“There’s a wolf!” Mr. Marshal yelled. He shone his flashlight in a direction, different to the one Foster pointed.

Schuster gingerly let go of Foster, who swayed for a moment. Drawing his gun, Schuster slowed Foster’s topple into the mud. “Sorry, buddy. Take it easy.”

The wolf hunt for two wolves continued a couple of blocks away; the police and wolf hunters expected to kill or capture at least one soon. Wayne thought the wolf that attacked Foster would die or become incapacitated, leading Schuster to believe somebody would catch up to the wolf Mr. Marshal sighted. He worried about shooting a person.

“Anyone there?” Schuster yelled. “If there are people back there, holler.”

“It went to your left,” Mr. Marshal said.

“Okay,” Schuster said.

“Do you want me to get Officer Foster indoors?”

“No, stay put. Okay, Zach, this is going to be unsafe gun handling.” Schuster took his finger off the trigger and put the safety on and wrapped his arms around Foster’s chest to drag him towards the Marshal’s house. “Well…I’d say yes if a person was attacking us.”

“I can call the ambulance again,” Mr. Marshal said.

“The situation is under control,” Schuster said.

“Why isn’t anybody coming for you?”

“They’re doing their jobs.”

“They have to catch the wolf,” Foster mumbled.

“There’s a wolf! On your right side! It’s going to get you!” Mr. Marshal yelled as the wolf collided with Schuster and bit his upper arm.

Schuster’s head clanged off the Marshal’s swing set, and he caught himself on it. He felt that if the wolf pulled him to the ground, he would never stand up again; Wayne had advised officers to make themselves look bigger. The wolf dodged the kick, and the kick unsteadied Schuster.

Foster told Schuster to hide in the Marshal’s house, but Schuster thought separating was impossible.

The wolf wrenched Schuster’s arm behind him, and he let him. If resisting a K-9 dog’s bite-and-hold technique caused further injury, resisting a wolf would cause greater damage. His clenched Beretta 92 pointed away from the wolf. He fired the tranquilizer gun at the wolf, intending to pry the wolf’s mouth open after it dozed off. Although the wolf bit shallowly, and whimpered like his mouth hurt, he seemed unwilling to release Schuster soon.

Sloppily, Foster stabbed the wolf’s hindquarters.

The wolf released Schuster’s arm to snap at Foster, so Schuster shot the wolf’s torso. Yelping, the wolf jumped and lunged to his left side. He jerked his left arm over his head, tearing his sleeve. Schuster fired again. Then the wolf latched onto his right forearm, and bounded backward, pulling Schuster face-down into the mud.

The wolf drew Schuster’s arm out from his side, a position that prevented transferring the handgun to his other hand. Schuster knelt on his knees and other hand, but the wolf jumped on top of him. Schuster groped for his flashlight. The wolf was scrabbling his arms and leaning its weight on Schuster’s lower back. When a paw slid off, the wolf regained his footing. His nails dug into Schuster’s skin. Hoping to scare the wolf, Schuster fired twice. He worried about harming somebody behind him or inside a house.

Mr. Marshal said during the attack: “I’m calling the police.”

“Okey-dokey, just stay inside,” Schuster called. “The situation will be controllable sometime, so don’t worry.”

When Schuster told John about the attack, he expected officers to swarm the Marshal’s backyard. Schuster refused to explain why he and Foster fought the wolf alone. During the attacks, Schuster heard the police and other wolf responders attempting to capture the other two wolves.

Then Foster did something to the wolf, but neither Schuster nor Mr. Marshal saw what. Again, the wolf attacked Foster.

With Schuster’s left arm, he blocked its attempt to bite his head or neck, and he shot the wolf between its chest and neck.

Whimpering, the wolf darted behind the Parkers’ garbage; Schuster was still shooting. Doubting he would hit the wolf, he fired through the plastic cans.

Schuster worried about low ammunition because he had left his other magazine in the police car’s trunk. One magazine seemed sufficient at the time, but since the attack on Foster and Schuster, the Wolftown Police Department required all patrol officers to carry at least two magazines on their persons. He considered borrowing Mr. Marshal’s shotgun despite the impracticality; Wisconsin law allowed it.

Earlier, Foster had suggested somebody watched them; Schuster thought he noticed ordinary civilians peeking through the windows and the like. Now, as Schuster told John, he “felt like a subject was hiding and watching us. Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t just watching like people do at crime scenes. I’m not 100% positive there was somebody there and maybe I was just worried Mr. Lyons would take one more potshot at the wolf.”

He tried to drag Foster one-armed to Mr. Marshal’s house and point his gun simultaneously.

Seeing Schuster struggle to drag Foster one-armed to Mr. Marshal’s house and aim his gun, Mr. Marshal asked, “Are the things you accused the police chief of true?”

“You’re asking now? I mean, yeah, we have a lot of evidence, but why ask now?”

“I can get Officer Foster indoors,” Mr. Marshal said.

“Okay, but if the wolf comes back, drop him and go inside,” Schuster said.

“I’ll keep an eye out for the wolf.”

A savage wolf mauling a civilian whom Foster intended to protect but was instead protected by would disturb him forever.

“Why ask about Chief Laufenberg?” Schuster asked.

“Maybe my wife won’t yell as loudly if I tell her you two need to give evidence or something. Where’s your backup?” Mr. Marshal dragged Foster to the back porch steps.

“The police are doing their jobs,” Schuster said. “They have to catch the wolves.”

“What about the ambulance?”

“EMTs can’t put themselves in danger because if they were bitten, they couldn’t treat us. They’re doing their jobs, too. The situation is controllable, but we appreciate your assistance. Take it easy.”

(John privately suspected half of Schuster’s reassuring sentences lied.)

The wolf ripped Schuster’s ballistic vest and skin, and he collided with a Little Tikes push-and-ride car. Sliding, Schuster ordered Mr. Marshal to drop Foster and run indoors.

Unusually, compared to Schuster’s previous encounters with him, Mr. Marshal did not comply. Foster spluttered along the lines of, “Mr. Marshal, go inside.” Schuster repeated himself until Mr. Marshal said he had shut the back door behind himself.

The wolf had bitten through Foster’s cheek. Mr. Marshal turned gurgling Foster on his side, hoping the blood would pour onto the floor instead of into his mouth.

Meanwhile, Schuster managed to sit up, still under woozy attack by the wolf, who tended to stay behind him, jump, or yank his arms. The wolf still latched onto Schuster’s left arm, but weaklier. Then when he transferred the gun to his right hand, the wolf snapped at his right arm. He fired blindly once, the wolf hid, and Schuster fired again.

Radioing dispatch, Schuster bolted for the door, but, again, the wolf attacked his ballistic vest. Outside, Schuster slammed the back door and drew his pepper spray.

Mr. Marshal said through the kitchen window, “Do you want my shotgun? I can shoot it, but what if the buckshot hits you, too?”

The wolf charged the window, and Schuster followed, yelling, “Shut the window!” Mr. Marshal thought of the same idea.

The wolf’s front claws screeched down the glass. Schuster yanked the wolf’s tail; Mr. Marshal locked the window.

As the wolf drunkenly turned, Schuster tripped it. He pepper-sprayed the wolf; relatively little blew into his face because of the height difference.

The wolf and Schuster toppled off the concrete back step, Schuster losing his grip on the wolf’s tail on the way down. Though the wolf did not bite Schuster, it bowled him over and aimed for his head and neck. He pistol-whipped the wolf’s snout, thinking a broken jaw would deter biting and attacking the eyes might equalize the two species’ night vision. It felt like hammering the teeth deeper into his forearm.

Thinking the wolf had bitten Schuster, Mr. Marshal opened the window just enough to yell, “I’m worried about missing, but do you want me to shoot the wolf?”

Lacking a safe way to reach the shotgun himself, Schuster said, “Okay. Just don’t shoot the glass out.”

The wolf careened between the houses. Mr. Marshal fired his shotgun once, Wayne his .44 Magnum six times, and Officer Lang his Beretta seven times. Schuster had heard Wayne and Lang in the distance but assumed they were discussing the other two wolves.

Wayne followed the wolf and Lang remained in the backyard. Schuster called, “Wayne, don’t go alone!”

“I’m with him,” Lang said. “Where is Zach?”

“I bet it crawled off to die in a hole,” Wayne yelled, sounding full of adrenaline and matter of fact, while Schuster said, “In the Marshal’s kitchen.”

“Check on him. We’re fine here,” Lang said.

Mrs. Marshal was comforting the children in another room.

“Well, maybe the rain just makes it look worse than it is,” Mr. Marshal said. “For you, anyway. Not Officer Foster.”

Schuster opened Foster’s mouth. He worried Foster died from Schuster forgetting to check his airway, breathing, and circulation after the first attack, but Megan said that he died of massive blood loss.

“The dispatcher walked me through first aid. Maybe I’d better use it on you.”

Foster spluttered.

“Take it easy, buddy,” Schuster said.

Lang and Wayne crashed through the door. “The wolf isn’t moving fast or well, but it’s out there,” Wayne said.

“He can’t wait for an ambulance,” Schuster said.

“Neither can you,” Lang said. “Wayne and I will get him to the police car, and I’ll drive.”

“Then I’ll hunt the wolf. It’s weakest now, so all of us probably won’t be attacked getting Foster to the police car,” Wayne said.

“I’ll drive,” Schuster said. He felt like the time between donating blood and eating the orange juice and the cookie.

“Wayne, you need to apply pressure,” Lang said.

“I’ll do it,” Schuster said.

“Who will do it to you?”

Mr. Marshal asked, “Will you get Dennis Laufenberg sentenced for something?”

“What? Yeah, probably,” Schuster said.

“I’ll go with Officer Foster,” Mr. Marshal said.

In retrospect, Schuster believed Lang tourniqueted his arms with Schuster's and his tourniquet. He remembers he, Wayne, and Mr. Marshal providing first aid to Foster, which required all hands constantly, and nobody else had the opportunity.

“I’m good to drive,” Schuster said.

“Fine. Foster doesn’t have time for an argument,” Lang said.

They discussed how to transport Foster to the police car. When the police began chasing wolves, they asked Dr. Groves to wait for casualties in the Wolftown Medical Clinic. Wolftown’s two ambulances took two other officers to the clinic, but Schuster could not tell John why.

Mr. Marshal and Wayne carried Foster and, Lang and Schuster guarded them against the wolf. Schuster borrowed Mr. Marshal’s shotgun and Wayne had reloaded his revolver.

“What are you doing here?” Schuster asked.

“Wayne stopped cooperating. I said I was chasing him to bring him back,” Lang said.

“So, he stopped cooperating, too,” Wayne said.

Nobody saw the wolf, including Lang and Wayne, who continued hunting the wolf.

Schuster had asked Lang to check on the Parkers and Mr. Lyons, and later in the morning, Lang told him they reached a friend’s house safely.

Stephanie and Megan overheard the wolf attack on the radio and waited for Schuster and Foster at the Wolftown Medical Clinic. Schuster told Stephanie that Foster told him to tell her to tell Megan to stay away from him because, regarding other wolf attack victims, Dr. Groves had not ruled out rabies. Apparently, Mr. Marshal promised Foster he would give Schuster a couple of personal messages for Megan. They did.

The medical clinic already typed all policemen’s blood and, with type AB+ blood, Foster could receive any type. Dr. Groves could not collect blood from pregnant Megan and Schuster lost over one pint, and so Stephanie donated.

Because Foster worried about losing his wedding ring and infecting Megan, Schuster asked a nurse for a specimen container.

Dr. Groves called an air ambulance.

Worried that the Wolftown emergency services could not transport Foster to the landing site, and they might request county resources too late, Schuster called Sheriff Jordan’s home. The Sheriff immediately coordinated with the air ambulance, then notified the Wolftown Police Department. Sheriff Jordan thought if the Wilde County Sheriff’s Department appeared, the local police might not disperse them.

The country police escorted the ambulance crew and Foster safely to the air ambulance, but Dr. Groves and Stephanie forced Schuster to remain in the Wolftown Medical Clinic. Nobody saw a wolf. Stephanie and Megan drove to the University of Washington Health University Hospital.

Foster died in surgery before Stephanie and Megan arrived. Transfusions and IVs pumped more blood and fluids than a human body normally held, but Foster bled too rapidly. His heart stopped and he could not be resuscitated.

Schuster convinced Dr. Groves he could continue working, and they hid some injuries from the police. Schuster showed John his bite wounds and the claw marks on his back. The wolf sprained or tore his shoulder’s muscles. Dr. Groves had no idea how the wolf’s teeth caused serious but not severe damage.

Dr. Groves asked Schuster if he or Mr. Marshal should receive the last rabies vaccine. Schuster told him to vaccinate Mr. Marshal. On Monday or Tuesday, Dr. Groves expected the shipment, and he and Schuster relied on the incubation period. Although the first victims’ rabies test results were negative, he would vaccinate Schuster anyway.

Because the Marshals had one bathroom and Mr. Marshal worried about infecting a friend, Schuster let him shower at his house.

He washed the blood out of the police car’s front seats, but some soaked the upholstery. Dr. Groves said the rabies virus died when the blood or other fluids dried, so Schuster borrowed Stephanie’s hairdryer.

Schuster disinfected Foster’s wedding ring and left it to dry on his dresser. He washed off the mud and blood, changed his uniform, and wrote a note for Stephanie, warning her he would disinfect the bathroom later.

Dropping off Mr. Marshal, Schuster noticed Mrs. Marshal scolding him, but it did not seem to be a domestic altercation.

Then Schuster returned to work because the Wolftown Police Department lacked enough officers. He offered to wash out the back of the police car, but Karl Henry volunteered, saying he needed to protect the sutures. They talked while he cleaned.

Deputy Chief Phelps assigned Schuster to routine patrols instead of unpaid administrative leave, but only for the duration of the wolf emergency.

Schuster had asked Lang to check on the Parkers and Mr. Lyons, and later in the morning, Lang told him they reached a friend’s house safely.

Due to the holidays, the next post will be on November 29, and there will be no post in December. Regular, every-three-weeks posting will resume on January 3, 2025.

“They were killing my friends.”—Audie Murphy

Charles said, “If we stay here, we’re going to be killed or captured. Taking the machine gun nest might solve some problems, but I don’t know what will happen. And I can’t order anybody to do it or ask for volunteers, so I’m going to take the machine gun nest by myself.”

“We did already try as a group,” Corporal Winters said, but the other seven’s reactions ranged from skeptical to witnessing insanity to fear. “He’s made the decision.”

“Corporal, you’ll be the leader.”

“Shall we come after you?”

“If it works, but only volunteers. Corporal Winters, handle the volunteers. Whoever stays here surrenders. If it works, I’ll try to come back for you.”

“We will be here. You can sneak up on the machine gun alone, but nobody fights in every direction alone.”

He and Charles prepared.

The 3rd Section and a few stragglers across the 2nd Compagnie threw smoke grenades. Charles, Corporal Winters, and a few others crossed the street.

Corporal Winters and the others retreated, hoping the enemy had not counted them.

In the building, Private Roux activated the mechanical and silent spider. He directed it upstairs and gave Charles directions to the unstable attic stairs.

The others retreated.

Charles went up the stairs, rifle slung over his shoulder. Before he opened a door, he said, “Surrender,” waited a few seconds, and opened it slowly. The British forces typically did not attack surrendering soldiers; he assumed the Scottish guerillas viewed surrender the same way.

Wood clattered upstairs. Footsteps approached and Charles kicked his rifle into a corner and stuck his bayonet in the back of his belt. He knelt on both knees with his hands in the air.

“I'm surrendering!” he called, and kept repeating it.

The two Scottish guerillas peeked through the door and decided one should take him prisoner and the other check for other French soldiers. The guerilla who remained with Charles let his rifle swing loosely.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the guerilla said.

Charles drew his bayonet and stabbed the guerilla through his body armor. The guerilla thumped onto the floor, calling for the other one. Covering his mouth, Charles sat on him. He switched to deflecting the strikes and winced as his bayonet hit his sternum.

The other soldier ran into the room, rifle raised, and Charles charged with the bayonet in his hand. His shot missed. Charles stabbed him three times in the left ribs. Panting and trying to ignore the blood, he grabbed his rifle and ran upstairs.

The spider followed.

There was a massive hole in the floor, which was why Charles brought the spider. He held a length of paracord in front of the sensor. Roux scuttled the spider up the walls to an exposed ceiling beam. He made the spider extend its legs and wrap around an exposed ceiling beam, like a grappling hook.

Skinny Charles tied the rope around him and distrusted the beam. He swung over the gap, and, to his surprise, the beam held. The floor wobbled, and he only untied the rope when it went taut.

The British guerillas removed the ladder from the trap door, but, again, the spider functioned as a grappling hook and Charles climbed the paracord.

Whatever had damaged the house also damaged the hidden panel in the attic. Charles opened it and looked through, into a narrow passageway lined with boxes of munitions and ammunition.

Charles untied the paracord and rolled it up neatly. He gave the spider the signal to return to Roux, who obeyed.

Six-and-a-half feet tall, Charles crouched, head scraping the ceiling’s peak, and walked slowly and evenly. He removed everything rattly and shiny, but still made too much noise. Or did he sound like somebody sneaking? He could explain that—he became separated from his unit and had absolutely no idea who anybody was or if he was inside British or French lines or in no-man’s land, and so moved cautiously.

Passing open boxes, Charles pocketed grenades and dangled them from his ballistic vest’s cover. He made a mental note of various types locations. He continued down the row of buildings.

A hidden attic door opened. Charles stepped closer to the far wall and set his rifle down. The older-middle-aged Scottish female Scottish guerilla headed for the destroyed house.

Charles had to stop her but had never killed a woman before, at least, that he definitively knew to be female. Asymmetrical warfare was the most obvious reason to enter the attic. Also, the French forces warned Edinburgh that anybody in the city limits would be considered hostile, and the British forces believed it.

Hearing Charles’ footsteps, she turned. Charles twisted the much smaller guerilla and clamped a hand over her mouth. The helmet dented the fiberglass overhead, and they knocked against the walls. He dreaded killing a woman; threatening her at bayonet point felt wrong.

“Stop struggling and I won’t kill you,” he whispered. “Shut up and I won’t kill you.”

She resisted, and the bayonet cut her. He choked her into unconsciousness multiple times and stunned her, which allowed him to gag her with one sleeve from the British jacket and tie her up with paracord.

During the struggle, another guerilla called for her. Charles stunned the gagged woman and stooped next to the door. He hesitated, but he thought asymmetrical warfare was the most obvious reason to enter the attic. Also, the French forces warned Edinburgh that anybody in the city limits would be considered hostile, and the British forces believed it.

As the guerilla entered, Charles muffled him and stabbed him twice times through the left ribs, shutting his eyes and turning aside. His bayonet slid off a rib. The male guerilla collapsed in the doorway, taking Charles with him. The woman was thrashing against the floor. Subduing her distracted Charles from the warm, sticky blood soaking through his glove.

Expecting another guerilla, or maybe more, to check on the other two, Charles moved as quickly as he could backward. He bumped into the far wall and found the door.

Gun raised to clear the room, a Scottish guerilla stepped over the male guerilla. Charles shot him, then the other guerilla, who also fired at him. He gasped as a bullet tore through the side of his ballistic vest.

Charles ducked through the doorway into the real attic and shut the door. The bullets barely missed his arm. He stacked full but easily liftable cardboard boxes in front of the door to slow them down. He stepped clear just before the guerillas fired through it. He breathed heavily for a few seconds, turning the light machine gun’s switch from safe to automatic fire.

The guerilla shot with a rifle; Charles sprayed the door and passageway with light machine gun fire, dodging behind boxes, a rolled-up rug, and a rocking horse. Charles found the trap door downstairs, noticing people speaking and moving in the room below it.

He worried about bouncing a grenade off the closet walls and detonating the ammunition. But the mortar shells were a house-length away, he was pretty sure a blast wave could not ignite grenades’ fuses, and if grenade blasts cooked off rounds, he would have found out by now. Still, he was considering setting off an explosion below an ammo dump. Blowing up a row of buildings full of guerillas was acceptably gruesome in certain circumstances. However, the secondary explosions spread shrapnel and debris for up to a mile, risking not only his own section and the stragglers but also the hard-pressed remains of other French units.

A ladder clattered against the trapdoor. He ran to the trapdoor and threw a grenade into the room. He turned away and protected his head. His ears rang. The floors and walls vibrated and splinters and fragments blew into the bedroom. To his relief, the walls and ceiling protected the ammunition dump.

He sneezed from the dust and swept the room with his rifle. There was an additional entrance to the flat from the outside. He locked it and barricaded it with an armchair; guerillas could not crawl through the frames that once contained glass.

Charles tossed a grenade into each room; there was no good reason for a civilian non-combatant to be in the building. Also, when the French declared a city hostile, the British evacuated it. But he worried about civilian casualties. Charles killed a guerilla shooting from the lavatory. He swept the tiny bathroom with his rifle because he thought a grenade blast would knock the door off the hinges and spray him with ceramic fragments.

The building consisted of a flat over, judging from the smell, a thriving fish and chip shop.

Feet trampled overhead and Scottish guerillas pounded against the boxes.

Charles clattered down the stairs and grabbed the banister to halt abruptly at the half-landing. He leaned around, fired, and leaned back. The Scottish guerillas returned fire. Charles suppressed their fire with machine gun bursts and drove them into the kitchen, killing one and wounding one. He let another guerilla drag him away, wishing they spoke different languages, but he would have understood the meaning.

Overhead, Scottish guerillas creaked creaking wood and rattled debris. Charles rammed the door, locked from the other side. He almost dodged the guerilla’s rifle fire—a bullet passed through the door and embedded in his chest plate, and he involuntarily bent over, breathless.

He pressed against the wall, trying to straighten and breathe, and shot at an angle through the door. Relying on the walls to protect him, he drew his pistol and clustered shots near the deadlock and doorknob.

In the direction from which Charles snuck, rifle fire began—Corporal Winters.

A bullet pinged off Charles’ helmet. Switching to his light machine gun, he turned and fired at the guerillas on the stairs.

