Dancing with Werewolves - By Carole Douglas Page 0,1
from the police radio screwed onto Dolly's humongous drive-shaft hump.
Werner nodded at it. "You're wired into us if you need anything."
"I'm okay, you're okay. Good night, Leo."
I watched his taillights fade into the absolute country night.
I'm not a particularly brave woman, but I am determined.
Once me and Dolly and the dark were an uncrowded three-way again, I left the car, toting a heavy-duty flashlight. Dolly's trunk could hold everything, including the kitchen sink.
The flashlight spotlighted the corpses' massive profiles. Three dead cows, their huge carcasses pulverized to broken bones floating in precious bodily fluids inside intact cowhides. Those intact hides were most unusual for livestock attacks; they usually involved cryptic mutilations.
I played the intense light over the ground markings. What Edwards had described as "moo-cow hooves wandering into a scene of punk prankery," I saw as local livestock blundering into a mysterious crop circle creation incident.
I'd also spotted some very non-bovine marks on the rough soil. Maybe the spooked animals had been stampeded into the crop circle by something.
My flashlight hit the highs and lows of the alien footprints. Not "moo-cow" hooves, but huge heavy footpads. Way too big for werewolves, but what else pulled down adult cows except were-packs, or even natural wolves; of which very few were left?
I squatted to measure the tracks mixed in with the milling hooves.
Dinner-plate size. Clawed. Almost wiped away by some trailing... appendage.
Okay. Cow tails are scrawny and just long enough to swat away horseflies and not much else. This was almost a... a reptilian trail, making a long, S-shaped swath. Cows with lizard tails? Not even a rare were-cow could leave marks like that.
I stood. The cows had been attracted to the activity at the crop circle. Lights. Action. No camera. Something had followed and then slaughtered them. I'd get another station videographer out here in daylight to film the footprint evidence without the prying eyes of the authorities present. Even the local cops had a stake in not stirring up the populace with alien invasion or supernatural slaughter stories.
In less than half an hour, I was back in my rented bungalow, jubilant, rerunning the audiotaped second version of the stand-up I'd sneaked in under the noses of the local cops and the Fed.
"Authorities are perplexed by a crime scene where local cows apparently have been cooked inside their hides by forces beyond conventional firearms or other weapons. Found dead yesterday in a field outside of Wichita, Kansas... "
Found dead.
Found live was the story of my life so far: I'd been found alive, from birth, but just barely.
Found dead always made a much better story hook.
Chapter Two
After work the next day, the latest report on my story safely digitalized and under wraps for a debut on the evening news at ten, I crashed at home by seven that night. How does a weird-phenomenon TV reporter relax? By watching national network forensic crime shows, natch.
So there I am, sucking up microscopic forensic details on TV with the rest of the country, when wham-o!
It all happened so fast. The camera zoomed in closer than the world's best lover. A maggot writhed like a stripper from the dark cave of a deadly pale... but delicately shaped... nostril. With a tiny blue topaz stud.
The camera dollied back. Hmm. Not a bad-looking nostril at all. In fact, it's a dead ringer for mine. Tiny blue topaz stud and all. A very dead ringer. Literally.
I can feel my cold sweat. This is the same old nightmare: me flat on my back, unable to move, bad alien objects coming at me. Except I'm not dreaming, I'm watching network TV on a Thursday evening, like eighty million other people in America.
The object of the camera's affection is a body on the hot TV franchise show, CSI Las Vegas V, Crime Scene Instincts, what I nickname Criminally Salacious Investigations. Media is my business. I have a right to mock it. I am not in a mocking mood at the moment.
Who has tapped my very personal nightmares for network exposure? While my stomach starts to churn, the camera retracts farther.
Holy homicide! The turned-up nose is mine! And the chin, the neck, the collarbones, the discreet but obvious cleavage, the muscle-defined calves visible past Grisham V's burgeoning backside...
Even the toenails are painted my color, Glitz Blitz Red.
I look down and wiggle my bare toes shimmering blood-bright in the living room lamplight. I'm alive but I'm alone, in all senses of the word.
Me with a body double? A doppelganger. A replica. A clone?