Blood Moon Over Caldera
Halloween came early. Not on a calendar—on the air.
It began with a scream down by Slip 13. It wasn’t the kind of scream that climbs; it was a single, ragged tear that made people look at each other and pretend they’d misheard. Ten seconds later there was another one, shorter and wet around the edges.
By the time someone worked up the nerve to call it in, the gulls were already circling. The hoses were still hissing on the dock, and nobody had a hand on them. Water ran over the boards and fell in thin skirts between the pilings. Down there, it didn’t sound like water; it sounded like something drinking.
Chapter 1: Slip 13
Gus Riker was a dockhand who didn’t take pictures of fish. He’d been washing the boards at the end of shift when something came up from the shadow under the pier. He never saw it. He only felt the weight, then the teeth, and then how far those teeth were willing to travel.
When the flashlights found him, he looked like two different plans fighting over the same body. One plan still tried to breathe. The other had finished.
His chest was open from collarbone to belly, not with slices or cuts but with bites, layered until the skin had no meaning. Something had tried to pull his ribs apart like a gate. One hinge had held and the other hadn’t.
Claw marks raked the piling beside him—four grooves that started low and climbed higher with each pass, the wood shaking while it happened. Blood had pooled black between the barnacles.
“Dog?” a harbor guy said, and his voice sounded like he wished it belonged to someone else.
Mara Hood didn’t look at him. Thirty-seven, badge, no patience for pretend. “No dog,” she said. “Call it in the right way.”
“What do I even say?”
“Say animal attack, and tell Dispatch to lock the Night Parade until I say open.”
He nodded, but he didn’t move.
“Move,” she said, and he finally ran.
Kearney pulled tape and made the square wider than usual, because when it’s this bad you leave room for the air. Her hands stayed steady, but her mouth flattened.
“You think it’s one?” she asked.
Mara studied the rakes. She didn’t answer. She looked down into the narrow black slit between pilings, where the bay breathed without bubbles. It moved like something that had figured out a new way to inhale.
She kept two facts and threw the rest away. Something big did this. And animals that hunt hate open flame. She’d need both before the night was over.
Chapter 2: The trestle
An hour later, two teenagers went missing at the trestle. They’d gone out there to smoke and kiss and dare each other to walk the rail. They never made it to the middle.
The boy’s phone recorded twenty-four seconds. For the first ten it was all giggles and whispering and the soft crunch of sneakers on suffering wood. Then there was a growl, the kind you feel through the boards before you hear it in the air. The girl said, “Don’t.” The boy said, louder and brave for the microphone, “Who’s there?” Something heavy hit wood. The phone fell. The last frame held the slats, then a smear, then a paw—five claws, one of them broken—pressing the lens until the picture warped. A slow, wet tug pulled at the boy’s jacket just out of frame. He made the small sound you make when breath gets stolen and you want it back, and the sound answered him. Then black.
When Marine hauled them out of the cut, pieces were missing—not careful pieces. Hungry ones. One boy’s ear was half gone—clipped clean across the lobe. The other was still in his hand when Marine found him, cold and slick like someone had been storing it for later.
Deck lights from a moored boat lit the underside of the trestle and turned slime into mirrors. Kearney shined her Maglite at the tide line and found prints that refused to be normal. The feet were too long from heel to toe, the spread was wrong, and the claw marks were deep enough to keep water.
“Wolves don’t take stairs,” Marine said, because he needed the world to stay how he’d learned it.
“These do,” Kearney answered.
Mara got the call while Slip 13 still felt like a crime scene nobody could explain. She listened without interrupting. She didn’t swear. “Shut Haviland,” she said. She looked at what was left of Gus Riker and said, softly and to no one, “Stay put,” to a man who couldn’t.
Chapter 3: The parade
Caldera loves Halloween. It loves masks and noise and sugar and the simple relief of being told who to be. The Night Parade runs up Bay Street and ends at the courthouse steps, where the town parks a pumpkin the size of a child’s bed and acts like that means something.
By eight o’clock, the sawhorses were up. Kids wrinkled their noses at cold face paint. Teenagers smoked where they thought no one could see. Parents practiced calm. Fog sat low and thin, and the air tasted like old leaves and frosting.
Mara told them to hold the start. Dorsey from City Hall said that would make people mad. Mara said she could live with mad. Dorsey made a call, went pale, and said, “Hold.”
