Free The Ultimate Werewolf by Byron Preiss (ed) Page B

world was permanently rid, old scourge conveniently crisped to nothing by the microwave heat of medical science?
    One of the two windows was broken, small rectangle kicked to chips and sullen cracks. He had tried to seal the pieces retrieved with duct tape, dull silver like the surface of a nickel. The wind still found purchase, there was no way to keep it completely out. Still he didn't mind the cold. There were worse things than weather.
    Exploratory scratch at his chin; he had not shaved since the angelic change, but his beard had not grown at all. The hair on his arms, his chest, his legs and groin, all seemed the same, but then it was hard to tell, it wasn't the kind of thing you would notice. Maybe it was a little coarser, but then again that could be imagination. At first he had tried to tell himself it was all imagination, some manifestation of his inner illness, some new unbearable loss. First the poems, then the words, and now humanity entire, forced transcendence on a specimen already so weakened that mere living was a challenge unhealthy in its force. He remembered waking, frightened, naked on the cement floor, compulsively counting his toes and fingers as if he might have dropped one changing back.
    But wolves had ten toes, too; he knew that from the book he had gotten from the library. Had stolen, really; ashamed but it was so, he had no library card and no money to buy a book like that; and he had to have it. He had to find out what he was like when swept by angelic change, and there was no one to tell him, no way to ask. So with clumsy dread he struck the book down his shirtfront, where it lay thumping arrhythmic counterpoint against the beat of his heart as he bicycled home. Snow chivvied him, made it hard to ride, to keep the bike straight, but could not increase his hurry. Snow on his bed from the broken window, drifting small and dusty across the slick gray paint of the concrete floor. He had to put the book aside to tape the window shut again, but as soon as that was done he sat down to read; no bathroom, he did not even eat; he had a greater hunger.
    At once he found that most of these words were as well beyond him, too long and hard, like roads made up entirely of stone, and in his anger he pounded at his forehead: stupid, stupid, he should have stolen a children's book, something easy. But at least there were pictures. For an hour or more he studied them, the yellowish cool of the short-lashed eyes, the firm muscled landscape of their pelts. Despite himself he felt a shameful pleasure in their strength; if he was really so, then he was something to be proud of. He fell asleep with the book on his chest, tucked back inside the wilting flannel of his shirt as if it were a living thing whose heat he must protect to the limits of his own.
     
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    The room was ten by ten, a basement storage area for the abandoned building above, the origin of which he could not guess. It was not precisely a house, but if it had once been a business then it was a small business indeed. When he first came, he had cleaned it out, piled the scatter of boxes and containers neat as a puzzle in the far corner. None of the boxes held anything he could use—plastic squares of various colors, some tiny metal pieces that looked like the atom genesis of machines—but he would not discard them, in case the owners one day came looking.
    The bed was a twin-sized mattress, mildew-bleached and only a little rank, balanced carefull) atop its plywood boxspring and four blue plastic milk crates which he had weighted with rocks selected for their potential immobility as well as their size. He had three other milk crates which were chairs and table, or sometimes pantry when he had food enough to warrant storage: stale chewy saltines, cereal which he ate by hand, or his favorite, raisins, they would keep forever. He also had a boombox with one speaker and no batteries; he had to save the batteries for the camping-out light, although