Chapter Two

Alvarez woke to a white-hot sun searing through his eyelids.

He was flat on his back in the burning desert sand.

The flesh of his arm was being ripped away.

And then the thief was screaming as he blinked his crusted eyes open to see the rotted pink head of the stinking buzzard, its foul yellowed beak tugging at a flap of wet red flesh on his bicep. God, the pain! Panic and terror turned his guts to jelly. Out of pure reflex, he grabbed for the gun in his belt, yanking it out of the holster to jam the muzzle into the vulture’s black-feathered chest, pulling the trigger again and again.

Click click click.

Empty.

Shit!

It was coming back to him now how he used up all his bullets the night before and the horror he had used them on.

Right now he was being eaten alive by a carrion bird ripping a piece of his arm off while more vultures circled overhead. Adrenaline kicked in. Flipping the big Colt Navy pistol in his hand to grip it by the barrel, he wielded the wooden butt like a club, bringing it down again and again on the buzzard’s fetid skull, beating its brains out. The vulture flapped its wings, blowing its stench, and screeched and cawed against the blows. “I am not dead yet, you stinking bastard!” the bandit cried hoarsely. “So you don’t get to eat me! I kill you first! I kill you!” Alvarez brutally pistol-whipped the vulture until he felt the mottled skull cave in. Soft wet matter splattered his hair. Then the disgusting bird was down on the ground, not moving except for the death twitch of its limpid talons. The man laughed in demented triumph. “Who’s dead now, eh? What, nothing to say? Hahaha! That’s right, because it is you that is dead, you filthy fucking scavenger! I, Alvarez, am alive!” 

Not for long.

Sitting up took great effort, as did staggering to his feet, but the wounded man managed to stand up. He swayed, dizzy from loss of blood, blinking away white spots in front of his eyes from the sun he’d been staring into. When his vision partially cleared he saw that he was alone in a sweltering desolate expanse of the Durango desert stretching out in all directions as far as he could see. 

The dead vulture lay at his feet. 

Alvarez shuddered at the memory of it feeding on him.

His dangling right arm throbbed in raw, savage pain. To his horror, the awful wound from the night before was festering. Bite marks of huge teeth punctured his swollen bicep like rows of bullet holes from elbow to shoulder. Blood was caked and dried over huge raking bruises on the rent flesh. The arm bone felt broken by the clamp of those monstrous jaws. He tried to move his fingers but they were numb and not working.

Now all at once he remembered the monster that wounded him last night; horrific memories of fangs and fur flooded back. A half-remembered nightmare that was all too real.

Filled with dread, the man looked around him until he located the stagecoach outpost in the distance. It jutted like a broken tooth out of the arid terrain a half a mile away. The small structure sat silent and still. Nothing moved inside, and from what he recalled, nothing would. Flocks of vultures flew in and out of dark windows that resembled eye sockets of a skull. More ugly buzzards perched on the wooden roof or circled like black fangs in the sky, attracted by the death that lay within. A path of his footprints in the sand led from the outpost up to where he had fallen and the indentation of his own shape on the ground with the wide dark stain of dried blood buzzing with flies. The stagecoach junction was a tomb, and while the little building afforded the only shelter from the deadly heat, he would sooner die before returning there.

But Alvarez knew he better find a doctor before gangrene set in.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

The wounded man was in the middle of nowhere, engulfed by pitiless badlands vast and empty that seemingly went on forever. The sun was a searing oven, roasting him from on high.

What was he going to do? he wondered.

Better start walking.

Move those legs.

So he began taking clumsy steps, buckling under the punishing heat.

Touching the pocket of his trousers, Alvarez felt the bulge of the pouch; he still had his silver, what had gotten him into all this. Too bad he would not live to spend it because his wound was bad, so much blood lost, and there was nowhere to go for help.

But he kept walking.

And walking.

The day got hotter.

He grew closer to death with each unsteady step.

The wounded man would stagger over a hill in desperate hope he would spot some sign of civilization only to crest the rise to face more blasted empty terrain. In his delirium and despair, the thief was not sure how far he had walked before he saw the horses. 

Two of them, in the distance; twin horses and riders melting like a mirage out of the watery waves of rising heat. He raised his hands above his head and flagged them down, praying that the caballos and hombres astride them were not a hallucination.