Charles swung the door open, just enough to toss a grenade over the counter between the kitchen and seating area. He slammed the door, which drifted open. Pressing his back against the wall and turning his face away, he fired randomly up the stairs. The blast knocked the door off its hinges and onto Charles, and he jumped against the wall from surprise. The door provided decent cover from the smaller debris, but a piece of shrapnel sliced into it. He wondered vaguely if he blew himself up.

The explosion also scared the Scottish guerillas stacked on the staircase.

Seconds after the blast, Charles shoved the door off him and then pushed it upright and leaned against it to fire upstairs. He stood too close to the doorway to detonate a grenade and he worried about it rolling down the stairs, but he expected the guerillas to fire from another room.

He obstructed the staircase with the door. Crouching, he alternated at the guerillas on the stairs and sweeping the kitchen. Charles expected an attack from one of the other rooms or the manned fighting positions outside.

The display case and faux wood counter lay in ruins, the cash register smashed. His grenade had blasted most of the glass outward and dispersed the fixtures’ glass and plastic. The chairs and tables had scooted and toppled.

A guerilla and Charles exchanged fire from a room off the kitchen. Glancing at the windows, he moved closer and aimed bursts first at torso level and second at floor level. He read the label, office. From behind, A bullet punched through his shoulder body armor, but not his skin. Groaning, and turning around to fire at the guerillas on the stairs again, he noticed the firing inside the office ceased. He darted to the wall between the office and the janitorial closet and shot the janitorial closet the same way as the office. He reloaded and repeated the process in the restroom.

Meanwhile, the guerillas won their wrestling match with the door. A female guerilla urged them to attack, saying, “It’s just one bloke!” He heard something about crossfire, but whether the guerillas worried about causing friendly fire or the combatants in the outside positions caused it, Charles heard nothing clear.

Charles felt like soldiers or guerillas outside stared at him, but he did not see helmets. He could have missed them. He knelt to change to a fresh magazine, though the old had enough rounds for another burst, and double-check his rifle’s full magazine.

The back door opened, Charles snapped the magazine in place, aimed, and shot the British soldier through the nose. He searched for the window behind the machine gun nest distracted him from the stain. Corporal Winters and he theorized, but he doubted he could fix choosing the wrong position this time.

Something metallic landed on the floor. Without actively considering whether the enemy threw the grenade or he dropped one, and while performing improvisations on fuck, Charles picked up the grenade. He threw it through the broken window as hard as he could.

Charles skidded into the far end of the room, covering his head and thinking he now, definitely, was being blown up. Glass and plastic tore and scraped his uniform and skin. It cracked under his knee protection and dug through his fingerless gloves.

Fortunately, his grenade blast had broken most of the glass. The guerilla’s grenade knocked out the rest, towards the inside, sending large shards over his head. Plastic frames and screens from the display cases flapped and skittered. Bits of window frame crashed against the wall. He flinched as the debris tumbled onto him, eventually running out of muscles and trying to squeeze his internal organs.

For several seconds after the blast faded, Charles continued trying to curl into a ball and scrunch his neck into his chest. Despite the ringing in his ears, he should have heard his heart pound.

“Bloody hell,” Charles muttered. He wondered when the outside gunfire close to the fish and chip shop began.

He began unfolding and thinking about injuries.

The grenade had detonated outside, probably sparking the gunfire aimed elsewhere, which slowed and stopped.

Completely missing and forgetting to count his rounds, Charles shot at the first British soldier through the emergency exit.

Charles crouched, moving from window to window, verifying the machine gun’s position.

Guerillas were thumping on the staircase and overhead, but Charles fired the light machine gun at British soldiers aiming around the emergency exit. He wondered why the guerillas did not throw another grenade, and if the thumping indicated the guerillas evacuated the ammunition dump from a structurally unsound building or if he would fight thirty to forty alone. If so, at least they would come through the doorway a few at a time.

Charles paused firing to roll a grenade out the door, but the pause gave a British soldier the opportunity to aim carefully. A bullet penetrated his ballistic vest, winding him again. He shut his eyes against the grenade’s debris, though his goggles protected him. Before he could take a breath, another bullet lodged in his chest. Both bullets burned. He fumbled his machine gun, shooting in the wrong direction. Due to a flinch, a bullet skimmed his cheek. He fired erratically, constantly.

He opened his eyes and swapped the empty machine gun for his rifle and shot the scrambling soldier through the knee. He fell, but Charles aimed at him and the other soldier who pulled him.

Charles still thought everybody observed him. He pulled the pin from a grenade, and firing again, counted to five, and tossed a grenade into the chosen British fighting position, deliberately remembering to throw the grenade and not the gun. To his left and right, the guerillas opened fire, but ducking from the blast meant he dodged the bullets.

Returning fire with his rifle, Charles clambered onto the booth. He dropped through the window, cutting himself on broken glass. Other British soldiers or guerillas were yelling about crossfire. His ears rang longer than the other grenade blasts.

He landed simultaneously with a British soldier, with whom he grappled. The British soldier choked Charles, but he drew his pistol and shot randomly behind him. The British soldier disarmed dizzy Charles. Drawing his bayonet, Charles tackled the enemy.

French guns fired. He had absolutely no idea if his commotion prompted friendly units to fight, but regardless of the reason, the French forces might preoccupy some of the enemy.

A second soldier struck his kidneys, then head with a rifle butt. Charles tried to go limp, except for his hands around the bloody bayonet. The second soldier yanked Charles off the soldier. Charles stabbed anything he saw, typically missing.

Two more soldiers piled into the foxhole, but Charles’ vision cleared enough to pick up his pistol and aim. The third soldier tried to disarm the gun.

A .50 caliber machine gun fired, and to Charles’ relief, it was not the one outside the fish and chips shop. That one was the closest to the 3rd Section.

Gripping the gun tighter, Charles stabbed the third soldier’s arm and shoulder. The soldier raised his arm, allowing Charles to slash his armpit. Charles broke out of the third soldier’s hold, but the fourth soldier grabbed his bayonet arm. Charles kicked the third soldier in the groin. Trying to wrench his bayonet arm free of the fourth soldier. He fired at the fourth soldier’s head.

Blood spurted across Charles’ goggles and he thought something blinded him, but his eye did not hurt. His knees weakened. Wobbling, he steadied himself on the sandbags. A bullet whizzed over his head and he flattened.

“I saw him fall,” a soldier said.

Charles remembered he wore goggles. As he rolled over and pulled the goggles down, intending to blink carefully, a soldier shot him. Two burning spots appeared on his abdomen and back, closer to his side than his spine. Eyes squeezed shut from pain, he bit through his lip in a failed attempt to stifle a groan. Gingerly, Charles blinked. It’s just the bloody goggles, he thought.

Some of the other units’ gunfire stopped.

Trying to otherwise lie still, he tightened his fingers around his bayonet and pistol and tried to remember how many rounds remained in his rifle. If he counted correctly, he had two grenades left.

“White knuckles,” a soldier said.

Charles had taken the machine gun nest and could have surrendered as wounded (legitimately surrendered, not trick the enemy), but any soldier could replace the machine gunners, leaving his section and the stragglers in the same predicament they were in when he left them.

“Oi, are you wounded?” a soldier asked. He was probably a medic.

What else do you bloody well expect? Charles thought.

A British soldier was saying essentially the same thing and another was suggesting taking him prisoner as Charles pushed himself up on his hands and knees.

The British soldiers took cover and began firing. Shooting one-handed, Charles slumped against the back of the foxhole. He sheathed his bayonet and grabbed his machine gun to suppress the fire. It clicked, and the .50 caliber machine gun’s barrel was too long to turn on the adjacent fighting positions.

Charles darted a look over the side of the fighting position and fired at the British soldier crawling out of it, away from him. A bullet from the other side struck his back. He counted the pistol’s rounds properly and switched to his rifle.

The third British soldier lunged at him, but Charles killed him. He pushed the body aside.

Charles lay almost even with the sandbags and reloaded the light machine gun. Blood smeared it, but lying on dead bodies bothered him more. Don’t pass out, he thought. If the enemy is dead, they aren’t a problem anymore.

Thinking, Charles read the smoke grenade’s label aloud and threw it into the street. He told Corporal Winters that red smoke meant he took the machine gun nest. He needed to be extremely sure he threw a smoke grenade, rather than a fragmentation grenade.

He had insufficient cover for fragmentation grenades, which would have neutralized the firing positions closest to the .50 caliber machine gun’s barrel. Then he could have held off the British soldiers with the machine gun.

And if Charles moved the bodies, he would have enough cover. Or he could cover himself with a body When a soldier jumped on a grenade, his body blocked or slowed most of the shrapnel, and it probably worked the same way at a distance, but he was not sure he could lie under a body, let alone in time to take cover and intend it to be blown up.

A grenade exploded and glass flew from a building down the street, as Charles decided to eliminate closer targets when they approached him.

He wriggled around to the .50 caliber machine gun, lay prone, and scrunched his legs. The recoil jerked his arms and jarred his entire body.

Other, muffled gunfire began again, and he wondered how far away it was.

Charles fired short bursts, aiming badly, but more-or-less at the British fighting positions. Sand poured from the British sandbags and bricks crumbled. Charles broke windows and hoped civilians were not inside. Noticing he fired back and forth in a straight line, he randomized his targets.

The British returned fire with their rifles and Charles heard a different .50 caliber machine gun in the distance. He dreaded being within firing range. Any second, he expected it, a grenade, mortar round, or some other way to neutralize a machine gun nest. Sticky blood flowed from his bullet wounds, but Charles could not stop firing for first aid.

His ears rang constantly. With sweaty hands, Charles fumbled the reloading. Unfamiliar with the British design, he understood the French .50 caliber machine gun enough to inspect it. He relied on guns sharing the same, obvious, basic principles. He glanced around, knowing he was most vulnerable then. He doubted he would win a hand-to-hand fight or aim accurately.

He was thirsty, but he lost the water reservoir’s straw. Charles did not have time to take off his reservoir and drink from it because British soldiers crawled into the closer firing posts. If he fired the machine gun, they would probably stop.

Charles turned the machine gun to its closest possible targets, and a bullet thudded into his back. He rolled over, groping for a grenade; he and the machine gun could not fire behind him unless he left the foxhole. Dozens of British soldiers would open fire if he moved to the concrete.

Assuming the fish and chip’s shop brickwork shielded him from the blast, Charles threw a grenade. He returned to the machine gun. There was few debris to spread, but pieces of ceiling crashed to the floor.

Charles periodically checked the fish and chips shop and closest fighting positions. But he never fired at the medic or soldiers retrieving casualties, though they targeted him. He aimed unreliably to the right and left of the machine gun. A British soldier shot his buttocks and a ricochet passed through his boot and bumped against his foot, stinging it.

The soldiers from the direction he came seemed to fight him and a French unit he could not see. Charles suspected it was Corporal Winters and the 3rd Section. He could not decide whether to attack them more or if it would be friendly fire. Maybe the other French units needed machine gun support more, but he could not locate them.

Lying on his stomach hurt his whole abdomen. Charles’ arms and shoulders ached and burned, and sweat ran into his eyes and stung his bitten lip. Bells grew louder in his ears.

He struggled with the machine gun’s recoil, so aimed further up the street, in front of the 3rdPlatoon’s route.

Another grenade detonated in the row of shops. The French gunfire was advancing steadily towards his position.

Carefully identifying the helmets as the enemy’s, Charles fired the rifle and light machine gun’s last rounds behind him. Then he severed a rifle strap from a dead British soldier and shot the rifle.

He occasionally looked at the British forces behind the 3rd Platoon’s route. British soldiers threw smoke grenades from the fish and chip shop’s side to the opposite side. With more effort than he usually required, he threw the last grenade diagonally from his position. He swiveled the machine gun quickly and shot several bursts, but always kept the barrel pointed at the far side’s buildings.

Charles’ erratic bursts of automatic fire became more erratic and he squeezed the trigger more weakly. Gripping the gun tired his hands.

The British soldiers reached the position adjoining his, and the British gunfire died down suspiciously quickly.

Charles fired the British rifle until it clicked. As he struggled to find another one, a British soldier’s bullet ploughed across his back’s body armor. With a sudden burst of energy, Charles tugged the hot barrel. The British soldier had screwed a bayonet to the barrel, and could still fire the rifle, which missed Charles. The British soldier broke free. Holding a bayonet detached from his rifle, another British soldier jumped on Charles, knocking him onto his back.

Pinned down, Charles held off the British soldier’s bayonet. He knew exactly how to break free, but was too weak to push against the knife one-handed and break the hold with his other arm. When he tried, the knife sliced his neck near the collarbone. The other soldier yelled something and fired. Charles flinched, but the bullet did not strike him.

He thought he heard Corporal Winters’ voice, which was odd. A French rifle was firing quite close to Charles, prompting the British soldier to look behind him. Charles clenched the soldier’s arm to the soldier’s body, but the soldier broke his grasp.

The British soldier fell on Charles, which confused him, but he snatched the bayonet.

As Charles plunged the bayonet into the soldier’s neck, Corporal Winters yelled, “Lieutenant!” The blood poured smoothly, but he expected a spurt or a gush. Again, Charles stabbed the soldier.

Charles heaved the soldier’s body off him, hearing Roux shout, and looked for the other soldier who attacked him. Attacking the other soldier, Charles noticed that an exit wound covered much of that soldier’s face. Charles considered it friendly fire, and he kept his head low.

Very muffled and in French, Corporal Winters yelled, “Lieutenant! Don’t fire at the fish and chips shop!”

“What?” Charles yelled, while Corporal Winters yelled, “We’re coming from the fish and chips shop! Don’t fire at us!”

Corporal Winters and Charles repeated themselves until Charles thought of trying French. “Qoui? Quoi?”

“Don’t fire at the fish and chips shop!”

“I won’t!” he said in French.

“Keep your head down! We’re coming!”

Charles returned to the machine gun and noticed somebody run towards him from behind. Clumsily, Charles drew his bayonet and lunged.

Saying, “It’s me, sir, Corporal Winters. Relax, relax, relax,” Corporal Winters disarmed him with an ease that would be embarrassing if Charles felt less panicked. He blocked Charles’ punch.

“Bloody hell, sorry, I didn’t know it was you. What are you doing here?” Charles groaned, attempting to roll over and reach the machine gun.

Corporal Winters grabbed the gun first. “I’m on the machine gun. Relax. Let go.” He pried one of Charles’ hands free.

“Take cover in the fish and chips shop. You’re too exposed here,” Charles said, while Corporal Winters yelled for Côté to drag him into the shop.

“Well, sir, with all due respect, shouldn’t one have thought of that before one cluttered up one’s position with corpses?”

“Fine, I’ll make room for you.” Pushing the bodies with no effect, Charles realized Corporal Winters ordered a soldier into fire, and Charles yelled, “Côté! Hold your position!” He had told Corporal Winters to command the men as he saw fit, but Charles knew how vulnerable a soldier was when he assisted a casualty. Their medic had died, and the British might shoot any infantry soldier.

Côté picked Charles up in the fireman’s carry.

Finally, the 3rd Section had a fully operating radio.

Over the radio, Colonel Noel heard the pain in Lieutenant Morgan’s voice.

“Madame, apologies for not holding our position, and for fighting in a different area than we were ordered to maneuver in,” Charles said.

“Don’t apologize, lieutenant. You gave us a chance to regroup and keep fighting,” Colonel Noel said, half-laughing.

“We’re still fighting.”

Charles evacuated last on the medical helicopter to reach the fish and chips shop.

In the field hospital, the friendly triage nurse overruled him. “Oh, you think you can fight me? I’m not even holding you down.”

Charles grumbled.

“We’re taking care of your men. Nobody will attack them here.”

Charles had abdominal surgery and after a day or so, he took short walks again and complained when nobody would tell him about his section’s condition.

Every day, as soon as he could walk to them, Charles visited his wounded men, and sometimes multiple times if they sustained severe wounds or required further surgery. Charles panicked when somebody else was in Jean Baudu’s intensive care cot. The nurse explained that he had been evacuated.

So during the doctor’s evening rounds, Charles said, “I’ll stop nagging you about the mass evacuation route.” The doctor could not have done anything to secure the route, but Charles thought he might have had an inkling of when to expect evacuation.

A nurse let Charles print paperwork from her computer. Charles asked an orderly if the blank paperwork arrived and it had. He filled out forms to award medals and promotions, writing the fill-ins on scrap paper first. He had never particularly thought about which muscles writing required, but, apparently, they included his sutured, scabbed, and bruised ones.

Still, he was able to return to light duty in four or five weeks, and the doctor expected him to fully recover in an additional four to eight weeks.

Charles’ eardrums healed, but continued infantry service would surely result in tinnitus, probably permanently.

During the Battle of Edinburgh, 4% of the 4th Bataillon were captured, 17% died, and another 35% were wounded. Of the 35% percent, 11% of them never returned to the military and 8% were transferred to the replacements pool due to lengthy recovery times. Their sister units had similar casualty rates, so the brigade rested and trained in a camp in Scotland well back from the fighting.

Charles read the letter’s opening lines, then checked the address, once from memory and once compared digit-by-digit with his paperwork. It matched his military address. He read it.

He went to Colonel Noel in the relatively stable Scottish town council house serving as a command center.

Charles handed the letter to Colonel Noel, “I think they addressed it to the wrong Charles Morgan.”

“You read it through?” she asked.

“Yes, madame.”

“Wouldn’t you know better than anybody how consistent the letter is to your action?”

“But I wasn’t trying to be heroic or whatever. And breaking the choke point just sort of happened.”

“You deserve it.”

“Could it be a unit citation instead?”

“It’s already been awarded. And you lead soldiers from units outside your chain of command.”

“What about the other soldiers?”

“Many of their medals and promotions came through.”

He decided to stop arguing. Privately, Charles wondered how the French Army had supply line issues during a well-planned invasion of Scotland, but could transport him to and from Paris on short notice.

Charles felt slightly better after speaking with other Croix de Guerre recipients.

The morning after the ceremony in Paris, our lieutenant began a journey to Scotland. He rode public transportation and caught rides on military transport, finally arriving on the same day he was scheduled to return. I’m not speculating whether he went away without leave or if it counted as his semi-relaxation time. But if there were consequences, wouldn’t the military police have detained him by now? (An excerpt from Sergeant Aeneas Winters' Letter to Miss Persephone Winters.)

Ironically, our lieutenant’s avoiding attention re the medal brought more. (I’m excluding the colonel having words with him.) A war reporter was assigned to us. Not only can the lieutenant not get rid of the war reporter, he must protect him. He hides, or he redirects the war reporter’s attention to us. The lieutenant is becoming the dedicated, loyal soldier who would never abandon his troops. It seems an awful lot of trouble for a punishment, but perhaps the colonel supported a bothersome consequence. (An excerpt from Sergeant Aeneas Winters' Letter to Miss Persephone Winters.)

After a long commercial fishing expedition, Bartholomew Morgan watched television and drank a beer. He dropped the bottle. It could be another Charles Morgan. Bartholomew had no idea what his son sounded like or how he behaved, but Lieutenant Charles Morgan was the right age and resembled Susan, but with Bartholomew’s nose.

From age nine, Charles lived in the government-run mandatory child-raising program, the Asylum. He and Bartholomew had no contact with each other since he entered it. The system interfered with reconnecting parents and children, but he was not sure if it was intentional or coincidental, and knew better than to ask. Further, his and Charles’ family history complicated matters.

And Bartholomew knew the family relations probably heard the news and recognized him, and maybe so would other people who knew him before the Asylum.

Reverend Mother called the novice Alice Morgan to her office, which intimidated Alice. She pressed her hands on her knees in the chair in front of Reverend Mother’s desk.

“If I’m not mistaken, you send a letter to your brother each month?” Reverend Mother asked.

“Yes, but he doesn’t respond,” Alice said. “Should I stop?”

“Oh, no. Perhaps your brother enjoys them but feels he can’t answer proper. Can you remind me of his name?”

“Charles and he’s a lieutenant.” She pronounced it the French way. “Is he all right?”

“I wouldn’t worry about him more than you already do. Is he about eighteen-years-old?”

“Yeah. His birthday is September 29th.”

“And remind me which division?”

Alice instantly translated it into English. “The 43rd Infantry, Land Army. It’s French.”

“I’m horrid with French. Write it down, please, so I can compare.” She handed Alice a sticky note and a pencil.

Alice wrote it. “Did something happen to it?” She thought, Did they do something wrong?

“No need to fret. So the Charles Morgan I read about was probably him. For fighting in the Battle of Aberdeen in November, he’s won the Croix de Guerre.”

“Posthumously?” Alice asked.

“No. He’s alive, as of a few days ago. He had barely any wounds, and he’s recovered from them. Physical, anyhow; it may be too soon for the others. Would you like to hear how it happened?”

“Of course, I haven’t heard anything from him.”

Afterward, Alice said, “I’m not surprised he could’ve fought hard, but I didn’t know he could do things like that.”

“I know almost nothing about the military, but few men can.”

“Can I have an opinion in a nunnery?”

“It’s risky, but you can trust me. Go on,” Reverend Mother said.

“The Bible contradicts some stuff about the French government, so should I be happy he survived?”

“I’d be concerned if he died and you felt glad.”

Anna and Charles fell asleep, snuggled together. Gunfire woke him. He bolted upright, grabbing at a pillow, where he expected to find a gun, and shoved Anna off him. Charles was about to lunge at her, but he noticed a front-lines dispatch about the French invasion of Ireland.

Scared, Anna said things along the lines of, “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Sorry,” Charles said, staring at the television.

“Did you push me?” Anna asked, rubbing her head.

Charles got his coat. “I’ll leave. Bloody hell, I beat you up.”

“It doesn’t hurt now.”

“What else do you call it?”

“Call what?”

“You got hurt.”

“You weren’t assaulting me.”

“I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“We just won’t fall asleep in front of the telly anymore.” Anna switched it off.

“We can have sex if you want, but you probably don’t want to anymore, and you don’t want to date me.”

“I’m not breaking up with you over this. I’m okay. Nothing else needs to change. Come here.”

“Then I’m not going to fall asleep with you. See you.”

When Persephone wondered if the veteran she met knew her brother, she looked through her photos and correspondence with Aeneas. Any trace of the veteran disappeared in the digital collection, but she identified him through Aeneas’ printed photos and handwritten letters.