Kolbe Fletcher stood three bodies back from the line and looked at the crowd the way a man looks at water when he’s not sure about the current. He wasn’t on duty. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere. But he knew the sound of a town holding its breath, and the town was doing that now.
Emily slid in beside him with Bruiser tight to her knee. The dog’s hackles were already up. He stared at the fog like it had mouthed off.
“What do you know?” Kolbe asked.
“Two dead at the trestle,” Emily said. “One at Slip 13. The claw marks won’t hold still long enough to measure.”
“You hear a growl?” he asked.
“Do I need to?” she said.
A girl in a red hood pushed past them, laughing. A boy in a wolf mask chased her and made a lunge; three adults told him to knock it off. He grinned and went pink and pulled the mask up.
A siren whooped once down by the wharf front. Not a warning. A mistake.
The sound rolled up Bay and came back wrong. People quieted the way flocks do when a shadow isn’t a cloud.
Bruiser grumbled in his chest. It was the kind of sound that changes a room without raising the volume.
Mara stepped into the street and lifted the battery megaphone. “Parade is cancelled,” she said. “Go home. Do not go alone. Lock your doors.”
A hundred faces stared like she’d kicked a tradition. Then someone screamed.
Not by the docks. Four blocks up. Near the church.
One scream turned into many. Running followed. Then bodies hit bodies and a stroller folded the wrong way, and someone went down and everyone near them pretended they hadn’t seen it because no one wants to think they just watched it happen. Somewhere a plastic sword snapped, the tip skittered across the street, and five people flinched like it had been a gunshot.
People didn’t scatter; they jammed.
Kolbe started the wrong direction on purpose. Emily went with him because that’s how they stay alive. Bruiser hugged Kolbe’s knee like they were tied.
“Don’t do hero,” Dorsey called after them, thin as paper.
“Do math,” Kolbe said. “Heroes die first.”
They pushed against the current. Sweat broke face paint and turned it into muddy masks. The fear was real now.
They saw the first one at St. Brigid’s corner.
It unfolded wrong and found the ground. It was hair and muscle and mouth, with a head too heavy for the neck and human eyes misplaced in a skull that didn’t respect the layout.
It hit a man and put him down. It didn’t pause on the chest like a film trick; it went right for the belly and opened him like a bag. When it lifted its head, the eyes were still there, staring straight up at the clouds. The mouth wasn’t a mouth anymore.
People screamed, and some of them ran toward the noise, because that’s how you die in a small town with a good heart.
Mara came up on the far side with her service pistol high and steady. Two rounds into the middle of the thing and it flinched like she’d thrown gravel. It turned and looked at her, smiled with all its meat, then cut left, took a child in a soccer uniform by the leg, and dragged him toward the alley.
Kearney came up the curb in the cruiser and didn’t brake. The grille hit the thing at the hip and shoved it into brick hard enough to push the wind out of it in a single, broken wheeze.
It stood on a leg that bent the wrong way and didn’t care. It got its claws under the bumper and lifted, and Kearney had to bail as the front wheels came off the ground. The radiator hissed and threw steam that turned the air white. People coughed and backed into each other.
Kolbe stepped in and put two rounds through the ear at six feet. That finally broke something. The creature fell the way a room goes dark when someone pulls a plug. It kicked twice and stopped.
For three long seconds people tried to breathe.
Then the windows around the corner exploded inward. Claws. Glass. Arms. Fur. They came through storefronts and car doors and the dark between buildings. Some fell from roofs. Some crawled out from under parked trucks. All of them were mouths.
“Inside!” Mara shouted, pointing at St. Brigid’s because it had a door and a space and an old story that still works on nights like this.
Some ran for the church. Others ran from it. It didn’t matter which way you chose; the pack was faster.
Kolbe caught a girl by the cape and pitched her at Emily. Emily shoved her into the crush going up the steps. Bruiser backed and planted himself between a small boy and a wolf pulling itself out of a storm drain. He barked once. The wolf paused, puzzled, like the smell didn’t match the shape. Then it lunged anyway.
Bruiser went high for the eyes and made that ugly wet-flag sound eyes make. The wolf swiped and missed. Kolbe kicked it under the jaw, and a tooth shot across the asphalt, clicked like a marble, and kept going. The wolf blinked at the loss as if it had forgotten it could be hurt, then bolted through legs and was gone.