Alvarez had fallen to his knees and wept in relief when the two Federales rode up, even through he had been running from them only yesterday. What a difference a day makes. Their tan button coats and caps blotted the sun as they sat in their saddles, light glinting off their brass buttons and the cartridges in their bullet belts. “I surrender, senors, please, take me in,” the thief begged, and the obliging policia federal took him into custody directly.

 

 

The prisoner Alvarez sat at the table.

The rusty iron manacles bit his ankles.

The fat Federale sat across from him. The thin unshaven one leaned against the wall. They were inside a squat single-story outpost nestled in the foothills, a few miles from where he had been picked up. The police station, if it could be called that, was a hovel. Brick walls, dirt floors. A rifle rack in the corner. Two cots against the left wall. Empty whisky bottles. In the next room, he could see the bars of a cell. The air was close and stank of sweat and body odor.

And gangrene.

His arm wound had been washed and bound with a dirty cloth, but was infected. He could already smell the onset of necrosis. “I need a doctor,” Alvarez groaned through teeth grit in pain.

“We said we will get you one,” said the cop behind him. “After you talk.”

They had found the silver when they searched him. The pouch sat on the table, out of his reach, and there was no point in lying to these men.

“My name is Pedro Alvarez,” the prisoner began. “And I will tell you what you want to know.” You bet you will, said the grim expressions on his captors’ faces. One way or the other.

The fat one pushed a worn wanted poster showing a trio of Americanos under his nose. “Do you ride with these men?” the thin one barked. Alvarez stared dumbly at the hard faces of the three bad men in the crude sketches, but the letters on the crumpled paper meant nothing to him.

“Look at them!”

“He asked you a question, shit for brains!” The thief got punched in the back of the head by the cop against the wall.

“I can’t read.” Alvarez lowered his eyes in shame.

“Their names are Tucker, Bodie and Fix. Hombres muy peligrosos. Gringo gunmen down here who have done many robberies, killed many people with their fast pistolas. Do you ride with them?”

“No, senors, I do not know these men. I swear I have never seen them.”

“You have not heard of the reward?”

“What reward?”

“You have never ridden with these gunfighters?”

“I do not know them!”

The fat officer punched the table with a beefy fist. “Then where did you get the silver? We know you stole it!”

“I am a thief. I robbed the money, as you said. It was a paymaster in Sinaloa but I did not kill him, senors, just hit him on the head a little bit, enough to drop him. This I swear to you on the grave of my mother. For the last three days I have been on the run. My plan was to catch the stagecoach at the Aqua Verde junction and escape to Mexico City, but the stage it never came. Last night, we had all of us been waiting there for hours at the junction when the trouble started.”

“Who was waiting?”

“There were five of us. Two vaqueros, the man who sold the tickets and a fancy woman and her little girl. They steered clear of me, senors, because of my stench for not having bathed in days, and that was fine with me. I did not want to be noticed, you see. My brain was worried the Federales would catch up to me any minute, and if I did not get on that stage and get to Mexico City then I was a dead man.” The prisoner laughed ironically. “Just a few hours ago, I thought getting arrested was the worst thing that could happen to me, but I was wrong. Now here I am, you caught me, and I am relieved because what I met up with last night was worse than anything the law could do to me.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“Put me in jail and throw away the key, senors, it would better than what attacked us. Here I am safe.”

“Go on. Finish your story.”

“The stagecoach did not come. Something else did.”

“Is that what happened to your arm?”

Alvarez winced, clutching the gruesome bandaged wound in his bicep. “I need a doctor.”

“That depends on your story.”

“May I have a cigarette at least?”

One of the policia pushed over his fixings and matchbox. The thief spat on a piece of rolling paper, added a pinch of shag tobacco, closed it, licked it and put it to his lips. He struck a match and sucked smoke, coughing. “Maybe two hours passed. We looked out the window for any sign of the stagecoach. We would have surely seen its approach for the moon was full and very bright. You could look out and see the whole desert for many miles. But there was no dust on the horizon. And it was so quiet, senors, no desert sounds, no insectos, not even wind. No sweet music of the night. Niente. That is how I knew, how we all knew, something was very wrong. I admit I was very scared, senors.” His eyes widened in horror. “We heard them before we saw them. Howls, many howls, like wolves but not wolves. From everywhere.”

