Bestial by Ray Garton

they were, some people in the crosswalk, and he’d nearly screamed.
    He hadn’t come into town in over two months. He hadn’t wanted to come today, but he’d needed supplies. Saturday seemed like a good day—there would be tourists everywhere, bustling activity and busy sidewalks. Daylight would give him a feeling of safety... even though he knew he was not safe. Not in Big Rock. Not anymore.
    George let up on the gas pedal, took a few deep breaths, and forced himself to calm down. He’d gotten everything he needed and was ready to head back out of town and up to his cabin. He would feel better once he was out of Big Rock again. Passing the town limit would not erase his fear, but he would feel a little better.
    He kept glancing at the speedometer to make sure he stayed at or a little below the limit. That had been his problem earlier—he’d gotten distracted by his fearful thoughts, had allowed his foot to get too heavy on the pedal, and had nearly hit those people in the intersection. He had to be more careful. If he were pulled over for a traffic violation—well, he’d be finished if that happened, and he knew it.
    He braked for a stop sign at a four-way stop. To his left, a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up to the intersection and stopped a moment later. George looked at it peripherally, without turning his face to it. He recognized the deputy at the wheel in dark glasses—Phil Merrick, a widower in his thirties with a couple of kids. He remembered the torn body of Merrick’s wife in the morgue after her car accident a couple of years ago.
    George froze up for a moment, paralyzed with fear. So much in his life had become uncertain since January, but George knew the cops were dangerous, from the phony sheriff on down. That was a certainty.
    The deputy turned his head slightly, aimed his dark glasses directly at George. He nodded once, gesturing for George to take his turn and drive through the intersection. George lifted his foot from the brake, pressed it to the gas pedal. The truck moved forward, but in his fear, George had no sense of his own speed. Was he going too fast? Too slow? He drove through the intersection, past the cruiser, eyes front, knuckles pale as he clutched the wheel. He felt himself relax as he put the intersection behind him. But he tensed again when he looked in the side mirror and saw the cruiser turning to follow him.
    “Oh, Jesus,” George breathed.
    Deputy Merrick’s black sunglasses seemed to fill the side mirror as the cruiser kept pace with George’s truck.
    It was impossible to tell who had been turned and who hadn’t, but George knew the Sheriff’s Department was a threat. It seemed impossible that his friend Arlen Hurley had been sheriff just seven months ago. George and Hurley had not been terribly close, but they’d had a good working relationship. Hurley and his wife Ella had invited George over for a couple of barbecues, and he’d enjoyed their company. Hurley had been a good guy, a good sheriff, and George had trusted him. George’s job as deputy coroner seemed eons in the past, a life led by another person he’d heard about second-hand from someone else. It no longer seemed to have been his life. But it had not been long ago that it all had unraveled.
    Things had gone bad in January with that smelly, naked corpse that had come into the morgue on a stormy night, its left eye missing from its socket. It was a rapist who had attacked a local woman whose car had broken down beside the road. The woman had killed him during the struggle, had driven a dirty old corkscrew she’d found on the ground straight into his left eye. The rapist was dead, there’d been no doubt about that. And yet it had gotten up and walked out. George hadn’t seen it walk out, but it soon became clear that it had, and after that, things had gone downhill fast. The animal attacks... the mangled, torn corpses... and then the arrival of that strange, badly scarred man who claimed to be a werewolf