“Inside!” Kearney screamed, voice shredded. “Now!”
They tried.
Chapter 4: The church
St. Brigid’s door isn’t heavy until you try to close it on people who aren’t all going to make it.
Father Quinn braced himself in the threshold with both hands on the wood and his face slick with sweat. “In,” he said, over and over, like a shovel bite. “In, in, in.”
A hundred people made it inside. Then twenty more. Then it was time to start pushing people away, because letting everyone in would kill everyone else.
A woman stumbled on the steps with a baby. Hands lifted the baby and passed it over heads the way you pass a bucket at a fire. The woman didn’t get up. A wolf reached her, took her at the waist, and pulled. She screamed once.
The bar came down and caught the brackets. People pressed their backs to the door because it feels like doing something. Emily flipped folding tables on their sides and slid them up against the wood. “Hands here,” she said. “Hold it and breathe through your mouth if you have to.”
Something huge hit the outside. The bar shuddered. The saints on the west wall rattled in their stands.
“They can’t come in,” someone said with that fragile confidence people put on like a coat. “It’s sanctuary.”
“They’re not vampires,” Kearney said, breathing hard. “They’re animals.”
The door bowed again. Something cracked like a rifle shot as the grain split along a seam.
Quinn started praying out loud. It wasn’t pretty; he read names like he was calling roll. He said Gus Riker. He said the kids from the trestle. He said a name and then stopped and said it again because he’d finally remembered its shape.
Emily moved the center aisle with Bruiser glued to her leg. She counted bodies and exits and the rhythm of the door, which was a rhythm she hated.
When the wood finally tore, she was already turning.
A hand came through first. There was no fur there yet. The nails had grown into something else. The fingers were long enough to hold a head. The body changed while it shoved itself through. Bones popped. Skin tore and stitched itself as if that were normal. The head stuck at the cheekbones and then slid, making a wet friction sound, and it was inside.
The smell hit first—copper, wet wool, animal breath, and rot. It opened its mouth and lines of spit stretched and reached the floor and clung there instead of falling.
It looked at the people, not all of them strangers. It sniffed once, locked on a man who was bleeding from the forehead, and moved toward him like knees weren’t part of the plan.
Kearney stepped in front of it. She didn’t fire; they’d already learned what that bought. She grabbed a brass candlestick with both hands and swung it into the creature’s mouth like she meant to drive it out the other side. The blow rang. One long fang snapped. Its head rocked back. It blinked at her like she’d tapped it at a bar and then put both front paws on her forearm and pulled it toward its teeth.
Kolbe hit low and hard, shoulder into ribs the way you remove a man who doesn’t want to leave. The body didn’t feel like meat; it felt like braided rope. He got underneath its weight and heaved it sideways. Kearney tore her arm free and blood started—not a river, not nothing, just enough to matter.
The wolf crashed into a pew, knocked three people down like pins, and tried to stand too fast. Mara jammed the shotgun barrel into its throat and fired. The neck broke open. It sprayed. It slipped in what it had made and went down, and Bruiser was there already, tearing at what makes legs go.
Emily cinched a belt high on Kearney’s arm. “Bite?” she asked.
“Claw,” Kearney said through her teeth.
“Better,” Emily lied, and pulled the strap until Kearney hissed.
The wolf heaved, and four hands grabbed it. Then four more. People held a thing that wasn’t supposed to be held because holding doors had worked for a minute and felt like hope. It bucked and took them over like a wave, found a knee, and started to rise.
Mara jammed the barrel up under its jaw and fired again. The head opened in two directions. It fell and kicked once and was done.
For one long heartbeat the only sounds were the slow drip from the door and the thin, tin rattle of St. Brigid’s sanctuary lamp. Everyone heard their own breathing and wished they hadn’t.
Then the bar jumped again. Another shape shouldered through the gap left by the first. Then a third. They learned as they pushed—angles now, not force, claws in the frame. And then the worst detail: they started to stack.
“They can stack!” someone cried, and it was the truth and completely useless.
“Back,” Mara shouted. “All the way back!”
They ran out of aisle. They hit the altar rail and spilled into the side chapels. Rooms designed for quiet didn’t know what to do with this much noise. The wolves came in a line and then as a fan and then as a room.
