Dawn
by:

I originally published this piece on DeviantArt last month, and I figured I'd throw it on here too, since I don't want this section to go to waste. It's about a dream I had that I was a werewolf, and there was this mannequin bitch trying to kill everyone.

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"You want a bag of popcorn or something?" asked Eve, a handful of change in her palm. "My treat."

Nick looked up at his girlfriend from the confines of the stiff theater seat and grinned. "Sure," he said, and dropped a couple quarters into her hand. "Get a large bag so we can share it." He settled back into the seat and tried to find a comfortable position while Eve headed up the ramp to get the popcorn. She didn't mind missing part of the movie; they had seen the same flick three times since it was released. They both knew how it ended.

She came back a few minutes later with a huge tub of popcorn and an equally large cup of Coca-Cola, filled to the brim and completely lacking in ice. As she slid into the seat, Nick took a small handful of popcorn and started to munch on it casually. In the back of his mind, he toyed with the idea that maybe they should stop making video game movies. Mortal Kombat was halfway decent, and the third installment had made up for the second's horrible quality. Resident Evil suffered a similar fate with their third film, Nemesis. After that, the producers decided to stick with old-school video games.

Even Alien vs. Predator and Breath of Fire had halfway decent plots, though anyone could argue that Predator was the best series hands-down and still walk away with all ten fingers. But this one was a mistake since its inception. The only reason they managed to sit through it three times was because it provided a fair make-out atmosphere. What better way to spend the weekend, especially on a $4 matinee late Saturday night?

The problem, as it occurred to Nick on the way out of the theater, was that they hadn't brought a car. They also lived 20 miles across town. The buses had stopped running half an hour ago, and there wouldn't be a cab anywhere near the city until Hell froze over. Of course, this meant they had to walk.

They would have had a time of it too, if it hadn't been for the silver BMW that shot out in front of them as they were crossing Pelucci Avenue. Nick had half a mind to kick it as it ground to a halt in front of them, until a familiar voice floated out of the cracked window. "You guys need a lift?"

Eve recognized the voice first. "Melissa, is that you?"

"Guilty as charged," came the rejoinder as the doors unlocked. Nick still had half a mind to kick the car, just for the hell of it, but as he climbed into the back seat he decided not to. Instead, he just seated himself and strapped on the over-the-shoulder style safety belt, just as Melissa asked: "Where to?"

"Home," said Eve absently, leaning back to administer an affectionate cuff to Nick's left shoulder. He grinned as Melissa sped away, and in the back of his mind he wondered exactly where the hell she learned to drive like she had a perpetual fire up her ass.

As they pulled onto the interstate, Eve unstrapped her belt and climbed into the back seat with Nick. Melissa switched on the CD player, for a few minutes, they cruised along the bypass with Slipknot pouring out of the speakers like a pack of hyenas on steroids.

They stopped at a gas station about halfway there, for gas and sundries and other such things, when a stranger caught sight of Melissa and Eve. A few minutes later, she was in the car with them, and hey were heading down a back road, a shortcut to Eve's house.

"Y'know," Eve said as the car rounded a curve, "we never were s'posed to pick up strangers at gas stations."

Melissa played along with the joke. "Right," she agreed. "But the worst thing she can do is kill us."

"Exactly." The stranger smiled a very strange smile, and suddenly she attacked. Melissa was caught off guard as a knife grazed her cheek, and as she wrestled with the strange woman who weilded it, the car began to swerve dangerously in the road. Suddenly, Melissa cried out as the knife found purchase in her side, just below the bottom of her ribcage, and the car veered sharply to the right.

They slammed full-force into the tree, so hard that the stranger was ejected through the windshield. Certain that she was dead, Nick unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned over to check on the others. Eve was unconscious but otherwise unharmed. Melissa, on the other hand, was bleeding freely through the wound in her flank. She had to get to a hospital, and soon. Nick braced himself and kicked the car's door open. As it flew out, he latched onto his girlfriend and gently extracted her from the car. Then he turned back for Melissa, just as the strange woman stood.

She looked different than she had just a moment ago. Her head had suffered the brunt of the collision, and a small dent stood out above her left temple. But there was no blood. Nick frowned at the sight, but he couldn't leave the girls yet.

Eve stirred and opened her eyes. Somehow, she had been hoisted into a tree, and what she saw below wasn't exactly a pretty sight. Melissa had been propped up against the tree, a tourniquet wrapped around her to slow the bleeding. She thought for sure her friend had been killed.

At last, Nick turned to face the stranger, a defiant glare on his face. But before he could move or speak, the stranger attacked him. She leapt over the car, long fingernails lashing out for his throat, probably in attempt to tear out his trachea or crush his larynx. But she never found purchase. He countered as quickly as she struck, with a graceful step to the side and a hard elbow delivered to her back.

