Lupine Unit #5

By Strega

They say there are parts of Los Angeles, and by extension the whole L.A. Metro area (everything from Santa Clarita to Irvine and Riverside - ten million people) where the cops do not dare go. This is, strictly speaking, untrue. There are places where they go cautiously, and never alone, but they go there. This does make it easier for crime to flourish there, since you didn't need to worry about a beat cop walking down the sidewalk and your scouts would tell you if a police cruiser was on the way.

In one of these dark, little traveled areas a string of SUVs pulled to a halt and a burly man very respectfully opened a door for a woman.  She was not especially tall, nor especially beautiful, but there was a hardness to her face that marked her as someone not to be trifled with.  She was Carlotta, with several last names depending on who you asked, and she ran the largest drug operation in Southern L.A. County.  The police wanted to talk to her very badly.

Each of the SUVs disgorged men until there were an even dozen and Carlotta straightened the anachronistic fur boa she always wore.  Some said it was a souvenir of her first husband, a movie magnate she murdered in his sleep.  Some said it was made of the fur of a rival's pet dog.  All that mattered at the moment was that suddenly, right before the men's eyes, the fur boa was hanging there in midair and Carlotta was gone.

There was a startled yelp from Carlotta and a curse from more than one man as something big and dark and impossibly fast dropped from a rooftop two stories up and bounced just as fast over the SUV, taking their boss with it.  There was a flash of dark fur and some sort of close-fitting black armor and the long furry tail streaming out behind it gave away the game.

"Werewolf!" Only one man got his pistol out in time and there was a rapid pop-pop-pop as he loosed three rounds, but if he hit the wolf it did not slow. With an inhumanly powerful leap it hit a wall and bounced around a corner. Only as it turned and only for an instant was the woman clasped under its arm visible.

"Get after it, idiots!" A dozen men sprinted after, knowing from watching the news that they could never catch a werewolf if it were alone, but perhaps they could catch one burdened by a women.  It had to run on two legs and that slowed it down. Their pay depended on getting Carlotta back alive and well and they charged after the wolf, hoping to bring it down with a hail of lead or at least force it to retreat without their boss.  She had spent five years wrangling the drug business into its current efficient shape and if she died or went to jail the same old infighting would start up.

The werewolf for his part loped along, turning a hard corner into an alley and using his free hand to tear away Carlotta's purse and any weapons it might hold. But Carlotta had not gotten this far by being unprepared and though the wolf's bouncing gait forced the breath out of her every time it landed her hand still went to the small of her back.  It came back up with a little .32 pistol which she pressed against the wolf's skull and pulled the trigger.

Maybe that would stop even a werewolf, but it saw the movement and jerked its head around.  She got off one shot which instead of going into the hollow of its ear glanced off the black Kevlar of its tight fitting helmet and then the long muzzle slammed into her forearm and the pistol went flying. On the black forehead plate of a helmet clearly built for a werewolf was the number 5 and she saw now that the wolf's flexible chest armor had a more elaborate version, only slightly lighter than the surrounding material: Lupine Unit 5.

"Cut it out," it growled as she crooked her fingers to claw at its eyes, and let her drop a foot before an arm longer and thicker than a man's leg trapped her against its side again.  It had momentarily outrun its pursuers but there was a shout from up ahead. It could not outrun a cell phone and another SUV at the end of the alley spilled armed men onto the sidewalk.

"Just drop me," Carlotta said in her most reasonable voice.  "You need me alive and if you try to escape with me you'll drop me or I'll stop a bullet meant for you."
With a guttural growl and a long-legged leap to the side the werewolf sprang into a narrow alley leading off the first one.  There was little she could do but talk at the moment. Her one remaining holdout weapon was sheathed on her thigh and the nine-foot-tall wolf had her pinned to his side like a quarterback carrying a football.

"They'll be here in seconds," Carlotta said.  "Just drop me and go."

Unfortunately the beast came up with a very werewolf-ish solution to the problem of carrying her while moving quickly. It let her slip from beneath its armpit only for two huge clawed hands to catch her and lift her up in front of it.  Feral yellow eyes looked her over and she noticed the blood on its fur from some bullet that slipped past its armor. Her attention was suddenly drawn to the creak as the huge wolf's jaws unhinged.

"Stay still and this will hurt less," it growled as it yawned. For an instant Carlotta stared past ivory fangs into the wet purple chute of its gullet and a comment heard on the news sprang into her head.  'Body of school shooter tracked down by Lupine Unit is reported to have entirely disappeared,' the news anchor said. 'We are assured by the LAPD that he was consumed and did not escape.'

Everyone knew the werewolves ate people.  Only a select few knew they could swallow them whole.  Carlotta joined the ranks of those few people and as she sucked in a breath to scream the werewolf stuffed her head into its maw.

