I had no idea how long I had been out, but the blood had dried and turned to that blood-brown color that only people used to see it would instantly recognize. It was flaky and all moisture was gone. It must have been days.

  I tried to feel my injuries, but I felt neither pain nor any itching

  But that was impossible.

  I knew I had been seriously injured when I passed out. There had been wounds down to the bone and I had been bleeding like a pig in a slaughterhouse at the time, but not now.

  I noticed something else as well. I could smell.

  I don’t mean smelling dust or oil, or things like that. I mean I could smell. It was like a whole other world. All the information in just odors alone, it was amazing. The I realized that I should be gagging due to smell of the corpse in front of me, but I wasn’t. Suddenly my stomach wasn’t connected to my brain the same way. The stench, and I knew it was stinking, was just information. It had age, texture, strength, and origin. I could pick all that out.

  Smells had flow and current. It had directions and it was scrambling my brain as the sensations hit home. My brain tried to categorize all this, and some of it was familiar, but what I could smell before was nothing like this. It was like you had just learned to walk when your body suddenly decided, on its own, to run and jump like crazy. My brain overloaded and I saw stars once again, and I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet.

  The headache that followed was a killer. I was certain that my head was about to split open. It pulsed and throbbed, making me wince with every heartbeat.

  I tried to breathe calmly. Long regular breaths, but every pain peak made my stomach cramp, and I curled up in a fetal position hoping it would go away. The smell didn’t stop though. The information kept pouring into my hurting brain, but I noticed that it was slowly adapting to all this.

  After some time, perhaps an hour, the headache receded to a dull ache.

  I still hadn’t opened my eyes or even tried to touch my injuries.

  The smells came in categories. It sounds stupid, but it was like different colors. Every smell had its own tone and characteristic and even jumbled together.

  I could separate each smell. I could tell which smell was new and which was old. I could tell approximately which direction they came from. I knew that if I moved my head, I would know exactly where from. I opened my mouth and drew a breath, but I shouldn’t have done that.

  I thought the smells were strong before but drawing them into my mouth made my brain overload again.

  There were smells I hadn’t noticed before, and there were contexts to them. Context like emotions, I could smell remnants of my own fear and Freaky Fred’s rage.The smells had texture. And taste! It was a whole new god damn world yet again. And it sent me reeling. There was no way to explain how it felt.

  My sense of smell wasn’t the only sense that was on overdrive. My hearing was so acute that I could hear people walking above on the pavement. Cars, sound from the sewers, creaking sounds that I never heard before. Funnily enough, that didn’t scramble my brain like the smell did. It might have been because the hearing hadn’t really changed. It was the same, except for the magnitude, but that was bad enough.

  I caught myself wondering why someone else hadn’t showed up to finish the job. If the freak found me so could others. They should have been here by now. At least those who were with Freaky Fred when Tony died. They had to know where I lived, didn’t they? But why they hadn’t shown up was a big mystery.

  I was afraid to open my eyes. I knew that my body had changed, and the more I came-to, the more I was aware of the changes.

  My bones felt heavy. Like they were made of something more than bone. My hearing zeroed in on my beating heart. It thumped like thunder, and the rhythm was not one I was used to. It was a lazy efficient rhythm.

  My muscles felt supercharged and strong, when they should have been weak. Or rather, I should have been dead. I tried not to think about that. Whatever had happened should have killed me, but now I was alive and I prayed to every god I ever heard of that I wasn’t turning into Freaky Fred.

  I hesitated but then opened my eyes. What happened really freaked me out.

  The light stabbed my eyes. The light, even though it was only a single light bulb, felt like looking straight into the sun. I closed my eyes again, but not before I glimpsed the corpse, still with the top of his head missing, surrounded by a fading golden light.

  I didn’t open my eyes again for a while. I tried to make sense of it all, hearing, smell, and eyesight had all changed. My body felt supercharged and I was ravenous. Something about Freaky Fred’s attack had changed me. The word werewolf flashed through my mind, but I shied away from it.

