Savage Beasts - 3. Strange Things Roam the Mountains

“Surprise!” Thomas shouted, pulling the tarp off the heap of rusty metal. “Happy anniversary, Cub. I hope you like it.”

Sam did a walk-around and he looked up at his Papa with a grin.

“Papa, do you know what this is?” Sam asked with barely contained excitement in his voice.

“Of course I do,” Thomas replied. “This was my car years ago. I bought it new in 1955. I want to know if you know what this is.”

“It’s a 1955 Ford Thunderbird convertible!” Sam exclaimed. “This was your car? How is it still around?”

“Well, I drove it till the wheels fell off back in the 50’s and 60’s, especially when I was going back to college to get my engineering degree. When it was time for something new, I couldn’t bear to part with it, so I parked it in a storage garage that I own, waiting for the day when I’d feel like restoring it. That day never happened for me, but now that I have a hot Cub who’s into fixing cars and engines, I figured it was time to bring the old girl out of retirement.”

Sam bounded over to his Papa and gave him a great big kiss. Thomas slid his hands down Sam’s back to grab and squeeze his firm round ass.

Sam broke their kiss and leaned back against the car, stripping off his shirt and showing his Papa his beefy muscles and hairy chest and belly. He slid his shorts down and laid on his back on the trunk of the car.

“Come over here, Papa,” he said lifting his legs and showing Thomas his waiting ass. “I want to say, ‘thank you’ in my most favorite way.”

Thomas grinned, and dropped his shorts, ready to tell his Cub, ‘you’re welcome’ in the language that werebears knew best.

****

Thomas and Sam were cuddled on the couch after dinner, wrapped in a blanket and kissing each other tenderly as a warm fire crackled in the fireplace. The mood was suddenly broken when Thomas’s cell phone began to ring on the coffee table.

“Let it go to voicemail,” Sam said, reaching into Thomas’s pants and stroking his thick cock.

“It could be important,” Thomas replied, but Sam’s hand squeezed him tightly, and he gasped in pleasure and resumed kissing his Cub, letting the phone ring until the automated voicemail system picked it up.

A couple of hours later Thomas woke with a start on the couch. He and Sam were still cuddled under the blanket, but the fire had died down to a bed of hot coals. He extracted himself from underneath his cub and grabbed a few more logs for the fire. As he was returning to the couch, he noticed his phone blinking, indicating a new voicemail message.

Thomas sighed and picked up the phone, letting Sam sleep on the couch while he sat in the easy chair and tapped the phone to see who had called.

It was from Brian Adahy, a bear that Thomas kept in touch with over the years, who lived in a small village of maybe twelve werebears in the mountains to the south of Thomas, in Tennessee. Thomas tapped the button to listen to Brian’s message.

“Thomas!” Brian’s voice cried out from the phone’s speaker, “It’s Brian Adahy. We’re under attack! I don’t know who or what these things are, but they’re not human and they’re not wolf. They started a surprise attack on the edge of the village, and before we could act, half of us were dead. The last six of us are holed up in the hidden emergency shelter underneath Gary’s garage, but we’re pretty sure that they can smell us in here.

“Thomas, you have to find out who did this to us. They’re a danger to werebears everywhere and all lycans and humans alike. You have to find them and stop them!”

At this point in the recording, a loud smashing sound could be heard, followed by shrieking growls that were neither human nor lycan. The six werebears could be heard shouting and someone called out to the others to shift and fight for their lives. The remainder was filled with screams and the sounds of rending flesh. Before the recording ended, Thomas was sure that the last sounds were of meat being torn from the bone and consumed.

Thomas sat in the chair, ashamed that he allowed his urges with his Cub to get the better of him when he should have answered the phone. He woke Sam and played the message for him as well.

“Papa,” Sam said, “I’m so sorry. But, even if you had answered, there’s nothing that you could have done. Brian was smart to call and has left us with enough information to investigate. We will find out who did this, and we’ll make it right. We should get down there as quickly as possible to see if anyone survived this attack.”

They threw the bare necessities that they may need if they were going to be gone from home for a couple of days into a bag, and they jumped in Thomas’s truck to begin the drive down to Brian’s place in the dark of night. If Thomas drove all night, they should arrive at the village around sunrise, and then they could see for themselves exactly what had happened.

****

Christopher called to his children from the center of the village square. Eight monsters converged on his location from all directions, their teeth and claws dripping with werebear blood. His eighth child, Alcyoneus, was only two days old, having just been born from the body of the human formerly known as Max.