It was in a hurry and rammed her in to the waist, its canine fangs ripping long gashes in her very expensive dress and leaving cruel welts on her breasts and back. Carlotta's scream was lost in the slimy depths of its gullet as it threw back its head and bolted her down.

It took only three gulps, each time lowering its nose only to snap its head back, clamping down until she was yanked forward and only the yawning to let her momentum drive her into its throat.  One toss took her to the thighs, the second swallowed her to the knees, and with the third its jaws closed around $1200 Gucci shoes hand-crafted of leather that would prove no harder to digest than her flesh. With a last great gulp Carlotta slid down the werewolf's throat, squirming but unable to save herself from sliding into the disgusting bile-scented pocket of werewolf stomach. There was the groan of muscle stretching and the inward pressure of armor segments around its chest that tried to resist her passage but just the same it closed its long muzzle and swallowed her alive.

The good news was that she wasn't sloshing with acid, at least yet, and though the werewolf at once let out a great belch it also immediately swallowed a mouthful of air to replace it.  Carlotta just had time to tap the face of her smart watch and cast some light on the slimy pink hell she found herself in before the wolf sprang into furious motion. 

She bounced around inside the prison of flesh and fur, unable to see what was going on but assuming - correctly - that the wolf had swallowed her to increase its mobility and was once again fleeing her men.

Fleeing and fighting.  Yet another SUV appeared at the alley mouth and the werewolf sprang over it, on all fours now and using its long legs and arms to move without its swollen belly getting in the way.  A man sprang from the vehicle and this one had a long gun, not a pistol.  The werewolf recognized a weapon that might penetrate its body armor and it swiped at him in passing.  Three-inch claws didn't quite decapitate the man but it sent him flying with the side of his neck ripped out.

The wolf skidded off the SUV and oriented itself, darting into the widest of the available alleys.  This was perhaps a mistake as it was broad enough for vehicles to follow at speed and though the wolf was now running on all fours at close to 50 MPH three SUVs roared after him. Carlotta was bouncing around in his stomach like popcorn in a popper and she didn't like the motion any better than the wolf did but the stretched flesh and fur protected her from any real injury.

"What the hell is going on," swore a man in the lead SUV.  “Where's the boss?  Did it drop her somewhere?" Ahead they saw the flicker of dark fur and armor but the wolf's movements were too quick to see the lumpy bulge in its middle for what it really was. A thug leaned out the window and fired, surely hitting the beast, but still it kept running.

Nauseating as the bouncing was she could tell the wolf was at a dead run and that meant her men were close behind. Every few steps the wobbling motion of its gut forced a belch out of it but the wolf managed to swallow enough air to keep her going, albeit at the cost of her breathing hot, foul, bile-scented air. It was horrible but at least she wasn't being digested.  It was time to do something to help her men catch up.

The hem of her dress hung to her knee and that was low enough to cover the straight-bladed knife sheathed on her thigh.  This too was a souvenir of a long dead rival and it had seen use over the years.  It was designed for stabbing rather than slashing and tough as the hide of the werewolf might be, its stomach wall proved to be mere flesh. Carlotta smiled as she stabbed, pulling the blade out and ramming in as fast as she could. Maybe she could even stitch the wounds together and cut her way out!

The first stab penetrated only a couple of inches before hitting, presumably, the inner side of the werewolf's armor. She tried again with the same result but as the light from her smart watch went dim and red from the blood flowing into the stomach she succeeded in driving it to the hilt into the meat. The werewolf shuddered, stumbled, but kept running.

"Ten zecond warning," growled the wolf into its helmet microphone.  "Zey are right behind me." He snarled as the knife blade reappeared from a gap in his armor but he was too busy to deal with it. He skidded around a corner, barely ahead of an SUV that seemed determined to run him down, and with a powerful leap that was still less than his best - luckily the woman inside him wasn't stabbing into his organs but it was still agonizing - he disappeared into a slot between two buildings barely wide enough for his long-limbed frame.

Behind him was a sudden glare as a dozen high powered floodlamps snapped on, directed into the faces of the driver and the men in the two SUVs. The drivers cursed and braked as the police loudspeakers came one.

"LAPD.  YOU ARE UNDER ARREST," the amplified voice boomed.  "COME OUT OF THE VEHICLES WITH YOUR HANDS UP OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE."

Faced with who knew how many weapons and unable to see a thing through the glare, the driver cursed sourly and raised his hands. It was that or try to back up, and he knew what would happen if he did.