  It couldn’t have been...could it?

  Things like that didn’t happen. They couldn’t happen. I was sure of that. One hundred percent sure, perhaps even two hundred percent sure. And even if I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t allow it to happen to me!

  I was so set on it being a dream or hallucination, trying to convince reality that it wasn’t real. It worked quite well - until I felt claws trying to grow through my fingertips.

  I screamed and jumped.

  I didn’t really understand that my body wasn’t what it used to be. I slammed into the ceiling hard enough to lose my breath. And when I hit the ground, it took the rest of air I had left in my lungs. I tried to pump some more air into my lungs but failed. I must have looked like a fish on dry land.

  I opened my eyes again.

  This time my eyes seem to adapt fast. I could still see those golden flakes of light surrounding the body on the floor.

  I had no answers. Only more questions.

  I wanted to be me, I thought as I struggled for air. I didn’t like this change in me. I hadn’t even started to feel what other things had changed. Emotions, instincts, and things like that. I was too scared to do that.

  Something had passed from Freaky Fred to me. Not knowledge, but more of a superset of instincts. They were like an overlay, meshing into my normal responses, making me feel very uncomfortable.

  Weird things happened as I lay there. My breathing was easy and it became easier to categorize the odors in the air. I noticed that if I concentrated, my body odor changed to an almost unnoticeable smell. Like background noise you’re not really aware of. I could tone it out.

  A powerful urge to change, melt, become!

  Thinking of Freaky Fred suddenly made his scent stand out like a fire beacon. Not only the smell but the sense of him. Even if his presence was almost gone the smell of his dead flesh was strong. It sent me scuttling into the wall, and this time a banged the back of my head onto the concrete wall.

  God damn! I knew I had to stop reacting to my panic until I had this under control.

  The claws! I had forgotten about them. I had scratched furrows in the concrete floor, and it hadn’t even hurt. I also noticed that I had claws only on my right hand and not on my left.

  No sooner had I noticed that, than my left hand changed. The fingers grew shorter and thicker, the claws bulged up black-grey, sharp, with vicious hooked points. I still had opposable thumbs and could grip if I wanted.

  The sweat started to run down my back. I hyperventilated and the narrow hallway was spinning and turning.

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  I giggled to myself.

  It shouldn't happen like this, I thought in panic. I must be hallucinating.

  Should it really happen this fast, I wondered. That was what I thought to myself. I should start with cravings for raw meat. Sweating and getting hair in weird places, growling and howling after cars.

  I giggled again.

  My stomach churned and I suddenly found myself on all fours. I felt my bones move?! I felt my bones move! And it hurt like a motherfucker!

  I was growling, whining, and every part of me seemed to be somewhere it shouldn’t be. I wouldn’t give in to whatever was happening. I had to be me!

  I would not give in!

  Slowly and with more pain, the change receded.

  When I was wholly me again, I was panting. I was exhausted. And I fell asleep or became unconscious. I really don’t know which.

  When I woke up again, I knew I had lost about another day. I had no idea how I knew. I just did.

  All the pain was gone. No headache. No hurting eyes. Nothing.

  But I was primed. That was the best way to describe it. When I opened my eyes, I notice that there wasn’t as much of the corpse left as when I passed out.

  There were bite marks on the body. Human bite marks and some other kind. Flesh was missing. Unfortunately, I had a very good idea where that flesh had gone. My body froze with shock, not being able to process that. Had I eaten parts of Freaky Fred?

  This was too much for me. I started retching, trying to force my body to empty whatever I had eaten. But there was nothing left. Bile, stomach acid, and fluids came up but there was nothing else. I continued to try to vomit more, foregoing breathing in my panic to purge everything. Then my panic overloaded my brain and I passed out again.

