the next stop Foxham. Maybe there would be foxes waiting on the platform there. He felt another dangerous, panicky laugh rise in his throat—like bile—and swallowed it down. Laughing now would be as bad as screaming.
He had to insist to himself there would be people in Foxham, that if he could get off the train, there was a chance he might live. And on his map, Foxham was barely a quarter inch from the Wolverhampton stop. The train might be almost there, had been rushing along at a hundred-plus miles an hour for at least fifteen minutes (No. Try three minutes, said a silky, bemused voice in his mind. It’s only been three minutes since you noticed that the man sitting beside you wasn’t a man at all but some kind of werewolf, and Foxham is still half an hour away. Your body will be room temperature by the time you get there.)
Saunders had gotten turned around and started, unconsciously, to walk back the way he had come, still staring at his map. At the last moment, he realized he had pulled abreast of the wolf reading the Financial Times. At the sight of the giant dog-faced thing on the periphery of his vision, he felt icy-hot skewers in his chest, needling toward his heart: Saunders, the human pincushion. You aren’t too old for a cardiac arrest, buddy, he thought—another notion that wouldn’t do him any good right now.
Saunders pretended to be lost in the study of his map and kept walking, wandering down to the next row of seats. He looked up, blinking, then settled into a seat on the opposite side of the aisle. He tried to make it look like an absentminded act, a thing done by a man so interested in what he was looking at that he’d forgotten where he was going. He didn’t believe that his performance fooled the wolf with the Financial Times in the least. Saunders heard him make a deep, woofy-sounding harrumph that seemed to express disgust and amusement alike. If he wasn’t fooling anyone, Saunders didn’t know why he went on playacting interest in his map, except that it felt like the safest thing.
“Did you find the loo?” asked the businesswolf.
“Occupied,” Saunders said.
“Right,” the wolf said. Ro-ight. “You are an American.”
“Guess you could tell by the accent.”
“I knew by the smell of you. You Americans have different accents—your southern accent, your California-surfer accent, your Noo Yawk accent.” Affecting an atrocious faux-Queens accent as he said it. “But you all smell the same.”
Saunders sat very still, facing straight ahead, his pulse thudding in his neck. I am going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train, he thought, then realized that somewhere in the last few moments his mantra had turned from a statement of negation to one of affirmation. It came to him that the time for pretend was well past. He folded his map and put it back in his pocket.
“What do we smell like?” Saunders asked.
“Like cheeseburgers,” said the wolf, and he barked with laughter. “And entitlement.”
I am going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train, Saunders thought again, and for a moment the idea wasn’t the worst notion in the world. It was bad, but even worse would be sitting here letting himself be taunted before it happened, taking it with his tail between his legs.
“Fuck you,” Saunders said. “We smell like money. Which beats the hell out of stinking like wet dog.” His voice shaking just slightly when he said it.
He didn’t dare turn his head to look at the wolf directly, but he could watch him from the corner of his eye, and he saw one of those erect, bushy ears rotate toward him, tuning in on his signal.
Then the first-class businesswolf laughed—another harsh woof. “Don’t mind me. My portfolio has taken a beating the last couple months. Too many American stocks. It’s left me a bit sore, as much at myself as at you lot. It aggravates me that I bought into the whole thing, like everyone else in this blighted country.”
“Bought into what whole thing?” Saunders asked. A part of his mind cried out in alarm, Shut the fuck up! What are you doing? Why are you talking to it?
Except.
Except the train was slowing, almost imperceptibly. Saunders doubted that under normal circumstances he would’ve noticed, but now he was attuned to fine details. That was how it worked when your life was measured in