Charles secretly wrote down everything he could remember about the action, especially Sergeant Winters. He earned the Honor Medal for Courage and Devotion, bronze grade, and for the rest of Charles’ life, he believed Sergeant Winters deserved it. When he died, none of his belongings were sent to Persephone, and Charles doubted she had it.

But presenting it to Persephone was risky, both regarding the law and her reaction. So he said, “I wrote down the Battle of Edinburgh stuff for you. I’ve forgotten a lot and I can’t check the facts but it’s probably accurate. Do what you want with it.”

“I will,” Persephone said.

Charles and Persephone requested revolutionary aid from Mr. Tambling-Goggin in Italy. He was an old revolutionary who spent the past several decades opposing the French totalitarian regime, and a cousin of the last British king, James III.

Since Charles and Persephone thought Mr. Tambling-Goggin needed to hear everything about his service in the French Army, they immediately told him. He listened attentively, often disapproving but in a reasonable, polite way. And when Charles reached the end of the Croix de Guerre action, he said, “I was fighting on the French side and I helped them win the battle, but I wasn’t thinking about the consequences. I was just paying attention to the combat.”

“I’ve fought in combat,” Mr. Tambling-Goggin said. “I’ve spoken with many of those who have on both sides. They think of each other and their fate, but not of politics.”

Mr. Tambling-Goggin thought Charles, deep down, understood some things were always right and always wrong.

“You fought courageously,” Mr. Tambling-Goggin said, who rarely used a Latinate word. “Or was it bravely? Asking if were you scared might seem silly, but?”

“Loads,” Charles said. “The whole time.”

“So you were courageous, as few men around the world could be.”

“I told you so,” Persephone said.

“No, her brother saved me. I was about to die.”

“And you attacked him, Horatius.” But she sounded amused.

“It was friendly grappling and shouldn’t have happened.”

“A berserker, as well?” Mr. Tambling-Goggin asked.

“What?” Charles asked.

“From your blond hair, you have a bit of Viking blood. May I ask if Vikings have been speaking to you?”

“You can ask. No.”

“You did a very awful deed, in the archaic sense.”

“Impressive,” Persephone whispered.

“Anybody could’ve done it,” Charles said.

After the Welsh Revolution, Bartholomew Morgan asked Charles, “Did they give you a Croix de Guerre?” he asked.

“Why are you asking?” Charles asked.

“I heard about a Charles Morgan taking on a choke-point. It would’ve scared his dad.”

“Why would you care?”

“You’re still my son. How the hell did you survive?”

“Maybe the officers said, ‘It’s just one bloke,’ and didn’t authorize a strike.”

“Your mum would’ve—”

“Don’t talk about her.” Charles began striding to the door.

“—hated you joining the French Army—”

Charles slammed the door, but Bartholomew shouted, “—she would’ve been proud of how you can fight if you’re pressed.”

George and his friends Bertie and Eamon lolled around, looking for something to do. It was raining outside, but warm enough to play. They intended to play war but objected to the rain, and Charles said that the rain was good for their imagination. Mrs. Jenkins let them be slightly bored and read to Shafaat (who had wandered over), Evangeline, Eamon’s oldest younger sister Maureen, and Zahira, Shafaat’s younger sister.

Bertie reluctantly rummaged through the junk box himself, but Eamon pointed at something and told Bertie to pick it up. Bertie handed it to him. Interrupting the argument about who should ask permission to play with it, George called, “Charles, can we play with this junk box thing?”

In his and Anna’s bedroom, Charles was maintaining his uniform and gun and did not look up. “Is it sharp, flammable, a weapon, breakable, classified, chemical, consumable, or naked?”

“No,” George said. The last prohibition confused him because he visited museums and looked through Aunt Persephone’s art and archaeology books.

“Okay.” Charles answered the secure, red phone reserved for the king.

Meanwhile, George found a box, unusual compared to everything else in the junk box.

Anna shut the bedroom door behind herself and gently reminded the children to play quietly until the King hung up. She weaned Donna at the dining table.

The boys debated what to do with the thing in the box. George said they needed to wait for Charles to hang up and decided the call would last a while. The other three boys crowded behind him while he went to Anna. Ella, the housekeeper and Mrs. Jenkins’ reinforcement, was setting the table.

“Is this real?” George asked.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“In the junk box. We won’t play with it if it’s real.”

The others agreed, quite seriously and unanimously.

Anna weighed the bronze medal in her hand and felt the ribbon. “Yeah, it’s real.” Donna grabbed for it, but Anna said, “It isn’t for you to hold. I think it’s Charles’ medal, so you’re right, you shouldn’t play with it.”

“He doesn’t wear it,” George said.

“But Wales doesn’t have medals. Except for the Revolutionary Medal, like me Dad’s got,” Eamon said.

“He wears that one,” George said.

“The French Army has medals,” Bertie said but looked uncertain. “Wasn’t he in it?”

Shafaat came over to see.

“It’s French, the Croix de Guerre. The King doesn’t like talking about his time in the French Army, so if you ask him about it, he might be grumpy.”

“Why?” Shafaat asked.

“Sometimes memories of being a soldier makes them feel sad or scared. It’s too hard for them to talk about. So they get upset when people ask them.”

“But medals are for good guys, and Charles was a bad guy,” George said.

Bertie nudged him.

“He says so,” George said, defensively.

“What did you find?” Mrs. Jenkins asked.

“A medal, but they’re going to put it back in the box and in the junk box. It must be where Charles wants it.”

“Want to make cardboard medals?” Mrs. Jenkins said. “You can make them up. And you can make them up for all kinds of things if you don’t want a military medal.”

Everybody thought it was a good idea for after lunch, but the other boys continued to look at the closed box.

“Maybe if we left it out, he would tell us about it?” George asked, carefully setting it in the junk box. “Or would he be mad?”

Slowly, Anna said, “He left the Land Army because he couldn’t make himself kill people his superior officers wanted him to kill. I’m not going to tell you more about that. You’re too young. The decision might have affected other people, not just the ones he couldn’t kill. He feels people might be in danger if he talks about his service.”

“Why?” Shafaat asked.

“They’re fascist bad guys,” George said.

“The French government punishes people who don’t obey them. I won’t tell you how. Charles doesn’t want people to be punished because of him. Before the Revolution, he wasn’t allowed to talk about his service and he wasn’t called a veteran. Did you put it back?”

“Yeah,” George said.

“Play something else.”

Mrs. Jenkins distracted the girls, but the boys whispered amongst themselves. George went over to Anna and he and Bertie assembled them.

“You’re curious, aren’t you?” Anna asked. “I’ll ask. If he says he won’t talk about it, don’t ask again.”

They promised.

“I met him before the Revolution, but he didn’t mention it. And he might tell you he will tell you later. If he does, don’t ask him when.”

“So we won’t nag him?” George asked.

“Partly. When he got the medal, he fought for a country. His Revolutionary Medal means he fought against the country he defended. It’s a difficult emotion. Revolutionaries have trouble explaining to themselves, let alone other people.”

“We’re wondering some things,” George said. “Bertie, go on.”

“You said you’d do it,” Bertie whispered.

“It was your idea!”

The other three boys insisted.

“The Asylum raised him to be a bad guy, but he’s a good guy now. So he was confused about what to do.”

“Maybe,” Anna said.

“Or he was pretending.”

“I don’t know when he changed his mind,” Anna said.

“Or he was just following orders.”

“The army doesn’t order soldiers to do the kinds of things that earn a Croix de Guerre.” Anna wished she could categorically say, No, he didn’t do anything unethical. “I don’t think the French would’ve awarded it to somebody doing the worst stuff. People would have found out about the bad things and the government tries to hide them.”

George said, “Charles says dictatorships give out loads of pointless medals that don’t mean anything. They think it makes them look better than they are, but it doesn’t work.”

“The Croix de Guerre is a very important military medal.”

Ella said, “Ma'am, I don’t want to butt in, sometimes His Majesty lets me say what my parents told me, but he’s always been here.”

“All right,” Anna said.

“They said nobody is completely bad. Even really bad guys do something good, even if it’s once and it’s a little thing.”

Evangeline squealed about the medal, running to the junk box.

“What about it, Evie?” Charles asked.

“I found your Croix de Guerre in the junk box,” George said.

A little strained, Charles said, “I got it for action in the Battle of Edinburgh. The award says I did a lot of stuff that qualified me for the Croix de Guerre. I did it, but not everything counted. If they were going to mention teamwork, the Croix de Guerre should’ve been a unit citation.”

“I said I would ask if you would tell them about it,” Anna said.

“Anna and I have a date in twenty-four minutes, but I’ll tell you a bit about it.”

“You don’t need to cancel?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Anybody can listen.”

The boys and Charles went into the bedroom, but everybody else had something else to do. Ella hovered in the doorway and Charles waved her inside.

Charles continued ironing. “I’m telling you about it because you need to know what happens in war and you’re old enough to pay attention. You won’t understand it because you haven’t served, and you probably think everything is right and wrong. There are grey areas. Something can be right in one situation and wrong in another situation. I think killing is a grey area, and loads of people disagree with me. Listen to your parents. Pay more attention to their opinion than mine.”

“But you’re my whatever,” George said.

“Then pay attention to Mr. Tambling-Goggin. Ella, you’re old enough to figure it out by yourself.”

Ella laughed.

Then in his command voice and posture, Charles emphasized that if any of them killed anybody outside service in the military, police, the government, and so forth, they would be in huge trouble. He would not lessen the consequences, however much people asked him to. He said that self-defense and the defense of others might result in slightly less trouble, but they must turn themselves in to the police. He reverted to his normal attitude, but the boys remained rather terrified. Ella looked dutifully solemn, but Charles knew he and she had the same opinion, and he had not aimed the intimidation at her.

“During the action that I got the Croix de Guerre for. I’ve done it for the Welsh side, but nothing that deserves a medal like the Croix de Guerre. I’ve done it for the Welsh side, but nothing that deserves a medal like the Croix de Guerre. If the New Welsh Army had one, it's against regulations for an officer to award a medal to himself, so I wouldn’t have one anyway. There are no superior officers who can award it to me. I think I was on the wrong side, but at the time, I thought I was killing bad guys and that I was the good guy. I was fighting to make a bad country bigger. I shouldn’t have been. Understanding me all right?”

Ella nodded. Bertie raised his hand; the other boys looked slightly perplexed but did not ask questions.

“Yes?”

“Dad says we ought to forgive you. Sometimes we shouldn’t utterly blame you.”

“The authorities didn’t let me know I was wrong. Maybe I knew when I was your age, but I got brainwashed.”

Charles tried to explain that he needed to order soldiers into battle but was also responsible for their lives. Though the enemy wounded or killed them, unpredictably, Charles placed the soldiers in danger, and it weighed on him, whether the soldiers volunteered or were drafted. Ordering soldiers into battle felt awful. Charles said, “So I’d be happy if I didn’t have to send anybody into combat again.”

He explained that he did not want to send his soldiers into a situation where they would die. Charles thought he led them into a bad position and could not extricate them.

“Loads of them ended up dead because of me anyway,” he said. “They died in the Land Army or because of the revolution.”

“Sir, I have an opinion,” Ella said.

“Okay.”

“When you were commissioned in the French Army, you didn’t know you would overthrow the government. And it’s like being in a civil war.”

“But I knew the French government executes suspicious persons. I thought about it a lot. If you lot ever need to overthrow me, you need to think about whether or not you can fight people you know on my side. And saying things like that is why you need to listen to your parents, not to me. Bloody h—”

“H-E-double-hockey-sticks,” Ella said, and Charles chuckled.

Though he omitted the gory descriptions, he said he killed and wounded thirty to fifty of the enemy. He and his unit held off between three hundred and four hundred enemy for approximately five hours when another French division relieved them. “I felt like I was dying,” Charles said.

Then Charles pointed out the different elements on the Croix de Guerre. “The silver star means that Général Brochard mentioned me in an official report.”

Before they left, he looked into their eyes in his command posture and said with his command voice, “Don’t talk to Lady Winters about Aeneas Winters unless she mentions him.”

“Yes, sir,” they said.

Generally showing few emotions, Charles seemed more subdued than normal.

“You didn’t need to talk about it,” Anna said. “I was going to ask you in private, but Evie got there first.”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“It’s not like you to put it in a junk box.”

“I dumped stuff in boxes when I moved and didn’t see it, so I figured somebody broke into my storage space and confiscated it.”

“Do your scars come from it?” Anna asked.

“Most of the ones you saw when we met,” Charles said. “Thanks for not asking about them and my service and stuff.”

Anna stroked his beard. “When we met, I thought knowing you well would take a long time.”

For years, the French government ignored the good parts of Charles’ military records and used his experience in their anti-revolutionary propaganda.

Sporadically over the years, word had spread about the Croix de Guerre, but Charles remained silent except to a few people. He allowed them to speak, but mostly they refused. Eventually, though, the French government could not ignore it anymore. They revoked his medal and asked him to send it back.

“So I figured out the postage and spent it on candy for the kids,” Charles said in a press conference.

People speculated he intended to harmlessly irritate the French government.

When the boys were a little older, Charles told them about the Croix de Guerre in more detail. Charles drew a map and defined terms. He explained the 43rd Division’s purpose and how the French forces and British forces’ decisions led to a hard battle.

“A good combat officer has to send his men to dangerous battles where they might be killed, but he doesn’t send them out into blatantly stupid battles where everybody is going to die, like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sometimes a good combat officer ends up in a battle when everybody is going to die, and it’s not always a blatantly stupid battle, like the Chosin Reservoir. I don’t know if I’m a good officer or not, but I’ve been in hard battles. I don’t think they were blatantly stupid, and the Battle of Edinburgh wasn’t. We fought it for the wrong reasons, but we did it well. So did the British Forces.”

Charles asked a time-traveling historian, Benjamin Connor, to collect the information about his service in the Battle of Edinburgh—not to show off, but on principle, because the French government suppressed it and deleted the files. Naturally, Benjamin Connor agreed, considering Charles a rare historical relic.

The Welsh government might have hacked French files and found the data, but it was politically risky and Charles considered it a waste of government resources. However, the Welsh government and the Time Travel Institute worked together.

Benjamin used various time travel techniques to collect the lost data before the French government destroyed it. To deter political problems, he worked quietly. He and the Welsh government and he waited years to announce it.

And Charles also let Benjamin analyze it and even provided a new personal account.

Still, Charles rarely spoke about the Croix de Guerre or acknowledged he earned one.

An elderly British veteran wrote Charles a letter, explaining that they fought each other during the Battle of Edinburgh. He said they were soldiers doing their jobs, but because of that, he continued to consider Charles an enemy. But he said that Charles scared him during the battle.

Charles responded that the British forces terrified him and the wounds and death they inflicted bothered him.

(Note: It's an independent story from a world I've been working on for years; I like playing with the world when I'm sick or tired. I've written down other stories, but they haven't turned out well. I was sick, so decided to write down this one, which I haven't done before. The writing is very rough, but I think it's more-or-less what happened in the right order.)

John generally left the wolf responders alone; they seemed too tired and bedraggled to answer questions, and a few treated him with suspicion or as an intruder.

But he learned that Mayor Dwyer reluctantly mobilized the Wolf Guard in the early morning of March 11. Most had neither hunted wolves before nor joined the Wolf Guard before March 11, but they tended to own guns and patriotically worry about Wolftown’s safety. They relied on the authorities’ instructions.

Due to the flood, some responders sheltered in houses or businesses, ready to patrol the streets once the water level lowered, but most people rested in Holy Trinity. Some people preferred living in damp houses without electricity or plumbing to venturing outside and encountering the wolf.

Phil, the town plumber, and Gary, Holy Trinity's, acquired potable warm water and improvised ways to relieve people. They asked John not to describe their methods to inspectors.

Most wolf responders were male and unaffiliated with Holy Trinity, but Lutheran women popped up, apparently prepared for anything. They scrounged water-tight containers and laid out the locker rooms’ towels and washcloths in the science lab. Their hot food and coffee wafted from the Fellowship Hall, which John avoided. If he asked, “What brand is it? What’s in it?” somebody would ask why, and speaking with people all day made him too tired to explain veganism.

Eating a granola bar from his pocket, John re-read and organized his notes at the gymnasium’s folding table.

Officer Billy Schuster trudged to him. “Hi, Mr. Dalton.”

“Hi. You don’t need to call me mister,” John said, four years older than Schuster.

Previously, John had been too preoccupied to think about Schuster’s appearance, but now he noticed Schuster’s red eyes. He assumed Schuster had cried; he forgot if his eyes were red earlier.

“I’m on duty, so I call all men mister,” Schuster said. “I’m looking for Wayne.”

“He’s taking a nap, but I don’t know where.”

“Let him sleep. Half the wolf responders are too old for stuff like this. While I’m here, do you have questions for me?”

“I was told to be careful what I asked you because you answer whether or not you have authorization.”

He snorted a laugh and said, “It depends on the topic. I’ve asked Phelps and Mayor Dwyer what I’m authorized to tell you. Has Wayne told you about the attack on Foster and I?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s important to things I have to ask Wayne. I’m assuming you would be listening, so you need context. You can chime in if you want. Do you want me to tell you?”

“Sure, but I can’t help you if you intend to kill the wolf. I don’t know how I could help anyway.”

“Okey-dokey. If you want to listen but decide not to give any advice, that’s fine. It’s up to you and I won’t pressure you. With the kind of ideas we have, we need multiple perspectives. And you seem to be available.”

“I’m a lot less experienced with wolves than Wayne is. And a lot of other people.”

“I also don’t have a good way to preserve my account of what happened. I think you’d write down what you heard and it would be difficult to get the only copy from you.”

“Because of the police corruption?”

“Making multiple copies of things and stuff like that is a reflex at this point. It probably isn’t a big deal.”

“Sure, I’ll listen.”

To avoid somebody inconvenient overhearing, Schuster led John to the principal’s office, which much of Holy Trinity’s activity would bypass. Normally, John would have dubiously gone with him, especially alone, but Schuster seemed ethical.

“Just so you know, I’m not looking for revenge. I don’t care if the wolves get captured or killed or whatever, but they need to stop killing people,” Schuster said.

“I agree that they need to stop,” John said. “And most mayors would have authorized killing them.”

“You won’t like what we did to the wolf.”

“It might be acting normally for a wolf, but I feel sorry for the victims. I don’t want wolves to attack people.”

“We didn’t, either. Officer Foster and I were on unpaid administrative leave for accusing Chief Laufenberg of misconduct. We volunteered for duty because the wolves were attacking people and somebody was going to die sooner or later. We became cops to protect people and sometimes animals are involved. If Wolftown had a bigger force, we probably would’ve been given duty today instead of last night.”

The Wolftown Police Department issued officers with pepper spray, also called OC, 92 Beretta handguns, and, against the wolf, tranquilizer guns with ketamine darts. Pepper spray and grappling subdued the average unruly person in Wolftown, but Wayne was highly theoretical about pepper spray’s effects on wolves. They carried guns because many citizens owned guns and some visitors hunted. The semi-automatic handgun fired 9mm rounds and one magazine held fifteen rounds. Thus far, every attempt to tranquilize a wolf failed, but Schuster and Foster expected somebody to sedate a wolf sooner or later.

“But this morning, you shot seventeen times before reloading,” John said.

“Stephanie made me switch to my Glock,” Schuster said. “I don’t think it changes anything, but it makes her feel better.”

Left-handed, Foster carried the gun and pepper spray on his left side, but Schuster on his right. They could use weapons with the opposite hands, but less accurately.

In his briefing, Wayne essentially said, that the wolves would win a grappling match except against Tarzan.

Corporal Karl Henry advised policemen to bring bandages and tourniquets in their pockets, instead of leaving them in the patrol cars’ first aid kits, and to use the injured policeman’s first aid supplies.

On March 10, the Marshals worried Ms. Parker and her boyfriend or their friends might be unaware of a wolf near the children or unable to protect them during a wolf attack. Mr. Tyrone Marshal offered to board up Ms. Parker’s dog flap. She had already barricaded the dog flap.

On March 11, at approximately the same time as the wolf attack on Schuster and Foster, police officers and animal control nearly caught Barker and Charlie.

At 5:00 AM on March 11, Mr. Marshal woke up, letting his wife sleep in. With children inside and a wolf outside, in order to smoke a cigarette, he ran the stove’s ventilation fan and stuck his head out a kitchen window. His kitchen window faced Ms. Parker’s backyard.

Mr. Marshal looked out the backyard. Seeing a large dog different than Ms. Parker’s mutt, Rowdy, he turned on the back door’s light. He thought the animal seemed less doglike. It pushed halfway through the dog flap, paused, backed out again, and walked between the houses.

Worried about the wolf attacks, Mr. Marshal warned the homeowners. Ms. Parker told Mr. Marshal they preferred animal control over the police and asked him not to call anybody. Because the wolf left, and their quick search showed no wolves, they felt safe. He worried the wolf could have returned or would in a few minutes.

Mr. Marshal called 911, brought his shotgun and buckshot shells to the kitchen, and through the window, watched for the wolf. Also, he warned the dispatcher about his shotgun and promised when police arrived, he would store it in the master bedroom’s closet.

Schuster and Foster responded to the 911 call and saw a wolf further down Ms. Parker’s street.

The policemen woke up Ms. Parker, and Schuster assured her that the Wolftown Police Department focused on the wolves and fatal situations, disregarding everything else. Her family’s and friends’ safety concerned Schuster and Foster. Foster pointing out wolf eyes across the street changed Ms. Parker’s mind.

As if looking for a human, having little idea how else to conduct a house search for an animal, Foster and Schuster cleared the messy, dirty one-story two-bedroom house. They gathered Ms. Parker, her boyfriend Mr. Lyons, her children, and Rowdy into the master bedroom and told them to lock the door.

To block the door, Ms. Parker had piled stuff around a broken chair that Schuster considered junk but Ms. Parker might consider a legitimate piece of furniture. The pile had been scooted and toppled towards the kitchen like something shoved it from the dog flap.

Because of people smoking, Ms. Parker’s gas stove, and a cluttered house scattered with flammable things, plus Schuster and Foster’s unexpressed dubious feeling about the smoke detectors, the policemen offered to board up the dog flap themselves. Ms. Parker thought their barricade worked well; she cared slightly about damage to the door.