  Coming to was more gradual the third time. As if the shock had really, really shut down brain and was only now slowly coming back online. After I struggled back into an upright position, I focused on not passing out again. I felt like a damsel in distress fainting all over the place.

  I had gotten lucky for not getting a second visit by some other weirdo, or worse – by an amateur. That luck couldn’t hold out, so I needed to move. I needed to see if I could find anyone nearby looking for me. I needed the garage to be my safe place. My bat cave.

  I gingerly got up and made my way to the hand shower. I rinsed my mouth like my life depended on it. Then I dragged the corpse to a piece of old tarp so it would be out of the way when I cleaned up. Every time I looked at the body, bile rose in my throat and almost made me puke.

  I needed to get rid of a corpse and I needed to make it more bite-size for the rats and other things that lived in the sewers. It took me only twenty-five minutes to, ah…reduce the package. Then it was time for a midnight stroll in the sewers. I cursed my luck as I realized I had more than two hundred meters of sewer walking to do to get to a deep enough drainage where I could dump the pieces without being too concerned with them surfacing any time soon. The rats would do the rest.

  My new physical strength was much, much greater than it had been and growing by the minute. I had no idea of how much I could lift, but I knew that I was at least four-five times as strong as I had been - at least four-five times. I could jump and run like nothing you had ever seen. I t didn’t bother me that I was carrying a one-hundred-and-sixty-pound corpse. My reflexes and speed were so fast, that even Freaky Fred would have had problem tracking my movements.

  I cut myself on a metal piece sticking out from the wall while I was making my way through the city sewers like some Quasimodo on acid. And it damn well healed while I was watching. I must have looked like Freaky Fred while I watched my skin close of its own and heal over without a scar. It tingled and itched for a short while before the line of wound faded.

  At first, I was close to panicking again. I calmed down as I watched with fascination as my skin knitted itself back together. I felt like I must have gone mad. Hallucinating or something. But at the same time, I knew I wasn't. Too many things told me this was real.

  I felt my guilt bubble up again. It strengthened my resolve. Whatever I was turning into didn't matter. Whatever I was becoming didn't matter, because I could not let Tony's murder go. Even if I went truly mad, I would make sure they paid with their lives.

  Whoever they were, they had killed one the few real friends I had. They would die for that. There was no doubt in my mind that they would die. Even less doubt now than before.

  The anger that followed made me growl, but I was glad that nothing else happened while I contemplated wholesale slaughter. I was happy with my body not changing nor me having weird cravings.

  My fear and disgust rose as I remembered the bite marks on Freaky Fred’s body. I was doing my best to ignore that there had been quite a lot of flesh missing when I awoke the third time.

  So, what had I become? Werewolf? I didn’t dare experiment with that. Oh, I did let out my claws, so to speak, in the sewers because I needed to get a grip in the concrete. I could jam the claws far enough into the concrete to get a grip, though this time, it hurt like a bitch. But it worked.

  When I returned to my place, I showered for thirty minutes. I just stood there and let the water run. It felt so good just standing there and not thinking about anything. Especially not on what I had done.

  Killing Freaky Fred didn’t upset me. No, what upset me was that I wasn’t Maria Smith anymore. Maria Smith didn’t munch on corpses and howl at the moon. Not that I had howled at the moon yet, but it would surprise me if something like that was coming.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I was a monster. A true monster. One that perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to live. Only I wasn’t sure I could give up being alive. I still had things to do and I wouldn’t make any decisions before I had gotten my revenge anyway.

  Cleaning up took its sweet time. I had tried to remove the blood from the concrete, but even though I used ammonia and some high-grade detergent that the chop-shop people had left behind, I could still vaguely smell Freaky Fred’s blood. Maybe if I got a jackhammer and removed half an inch of the floor? Nah, too much trouble. From what was left, there wasn’t enough to get any kind of DNA from. And even if a police dog could smell it they would not need it had it gone as far as CPD bringing in dogs.

