The wolves hunted at night.
Or that’s what I thought they were. They were elusive shapes, shadows that moved fluidly. Always hunting, picking at the lost, the stragglers, the exiled. We locked ourselves in; even our lights were dimmed. Wolves don’t exist, Mother would say. Not on our world. The books told me otherwise: wolves existed. Long ago, before Old Night. Four legs, a muzzle filled with sharp teeth, amber eyes.
When morning finally broke in a weak lightening of the sky, we emerged from our habs. The sky was not even a real sky. It was a dome of plastisteel, a transparent barrier between the poisonous real skies outside and the supposedly safe interior of the habworld.
I chewed through the nutrient bar dutifully, swallowed two mouthfuls of recycled water, and went to work at the factory. I stared at more nutrient bars churned out in thousands, made from… whatever this world could recycle. Some of the nutrient bars would be packed and shipped out to Imperial Guard regiments across the sub-sectors. The bars were bland and mealy. I longed for real food, like what the nobles ate. Real meat, real fish, real delicious food. Even real greens. Vegetables. Fruits I had seen them, in crates imported from elsewhere. Destined for the tables of the hab nobles. My mouth watered. I had to stifle my urges. Pastor Guilen would say that hunger was the tool of the Unclean Ones—terrible things that haunted us and kept us away from the Golden Light.
The wolves hunted at night.
Eveningtide was a rushed affair, a horn blast from the tower to warn everyone out to head back indoors. The hab city trembled at the hollow sound. I often thought it sounded like the voice of a carnosaur I had seen on pirated vids from the black market. When I was much younger, I was often frightened by the sound. The terror it engendered. The sheer silence. The sheer fear.
Pastor Guilen often spoke of the Unclean Ones during his homilies. The Imperial Guard fought these Unclean Ones, hence we gave them the nutrient bars. We also performed an important duty. The Unclean Ones came in many forms, Pastor Guilen warned. Be careful. Keep your eyes open. We all liked Pastor Guilen. The hab-wives gave him the meagre, mouldy fruits they saved from the street vendors.
Even now, the sound of the horn struck a chord of terror in my bones. I crossed myself and prayed that the Golden Light of the Throne guide me today. Mother was not there to protect me now. She died of the flux last year. I still had yet to clear her hab of the hoard she had kept for years. Bags and bags of clothing, knick-knacks and refuse. She collected the unwanted, the unsold and the broken.
I slept beside boxes of musty rations. ‘You might need them one day,’ Mother always gently chided me. So much wasted food, too expired to be eaten, but too precious to be thrown away. It felt like a crime, a sin. And like sins, the hoard drew insects. Roaches the size of thumbs, all brown and glistening.
When the nutrient bars were late due to factory delays, Mother and I resorted to eating the roaches. We joked that they were “drain shrimp”. We caught them by baiting them with the expired rations she’d collected.
The “shrimp” made us sick. We vomited a lot. Yet, after a while, we grew accustomed to their taste and the stomach aches.
Darkness fell upon the hab. I dimmed the lights. I peered out of the slit, which was the only window to the outside world.
Everything was silent. The streets were empty. Our street smelled of sewage and nothing else. Nobody dared venture out. Not even the illegal food vendors.
The unreal sky flickered. Beyond the dome, the poison clouds roiled.
Shadows slipped through the empty street, a pack of dark, fluid shapes that ran on four feet. They skittered and clicked like my shrimp. Wolves do not click, I thought to myself. One of the dark shapes paused, as if sniffing the air. It looked like a mangy feral dog or an approximation of one. Like how someone thought canids should look. It raised its snout, and its fangs glistened.
They were mandibles.
Insect mandibles.
They were not wolves.
I gasped and backed away. I slept with a lumen ball next to me that night, terrified of the dark.
The wolves hunted at night.
I barricaded myself in my hab. I had stocked up on nutrient bars. They hunted us. My hoard—once my mother’s—sheltered me from the dark. What were these not-wolves? Why were they hunting us?
After the horn blasted from the tower, I simply waited by the slit. My heart beat like a festival drum. Why was I waiting for them? Why did I want to catch a glimpse of these… not-wolves? It was a perverse pleasure. An illicit joy. Did my neighbours know that a pack of not-wolves ran our streets?
As if on cue, the pack streamed down the street, their not-paws clicking on the rockcrete. Their claws were pronounced, wicked, black hooks. Their maws dripped with viscous saliva. One of the black shapes stopped again. Was it the same one I’d seen before?
Its eyes were amber… and yet oddly human. Did I recognise them? They had human eyes. I recognised those eyes. My supervisor from the factory? The work-mate I’d joked with during midday meal? My… friends.
The black dog-shape skittered away.
I huddled into my rough blankets, unable to sleep. My mind was haunted by those human eyes.
For a while, I tried not to catch my friends’ eye. I didn’t want them to pay me any attention. Life in the hab and working in the factory was already hard enough. I grew increasingly lonely. I hid in my hab, surrounded by the hoard and the roaches. Even when the horn blasted its horrid song, I chose not to hear it.