Bruiser didn’t waste breath barking. He worked—eyes, tendons, the soft place behind the heel. He got thrown and came back. He got cut and didn’t care. He didn’t know odds well enough to be discouraged, and that helps in a fight.
Kolbe grabbed the chalice from the altar, felt how stupidly heavy it was, and threw it into a face full of teeth. The wolf jerked back like it had been slapped. It was one second. They used it to move sideways.
Emily’s hand found the sacristy door. Locked. “Key!” she shouted.
Quinn tore a ring from his belt and flung it. It hit stone, clanged, and skittered under a pew. Emily slid on her side and reached. A wolf landed on the pew above her, bending the wood with one lazy paw, and looked down at her with those human eyes that refused to blink.
Bruiser hit its throat and made it flinch. Emily’s fingers closed on the keys. She stabbed one into the lock—wrong. Another—wrong. Kearney came from the side and swung the candlestick like a woman who didn’t mind breaking furniture; it caught the wolf’s knee and bent it until it stopped working. The creature fell, took the hymn rack with it, and pulled down two people who didn’t let go of each other.
The third key turned. The door gave. “Here!” Emily yelled. “Move!”
The first three through didn’t look back. The fourth did and saw the wolf’s head in the shape of a doorway and couldn’t make her legs move. The woman behind her was still standing, eyes wide and working, jaw hanging in strings. She made a sound that had no vowels left in it. Emily shoved her between the shoulders so hard it left a perfect print through the makeup.
People poured into the sacristy. Not everyone. Enough. The frame only took one wide. The bottleneck bought three seconds. Mara shoved a bench into the gap and Kolbe tipped a closet of robes across the floor. Fabric spilled like waves. It didn’t stop anything; it slowed it, and sometimes that’s what you get.
They didn’t just eat. They took mouths. They left eyes. Wherever they passed, faces stared back with all their eyes still in place, and pulp where words used to live. Someone saw it happen to a man in the aisle and tried to scream, but the shape of that missing mouth shut him up faster than any hand could’ve.
Eyes open. Mouth gone.
“Out the back,” Quinn said. “Alley.”
“Where does that go?” Mara asked.
“Anywhere,” he said.
They moved through linen and wine and oil, and then they were out in cold brick. Trash barrels. A narrow run that makes big things clumsy. The alley smelled like iron and old mop water.
Something slammed the sacristy door. The wood jumped in its frame. A head forced through the splinter and howled; the sound hit both walls and came back as a shove you could feel in the ribs. People went to their knees. A man turned to help his wife and saw her eyes clear as glass and her lower face gone, teeth showing in a way teeth aren’t supposed to show. Someone lost a shoe and didn’t stop to find it. Emily caught a kid by the coat and kept moving until his feet remembered him.
For eight seconds the world held its breath. Drip. The thin rattle of the sanctuary lamp through the ruptured doorway. In that hush the crowd could hear their own mouths working. Then the scream started again, smaller, like someone trying not to wake a child.
“Go,” Kearney barked. She limped. Her breath had gone quick and quiet. Sweat didn’t bead on her skin; it lay there like oil. She moved anyway.
Bay Street was a bad dream—cars up on sidewalks sideways, people under them, a wolf on a delivery van roof tearing the sheet metal while the people inside screamed into their hands. Sirens came from three directions and then five. Fog took each light and made halos and smears. Somewhere glass kept falling a piece at a time, like a clock that wouldn’t shut up.
“We can’t hold the street,” Mara said, and there was no argument in it.
“We don’t try,” Kolbe said. “We cut through.”
“To where?”
“The Cannery. Those doors remember how to be doors.”
“And after that?”
“There isn’t an after yet,” he said.
They went.
Chapter 5: The cannery
The Cannery has doors that remember the past. They shut like they mean it, and the locks squeal but hold. The windows are twenty feet up and were built by men who thought glass only breaks when you show it a rock.
They got about forty people inside. They locked the door. They stacked pallets until the top one stuck out like a stupid idea. Everyone stood there and tried not to breathe too loud.
The wolves didn’t rush the door. They gathered. They moved around the building. They sniffed. They found ladders.