Ms. Parker kept Rowdy inside because of the wolf, and she and Mr. Lyons said the front door was shut when Mr. Marshal called. They wondered if he called the police on Rowdy again.

The family intended to go to sleep when the police left. Schuster and Foster thought Ms. Parker might agree to boarding up the dog door if Mr. Marshal’s description did not match Rowdy, but disturbing her sleep again would irritate her.

Meanwhile, Mr. Marshal saw the canine and heard a wolf.

Schuster and Foster picked their way back-to-back around Ms. Parker’s house to the Marshal’s house. The upkeep levels clearly marked the boundary between their properties, and less so the other neighbors.

“Do you feel like somebody is watching us?” Foster asked along the way.

“They could be,” Schuster said. “Do you think we get that feeling from animals?”

“No idea.”

Foster and Schuster asked Mr. Marshal to leave his gun inside the closet until they left and warned him that firing a gun within Wolftown’s city limits was illegal. He said, “I won’t go near it, no way. I don’t want a misunderstanding where somebody gets shot.”

They asked Mr. Marshal about their dog flap idea. He was willing to lend tools to Schuster and Foster, but absolutely never to Ms. Parker’s family or her guests. “And don’t bring the toolbox with you,” he said. For extra wolf resistance, he suggested the drill, and he volunteered to unscrew the board later.

Schuster and Foster apologized to Mrs. Marshal for waking up her and the children. Taking Mr. Marshal’s statement, they heard gunfire near Ms. Parker’s house. They told him to stay inside, lock the doors, and keep everybody away from the windows, and radioed dispatch again.

Cautiously, Schuster and Foster returned to Ms. Parker’s house, both with drawn guns. Schuster saw a wolf’s glowing eyes, but the wolf ran away.

According to Mr. Lyons, a wolf jumped near the window several times. Standing inside the bedroom, Mr. Lyons fired through the window, breaking the glass; police determined he completely missed the wolf. Schuster considered this surprisingly clear thinking compared to Mr. Lyons’ thought processes on previous calls. He and Foster warned Mr. Lyons about various laws and recommended telling officers he had a gun. To his and Foster’s relief, Ms. Parker’s family would go to a friend’s house.

Schuster and Foster intended to escort the family safely to their car, but Foster saw the wolf across the street. It bolted behind a neighbor’s house.

Instead, they decided to search for the wolf and ask Mr. Marshal to warn his neighbors.

So, Ms. Parker’s family locked themselves in the windowless bathroom, waiting for the police to either catch the wolf or chase it away.

The wolf vocalized closer to the Marshals’ house than Ms. Parker’s house.

On the dash to the Marshals’ house, Foster said, “Sometimes I really hate the Second Amendment.”

Mr. Marshal opened the door in time for Schuster and Foster to run straight inside. They still asked for permission, though. He began phoning his neighbors.

Mrs. Marshal said she saw something towards the front of their house.

Schuster slung his tranquilizer gun over his back and drew his handgun, while Foster held the tranquilizer gun in one hand and had his other hand on his handgun. They walked with their backs to the walls, and when going between houses, they moved back to back. Schuster could not tell John what they said during radio transmissions, but they remained in contact with the dispatcher.

Over a couple minutes, the wolf returned to Ms. Parker’s and Marshal’s house. The dispatcher said that Mr. Marshal said the wolf explored the dog door again. By the time Schuster and Foster reached Ms. Parker’s house, the wolf had moved out of sight along the wall with the broken window.

A pair of wolf eyes glowed in front of Schuster for several seconds; he doubted his shot struck the wolf.

As Foster turned the corner, the wolf bit his right leg just above the knee. He screeched and fell.

Schuster turned the corner. He tried to dazzle the wolf without blinding Foster. He repositioned himself. Because Foster and the wolf moved constantly, Schuster could not find a clear line of fire.

Foster fired his handgun three times, once inside the wolf’s mouth, and once striking it.

Retelling the events to John in a church building, Schuster paraphrased much of Foster’s words through the rest of the attack. In an alarming, panicked tone Schuster had never heard from anybody before, Foster yelled, “Shoot it! I can’t fire my gun!”

Just when Schuster saw Foster and the wolf, he tore something off Foster’s body. Schuster initially hoped the floppy thing was his shirt or the softer fabric covering of his body armor, but worried it was Foster’s flopping skin or an intestine.

In the same tone, Foster said, “I lost my gun!”

Likely, Foster gripped any part of the gun with either hand, but rain, blood, and mud made the gun too slippery for a secure grip, and the pain probably discouraged using his hand. If only one finger looped through the trigger, and nothing else touched the gun, Foster could have lost it. Schuster believed Foster touched the gun without holding it for as long as possible; he may have dropped it multiple times. The wolf bit through Foster’s left hand, affecting his dexterity. The bites on his forearm affected his grip strength. The wolf injured Foster’s right hand less severely, but enough to complicate firing a gun with a non-dominant hand.

He continued wrestling with the duty belt and told Schuster to shoot regardless of hitting him. He fired at the wolf’s ribs; around the same time, Foster pepper sprayed the wolf, which flinched and yelped.

Schuster fired three more times at the fleeing wolf, while Foster tranquilized the wolf one-handed. The heavily bleeding wolf held a solid metal object in his mouth. It resembled a gun.

Slumped against the wall and ground, Foster fumbled with his tranquilizer gun.

“I can’t reload,” he said.

“Take it easy,” Schuster said.

Schuster looked for Foster’s injuries under the mud, from head to toe.

“Did it bite you?” Foster asked.

“No. Where are you bitten?” Several times, Schuster would tell Foster, “Take it easy.”

“In my radio.”

“What?”

“You didn’t shoot me.”

“I shot you?”

“No, you didn’t. It whizzed.”

“Mr. Marshal, can you hear us?” Schuster yelled.

Mrs. Marshal said, “He’s getting his shotgun! Tell him not to shoot around policemen!”

“Tom Lyons?” Foster asked.

To Schuster's relief, body armor protected the front of Foster’s chest and torso.

“Okey-dokey, ma’am. Tell him Foster and I told you to make him listen to you. Stay inside.” To Foster, he said, “Mr. Marshal has a shotgun.”

Foster paid little attention to the pain throughout the attack, but he began to notice it. His left hand and arm poured blood, causing most of his blood loss. His left middle finger dangled by a tendon or his skin, and the wolf had bitten or torn off his left index finger, his trigger finger; blood gushed from them.

Foster asked, “Where’s my wedding ring?”

“You have it,” Schuster said. “Where’s your tourniquet?”

“I promised Megan I wouldn’t take it off. Where’s my wedding ring?”

“It’s on your finger.”

Schuster applied Foster’s tourniquet to Foster’s arm. More blood streamed down Foster’s hip and leg, and Schuster hoped it could wait. Applying direct pressure outside felt unsafe.

“It bit my knee and knocked me down,” Foster said.

“I’m inside, keeping an eye out for the wolf,” Mr. Marshal called.

The empty space between Ms. Parker’s house and Mr. Marshal’s house was shorter than the space between Ms. Parker’s house and the police car. Moving Foster would require a few minutes. Schuster administered first aid and asked Mr. Marshal for permission to hide in his house, despite rabies.

Simultaneously, Foster groaned that the wolf tore off his duty belt, his gun was gone, and the pepper spray blew into his eyes, and, scared, that the wolf would return. He fiddled with his pocket, wincing.

“I can’t get it and open it in time,” he said.

“What?”

“Yeah, come in, but stay in the kitchen, so she can bleach everything,” Mr. Marshal called. “She’s got the kids in the bathroom.”

Schuster was sticking Foster’s flashlight in his right pocket and telling him which side.

“My knife. I need a weapon.” Foster dropped his red Swiss Army knife.

“Okey-dokey. We’ll be there in a minute. We appreciate it, sir.”

Schuster unfolded the larger blade, and Foster squeezed the pocketknife in his right hand.

“I’ll watch your back.” Being dragged, Foster said, “Yeah, Mr. Marshal. Thanks for your help,” Foster called. “Come on, I’m scared. Give me your OC.”

“I’ll take the safety strip off, so you can grab it off me.”

“Tell Megan to stay away from me.” Foster methodically reached for the flashlight.

“Take it easy.”

“No, you’ve been exposed. Stay away from Megan.”

Schuster began dragging Foster again. “Okay. Take it easy. I took off the safety strip.”

“Tell Stephanie to tell Megan.” Foster yelled, “Wolf, wolf, wolf!”

Part 10 coming November 1, 2024.

When his phone’s alarm rang, his entire body complained—the previous day’s rescue irritated his solar plexus, which affected multiple organs, and his spinal cord and brain felt sore. He abandoned the idea of going to work. Then he texted the store manager and he promised to cover the replacement’s shift, plus work with the time he missed the day before. He turned on the TV and lay on the couch, where he had spent the evening and night.

The second time he woke, he felt like somebody called his name or persona.

“O-ver-flow-er, rhymes with grower. Overflower.” the Overflower said to the TV. “Not flower.”

An onlooker filmed Ivy’s rescue, and the news broadcast froze the video and zoomed in on a red circle—his store name badge.

“Great.”

Fortunately, he lacked a dangerous reason for a super-secret identity, but if people knew his identity, they would ask him for help beyond his abilities. He hated saying no; he felt guilty about it. If he worked harder, he might learn to help them.

“It’s not your fault, Stella,” he said.

Ivy had a fresh bruise on her forehead, probably from the checkout counter. Her fresh band-aid suggested she felt fully recovered.

He claimed that his persona, the Overflower, had no relevance to his job or everyday life. The Overflower’s coworkers already knew his real name and the regular customers recognized him. Expecting them to remember a disguise seemed unrealistic, ridiculous, a waste of time, and too stressful. Changing jobs and moving were a hassle and overreaction.

At least the store did not tell people employees’ names. Outside the store, if somebody spotted him, he could always look around and say, “I don’t see him here.”

The reporter suddenly corrected her pronunciation Over-flow-er, rather than Over-flower. The Overflower’s mother called the station anonymously again, which embarrassed him.

The Overflower checked his phone. You said you’d be fine in the morning, the manager said.

“I said tomorrow. And I said I didn’t know what I’d feel like in the morning because I’ve never spent that long breathing for somebody else before.” The Overflower grudgingly agreed to come to work in a couple hours.

The Overflower had been vaguely aware of a toddler or preschooler in line acting his or her age. Later, he learned Ivy and Stella’s names, but at first, they were random customers.

Stella wedged her way to the front of line to ask if somebody could pay over the phone. The line proceeded, with Stella shuffling her items, talking on the phone, and helping Ivy with the tablet. When they temporarily left the cart to use the restroom, Dorothy demanded somebody move it.

“Dorothy, ma’am, they’ll be back in a minute,” Jake said.

“Well, they should move to the back of line.”

“If they aren’t back by their turn, they will. The little girl’s sister said so.”

“When a little kid has to go, she has to go,” Dylan said.

Stella reclaimed the position saying, “I got stuff we keep around like you said. Yeah, it’s under $200, but I’m not sure we need all of it now.”

Ivy chanted, “’Tella,” louder and louder.

“I remembered the coupons and sale prices, and the by the ounce thing.” She groaned, “What now?”

Ivy jabbered.

“You can buy pickles and the aminal quackers with your fun moving money, but if you want to buy it like me, you have to share them. They aren’t just for you. Go ahead. A kid’s soda, not a grown-up soda. It’s too late for caffeine and you don’t need any today. Mom, don’t ask Grandma. If the credit card can’t cover it, I want to put things back. And some woman is giving me a hard time because she thinks I’m Ivy’s mom. We’re not doing anything wrong!”

Ivy whirled around to the woman and shook her finger, her other hand on her hip. “You keep your eyes on your own work!” She stamped her foot.

Dorothy glared at Ivy. “Nobody likes rude little girls.”

If a smellable stink-eye was Ivy’s superpower, the store would have evacuated.

“Ignore her, Ivy. Strangers’ opinions about us don’t matter,” Stella said. “Want to put things on the container belt?”

“Yeah!”

Dorothy turned on Jake and Dylan, the bagger. “Are you laughing at me, young man?”

Jake intentionally dropped the customer’s change on the floor.

“I’m smiling. We’re trained to smile,” Dylan said.

“My turn! By myself!”

“Be gentle,” Stella said.

With both hands, Ivy slammed the glass sweet pickle jar on the counter, and ran back for the animal crackers, and again for the root beer, provoking crossed arms and two separate sighs from Dorothy. Ivy’s buzz cut disguised a couple of electric razor swipes.

“Did you find everything you need?” Jake asked.

“Yeah! ’Cause Mommy didn’t pick-up the pick-up.”

Then she handed him each coin and bill individually and named them, while Stella piled items on the conveyor belt. Dorothy tapped her foot.

“Do you take the caribou coin?” She held up a Canadian quarter.

“No, sorry.”

Ivy’s face fell.

“We live too far from the border now, Ivy,” Stella said. “I thought I converted it all.”

“I don’t have another coin,” she whined.

“You can have change for a dollar,” Jake said.

“Okay!” she said something undecipherable.

“Did a bad guy break the parking spots?” Stella said.

“It’s just old and broken.”

Jake counted the change into Ivy’s palm and Dylan gingerly passed her the bag.

“I’ll probably have to put some things back,” Stella said.

“No problem,” Dylan said.

“Do I have to put the kangaroo back?” Ivy asked, anxiously.

“It’s your one thing for being good, so you’ll keep it…Oh, I have a coupon app.”

Jake scanned a bunch of grapes the size of miniature plums. Dylan hopped the plush kangaroo across the counter to Ivy.

She chewed its ear while hopping. Ivy bounced off the counter, knocked her head against the opposite one, and fell down. “Oops, bonk. Ow. I’m okay.” She scrambled upright.

“That was a big fall. Look at me. You’re going to get a concussion sometime. Okay, go on.”

Ivy stuffed the tablet in the kangaroo’s pouch.

Dorothy rapped her fingers on the conveyor. Still owing money, because, according to Dorothy, she insisted on buying a frivolous kangaroo, Stella removed several items, decided against a few items, and called her grandma. Dorothy rapped her fingers on the conveyor belt.

“I want to go home,” Ivy whined.

“We will in a minute,” Stella said.

Ivy began flinging full bags into the cart, and Dylan pointed out the light, sturdy ones.

Sneakily, Jake swapped Stella’s Canadian dime with his American one.

“I can put more stuff back,” Stella said to Grandma, “I forgot about tax. Are you sure? Okay. Thanks.”

Jake said to Grandma, “The prepper day sales saved her a lot of money.”

Dylan volunteered to take her bags to the car in the rain, to avoid Dorothy.

“Uh-oh, maybe you need to use two—,” Dylan said.

Several eggs cracked on the floor.

“Ivy Eleanor Babbit!”

“Too heavy, so I taked them out! I’m helping!”

“Good thing I bought paper towels. I’ll clean it up.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get it. And you need another carton of eggs.” Dylan left Jake alone with Dorothy.

Stella pushed the cart aside, saying, “Let’s get out of her way. We’ll go to a different line to pay for the eggs. Stay here and watch my purse.”

“And I came twice in one week because you limited the number of items,” Dorothy said.

Limiting the number of emergency supplies when not in a state of emergency made little sense to Jake, too, but he followed the store’s guidelines. He asked Karen (an unsuitable name) to come over.

Stella said, with more alarm than young children’s havoc usually called for, “No, no, no!”

“What’s up?” the Overflower asked.

Stella gabbled about Ivy choking, and she was performing the Heimlich maneuver and back blows to no avail. Red-faced Ivy was holding her throat and trying to breathe.

“Shut up, lady! My sister is choking!” Stella yelled at Dorothy.

Throughout the day, the Overflower learned what happened: Ivy, Stella’s half-sister, developed a habit of licking or mouthing things she particularly liked or felt curious about. To circumvent the rule about sticking things in her mouth, Ivy licked things, so her family forbade licking things forbidden to be in her mouth. If caught, naturally, she pretended her mouth was empty. Before entering the store, Stella confiscated a chunk of asphalt from the parking lot’s crack. Ivy loved Canadian quarters, so Stella placed herself on high alert. Halfway through repeating the rule, Ivy’s tongue disappeared, and she voluntarily stowed the quarter in Stella’s purse. A minute later, Stella asked what Ivy had in her mouth, and she did not respond. Frazzled, and in the middle of a request for egg money from her father that devolved into a fight, Stella asked what was in Ivy’s mouth. Ivy coughed, then lost control of the grape.

“She choked on a grape, and it’s completely blocking her windpipe,” Stella said.

Absorbing a complex organism like a grape required great effort and concentration, and he considered it too risky and slow. But the Overflower thought he could keep Ivy alive and conscious until a doctor removed the grape conventionally.

Dorothy complained about Stella and Ivy, but Karen paged for anybody with medical experience. She asked the assistant manager to listen to Dorothy. Also, the Overflower learned later, she told Dorothy bluntly to stop complaining and sympathize with a choking child; she encouraged Dorothy to help or leave the store, potentially forever, if that suited her best. Dylan privately said that Karen snapped, but if anybody asked, he called her professional.

Jake mentally adopted the Overflower persona. “I’ll use my superpower to give her oxygen.”

“How?” Stella asked, laying Ivy down.

“Like this.” The Overflower gently held Ivy’s head and transferred a burst of oxygen from his hands into her head. He breathed deeply and spaced his sentences between breaths. Even when the Overflower kneeled, he was taller than Ivy. He stared at his watch, analog because he concentrated better on the second hand than flashing numbers. He tried to breathe at forty breaths per minute, adjusted for time spent talking.

“She needs CPR,” Stella said.

“This gives her more oxygen than CPR.” And CPR has a low success rate, he thought. “Can I talk to the dispatcher?”

Stella began mouth-to-mouth.

“Stay still, Ivy. I’m giving you air through my hands. It’ll help you. I practice my superpowers, and I have a license. It’s in my wallet, back pocket right pocket.”

The Overflower took Stella’s phone off speaker as Dylan sprinted with first aid kit. “This is the Overflower.”

“If she’s conscious and not turning blue, she has enough air. You need to call your mom. Dylan, you need to get the backpack in my locker.”

“Why?” Dylan asked.

“It will help me help Ivy. The combination is 318. Stella, check the ID. In my wallet. Back left pocket.” He provided oxygen while speaking with the dispatcher and deterring Stella, who worried too much for the instructions to register.

“Are you beginning CPR?” Karen asked, while the dispatcher listed four possible endings to his registration number.

The Overflower put the phone on speaker phone. The Overflower laid Ivy on her back and transferred ideally one part oxygen, three parts nitrogen, and one part either of the gases or miscellaneous ones, his best imitation of Earth’s atmosphere. He sat next to Ivy, legs straight in front of him, the best way to prevent his legs from falling asleep. His wrist and hand on her head transferred oxygen and nitrogen, while a forearm across Ivy’s chest transferred carbon dioxide from her pulmonary arteries; he placed approximately the weight of a penny on her, but she objected. Instead of exhaling the carbon dioxide, he released it through his veins into the store’s air; the process incidentally diverted his carbon dioxide to his arm.

The Overflower and dispatcher’s conversation included: “I can’t dissolve the grape. I need to keep my hands on Ivy’s skin or clothes. I know it sounds backwards, but I’ll need oxygen before she does.” He hung up.

Karen convinced Stella to look at the ID. “Who’s the Overflour?” Stella asked.

Flow-er, the Overflower thought.

“I thought we had the Overthrower,” Karen said. “How’d Jake get the Overthrower’s ID?”

Ivy fidgeted and fussed a little, but the Overflower ignored it.

“Stella, I’m doing this.” He blasted Stella with oxygen. “It’s making her feel better.”

She shook her head and blinked. “How does that help?”

“Maybe you can’t tell because you have enough oxygen.”

Superpowers often felt uncomfortable and could be disturbing, especially to somebody unfamiliar with them. Few young children experienced powers, and then probably in a life-threatening emergency.

“Ivy, you’re acting like a big girl even though you don’t feel well.”

“She’s tough. You have to wait here for an ambulance. You’re going to ride in an ambulance so doctors can make you feel better,” Stella said. “She needs her blanket and kangaroo, but I don’t want to leave.”

“I’ll get them,” Karen said.

“Stella, have you called your mom?”

“Oh yeah. She’s on the phone.”

“Can I talk to her? I want you to hear, too. Stay here.”

“I’ll put it on speaker phone.”

The Overflower already felt out of breath, but he explained the procedure to Stella and Ivy’s mother, Beth. Karen warded off the store manager, Hank.

He interrupted the call to instruct Dylan. Dylan labeled a tiny oximeter 88% and put a tiny pulse oximeter on Ivy’s finger, which the Overflower let her play with on condition she wore it and showed it when necessary. Dylan rolled up the Overflower’s sleeves and, on the top of his forearms, wrote oxygen + nitrogen on his right arm and carbon dioxide on his left arm.

To explain the situation to Beth, the Overflower began with, “My superpower is transferring things between my body and something else. So, I’m giving Ivy oxygen.” The Overflower worried about gas bubbles in her veins, like decompression sickness or an air embolism. If I go too fast or lose my concentration, he thought. A doctor could check them, and the Overflower knew how to remove them. He doubted the doctors would understand his procedure immediately, and they would not predict the risks or complications. “Do you want the EMTs to treat her conventionally when they get here?”

“I’ll ask them about it,” Beth said.

“Parents decide. I’ll give Ivy oxygen until you tell me to stop, or the doctors remove the grape and she’s breathing on her own. You can change your mind any time.”

The Overflower had practiced breathing for years, beginning resting and calm and working up to exercising heavily. His times varied. He did not tell Beth how long he could transfer oxygen to Ivy or the amounts, and he did not guarantee survival or a lack of brain damage.

Beth needed to speak with her husband, so Stella listened for her to return.

People gawked. The gasses flowed invisibly and the Overflower considered adding colors, smells, and the like unreliable and potentially dangerous. It would tire him too quickly.

