Game Two
[i]
Birds twitter in the tall dark trees surrounding the tiny hamlet of
Zahnburg, a town of only nine souls (plus an itinerant trapper, who, if
he has a home, makes it in Zahnburg), nestled in the deep forests in the
northern mountains of the Duchy of Hundenstein.

Hundenstein's principal exports are decorative beer mugs, intricately
carved cuckoo clocks, and police dogs. Its primary industries are
tourism and police dog training. It is renowned for its jagged peaks,
its dark evergreen forests, its relative inaccessibility in the Internet
Age, and its world-famous police dogs.

This morning, as the nine villagers assemble underneath the outlandishly
large carved clock on the village square, they are shocked to discover a
corpse.

It's AArdvark, the itinerant trapper. His throat has been torn out, and
his blood has been used to crudely paint 'WHOSNEXT' in the dust next to
his corpse. The letters are large and unsteady, as might be made by
dragging a wolf paw soaked in blood. The large, bloody paw prints around
the corpse seem to give credence to this theory as well. So, come to
think of it, does the fact that his guts have been scooped out and a
wolf pelt--clearly part of his latest haul--jammed into his abdominal
cavity.

No two ways about it: Zahnburg is infested by werewolves. The villagers
eye each other, and the gallows tree, speculatively.

~~~

Jack Straw, local haberdasher, was a melancholic. He always said he
didn't care much whether he lived or died.

His approach to his work reflected this, too: his clothes were
one-size-fits-all dull-beige functional-but-ugly garments. But at least
they were cheap.

The townsfolk had, of course, noticed his tendency to get markedly
crankier after a certain time of night. It wasn't too long until someone
pointed out that, maybe, lycanthropy could be regarded as just an
extreme form of crankiness. Heads nodded sagely.

Straw didn't put up much of a fight, pausing merely to make a brief
statement: "Don't you understand I am human and have always been? When
have I steered you wrong?"

No one paid any attention; the noose was around his neck, he was hoisted
off the ground, and after a few minutes of twitching and struggling
(and, yes, for all you pervs, with the usual effect of asphyxiation), he
was dead.

The corpse hung there from the gibbet, resolutely un-lupine.

Jack Straw's dying words echoed mockingly in the villagers' ears: "Have
fun fucking this one up too."

Jack Straw was human.

Now it is Night.

~~~

Dawn in Zahnburg.

Usually, about this time, there'd be a "Hear Ye! Hear Ye!" as one of the
locals, a down-on-his-luck actor and printer named ChainGangGuy, would
finish printing the daily broadsheet on his tiny portable printing
press, and then--since most of the inhabitants of Zahnburg are
illiterate (although, apparently, at least not one of the wolves)--would
proceed to read the broadsheet, complete with a dramatic reenactment of
the news within.

It was generally agreed that the recreation of the birth of the Duke's
third son, a hydrocephalic mongoloid named Hans, had been ChainGangGuy's
finest hour. Indeed, one of the slower-witted villagers had been unable
to grasp the concept of drama, and had proposed to ChainGangGuy under
the mistaken impression that the town had suddenly acquired a (another?)
fertile woman.

But today, in Zahburg, there was no news.

There was just a body in ChainGangGuy's house. His body. His Achilles
tendons had been bitten through to hobble him and his hands had had
their fingers chewed to bloody pulp, so that he couldn't fight
back. Then apparently the wolf had become human again, because how could
something with paws carefully melt the lead from the printing press,
print up a broadsheet reading, "BURN DOWN MY FOREST? I DON'T THINK SO!",
tack it to ChainGangGuy's armoire with a knife, re-melt the lead, and
then pour it into ChainGangGuy's eyes and mouth?

ChainGangGuy was a peasant.

