Free Bestial by William D. Carl

be my neighbors,
she thought.
People I’ve known for years
.
All dead.
    Bloody paw prints, huge and disturbing in their sheer number, tracked along the road and up private drives, meandering to and from the various corpses. Kneeling, she examined one of the prints in more detail. It contained one large pad, triangular in shape, with four smaller rectangular shapes above it. Four pinpricks of blood fanned out from these rectangles, and she knew these were made by the crimson-covered tips of claws. They appeared vaguely bearish to her, not at all like the wolf prints she had seen in books and magazines. For some reason, this alarmed her more than the dead people did, even though she was beginning to recognize some of her neighbors.Standing, she backed away from the gates. After seven steps, she turned and ran back to the relative security of her house.
    Cathy slammed the doors behind her, leaning her back against them. The heavy wood was comforting, even cool to the touch. But her living room, decorated by one of the city’s most fashionable designers, was a war zone of devastation. Beirut by way of Debbie Travis.
    Cathy hadn’t worked since she married Karl. While he made a good living as a defense attorney, she preferred the life of leisure, spending time with her favorite charities and making sure the house was run as best she could. She supervised the two maids and four gardeners, chaired various committees such as Cincinnati’s AIDS Awareness Foundation and a halfway house for mentally challenged adults. Her life had been as neatly arranged as her furniture. Everything was in its place, and she didn’t cope as well when disorganization interfered.
    And it had interfered. After the terrible arguments and accusations that had been flung around by Christian and her husband, she’d marveled that the walls weren’t stained with bile and vitriol.
    Now this.
    The maids probably wouldn’t work today—she could hardly blame them—so she began to straighten the living room, keeping her mind focused on the project at hand. It had worked before, the way her numerous charities and activities masked the hurt that festered within her. It was working again. After shoving the sofa back toward the picture window, she searched for the pillows. One of them had been clawed. She simply turned it over, hiding the places where the stuffing escaped from the material. The illusion of normalcy satisfied her. For the moment, all seemed balanced and sane.
    If I can concentrate on cleaning this house,
she thought,
I can forget about the rest for a while … about Karl and Christian and … and all the rest of it. . . .
    One room at a time, she cleaned, restoring the furniture to its original locations, sweeping glass into a dustpan, throwing anything that was unsalvageable into the garage for disposal later. She placed boards over broken windows, duct-taping them in place, and shestraightened art on the walls. She would have vacuumed if there had been any electricity.
    Before long, Cathy had completed the living room, dining room, and kitchen, which had been the messiest. Silverware had been tossed around the room, and the light fixture had been yanked from its moorings. The floor was covered with bits of plaster and dust.
    Looking around at her cleansing efforts, she felt a reassuring sense of accomplishment. She had twelve more rooms to clean, but her success with these three gave her a bit of hope. Maybe the world wasn’t ending. Maybe people could find a way to restore order and return to normal lives.
    It had been a while since her life had been normal. If she could return to that happy time, before her boy became a teenager, before he became wild, before all the horrible lies, she knew she could be happy again. It had been such a long time since she had been happy.
    She was leaning on her broom, looking out at the dining room, when she heard a sound behind her in the kitchen. It wasn’t much, and she sensed it more than she heard