The store’s ambient noises drowned out his watch’s tick-tock, but he imagined it. Lightheaded, and feeling like he had been lightly exercising, the Overflower tried to slow his breathing to forty breaths per minute. If he breathed at a young child’s rate, he would hyperventilate, which was counterproductive. Using superpowers affected the person’s breathing, too, but the Overflower accounted for it.

Why do I feel like this? Because you don’t talk during practice.

He told Hank that he could not breathe and talk at the same time, and Stella promptly whispered in his ear, “I can get away with telling people to shut up. Want me to? Just nod or shake your head.” He shrugged.

Hank implied that, along with worrying about Ivy as a choking preschooler, he worried about liability. He patronized Ivy, often in baby talk. At least he held Stella’s items and replaced spoiled ones for free.

Between listening distractedly to Hank and comforting Ivy, Stella eyed the Overflower.

Ivy’s heartrate rose during the baby talk, according to the pulse oximeter. The Overflower felt her heartbeat, but it felt the same as before.

Go away, Hank, the Overflower thought.

“Although, of course, the Overflower will make you feel better, poor little Ivy,” Hank said, patting her hand.

No! the Overflower thought.

Ivy folded her arms, wedging her hands under her armpits. She wore a robot T-shirt.

“And you can go home and play tea party with your kangaroo!”

Ivy’s stink-eye surpassed the one given to Dorothy, and she wriggled hard.

“She’s going to kick you,” Stella said.

Hank dodged, and Stella idly intercepted Ivy’s leg on the downward swing, during which the Overflower noticed somebody had scribbled on her sneakers with permanent markers.

The pulse oximeter showed good oxygen levels, but the Overflower also thought Ivy’s deliberateness indicated she felt oxygenated. If she felt oxygen-starved, he thought, she would be feeble. Or I’m damaging the aggression part in her brain, he thought. No, it’s an approved procedure. But it can still hurt her.

“Ivy, only kick bad guys,” Stella said, neutrally.

If Ivy could have huffed, she would have. She opened and shut her mouth as if jabbering, and stopped abruptly, worried.

“Hank, we’re trying to keep Ivy calm and quiet, and she needs to rest.” He hoped it sounded more tactful than, Shut up, Hank!

“If everything’s fine here, I’ll check back in a minute.”

“No need, but thanks,” Stella said.

“Is it okay if Karen stays?” The Overflower thought she might comfort Stella.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’ll be over there,” Dylan said.

Karen professionally shooed the crowd, also asking if they could help, without success.

Ivy seethed at the Overflower, but she clearly restrained herself.

Stella said, “He’s helping you. You have to put up with it.”

“I know it feels bad,” he said. “Does something hurt?”

She pointed to her neck.

“I’m sorry. It’s probably the grape. Sometimes the air I put in people hurts. If something hurts, point to where it hurts.”

She nodded.

“She’s tough,” Stella said.

“Even if it goes away in a second, you need to tell me. Don’t be tough about it.”

Ivy nodded.

The Overflower transferred the air slowly and smoothly to prevent gas bubbles. “Ivy, when I give people a lot of air, sometimes I make a face. It’s okay.”What else do kids like to know? he thought. “Stella understands what you need, so she’ll tell me. Okay?”

Ivy nodded.

“We’ll give you a minute alone,” Stella said. She whispered in the Overflower’s ear, “If something happens to you, Ivy will die, so if you need something, tell me.”

The Overflower nodded.

“Will you get confused and take oxygen from her?”

“I’ll stop before then. It takes effort.”

“What if you get confused?”

“I stop automatically if I pass out or get very confused. Taking oxygen isn’t an automatic reaction like a drowning guy breathing water. It takes effort.”

“Because I’ll taser you if you take oxygen from Ivy.”

“I won’t. I’d never, ever suffocate anybody. I can’t. And the gasses are harmless and don’t cause a bad chemical reaction with anything around us.”

Sweat ran down the Overflower’s face. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve, and Stella opened a tissue pack.

Karen stood behind Stella, waiting quietly.

“I don’t know why you’ve been watching your watch, but you need to see the hands, right?” Stella whispered.

“Second hand.”

“Do you need Ivy to stay still?” She dabbed the Overflower’s sweat from Ivy’s head.

“It helps. Saves oxygen. Helps me find the blood vessels.” Stillness saved a negligible amount of oxygen, but any way to save oxygen reassured the Overflower.

Ivy tapped the Overflower’s arm.

“Yeah, Ivy?” he asked.

She crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue, and failed to puff her cheeks, so she sucked them in.

“Is it a silly face?” Stella asked.

“No. Some people don’t like the face I make.”

According to other people, the Overflower developed a blank expression, relaxed if possible, but normally limp or dead. Sometimes he frowned or “looked intense,” as his mother put it, and his sister called it creepy or scary. Once in a while, somebody thought he zoned out. The Overflower knew he showed more confusion, agitation, or sadness than a rescuer should to the person in a crisis, but after a certain point, he could either concentrate on his superpowers or his attitude.

“Your arm is turning red,” Stella said. “Oh, good, here comes the ambulance!”

Ivy’s eyes darted around and she twisted her head.

“Hold still, Ivy,” Stella said.

“Good. They’ll take you to the doctor,” the Overflower said.

“They’ll take good care of you,” Karen said.

Ivy looked dubious.

“Ivy, I need to look under the kangaroo. Karen, you need to show the EMTs where we are.”

“I will,” Karen said.

She and Stella lifted up the damp kangaroo, and, as the Overflower predicted, the carbon dioxide flushed his forearm to the elbow. If the redness spread up his arm, he would worry.

“I’m fine. You can put the kangaroo down now, Stella.”

“Your other hand looks normal. Is it a problem?”

“No.” He diverted oxygen to the normal hand.

“But you’re really pale.”

“Blue?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m fine.”

“I mean, you look like you don’t have enough oxygen.”

Don’t tell me things like that, he thought.

The elbow he leaned on throbbed, and his forearm dozed, since the superpowers stopped it from completely falling asleep. His fists ached from clenching and releasing them in time with Ivy’s heartbeat, or as close to it as possible.

“I’ll keep Ivy distracted while you guys talk. Go along with her if you can,” Stella whispered.

The Overflower nodded.

Looking directly at Ivy worried him, but he evaluated her condition regularly. Overflower needed a major reason to alter his procedure, other than wondering if he did everything possible. If, from his own mental confusion he altered the plan, he might misinterpret the situation or forget how to treat her, therefore putting Ivy in more danger.

The EMTs felt like reinforcements to the Overflower; they understood part of the stresses and how people unraveled under pressure and could establish Ivy’s airway if his procedure overwhelmed him.

Due to Ivy’s acceptable oxygen levels, until they saw the grape, the EMTs doubted she choked. Ivy objected to the IV port, but Stella and Beth made her hold still. Stella and she played clapping games and nursery rhymes.

The Overflower avoided answering questions about his symptoms, both to save his breath and because his symptoms would pass when Ivy could breathe independently. He longed to drain the oxygen cylinder but rationed it.

Because of the grape’s position, the Overflower thought the EMTs would resort to an invasive, short-term emergency airway puncture. He worried Ivy was too young and her throat too small but expected that some EMTs and doctors would risk it. His powers also had a time limit, possibly matching the emergency airway puncture’s and probably below it. Don’t think about that, he thought. Figure out the length as you go. For short periods, he definitely could give Ivy more oxygen than an emergency airway puncture; for however long Ivy’s emergency lasted, he wanted to. Even if he stopped before the doctor removed the grape, the Overflower would have stalled Ivy’s oxygen deprivation. He kept his opinion to himself; he simply told the EMTs the maximum oxygen he could provide at once and an estimated sustainable rate and let them compare it to their treatments. The EMTs knew more.

The EMTs noticed that the Overflower fulfilled the function of a ventilator, and they said that an emergency airway puncture was a last resort when other airways and ventilators were impossible. The Overflower offered to breathe for Ivy as long as necessary. Beth expected the airway to unnecessarily distress Ivy, who semi-cooperatively endured the Overflower, and she thought he was less invasive.

The walls and floor swayed, and the Overflower lost track of his second hand. He counted in his head. Initially, the Overflower thought the nursery rhymes would be worse than wiggling. Instead, Ivy stopped wiggling, and he predicted her movements. Counting breaths along to the music confused him. Stop experimenting, he thought. Just be slow and steady.

Privately, Beth also considered Stella’s feelings and reactions to Ivy’s treatments. Stella thought she caused Ivy to choke; Beth told Stella that it was not her fault, and Ivy could have choked with her parents instead. Coping with Ivy’s intensive medical care daunted Beth. Until Beth reached the hospital, Stella insisted on caring for Ivy as a mother would, rather than abandoning her. She considered Ivy’s well-being her responsibility, but breakdowns crept up on Stella.

If the Overflower’s air failed or the emergency room doctors deemed conventional treatment necessary, Beth approved it.

The Overflower’s head twinged. The ache would begin in the head, then travel down the spine and possibly to his solar plexus, where it could change from an ache into other unpleasant symptoms. Carbon dioxide caused headaches, though. Remember you’ve absorbed more carbon dioxide before, he thought.

Ivy developed a suspicious expression and clutched her blanket and kangaroo.

The Overflower reminded himself to keep pressure off Ivy—it would be uncomfortable for her and she would hate it, and she would probably retaliate.

The Overflower and the EMTs, Tasha and Malik, thought through possibilities, which the EMTs would chose between. They planned the various transfers from store to ambulance to hospital with as few difference between the plans as possible.

Stella stuffed various things in the Overflower’s backpack, put it on, and stuck his ID and wallet in his pocket. She grabbed her purse, then eased Ivy’s blanket and the kangaroo out of the EMT’s way.

Next to Ivy, the EMTs lowered the stretcher to the floor. They, Stella, and Karen lifted her up and scooted the stretcher closer. Stella returned her blanket and kangaroo, which Ivy clung to. The stretcher bar dug into his side, but the mattress cushioned his elbow.

“Ivy, I’m going to let go for a minute, but I’m giving you an extra burst of oxygen. I’ll be right back,” the Overflower said.

Ivy nodded hesitantly.

“You’ll be okay,” the Overflower said. “It’s just like holding your breath. One, two, three.”

The Overflower transferred an extra burst of oxygen to Ivy. As he went from the floor to the stretcher, his vision blurred.

“It’s okay, Ivy. I think that’s the face he gets when he gives people air,” Stella said.

He felt like falling, so grabbed at the stretcher with his carbon dioxide arm. An EMT propped him up.

“Where is she?” the Overflower asked.

“Right here.” Mailk positioned his forearm.

Ivy shrunk away, and the Overflower’s hand slipped off her head.

“Come back, Ivy,” the Overflower said.

“Ivy, he needs to give you air!” Stella said.

Ivy looked at the Overflower with an I have to put up with you, but I don’t like you expression.

The Overflower sent another oxygen burst and settled cross-legged behind Ivy and the kangaroo. Stella and the kangaroo followed the EMTs. They warned the Overflower about the doorways, worried he would lose his balance.

Tensed, Ivy held extremely still, which worried the Overflower.

“You’re okay, Ivy.” He began exchanging the gasses again. “You’re being really good.”

In the ambulance, the Overflower gave Ivy extra oxygen again. He used slightly more pressure as Tasha helped Ivy scoot towards the head of the bed. Malik assisted the Overflower’s clamber from the stretcher to the airway chair, which involved standing.

A wave of dizziness hit the Overflower, and he backed out.

“There you go,” Malik said. “Deep breaths.”

Somehow, Malik had deposited him in the chair. The Overflower breathed oxygen once for himself but was patting for Ivy’s head and neck. Malik stopped rationing oxygen.

“Are you okay to give her more oxygen?”

He began transferring pure oxygen. Stella stood at an awkward angle because Ivy had wrapped her arms and legs around her neck like a monkey. Her coaxing sounded more like panic, and Tasha calmed them.

She doesn’t have enough oxygen, he thought. It’s not working. It has to be working. I’m doing it right. It just took a second.

“Are you okay to give her more oxygen?” Malik asked.

“I already am! How is she?”

“Her oxygen levels are fine.”

Stella held Ivy on one hip and convinced Ivy to hold Tasha’s hand. Tasha pulled her arm back just enough for the Overflower to reach her left lung.

“It’ll be okay, Ivy,” he said. “You’re being a big girl.”

“How long didn’t she have oxygen?” he asked, as Malik placed one of his hands on Ivy’s head and one hand on her chest.

“Less than a minute, well within the time.”

The Overflower reminded himself which arm transferred air, and which arm transferred carbon dioxide, and to direct the oxygen-nitrogen mix at Ivy and the carbon dioxide at him.

“You can turn it down now.”

“If you say so.” Malik adjusted the cylinder.

About a minute later, Ivy relaxed enough to lie down, and the Overflower adjusted his carbon dioxide arm. He moved his hand under Ivy’s skull; the weight assured him he would not lose his grip.

Ivy buckled in the kangaroo.

During the ride, the Overflower’s head ached dully, and he resisted the urge to fidget. He sweated as if he jumped a lake. His arms shook from the effort of holding them up. The uneven sirens distracted him from Malik’s counting. Occasionally, Ivy shifted, but she did not wiggle or participate in the nursery songs Beth sang.

Stella rummaged through his backpack, searching for anything potentially helpful, and found nothing.

The Overflower did not feel like dying, but he needed to breathe. He forced the oxygen and nitrogen into Ivy and tried to ignore that carbon dioxide was toxic.

The Overflower fidgeted. The ambulance’s interior revolved, so he lay his head on the stretcher, despite squishing his lungs and diaphragm. He involuntarily lowered Ivy’s oxygen level.

“Need something?” Malik asked, and at the same time, Stella said,

“There’s something wrong with him.”

Simultaneously, Stella’s mother stuttered The Wheels on the Bus; Malik unbuckled his seat belt and said, “Overflower”; the Overflower paid no attention to the pronunciation; Ivy gripped his loose fists; the Overflower wheezed, “Did you take it from her? No, it’s still going the right way”; “He probably has more than one face for giving people air, Ivy,” Stella said.

“I’m turning up the oxygen. We’ll be at the hospital in about two minutes. Is it time for the emergency airway puncture?”

“No,” the Overflower wheezed.

Sometimes, people overexerted their powers and died or disabled themselves from the strain. Don’t think about that, he thought. They did more than this, anyway.

Malik matched the Overflower’s unsteady breathing with the bag valve mask. He shushed the Overflower’s attempt to comfort Ivy. “Save your breath. Breathe with your belly like you said you were supposed to.”

Ivy lay so still, the Overflower worried she died, but if she had, the EMTs would have performed CPR. He felt confused, but not enough to overlook CPR. Just in case, he asked, “Is she alive?”

“Ivy is stable. She’s alive and fine,” Malik said, gently. “You’re taking care of her. Don’t worry. It’s best not to ask questions like that, though. I’ll tell you if there’s a problem. Relax.”

If the Overflower acknowledged that Ivy would survive if he stopped providing oxygen for her, he would stop immediately.

“Look, Ivy’s oxygenation is a lot better than yours. You could probably back off a little.”

“No,” the Overflower wheezed, scared Ivy might feel like him. Then he realized she had several times already, and he could not make her experience it again. “She will during the transfer.”

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll do what we planned,” Malik said.

The lack of sirens and motion confused him. The EMT reviewed the plan and another commandeered two orderlies.

The Overflower lost consciousness en route from the airway chair to the stretcher and from the ambulance to the ER stretcher. Every time, he revived in a panic for Ivy’s health. He asked which arm which gas came from, where Ivy was, and how long he starved her of oxygen. He always gave Ivy time to recuperate and brace herself between transfers. Distantly, the Overflower heard people complimenting Ivy’s bravery and cooperation. Later, Stella said that except for the transfers, Ivy seemed to cope with the experience.

Stella photographed the Overflower as proof he was too weak to help Ivy.

Controlling three gasses at once seemed impossible, but the Overflower continued oxygen, constantly. He automatically sucked in the Emergency Room’s oxygen. Ivy, growing less pale, clutched his limp hands, which confused him because a nurse also held them.

“How is she?” the Overflower whispered one word per breath.

“Ivy is stable,” a doctor said.

Over the doctor’s examination, Stella and the Overflower talked.

“Right arm oxygen-nitrogen? Where is she?”

“You’ve got her.”

“Right arm oxygen-nitrogen?”

“Yeah.” Stella patted his left arm. “This one says oxygen-nitrogen.”

“Right arm carbon dioxide?”

“Yeah, this one says carbon dioxide.” She patted him again. “You and Stella are in the ER.”

“Where's Ivy?”

Stella turned his head the opposite direction. Pale Ivy huddled on the stretcher next to him. Her nails dug into his hand, and she wore a hospital gown.

“How long?”

“About a minute, like going through really long tunnels.”

Ivy nodded.

“EMTs?”

“They left. Take it easy. Sorry, Ivy won’t let go of you.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“He wasn’t going to shut up until he got the answers,” Stella said.

“Bubbles!”

“He wants you to know about the air bubbles.”

“Malik and Tasha told me about the air bubbles and everything you worried about.”

With supervision, the Overflower lessened the gas exchange—Ivy received less than ideal amounts of oxygen, but the Overflower’s oxygenation levels rose to a tolerable level—and increased his oxygen supply.

The Overflower answered as briefly as possible, spending most of his energy on Ivy. The doctor encouraged him to quit because Ivy had an alternative, an emergency airway puncture. Worried the uncertainty would scare Ivy, the Overflower said, “No. I’m not deciding that. Ask her parents. They decide. I’m not quitting until they tell me to.”

Along with oxygen deprivation, the doctor worried about oxygen toxicity in his right hand and carbon dioxide in his left hand.

“And your left side shows more discoloration than your right side,” the doctor said.

The Overflower diverted oxygen to the left half of his body and narrowed it into his arm.

People healed well from the effects their own powers had on them. Deep down, the Overflower understood it, and remembered he had experienced it.

The desperate need to breathe alone dulled somewhat, and the doctor told the nurse to adjust the flow when the Overflower requested. From sweating, the doctor thought he might be dehydrated. He refused an IV; the fluids in his bloodstream might confuse him.

He interrupted the doctor. “Ivy, am I squishing you?” he asked.

She shook her head and yanked his arms closer.

“Oh, Ivy, he won’t have to go to a new bed again.”

“No, I’ll stay with you,” he said.

Ivy nodded.

The oxygen gave the Overflower energy to increased his body’s capacity to absorb oxygen, and he emptied the cylinder.

“I’m giving oxygen-nitrogen and removing carbon dioxide,” he said.

“You really need to talk to the doctor about that.” The nurse dashed.

“Does that feel better?” the Overflower asked Ivy.

She nodded, visibly relieved.

“You weren’t feeling well, were you?” the Overflower said.

“You kept her levels above 80% except during transfers,” Stella said.

“And most of the time, she was over 88%. So, the doctors think you’re in more danger than she is.”

Both doctors rushed in; the Overflower forgot their names. The hullabaloo upset Ivy, which distracted Beth and Jerry, her father and Stella’s step-father. Stella watched everything.

The Overflower’s doctor seemed a bit annoyed about the situation, but he gave up arguing with him, possibly because it was a one-sided argument. Few things could make the Overflower stop.

“How?”

“They haven’t explained it to her yet. Mom wants to talk to you about it. She’s really worried about asking you to do more, but she will if it’s best for Ivy. She’s a good mom. If you say no, she won’t argue with you, I guess. It sounds like what she would do. I’ll get her. Mom, Dad, the Overflour is okay to talk now.”

The Babbits called the Overflower Overflour, but the Overflower hardly cared about their mispronunciation. He concentrated on breathing, draining the cylinder. Stella counted his breaths and Ivy held up erratically correct fingers.

Although the Babbits thought of Ivy’s health first, the Overflower’s concerned them; Stella texted Jerry Babbit clandestine updates. He omitted his symptoms, like the ache spreading down his spine, and the exhaustion from breathing and listening, let alone interacting with people.

Betha and Jerry had several reasons to ask the Overflower to continue breathing for Ivy, but the Overflower said, “I know you have good reasons. I don’t need to know them.”

“Mom, he means don’t explain them. Right?” Stella asked.

“Yeah,” the Overflower said, which surprised the Babbits. “It takes a long time. The goal is getting the grape out of Ivy’s trachea. Parents decide how. Just get it over with.”

“We didn’t know superpowers had this effect on people,” Beth said.

The Overflower reassured the Babbits that he would breathe for Ivy until the bronchoscopy removed the grape. “Just get it over with.”

“You might be harming yourself needlessly,” Jerry said.

“No, I’ll be fine when it stops. Just hurry.”

The delays exasperated him for his own comfort and, more importantly, because he thought Ivy suffered more than him.

Dr. Fawcett explained the procedure to Ivy, while nurses rolled the Overflower into the recovery position and he rested. To his relief, the doctors believed in maintaining a similar plan for each transfer, despite the chaotic entrance to the ER; the EMTs must have explained it already.

Scowling, and listening to the doctor, Ivy tried to climb onto Beth and pull the Overflower with her. Beth climbed onto the bed.

The doctor left and they waited for the nurses. The Overflower longed to yell at somebody to hurry up for Ivy’s sake, but he was not a yeller and felt too breathless. Should I dissolve the grape? Don’t change the plan. And the doctors will just delay it again.

“Ivy, sweetie, he’s going with you.”

“I’ll be with you the whole time,” the Overflower gasped in a whisper. “Even when you’re asleep. I’ll stay with you until you come back to Mommy and Daddy and Stella.”

“Ivy knows you’re sick too, even if she can’t explain it yet,” Beth said. “I’m sure she appreciates your help and feels sorry for you.”

“I’m okay, Ivy, and the doctor is going to help you.”

“You’ll be okay with him. And when you wake up, you’ll feel better.”

Beth followed the bed. When the doors closed, Ivy looked like she would have whimpered if she could. Her fingernails marked his hands and scooted closer. Everybody failed to comfort her, but the Overflower said, “You’re being very brave. I’m sorry it’s taking so long to get the grape out.”

The nurses rolled the bed within arm’s reach of the operating table. Ivy whimpered soundlessly during the transfer.

Under anesthesia, Ivy’s hands went limp, which scared the Overflower. Remember she’s not dead, he thought.

The nurse anesthetist monitored his labored breathing suspiciously. He struggled to breathe for Ivy, and he tried to ignore everything except breathing.

