Werewolf's Night Out

It was a chilly August night. The cold nipped at Michael's naked flesh as he stuffed his clothes into a gym bag, and hid the bag under an old cardboard box behind the overflowing trash-cans at the back of the alley. His bare foot touched some cabbage-smelling garbage water, and he recoiled. He was getting a little more accustomed to walking the city streets barefoot, but some things still grossed him out.

Making a grimace of disgust, he shook droplets of the foul, stagnant water from his foot, then he breathed deeply and turned his focus inward. He visualised a mass at his centre, and pulled it up and out towards the surface. It enlarged as it rose, and he felt his body stretching and expanding, getting heavier as his muscles swelled past the proportions of a professional body-builder. He felt his face warp, extending and extruding to form a muzzle, his ears moved up on his head, his teeth forced their way further out of his gums and sharpened to predatory points. His legs changed proportions under him, the thighs and shins shortening, and his feet extending until the metatarsals formed another segment of his limbs and the balls of his feet were canine paws. He'd done this enough times now that he could keep his balance even while his legs warped and shifted. Finally thick, shaggy, fur burst from his skin, coating him head-to toe; cream-coloured on the underbelly, and the same ginger as his hair everywhere else. The whole process had taken mere seconds.

His muzzle wrinkled as now he could smell so much more detail on the garbage than he ever wanted to. From exactly what was in it (mostly food waste, but also paper, the ubiquitous plastic packaging, and somewhere, deep in the heart of it, a used diaper from a boy no older than six months, fed on formula, and with a slight vitamin B deficiency), to how long it had been there (at least three weeks). His eyes picked out detail as though it were broad daylight, and he could plainly hear conversations happening in the surrounding buildings.

In a single bound he leaped up three stories and grabbed the fire escape. The rusted metal creaked and bent slightly under his prodigious weight, but stayed firmly bolted to the brickwork. With a couple more upward lunges he was on the roof. Scents both foul and enticing were carried to him on the night-time breeze, and the whole of Brockton Bay was laid out before him like a dingy, crumbling, playground. He grinned like a drawer full of steak knives, and took off at a run. Hurling himself from rooftop to rooftop, he made his way down to the boardwalk, where all the up-market shops clustered around the bay, trying to entice the ever-diminishing pool of tourists to spend their money. If there was anything worth having it would be there.

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A quick smash-and-grab later and he was crossing the rooftops back in the opposite direction, clutching an armful of loot from a jewellery store. A couple of designer watches for himself, some stuff for whichever cheerleader he was dating this week, and a few items which had caught his eye simply because of how shiny they were. Michael could have easily bought them if he wanted to, or his parents would have if he asked them, but it was so much more exciting to take them. Honestly, most of this stuff he'd either stash under the loose floorboard in the attic with the rest of his supervillain stuff, or just give away to his friends.

He was passing through the sad remnants of the industrial district when he jumped right through a swarm of insects. With eyes, ears and nostrils full of writhing, stinging, biting creatures he landed hard on the roof of the next long-since-abandoned factory block, rolling over and over, dropping his haul everywhere and swatting at his face with his enormous clawed hands. He rose to his knees, spitting and snorting as he tried to clear his airways of wriggling bugs. He nearly lost his grip on his power, the lapse in concentration causing him to diminish slightly in size, and his fur to begin receding. The threat of suddenly reverting to his human form, naked and vulnerable on a factory roof brought him back to his senses. He renewed his mental grip on his power and his wolf form surged back to full force.

"Aaugh!! The fuck!?" His voice was deeper and rougher in his wolf form, but still intelligible as human speech.

A myriad of different flying insects continued to assault him as he swatted and flailed ineffectually at them. Through the haze, he could make out a figure standing at the edge of the building, clad head-to-toe in black and grey, and wearing an insect-like face-mask with gold-tinted lenses for eyes. It didn't take a Thinker to put two and two together.

"The fuck is your problem, asshole?" He growled, staggering to his feet, trying to cover his mouth and nose with his hands.

The figure pulled out a collapsable batton and flicked it out to full length, then spoke.

"I'm putting you under citizen's arrest! Stop resisting and I'll call off the bugs." The voice was clearly feminine, and young, probably not much more than a teenager. Werewolf wished he could get more information about his assailant from her scent, but every time he took his hands away from his nostrils more insects tried to crawl in.

"Fuck you, cunt!" He yelled, and launched himself at the girl in grey, claws out.

At the last second, and seemingly more through luck than expertise, she threw herself to one side, letting him sail over the edge of the building. He had just enough time to regret not thinking his attack through a little better before he hit the railing of the fire escape on the way down. Unlike the escape he'd ascended earlier in that night, this one had been neglected for far longer and the entire thing from top to bottom tore free from the structure. His powers protected him from his impact with the asphalt, but did nothing to shield him from the half-a-ton of loose ironwork which crashed down on top of him.

He lay, in terrible pain, partially buried under the nineteen-fifties' idea of O.S.H.A. compliance, impaled through the chest, guts, and right thigh, with rusty spears coated in lead paint. His blood pooled around him, and still those fucking insects were swarming him! Even as his body pulled itself back together he could feel determined creepy-crawlies all over, burrowing into his thick fur, trying to find skin to bite or sting. He raised his arm to swipe a spider the size of a saucer away from his eye. He heaved the loose metalwork off himself, and with grunts of effort and cries of agony he wrenched the impaling lengths of iron from his body, the holes they left in his flesh sealing so quickly that, mercifully, no bugs were able to wriggle their way inside him.

He looked up and saw the tiny, distant, figure of the girl staring down at him from the edge of the rooftop, her masked face completely impassive. He made a snap decision and took off running down the street, determined to get as far away from this insectile psychopath as he possibly could. Flipping her off over his shoulder as he went.

"Fuuuuuuck yooooooooou, cuuuuuuuunt!!"