One of them climbed the stacked pallets by the loading dock like a man who’d once done this for a living. It reached the second-floor catwalk, put its hands on the window, and pushed. The glass bowed but didn’t break. It pushed again. The old putty powdered. The pane popped free and fell and the wolf squeezed its shoulders and came through.
Mara shot it from ten feet. The bullet went into the mouth and out the back of the head. It fell, destroyed a crate, and tumbled onto the floor. The head landed wrong. The eyes kept looking. The mouth was only pieces.
A second one shouldered through the gap it had made.
Kolbe swung a pry bar at its knee and felt bone give under metal. It snapped at him and took the end of the bar off like it was a breadstick. He hit the empty eye with what was left and the eye came apart. It grinned anyway—no lips left to hold the teeth in—and the stare didn’t blink. The wolf screamed. He didn’t feel good—he felt alive.
Emily had a knife from the cannery break room. She went low and stabbed behind the heel where tendons live. It turned and slashed at her and Bruiser launched and tore the ear halfway off. The wolf kicked him into a stack of trays. He hit, slid, and didn’t move for a breath that felt like a year. Then he got up, shook blood out of his coat, and kept working.
“Stairs!” someone yelled, because three more had found the catwalk and were deciding what stairs were for. Two pushed at the door; the pallet stack jumped on every shove.
Kearney’s breathing had gone wrong—short and deep and quiet, like the body had changed speakers. Her pupils were too wide. The skin under the bandage had gone a color that didn’t belong on people. She flexed her fingers and they didn’t feel like they were hers.
“We need fire,” Mara said. “They know what it is and they don’t like it.”
“Sprinklers?” Emily said.
“Dry,” Kolbe said. “This building lies.”
Marine, who’d come in with the last wave and hadn’t said a word since, finally spoke and pointed. “Forklift. Propane.”
“Where?” Mara asked.
“In the cage. Padlocked.”
Kolbe looked at the broken pry bar and then at the lock. “Keys?”
Marine stared at him like he’d asked for thunder.
Kearney stepped forward, put her hand on the lock, and pulled. The metal groaned like an old man in a stiff chair. It didn’t open. She pulled again, and a sound came out of her chest that wasn’t words. The shackle popped.
Everyone stared at her. She stared at her hand and tucked it against her stomach like something she’d stolen.
They rolled the tanks out and bled the line because there wasn’t a smarter plan than make them want to leave. The air filled with that sweet chemical stink that makes people step back without realizing they’ve moved.
Mara flicked her lighter. The first strike went dead. She flicked again and got a flame. “One left,” she said to nobody, because you say things like that in rooms like this. She looked at Kolbe, who nodded, and then she dropped it.
The flare didn’t roar; it thumped. Blue fire ran low across the floor fast enough to shave the hair off shins. A tongue of flame climbed the wall and ate paint. The wolves screamed and gave the fire space the way you give a dog with a job the length of his leash. The ceiling didn’t go; the door didn’t blow; someone somewhere had chosen to be lucky just long enough.
Fire runs out of things. When it did, the wolves weren’t in the doorway anymore. They were back on the catwalk, working the ladders and the angles and the places men forget to think about.
“We can’t hold this forever,” Emily said.
“We hold it until somebody does the thing we haven’t thought of yet,” Kolbe said.
“It’s a hell of a plan.”
“It’s the one we have.”
Chapter 6: The alpha
Kearney had gone quiet in a way that wasn’t rest. She kept her back against the wall and her face turned away from the rest of them. Her fingers twitched, the way a dog’s paw moves when it dreams of running. Heat seemed to pour off her in slow waves she could almost see; the air around her bent like it was standing near a grill.
“How bad?” Emily asked, and she already knew.
“Fine. My arm hurts,” Kearney said, and there were two voices in her voice—hers and something that had placed a hand on top of it.
“Your eyes are wrong,” Emily said, because kindness wasn’t going to help.
“Don’t tell me,” Kearney said, and closed them anyway.
A howl cut through the building from outside and drove itself up into the roof beams. It wasn’t like the others. It was deeper, and it made the ones inside stop moving and turn toward the windows and answer. Every hair on every neck lifted, even on people who will tell you they don’t believe in that kind of thing.
“What is that?” Marine asked.
“The big one,” Mara said. “The reason the others are here.”
“How do you—”
She didn’t bother with the answer.