  Maybe I could scare the dogs if that happened? As soon as I thought that I started to laugh. I could see myself standing over the spot pissing and howling to mark my territory.

  No, even if it worked, it would creep me out. Everything about this was creeping me out. I was something else than human, perhaps more than human, but pissing on the floor of my own apartment just to mark it? No way!

  I loaded up with every gun I could carry without looking like I had something to hide. I thought about taking my leather jacket, but Freaky Fred was just too fresh in my memory, so I took my parka instead. It was a bit bulgy when I left, but nothing was too obvious.

  Stepping outside was a shock.

  The night wasn’t really night anymore. Not to me. There were no deep shadows and no dark corners. It didn’t seem like I needed much light to see. I had noticed that in the sewers but being outside was very different from that. All my senses bombarded me with information. Before I knew it, I was crouching in the alley as my fight-or-flight reflexes kicked in. I forced myself to accept the constant onslaught of impressions and rose slowly and started to walk.

  All this was etched into my brain. I felt detached from myself. In some ways it was like a nightmare where everything had an unreal quality to it, but it was an unreality that had a feel of reality to it. And no matter how much I wanted to ignore it, I couldn’t.

  There were some positive things to this change though. I could hear people moving. How they moved. How they all smelled. Hints of what they were feeling. Like fear, stress, anger, and a whole lot of other things. Each feeling seemed to have a base scent and overlay the personal scent. It wasn’t that complicated, but it was so much information to take in that my mind protested, and pain-spikes shot through my brain.

  Then I smelled something else that made me freeze.

  There were markings all over the place! Markings of territory, I had no idea how I knew that, but I did. There were other markings as well, communal markings, directional markings, threat markings. Not all markings were scents, some were visible, they must have been there all along but now my eyes could see them and sometimes understand them. My brain was cramped with new things that I had no idea of how to use.

  It felt like I was two different people. One had all this information that let me see the markings and smell the scents, but the other had no idea how to respond. I knew what I saw, but I didn’t know what to do about it. And the two did not really speak to each other.

  The visual markings sort of stood out. They could be a part of a normal sign, but as I looked at it I knew it warned me of something, even though I couldn’t say what. Other markings were carved, or graffiti, but they were not only that. It was frightening. To see so many signs, to smell and see them could only mean one thing; there really was another world in our world. Perhaps I was now a part of this new absurd world, but I really didn’t feel like it. It scared the hell out of me. What else could be waiting out there? What else was real?

  Tags that I thought were made by bored kids, were sometimes warnings, or markers, or something else. Some I could understand, others just gave me the feeling to back the hell off.

  The streets were not familiar to me anymore. All the things I had taken for granted, all the things I knew, were suddenly a thin film covering another reality. It was not what I thought it was. It was something impossible. Something scary.

  I walked the streets like a ghost. Not seeing anything nor hearing anything. All the things I was feeling and sensing made no sense to me. Rage, hunger, prey, hate, and fear were feelings of something else. Something inside me. A thing that made them something more. Something not human – something inhuman.

  My feelings and emotions felt alien to me. Like someone else was sharing my body and mind – something else! This something did not control my feelings or emotions, only tingeing them. Polluting them. Making me feel – tainted somehow.

  The worst thing was that I knew I was cursed.

  As my thoughts churned, my body learned. Power, speed, heightened senses, new senses seeped into my mind, making it feel almost natural. Almost, but not quite.

  Walking around aimlessly is usually a recipe for disaster. According to Murphy, someone should have jumped me. None did. Perhaps the gods do protect fools. But whether I was the fool or not was another question.

  Even with all these feelings, I felt numb. Tony’s death was in the forefront of my mind almost all the time. I had thought that I could escape the consequences of my action by disappearing. In a way I did, because Tony had paid that price. His family had paid that price. And now I had to pay it as well. And the only way I knew how to do that was with a blood oath! That was something I was pretty sure all parties would understand the meaning of.