“We got the grape out,” Dr. Fawcett said. “You can stop now.”

’What?” the Overflower wheezed.

“You can stop,” the nurse said.

The Overflower thought Ivy’s chest rose and fell, but the general consensus was that she breathed unreliably.

“Is she breathing?” he asked.

“She’s trying to,” the doctor said. “We removed the grape.”

A nurse tried to move his hand, but, from somewhere, he found the energy to fight back.

“Is she breathing?” he asked.

“There she goes. Yeah, she’s fine. Relax. We’re going to separate you now.”

“No,” the Overflower said.

The nurses pried him away, and the anesthesiology nurse pointed to Ivy’s vital signs. The Overflower stopped the transfer and slumped on the bed, completely out of energy. Breathing in twice an average person’s oxygen consumption revived him enough to say, “No, she’s scared to be alone.”

“We’re just putting her on a separate bed,” a nurse said.

“Good,” he said.

The Overflower wondered if Ivy stirred.

“No, I said I’d be with her when she woke up!” The Overflower attempted to sit up. “She’s scared!”

“We’ll ask her parents if you can be in a recovery room.”

I was with her when she woke up, he thought. Everybody let Ivy believe he accompanied her into the recovery room.

The idea that a person was more physically capable of things they mentally thought possible occasionally killed and disabled people with superpowers. The Overflower considered himself far below their abilities, and decided he did not want to reach their levels.

The Babbits allowed the Overflower into the recovery room, but sitting exhausted him.

Stella brought his backpack to him. “Mom and Dad want to say thanks.”

“They don’t have to.”

“Ivy doesn’t need help, but she’s still scared. She’s clingy and says she can’t breathe.”

“Can she?”

“She can breathe. She’s too little to understand, and she’d probably feel better if she said bye.”

The doctor tolerated the wheelchair because he acknowledged it was against medical advisement, he breathed normal air again, and the Overflower understood his powers.

“The first thing she said was, ‘I’m never ating grapes again!’” Stella said.

“That was the first thing we understood, anyway.”

“Is she breathing?”

“Oh yeah. You’re still wheezing and gasping.”

“It’ll go away in a few hours. Thanks for getting my backpack.”

“No problem. I put your ID in your wallet in a pocket, too.” Stella burst out, “I thought Ivy was going to watch you die! She couldn’t see that.”

“I’d be completely unable to use my powers, but I’d be alive,” he said. “I’d look more normal in a few minutes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Sorry for scaring you. How are you now?”

“I already had a meltdown while were waiting. I’m fine for now, but I’ll have another one sometime.”

“You plan them?”

“No, I just know how I feel.”

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you,” the Overflower said.

“You kept my sister alive! That’s as helpful as you could be! But it was my fault, and she’s lucky,” Stella said.

“No, it isn’t your fault. A lot of kids choke.”

“That’s what Mom says, but she’s my responsibility. I’ve cut up literally thousands of grapes for her! But we’re trying to distract her from that.

The Overflower handed her a manilla envelope from his backpack. “Your parents might want the forms for financial assistance after a superpower rescue.”

“Thanks. We have enough money most of the time. But our cat needed surgery. My car broke down during the move, so I had to pay the tow truck, spend two nights in a motel, and get food. And moving is expensive.”

As soon as Ivy saw the Overflower, she ran to him, grabbed his hand, and said, “Offerfoer! Come here and breathe with me!” She pronounced it, Offer-foe-ur.

Of course, the others interrupted to thank him, which he felt awkward about.

“Why do you want me to breathe with you?” the Overflower asked. “You look fine now.”

“’Cause I couldn’t breathe.”

“She has to get her confidence back,” Jerry said.

“I’ll look at your blood vessels and see if you have enough oxygen. I’ll check for bubbles, too.” He gently touched her neck’s blood vessels.

“She’s going to have a scan in a minute,” Beth said. “You don’t have to. Don’t ask him, Ivy, he’s tired.”

“It’s okay,” he said, but it required quite a bit of effort. Guiltily, the Overflower removed a few small air bubbles, and he forced himself to sit upright.

“Do you hurt anywhere?” he asked.

“This.”

“I can’t do anything about the IV.”

She jabbered.

“It’s the irritation from the bronchoscopy,” Beth said.

“I can’t do anything about that, either. I think you’re breathing okay, and I took the bubbles out. Did they hurt?”

“Nope!”

“Good. You’re feeling better.”

“He’s tired. Just say thanks and let him go,” Beth said.

Ivy whined and held his hand, and, of course, leaving her felt more complicated than if he rescued a kitten from a tree and it fell asleep on him. There was no opportunity to fade quietly into the background.

The Overflower stayed for a couple hours, although half an hour after entering the room, Ivy demonstrated hopping on one foot. She and the Overflower watched My Little Pony, and she taught him nursery rhyme games. Dr. Fawcett declared her healthy.

The Overflower hired a ride home.

The Babbits picked up their groceries and thank Hank for holding them. Ivy’s recovery and signing a waiver liability agreement relieved Hank.

The wolf response lacked a headquarters. Wayne needed to rest and review the gathered evidence, ideally in Wolftown for a fast response. Officer Zachary Foster suggested his house; he already had equipment to copy tapes. Although Megan Foster objected to turning their house into a police investigations unit, she allowed an exception. Because Foster owned a police scanner, Wayne would hear about wolf attacks before anybody called him.

Rebecca returned to Happy Howlers and left a marker board and box of markers, Post-it notes, and whatnot on the Fosters’ porch. Megan rolled the marker board into the house and went back to bed. Wayne set the box on the dining table.

He lay down on Foster’s couch, but, unable to sleep, he thought about the wolves and Suzanne. Wayne blamed himself for the attack, and changing her schedule led the list of his worst decisions. Realistically, if he and she kept their planned schedule, Wayne would have been somewhere other than the Old Wolftown Restaurant, but had he been in Suzanne’s place, he would have wanted the wolf to attack him.

Theoretically, the wolves could have attacked Jane or somebody else in the restaurant.

Wayne expected to find evidence somewhere if the wolves roamed Wolftown on March 10. Nobody reported them approaching the restaurant, and the wolves disappeared after the attack.

After a while, Wayne studied the wolves. He sat down, then stood up a minute later to stick a Post-it note on the wall. The house’s old floor warped just enough for markers to roll across the table.

Since Megan worried too much to sleep, she asked if Wayne needed assistance. Wayne felt physically exhausted. He thought sitting still in a chair would make him feel better, but he considered pregnant women delicate, especially if stressed. Light activity might harm the baby.

Megan assured him that writing on the marker board and sticking Post-it Notes to the wall would not overtax her, and the baby liked being rocked. She and Stephanie routinely copied and typed up the incriminating evidence Schuster and Foster gathered about Dennis Laufenberg, although they managed the more disturbing parts themselves. Talking aloud about issues helped Foster think; he enjoyed answering questions and explaining.

Wayne and his employees had recorded the wolves’ vocalizations. They sounded like wolves, but odd and creepy.

The wolves rarely communicated with each other.

The police refused to show Wayne their surveillance videos. However, without authorization, Schuster and Foster acquired the tapes, watched them, copied them, and took notes. They sent the unauthorized copies and notes to Wayne. John lacked authorization to view the tapes, but Wayne showed him the others.

According to Schuster, when people submitted tapes of a wolf to the Wolftown Police Department, the tape was returned or thrown out. Schuster, Foster, and Wayne interfered secretly: people sent tapes to Happy Howlers, and Rebecca copied and returned the originals when necessary.

Every Happy Howlers employee who saw the canines or their markings labeled them wolf. John agreed. Still, there was something odd about the wolves, like people required extensive proof to call them wolves.

Wayne and John paused the tape periodically to show the wolves confused gaits. John thought all animals had emotions, even as much as humans, depending on the species. Barker’s eyes seemed more humanlike than wolflike. Her ears never twitched, and her neck only moved when necessary. Her tail flopped and swung.

“I’m very uneasy about Barker and Charlie because I can’t read their body language,” Wayne said.

“What about Abel?” John asked.

“His body language matches what he was doing, but his expressions were stiff.”

Also, Wayne wondered if Abel resembled a Eurasian wolf more than a North American wolf. He said that North American and Eurasian wolves sounded different, but he expected difficulty analyzing the vocalizations. John felt too unfamiliar with global wolf vocalizations to form an opinion, but the fur’s coloring and length looked Eurasian. He and Wayne identified Barker and Charlie as North American wolves.

“Maybe they are only weird wolves,” Wayne said. “They adapted their hunting patterns to people. Hunting us is really hard and dangerous, but maybe the wolves need to try a few times before they figure it out.”

“Suzanne was attacked before someone shot the wolves, right?” John asked.

“Chief Laufenberg and another policeman shot at the wolves, but I’m pretty sure Billy Schuster was the first person to hit the wolf. I can’t explain the wolves’ behavior. I’ve read accounts of wolves attacking towns, but our wolves are different. We have more details than they did, but a lot of the accounts are at least a hundred years old. Maybe that makes the wolves look abnormal. Or it’s a werewolf.”

“Do people think that?” John asked.

“Some people joke about it. Some people in town believe in werewolves. No one has been taking it seriously. Or they have and they aren’t part of the wolf response. The closest thing I could call a discussion is an argument over how people become werewolves. One person said that it couldn’t be a werewolf because it’s the wrong phase.”

“It’s a waxing crescent? Maybe it’s the first quarter.”

“They argued about what phase it was. And no one who has been bitten has turned into a werewolf. The böxenwolf legend doesn’t have a moon phase or being bitten to become a werewolf!” The arguments’ inaccuracies annoyed Wayne. “Personally, I think it’s convenient that a böxenwolf looks like a regular wolf. I wouldn’t go up to a wolf and look for the strings.”

“The strings that tie the wolf strap to the person?”

“Right. Böxenwolf believers could join the wolf response if they wanted. Maybe they have and no one mentions it.”

Wayne sighed. “I got off-track.”

“It’s okay,” John said.

“You’re here, so you should know what happened if you want to.”

“When I called yesterday, the wolf attacks hadn’t escalated, or you didn’t know they had.”

“Maybe we would have noticed something if we had an organized response.”

“Coyotes normally don’t attack people, but they live in cities. Could coyote-wolf hybrids be involved?” John asked.

“Maybe some live around here. And the police have been grouping wolfdogs in with dogs and I think they could be grouped in with wolves. We didn’t make them a group because it would remind people of the wolfdog attacks. I want to send samples for DNA testing, but it’s expensive.”

“DNA testing is very important to conservation. Let me ask Paula if the Nature Protection Society can assist.”

“Thanks.”

“If you get any DNA from Ms. Vasquez and the police won’t test it, I’ll ask about it, too.”

“I’ll tell her. The sheriff’s department might have thought of it.”

At the time, Wayne thought the wolves entered Wolftown because of rabies or the inability to hunt normal prey, whether from low prey numbers or dental issues, like decayed teeth or an infected jaw. Wolves hunted people when provoked or as a last resort. Now he knew the wolves tested negative for rabies and they appeared healthy.

“Their bites are less powerful than most wolves, but I don’t notice a clear dental problem,” Wayne said.

Wayne and John hated thinking about people as prey, but from the wolves’ perspectives, they were.

Likely, the wolves carried out exploratory attacks on humans, which did not necessarily involve killing and eating. The wolves fed on Wolftown’s small animals.

Sometimes, wolves scavenged food. Closed dumpsters flummoxed the average canine, and the Old Wolftown Restaurant raccoon-proofed their dumpsters. The expired or uneaten meat could have attracted Abel, who decided to wait for humans to walk outdoors. But it was an unsatisfactory explanation.

Between approximately 1:00 to 3:00 AM, the wolves killed Shane Greenbough in Sugar Maple Park. Wolf patrollers found him around 10:00 AM, giving wolves plenty of opportunity to feed.

Shane carried marijuana, and the human footprints matched his tennis shoes. (Wayne told John what details he coincidentally noticed.) According to Officer Matthews, Shane served time in jail for various drug charges.

Wayne thought Abel bit Shane’s hamstring, his neck and shoulder area from behind, and his mid-back. Shane might have provoked an attack and turned away to run, but Wayne still could not explain why he felt skeptical about a provoked attack. The coroner might find defensive wounds Wayne overlooked. He hoped the Wolftown Police Department would request an autopsy. Flinching, stumbling, or looking behind him explained Shane’s twisting and crumpling. Abel could have bitten his neck first. Shane would have slumped off the bench, but then, why hamstring him? His body showed some signs Abel dragged him, but none that the wolf attempted to dismember and cache Shane.

Shane’s body showed little sign of feeding, but police found a chunk of liver nearby. Rainwater diluted the blood spatter and the unidentifiable but possibly wolf diarrhea and vomit. John correctly predicted that, without being asked, Wayne would tell him how to identify wolf bodily fluids. Wayne stored his double-bagged samples in the Happy Howlers’ fridge and sent others to Dr. Richardson, the vet.

“Why was Abel sick?” John asked.

“Maybe he caught something from a dog. Maybe he ate really expired meat, but wolves eat carrion. If it was Abel, I don’t want to call it food poisoning, but maybe he got something like that from Suzanne’s intestines. It’s hard to find papers about what diseases humans and wolves share because it isn’t an issue.”

Wayne thought Shane’s death was such a waste; he would have the same opinion if Abel killed Pablo Escobar or Nancy Reagan. Shane was involved with the wolf response, nothing indicated he provoked the attack, and from Officer Matthews’ reactions, Wayne doubted the police suspected him of committing murder or being murdered. In Wayne’s opinion, nobody had a smart reason to visit in Sugar Maple Park. Officer Matthews thought only an addict or, highly unlikely in Wolftown, somebody meeting with a cartel leader would sit outside in a wolf’s territory.

Wayne wondered if the marijuana buyer or seller saw Shane dead or being attacked and escaped. The other person would not tell anybody a wolf attacked him—police would wonder why he approached somebody carrying drugs. Similarly, the wolf response’s questions included, “What were you doing at the time?”

Again, Wayne found no trace of the wolves’ movements. The rain disturbed the trail and fresh paw prints blended with old ones.

On March 11, around 4:00 AM, the Wilde County Sheriff’s Office asked Wayne to examine the Vasquez’s campsite, racing the weather. Though the Wolftown Police Department encouraged Wayne to remain in town, he thought he had another opportunity to find the wolf.

Wayne arrived as the crime scene technicians tidied up, which mussed the ground. He recognized a few things Miranda mentioned in her statement. He gingerly explained the campsite; John had not yet requested authorization to view Wilde County’s police evidence. John thought Wayne noticed a weird thing.

The police said that they had not removed Sergio’s body. Wayne found neither signs that a wolf dragged Sergio away nor indications that the campsite was, “‘not where’ Sergio ‘eats but where he is eaten.’”

“Sorry, could you repeat it, please?” John asked.

“I’m tired of saying ‘the wolf ate whoever.’ Sergio wasn’t eaten by anything at the campsite, but I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“How long does that—being eat—carrion animal—last for a human?” John asked.

“Longer than a couple of days. Maybe someone will find him. Search-and-rescue already looked in the wrong place once and maybe they were wrong again. Maybe Sergio was alive when she left, and he wandered off.”

“Oh, no.”

“I didn’t tell her that, but it could happen. He probably hasn’t survived the weather, though.”

Wayne spoke with Miranda over the phone, near noon. She said that the police suspected her of killing Sergio or covering up an accident. Still, her injuries convinced them and Wayne that a wolf, coyote, or dog attacked her. He promised to search for the wolf since Miranda worried the police would rule it out while determining Sergio’s cause of death.

John believed people were good, but he imagined that a honeymooner could murder a spouse. He asked, “Because the murders looked like a person got a wolf or a large dog to kill people?”

“I don’t know if anybody thinks she is connected. I don’t think she is, and I don’t think she set a pack of wolves loose or trained wolves to kill somebody. I’m not convinced she murdered him. The wolves would have attacked her whether or not she murdered Sergio. The weird thing is how the wolf got inside the tent. I want to talk to her again in a few days. If the information changes, maybe the sheriff’s department won’t think she was changing a lie. It’s better to be investigated by Sheriff Jordan than by the ​Wolftown Police Department.”

“How is she now?”​

“She felt a lot better when she warmed up and rehydrated, but she still has a really bad infection. She needs a lot of surgery and rehab. And she thinks if she stayed in the woods overnight, she would have died.”

“If you and Glenn kept following the wolf trails on the 9th, the search might have covered a different area, and Eddie Miller wouldn’t have found Miranda,” John said.

“We found wolf signs around her, so maybe the trail would have led us to her anyway, and we would have caught the wolf, too.” Wayne yawned midway through a sigh. “I haven’t been going in chronological order.”

“I’m following it. How long have you been awake?”

“I took a nap. I’ll go back to the evening of March 11.”

“How? Today is the 11th.”

“March 10, then.”

Overnight, Dr. Groves and the nurses organized a blood drive, intending to send the donations to the blood bank if unused. Thanks to the annual blood drive, they had the necessary supplies. The drive began at 7:00 AM.

Wayne believed that Dr. Groves prepared for more victims in other ways, too, but discreetly, to avoid alarming people.

Glenn Malone’s family asked him to stop hunting for the killer wolves; Wayne understood their concerns and adjusted Glenn’s schedule. He lived on an often-flooded road. The route toward Wolftown filled before the one to the Happy Howlers facility. If possible, he would sleep on the Happy Howlers’ breakroom couch and tend to the penned wolves.

The killer wolves terrified Calvin Kowalski and he quit. Wayne offered to re-hire him again after the crisis, or else write him an excellent recommendation letter.

Wayne grudgingly admitted he should nap twice in the same day.

John thought Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and School might influence people’s opinions about the wolves. Wayne supported him despite thinking religion barely mattered to the wolf response. Wolftown congregants from other denominations’ churches likely participated in the wolf response, but the church and Pastor Mickelson joined the wolf response once Mayor Dwyer asked to use Holy Trinity’s gymnasium. Mayor Dwyer had forbidden the wolf responders to discuss matters with outsiders. Still, Wayne thought Pastor Mickelson would tell him about local Christians’ opinions and let him look at the school’s library.

“I don’t know how to ask something like that,” John said.

“I bet he’s heard it before,” Wayne said.

Pastor Mickelson answered questions and showed John to the library.

Among Christian wolf responders, Pastor Mickelson said their faith influenced them, and he prayed for God to guide everybody of any belief. He said that the leaders’ decisions probably did not come from a doctrine because Wolftown’s city government separated church and state. But Wolftown authorities debated whether they valued a wolf’s life or a human’s life more.

John followed Pastor Mickelson’s theological explanations of how to treat wolves, why the wolves attacked, and how God protected people from the killer wolves. He had absolutely no idea how to write it down.

Holy Trinity Lutheran School taught creationism as fact, but children also learned evolution’s tenets. The methods changed every so often during Pastor Mickelson’s tenure, and the school board regularly debated how to include creationism and evolution.

Part 9 coming on October 11, 2024.

I love looking for names, but pick ones as quickly as possible. Researching is fun and I get distracted. Also, I’m pretty geeky, like researching, and get distracted easily. But I guess how to apply which naming method to which story and the process speeds me up a little or shows new ways to find names. Being dyslexic, I have a lot of trouble with names and languages, but, unfortunately, enjoy working with them.

Every so often, I find a name that looks nice as a sequence of letters, then spend a long time learning to pronounce it. Or I try to write down a name that sounds nice in my head and can’t.

Some names fit characters well immediately. The characters need a name, but I don’t always have an opinion about whether or not the names fit. Theoretically, I might not develop the character enough or he might not show up enough to determine the suitability. On the other hand, the reader might have his own opinion about what name would suit a character in the situation. Some names probably grate against a reader who knows more about the character's situation than me.

Though I can overthink names, sometimes persnicketiness matters. And I can’t predict when to be picky. I think more about whether the names generally coordinate with the story. Most people don’t choose their own names, so I think about demographics, family customs, and naming conventions. When I’m familiar with a naming system, picking out names speeds up, so sometimes I spend a while developing the system. Reading about naming conventions in general helps me conlang names and it’s interesting. Symbolism and meaning matters to some characters’ backgrounds. A character’s name might sound better with her born surname better than her married name. A character might be opinionated in the story about which name to use when and why, though that can be shown instead of told.

In most stories written over the past year, I use lists of the most common names for a specific time or place, like from the Social Security website or genealogy sites. Plenty of baby-naming sites list the name’s popularity, usually into the 1800s. Finding a name’s popularity earlier is difficult. Most names in Wolftown came from the Social Security first name lists and a list of Wisconsin surnames, and I spend minimal time choosing them and really only pay attention to the balance of Germanic names and non-Germanic names.

Quite a few sites list thousands of names, even from archaeological finds. Linguists don’t necessarily know how to pronounce the names, so I fill in missing sounds from Anglicized words. English probably corrupted the pronunciation and I made it worse, but the words are writeable and readable in English. When naming characters from unfamiliar times, places, or social groups, I compare multiple name lists carefully. I might be looking at the wrong thing, the names might vary significantly depending on social or historical factors I don’t know, the compilers could have miscategorized them, and the lists may have other problems I can’t recognize.

Also, I have a list of interesting names, which I tend to save for characters predicted to be important. Reading name lists, and paying attention to credits and acknowledgments probably feeds the names into my brain.

I change names while writing (even in the same paragraph) and double-check the consistency while editing. I know the characters’ identities, and since nobody reads the early drafts, confusion about little details matters much less than the storytelling. Also, multiple characters might be combined into one, and it’s possible to waste time thinking about their names and other details. (Sometimes, figuring out details helps me combine characters. I guess which while writing.)

If stopping to name interferes with a writing flow, I’ll call the character, “the [noun]”, with the noun being the role, the relationship to a character, or another distinguishing word. Some never need a name or they are better known by the description.

Changing or finishing a name might be at the last minute, thanks to search-and-replace. Sometimes I have trouble keeping track of the names; I accidentally gave a Wolftown character two different names and had to correct it after publishing. I'm guessing that making a list of characters and aliases would prevent it.

