The Wolves of El Diablo. Eric Red

are friends of these men?”

      “No.”

      Outside the cantina window the last of the sunlight trickled away as a cold tide of moonlight flooded the darkness of the bar.

      The rest of the bandits were fanning out behind their leader, taking position around the room, blocking anyone’s escape. A pungent smell of animal heat was in the air. The brigands regarded the moon through the window with flares of eyeshine in their hairy bearded heads.

      Customers in the bar grew nervous and a few hands moved nearer to the guns in their holsters. The Federales exchanged uncomfortable glances, knowing it was their job to do something but seeing no money or profit in it.

      Sensing the threat, the bartender reached below the counter, fingers inching towards the sawed-off Remington shotgun loaded with double ought buckshot he stowed there. When his hand closed on the stock of the weapon it emboldened him. “What do you want with these men?” he suspiciously demanded of the strange woman.

      “They killed my brother,” she snarled.

      When Azul spit out the words in answer, she spat out teeth that popped from her gums and clattered on the bar counter, shocking the bartender—he was doubly startled as he saw the sharp canine fangs punch like tusks through the pink flesh where her teeth had been seconds before.

      Her hair was growing, the bartender saw.

      The beautiful thick black trestles flowing like a river from Azul’s head now poured like a fountain of hair over her shoulders. The barman marveled at this in the few seconds he had left to live, until wonder turned into revulsion then horror as patchy bristles of pubic-like black hair rustled in a forest out of the smooth skin of her face as the bandita grew a beard. Her eyes pulled apart with a scraping of skull socket bone, her jaw dislocating with a sickening crack, razor sharp rows of salivating fangs disfiguring her mouth like a bear trap inside her cheeks. Azul was in great pain, leaning on both hands on the bar, arms lock elbowed—those furry hands reshaped in a popping of breaking and reconfiguring bones and cartilage as jagged talons punched in sprays of blood through her fingertips, shattering the nails, as the palms of her hands became black pads. The claws raked deep marks in the wood of the counter.

      By now the bartender had time to lug the shotgun out from under the bar. He was busy shouldering the weapon to blow the she-thing’s head off but the sight of the front of her face stretching as the skull punched out a prodigious gaping wolf snout caused his fatal hesitation in pulling the trigger. And the werewoman attacked. Lunged over the bar and ate his face. His entire head was instantly gobbled in the slavering maw of the beast, savage jaws snapping shut, crushing his skull like an egg, splattering a yolk of brains and blood across the bottles on the bar and the mirror.

      The splashed curtain of blood dripped like melted red candlewax down the mirror, reflecting the werewolf Azul had become shearing the bartender’s head off his shoulders with her fangs, biting through tendon and spinal column and swallowing the decapitated head down her gullet in ravenous slobbering gulps. Behind her, the bloody mirror reflected a ghastly tableau.

      All around the cantina, the other bandits were turning into werewolves and revealing their horrific true selves. The seven screaming, agonized men suffered violent seizures, eyes rolling up in their sockets revealing the whites, frothing at the mouth, toppling tables and chairs as they staggered and thrashed in the pitiless moonlight blasting into the bar: spines whiplashed, legs twisted into dog-like haunches, bushy tails sprouted from hindquarters. The dirt floor was littered with piles of discarded clothing the bandits shed while transforming. Frozen in horror where they sat, the terrified customers in the cantina stared in shock and awe at the sudden sickening spectacle happening around them. Now, growing to eight feet in height, the half-man half-wolf monsters crouched hungrily under the tin ceiling and looked for prey.

      One of the policia federales was less drunk than the other boracchos in the cantina and moved quicker than the rest, ran for his life but never reached the doorway. A towering black shape blocked his path, a hairy paw with huge scythe-like claws raking deep through the canvas of his uniform and cloth of his undershirt ... RRRRR-RRR-IIIIIIIPPPPP ... talons digging through the fat flesh of his chest and cleaving the ribcage, cleanly exposing his red wet lungs and beating heart, and ripping the organs from his chest cavity as the soldier’s discarded dead body was tossed back fifteen feet and crashed through the wall.

      The second Federale, very drunk, wobbled up from the table, fumbling his pistol out of his holster in wide-eyed horror at the wolfmen surrounding him.

      He got off one shot.

      His severed arm clenched the pistol as it fired by involuntary reflex.

      The arm was torn out of his shoulder right as the gun left the holster.

      The spinning, blood spewing detached limb whirled through the air, its aim off.

      The bullet exploding from the barrel blowing half the soldier’s own face away.

      Killed instantly, he was the lucky one.

      The first vaquero was shrieking as he retreated firing his six-shooter blindly at the gigantic wolfmen descending on him in buzz saws of teeth and nail. His slugs punched through the beasts’ chests and exploded out their backs but the monsters were unfazed as they tore him limb from limb reducing the man to a pile of meat.

      Two werewolves grabbed the second Mexican cowboy by the arms and legs. One wolfman had the feet, the other the hands in a frenzied, ravenous tug of war like two dogs fighting over a chew toy. It ended when the man came apart in the midriff and the creatures pulled the top and bottom halves of the corpse away with them trailing ropes of pinkish intestine that tripped up the third vaquero as he tried to get away, screaming in unimaginable horror, cries which didn’t last long once he stared up from the floor into huge globular eyes that were psychopathic whorls.

      All around the cantina abattoir, volcanic eruptions of bright red oxygenated blood blasted across the ceiling, cascaded down the walls, flooded across the floor, a shiny black tide in the supernatural moonlight. The moon that shone down on the lycanthropes was not the same moon that shined on mankind elsewhere in the world, the light turgid and moribund here like the air and space the werewolves moved in was a vacuum that tore the fabric of reality.

      At the bar, the werewoman watched the carnage with approval as she effortlessly ripped one of the legs off the bartender at the hip socket and chomped the raw meat off the femur, gripping the leg in both hefty talons.

      Azul liked watching her pack feed while she ate.

      The boy saw it all.

      From his hiding place in the cellar under the cantina floor, the peasant watched through the crack in the trap door. Beginning at dusk, he witnessed the whole thing from when the bandits walked in on two legs, became monsters on four legs that killed and ate everyone, to when they walked out as men on two legs again at dawn.

      His name was Pedro. He was ten years old and had brought supplies that afternoon from his village that the bar owner had purchased. The boy was unloading them in the cramped fruit cellar beneath the cantina when the bandits came at twilight. The werewolves they had swiftly become did not see or smell Pedro below in the cellar from the surfeit of blood and manflesh for their gorged nostrils in the bar, so the peasant escaped the savage slaughter that befell the others.

      Throughout the long, long night Pedro stayed hidden. Paralyzed with fear, he peered through a tiny crack in the trapdoor at the gorge-rising horrors above him, witness to the entire ten hours the eight werewolves butchered and devoured everyone in the bar until the gnawed bones of the corpses were picked clean. Time passed slowly as the peasant gazed out from the fruit cellar, unable to look away as the creatures chewed and gobbled every last scrap of flesh from the stripped bones. Only then did the monsters rest, bellies engorged, and one by one fell to the floor where they stretched out and slept. As the beasts snored, Pedro had not dared move from the spot lest he wake them and be discovered. He was secure in the knowledge that when the sun rose