As they interred the body, the villagers glared suspiciously at one
another. Who would be today's victim?

~~~

Suddenly, Worm draws his pistol, spins, and shoots....

Vitriola's favorite police dog and constant companion Viktor right
between the eyes. Vitriola begins to scream obscenities at Worm, but
suddenly shorn of her fanged protector, she doesn't seem so scary.

The men of the village drag her to her house. They strap her to the
bed. By common consensus, Worm gets to go first.

"YEAH," he screams, "and in Brindelstedt, what did you keep doing?
Bitching that I DIDN'T HAVE FUR AND A TAIL, THAT'S WHAT!" He pauses to
rape her. It doesn't take long. After that he punches her in the
face. "AND YOU MADE US WATCH 'ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE SS' LIKE FORTY
TIMES." Punch. She says nothing, just glares up at him. "YOU TRAIN
POLICE DOGS. YOU FUCK CANINES. YOU ARE A BITCH."

Well, none of the other men in the village had even gotten that far with
her. Vitriola had always been the unapproachable Ice Queen protected by
her police dogs.

A good old-fashioned gangrape ensues. Through all of it Vitriola
maintains a stubborn silence, punctuated only by spitting
increasingly-bloody sputum through increasingly-bruised-and-cut lips and
increasingly-broken teeth into the face of whichever man happens to be
on top of her at the time.

When they're all done, Pinback cuts a long shallow gash across her
belly. Ice Cream Jonsey pulls a rasher of bacon out of his clown pants
and begins methodically laying a trail of bacon to the kennels, in which
are four ravenous and vicious police-dogs-in-training. hygraed considers
a minute, picks up the nearest bacon strip, and crams it into Vitriola's
cunt.

Vitriola moistens her bruised lips with the blood running from her
broken gums, and speaks:

"Ever since I suckled at the teat of a wolf when I was a babe, I have
had the gift of Dreams. I know not who our enemies are, but I know some
of our friends. I used to be one of them, but no longer.

"You're on your own."

The villagers stare coldly at her and walk outside.

Standing well back, Casual Observer lifts the latches of the kennels
with a long pole.

The dogs break free and follow the trail of bacon inside.

Then, and only then, does Vitriola begin to scream.

After a while, the noises die down. The villagers all draw their
firearms and stand in the doorway, shooting at the dogs until they all
lie still and bloody on the floor of Vitriola's house.

Then they proceed to the thoroughly
raped-by-dogs-and-people-and-mostly-eaten-by-dogs corpse.

Her third eye, in the center of her forehead, is open, glaring
sightlessly at the ceiling. "Fuck," says gsdgsd, who didn't think this
was such a good idea anyway.

Worm's face lights up. "You know, I think I can," he agrees. He gouges
out the third eye with his thumb, and then proceeds to fuck the bloody
socket. No one stops him. After he's done, he asks the assembled
onlookers, "What the hell are you looking at? What? WHAT?"

Vitriola was the seer. Just one who, you know, liked to fuck dogs.

Now it is Night.

~~~

It's a leaden, gray, rainy morning in Zahnburg, cold rain pissing down
out of a heavy gray sky, a raw wind chilling the inhabitants to their
bones.

The villagers assemble on the green. Five.

Casual Observer, the local priest and Republican Member of Congress, is
missing.

With fear in three of their hearts, and silent glee in two of their
hearts, they open the door of his house.

His Pimp Hat is neatly hung on its peg. His Pimp Suit, sharply creased,
hangs in the closet next to his leopard fur coat, his clerical
vestments, and his power suit. His skull-headed diamond-encrusted cane
rests in a corner. On the nightstand is a giant bottle of lube, a
crucifix, a well-thumbed copy of William Bennet's Book of Virtues, and
an assortment of lollipops.

But Casual Observer?

"Holy shit," gulps one of the villagers. Holy shit indeed.

Casual Observer squats naked in the corner. His head has been torn off,
and the sharp reek of dog shit fills the air. It appears that someone
has literally ripped off his head and shit down his neck.

But that's not all. His severed head has been placed below his anus, so
the shit can drip out and into his own mouth.