“Tonight was your first test, my children,” Christopher said to the monsters as they gathered around him in a circle, “You were pitted against a superior number of werebears, and you cut them down as easily as blades of grass. There are no lycan forces who can stop you, children. We will travel north, eliminating all bears and wolves who stand in our way until we reach our goal and have our retribution against the one who has wronged us!”

The monsters tipped their grotesque heads back and roared in unison, the unholy sound echoing across the nearby mountains.

“Did you get enough to eat, my babies?” Christopher asked. The creatures mewled and licked their bloody claws and jaws. “What else can I give you as a reward for the excellent job you did tonight?”

The creatures moaned and rubbed at their deformed genitals. Some got on all fours and presented themselves to the Papa for reward.

“You have earned this playtime, my children,” Christopher said, rubbing one of the creatures on the top of its head. “Go ahead and play together to give each other release.”

Christopher stood back and watched with glee as the eight monsters moved together in the middle of the village square and created a single pile of writhing squirming flesh as they pleasured each other with their clawed hands, fanged muzzles and mangy asses. Their orgy went on for hours until each of the creatures had worn themselves out to the point of exhaustion.

Christopher backed a large horse carrier into the square and up to the pile of spent monsters. He opened the back and beckoned them to the eight comfy nests occupying the inside of the trailer. The creatures wearily extracted themselves from the pile, and one-by-one entered the trailer to claim a nest and to sleep.

The last monster standing in the village square after all his brothers had boarded the trailer to sleep was the youngest, Alcyoneus. Christopher walked up to the beast, and stroked his deformed bear muzzle.

“I know, baby,” he said. “You don’t know what is happening, do you? The good news is that you don’t have to know. Let Papa do the thinking for you, and I’ll always watch over you. Just do as I say, and you and Papa and your brothers will all be a big happy family. You want that don’t you?”

The creature growled pitifully and began to weep. It nodded its head and nuzzled its grotesque face into Christopher’s chest.

“Oh, yes. That’s such a good boy!” Christopher said softly, petting the beast between its round, mangy ears. “You go on in and find a bed and get some sleep, okay? We’ve got a big week ahead of us! Yes, we do!”

The creature nodded and shambled up the ramp into the trailer to join its brothers.

Christopher closed and locked the doors and smiled to himself. His children passed the test tonight with flying colors. The werebears who wronged him will be powerless against the new family that he had created for himself! But there were more tests and trials to come, and more lycans who must pay for their treachery.

****

Shortly after sunrise, Thomas and Sam pulled into the small village of a dozen houses tucked into a sleepy valley between the mountains. It had no hotels or restaurants, no tourist traffic. It was the perfect place for a small group of werebears to live in harmony with nature, until now.

Thomas’s truck pulled slowly through the village. The doors of each house were broken down and there were grisly scenes of blood splashed upon the walls and the street. Brian had reported that the last surviving six bears were holed up in the emergency shelter beneath Gary’s garage, so he stopped the truck in front of that house, and he and Sam exited the truck cautiously.

The garage door was literally torn open, as if something had clawed through the aluminum door panels and ripped them apart in the middle as if they were made of paper. They stepped through and saw the hatch in the middle of the garage floor that had been smashed open, the door completely obliterated.

“Papa,” Thomas said, covering his nose, “What’s that horrible smell? It’s making me feel sick and dizzy.”

“That’s the smell of werebear blood, Cub,” Thomas replied, struggling with his own reaction to the scent coming so strongly from the hole in the garage floor. “Wait here, I’m just going to check for survivors.”

Thomas pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and held it over his nose and mouth. He picked up a flashlight laying on the garage workbench and switched it on, shining the light into the hole in the garage floor before descending the steps.

Sam waited in the garage, pacing back and forth nervously as he waited for his Papa to come back up the steps. After just a few minutes, Thomas’s head poked back up through the hole in the floor and he climbed the rest of the way out of the hatch.

Thomas had tears streaming down his face, and when he saw his cub, he broke down in sobs, clinging Sam to himself as if he’d never let go.

“What did you find down there, Papa,” Sam asked as Thomas began to get his crying under control.

“I saw a massacre, Cub,” Thomas said. “Whatever it was, it didn’t just kill them, it ate them as well.”

“How are we going to find the ones who did this?” Sam asked.

“With our noses and brains, Cub,” Thomas replied. “Let’s get out of this garage first, because we won’t be able to smell anything else besides werebear blood in here. We’ll take a walk through the village and see what scents we can pick up.”

As they walked away from the garage and out into the lane running through the village, Sam picked up on the strange scent first.