For a minor character, a member of a large cast, or another if the name seems unimportant, I basically scribble a name tag and slap it on him. Occasionally the character becomes important and has to put up with a random name that stuck. If the character is important enough or I’m unfamiliar with his background, I spend more time on naming. If the names seem too familiar, I google them, and if the name is too distinctive and somebody already has it, I change it.

When trying not to interrupt a writing flow, I just stop for a few seconds and the name pops into my head. Then I try out a few ones, like filling in a crossword puzzle, sometimes by looking for similar names. I might have a name list open, or spending a couple minutes looking at one gives my brain a break while being productive.

Writing the character without permanently naming him can give me enough information to find his name. I might think of the name or know which keywords to use. Also, figuring out the name occasionally leads me to useful details or somebody else’s name. Sometimes I need to spend time focusing on the character’s name. I try to search for names outside composing time, but sometimes I have to figure out the name. An unnamed character might be hard to write, maybe because finding a name digs up details about the character or story.

While looking for names, sometimes I list choices, which identify similarities and differences between names, the language, and the story, like finding a flavor or a clash. I try to limit the choices to two or three, but some characters have several options.

To conlang, I combine syllables or sounds randomly with each other, leaving off endings and the like until I have time to figure them out. I change existing names slightly if the language relies heavily on an existing language. For example, Elissa became Alisha. Unaltered names might fit, but for a current work-in-progress, I’ve been checking the names’ origins and replacing names when the characters wouldn’t be involved with the origin cultures. Breaking real words into prefixes, stems, and suffixes, and recombining them works well for me. The meaning might matter or they just need to sound good together. I had this idea because, as a Latin and Greek teacher, my dad could predict the effects of J. K. Rowling’s spells and her character’s identities.

Aliens are a nightmare to conlang and it’s because I assume alien vocal tracts and human vocal tracts are very different. So far, I’ve experimented with giving aliens Human names, approximating the aliens’ sounds to the human vocal cords, and translating alien words into a human language, although the translated thing might just vaguely look alike on Earth and the alien’s planet. “Coral” on Earth is an animal, but a planet’s “coral” might legitimately be a rock; I’m not sure. If aliens use robotic translators, I still have to write the sounds down somehow.

One story has particularly finicky names. The main character’s name is Charles Morgan; the antagonists make sure they have the right Charles Morgan. The antagonists and probably other people triple-check that they have the right Charles Morgan. The time travelers regularly alter their names to suit different historical periods or to keep their identities separate. The royalty tend to have long names and pick them carefully, based on tradition. I spent months calling one character her nickname, Classics, before figuring out her real name, Persephone, chosen because of her family’s interest in mythology. But only Charles may call her Classics; he invented it from a button on her bag. Other characters in the same work rely on codenames, and if they decide to use usernames, at least Charles has a strong urge to yell at them. An important character picked out the codename Macmillan. He wanted to be called Macmorris from Henry V, but I thought Macmorris’ name was Macmillan. By the time I noticed, Macmillan stuck—Macmorris was wrong. Macmillan and Persephone argue about which name Shakespeare used, everybody calls him Macmillan, and I’m not convinced anybody bothered looking up the answer. (Persephone argued for MacMorris.) Calling Mr. Tambling-Goggin anything else feels wrong, though characters use other names. He needed a British-sounding slightly odd name, which probably came from a list of rare British names. I can’t exactly remember its origin, but when it showed up, it was perfect. (This paragraph sounds like the elements should not go together, but they do, at least to me.)

To enter Holy Trinity’s gymnasium, Officer Billy Schuster balanced on one foot, put on his sock and boot, stepped across the sandbags, and repeated the process for the other foot. The whole time, he clenched an evidence bag under his chin.

Schuster trudged from table to table, distributing papers from an evidence bag. Occasionally, he handed a clipboard to a member of the wolf response, who wrote on it. To Wayne, he said, “If you recognize the individual, please sign your name, the date, and time.”

He or Lang wrote on the evidence bag: NOT FOR EVIDENCE.

Wayne glanced at the photograph for three seconds. “Dennis Laufenberg. I was right about the toupee! He is the Chief of Police, John.”

“Dennis Laufenberg is the Chief of Police, but we haven’t made a positive identification of the individual in the photo yet. I’m not going to get tunnel vision. You can try identifying the individual if you want,” Schuster said to John. “No one in the police station told Lang and me to investigate him or tell you about him.”

“Sure,” John said, and Wayne passed it to him.

The black and white security camera barely captured the bald man’s profile. Wayne recognized the long nose and jaw formed by a flabby neck which would be a double chin if his chin was non-receding.

“Now I think about it, Peter’s description matches Dennis Laufenberg and the naked man. A lot of men look like them, though.”

Schuster whipped out a pen and damp notebook. “What makes you say that?” He wrote down Wayne’s description.

Afterward, Wayne said, “Because the phones went out, Rebecca probably can’t fax the list of times he communicated with Happy Howlers.”

“Take your time. I have other, unofficial questions. Mr. Dalton, I don’t know if you want to hear them, but Lang and I don’t mind if you do.”

“Wayne was telling me about the wolf response, but I can get other work done,” John said.

“Danny says I need to sleep, eat, and shower first, and take a break away from the police station, so I’ll come back,” Schuster said.

“You won’t be able to shower,” Wayne said.

“I found that out walking barefoot down the hall.” Schuster looked like he remembered to put a colander in the sink after dumping out the spaghetti.

“Oh no,” John said, making a face, and Wayne said, "Eww!"

“The police can’t go out in the weather, and I was thinking you would have time to answer the questions,” Schuster said.

“Whenever. We’ll be stuck here until sometime tomorrow,” Wayne said.

“Mr. Dalton, a lot of part-time officers become full-time officers during the tourist season. March 10 was the first time we’ve switched every part-time officer to full-time at any time of year. It was the only way we could try stopping the wolf. Other people would tell you, but I didn’t think you would know to ask,” Schuster said.

“I’ll write it down,” John said.

Schuster left and Wayne continued telling John about the events of March 10.

Nobody reported seeing or hearing the wolves overnight; Wayne and the other response leaders thought the wolves returned to the woods. He thought the wolf response chose the completely wrong location to find the wolves.

Rebecca printed warning posters of the wolves, including their pictures, and Nancy distributed them for miles around.

Wayne thought one Happy Howlers employee should remain in town, just in case the wolves returned. He assigned Suzanne Giese to Wolftown because she preferred observing nature without leaving modern conveniences.

John needed authorization from the sheriff’s office to know much about Sergio Vasquez. Wayne limited what he told John, but he brought news reports Wayne’s wife, Nancy, collected.

Since Sergio died outside Wolftown’s city limits, the county sheriff’s office investigated his death. The sheriff’s office asked the public to identify Peter, who met Miranda and Sergio before the wolf attack. The police and search-and-rescue hurried to find the Vasquez’s campsite and Sergio’s body before the flood.

Derrick Charles led the first search-and-rescue team to look for Sergio, believed to be within staggering distance of Miranda.

At approximately 4:00 PM, a wolf charged a local mailman, Troy Vandenheuvel. The thrown doggy treat box missed, but the wolf veered off at the last minute. Troy rang the closest house’s doorbell and smacked the door, but nobody answered. He ran out of sight.

Brittney Ness and her eighteen-month-old son Evan watched the mail route daily. Next door, Brittney hustled Evan into his bedroom, where he threw a tantrum. She called the police.

Troy rang the bell of every house en route to his mail truck. The wolf leaped onto a porch and ripped the mailbag open. He galloped between the houses. Troy huddled inside his truck and waited for somebody to find him.

Police Sergeant Babcock reassured Troy that throwing a doggy treat box at a charging wolf was self-defense and a diversion, rather than feeding the wolf. Wayne thought Troy survived an exploratory attack.

Norman James tethered his wolfjäger, Max, outdoors. A wolf and Max bit each other, but Norman had no idea who began the fight. Norman expected them to gore each other to death; instead, the wolf galloped out of sight. Dr. Richardson predicted a full recovery from Max’s two bite wounds.

A six-year-old boy, Ryan Nolan, reported that a canine killed his pet rabbit. The tractor protected Benjamin Bunny well from other predators. Ryan’s parents worked all day and Ryan attended school and daycare. Due to the wolf situation, the Nolans positioned the rabbit tractor far enough into the grass for nibbling and not far enough for a tunnel, with the rest on the concrete patio. Benjamin temporarily took his morning and afternoon hops in the family room. The culprit somehow forced the tractor farther onto the grass, dug into it, and ate Benjamin—his guts, fur, and blood mixed with the grass, cedar chips, droppings, and leftovers.

Suzanne identified the wolf prints, one bloody, and collected a blood sample and two long, canine hairs. She photographed the skid marks, broken rabbit nails, and carnage. She measured the caved-in tunnel, which she and Wayne thought was the wrong shape for a canine to crawl fully through. Once inside the tractor, it would struggle to turn around or back out through the tunnel. A rabbit probably could fit through the tunnel but would refuse to enter one smelling like a predator. Suzanne and Wayne thought Benjamin would crouch as far from the opening as possible, and they wondered why he was not in the den.

“Is the den the wooden square hutch thing?” John asked.

“Right,” Wayne said. “I don’t know how the wolf would have gotten him out of the den. The best explanations are a wolf attack or a psycho killing a little kid’s pet and blaming it on a wolf. So, I’m calling it a wolf attack.”

Happy Howlers learned about the wolf attacks when the media called the office and Wayne’s house. Rebecca contacted Wayne through the walkie-talkies, and he gave her a message for the media: “Happy Howlers is cooperating with the police.”

John squinted at Wayne.

“The police hadn’t involved us, so we weren’t going to get in the way.”

The wolf hunt intended to go home at 7:00, but the attacks prompted a few members to turn around early or quit. Others, like Derrick Charles, his search-and-rescue team, and Wayne, stayed longer. Wayne hoped to catch the wolves approaching the woods, but Nancy argued with him over the walkie-talkie. She said that Derrick needed to search the area for Sergio, but Wayne would have another opportunity to catch the wolves.

The authorities figured out that Miranda wandered miles from her and Sergio’s campsite. From the moment he heard it, Derrick doubted they would find it and Sergio before the flood. He expected the flood to obliterate the site.

Suzanne agreed to work late; otherwise, Wayne would have patrolled Wolftown at night. Now Wayne wished he had followed the original plan.

The wolf attack on Suzanne lasted less than two minutes, and it was one of the few indications that the wolves hunted as a pack or counted humans as prey. To save batteries and film, Suzanne had turned off the tape recorder and camcorder, so the accounts came from Adam, Jane Matthews, a waitress, and Karl Henry, a corporal in the Wolftown Police Department.

Around 9:30 PM, Suzanne ate supper at the Old Wolftown Restaurant and waited for her husband to pick her up. She stood by the door, stiff from sitting in the van all day. Her husband drove as close to the door as possible. Carrying the tranquilizer gun, Suzanne looked around for the wolf and dashed out.

Abel pounced from the dumpsters, biting the back of her thigh, and Suzanne’s blood spurted. She collapsed and fumbled for the tranquilizer gun.

A second wolf circled the car, and Barker or Charlie howled; Wayne could not determine the howling wolf’s location. Adam accidentally bashed the second wolf by opening his car door.

Suzanne rolled onto her back. While Suzanne began going in and out of consciousness, Adam scrambled for the tranquilizer gun. Abel straddled Suzanne, his snout inside her abdomen, and pawed her.

As soon as Adam aimed at Abel, he galloped down the street. At some point, the second wolf left. The wolves howled nearby.

During the attack, Jane Matthews, called 911, and asked for Officer Matthews to respond. She hollered instructions to Adam, but he paid little attention to her. Jane avoided looking at Suzanne.

Jane threw towels to Adam, who said that Suzanne’s blood spurted.

Karl estimated he was halfway to the Old Wolftown Restaurant before Jane dialed the second 1in 911. He sped in his own car because a police car was not available for various reasons, such as the kind of duties he performed and the Wolftown Police Department’s size. He admitted to driving faster than he would if transporting his dying children through Wolftown’s normal traffic. Daily, it hardly amounted to traffic, and the wolves scared people into staying home after dark. Nobody wrote Karl a ticket or gave him a warning about speeding.

Seconds later, Karl squealed to a stop in the parking lot, looked around quickly for the wolf, and knelt by Suzanne. He checked Suzanne’s airway, breathing, and respiration, and tightened a tourniquet around her leg. Saying, “Hold pressure on there,” Karl pressed Adam’s hand against her femoral artery.

Karl rummaged among Suzanne’s internal organs, and blood poured around his hands and her guts. Intestinal fragments slipped out. When Adam attempted to push the bulging intestines into her abdomen, Karl snapped, “Stop! You’re making it worse! Hold pressure on the towels!”

Just as Karl pinched a vessel Abel bit through, Suzanne lost consciousness for too long. He had been counting her quiet moments in his head, like the time between thunder rolls.

Suzanne’s internal bleeding slowed, but she was unconscious until on the air ambulance. The rain soaked her bandages.

Officers Matthews and Jones arrived. Officer Matthews checked on his cousin. After Officer Jones vomited, Karl told him and Adam to wait in the restaurant and send Officer Matthews to assist him. The officers forced Adam to release the pressure on Suzanne’s femoral artery, but Officer Matthews replaced him.

The dispatcher already sent Wolftown’s single ambulance somewhere else, so dispatched the fireman EMT, Chad Gates. He administered an IV and oxygen.

Gingerly, the policemen and Chad transferred Suzanne to a stretcher and carried her into the Old Wolftown Restaurant. The jostling nearly made Karl nearly lose his hold on the vessel.

Although dispatch called an air ambulance, Karl told Officer Jones to bring Dr. Groves.

Chad cut off Suzanne’s dripping clothes, covered her with a blanket, and looked for other injuries. Jane bundled everything into a trash bag for Adam.

During the next part, John steadily went queasy and made disgusted sounds.

Karl told Wayne one observation which they thought Adam should hear from a doctor and only if the doctor thought it mattered. As a Navy corpsman with two tours in Vietnam, Karl learned what perforated guts felt like. He assumed that animal bites felt distinct from gunshot wounds or blast injuries. Jane’s guts felt like the wolf bit and tore them, but, instead of eating them, left them in the abdominal cavity. The damage was too extensive for the fragments on the asphalt to be anomalies. Due to Karl’s discomfort, Wayne decided against asking for more details, to John’s relief.

Wayne said, “Abel could have been feeding. People survive animals eating their muscles, but I don’t know about internal anatomy.”

“Maybe she will recover. It’s been less than twenty-four hours,” John said.

John did not write down the internal chewing conversation.

Karl stopped pressing on Suzanne’s femoral artery, concerned about damaging her leg. Adam asked if he was still applying pressure, and Karl lied to him.

When Dr. Groves arrived, he gave Suzanne ketamine. He delicately found the blood vessel that Karl pinched. He clamped it. Karl worried about the vessel tearing, but the clamp held. Dr. Groves and Karl tended to her for five more minutes, and then, finally, the air ambulance landed.

Officer Jones called Happy Howlers and Wayne’s house, but the wolf response already contacted Wayne. Nancy asked Officer Jones to stay with the children until she reached them. The Gieses’ family lived hours away and Nancy worried about finding a neighbor or friend.

“And she worried that I’d be mauled to death, but she told me to keep looking for the wolf,” Wayne said.

“The wolves are dangerous,” John said. “I personally think they shouldn’t be killed, but they should be stopped.”

“We have a good pen for them.”

“It’s better than killing them.”

Wayne hiked and drove to the Old Wolftown Restaurant and investigated.

Not even Karl told Wayne what alerted him. Wayne thought the murder investigations pointed Karl to the Old Wolftown Restaurant. Either the police considered Karl the best officer for an important part of a murder investigation or Karl responded himself without authorization. Because Karl drove alone and without a tranquilizer gun or radio, Wayne leaned towards the latter.

When Wayne left the restaurant, the police asked Wayne to look at two murder scenes. Wayne knew about the first murder, but the public learned of the second in mid-morning on March 10. He told John the bare minimum.

There was plenty of evidence that a person with a large dog or a wolf was in the first house approximately when the murder occurred. The second house had less evidence. In both houses, the police found wolf prints and hairs. Wayne verified that a wolf left the prints and that a canine shed the hairs. Exhausted, he thought anything else he told the police would be unreliable.

The police asked if it was theoretically possible for a person to make a wolf kill people. Rather than knowing what actually happened, they wanted to know if something could happen. Because Wayne owned books describing wolf training attempts, he said that training wolves was unreliable and impractical.

As far as Wayne knew, it was the first time anybody suggested the wolf murder weapon hypothesis. Later, the wolf pack hypothesis developed from explaining why the wolves appeared alone. Wayne constantly emphasized that he needed time, rest, and data to consider the ideas thoroughly, and that the police should not base their investigation on his immediate opinion. He disliked the hypotheses. Wayne argued the ideas to test them, not to defend them—John understood that, unlike many people. Wayne wanted the authorities to ignore his dumb ideas.

The next part will be posted on Friday, September 20, 2024.

Wayne continued telling John about the wolves prowling Wolftown and the woods.

On the night of March 8 and 9, Miranda Vasquez perched in a sugar maple tree deep in the woods around Wolftown. The wolf left without eating Sergio’s corpse.

Across Wolftown, civilians and police glimpsed wolves and heard their howling. Chief of Police Dennis Laufenberg himself fired at the wolf, but the wolf escaped.

At approximately 5:00 in the morning, sanitation workers delayed their route because a wolf rummaged through 8 Oak Street’s garbage cans. The sanitation workers waited in the truck until the wolf moseyed away. Ordinary garbage could tear the bags worse than the wolf’s claws had.

After sunrise, Miranda hobbled through the woods. When she noticed wolf signs, she altered her course, fearing another attack. But she struggled along in her chosen direction.

Dr. Groves prepared his clinic for wolf bites.

Officers Allen Klug, Larry Jones, and Melvin Matthews guarded the school bus stop and the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and School crossing and parking lot. Chief Laufenberg ordered officers to carry standard weapons and tranquilizer guns. The police darts contained ketamine combined with other sedatives. The Wolftown Police Department held optional tranquilizing gun training, and the untrained officers adapted.

Chief Laufenberg authorized shooting if the wolves attacked people, defined by biting or clawing. Wayne advised Chief Laufenberg that wolves attacked with teeth rather than claws. Therefore, since Chief Laufenberg wanted to include clawing, it could be grouped into threatening behavior, like veering off at the last second. He said to John, “When the wolves don’t hurt anyone, Chief Laufenberg and Mayor Dwyer call the attacks a ‘wolf encounter’ or a ‘wolf incident.’ When they have to, they say crap like, ‘The potential for an attack at that time was prevented by…whatever.’”

Throughout the wolf response, Wayne told Chief Laufenberg and Mayor Dwyer that they drew the wrong conclusions from the data and presented their conclusions as facts, which would confuse people. He warned Chief Laufenberg and Mayor Dwyer that when people noticed discrepancies between the authorities’ statements to scientific sources, he would not support the authorities’ statements. He decided against openly contradicting them until the wolf situation was resolved.

“Really?” John knew Wayne was opinionated.

“I’m right, and I like being right, but I don’t need to be right about everything all the time.” Wayne also told Happy Howlers employees to disregard misguided conclusions and instructions. He trusted them to respond to the wolf’s behavior.

“A lot of people knew the police are corrupt and the city government screws up sometimes. I didn’t want to make Wolftown’s problems worse. The more the wolf attacked people, the more Mayor Dwyer listened. When Chief Laufenberg stopped being as involved, the authorities’ responses improved. We agree about things more now. Still, I don’t contradict the police in public, to the media, or to people not involved with the operation. I don’t tell people my opinions, but I’ll give them the raw data. I told my employees to do the same things, but you and me are the exception.”

“Could you tell me why?”

“You wouldn’t get accurate information. Chief Laufenberg and Mayor Dwyer were very concerned about vigilantes, and they didn’t want to call up the Wolf Guard.”

“The patrollers I saw?”

“Right. If I contradicted the authorities too much, people could have looked for the wolves. I don’t think that is a good idea because an emergency response needs a structure and resources. Normal, scared people can’t get them easily.”

To capture the wolf, Happy Howlers brought slow-acting tranquilizers but relied on the same kind of darts police used. Happy Howlers routinely carried drugs to counteract the sedatives; each employee assigned to the school routes prepared a dose. Wayne dreaded overdosing the wolf. One dart sedated the wolf in several minutes, but people might expect the ketamine to work in seconds and so tranquilize the wolf again. The plans prevented multiple people from firing one dart each. Also, a drowsy, loopy, aggressive wolf could provoke a shooting.

Happy Howlers employees and Wayne carried new camcorders and tape recorders. They recorded the entire time. The employees hung the camcorders around their necks, letting them switch to tranquilizer guns without destroying the camcorders.

A few children wanted to skip school; some parents forced them to school because, among other reasons, the authorities mitigated the risks. Other parents kept their children home and indoors. Parents drove their children to Holy Trinity and congested the streets surrounding the school bus stop. Wayne’s grandchildren hesitated to attend school, but he told them to listen to their parents.

Members of the Wolf Guard or people who remembered armed themselves. So did the hunting and gun-owning parents, relations, and friends—at least two hunters carried bows.

“If I saw a wolf attacking my kid, I might attack it, too,” John said.

“My grandkids and their friends were going to be there. They were scared, so I told them we were ready to stop the wolf,” Wayne said. “I was worried about crossfire or confusion, and the police asked people to disarm. I bet a few people had concealed carry permits.”

Beginning at the Wolftown sign, a wolf stalked the bus. The bus driver, Lori Ritter, notified her supervisor, who called Wolftown police. Sometimes the wolf galloped alongside or behind, or people chased it away. The driver and children saw one wolf at a time, but their descriptions varied.

Wayne and John knew wolves were endurance predators, but the school bus should have outstripped them. They had absolutely no idea why a wolf would consider a school bus a prey animal. Hunting walking schoolchildren made perfect sense.

Officer Klug waved for Lori to open the school bus door; Wayne and Suzanne waited on either side of the bus. Abel charged Officer Klug, whose tranquilizing gun jammed. He yelled, “Wolf, wolf, wolf! Tranquilizer—Jammed!”