Next to the body, written in blood and feces, is, in big clumsy
paw-writing, "1MORE".

After a hasty and awkward--with no one around who knows the service,
really--burial, the villagers look uneasily around. The wolf is
right. If they pick wrong, then it's two werewolves and two villagers,
and after the lynching it will be a short and bloody evening. If they
pick right, two of them might survive.

Who, three of them wonder, are the wolves?

Two of them aren't telling.

~~~

"Looks like I'm fucked," says hygraed.

Worm yawns. "We did that yesterday. Maybe you should be, I dunno..."

"I like FIRE!" shrieks Pinback. "BURN HIM!"

Leave it to gsdgsd to make the obvious joke about "burning the maggot."
Which he does.

So that's what they do: they hammer a stake into the ground, pile wood
around the base, and douse it with kerosene. They bind the sullen
hygraed to the stake.

ICJ stands back, squinting at the priest's Bible. "Uhhh, pax vobiscum?"
he guesses, and strikes a match and tosses it onto the pile.

You've probably never seen someone being burned alive. Neither had most
of the villagers. It's not pretty. For a few minutes hygraed tried to
play tough guy, but as the flames licked up his legs, first he pissed
himself, and then he started screaming.

And not long after that, he underwent a horrifying but much-anticipated
transformation, and there was a shrieking, snapping wolf bound to the
pole, its hindquarters already afire. The stench of burning hair rose
into the blustery day.

Eventually, the flames reached the wolf's chest, and it was with relief
that it greedily inhaled them, and then fell silent.

hygraed was a werewolf.

Now it is Night.

~~~

The last morning in Zahburg dawns bright and clear.

Last morning? Why, yes. There are three villagers left. One of them
is a wolf.

Either the wolf will be lynched, and the last two can live out their
days in (somewhat lonely) peace, or it won't, and after the lynching, it
will eat the remaining peasant.

Anyhow, no matter what, it's the last day of our story. And on this
day, the villagers don't have to guess. They come out to the square and
find Pinback, the local drunken gambler, on the village green. And like
his mama, when he's all over the village green, he's ALL OVER the
village green.

This is not because he is fat.

It is because he has been meticulously flayed, like peeling an apple.
His skin has been removed from his body in one long continuous strip.
He evidently was still alive and conscious for this process, but his
screams were muffled as his cock and balls had been severed and stuffed
into his mouth, which was then stitched up. His mutilated crotch was
then cauterized with a torch, so he wouldn't bleed to death too fast.
Then, after the cautery but before the flaying, the monster that killed
him stuffed a nearly-priceless bottle of Blair's Extra Special Reserve
6AM Hot sauce in his ass. An OPEN, SHATTERED bottle.

Two of the villagers surveying this horrific scene have never seen such
an agonized expression before, and find it quite disturbing. One has,
and enjoyed it immensely, as the sticky ropes of wolf-semen on Pinback's
agonized face testify.

Whoever did this to him has artfully arranged the strip of skin, to
spell out, in pretty decent cursive, "lastchance."

And that's just what it is.

