackle crunch of ripping cartilage and splintering bone. Full lycanthrope now, Azul threw back her head, jaws spread wide, and howled at the moon. Then she was down on all fours, bounding on padded paws on huge talons down the side of the cliff, savage blue gaze fixed the three gunfighters below, her single-minded thirst for vengeance unmuted by her transformation from human to werewolf.

      Azul did not need to look to see the other seven wolfmen were with her for she smelled their hot breath at her side and by then the lycanthropes had reached the train and begun to berserk.

      The monsters came out of nowhere and right away the Federales forgot about the train robbers.

      With his very own eyes, Colonel Higuerra saw his private’s head chewed off his neck like a dog’s tug toy when the first werewolf pounced on the unsuspecting man. The creature’s jaws clamped shut and the man’s skull shattered in a dark carbonated spray of blood, bone, brain, and teeth like a spritzing seltzer bottle. With a toss of its huge canine snout, the wolfman cast aside the headless trunk as the meaty strand of gristle and slimy red spine snapped free. Now the monster was revealed in plain view to the astounded Higuerra, towering eight feet tall, no longer blocked by his dead officer. Reflexively, the Colonel raised both pistols, one in each hand, and squeezed the trigger again and again, aiming at the hairy chest and lupine head of the hideous creature.

      In the muzzle flash he saw his slugs punch wet holes in the monster, hammering it back. The staccato strobes of his gunfire revealed the monster in horrific detail: jagged fangs, a slavering maw, red eyes, fist-sized nostrils, massive jagged talons, muscular dog-like haunches supporting an upright human ribcage and titanic swishing tail.

      The hammers of the Colonel’s guns clicked on empty chambers soon enough and darkness fell again.

      He saw the silhouette of the werewolf still upright, steadying itself, shaking its head to clear its senses. A rumbling growl erupted from its throat. Then those red eyes met his. Higuerra was looking into swirling whirlpools of supernatural madness, whorls of pure bloodthirsty predation. Wounded, but not much, the creature advanced. The curled talons of its paws took a step towards the Colonel. He saw its lean yet muscular body coil and knew it was preparing to pounce at him. The swishing tail went straight and up, like an angry dog.

      Out the corner of his eye—he did not avert his own gaze from the beast—the Colonel saw the werewolves were many and everywhere ... the monstrous inhuman shadows were hurtling out of the darkness from the direction of the canyon, emblazoned in nightmarish bas-relief in the strobing gunfire of the Federales who shot back as they were set upon.

      But the bullets weren’t working.

      The legends were true.

      The Wolves of El Diablo were supposed to be a myth, the stuff of local folklore. The comandante had believed all that wild talk to be peasant superstition up until now. But he was a quick study. He believed the evidence of his own eyes. When an officer is outgunned he retreats—all this went through his mind in the space of three seconds before the werewolf leapt at him.

      Higuerra’s back was to one of the railroad cargo wagons three feet behind and as the werewolf sprang, the Colonel spun, ducked and dove in one swift motion. Throwing himself completely under the coach, he hit the trestles between the rails with a hard impact. There followed a tremendous concussion of cracking wood and slammed steel as the wolfman hove into the side of the train where his prey had stood a second before with such immense force it shook the whole train car. Next the thing was reaching under the train car for the Colonel making a ferocious scrabbling assault of talons, snout and claws. All raging mindless fury, the beast snatched at air and gravel, straining to push its head and shoulders through the gap between the transom and the ground but the space was too tight and it couldn’t fit. The sight reminded the Colonel sickeningly of the muzzles of his attack dogs biting against the bars of their cages back at the barracks.

      The Colonel had already pulled himself up under the chassis of the railroad car, hanging to the crossbeams by hand and foot. Inches below him, lethally big and sharp fur-matted claws swiped the air to grab him as foul lickspittle from the beast’s mouth sprayed the gravel below. The officer held on for dear life and prayed. Prayed hard. With a sudden huff and snort of its nostrils, the werewolf withdrew, its attention diverted elsewhere. The subsequent human scream, gurgle, and meaty ripping splatter let Colonel Higuerra know what had attracted its attention.

      The officer risked a view from his precarious perch past the underside of the train car to see what was happening outside. Nothing came at him but for a moment he could see little—the darkness under the chassis was total, thick as ink. Beyond the oily rusted wheels, his eyes adjusted to the light of the occluded full moon dimly bathing the desert and the unimaginable slaughter became slowly, horribly visible. Gradually the Colonel could make out the running, falling, shooting figures of his men and leaping, pouncing rearing shapes of the werewolves tearing them apart and eating them alive—monstrous silhouettes in a hellishly monochromatic tableau. Dead, dying or wounded soldiers lay sprawled everywhere in the gloom. Detached limbs, severed heads and piles of steaming disemboweled entrails blotched the landscape in grisly patches of shiny black. The rampaging wolfmen were fickle in their attentions, no sooner killing or maiming or biting a piece out of one Federale before moving on to the next live soldier they saw. In this way, the demoralized Higuerra could already see most of his garrison were down. The terrible screams of the men were a symphony