The Federales exchanged dubious glances.

“It was an unholy sound that filled our hearts with fear. One of the vaqueros saw the first one through the window and when we rushed over there were many more, circling. Big, black shapes. Hairy. The ticket man took his rifle and fired into the things, shot many times, cocking his Winchester again and again but the bullets did not kill them and did not scare them off. So we locked the door and bolted the window shutters. That was when we heard the horses in the corral being killed. These were big horses, senors, but you should have heard their cries of pain and terror and the repungante sounds of meat being ripped from their bones and savagely devoured. ¡Qué horror! What kind of animal is powerful enough to kill a full-grown horse and tear it to pieces, I ask you?” 

“They were coyotes, you ignorant peasant!” The fat Federale glared in disgust at the bandit. “Mira! Have you never seen a coyote before?”

Alvarez shook his head vigorously, like a wet dog drying itself. “No, no, no. These things were big and fast, muy grande like coyotes but larger than men and their teeth, senors, such huge fangs! We pushed the stove and table against the door and windows but los bestias smashed and tore at the building with such force we felt the whole place shake. The little girl, she was screaming and her mother held her, but her mother she was hysterical too. I saw one vaquero get his head ripped off as a shutter caved in and a huge paw broke through the wood and those claws peeled the man’s face from his skull like a banana and there was blood everywhere. The other caballero pissed himself when he saw his friend die in this way. You can bet I had my gun out by now and bang, I shot one of the claws off the monster and then I was at the window and fired right into its face, bang bang bang…” 

Alvarez’s eyes suddenly went glassy and unfocused. “I saw its face. It was not wolf and not man. It had jaws like a wolf and ears and fur like el lobo but the eyes, senors, its ojos were those of an hombre. Sus ojos eran come rojos carbones. I shot it in the face five times, not thinking I was wasting my bullets because there were so many bestias. The shots blew pieces off the monster’s head, putting a hole in its skull and I saw the bloody brain.” The thief’s voice fell to a whisper. “And it grinned at me. A mocking grin, ear to ear. The bullets did not hurt it, senors, and in the ten seconds this happened, I saw its face grow back.”

The fat Federale rolled his eyes and groaned as he listened but his partner was riveted, hanging on the bandit’s every word. “What did you do?” He asked breathlessly like a small child. “What happened next?”

The storyteller went on with his tale, emboldened by the attention. “The shutters were being broken to pieces by the blows of the creatures. And their claws sheared through the wood. The ticket man was reloading his repeater when one of the beasts stuck its snout through the window and took the man’s arm in its jaws and with one bite snapped it clean off. Snap! It ate the arm! So much screaming, so much blood. I was out of bullets and was going for the fallen vaquero’s gunbelt to get ammo to reload but at the same time keep my head down and duck the bullets his friend was shooting at the monsters, and that’s when the damn kerosene lamp fell and the place caught fire. We had no choice but to flee.”

Alvarez began to weep, recalling the horror that followed. “The rest happened very fast. As soon as we were out the door, one of the monsters grabbed the little girl right from her mother’s arms in his teeth and swallowed the child in a single gulp. Then su pobre madre had her head ripped off. Another monster tore her headless body in half like a rag doll with meat inside. Everywhere, it was fur and claws and blood and arms and legs flying and guts all over the ground. I just ran into the darkness, rápido como mis pies se iría, to get away. Something bit my arm, crushed down on it like a bear trap right to the bone so I shot my last bullet into the red mouth and the jaws released me. I fled into the desert and heard the others’ dying screams behind me and…this is all I remember, senors. When I awoke I was lying in the desert. And later you found me.”

There was a clap. Then another. The Federale behind him was clapping his hands slowly and deliberately. “That’s quite a story.” The thin man nodded at his partner, impressed.

“Wolfmen.” The fat one fingered one of his chins. “That explains everything.”

“Yes, yes! Gracias a Dios you believe me!”

The cop leaned forward across the table, gaze dripping with contempt. “We did not say we believe you. In fact, we think you are a lying thieving piece of shit trying to bullshit us to save your sorry ass. Do you take us for fools?”

