1.    

Lex

Exertion sang through his body, but as he cleared the last hump of rock to reach the top of the not-quite-a-mountain hill, he’d never felt more alive. Getting out among the hills was his favorite pastime, and one he indulged in far too rarely these days. Certainly not to this extent. But it had been impossible to ignore the call of the wild today. Something had pushed him to make the climb. Now as he looked out and over the smaller nearby hills, he suddenly realized why.

The massive overpressure that had started as a nuisance and grown into a full-fledged assault on his system now made complete sense. The skies over the valley to the east of his were pitch black, and rolling swiftly toward him.

Lex blinked, eyelids sliding over his yellow orbs in a very human-like manner. The clouds were not just coming in swiftly, they were all but sprinting. He stared at the vast storm system that surged forward, like a lion that was done stalking and now lunged in for the kill. He had seconds, perhaps, before the first raindrops hit him. The wind came up abruptly, announcing the imminent arrival of a storm that would rival anything he’d seen in a very long time.

It buffeted the hilltop, and even his four-legged form was driven back a step by the gale-force winds. Trees farther down the slope began to groan and were slowly bent up the hill toward him as more winds whipped at them. Dust sprang into the air and he was forced to narrow his eyes to slits.

Lightning flashed in the skies, sheets of it running every which direction. A second later the boom! of thunder hit him, feeling more like the sonic-powered blast of a plane breaking the sound barrier. It made his fur stand on end and he cringed slightly with the pain in his ears.

Time to go.

He wouldn’t gain anything more by sticking around, and the rain was already starting to mat his fur down in clumps, and it showed no signs of slowing either. In fact, he was fairly positive that this was only the beginning. With a frustrated snarl he turned and darted back down the hill toward his own valley, the one that held his home, and the little town he called his.

Four limbs worked in unison, propelling him forward at great speed. Lex could outrun just about anything in his wolf form. He was among the swiftest creatures on the planet. He’d even tested himself out against a cheetah during a random trip to Africa nearly twelve years earlier, and found that he could not only out-sprint it, but hold the pace for longer.

Yet the storm made him feel like he was slow-dripping molasses for all the effort he put into it. It slammed into the hilltop, billowed up and over, and came driving down hard at him and the occupants of the valley below. The ground grew slippery underneath and he was forced to watch his step, placing his paws more carefully than if it had been dry. He was used to running in the rain however, and this barely slowed his pace.

It didn’t matter. He could have been on flat, hard ground, sprinting his fastest, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the storm. The freakish creation of nature simply washed right over him and kept going. The afternoon sky, once a bright blue and filled with sunlight, was eclipsed by clouds so black even Lex was nearly reduced to seeing only by the flashes of lightning.

He feared for himself, but more importantly, he feared for the people below. They weren’t ready to deal with a storm of this magnitude. There had been absolutely no warning. It was as if the storm had appeared out of midair.

A whistling noise alerted Lex to the fact that the wind was picking up in strength. Trees around him began to sigh and flex—the huge Douglas firs used to the storms that would occasionally lash the valley. But those storms always came in from the west, from the coastline nearly sixty miles distant. None of them were ready to deal with such wind shear from the direct opposite. The whistle became a full-borne howl, and in seconds the first branch snapped and plummeted to the forest floor nearby.

Lex’s flight home had just become infinitely more dangerous. He was now forced to split his attention between the ground in front of him and the skies above. The huge trees towered upward of three hundred feet in the air. They had many branches bigger than most trees. Any one of them could kill him if they came plunging down on his hapless body. Although the wolf form was resilient and able to recover from most injuries, a branch five feet across landing on his head would kill him just as easily as it would a human. There was no understating the imminent danger he was now in.

As if to punctuate that thought, another branch came flying down out of the darkness overhead. Lex saw it in time and dodged to the left, leg muscles bunching as he hurled himself up and over a fallen tree, one that had come down some time ago. A weird thrumming noise reached his ears. The vibrating sound grew and grew, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

CRACK!

He skidded to a halt, looking up with horror as the trunk of one of the magnificent, colossal trees seemed to simply disintegrate before his eyes. It all happened in slow motion. About halfway up the tree a section of trunk easily ten feet around shivered and just sort of exploded into fragments. A loud groan preceded the collapse of over a hundred feet of tree as it toppled over with what appeared to be agonizing slowness, but in reality wasn’t.

The entire ground shook as the massive trunk hit and rebounded slightly before coming to an abrupt halt. Lex swallowed hard. All around it branches began to fall from other trees, weakened by the passage of the downed titan. He shook his head, trying to get it back in the game as rain lashed at him through the suddenly cleared portion of canopy. The storm was only growing more intense. He couldn’t afford to sit around and try to wait it out. He needed safety, and soon.

Urging himself onward he rushed forward again. A minute or two later a second tree exploded. This one was off to his right, far enough away and falling in a different direction. He spared a moment’s thought to mourn it and the other centuries-old trees that would be destroyed by the storm, but he never slowed. To slow now would be to die.

The water finally started to filter down through the thick canopy, drenching him and everything else underneath in a constant waterfall of liquid. There was no escaping it, and the ground underneath became muddy and treacherous, slowing his passage once more. He was forced to move at a more sedate pace, else he lose his footing and go down. Or worse, break one of his legs. Lex had practiced running on three legs before, both willingly and not, but it wasn’t something he enjoyed, nor was he particularly adept at it. Give him four legs any day, please and thank you.