Something hit the loading door, not like a ram but like a truck. The steel bowed. Light opened along the seam. A second impact tore the center free. The bottom edge curled up like a tongue. Fingers—no, hands—found the underside and pulled. Steel bowed; a seam opened; anchors screamed out of the concrete as the door rolled up in its grip, and the thing stepped through like the room owed it light.
Bruiser put himself between Emily and the hole and did something he hadn’t done all night. He barked once, sharp and clean. The alpha paused as if no one had ever told it “no” before and it had to check the manual.
Kearney stepped away from the wall and walked toward it. Not fast. Sure. Her pupils were so wide you could see yourself inside them. Her teeth looked longer because the hinge of her jaw had changed. “I can get close,” she said, and the truth sat in that sentence like a weight. “No one else can.”
“Don’t,” Mara said, and meant it.
“I already am,” Kearney said, and showed her teeth in a way that wasn’t a smile anymore.
She went right up to it. The alpha lowered its head and sniffed at her hair. It tapped her shoulder with the back of a claw, almost polite. She put her hand on its chest and felt the heart. She could hear it as well—fast and slow at the same time, like two metronomes that hated each other.
She leaned into it, looked up into its wrong face, and said something that Kolbe didn’t know how to hear. It had the shape of the word mine, but it wasn’t a word you say to people.
The alpha cocked its head. All the other wolves went still.
“Now,” Kearney said, and her eyes flicked to Mara.
Mara raised the shotgun and pressed the trigger. Dry click. Empty. She racked, shouldered, and fired into its eye.
The howl that came out of it bounced the roof bolts in their seats. It turned its head and took Kearney with it and then it had her and it didn’t bite, it slammed her into the floor. Once. Twice. On the third hit she didn’t make a sound anymore.
Kolbe ran at it because there was nothing left to throw. It swatted him into the forklift and he slid down the tank and the world narrowed to a thin, angry tunnel.
Bruiser went under and tore at its belly and came away with a mouthful of hot meat. The alpha kicked him and he skidded into a crate, hit, and stayed down longer than anyone wanted.
Emily screamed without picking a name to aim it at and ran with the kitchen knife in an icepick grip. The alpha caught her wrist with two fingers and squeezed and the knife fell. It lowered its head to her face as if there were something to smell there that would make it happy.
Someone on the cannery floor flicked a lighter without meaning to. The flame jumped; the nearest wolf flinched like it remembered something hot.
Mara fired into the alpha’s mouth. The shot took the back of its head in a wet cone that slapped the crates and kept traveling. The alpha fell forward. Its shoulder caught Emily and crushed the air out of her, and then the big body slid off. One hand still moved, groping for purchase like it wanted to get up and had forgotten how.
Every wolf in the building stopped moving. Then they started screaming—no music in it, no moon. It was the sound people make in a furnace. They ran at windows and walls and climbed the shelving and tore at the ceiling. For eight seconds they forgot the meat in the room. They wanted out of the feeling.
Mara stepped over the alpha, put the barrel against what was left of its head, and fired again. Bone and gray. She kept the barrel there because it felt like the right thing to do.
“Emily?” Kolbe said from the floor.
“I’m here,” she said. Her voice was small and furious. She shoved the shoulder off with her knees and her good hand. Her wrist had gone purple and she was pulling breath like it hurt, but she was present.
Bruiser stood like a drunk, shook his head, and walked to her. He pressed his side against her leg and she put her hand in his coat and hung on. He set his feet square, took one step, then another more carefully, favoring the back leg for three paces before his tail lied for him and the limp disappeared.
Kearney didn’t get up.
Mara knelt and put two fingers at her throat. She closed her eyes, opened them, and said, “Breathing. Barely.”
Emily crawled across the concrete and looked at Kearney’s face. The front teeth had shifted. The jaw hinge didn’t look right on a person. “We can’t let her turn,” Mara said. It wasn’t hard; it was empty.
“Tonight?” Kolbe asked, and he already knew.
“Ever.”
“Not here,” Emily said. “Don’t make this the place people remember for that.”
Mara nodded once. “Truck,” she said to Marine. “Dock road. No lights.”
“Where?” he asked, already moving.
“Old fish market,” she said. “Concrete and drains.”