“Do you think we are assholes?”

“I think he’s calling us culos.”

“Insulting an officer is a crime. Muy malo. We can lock you up for a very long time. A very, very long time.”

Alvarez did not like the way the obese cop was fingering the bag of silver. Or the knowing looks being exchanged between both the dirty policia federal. The fat, lazy Federale took a swig of whisky from the bottle. “Maybe I should ride over to the stagecoach junction and see if this hombre’s story checks out.” He scratched his stomach. “There must be bodies all over the place, si?”

“If the vultures haven’t eaten them,” the thief said, worried no evidence might remain.

The thin one yawned, bored. “We’ll go in the morning. My ass hurts and I want to take a nap. Then we’ll get drunk and play cards.”

“But senors, please! Mi brazo!” Alvarez pleaded, the throbbing agony of his mangled arm getting worse. Stabbing pain traveled through his shoulders and chest, like a hideous infection spreading through his bloodstream. “Dijiste que me recibiría un medico.”

The thin Federale clicked his teeth. “Tsk. Tsk. Si, that bite is very bad. It already looks badly infected. I smell the gangrene.” He sniffed like a rat. “You don’t want el doctor, amigo. He will just take the arm. Cut it off.”

“I need a doctor. We had a deal.”

“You are a hard hombre, a bandito, tough it up!” The Federales laughed at each other, gold teeth glinting, and the thief understood there would be no doctor and he would die in jail. The policia federal meant to keep the silver and when he died from gangrene tomorrow or the next day they would bury his corpse in a shallow grave where the body would never be found. This was Mexico and that was how things were done. 

“Fuck your mothers.” 

“Lock him up.” 

The thief was grabbed by the collar. The thin cop hauled him into the next room, a small chamber with two jail cells side by side. There were two occupants. An old sleeping drunk under a weathered brown sombrero and orange poncho was curled on the cot in the far cell. A filthy, muscle-bound laborer stood in the closer pen. The cop pulled out his keys and unlocked that cell, shoving Alvarez inside.

When he hit the floor, the shooting pain in his arm nearly caused him to pass out. When the thief looked up, his cellmate was giving him the stink eye. Alvarez was too wounded to resist as he felt the rough hands rummage through his pockets, stealing his last few pesos.

Alvarez was born poor and knew he would die in a pauper’s grave.

 

 

The borracho stirs in his cell.

The drunk old man is eighty-five, dressed in rags, sombrero resting over his face on the hard cot that hurts his brittle bones. But it is not the clang of the next cell door slamming shut that awakens him, although he is a light sleeper. 

He knows by his smell the new prisoner is one of them.

The Men Who Walk Like Wolves.

The bum has met them before, long ago, in a life spent in the shitholes of Durango. While the old man’s eyes aren’t good and his hearing is failing, his nose works just fine and the distantly remembered stench comes back to him instantly. Once smelled, the odor of the werewolf is never forgotten. 

He tilts the sombrero back from his eyes and studies the newcomer.

The wretch lies on the stained cement floor where the Federale who now locks the cell has brutally pushed him. His wound, a savage raking bite on his arm, festers yellow pus through the bandage the policia have carelessly applied. That explains it. The unfortunate has suffered the bite of the werewolf, and already the curse is in his bloodstream. Hence the smell, the acrid angry tang of bad blood, in the aged drunk’s 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.

And piss it off.

Inflamed by the sting of the bullets and hungry for more flesh, the werewolf leaps at the bars and the men jump back, bathed in sweat as they clumsily reload. The monster’s slavering jaws stretch impossibly wide and it emits a petrifying roar of frustration and fury. Clenching the cage in its talons, the creature yanks and jerks with all its incredible strength, trying to pry the cell door loose. 

Those bars will not hold. The old man smiles to himself.

You Federales should have run while you had the chance.

Werewolves are above your pay grade.