I prayed to the Throne of the Golden Light to spare me the horror.
He didn’t answer. I still went to bed hungry.
It was before eveningtide when the pack surrounded me. The horn had not yet roared. I tried to evade the approaching crowd. No, they didn’t approach me en masse. It was as if they all received their cues from some unseen power. One by one, they appeared from all corners, all directions. Very innocuously. As if they were my friends approaching me for a chat.
They were my friends.
In human-shape, they circled around me, now like the bullies who harassed me when I was a child. I looked at their shadowed faces. My neighbours. My work-mates. My supervisor. My friends. I knew them and trusted them. I passed them in the hab corridors. I worked with them in the factory. They stood before me, human-shaped and human-sized. Tall, squat, thin, plump. Wrinkly skin, smooth skin. Laugh lines. They looked at once kindly and evil.
Didn’t Timothius just share his lunch with me? A simple dish his mother made: a stew of nutrient bars and salvaged root vegetables?
Timothius’ mother grinned at me wolfishly, bearing dripping black fangs.
‘Why?’ I managed to speak, and it was more anger than fear. ‘Why?’
‘We hunt so that we can eat well,’ my supervisor hissed. He was a tall man, almost fatherly in appearance, and not yet married. He licked his blackened lips.
‘Why wolves? Why dogs?’ I demanded, scurrying backwards. They herded me like some prey animal.
‘It was the shape we liked and adopted,’ another voice said. Clara? Was that Clara? Clara, who soothed my tears when I fell in the factory? Her bubbly face was now sharpened, like blades beneath the skin.
‘You are the Unclean Ones Pastor Guilen spoke about,’ I said numbly. I tried to look for something. A shard of glass. A metal pole. Nothing.
‘And we are many,’ the pack said, their voices merging in one unwholesome mess. Their faces elongated and split to show teeth and mandibles.
I screamed. ‘The Golden Light will cleanse you!’
And I fled.
The horn blared.
Like a little rodent chased by the carnosaur, I ran. The wolves were after me. The people whom I had trusted and loved were after me.
I did not want to be defiled.
I did not want to be eaten.
Betrayal and loss filled me like some hot fire.
But I was so hungry that I grew angry. Why did I run from the ones who ate well?
Why?
I did not want to eat roaches anymore.
I faced them without fear. The pack circled around me, testing, tasting.
‘Come get me,’ I said. In my mind, I bade farewell to Mother.
They leapt.
The wolves hunted at night.
The sound of the horn warned us about the dangers of staying out too late at night. The walls shook with the roar. The dome-sky remained unmoved. Clouds still coiled and flickered with purple lightning.
The wolves hunted.
I had stayed out this time, heedless of the horn’s roar. I was hungry. The bite-mark on my right arm was a vivid red sore. I knew the rest of the hab huddled behind barricaded doors. There was real food out there. Real delicious food. Not dried nutrient bars. Not fried insects.
The pack arrived, a flowing tide of dark dog-shapes that were not true dogs. Their muzzle-mandibles tasted the air. Their hook-claws clicked. In the dark, their heads were misshaped, unlike dogs, unlike roaches. Their skin gleamed like bubbling black oil from the vats. I stared down at my arm once more. My skin had changed colour. The red had darkened to almost-black.
I laughed softly. The pack chittered back. They had been waiting for this moment. So had I.
I felt my face change, my limbs transform.
The pain was good. It was all good.
I became a not-wolf, and I would hunt.
‘You look well,’ hab-wife Sara said when she saw me one morning.
‘The nutrient bars keep us strong, and the word of the Golden Light strengthens our bones,’ I said. We had a new pastor now, a young man straight from the seminary. He was soft, hesitant. Already, the pack was sizing him up.
Sara smiled and tottered away on her thin legs. Sara was yet unchanged. I could hear her bones creak. Arthritis and brittle bone density. She would be a crunchy one to feast on and the pack had refused to eat her. I liked Sara. She had given me food before. She was kind.
The first few times I hunted with the pack, I went straight for the hab nobles. My teeth bit down into their soft, succulent flesh. It tasted like the best meat, the best cuts of grox. The sweetest, the juiciest. It was amazing. The rest of my pack-mates mocked and laughed at me. I was new. I was still idealistic. Still human. I would only hunt the rich because they had caused all our sorrows. Took all our food.
Of course, I would hunt the rest of the hab. All the habs. The hunger cared for nothing. Only fulfilment and satisfaction of it.
But hunting the rich and eating them was priceless.
We brought down Pastor Guilen much later. I wasn’t there when they finally caught him. The pack shared their meal.
His flesh was surprisingly sweet.
I watched Sara go. It was time to work.
Picking up my tools, I headed towards the factory. Another day of toil would begin and end with Eveningtide.
My stomach growled still. I chewed off half of a nutrient bar.
I would eat well tonight. My body felt refreshed. Healthy, even. Terrible things? Never.
I licked my lips with a black tongue.
About the Author
Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their RPG experience started with Demon: The Descent (Onyx Path). They write about werewolves in Singapore and werewolf clan wars in space.