Wayne and Suzanne sent people back to their cars. At the same time, Lori closed the school bus door and Officer Klug hit Abel’s head with the tranquilizing gun and, following him, pepper-sprayed the wolf. The pepper spray blew onto Officer Klug and people, too, but mainly sprayed Abel’s back. Abel bolted.

Suzanne could have tranquilized the wolf, but he moved too quickly near too many people to risk it, and she thought she heard Officer Klug say, “Tranquilizer.”

Before she finished asking for clarification, Officer Klug unjammed his gun and the dart hit Abel. He yelled, “Tranquilizer, tranquilizer, tranquilizer!”

Wayne and Suzanne chased Abel between the houses. Abel ran at over twenty miles per hour and turned corners, losing Wayne and Suzanne. They hoped to follow the tracks, except they jumbled with the other prints. Officer Klug told them to return to the bus stop unless they could intercept the wolf.

Suzanne picked up the dart. It probably had dangled from Abel’s skin, then the running jolted it free. They gave it to Officer Klug.

“Will the pepper spray damage his eyes?” Officer Klug asked.

“I’m pretty sure it won’t blind him permanently,” Wayne said. “But if he’s scared and in pain, he could be more aggressive. I don’t know for sure because people don’t pepper-spray wolves.”

Officers Jones and Matthews would also yell, “Wolf, wolf, wolf” when they saw him and “tranquilizer, tranquilizer, tranquilizer” if they tranquilized him. Shooting would follow the police department’s training for dog or other animal attacks.

At Holy Trinity’s crossing, Officer Jones sat on the police car’s roof.

Officer Matthews stood in the middle of Holy Trinity’s parking lot. Less than a minute after the last student entered the school, Abel pounced on Officer Matthews. Calvin Kowalski saw Abel nip at Officer Matthews’ back thigh, and Officer Matthews heard the snap. He dodged and landed on his side as Calvin tranquilized Abel.

The wolf galloped past Officer Klug, who lacked a clear line of fire. Somebody else missed shooting Abel and anything important. The crowd objected to firing and missing and wondered why Officer Matthews held his fire. He refused to acknowledge their questions, let alone explain to civilians. Also, Wayne suspected who fired, but the police would not release the name.

Somehow, Abel escaped.

John said, “I listened to the radio on the drive here, and the reporter said that the wolf attacks began yesterday. Wasn’t Abel attacking the police officers?”

“I think the wolves could have been engaging in exploratory attacks.” Wayne sighed. “Abel only attacked police, and the police don’t always tell people what happened to officers. The police gave the media the information. Most people didn’t have a good view, so it could look like a charge. Abel was really fast. A reporter would have trouble figuring it out.”

All day, Wayne led Happy Howlers: gathering physical data, responding to wolf sightings, and tracking the wolves.

Nancy, Wayne’s wife, collected personal accounts and ran errands, such as having camera film developed or making copies of people’s camcorder footage.

The secretary, Rebecca, provided authorities with as much information as they wanted, while unable to acquire information from them. She joked about requesting records under The Freedom of Information Act, but Wayne said to wait a few months.

“And Schuster and Foster called the office,” Wayne said. “They told Rebecca to only give copies to the police. They said we needed to keep the originals and recommended keeping copies.”

“Why?” John jumped off the assumption that Wolftown police mishandled evidence.

“Rebecca gave the police copies because they might keep the tapes. Making back-ups is a good idea. Foster said, ‘Keep the copies somewhere secure,’ and Schuster said, ‘Off the premises.’ They asked me to contact them if I saw misconduct. I haven’t needed to.”

Calvin noticed police officers at 3 Elm Street, but he continued working as planned, staying out of the way. Officer Lang told him to stop and forbid documenting the wolf sightings on the block. Later in the day, Wayne requested permission, but the Wolftown Police Department said it may interfere with an ongoing investigation.

Two miles apart, between 1:06 and 1:09 PM, Glenn Malone and Calvin both saw a wolf. Neither wolf ran swiftly enough to be the same wolf, and they ran in different directions. Glenn’s wolf sprinted away when he tranquilized it. Although he chased it, the wolf outran him. He searched long after the ketamine would have worn off.

At about 3:30, oddly, Suzanne discovered a wolf strap tangled in a boxwood.

“Do you know what a wolf strap is?” Wayne asked, showing John a picture.

“Yeah, I saw that one in the police station. They have a wet one, too,” John said.

Something other than the unexpectedness seemed weird to Suzanne, but even days later, she could not explain what. Though she did not believe in böxenwolves, she supposed local people owned wolf straps. Wayne told her to document the site, and, if she considered the wolf strap suspicious, turn it over to the police.

The officer on duty handed the wolf strap back, saying, “We aren’t taking werewolves into consideration, ma’am.”

Officer Lang said, “I’ll handle it,” and stored it in an evidence bag. He also questioned Suzanne.

People found wolf prints, mostly from Barker and Charlie, in gardens, half-brown grass, and trampled crocuses, and on pavements. A forsythia snagged wolf fur. By the end of the day, Wayne noticed a lack of verifiable wolf feces, and nobody reported wolves urinating or marking territory.

On various streets, a wolf scared people into their houses, businesses, and cars. One police car patrolled for wolves, while other officers performed their normal duties and investigated Wolftown’s police corruption and murder.

Wolves chased squirrels and birds, and people barely let their dogs outside.

Ralph Turner and his neighbors noticed fewer cats on the block in the days after the wolves’ arrival, but a normal amount of yowling. He thought little of the bloody grass.

While Happy Howlers and the police guarded the school bus’s drop-off route, the wolves roamed everywhere except the children’s routes. Wayne suspected Abel abandoned town after the pepper-spraying.

Meteorologists predicted storms and flooding in the next several days, which Wayne predicted would deter the wolves. The woods provided comfortable high grounds compared to Wolftown’s higher areas.

Wayne and Glenn tracked two routes, the first about one mile deep into the woods. In the twilight, they lost the second trail, found it again, and went home before they lost it and themselves. The decision relieved their wives; in retrospect, Wayne hated it. Quitting the wolf search for the night ranked in his top three worst decisions.

Mayor Dwyer contacted Wilderness Search-and-Rescue, a non-profit organization. Lacking evidence of unusual wolf activities elsewhere, Mayor Dwyer thought the situation did not require assistance from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Wisconsin Emergency Management, the local fish and game association, and other private organizations.

Although the Wolftown Police Department searched for people missing in the woods, like the beaver trapper, the police could not spare any officers. The police department placed Billy Schuster and Zachary Foster on unpaid leave while investigating their allegations of corrupt officers. Two fewer officers and three major problems—the corruption, the murder, and the wolves—overworked the department.

Rebecca called every potentially helpful organization in the phone book. Somebody could have encountered the wolves or seen something odd, but Wayne also wanted to warn people about the wolves. Ruby Klug directed Rebecca to wolfjäger owners who trained them for tracking wolves. All evening, Rebecca tracked down trackers and hunters willing to search the woods, to the annoyance of Mayor Dwyer and Chief Laufenberg.

“How are they different from the people in town?” John asked.

“They had instructions from search-and-rescue, and we were going to be calm and intentional. Some of them had search-and-rescue experience, and they weren’t going to shoot someone.”

On March 10, at 5:00 AM, people gathered to look for the wolves. Derrick Charles led the search-and-rescue team, which also brought necessary medical supplies for a wolf attack. Hunters carried guns capable of killing wolves because the law allowed them to shoot wolves in self-defense.

Since March 2, Derrick Charles led the search for Joel Block, the missing beaver trapper. Joel liked to spontaneously extend his stays in the woods, but he prepared well for emergencies and accidents. Erica, his wife, thought he could survive for weeks. She worried when he missed his shift at the BP station, then around 1:00 AM, March 2, she called search-and-rescue in the evening. Erica expected him to wander through the door a week later, oblivious to the search.

The search-and-rescue team found Joel’s footprints at his well-kept traps, but no signs of an animal attack. Erica guessed Joel might return to check his traps. When search-and-rescue returned to his traps, they found wolf tracks. When Derrick sent pictures and when the wolves began killing people, Wayne thought the tracks did not give evidence for or against a wolf attack.

Nobody could determine whether or not somebody accompanied Joel into the woods. Joel’s trail went cold; the other human signs could be unrelated to him.

John considered trapping a torment, whatever the method or prey, but he wanted Joel to survive the flood, and he felt sorry for Erica. He hoped search-and-rescue would recover his body or explain his death.

Wayne and Glenn marked the point to begin searching, but their trail markers vanished overnight. The maps indicated they started in the right spot, and some wolf signs remained. Wayne thought he and Glenn had muddled the trail.

The wolves’ trails became confusing, so the searchers dispersed further.

A team tracked bare human footprints until they led out of the wolf signs. It would have alarmed Derrick if there was a sign of a scuffle or distress. Before the flood, he double-checked the area and declared it a false alarm.

Eddie Miller practically stumbled upon Miranda, who lay almost unconscious on the damp, cold ground. Search-and-rescue called an air ambulance and administered first aid.

(Part Seven coming on August 23 or 30, 2024.)

Wolftown’s wolf response was headquartered in Holy Trinity Lutheran Church and School’s gymnasium, ideal for muddy, wet people. The wolf responders stationed constantly in the gymnasium sandbagged the doorways between the locker rooms and the gymnasium. Expecting Wolftown’s water level to rise another two or three feet, volunteers prepared classrooms for flooded-out families. Somebody monitored the generator. The town plumber, Phil, and a church and school custodian, Gary, bailed out the boys’ locker room.

“What’s wrong with the sewer system?” Wayne asked.

Phil said, “Something blocked it all over town.”

“This didn’t happen last time we had this rainfall,” Gary said.

“I don’t think the sewers were inspected before the storm,” Phil said.

“They should have been,” Gary said.

Phil shrugged. “Try the restroom on the upper floors.”

“We’re muddy,” Wayne said.

“I spread plastic over the carpets,” Gary said.

Wayne changed his clothes and John hung up his foul-weather gear.

The responders napped in classrooms and ate in the combination fellowship hall and school cafeteria. Pastor Virgil Mickelson officiated optional, short church services.

In the gymnasium, Wayne and John sat at a folding table. John plugged his laptop into an extension cord plugged into another orange one, but, at least, Holy Trinity’s wall outlets had surge protectors.

“We don’t have internet access,” Wayne said.

“If you don’t use it, I won’t need to.”

“Why do you have it anyway?”

“Paula thinks computer technology will make conservation easier. I keep notes on floppy disks, write, copy files, and can’t do much more.”

“What about Y2K?”

“Thankfully, she didn’t need to reimburse anyone for wasting $2,000.”

Wayne shuffled through notes and papers left at his folding table seat. “The kid was a missing person.”

“Oh, no,” John said.

“No one said he was when the police asked us to identify him.” Wayne sighed.

“I forgot about the beaver trapper, but I bet he was one of the missing persons Mayor Dwyer mentioned. Search-and-rescue declared him presumed dead today.”

“Condolences,” John said.

“We kept an eye out for him while looking for the wolf.”

“Did a wolf attack him?”

“No idea. I don’t know if we will know because of the flood. The first rabies tests came back negative,” Wayne said.

“Good.” John inserted a floppy disk.

“Here’s a note from Schuster: ‘Megan photographed Zach’s wolf bites, wrote down the measurements, and made a few copies. She said to call if you had questions. Megan can say what she wants. I’m working on Barbara Luben’s evidence. You are authorized to view evidence of Zach and Mrs. Luben’s attacks. I’ll try to bring them to you but can’t guarantee it.’”

“Do you want to look at fatal injures? It’s hard.”

“And harder if you know the people or live in the same town. I need to.”

“Do you want me to start with the hiker or the official first victim?”

“The hiker if it is chronological. I can take notes out-of-order, but I have to put it in order sometime.”

“I know I said I could tell you about the hikers, but I forgot about the police,” Wayne said. “They haven’t found Sergio Vasquez’s body yet, and Miranda Vasquez’s story is a little difficult to understand.”

As one of the most informed people involved in the wolf response, Wayne considered classifying the wolf situation pointless at best and, at worst, prevented an adequate response. He released any data somebody requested; it possibly provoked Mayor Dwyer’s restriction of out-of-town journalism and non-communication with local media.

Wayne suggested the most useful people to contact. Via Sharon Smith, Mayor Dwyer’s secretary, Wayne pestered the mayor for permission to answer the questions or to contact another person. Within half an hour, Mayor Dwyer allowed Wayne to explain details he considered pertinent—except about the wolf which attacked Miranda and Sergio Vasquez. The police continued to investigate Sergio Vasquez’s death. Mayor Dwyer permitted details about how they encountered the wolf, how it attacked, and how it stopped. To John’s surprise, Wayne agreed without argument.

John typed notes and listed evidence to copy.

While Sergio and Miranda Vasquez honeymooned in the woods near Wolftown. On March 6 and 7, they briefly met Peter, a stranger. He warned them about wolves in the area and suggested camping a couple of miles west. However, they stayed at their campsite. They built a fire and bear-proofed their food, which coincidentally deterred wolves.

In the middle of the night, Miranda left the tent to relieve herself. She zipped up the tent, but the hikers woke to a lone wolf inside the tent.

John said, “Sometimes the zipper doesn’t catch the other side of the fabric, but it sounds like it zipped.”

“I asked her. I haven’t had time to find out if a wolf can tear through a tent, but I told her I would,” Wayne said.

Sergio fought the wolf and slashed an escape hole for Miranda. She brandished a burning branch, which ignited the tent. Somehow, Sergio and the wolf struggled out of the tent, as Sergio yelled for Miranda to climb a tree.

Miranda tugged singed, bleeding Sergio from the tent, while the smoldering wolf rolled on the ground. The wolf retreated slightly, giving Sergio time to boost Miranda into a sugar maple tree. She hauled him up, but the wolf dragged him down. While Sergio stopped screaming, the wolf bit Miranda’s leg. The wolf’s teeth shredded her left leg, but Miranda tugged her leg out of the wolf’s mouth.

“How?” John asked.

“Adrenaline,” Wayne said. “But I’m surprised her the bone didn’t break, and he didn’t bite an artery or a vein.”

Wayne continued the chronological order, moving to the wolves entering Wolftown on March 8. Each wolf entered Wolftown on a different side of town by 2:00 PM, March 8. People treated them as a curiosity because sometimes wild animals passed the city limits.

Later, Wayne named the wolves Abel, Barker, and Charlie, although he initially thought Barker and Charlie were the same. Wayne said, “Abel looks like an overweight male, Barker is underweight, and Charlie is average. I don’t know Barker and Charlie’s sexes, but if the wolves are a pack, they are probably females. The wolves are about the same size, but people said Abel was big. Locals have a better idea of a wolf’s size than tourists have, but a wolf looks bigger in real life.”

“Probably more when you think it’s dangerous,” John said.

“And he was fat, and people called him fat.”

“He is.”

“At first, I thought the wolf was pregnant, but he is a male. I think he is bigger than Barker, but not unusually big.”

Around 3:00, Abel loped down Main Street into Holy Trinity Church and School’s playground. Barking and growling, he trotted, then cantered, then galloped. Kids scattered, and adults hustled children indoors, into cars, on top of the jungle gym, or down the street. Witnesses said fleeing felt like a natural response and thought the wolf could not chase everybody at once.

Playing hopscotch, Mallory Vaughn stood on one leg. Abel knocked her down; his paw left a smudged print on her pink jacket. Her older brother, Raymond, swung his stuffed backpack at Abel. He scooped up winded Mallory and dashed to the nurse’s office. On the way to the nurse’s office, Mallory accused Raymond of shoving her, even though Raymond babysat her. She merely skinned her knees, palms, and chin, and bumped her nose.

The wolf galloped out of the playground under a barrage of textbooks, lunch boxes, a ball, a copy of An Explanation of the Small Catechism, and a Furby. The playground monitor, Cindy Brown, slammed the gate shut and locked it.

As Abel wove through traffic, Maurice Williams nearly crashed into him; days later, he told Wayne he wished he totaled his car and killed Abel. The wolf caused erratic driving and two minor accidents. School-hour traffic and pulling over for the police cars complicated matters.

The wolf bounded through the grounds of the Sun ‘n’ Rain Childcare Center and the Giggling Forward Preschool. He circled the blocks and bounded again. Steve Taylor considered shooting the wolf, but the children were too close.

Throughout the town, people called 911 or Happy Howlers to report sightings. The wolves often left before anybody arrived—everybody focused on the schoolchildren. But the number of calls and the locations indicated two or three wolves roamed Wolftown.

Chief of Police Dennis Laufenberg was out of town. Until he arrived, Deputy Chief of Police Vincent Woods oversaw the police’s response. He told officers to carry tranquilizers and fire a gun as a last resort.

Because a wolf could easily jump Holy Trinity, the daycare, or the preschools’ fences, Wayne recommended that the staff keep children indoors until their parents arrived. To his relief, quite a few adults and children came to the same conclusion. The staff and parents arranged impromptu carpools and pickups. Officer Jones watched for wolves and staff or parents walked the children to the cars.

Police officers patrolled for unaccompanied walking children and drove them home, and they offered rides to accompanied children. Officer Matthews escorted the school bus and officers or parents walked children to their doors.

Around 4:30 PM, one wolf disappeared, probably into the woods, while two others continued prowling Wolftown. Wayne still wondered which wolf fled and which wolf remained.

Raymond and the adults’ reactions scared Mallory more than a wolf running her over. Just as a precaution, Dr. Groves ordered a rabies vaccine. Wayne examined Mallory’s jacket and collected wolf hairs from Raymond’s backpack.

The police unjammed traffic, despite Barker’s presence.

While Abel wreaked havoc, black-and-white security footage tracked Barker and Charlie, either of whom could have also chased the school bus. The wolf walked and loped, stopping to howl or bark. If somebody tried chasing him away, he cantered or galloped. He loitered around Main Street, but neither entered the school grounds nor threatened the parking lot. Wayne supposed the cars scared him.

Calvin, a Happy Howlers’ employee, tracked down Barker or Charlie at approximately 5:00. The wolf saw the car, turned around, and hid in a residential area. Suzanne backed up Calvin, and they almost cornered him. He jumped a fence at 6:00, but they tranquilized him. He headed for the woods and the Happy Howlers employees followed on foot at 6:10, plenty of time for the wolf to pass out. Neither wanted to chase the wolf on foot or search thoroughly for a trail, so they gave up a couple of minutes later. The wolf escaped. Wayne defended Calvin and Suzanne’s decision.

Around 6:30 PM, a wolf mauled Jill Vogel’s off-leash dachshund-Yorkie-miscellaneous mix. The wolf picked up Button and bolted out of the park. Button’s death eventually indicated Charlie existed.

Sightings halted after the attack.

The Happy Howlers administrative assistant, Rebecca Austin, sent information to the local media, which reported the wolf sightings for the evening news or morning paper. Other people heard rumors or they told their friends.

Happy Howlers intended to tranquilize the wolves and ask Dr. Jodi Richardson to examine them. If she declared the wolves healthy, Happy Howlers would tag, vaccinate, and release them. Employees nursed ill or dying wolves, except for rabid ones.

John disagreed with euthanizing animals for any reason but understood the reasons behind killing a rabid animal. Paula and the Nature Protection Society thought rabies and other diseases justified euthanasia. Because of that and Wolftown’s sensitive situation, he felt uncomfortable mentioning his opinion. He thought Wayne guessed, but they did not discuss it.

Wolftown’s nightlife consisted of McDonald's, the Old Wolftown Restaurant, and the Wunderbar, but they were quieter than normal.

“What’s the Wunder Bar?” John asked.

“It’s the only bar in town. One word, W-U-N-D-E-R-B-A-R.”

“Thanks.”

Mayor Dwyer made town officials, his family, and close friends to eat out, buy gas at the BP Gas Station, and play in the park.

“I told him it was a stupid decision,” Wayne said.

“Did something happen to him?” John asked.

“No, but it’s like living in Jaws! Would you have gone outside?”

“I’m a homebody.”

“And you already got into a wolf situation.”

“I had an escape route.”

Wayne sighed.

“You do it,” John said.

“I’m armed and keeping an eye out for the wolf. I don’t want to kill the wolf, but I want to survive.”

Seven businesses and the police station had security cameras. Four businesses had taped over their footage before police requested copies, and two showed barely any wolf. The police refused to turn over their videotaped footage but copied the low-quality time-lapse tapes. Wayne borrowed the school’s TV and paused the footage when necessary.

The security footage showed the wolf returned to downtown Wolftown at approximately 8:30 PM.

A couple of anonymous teenagers snuck out of their houses to buy junk food at the BP Gas Station and eat it in Sugar Maple Park. They noticed wolf tracks in the playground sand. Button died on the opposite side of the park, so Wayne suspected they found the first overnight tracks. The teenagers looked for the wolves because wolves would deter tourism, which their families depended on.

Schuster spotted their flashlights. He told them that Laufenberg ordered the police to send children and teenagers home, regardless of their parents’ usual rules, if the children walked or rode bikes alone after dark. Apparently, the teenagers had sneaked out. They could either go to the police station and give a statement about the wolf or go home without any mention of the wolf. The wolf howled behind the teenagers, too close. Schuster hustled them into the car, but the teenagers went voluntarily.

“I bet the parents found out anyway,” Wayne said.

“I won’t identify them,” John said.

(Part Five coming on August 9 or 16, 2024.)

I'm chronically ill, so when I have an additional health problem (especially several in a row, which happened recently), doing anything is pretty difficult. I'm so used to health problems interfering with plans, that when necessary, I warn people about it.

I've already delayed a Wolftown post once due to health problems, so I definitely did not want to again. Unfortunately, because of an ER visit and needing to follow the doctor's instructions, I have to postpone the next installment of Wolftown for 2-3 weeks. Posting will resume July 19 or 26, unless yet another health problem hits me. On the bright side, since making a goal of posting one story (or part) monthly since October 2023, Wolftown is the first project which's delays I have needed to point out to readers. I posted a couple of other stories by the skins of their teeth; this is an oddly successful, reliable schedule for me.

Even when feeling terrible, I have been able to tell myself stories or bits of stories, and now I generally feel well enough to write them down and edit them. I'm excited to finish Wolftown! It changed so much since the first draft, but I love figuring it out. But I can't work on it at the moment.