But no, the dumb cops feel foolishly secure with more bullets in their guns and they blast the monster again and again through the bars. The gunshots are ear-splitting in the enclosed space, along with the roars of the wolfman. Muzzleflashes ignite the total darkness of the room like lightning bolts, revealing the gigantic, hairy, haunched, fanged creature in strobing staccato flashes. The smoke-thick air stinks of gunpowder, cordite, coppery blood and human bile and excrement. The borracho covers his nose as he huddles in his cell, watching the show. The bullets take chunks of hair and skin off the beast in the cage, so out of its mind with fury its psychotic eyes bulge in mad swirls of red as it uses the talons of its massive paws wrapped around the bars to tug them free of the cement foundations.

Then the bullets stop.

The cops’ guns are empty.

It is too late to run but they try anyway.

They get maybe three feet.

The werewolf tears the cell door off the frame and pounces out, bringing both men down with two sledgehammer paws into a pool of darkness in the corner of the corridor. There are sounds of screaming and arms and legs being torn out of their sockets and skulls being crushed and rib cages splintered and bitten into amidst all the growling, slobbering and chomping. It is a hard way for the men to die, but the borracho has no pity for them.

The old timer guesses the creature will finish this meal in less than a minute and be looking for seconds.

It will see him then in the cell.

And break through the bars to get him.

This is the plan.

It is time.

The old man pulls off his right boot and dumps its contents out, which clank on the darkened floor.

The object glints in a ray of moonbeam.

A two-shot Derringer pistol.

Picking the gun up, the borracho snaps the twin barrels open to expose the two sterling silver bullets he has loaded there. Clicking the chambers shut, the old man squeezes into the corner of the cot, waiting for the monster to break into his cell.

The sounds of the feast cease. The revolting wet slurping of the wolfman lapping up the last morsels in the gloom of the jail.

The old man whistles.

A sudden angry growl of surprise and the monster rears in the darkness, a towering shape blacker than the other shadows. The silhouette of the huge canine head rotates, nostrils sniffing.

He whistles again, letting the wolfman know he is there. The old man understands the smell of booze on him has disguised his scent. But now the monster is alerted to his presence. Its red eyes glow like coals and fix on the borracho in the cell, noticing him for the first time. With a deafening throaty roar, the creature launches itself at the old man’s jail door with both talons, grasping and wrenching on the bars in berserker rage, tail swishing. It uses its ferocious razor-rowed teeth to try to bite through the iron rods, so mad and unquenchable is its appetite.

“Come and get me!” the chuckling old man taunts, egging the beast on.

It is halfway through the cage.

Readying himself, knowing he will only have two shots and mere seconds to place them, the old man raises the Derringer and settles the notches of the short muzzle on the broad furry chest of the werewolf ripping out the bars of his cell.

Patience.

Paciencia.

The wild-eyed monster pulls at the bars, prying them loose, the metal buckling against the crumbling cement of the fixture.

Esperar.

Wait.

CRRR-RRAAANK! Three iron rods break free of the ceiling as the wolfman tears the cell door loose and shoulders through the gap like a hairy battering ram, bending the bars as it squeezes through, claws swiping a foot from the face of the old man with the pointed gun. Its snapping bear-trap jaws clamp shut so close the borracho feels the spray of its foul spit on his face and smells the hot stench of its gullet. Then there is the sound of tortured metal as the whole cell door collapses inward and the werewolf is inside the cage.

Now.

Ahora!

The old man fires his Derringer twice, pulling both little triggers, putting two silver bullets clean through the werewolf’s heart before it gets another step.

The wolfman drops in its tracks, instantly dead.

As the lifeless body hits the floor, there is a flurry of movement as immediately the monster’s physiognomy twists and reforms back into the crumpled figure of a dead naked human being on the ground. 

The old man rises at last.

Everyone in the jail is dead but him.

His cell door is open, broken off the hinges.

He walks through it a free man.

The luck of the drunk. Tonight, he vows to say a prayer to the moon, the patron saint of werewolves, for the good fortune she bestowed on him.

Stopping just long enough to do a few things before his departure, the old man is soon on his way. He rummages through the pockets of the Federales’ remains and takes their wallets. Selecting two fresh rifles and two pistols from the gun rack in the office, he takes enough ammo to last him awhile. Three bottles of whisky are now his. The last thing the borracho takes from the police station is the pouch of silver on the table that he stuffs in his pocket with the bullets. Then, selecting the strongest horse from the corral outside, he saddles up and rides west.