She went down in a heap, but she was up in an instant. The sound of wood striking stone had resounded when she hit, however, and Nick saw that she was not human. More's the better, he thought, and took a defensive stance. "Come on," he said quietly, challenging the stranger.

She was more than happy to oblige him, but as she leapt to attack once more, Nick's own brute strength proved too much for her wooden form. As the mannequin lashed out again, Nick countered in a similar, much faster method. He leapt aside with the same grace as before, but instead of an elbow to the back, open fingertips flashed across the mannequin's face. When she stepped back, four deep lines had been carved into the wood.

He took advantage of her obvious shock and snapped his arm out from the shoulder. A vice grip closed around the mannequin's throat, and she was lifted into the air. As he got a sense of where he was, Nick turned quickly, the demon puppet still in his hand. There was a stone quarry not a hundred feet behind him, and it was into this that he threw the killer doll.

In the crash, one of the car's doors had been torn from its hinges. Nick hefted the dor as the mannequin finally came to rest at the foot of the stone hill, tossed it onto the grade, and jumped onto it. As he surfed down the hill, he saw the mannequin rise to her feet. Not taking any chances, Nick jumped as he neared the bottom of the hill, and sent the car's door spinning straight into the mannequin's chest.

They continued on like that for several hours, and in all the fight was pretty one-sided. The mannequin's wooden body soaked up most of the damage that Nick delivered, but for each strike she managed to land, he countered with two of his own. Once, halfway through the spectacle, the mannequin had managed to land a blow to Nick's face, just above the cheekbone, a blow that would have shattered a normal man's face. In a rage, he had leapt atop her, and his claws scored once, twice, a dozen times on her face before she managed to throw him off.

They battled until close to dawn, and by that time they had drawn a crowd of onlookers, which consisted of the ambulance team that had arrived half an hour after the wreck itself, a score of police officers who had been called for highway direction and general peacekeeping, and another dozen or so onlookers who had pulled their cars to the side of the road to watch the savage brawl.

Most of the policemen had formed a ring around the two contestants, their weapons drawn. THey had done this initially to break up the two. To their eyes, a slender woman was defending herself against a huge, wolf-like creature. But they did not fire. Eve had informed them that the wolf-like creature was in fact her boyfriend, and he had attacked what was most likely a demon-possessed mannequin, and so they simply stayed put. A few had even holstered their sidearms in favor of the hickory nightsticks at their sides.

Half an hour before dawn, everything changed. As Nick lunged for the mannequin once more, she countered with an impossibly fast maneuver, which sent Nick flying toward one of the policemen. He had scored a hit, however, his claws having drawn deep gashes across her chest. But this time it was different. She paused as Nick collected himself and hoisted the officer to his feet, and in the dim light, blood began to trickle down from the wounds carved into her body.

At the sight of this, she threw her head back and laughed, as if taunting not only the werewolf she faced, but everyone else in the vicinity. "Useless," she sneered at Nick. "You can't kill me. Dawn is too close." She leered at Nick as they circled inside the ring of policemen. "Your friend is going to die."

He was furious enough to rip the bleeding puppet to shreds. His Lycan half screamed, raging for blood, even if it was from some strangely animated doll. But his Garou half reasoned. It thought. And eventually, it talked some sense into the rest of him. She had mentioned dawn...did that have something to do with what was happening?

Suddenly, Nick turned. He spun on his heel, reached out, and snatched a policeman's gun from his holster. The mannequin leapt, just as Nick raised the weapon and fired. She fell onto the hard gravel, and a moment later, her left arm bounced off her wooden head and hit the ground beside her.

Furious, she tried to rise, and Nick fired twice in rapid succession. She fell to her knees, both feet blown off by the .40 caliber handgun. Nick had solved the puzzle. He slowly shifted, seemed to shrink in size, until at last the lupine features had left him completely. A small scratch was visible over his left eye, nothing now but a quickly fading line of light red.

She looked up and growled as he stopped in front of her, two minutes before the sun would breathe life back into the world, and found herself staring down the firearm's rifled barrel. She was defeated. As blood began to flow more freely from her carved wounds, the mannequin snarled at Nick. "Even if you kill me," she said defiantly, "there will be others."

Ninety seconds. Nick looked past the weapon, at the demon doll it was trained on. "Let them come," he said. "I'll send them straight back."

One minute. The mannequin looked up at nick again, and laughed. "You can't fight us forever," she said. "Even being what you are cannot change that."

Thirty seconds. Nick was out of words. He knew what had to be done. The barrel of the pistol lined up with the bridge of her nose, where a point-blank shot with a hollow-pointed round would do the most damage. The hammer was pulled back all the way.

Ten seconds. She sneered at Nick, as though daring him. "You're not a killer," she spat at him.

There was nothing left to say or do. The sun would rise in just a few seconds. Nick looked up the bank, at Eve, and then toward the sun, threatening to break.

And then he fired.