By this time there are sirens
winding down, red lights flashing out front, and a bunch of cops and
first-responder ambulance types charging through the front door. I don’t need
to tell you that this is one real mystery unfolding for anyone who wasn’t in Hair
of the Dog Saloon over the last hour. It’s almost like a stage play—bartender
doing what bartenders do, a guy (me) sitting at the end of the bar, a few
customers scattered around tables, bar girls taking some drinks out, kitchen
shoving a big plate of cheese fries up on the delivery shelf under the hot
lamps. And, of course, this disemboweled and dismembered carcass without a
face, drying blood and small intestines all over the floor, and that Glock
lying right there in the middle of it all. I won’t bore you with a detailed
description of the next hour at Hair
of the Dog, except to say that it involved a lot of interesting discussion.
Some time when he has a break, the bartender brings me my refill.
“We’re going out after closing,”
he says; “you’re welcome to join us.”
Of course I joined them. I’m not
sure there’s much literature on werewolf packs, so perhaps this unsavory time
of my life represents an opportunity to provide information to whomever might
need it in the future: law enforcement agencies, teen paranormal romance
writers, Hollywood wannabes, and anyone else who might have more than a passing
interest in extreme evil for the sake of evil. If you think one 230 pound, 6’
3”, beast with razor-sharp, two-inch canine teeth can wreak havoc, try a dozen
of these bad boys all hell-bent on complete destruction of anything and
everything in their path. The trouble is, there’s not much happening in Omaha
after 2:00AM and the last call for alcohol, so the pack has to go cruising for
24-hour places like certain pharmacies and grocery stores. My advice to the
average reader: don’t go to Heartland out on west Dodge after two in the
morning. In fact, even if you don’t live in Omaha, I recommend getting all your
normal business done before bar closing time. Yes, there are werewolf packs all
over the country, and probably throughout the world, too.
You’d think that high-ranking
elected officials, especially in the United States, would figure this out, but
in general they’re so stupid they can’t even understand evolution and global
climate change, so why would anyone expect them to appreciate the finer
attributes of a werewolf pack hiding right there under their noses? Anyone
wouldn’t, of course; the average person on the street still believes in angels
and that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, but come to think of it, such
individuals ought to be sitting ducks for a werewolf pack. I suspect there’s
some group dynamics at work here: it’s okay to believe that an American
President is not a citizen of this country because you get told that a thousand
times a day by some fat jerk with a cigar in his mouth spouting it out over our
common authority for all things, namely, television. So maybe if these kinds of
idiots started blaming your everyday problems on a pack of werewolves, then 56%
of the American public would come to believe it. Well, I’m here to tell you the
truth, that yes indeed, many of your common problems are, indeed, caused by a
pack of wolves.
Back in those days, before I
joined the pack, I honestly believed that the main function of a werewolf was
to instill terror in the human mind. What I discovered as a result of that
fateful evening in Hair of the Dog, was that there is a form of evil that goes
well beyond physical destruction. Trust me on this one: you see it almost every
day in the affairs of nations, the truly stupid conclusion based only on belief
(try “weapons of mass destruction” for starters, or if that hits too close to
your patriotic home, try “Let’s bundle these sub-prime mortgages and sell the
bundles as derivatives, then sell options on the derivatives.”) I will admit to
being a very naïve wolf in my solitary days. What I learned from the pack, and
especially the bartender—I’ll call him “Claude,” a very unlikely name for such
a role model—was that the words Shakespeare put into Mark Antony’s mouth were
right on target, and that if you really wanted to generate some evil that lives
after you, then you start by messing with the minds of those proverbial people
on the street. In other words, instead of killing them, you kill their ability
to think rationally.
The complete e-book, CHRISTIAN ZOMBIE: A TALE OF SIN AND REDEMPTION, is available on kindle and from smashwords.com.
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