Wolf Catcher

The first thing that woke Frank was a call from the debt collectors, phoning in from an unknown number, to hound him about the overdue payments on medical bills he had racked up after the car crash that had nearly taken both his legs seven years ago. He answered with a wavering, booze-breathed inflection, wiping saliva from the stubble on his chin. The voice on the other end carried the usual smugness of a tormentor lording their power over a victim, a fly caught in a web that they knew couldn’t escape.

Frank suggested a warm, dark place where they could find their next installment and tossed his phone back onto the bedside table where it took a hard bounce and landed on the floor.

The second thing that woke Frank was his neighbors, hucking beer cars at Ina Martinez’s guard dog, Percy, while it snarled and snapped spittle at them on their way to their car. He could hear the cans, ricocheting off of siding and the semi-rotten wood porch until there was a startled yipe, followed by continued barking and snarling resuming until two car doors opened and slammed and a noisy sedan in need of a new muffler and a dozen other repairs sputtered away.

The third thing that woke Frank was that he needed to piss.

He rolled his legs out over the floor and stood, wobbling ungainly through a week’s worth of crumpled clothes to the bathroom where he sat and peed with the door open as he rubbed the stars behind his eyeballs back into his brain.

He finished and flushed, then stood, lumbering out of the bathroom and mentally waving off his own stench until he had some caffeine and probably half the hair of that dog that bit him to stave off a gargoyle of a headache that was leering at him from the corner of his room waiting to pounce. He stumbled into the kitchen, checking a few cans for leftover energy drink when he heard the telltale buzzing, the rhythmic hum of a notification for an order coming in from work.

“God damn it,” Frank growled, in a way that - and no one would know this, because Frank lived alone, only left the house when he had to, and had let all of his friendships lapse into ‘people that he used to know’ - but if Frank were the protagonist, if he were the main character of his own story, would have been totally Classic Frank.

He found his clothes on the floor from two separate piles, wiped deodorant over his slept-in smell, downed a half shot of Beam and left out his front door to Percy’s uproarious disapproval with a fresh energy drink in hand, which he finished as he hit the highway, sun visor down and his hand rubbing his temples.

That headache might be coming on anyway.

The outline of a gargoyle crackled with blue lightning in his back seat.

Every job notification came in with the following details: two sets of coordinates, a threat level, a nonsense job ID, a return location, and a retrieval due date - usually for the next day. The coords always gave him the upper left and lower right bounds of an area he was supposed to search (determined by the farthest in all four cardinal directions his tag was last known to roam), while the threat level was communicated in color codes ranging from green to red (it was never green).

The threat level determined what equipment he was going to bring with him - though he noted it didn’t do shit to his pay. He seldom stepped away from his van though ill-equipped for red.

He pulled off the highway at an unremarkable exit and after a couple of turns was bouncing down a gravel county road that hadn’t been re-leveled in years. The surface looked pot-marked with muddy gray puddles that reminded him of diner coffee and was uneven enough to make him grind his teeth even though he wound from side to side to try to avoid them.

His phone’s GPS brought him to a pin he had dropped on the southernmost border of the geofence. The road curved back south around a thousand feet away at its closest, so he parked and ended the directions as the phone’s map app started spinning in circles for want of a decent connection. He walked around to the side and slid open the door to his van.

The back was a cluster of plastic crates, torn-open packages and decaying cardboard boxes with wooden shelves bolted onto the inside of the frame holding the heaviest pieces of equipment down with bungee cords. It stank like gas, animal fear and old blood - some that had leaked out of bait containers, some not. As haphazard as it all seemed, there was an art and a ritual to the placement of things that was one of his only points of professional pride. He knew where everything was or what it approximately ought to be lying under.

He pulled out the bait, mace, an extendable metal baton, a taser, stakes and a small shovel, zip ties, a catch pole, muzzle, a collapsible medical sled, and a thin metal flashlight he could clip onto almost any surface. Out of a fisherman’s tackle box, he removed two chainmail sleeves that he rolled over his arms and clipped onto his shirt, and he slung a bolt-action tranquilizer rifle over his shoulder and clipped a satchel of darts onto the waist band of his pants.

He reached for the door, and as he did the corner of the glass caught the sun in a flash of light, sending another spear of pain digging into his eyes. Frank grunted and yanked the van door closed, massaging the bridge of his nose with a gloved hand. He turned and tramped into the knee-high brush and tall grass growing wild between the road and the tree line.

The outline of two clawed blue feet tapped out a message on the metal roof of the van as he departed.

Frank didn’t think of himself as a tracker or a hunter. Tracking was an artform of signs, patterns and markings, and hunters knew the territories, behaviors, and habitats of their prey. He was a catcher, dispatched to subdue and remove - and on occasion, eliminate. His job was dirty, his targets were usually confined to relatively small areas, and he thought of them more as wounded or rabid animals that he was putting out of their misery. He could usually hear them before he could see the marks. They were much more likely to cower or attack than they were to run.

