I struck the steering column so hard that I blacked out for a few seconds. In the confusion, I forgot about the wolf and collapsed back into my seat. My chest hurt, and each breath was like the thrust of a knife in my side. I was sure that I’d broken a rib or two, but was thankful that I hadn’t punctured a lung.
I considered all of this in the second before the wolf sank his teeth into my right shoulder. I cried out in surprise, tried to shrug away from him only to realize that he was closer than before. The force of the sudden stop moments ago had caused the wolf to surge forward a few inches in the tight hole that separated the cab from the back of the ambulance.
The wolf’s bite was strong, and the pain was blinding. I bordered on the edge of consciousness again and wonder how long I could maintain. I’d lost a lot of blood, and my head swam as white spots of light danced before my eyes. I jerked away from the wolf to free myself from his jaws, but he held me tight.
I flailed with my left hand in an attempt to reach the road flares that had fallen at my feet, but they were too far away. In the next moment, I gouged at the wolf’s eyes, but had little effect. It was clear to me that all of the wolf’s head and most of its neck had been forced through the one-foot hole. The animal’s shoulders were wide, and its thick gray fur bunched up around the opening.
My weak attempts to poke the wolf’s eyes out only enraged the beast. He was furious and began to shake his head like a terrier trying to shake the life out of a rat. The pain was unbelievable. Fresh blood soaked my shirt. Worst of all, the wolf’s grip on my shoulder kept me from sitting forward. I couldn’t reach the flares at my feet, and I couldn’t open the door and jump out.
I fought the urge to panic as questions without answers marched through my mind. Would I die here? How long would it be before someone came along and found us? Would the wolf still be here, trapped in the hole? What then?
Just then, never releasing his grip on my shoulder, the wolf wriggled forward, and I knew what he had in mind. If he could just get one foreleg through the hole, he’d be able to work his whole body through the opening. If he ever got his entire body through the opening and into the cab, I’d be done for.
The wolf surged again in an attempt to inch forward and for an instant his grip on my shoulder relaxed. I punched him hard on the end of his black nose and pulled away from him with what little strength I had left. I heard my uniform shirt tear as I jerked my shoulder from between his teeth.
The wolf howled with fury, and the noise was unnervingly loud inside the closed cab of the ambulance. He snapped wildly, hoping to catch some part of me with his teeth. I kept away from him as best I could and tried to open the door. My hands were slick with blood, and they slipped again and again on the handle. I thrust my shoulder against the door repeatedly, but grew certain that the force of the accident must have bent the door’s frame, wedging it shut. Just when I was on the verge of giving up, the door creaked with a sharp metal on metal eek that told me I was making progress.
With the eyes of a killer, the wolf watched me, and to my horror I saw him bring one of his forelegs through the hole. This relieved the pressure on his other side, and a second later both of his legs were through the gap. In the next moment, I did the only thing that I knew to do. I turned in the driver’s seat, braced my legs against the center console with my back to the door and pushed with all the strength I could muster.
At first, the door didn’t budge, but then all of a sudden it gave way with an ear-rending shriek of metal that made the wolf howl in frustration. The door popped open so unexpectedly that I fell out of the truck and landed hard on my back in the tall, wet grass of the ditch.
Almost immediately, I heard the wolf scrambling inside the cab. He was trying to work his way through the hole, and it wouldn’t be long before he managed to do so. Next, I reached up, grabbed the side of the door and pulled myself to my feet. I then saw the wolf an instant before I grabbed the edge of the door with both hands and tried to slam it closed.
To my surprise, the door only closed half way. It bounced a few times on severely bent hinges that had been damaged in the accident. I knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the wolf would be able to climb into the cab and there would be no way to trap it inside if the door wouldn’t shut.
My only choice was to run, so I scrambled up the ditch. About the time I reached the end of the ambulance, I heard a commotion in the cab. The wolf had finally wriggled through the hole. I could hear its weighty claws on the upholstery as he move towards the driver’s side door. It was only a matter of time before he bore down on top of me.
I ran for the double doors only to slip down onto one knee. I dared not to look back out of fear of what I would see. I could hear the wolf. It was out of the truck and in the grass now. It would be on me in any second.
I got back on my feet, rounded the back of the truck and made a leaping grab for the double doors. I felt that my only hope was to barricade myself inside and to wait for help. The skin on my back crawled with gooseflesh for I knew that the wolf was close behind. I grabbed the handle to the right side of the double doors and pulled. It stuck on my first hard pull, but came open on my second try as I pulled as if my life depended on it.
The door swung open, and I was almost blinded by the bright fluorescent lights in the back of the ambulance. I leapt inside and tried to pull the door closed behind me. My worst fears were realized in the next moment when the door did not close all of the way. My heart sank when I glanced over my shoulder and saw half the wolf’s body in the gap between the open and closed doors.
My only other option was to make for the side door, but I went down hard a second later when my feet became entangled in the small space between the stretcher and the bench seat. I fell hard against metal and plastic and knew that this would be the spot where it all would come to an end. I imagined the wolf pouncing on top of me and ripping out my throat as it had my partner’s just a short time ago.
I spun onto my side and looked up in time to see the wolf climb into the back of the ambulance. I glared with black, lifeless eyes, and its gray chest swelled as it let loose with an ear-splitting howl that seemed to shake the very full moon to its icy foundations. A moment later, it pounced, and I shut my eyes in the face of my inevitable doom.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! was the noise that followed, the sound of gunshots filling the closed space of the ambulance’s rear compartment. The wolf fell heavy and lifeless onto the soft cushion of the stretcher, and I sat up in time to see the handgun fall from the limp grip of my partner, John, who was still sprawled on the bench seat.
I got to my feet and checked John’s pulse. He was dead, and when I turned to examine the wolf, I was startled to see that in its place was the body of the man that we’d struck with the ambulance earlier in the night. In the center of his broad chest, there were five fresh gunshot wounds, weeping blood into the white sheet that covered the stretcher.
At that point I collapsed. When I came to there was a man standing over me. He was a log truck driver who came upon us on his way to the pulp mill that morning. He called 911 on his CB radio and help arrived in force in the shape of deputies and paramedics.
By the time they got there, the man on the stretcher was nowhere to be found. He’d been gone when the truck driver found me. I ended up spending nearly two weeks in the hospital. None of the investigators believed my story even though I passed two polygraph exams about that night’s events.
In the end, they wrote it off as a highly unusual animal attack and told me to go home and get plenty of rest. That was three months ago, and I’m pretty much healed up now. I’ve got a few scars from the wolf bites, but they only bother me when the moon gets full, big and bright.
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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