Urban Safari

Your car trundles quietly along the Redfield roads. Unsurprisingly, the streets are almost empty. Sunday is generally the best day to head into the city. Northwoods is surprisingly old-fashioned, meaning that in parts of town that haven’t been smashed with the gentrification hammer, almost everything closes very early or doesn’t open at all on Sundays. The Jew in you feels a little othered by the presumption, but it’s convenient for the moment.

It’s less than thrilling to be heading back to The Last Stop to try to convince that weird, old bastard to help you out, but nothing Andy dug up today sounded promising. The least you can do is pull your weight and see if there’s any way to work things out. I mean, you ARE trying to fix a real problem. ‘That you started.’ See, that’s not a helpful way to look at this. ‘It’s an accurate way.’ Whatever. You’re trying to do the right thing. That has to count for something, anything? The thought is … less than confident in your head.

Of course, that line ends abruptly as your car unexpectedly sputters and chokes. While it at least has the decency to do so gently, easily braking and pulling it to the curb before the engine dies entirely, you still let out a groan of frustration.

Opening the door, you notice Redfield feels … empty. Checking around, you’re not sure you even recognize this part of town. Storefronts aren’t barred, but are boarded. Some of these apartments don’t even have doors, but none of them have signs of life. A chill runs up your spine. You can handle muggers. You can handle white collar criminals dabbling in mafioso dreams. You can even handle cops. But this … no one’s here. A sinking feeling in your stomach, you fumble for your phone, and immediately confirm your fears: no signal.

You had signal the whole time you were in Redfield yesterday. Your car wasn’t showing any problems. It was quiet, but you could see where people WERE. This … isn’t normal. Shaking off the paranoia, but keeping your eyes peeled, you move to the hood of your car and pop it open. The engine looks intact, no signs of sabotage. You’re not precisely a mechanic, but the damn thing is practically new.

“Dad’s going to kill me …” you mutter to yourself. “Jesus, I haven’t even thought about how to deal with them. I mean, they’ll want me home for Thanksgiving. And they already get weird enough when I sleep in, can’t imagine doing it literally all day is going to make them go easier. And I can’t even eat.” As you gripe to yourself, it proves entirely counterproductive to making any sense of your car’s breakdown. Even if you had the slightest idea how to fix cars, which you don’t, too much is going on in your head.

Noise.

You stand up straight, eyes scanning the darkness. Your night-sight cuts on, helping to clear things up a bit. The dim street lamps are only vaguely obscured, the rest of darkness-cloaked neighborhood considerably better-lit for you now. Still, nothing. It was hard and rough, a rattling noise. Metal? Stone? It’s hard to tell.

“Listen, asshole, I don’t know what kind of blackwater bullshit this is, but you’re fucking with the wrong lady!” you call out. Part of you is scared, but most of you is angry. Some dickhead pulling this 1980’s theme gang crap is almost as irritating as the idea that you’d be scared by it. The sound rattles through the night air again, this time clearer. You wheel around, an alley across the street bringing the noise to your ears. Still, it looks empty … for now.

Breathing. Heavy. Extremely heavy, if you can hear it from here. It doesn’t even sound human. On instinct, you call up your shadows, filling the space around you with clinging blackness to hide in. You become deeply appreciative of the concealment only a moment later when the thing stalking you steps from behind the corner at the end of the alley.

Even hunched, it’s towering over you. Standing up straight, you’d have to guess it’s around nine feet tall, maybe more. Shaggy, grey-and-black fur covers its body, powerful legs and arms bulging with inhuman strength, its chest barreled and muscular, and eyes alive with predatory energy. As it crouches, staring into the inky void, you can see a long tail flex upwards near its waist, attentive and balancing itself as it stalks forward on hands and knees. The creature’s face tells you what it is, even as new to this as you are: long snout, large, pointed ears, and gleaming white fangs bared as it growls towards your bubble of comparative safety.

Werewolf.

You’re not so much surprised they exist at the sheer power of the thing. As it moves towards you, you back up, near to the edge of your shadows, as far away from it as you can get. Claws as long as bowie knives tip its fingers, and you finally see the source of the noise as they casually dig furrows into the pavement. Sparks even fly up as bits of rock are churned aside, uncomfortably noting that it moves its natural weaponry through the street as easily as water.

It’s not nearly as uncomfortable, however, as when its head stops moving, nose snuffling just a bit, and fixes its focus on where you’re standing. It can’t see you. But you become hideously aware, as it leans down, then rears up into a shrill howl, that it doesn’t really have to. Before you can see it break into a run after you, you’re already tearing back through the opposite alley.

You consider throwing patches of shadow behind you, but you can’t imagine that if it can spot you from across the street inside all that darkness that would slow it down much. And focusing to do it most certainly would for you. As you push forward, you can hear it round the corner, smashing into something before claws on stone sound a quick recovery. Fuck, it is so much faster than you. You’re going to die.

‘JUST KEEP GOING! Run, find people, maybe it won’t attack there? You have to get away, stop fucking thinking!’ shrieks inside your head. It’s hard to make it shut the fuck up, especially as the heavy noises of the creature breathing build and build behind you. However, holding on to your head proves valuable all the same. Before it can grab you in one, short burst, you call up your shadowy tendrils, briefly consider trying to bind the werewolf, then decide against it as they instead spring off your back. As you leap on to a nearby wall, you can feel and hear the pass of one of those enormous paws where you were a moment ago, savage claws rending the air and telling you exactly how dead you’d be if you’d waited another second.

The tendrils grasp as fire escape, laundry lines, window ledges, hauling you up as fast as you can manage to the roof, trying to get distance. If you can, maybe you’ll have enough time to slip into your shadow form … of course, it could bust through anything you wanted to hide inside or behind. There’s no guarantee it wouldn’t just track you at dawn, even if you do get away. And all of that is assuming it DOESN’T have a way to hurt you like that, which you can’t be sure of. As your feet hit the roof, you take off sprinting, quickly jumping to the next. You can hear a distant snarl as the werewolf pulls itself to the top of the building you just left, more than ready to follow. Even as you hop from one to the next, your additional flexibility is hardly keeping you ahead. If you run out of roof, it will catch you and it will kill you.

This fear manifests itself shortly as Redfield breaks into the suburbs, buildings shortening to height you’re sure this thing can jump without any extra effort. No more high places to hide or leverage your swinging. As you hit the edge of the last tall building, you skid out on to the fire escape’s peak, the unstable structure rattling heavily as your hands smash into the railing to stop you. Wildly scanning for something, anything, you spot an out: a bus about to pass under you. If you can time your drop right and land on it, that’ll get you away from all this chaos and give you time to breathe. As rapacious as the creature is, you can tell it’s thinking in its approach, harrying and tracking you carefully despite the frothing, psychotic energy pouring off its slavering jaws.

A scream. High. Woman? No, child. You look down and see a small boy, no older than nine, wobbling on the edge of one of the escape’s unguarded segments. Why the fuck is he dressed like a Dickensian orphan? WHY is he just sitting on a rickety fire escape? What the FUCK, kid?

“Couldn’t just be easy, huh?” you snap to yourself as your critique of his style and choice of hangout are silenced by the fall he begins to take. You’re about a quarter of a building above him, which still leaves him far too much of a plummet to survive, especially for someone of his diminutive size. You jump, push off with your tentacles, aim right, you can hit the bus from here. You’ll be safe. But you can’t do both. There’s not enough time to call up more tendrils or send one down before he slips out of reach. If you dive, you can still hang on to part of the escape and catch him. Of course, you’ll miss the bus, and the werewolf behind you will almost certainly catch you.