Frank knew he was overly conscious of the way he walked. He was tall and had always been kind of gangly, and he moved through the forest with almost a halting. exaggerated lope. Most people couldn’t tell that he’d had to learn how to walk again. That he’d almost lost his legs, but to him it could never feel natural again. Not for the first time, he wondered how much of it he could have done without the implant, if he would have ever been able to walk again if not for -

He heard a loud snap, like a branch or a bone, and he halted. He listened and he could clearly hear his quarry thirty yards or so ahead. He let himself hear and categorize the noises - short, catching breaths, a persistent growl or whine from the throat and -

What the fuck.

It was a cub. He could see clearly around the trees now. It was too small. It was so small. They were never supposed to be cubs. He felt the bile rising up in the back of his throat.

The cub had curled itself around the protruding above ground roots of a tree. It was gnawing on something gray and bloody, and every so often it would start a snarl that would curl in a whimper, a bark that would end rattle and catch almost like a sob. The sounds were layered over each other, growl and cry, snarl and whisper.

It didn’t look good. Its face under one eye was covered in claw marks (likely its own). The skin he could see looked raw and infected.

When did they start experimenting on cubs? They had never used juvenile subjects before. This had to be new. Some new branch of experimentation. But how’d it get out? They should never have let it -

It saw him. It started cowering. It didn’t attempt to flee but was trying to push itself further into the hollow beneath the tree. It sent up shreds of bark from its desperate clawing.

It was an orphan - it had to be an orphan. By the look of it, it was no longer even remotely sane. A small mercy.

Frank leaned his rifle down against a tree out of sight and put his hands out. He advanced at a crouch. Moving slowly, he snapped open a pouch (triggering a crescendo of snarls and whimpers) and pulled out the bait - wet, fragrant, and bloody - to set on the forest floor. Without a second thought, Frank pulled the rest of it, and laid everything down in a pile on the forest floor in front of him. The smell was overpowering.

The cub’s haggard, desperate breathing slowed and calmed, and gradually Frank saw it lifting its head toward the scent. He could hear it sniffing and saw drool and blood falling in ribbons from between its teeth. Frank tried to hide his blanch.

Still crouching, Frank half bounced, half hobbled backward, hands still raised, keeping his eyes on the cub until he was back thirty yards away, by the tree and the rifle he had leaned against its trunk. He sat and watched the cub creep forward out of the roots of the tree, sniffing the air, whimpering and huffing the scent of the enormous pile of bait Frank had left in the dirt.

The forest around them both was eerily quiet. The only sound was the cub munching and chewing at the bait. A tepid wind rustled what was left of the dry and brittle fall leaves. The tree branches shuddered and what midday light there was hid behind a swollen gray cloud.

Frank slowly picked the rifle off of the tree and set it gingerly on a fallen trunk that lay across the forest floor in front of him. He let the cub eat nearly to its fill, until its gorging slowed and it was just gnawing on the leftover pieces more for the flavor of it then because it was hungry. The dart he had loaded up was big enough to take down an adult, which was fine. He wanted it out cold. If it was too much and stopped its heart, that was a kindness.

Frank fired. The cub started and jumped, bait and spittle sliding out of its slackening mouth. It snapped a few times and feebly tried to get its jaws around the dart sticking out of its side, curling upward and around itself before it stumbled backward and fell.

Frank sat with the cub until the sun went down, listening to its slow, rattling breaths. HIs head still hurt like hell, but he ignored it. He put his coat over the cub’s back and rested his hand on the side of its neck, feeling its pulse until it was dark. Finally, he stood and screwed together the bars of his sled, then zip-tied its limbs and strapped the cub carefully on its frame, then started hauling it back out of the woods. He tried as best he could to avoid dragging it over the largest of the fallen branches and rocks.

When he reached the back of his van and he opened up the double doors, sliding out two long metal rails that he rested on the ground. He dragged the sled between them, hooked it over the slides and then used the rails to lift his quarry into the back of his van. He shut the doors - as quietly as he could - and stood for a moment outside listening to the sound of the nocturnal insects shrieking at him from the woods.

The first thing Frank did after he dropped off his catch was get fall down, mattress-pissing, total system reset drunk. His last waking memory was of being perched on the edge of his chair next to his bed like a gargoyle, arms over his knees, taking long swigs directly from the bottle in only his underwear after sweating all of his clothes other off. His whole skin felt like it was crackling with a menacing blue energy that made him shiver and burn like with a fever. He filled his ears with angry music and vaguely recalled hearing shouts and banging on the side of his home. He told the walls to fuck right off.