Three villagers: ICJ, Worm, and gsdgsd. One of them's a wolf. If two
of them get it right, then they're saved. And if not...

~~~

"Yep," says gsdgsd, swinging the noose around like a lariat, "I reckon
it's ICJ."

"Hee hee," snickers Worm.

Ice Cream Jonsey, out-of-work court jester, screams like a little girl,
and dashes behind a building.

Worm cocks his head. "I can hear the little bells on his hat jingling,
gsdgsd. He's right over...there."

As he hears the footsteps approaching, Jonsey tries to run, but trips
over his clown shoes. Worm is on top of him with a knee in his back
before he can rise, and gsdgsd hogties him with the rope.

"Thought you'd get away with it, didn'tcha, bwah?" he sneers. "Thought
you'd get away with your...lie."

"Hey, Worm, we got any lye?" he shouts.

"Sure thing, Boss," replies Worm. He soon returns with a can of Red
Devil. ICJ whimpers as Worm tosses the can to gsdgsd, who opens it.

As he reaches towards Jonsey to start pouring the lye in his eyes,
Jonsey snarls and undergoes a terrible transformation. Unfortunately,
although humans can be hogtied with their hands and ankles together
behind their back, as a wolf, well, this dislocates Jonsey's hips and
shoulders. He howls in wolfish agony as gsdgsd smilingly dumps the lye
into his eyes.

ICJ begins flopping around and screaming, transforming wildly back and
forth from human to wolf. The lye, ever so slowly, eats through his eyes
and into his brain. It takes him hours to die, screaming all the
while. When he's human he curses Worm, gsdgsd, the other villagers, God,
Warren Robinett, all the Saints individually and as a group, Tiger
Woods, and Jack Tramiel, among others. When he's a wolf he just shrieks
and howls.

Worm and gsdgsd bring up lawn chairs and a cooler of beer to watch the
fun. Every so often they get up to administer a good kicking or another
dose of lye.

By late afternoon, ICJ has stopped twitching. His lupine tongue
protrudes into the dust. Flies have begun to settle on his cooling
carcass.

Worm and gsdgsd high-five each other as the sun sets behind the
mountains to the west.

The game is over. The peasants have won.

[/i]

Game One:
[i]
The blackness of night lies like a scratchy woolen blanket over the tiny
hamlet of Zahnburg, a town of only nine souls, nestled in the deep
forests in the northern mountains of the Duchy of Hundenstein.

Hundenstein's principal exports are decorative beer mugs, intricately
carved cuckoo clocks, and police dogs. Its primary industries are
tourism and police dog training. It is renowned for its jagged peaks,
its dark evergreen forests, its relative inaccessibility in the Internet
Age, and its world-famous police dogs.

And tonight in Zahnburg, nine people sleep snuggled in their houses
under the cold, clear skies, the actinic stars, and the uncaring moon.

Only eight will awake.

~~~

The sun rises over Zahnburg.

Sleepily, the inhabitants begin to go about their daily rituals: the
trip through the freezing cold to the outhouses, stoking their hearth
fires back to life, selecting and choking the day's chicken.

Soon, the daily life of the village is in full swing.

Well, almost full swing.

With mounting horror, the villagers realize that the blind cuckoo-clock
carver, Lysander, never opened his shop this morning. With trepidation,
they open the door to the ramshackle apartment he keeps above his
shop. They behold a terrible sight.

Lysander lies sprawled on the floor, his eyes staring sightlessly at the
ceiling. This would not generally be too unusual, as Lysander often
drank himself into a stupor and then found himself too hung over for
intricate clock-carving the next morning.

However, in this case, his eyes are sightless not merely because he is
blind, but because he is dead. One leg is missing at the knee, and one
arm at the shoulder. His throat has been torn open, and blood splatters
cover the walls, floor, and ceiling. Even more horrifyingly, Lysander
has been eviscerated. His liver and heart have been eaten, the villagers
notice amid their mounting nausea, while his intestines gaily festoon
the room like macabre multicolored party streamers.

It would appear that the tiny hamlet of Zahnburg harbors a
werewolf. With mounting resolve, three brooms, and a bucket, the
villagers sweep as much of Lysander as they can find down the stairs and
into a wheelbarrow, which they trundle to the churchyard for a quick
burial.

