Excerpt: Wolftown 2
The sequel to Unfinished Business, tentatively titled “What Life Remained” but for the moment being called just “Wolftown 2,” is under way over at my other Patreon! Here’s the first entry:
The living room of my one-bedroom Chicago apartment looked out through two blocks of low-rise apartments and strip malls to the concrete walls of Wolftown. They rose four stories tall, higher than strip malls but lower than most of the apartment buildings. I often wondered when I stood there what it was like for the people who lived above the fifth floor to be able to look down into Wolftown. There were district ordinances now that prohibited building above a certain level near the walls, but they weren’t going to tear down the buildings that had been there since the 50s.
I turned from the window back to the people in the room. What felt like plenty of space for me (and my former ghost partner) became cozily close whenever Czoltan visited from Detroit. Usually when we were in the privacy of my apartment, he (and I) preferred his usual half-shifted form: human shape, wolf fur, wolf head, wolf tail. Today, though, in deference to our other guests, he sat in his fully human form (dark hair, olive skin, bright green eyes) on the small couch in the living room that faced the TV.
Our other guests were also extranormal people, both also in their human forms. Gabriel, a nagual1 (were-jaguar) from El Salvador, sat next to Czoltan on the couch, and Carla, a thunderbird shifter, stood behind both of them. Gabriel had black hair like Czoltan with frosted tips and silver studs in both ears and his nose; Carla, taller than both of them, played with her shoulder-length black hair as she watched the TV report.
All three of them, Gabriel, Carla, and my boyfriend, were members of the National Organization for the Protection of Extras, or NOPE (they had an ongoing campaign with signs and banners that had phrases like “Is is okay to discriminate against werewolves? NOPE” and so on). This was the largest nationwide extras-rights group, and the one that had the most publicity and recognition. They marched, they lobbied politicians, they printed up information. They were the legit, by-the-book counterpart to the Teardown movement, an underground activist network that went in for showier, more destructive acts like smashing parts of the Wolftown walls or vandalizing construction sites of housing companies with discriminatory policies. Publicly, NOPE disavowed the Teardown movement; behind closed doors, Czoltan told me, it was a different matter.
The reason Czoltan and Gabriel were in human form, though still shirtless, was out of deference to Carla. Her thunderbird form, even half-shifted, was eight feet tall with a ten-foot wingspan that would nearly be able to brush both walls of my little living room from the place she stood now. So for her own comfort, she’d shifted to full human, and the other two had followed suit so she wouldn’t feel left out.
On the TV, a similarly human-looking—probably not an extra, though you never new—man in a blue jacket and yellow tie spoke in a carefully neutral news personality voice. “The protest will gather at Federal Plaza around noon,” he said, “and march through downtown after speeches by local civic leaders.”
“Hey,” Gabriel said, leaning back to Carla, “that’s you.”
A map came up on the screen showing the route. “The rally will end—”
“That’s good,” Carla said. “You can turn it off.”
Czoltan tapped the remote and the TV went black. “I thought you wanted to hear what they were going to say about us.”
“No, I wanted to make sure they got the route right. Two years ago they showed the wrong one and we didn’t know why the cops were directing us along different streets. It’s all good.”
“Anyway,” Gabriel said, “they always say the same thing. ‘Wolftowns date back to the 1950s, now a small minority of extras want them torn down.’ It’s the walls, not the Wolftowns, but they always miss that point.”
“Messaging is Danielle’s department anyway,” Carla said. “I’m logistics. I care about the route.” She scrolled through her phone and tapped out a message. “You boys ready?”
Gabriel stretched on the couch as if he had no intention of leaving, but Czoltan stood and looked at me. “Watch us on TV?” he said.
“Sure.” I felt bad for not going, but I appreciated him not rehashing the conversations we’d had over the last week—three weeks, really, ever since he’d decided to come to Chicago for the protest.
Gabriel turned with interest; I could almost see his cat’s ears perk up. “You’re not coming? To support your boyfriend?”
“I’ve got a contract from the FBI,” I said.