Kolbe lifted Kearney under the arms. Mara took her legs. They carried her past the alpha’s ruined head while the wolves on the catwalk watched with faces that didn’t know what they were anymore.
Chapter 7 After
When the world ends in a town, it does it all at once and then stops like it’s remembered there are bills to pay. People did what people do: they got through the night. In the morning they counted the living with coffee and blankets and hands that wouldn’t hold still. They gathered bodies and pieces and waited on names until waiting hurt more than saying them. They tried not to lie to children and mostly failed kindly.
On paper it was twenty-three dead. Anyone in Caldera knew the trestle would keep the rest a while, and the bay would take its time.
The state came with maps and explanations. They said rabid coyotes, or mass hysteria, or a gas leak. They said anything but the thing. No one argued hard. Nodding makes outsiders leave faster.
They burned what they could claim and buried what they recognized. The smoke smelled wrong and stuck to hair. By noon the water in the alley had dried everywhere except one palm-shaped patch; it stayed wet in direct sun. People learned to look up when they walked past it because looking down felt like permission.
Kearney lived. She woke up looking at painted cinderblock and a floor drain and a fluorescent light that hummed because that was its job. Her eyes were her own again and her teeth belonged to her face, but her arm looked like a machine had chewed it and a drunk had stitched it. “Did I kill anyone?” she asked, and no one in the room took a breath. They told her no. It happened to be true, which made it useful.
“You’re going to be okay,” they told her, and the question mark hung there like a mobile.
Emily’s wrist swelled for three days, then got bored and gave it back. For a week she couldn’t open jars without asking for help. She watched the moon the way you watch a neighbor you don’t trust.
Bruiser slept for two straight days and snored like a generator behind a warehouse. When a gull hit the window and bounced, he stood up, went to the door, sat, and listened to something none of them could hear yet.
Mara didn’t sleep. She cleaned the shotgun until the skin on her fingers cracked. She put it away. She took it back out. At two in the morning she drove the dock road with the window rolled down and tried to smell wet fur over the salt.
Kolbe stood on the trestle and watched his face wobble to pieces in the ripples. When people called to ask whether what they’d heard was true, he stopped answering and saved the few words he had left for the people in front of him. It was bad. It will be bad again. Lock your door.
Father Quinn said three Masses in a row, threw up behind the rectory, and said a fourth. At dusk he looped a simple iron chain across the church gate. It wouldn’t hold anything that wanted to come in, but people liked seeing a line someone had bothered to draw. He couldn’t look at the icons that showed open mouths singing. He turned them to the wall.
Cleo reopened the Crab Legs because rent doesn’t excuse itself. She put up a sign that said NO COSTUMES. Under that she taped NO DOGS. Under that, after an hour of fielding the same question, she added BRUISER IS FINE and underlined it twice.
They towed the bent cruiser out of the alley and hosed the brick until the water ran clear. It didn’t. Some stains vote to stay. The town learned to walk past that wall while looking at the sky.
The coroner wrote the same line three times that week without meaning to: EYES INTACT / MOUTH DESTROYED. Families started bringing scarves, not flowers.
A week later, just after midnight, a long howl rolled out of the timber north of the Cannery. Not close. Not far. Not one. More. The lights in a dozen houses clicked off in the same minute. People sat with their backs to their doors and didn’t tell themselves stories because they already knew them.
On the second week, a boy cut behind the old fish market on his way home from the late shift, because habit outruns warnings. He heard claws on concrete and thought raccoon. He heard breath and told himself it was his. He heard the soft sound a paw makes when it learns to be a hand and then he didn’t have room for thoughts because prey goes empty when it’s time.
He ran toward the streetlight because that’s what humans do.
He didn’t make it.
They found him at dawn. The blood was dry. The prints were new enough to keep dew at their edges. Some were big. Some were smaller. In one spot the ground was pushed down and held, like something had stood there for a long time and watched. His eyes were open. His lips were somewhere else. The streetlight made the teeth shine like spilled salt. That was the detail that made the old man from the bait shop take off his hat and hold it.
A little kid at the elementary school drew wolves for art and didn’t put eyes on any of them. The teacher didn’t correct him. She put the drawing in a folder and didn’t look at it again.
Before dawn on Thursday, smaller prints paced the school fence heel-to-toe, like a child practicing balance. They didn’t jump.
Not yet.