So with that in mind he ran forward. It felt slow to him, but in reality he was still moving nearly as fast as a wild wolf, one of his distant cousins. His anger spiked at the delay, but in the end, it probably saved his life. The constant boom-boom-boom of lightning overhead was near-deafening, and he never heard the branch when it separated from the trunk high above him. Nor did he hear it bounce off of other branches as it descended.

But he sure as hell felt it when one of the small outcroppings of the branch dropped over his rear haunch, slamming him to the ground so hard and fast his momentum came to a full stop in less than a foot of distance. He yelped and went down hard, his eyes wide open.

Less than two feet in front of him the massive branch itself was flat on the ground. It had to easily be six or seven feet around. If he’d been any faster, Lex would have been crushed to dust underneath it. Forcing down the rising tide of fear, he wiggled himself out from under the branch, testing his hind legs to see if they worked. When both responded, he headed out.

Almost immediately it became clear to him that something was wrong. The legs responded, but the pain lancing into his skull every time he pushed off made it quite obvious he was hurt worse than he’d thought. Lex forced himself onward as the rain drenched him and the ground, racing down the slope, doing his best to ignore the pain.

If he didn’t get off the hill in time, things were going to go badly. He was approaching the end of the old-growth forest line. Below it, the land had been clear cut nearly five decades before. Some trees had started to regrow, but it was nothing like what he was among now. It was open, and in a storm like this, that meant dangerous.

The darkness lifted slightly as he emerged into the open, the lack of trees above him allowing the near-constant flashes of lightning to show him the way. Lex was limping now, the pain growing worse as swelling stiffened his left hind leg. But he didn’t dare give up, pushing onward as best he could.

You’ve got this. You’re almost there.

He simply had to make it to the bottom of the hill, and then he could race up the road on the next one that led to his place. A flat surface, even if it was only gravel, would make all the difference in the world. Pushing himself, he started to cross the open land.

He was only a quarter of the way when disaster struck. The water pouring down the hill from above finally made its way out of the forest as well, and that combined with the torrential downpour that had already been working away at the ground finally won out. Lex slipped and fell as the ground beneath him abruptly split and then slid away.

Landslide.

Not good. This is definitely not good. In fact, this is probably listed under the definition of Not Good. Think fast, Lex, otherwise you’re dead.

He looked around for inspiration when it came to him. With a bone-jarring crash that hurt even from a hundred feet away, another massive fir toppled to the ground. It was so tall it stuck out into the cleared land with ease, like a finger pointing out from an enclosed fist. Lex was up on his feet and heading toward it before he’d had time for a second thought.

The earth beneath him continued to crumble and slide away in a muddy slurry, picking up speed as more and more of it was dislodged. The footing was treacherous, and his ride began to move with the ground. The power of the mudslide was awe-inspiring as it picked up the tree trunk that had to weigh several tons and simply started to move it downhill.

Lex snarled and put on a burst of speed, ignoring the explosive shot of agony in his hind legs. They were severely injured, he knew that, but if he could just get to the tree, he could rest them, and let the healing begin. First he needed to push them beyond what he should. Otherwise the tree would slide on by, leaving him at the tender mercy of the earth.

The tree was so large it didn’t pick up speed, and though much of the lower hillside was washing away, it was simply too big to fling downward at high speed. If Lex could get himself on the trunk itself, he could hopefully use it as a way to ride out the mudslide.

If. I really hate that word.

The trunk may have been over two hundred feet long, but it was moving straight downhill, while Lex had to take an angled approach to reach it. The jagged end where it had broken was starting to overtake him as he closed in. Lex reached into himself for even more speed, jumping from stone to stone, from a branch to a patch of ground that seemed to be more rock than earth, and then back onto patches. If it was even, solid earth he was running across, it wouldn’t have even been close. As it was, his haphazard crossing meant that by the time he was finally able to leap onto the trunk, perhaps only ten feet remained between where he collapsed in agony and the broken end of the once-majestic tree.

Made it. His lungs heaved and his brain screamed in pain as his hind legs finally collapsed. He dragged himself to the middle of the log, the platform surprisingly stable as it was carried downhill. Several times it jolted and bounced, but it was large enough that he wasn’t dislodged. From his vantage point he watched as the violent storm continued down the hillside and practically launched itself with a vengeance at the town nestled at the base. Lex stared for a long time as it battered the surrounding area, his mind playing back a scene from far in his past.

Eventually the tree came to a halt as the mudslide ran out of easy ground to rip apart and reached harder bedrock that protruded below, dissipating the force. At this point Lex heaved himself to his feet and—gingerly—hopped down to the ground below. The sky was still black and the wind whipped at his sopping-wet fur as rain pelted him, but the worst of the storm was still two or three miles farther downslope.

Bedraggled, hurt, and thoroughly whipped, Lex started the long trek up the gravel road to his place. He passed the official turnoff for his residence and slipped down the slope at the edge of the road, forced to swim through the creek that had formed there before emerging on the far side and up into the forest. There was a path through the trees that was much quicker than following the winding road.

He discouraged visitors, and the nearly mile-long driveway twisted and curved, despite his house being less than a third of a mile from the turnoff itself. It gave him plenty of time to prepare for guests.

Or avoid them.

He emerged from the woods and headed to the sheer rockface that was the entrance to his home. Ignoring the human-sized door, he padded ten feet off to the left, pushed upon a certain rock and then made his way down the stairs that were suddenly visible, wedged between the rockface and a boulder so as to be obscured from anyone who might come to his place. The horizontal door slid closed after he passed, and Lex was at last safely ensconced in his home. He went straight to his bed and passed out, not even bothering to shift back.

So he was a werewolf who lived in a cave. Who said stereotypes weren’t based in reality?