Chapter 138

• [Apple]
• The urge to scream is overwhelming, but I tamp it down, breathing through my nose in a vain attempt to keep my heart from racing from my chest as my mind struggles to catch up to what my eyes are seeing and realize that the twisted puzzle of a man before me had once been a wolf.
• Now, what is left of him is pieced together with wires, pulled apart and stretched thin. Pieces have been replaced, others removed, and all the while the wolf himself is left in some perversion of painful slumber, his brow permanently creased with both age and pain. Trapped between forms, his nude flesh is covered with patches of red fur and the small amount of hair remaining on the top of his head, where it hasn’t been shaved to add diodes between metal plates, is prematurely gray.