“And he’s worried that showing up at a protest could make them cancel the contract,” Czoltain explained.
The nagual looked from him back to me. “Must be a big-ass contract,” he said.
“It’s twice as big as the biggest job I’ve ever worked,” I said. “Plus they pay my health insurance.” When he looked puzzled, I said, “That was a joke. I wish they paid health insurance.”
“Even if he is only doing this FBI job so he doesn’t have to deal with Richard,” Czoltan said.
“Who’s Richard?” Carla looked up from her phone.
“Never mind,” Czoltan said quickly before I could answer. “Just a tough situation.”
“The job is good money,” I repeated. “I got some publicity when I had that other Wolftown case a few months ago.”
“Wait!” Gabriel stood up from the couch fluidly and smoothed his hair down. “That thing where the chick got poisoned and someone had to turn her to save her? There was a Chicago guy who knew what to do. That was you?”
“That was me.”
“Daaaaamn. Zo said you were famous for a hot minute but I didn’t think I woulda known you. That was crazy! I watched that vid like a hundred times. She was all like dyin’ and shit, and that guy was high on wolfsbane and just bit her, like whoa. I never saw someone turned before.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it was pretty intense.”
Gabriel paced toward the TV and then came over to me. “How’d you know she was poisoned? Some of my friends said the guy who turned her got arrested after, but Marce said it’s legal to turn someone if it’ll save their life.”
“How would you turn someone into a nagual?” I asked.
“Can’t.” Gabriel puffed out his chest. “I mean, I can’t. Naguals have nagual kids, but we don’t turn regular people. The jaguar is my connection to my god. If someone feels that connection real strong, then a priest can maybe free the nagual in them and turn them, but we can’t just bite someone.”
“That’s why there are so many more werewolves than any other extras,” Carla said. “Just need a little wolfsbane.”
“That and the wars.” Czoltan looked at the floor.
I walked over and hugged him, and he let me, and then hugged back. “I’m fine,” he said into the awkward silence. “Just history.”
I didn’t think Carla and Gabriel knew he’d been orphaned in the Second Kosovo War, and they definitely didn’t know that he was probably fine talking about it. Maybe that was just with me; we’d talked about his family a lot when we were first going out six or seven years ago, and we’d talked about them a little in the past two months after getting back together. But I didn’t want to say anything in front of them, and they didn’t know what to say, so finally Carla looked at me and said, “But you support the Teardown, right?”
Czoltan was the one who now made the “my ears would be perking up if I were in wolf form” face. I caught his eye and saw how ready he was to jump in if I said the wrong thing. “Of course I do,” I said. “I just have to be careful how I publicly support it because, you know, the government’s always watching.”
“Oh, we know it,” Carla said, and returned to her phone. She seemed satisfied, and Czoltan relaxed.
Look, it’s not that I don’t support extras’ rights to self-determination, that’s for damn sure. I just think that tearing down all the walls of all the Wolftowns is going to create more problems than it solves, and saying “those are good problems to have and we’ll work them out as they come up” is ignoring that a lot of non-extras are going to be upset and terrified and that will put a lot of extras in danger. So I think coming up with a reintegration plan first and then phasing out the walls is the way to go.
Flip side, though, I also don’t think that classifying the Teardown people as a terrorist organization is right, any more than it’s right for the Animal Liberation Front. Sure, the Teardown movement has destroyed sections of Wolftown walls, but they always clear people out right before so there haven’t been any injuries. Well, one guy sprained an ankle, I think, but that’s it.
Regardless of the pros and cons, I’m sure as hell not going to argue nuance with Carla, and Czoltan and I have had this conversation plenty. Fundamentally, at the core, I support the movement to get rid of the walls. I just think the Teardown folks are being a little hasty about it. Again, not a thing you tell one of the five top people in an affiliated local movement five minutes before they’re about to go organize a march.
1 In Mesoamerican religion, sometimes a nagual (or nahual) is a were-jaguar; sometimes it is any person who can shift into their guardian animal spirit’s form. In Wolftown, they are were-jaguars.