[As chaos descends, a 911 call is patched through to local dispatch.
The recording goes like this: it's a young guy, asking for an ambulance at the highway overpass, up near the train tracks. Says he just witnessed a woman on a Harley going recklessly fast suddenly swerve and spin out on the on-ramp. As he climbs down into the deep roadside ditch, he goes through the details of the scene—lotta road rash, blood, the leg she fell on in bad shape but no, wait, she's moving, panicking, clawing at her helmet—the guy says
hold on and calls out to the injured woman as he puts the phone down, jogs just out of range of the receiver. There's maybe a solid thirty seconds of relative silence. Nothing but the wind blowing.
Then, distantly, a
roar.
By the time paramedics arrive, there's no woman. Just a pulled-over car, the battered bike, a helmet—and a body, the witness, torn up like confetti. Responders turn up blood and shreds of clothing in a nearby pond, fresh wolven prints nearby in the soft mud. However, any trail is quickly lost to the water and the woods.
With the military involved, maybe it's no surprise that the dispatch recording is scrubbed shortly thereafter. The motorcycle is quietly impounded. Though plates are run, no missing person report for the owner is filed. Not
publicly, anyway.
And into the next evening, sightings of a very large,
very aggressive black wolf (limping heavily on one hind leg) begin trickling in from the outskirts of town.]