The second thing Frank did was wake up that following morning and make it almost all the way to the kitchen sink before vomiting. He felt like there was an arm down his throat threatening to drag out all of his guts and bad feelings, and he desperately wanted them all to stay. He half threw himself, half crawled the twenty feet or so back to his bedroom, knocking down pictures and winning fresh bruises in a half-hearted bare knuckle boxing match with the wall.

The third thing Frank did was do it all over again for three more days straight. He spent his mornings when he could crumpled in the corner of his shower, running out all of the hot water and breathing in the steam between drinks.

Not for the first time, he wondered why his brain implant couldn't do a thing about hangovers, why it couldn’t inject him with endorphins, or just knock him out cold when the feelings were all becoming too much. All the damn thing did was let him use his legs again - and mixed blessing considering what he was now doing with them. And tether him to his job. If anything, it seemed like it made the hangovers worse. Or else he was just getting older. Fuck.

The implant wasn’t made by Occularum, a tiny mote of good fortune in the otherwise spiked pit of hell that he had found himself wallowing in. The implant had been a product of your run-of-the-mill, state-of-the-art tech startup, Goliath, that had needed human volunteers to sign away their liability and become test subjects “in the field.” After his accident, Frank had found himself paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a hospital bed facing a long, crushingly expensive list of medical bills that would bring him through rehab and maybe, maybe give him a chance at walking again.

Or - the visitor told him at his bed side - he could trial with Goliath. One implant would go directly into his brain. The other would be embedded at the base of his spine to send signals to his legs. The company would cover the cost of operation as long as he participated in some trials after successful implantation. They promised it could get him walking again in a third of the time.

He took the deal in a heartbeat. And it worked. He wasn’t one month out of the hospital when he was walking again with a cane - a bit like a drunk or a toddler, but he was walking. The medical trials were easy; he just sat in a room for a couple hours on the weekend, walked back and forth across a room or wired up on a treadmill while some engineers and doctors ran tests, he answered questions, and, after a few months, it was easy to forget why he was even there.

Then Occularum bought Goliath. It was a multi-billion dollar deal. The final time he had gone to the Goliath offices for the study, everybody was drinking and celebrating and he was completely ignored. Then for a while after the acquisition, nothing changed. With only a brief interruption, he continued the trials, albeit at a new building and seeing new faces.

Then one day, Occularum announced the trials were over. And they handed him the bill.

The implants were company property. It had been on loan to him, and they thanked him for his participation, but now that their studies were finished they would like them back please.

Or, of course, there was option B.

He could continue to lease the implant from Occularum. The monthly fee was laughingly astronomical, something he could take to the worst student debtor support groups and have everyone there buy him a drink.

Obviously, the company had continued, if you worked for us, they could give him the discounted employee rate. Something that just low enough that he could afford it, and they would take right out his paycheck. He knew they had him. He was locked in.

Frank was about a third of the way through a bottle of bourbon after a four-beer breakfast when he heard the buzzing sound again - another incoming notification.

Omnipresent, crescendoing, it filled his ears like a swarm of angry digital bees. It made his teeth ache and his eyes itch. It was just the precursor to the message.

Then came the notification. He could see the letters, spelled out in front of his eyes in a way he could never quite describe, though nobody had ever really asked him and he didn't have anyone to tell. The words didn’t block or obscure any part of his vision. He could just - sense them, visually. Kind of like seeing, kind of like reading braille by pressing your eyes against the dots.

There was another subject. This one was not a catch. The threat status was red. He was supposed to put this one down.

He gave himself a day and a half to sober up, then he was in the van, driving. He had his coordinates, which brought him to a gate, for which he knew the code. He had been here many times before. Frank drove inside and made sure to close and lock the gate behind him.

The job code specified the late time, likely to ensure that there would be no one else around. He was at one of the Occularum research facilities. Not one where he’d participated in the early trials and studies but a place he’d ended his nights at frequently since they’d wage-slaved him into this position of “wolf catcher.”

The order gave him directions on where to go once he was inside, but he knew based on the small area outlined by the coordinates exactly where he’d need to be. He used his ID card at the back entrance, waited for the ominous red eye to turn gree, then opened the door to the hollow darkness inside.

There were safety lights on the above doors and flickering periodically through the hallways, but the place was dark otherwise. He carried his rifle out this time facing forward with his finger resting over the trigger guard. His flashlight was latched onto the end and he wore another one on a headband over his right ear.

He moved slowly, casing each room before advancing to the next and always shutting and locking the doors behind him. He’d been surprised more than once by a target that had slipped out of its designated area in these labyrinthine facilities and caught him off-guard. He had the scars and the memories to remind him.

Behind the next door was the ground floor labs. He was loathe to enter them, but with his facility access level it was the basically the only way through unless he took the long route past the incinerators. And he did not want to go past the incinerators.

