Hot nights prick dreams of blood out of their panting, heaving sides, tongues grown too big for their mouths, chins wet with slobber. In the warehouses, the revolutionaries stockpile guns, toys against tanks, the pitiful arsenal of the civilian, but in Dallas paw hits pavement and sizzles as they run. A wild, airless night, humid and heavy, full of frogcall and the thrum of cicadas, the night sky pressing against the city like wet rope, and they hunt.

They have carved names into the leather they wear around their necks, their wrists, their ankles, crisscrossed over the almost human curve of their chests: fascists, bootlickers, scabs, all the doomsday men in ill-fitting suits and ugly haircuts that have gathered to chant and wave torches. They circle the crowds, picking off stragglers, the slow moving, the drunk, the fat hunters with Wyoming tickets in their pockets, the Saturday warriors in their polyester camo. The alleys grow slick and sticky.

In the morning there will be empty seats, abandoned hotel rooms, empty book depositories. The air will roil with copper, iron, the black bodies of flies, the hope of a storm on the verge of breaking. They will return to work, collars peeking coquettishly from beneath apron straps, but tonight they are free, and roused, and revenged.

Every day was some new apocalypse, some looming end of the world drifting through the sickly orange of the sky like fine ash: invisible until it piled up on rooftops and car hoods and skin, notable mostly for how it dragged at their lungs like running. Plague and fire and flood; civil wars and the rumors of wars, dead spots in the sea, deserts swallowing fertile land, birds falling from the sky, whales washing up on beaches. Bones in the street.

They are at home here, if lonely, too wild for humanity, too human for anything else, an outcast in more stable times, but now just one more wary shape on the empty roads. They sloughed their skin years ago when the winter drove them west, a refugee from blizzards, simoons, tornados. The west is a thin skin of green atop a bottomless lake of desert, but it’s still bearable, for now, a heedless island of smug superiority even as the rivers run dry and the cliffsides collapse.

Coming down from the mountains, overgrown and ripe, they meet another exile, face impenetrable behind a layer of road filth. They circle each other, wary as dogs, sniff the air, weigh the options before edging in. They come together without relief, but for a moment the pall of doom is lightened.

A hunter’s eye, that sees nothing and misses everything but fear: he sees green, hears water, smells footprints. Beaten by the sun griddling off the concrete. He is out of his time, once a slave, once an owner of slaves. Reeks of grave earth and urine, wolf hair and adonis; beneath the heavy coat a belt of coral pinches at the hard flesh of his belly. Borrowed nipples heavy with milk, he longs for empire builders.

He kills by daylight, clears a wide circle around the trash and train-swept rumble of his domus, steel and leather. The noise and metal of the trains frustrate and bore him, but there are olive trees growing beyond the fence, and that is familiar. Olive trees and sea air: he remembers stories learned soldiering of a wager between gods.

Nights he is a wild thing, one with raccoons and coyotes, feral cats, drunkards. Brings deer down in the middle of the high road and leaves an accusatory finger of entrails pointed straight at the heart of downtown: I am Caesar’s, no one else may touch me.

Once taken up, the mantle is not put down so easily. This belt of moonstone bites deeper and deeper into my flesh with each passing cycle. Ah, that I had not ventured to the crossroads! Not struck that deal with the man dressed all in blue and black! I have bartered my birthright for a mess of pottage, and no blessings remain to shower upon me, the rightful heir, firstborn son.

Wolf.

Clumsy in the night, tail dragging heavy and awkward, crashing into trees, torn by bracken, mouth full of thistles and dew. No beast of the fields, I, nor the woods–outcast and shunned by man and wolf alike, a mercenary in the endless war of all against all. I feast myself on mice and carrion, and wake, one week out of four, retching, retching, Roman girdle biting always deeper into my thighs.

Ah, that I had not been so foolish!