The driver of the second SUV did the same but one of the men in his vehicle had other ideas.  He sprang from the door and would have run for the hills had a long arm not reached out of the darkness and dragged him in. He struggled for only a moment as he saw the huge clawed hand and the sharp white fangs.  There in the shadows were two police with assault rifles and another werewolf.

"Zpend the night in jail," Unit Seven growled.  "Or zpend the night in me.". She only had to lick her chops once to make him drop his gun.

Elsewhere the remaining thugs discovered that what seemed an opportunistic kidnapping (or apprehension, depending on who you asked) was in fact the largest coordinated action yet by the Lupine Corps.  A fleeing SUV came to a screeching halt as a 14.5mm round from what the LAPD succinctly described as a "werewolf-portable anti-material rifle" exploded its engine block.  A quarter mile away Unit Eight, perched on a rooftop, smiled a fanged grin and chambered another round.  Before the thugs could bail out of the stricken vehicle Unit One, in his massive armor, caved in the driver's door and turned the three-ton SUV on its side.  Unit Six plucked men out of the upper doors as they tried to flee.

Unit Four, called back from dogcatching duty for the night, easily ran down the ones who tried to escape on foot.  You simply could not outrun a werewolf, particularly one who habitually went on all fours and for whom a brisk trot was forty miles per hour.

It was not all easy.  The new second generation Unit armor saw plenty of use and it did not stop every bullet but the wolves were tough and the armor absorbed enough shots to keep them active and mobile.  Unit Two was staggered for a moment by a burst of close-ranged fire but reached past it and straight-armed a man into the side of a dumpster hard enough to break bones.

Twenty-two men came running after Carlotta and nineteen would spend a long time in jail. One bled out from massive neck trauma, one slipped through the cordon and escaped and a cop in tactical armor watched as Unit Three bolted down a kicking set of legs.  The perp had managed to hurt her enough to arouse her appetite and became, as the joke went and if only briefly, the world's leading expert on the werewolf digestive system.

Unit Three licked her chops and belched up a shoe before climbing back into her van.  She was not hurt enough for her metabolism to go into overdrive.  No sudden digestion and absorption for this perp,  He would spend the next day or two on a tour of a werewolf's intestinal tract.  Perhaps an ID or credit card would survive the trip and spare them grilling the perp's friends as to his identity and criminal record. Her partner shrugged and made a mental note to fill out the appropriate forms.

Don't shoot at the werewolves, the cops would tell anyone who listened.  Shoot at a cop and we'll shoot back.  Shoot at a werewolf and someone, probably you, will get digested.

Which brings us back to Carlotta, awash in blood as she stabbed Unit Five's innards again and again. The wounds closed almost as fast as she cut and the swaying belly wobbled as Unit Five at last came to a stop.  She could hear the werewolf panting in pain but no more thumps of bullets slamming into the thing's armor and pelt. Where were her men?

Her knife went through the werewolf belly one last time and Carlotta blinked as it was grabbed the blade from the far side.  Something with tremendous strength yanked the handle out of her hand and tore it right through the thick surrounding meat and out of the wolf.  For an instant the wound was large enough for her to see a flare of light and then it knitted shut just as the smaller ones had. Then everything went topsy-turvy as Unit Five retched.

She had gone down his throat alive and came back up the same way, though now coated in blood and slime and with her skin a shade paler. Unit Five was the best of the wolves at controlling his stomach but even so her minutes in there were long enough for the process of digestion to begin. Carlotta gasped as the wolf's powerful swallowing muscles squeezed her up instead of down and she was once again scraped by his fangs as he barfed her out into a plastic packing container big enough to hold a couple of people.

"Carlotta Piece," intoned a cop whose pistol never wavered, though she was gasping and covered in slime.  "You are under arrest.  Anything you say can and will be used against you -"

"Fine," Carlotta growled, and waved away the Miranda statement.  "I know the rest."

She gasped again as a second cop dumped a five gallon bucket of something sudsy over her.  "Wash," he commanded. "It's got baking soda in it to neutralize the acid."

The first cop was talking into a radio and from the direction of the flood lamps a young and very junior-looking officer came running, pulling a wheeled cooler chest behind him.  The werewolf who'd grabbed her reached in the second it was opened and plucked out two hams from the stack, peeling their plastic wrappers away with his claws.

It was no surprise now that a werewolf could swallow a fifteen-pound ham in one gulp but Carlotta still watched with morbid fascination as a great bulge moved through his dark neckfur, followed by a second. Unit Five belched briefly, considered, then followed the hams with a whole turkey.

"You know, if you'd stabbed him one, two more times," one of the cops said, and Carlotta's eyes went wide as a weird rumble emerged from the werewolf's belly.  The bulge of swallowed meat shrank visibly as his many wounds, knife and bullet, knitted closed.  "We wouldn't be having this conversation."