The Guns of Santa Sangre Read Online Free PDF Page A

haunches. The man’s chest buckles inward with a sound like breaking chicken bones to become long and tapered. Talons punch out his fingertips like blunt knives through canvas. By now, the other convict is in a total panic, pressing against the bars, screaming to the policia federal to release him from the cell and the thing he is trapped with. “Get me out of here! You hear me?”
    In the dark shadows behind him, the pitiful wretch suffers through the last of his tortured transformation. His voice changes, becoming guttural, hoarse and animalistic. “Oh God Oh God it hurts it hurts it Oh GGGGGGGGGOO-OOOOOOGGGG-GGHHHHHHHH!!!” The words slur into the growling roar of a beast.
    A bushy tail flicks into the moonlight.
    Frothing saliva foams over jagged white canine fangs, impossibly huge, bursting through gums.
    The cell is small.
    There is nowhere to run.
    A new bad smell arises as the cellmate shits his pants, cowering in the corner as the abomination in the cage with him grows enormous, expanding to fill the cramped space as it towers against the ceiling. The silhouette of the furry chest becomes concave and narrow as a dog rib cage in a crick-a-crack of a spinal cord regenerating. The skull beneath the skin of the half-human face discombobulates as jawbones dislocate and break, an extended feral wolf-like snout punching out like a clenched fist. Hunched against the roof, the monster stands eight feet tall.
    The werewolf is fully born and it wants meat.
    The creature falls on the other man in the cell and tears his head and half his shoulder off the torso in a grisly wet splurge of chomped flesh with a whiplash crack of severed spine. It hungrily swallows the mouthful in one gulping bite.
    This only whets its appetite.
    The old man holds his sombrero in front of his face to shield himself from the tornado of gore and shorn flesh that explodes through the bars as the wolfman rips the convict’s carcass apart in its huge talons and teeth, chewing and swallowing, reveling with feral abandon in the bloodthirsty carnage. Gallons of blood blast over the ceiling and gush down the iron bars of the abattoir of a cell like shiny black paint, splashing the sombrero but the only thing the old man feels is regret that his beloved hat is ruined for it has been with him for as long as he can remember.
    All is going to plan.
    It takes those damn fool Federales long enough to get there.
    But now they stand in the doorway, eyes like saucers, frozen in place as they witness the monster filling the cage to bursting. The wolfman is covered with shags of flesh and ropes of eviscerated intestine, a severed half-chewed human arm in its gory mouth.  
    The old man does not move a muscle, even though the werewolf is mere feet from him. It has not seen or smelled him yet.  
    It just noticed the policia .
    Wait for it , he tells himself over and over.
    One of the ignorant cops fumbles his pistola out of its holster and opens fire on the creature behind the bars, the bullets hammering it back, as the other officer runs to the office and quickly returns with a bolt action rifle that he has to load and fire one big round at a time as if any of those bullets do any good.
    They simply punch holes through the monster’s chest that quickly heal.
    And piss it off.
    Inflamed by the sting of the bullets and hungry for more flesh, the werewolf leaps at the bars and the men jump back, bathed in sweat as they clumsily reload. The monster’s slavering jaws stretch impossibly wide and it emits a petrifying roar of frustration and fury. Clenching the cage in its talons, the creature yanks and jerks with all its incredible strength, trying to pry the cell door loose.  
    Those bars will not hold . The old man smiles to himself.
    You Federales should have run while you had the chance.
    Werewolves are above your pay grade.
    But no, the dumb cops feel foolishly secure with more bullets in their guns and they blast the monster again and again through the bars. The