The beefy body of Ira Rinks convulsed and sliced sweaty lines through the lake of grime on the cell floor. With all of his inhuman strength he breathed and writhed and fought off the surging tremors that wracked his entire quivering body. He felt the muscles in his face constrict, twist and then take on a new shape. His jaw narrowed and stretched until it jutted outward enough to resemble the muzzle of an ugly dog. His arms spasmed and contracted, shortening his powerful biceps into the crooked forelegs of a beast. All along these anfractuous limbs sprouted up tufts of tough hair, coarse as frayed copper wire.
Another large convulsion forced Ira into the fetal position, sweat beading on his protruding forehead and wicking off the fur of his stretched flesh. With intense concentration, he closed his eyes and by sheer force of will made his arms unfurl, lengthen and return to a human semblance. Focusing through the pain, he mentally warred with the age-old curse in his blood and made each hair rescind and reverse back into his olive skin. He let out an enormous gasp of relief and let the dirty concrete cool his bare back.
It must be another full moon tonight, he thought to himself before cursing the guards and the warden and his foolhardy lawyer and the whole entire world. In this dark cell, locked away underground without even a shred of moonlight, his curse still affected him. Worse, since he has been locked away in solitary confinement, he has had absolutely no sense of the passing of time. So rather than being able to prepare himself to fight off the change, this time it snuck up on him and struck him when he was most vulnerable. Damn them. Damn them all.
He had only seconds of relief before the powerful urge to transform contorted his features once more. As he twisted and resisted, he mentally replayed the events that led him here. The rare night out for a blind date. The drunks assholes who couldn’t leave well enough alone. The fight in the parking lot, the taunts, the sucker punch..the screaming. The crunching sound of the skirmish ending in brutal fashion.
At the present, in the pen, things weren’t that much different. Wannabe tough guys with too much confidence and a ingrained hatred of anything, or anyone, different. That initial fight may have landed him in prison but it was the second, much bigger fight in the yard that put him firmly into solitary. The crunching sound of his bones contorting and trying to reshape reminded him of the sounds from that day. The men who tried to kill him, their insufficient homemade weapons no match for his sheer speed and strength and unadulterated rage. He killed three of them so quickly he hadn’t even realized that they expired. They were weak. Empty. Pathetic. He crushed them like a tin can beneath a hobo’s boot.
He groaned in agony once more as he fought against the change. The fight was constant and it was severe, it always was. Ira also knew from experience that it would last until morning, so letting his guard down for even a second was not an option. As he fought, he shifted the blame for his condition from the men he killed over to his family.
He had gotten this curse from his father. His father, in turn, had inherited it from his father before him. Before that…who knew? Ira’s grandfather had died in a dirty alley in London with a silver bullet buried in his back. His father had fled and ended up in North America after that. Ira’s father was a bloodthirsty monster who had gleefully hunted in the hills of Kentucky, sinking his teeth into any man, woman or child who was unfortunate enough to cross his path. He kept this up with every full moon until he too was hunted down and slain for the beast that he was.
Ira panted with agony and ground down his sharp incisors until they retuned to a human length. This pain was pure torture, his only wish was that he could get out of this forced solitude and spread the pain he felt amongst his peers like crabs in a whorehouse. The pain subsided for a moment and, in the heavy silence, he heard a faint rustling sound from the corner of his cell. When his dark eyes came back into focus he quickly spotted the source of the sound. It was a rat. A big, juicy black rat.
Despite a near constant spraying and poisoning of the hordes that ran through this prison, the rat problem never seemed to wane. Nothing seemed to stop them. Not the snapping traps or the sticky glue. Not the poisonous spray or the eager boot of an abusive guard. Not the bars or the walls or the concrete floor. Not…
This line of thought gave Ira the beginnings of an idea. He was struggling so strongly against the thing that he didn’t want to become. What if, instead, he wanted to be a new thing entirely?
Ira Rinks lay on the filthy floor as still as a stiff corpse. Despite the pain, despite the constant cry of his bones and skin to twist and change, he lay still until he got what he wanted. Once the big black rat ventured close enough to grab, it’s pink nose sniffing wildly at the air, Ira smiled an inhuman smile. His sharp, canine incisors would have gleamed if any moonlight had permeated his cell. It squealed in anguish as he sank his seek into its coarse fur. It ran when he released it, limping and squeaking and bleeding. As it disappeared back into the darkness, he laughed for what felt like the first time in years.
As the night continued, even in his deeply isolated cell, Ira heard the blood curdling cries of the men in uniform and the men behind bars. The screams coalesced from isolated rivers of pain into an ocean of revenge. Finally, his hatred, as well as his curse, would touch everyone.
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