The lights on the end of his rifle and his head band showed surgical tables and glinted off rows of monitors, glass cabinets full of various prototypes, and cut-away anatomical models. There were robotic arms frozen upward with laser scalpels and drains on the floor that in the darkened room and emergency lights looked like they had never been cleaned of their blood.

The next area was the kennels. Tall, wire cages, some lined with thick glass with holes for breathing, and all of them with shackles bolted to the floor next to cots and beds. They were empty. He wasn’t sure what that meant and quickly decided it was best not to.

The kennels were laid in a crescent moon arc around a surgical amphitheater that was built into the ground on his right. There was an elevator and a tunnel beneath the floor that allowed the surgeons to move subjects from their cages to the surgical floor. The stage was eerily behind past rows and rows of shadowed empty seats. He slowed and scanned the room through the glass walls separating the two areas, shuddering at its hollow menace, until he came to the door opening up in a hallway to the next building. Keeping an eye on the glass walls behind him, he reached down and opened the door.

He was getting sloppy. Or he was just shaken by the experiences and the heavy drinking of the last few days. The door came open and he stepped right into a downward swipe of a clawed hand that came inches away from his face and that he caught only barely with the barrel of his rifle that he swung up reflexively. That probably saved his life.

The stench was immediate and all-consuming. The air was thick with the iron smell of blood and sulfur and a wretched feral stink that made his eyes and nostrils burn. He half-ducked, half-fell to avoid the next blow and found himself scrambling backwards through the door as his target’s claws latched onto the doorframe, and it launched itself at him.

He lifted up a boot just in time collide with its chest, and he rolled with the weight, dropping his rifle and pulling out a knife from his boot holster and a taser, with crackled and snapped in his hand. His target folded itself back into the shadows and moved between the circles on the floor cast by the hanging emergency lights, moving to flank him and swiping outward with claws and fangs. Frank caught glints of snarling teeth and flecks of bloody saliva - as well as that tell-tale red light - right before it lunged at him. The attacks were ferocious but unsubtle and he began to fall into a rhythm of ducking, slashing, and shocking as he and his quarry circled each other and stained the floor with each other's blood.

He had dropped his rifle was somewhere near the doorway. He tried to keep a mental note of its general direction but he didn’t dare tear his eyes away for a moment for fear of catching more than surface grazes from the creature's claws, fangs, and wired flesh.

The thing was attacking him with abandon, with a shocking violence fueled by pain and rage and confinement and whatever else they had been doing to it here. But its ferocity began to wane, as it bled from the cuts and it sapped its energy to exhaustion with its unyielding offense. Finally, its snarls retreated into haggard wheezing until and it stopped its circling and fell backwards on the floor in the hallway in a pool of its own blood.

 “Pppplease…”

Frank froze like he had been shot. His heart jumped into his throat and fell violently back downwards into the cavity it had left in his chest. His ears were filled with its echoing thumps and the gulping sounds he made as he tried to catch his breath.

“Nooo. Nooo… Ppplease…”

No, no, no, no, no, no.

How.

It was talking. It was talking. They should be too far gone! There shouldn’t be speech or thought. At this point, they were supposed to be just a husk, less even than an animal, a hollowed out experiment gone wrong, the remains of an occult prosthesis whose wires and influence spread like an infection that threaded itself around the nervous system and poked out through the skin. All that was ever left were electrical impulses and madness. They were just targets that needed to be caught, and cleaned up, and put down or put away. They shouldn't talk.

“I don’t… don’t want… Hhhhhheeelp. Pplllease...”

It’s - his - voice was raw, vocal cords that were raw with screaming and ragged. The subject was bleeding, profusely, from all of Frank’s cuts, fresh red blood that mingled with the dried stains around the sores where the prosthetics wires poked out through the skin like hair.

“I want… to stop. Make me… stop. Pppplllease.”

Frank fell onto the floor. They sat across from each other in the hallway, both half veiled in the darkness, a circle of light between them. His target began to sob. It sounded more like coughing, guttural sobs mixed with phlegmatic barks. Frank let his knife and taser clatter to the floor. He stood slowly and stepped backward toward the doorway where his rifle was lying on the floor.

The sobbing became more convulsive, more violent, but the subject, the creature, the thing that was once a man didn't move. Frank walked over and rested the end of his rifle on his target’s head.

“Th-th… th-th-thank -”

The sound of the shot rebounded off the walls and tore into Frank’s eardrums. He didn’t much care.

Frank slumped back down on the ground and let his rifle rest across his knees.

“I'm finished!” he yelled. His voice echoed through the empty halls, bouncing through the kennels and coming back to his ears like the barks of so many subjects that had been through here before. “I’d like to be done now, please.”

There was a long, heavy silence. Then he heard the buzzing, coming out of nowhere and everywhere. It swelled, surrounding him, an insectile tinnitus thrumming filling his ears.

Then it stopped, and there was no message after.