“I’ve got something, Papa,” Sam said. “It’s fresh, only a few hours old or less. It’s very odd. It’s almost like the smell of a werebear, but with an undertone of decay and corruption to it. Do you smell that too?”

Thomas scented the air and thought carefully. He had not encountered this scent in all of his two hundred years, but he’d heard stories that suggested what this may be.

“I smell it, Cub,” Thomas replied. “Let’s check out the rest of the houses.”

As they neared the village square, the smell intensified, until they reached a spot that reeked of both the mystery scent and of sex.

“Whatever these things are,” Sam began, “There are a lot of them, and I think they had an orgy right here on this spot after killing everyone. What kind of sick creatures would do that?”

“Sick creatures,” Thomas replied, “I think you’re closer than you know.

“Look over there. That’s Brian’s house. Even though he lived cut off from the rest of civilization here in the mountains, Brian was a techie. I’ll bet that he has cameras set up around his house.”

They walked over to Brian’s place and as Thomas had guessed, they spotted security cameras posted on the exterior walls covering several angles. They stepped around the broken pieces of the front door, looking for Brian’s computer. They walked through the hallway to the kitchen, and it appeared that Brian was in the middle of his dinner when he was attacked. The table was overturned, and food and broken pottery was scattered across the floor. The back door was broken outward, so that must have been how Brian made his escape to Gary’s garage.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Sam found Brian’s home office in a large den just off the master bedroom.

Thomas looked at the complex computer setup with frustration. He may be an engineer, but computers were never his thing. Sam patted his Papa’s shoulder to let him know that he had this under control. Sam sat at the computer and began looking through Brian’s programs and applications. He was quickly able to access the security feed and when he pulled it up, a large monitor on the wall of the den came to life, split into six different camera angles around the exterior of the house. Sam began rewinding the footage and the saw Thomas and himself walking backwards from the house, and their truck driving backwards up the lane. He continued rewinding the footage until they reached approximately 9 PM the night before. Several figures moved in front of the various camera angles, and Sam paused the recording there.

“What the fuck are those?” Sam asked, aghast at the sight.

“Oh, Gods,” Thomas replied, “Those are something that most definitely should not be alive.”

Thomas slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. He held his head in his big hands and thought very carefully how he was going to explain this to his Cub.

“Sam, you remember when I gave you the werebear version of ‘the birds and the bees’ talk? When I explained about the genetics of werebears and how a human has to be kindred in order to be turned?”

“Sure, Papa,” Sam replied, “What does that have to do with these monsters?”

“These monsters,” Thomas said, “Are what can happen when a werebear breeds and bites a male human who is not kindred. It hasn’t happened for a thousand years, because all werebears are responsible in who they breed, and make sure that the human is not only kindred but has made the choice to become a werebear. If a werebear was to breed a non-kindred human, the human usually dies during the first change, but it is possible that if he survives, he will turn into a creature just like this.”

“So,” Sam replied, “You’re saying that these things were humans, and some werebear has bred them and turned them into these monsters?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Cub. I don’t know how any werebear could be so immoral to do that. Not only do that to one human, but to do that to many, and do it enough that they’ve somehow managed to figure out the key to keeping the human alive through the first change so that they can produce an entire pack of them!”

“What are we going to do, Papa?” Sam asked. “This is bigger than the two of us can handle by ourselves.”

“You’re right,” Thomas replied, “But we’ll need to handle the cleanup here. We can’t risk any humans coming across this scene and discovering any werebear DNA evidence. Every body, every fragment of remains, and even every bloodstain will have to be cremated. We’ll need to burn the entire village to the ground.

“After that, we’ll call Gunnar and Mike. They’re on good terms with the Atikokan enclave and have connections to the North American Lycan Council. We need to get some reinforcements here before we can begin to track these monsters and determine what their motive is for wiping out an entire village.”

Sam pulled the hard drives from Brian’s computers and then the two went from house to house in the village, searching for any werebear remains. When they found a body, they carefully bundled it up and moved it to the hatch in the garage with the remains of the others. Once they were sure that the remains of all twelve residents of the village were accounted for, they poured gasoline over the bodies in the hatch and tossed in a lit book of matches. The bodies erupted into flames, and the fire emanating from the hatch caught the rest of the garage on fire which quickly engulfed the rest of the house. They went back through the village, carefully setting the rest of the homes ablaze and tended to the fires to make sure that they did not spread to the surrounding forest. Once the entire village was reduced to several piles of smoldering ashes, and the bears were sure that there could be no werebear DNA evidence to be found, they got back into their truck and started the drive back home. The sun was just going down as they drove north through the mountains, setting on the worst day that Thomas could remember in all his long life.