Avenger of the Pack by DeadBabylon

Markus stepped out of the subway cart and made his way up the escalator, trying to stay ahead of the crowd of people exiting the train. There was nothing he disliked more than rush hour; all the noise, the pushing and bumping of the crowd around him, like a large organism where anyone who dared to resist the flow would be pushed down and crushed. The sooner he got home and out of the streets, the better. He had to move to this city with almost two million people because of his new job, and while the pay was good, he wasn’t sure whether it was good enough to offset the cons of the city’s hustle and bustle.
He looked at his phone, checking the map’s route towards his home from the station. Twenty minutes or so on bus, but it was better than walking, and at least he would be able to listen to some music on the way there. He looked outside the stairs to see the rain falling down the steps, and sighed as he was without an umbrella. He pulled up his hoodie, making his way up the wet steps while holding onto the handrail until he was outside, quickly moving to the nearest cover, which luckily for him, happened to be the bus stop. He pulled the hood back and tried drying off a little, pulling some change out of his pocket to pay his fare. Not a lot of cash on him, so asking for an Uber was out of the question.
A splash of water hit him from the back as a car sped past the bus stop, startling him as well as soaking his clothes from the waist down. “Ah, goddammit.” He cursed under his breath as he stepped away from the street, shaking his legs to try to get the water out, but to no avail, his socks were already drenched as well. He groaned, turning to see the bus arrive, nearly empty. The bus stopped and the doors opened, Markus leaving his fare on the collection tray before looking for an empty spot to sit, taking one right above one of the wheels. Not the most comfortable, but it wasn’t a handicapped seat, and other passengers would first try to fill the other seats.
At least the inside of the bus was warm. Maybe too warm. He put his hand against the air conducts to test them out, realizing that this unit’s AC was broken. Oh well, at least he wouldn’t catch a cold so quickly. He pulled his headphones out, putting them on as he picked some of his favorite rock songs in his cellphone, turning the volume up to drown out the blaring of car horns outside as the bus joined the afternoon traffic. The wolf blood coursing through his veins granted him enhanced senses of hearing and vision. Handy for stalking through the woods in search of prey, but not so much when living in the middle of the concrete jungle.
Markus rested his head against the glass, closing his eyes as he tried to focus on the drums, bass and guitar of the song playing. He could still clearly hear the movement inside the bus as it stopped to pick up passengers, the sound of people dropping their change in the collection tray, walking down the bus’s length before taking their seat. He felt a few get close and stop where he was seated, before picking another spot or just remain standing up. He figured that with the messy state his clothes were in, he probably looked like a drunk or a homeless person.
He would’ve taken offense to it, but in all honesty, it felt better to be left undisturbed than having some complete stranger try to strike up a conversation about something inane like the weather. He pulled his hoodie up as the next song came on, leaning back on his seat to check his phone. The weather report, which would’ve been handy to see before he left home without an umbrella, estimated that the rain would continue through the evening, easing up into a drizzle late at night.
He counted himself lucky, not having hung some of his clothes out to dry near the apartment’s windows, but then remembered he had likely left them open and would come home to find the floor a wet mess. He groaned, figuring he might as well try to take his mind off of everything that had happened today, maybe just browse the internet for a while to not think for a while, any distraction would be welcome if it could make his blood cool down.
The browser opened up and he scrolled through the home page down to the news links, reading title after title, looking for something that wasn’t awful. Another Netflix exclusive was announced, a celebrity broke up with their partner, some influencer did something bad on a stream, pretty much the average garbage news he was used to seeing on the web. However, a word in the lines of text popped out in his eyes, scrolling up to read the full title. ‘Poachers kill pack of wolves in National Park’. His brow furrowed and he took a deep breath, clicking the link and waiting for the page to load.
He read the news article in silence, his blood slowly starting to boil as he went over the words on his screen. ‘Authorities have reported that a pack of twenty wolves has been found skinned and mutilated within the depths of the largest wildlife reserve in the country. The Park Rangers estimate that the pack had gotten used to the presence of humans, given they were the park’s main tourist attraction. The poachers likely lured them with poisoned bait and waited for them to die before skinning them and removing the head of a few of them without struggle or firing shots that could alert the park rangers.’ He could not believe his eyes, everything about this sounded like bullshit. The park rangers likely had something to do with it, the ones that had sworn to protect that wildlife sanctuary had desecrated it for petty profit.
Markus gripped his phone tightly in his hand, feeling his head starting to pulse, all the bottled-up anger had finally reached a bursting point. He pressed the bus’s stop button and got off it as soon as it stopped, walking into a nearby alley as he felt himself start to hyperventilate. There was no moon out today, though he didn’t need it to change, something he’d learned a while ago. When he was stressed out or angry beyond words like now, the wolf blood coursing through his veins called to be let out, and in the darkness of the alley between buildings, with the storm raging in the sky above, he was gonna release it.
His ribcage swelled as the pressure in his gut began spreading through his body, his back hunching over slightly as his muscles began to grow rapidly, ripping the hoodie and the shirt he was wearing to shreds, exposing his feverish skin to the cold rain. He clenched his teeth as his face started to shift, large canines growing in as his nose and mouth elongated to form a lupine snout, snarling as the changes continued to spread through his body. His shoulders bulked up and his arms swelled up as the skin darkened, thick fur grew down his neck and chest, then spreading like wildfire over the rest of his body.
He fell to his knees as his legs began to warp and bones twisted under the skin, bulging muscles tearing his cargo pants up to the thigh as his shoes ripped open under the pressure while his feet expanded into paws and grew sharp claws at the end of each toe. He clenched his hands tight as the lower part of his spine cracked as it grew into a tailbone, pushing the skin along the new appendage as shaggy grey fur covered it, forming a long, lupine tail. He could hear the city’s sounds much more clearly now, his senses improved nearly ten fold in this form. He opened his steel blue eyes, taking in the little light that entered the alley he was kneeling in and giving him a clear image of the dead-end street. He stood up, hands clenched into fists as he reared his head back and let out a howl, a warcry that was a mixture of sorrow and anger that mixed with the boom of thunder from above.
The werewolf stood up, the rain cooling off his body as steam rose above him, and then, he looked down at his hand, opening it to let the remains of his phone fall to the ground. There was a twinge of regret at crushing the thing, before he refocused on why he’d changed. The park wasn’t so far away from where he was, and in this form, he would be faster than any rickety old bus. Tonight, there was a pack to avenge.