That taken care of and the ordinary business of the day forgotten, the
remaining eight inhabitants gather around the town gallows. Only one
question remains to be decided:

Who's it going to be?

~~~

The mood of the crowd--if eight people can be called a crowd--has turned
ugly.

With hatred in their eyes, the townsfolk turn towards the local miller.

ChainGangGuy had spent his life grinding grain between stones to make
flour. So it was that the villagers chose to end his life. Eschewing the
usual gallows, they swiftly dragged the screaming ChainGangGuy to his
mill.

Someone kicked the chocks from the grindstones and lowered the lever
that connected the paddlewheel in the stream to the axle. The great
stones began to turn, inexorable as the sunset.

Bit by bit, the villagers fed ChainGangGuy into his own mill. The bones
of his feet were the first to go, shattering with a sound like popcorn
popping. The millstones glistened with his blood.

ChainGangGuy screamed and shrieked, but the villagers were
remorseless. His howls of agony persisted as his calves were crushed. He
bellowed as his knees were pulped, and then fell unconscious.

The villagers looked at each other and shrugged; the fun part was now
over, and they released his body to be mashed between the grindstones.

As the stones revolved, reducing what was once ChainGangGuy to a uniform
red pulp, one thing became clear: there was no sharp canine odor, no
fur, no last-second transformation into a wolf.

The remaining seven villagers looked at each other and shrugged, as the
millstones ground on.

ChainGangGuy was a peasant.

Now it is Night.

~~~

It's a foggy morning in Zahnburg. The usual morning sounds can be heard
through the dense fog.

But one is missing.

Everyone heard gsdgsd, the town printer and well-known alcoholic, at his
usual carousing the previous night: the singing, the shattering ceramic
jugs, the belligerent ranting, the copious vomiting.

Usually, when this happens, his groans the next morning, punctuated by
miserable retching, are audible throughout the village.

The townsfolk look at each other, and wordlessly march to gsdgsd's
house. They open the door. Nothing can prepare them for the horror
within.

You see, an alcoholic printer accumulates a lot of fucked-up paper that
he can't use. And when you combine that with years of puking blood from
hemorrhaging ulcers irritated by cheap potato vodka, and a personal
philosophy that regards tossing a sheet of grimy newsprint over the top
of a puddle of bloody puke as a thorough housecleaning, then you've got
a room that's a hideous paper-mache construction, like a giant hornet's
nest, made of congealed blood, matted paper, and alkie vomit.

In this monument to a vile life lived badly, the corpse of gsdgsd barely
registers; even with the face chewed off and the stomach removed, it's
far less grotesque than the surroundings.

The stomach must have been full, too. Unsteady, bloody wolf prints weave
away from the open back window towards the forest. Halfway to the dark
trees, a puddle of wolf vomit, with a single eyeball floating in it,
testifies to the potency of that cheap vodka.

Someone lights a torch and tosses it into the house, which goes up like
an alcohol-impregnated hornet's nest. A thin rivulet of molten lead
trickles from the burning printing press and flows sluggishly down the
gutter.

The six that remain assemble under the gallows. Someone will pay for
what happened to gsdgsd. But will it be a werewolf?

~~~

The villagers lay hold of the screaming, flailing Ice Cream Jonsey. To
think they'd all trusted him as their tanner for many years, and here he
was, probably a werewolf.

Well, they'd soon see about that.

They stripped him naked and tied him firmly between two trees at the
edge of the forest. One of the other villagers triumphantly passed out
the collection of knives that ICJ had used to flay the animals whose
hides he'd cured over the years.

They started on the wrists and ankles, just inside the bonds. The
villagers didn't have a lot of practice, though, and even if he's
restrained, it's difficult to meticulously flay someone who's struggling
and screaming in horrific agony. As he lost blood, ICJ's strength ebbed;
his twitching and writhing grew fainter; his shrieks diminished to moans
to a breathy whisper, and then silence.

When the villagers looked up from their grisly work, they noticed
something. All three of Jonsey's eyes were open, staring sightlessly,
including the one in the center of his forehead.

The villagers had killed their seer. Only five remained: two werewolves,
three peasants. All of them knew that come morning, there'd be only
four. And then there'd be no more peasants than werewolves, and then
there'd be no more peasants.

Then it was night. Then it was morning, and that's exactly what
happened.

Werewolves Have Won
[/i]