"Yeah you do!" Scarper snaps. "You were supposed to figure out how to help Clay," Scarper yells. "You already blew it by letting Clay get under that camera, which I'm going to be dealing with for weeks. And now I hear you've been wandering around town attending to your 'own business'? You could not be more useless. Get in the damn van. We need to start fixing everything you did last night."
Scarper drives in angry silence, so annoyed to be stuck behind a school bus that he doesn't even yell at you or do more impressions. You wish you had more information except that one receipt from the gun store, but even that is more than Scarper knows.
The van lurches to a rattling halt outside the recycling center.
"Clay wants to talk with you," Scarper says, his voice carefully composed. "'Where is that boy?' You know how he is." A momentary, flawless impression of Clay's raspy voice, offered without enthusiasm or sardonic humor. Scarper's eyes are red-rimmed, his skin gray and drooping. He's in his fifties but he looks seventy right now. The galliard doesn't move from the driver's seat or try to roll the van into the garage, so you drop down onto the snow and head for the main door. It's still half-open, letting the cold in. When you glance back at Scarper, he's banging on the steering wheel.
"What happened, man?" he asks no one. "We ruled these lands. We were kings! We were…fucking…kings…" He's weeping as you head inside and yank on the door until it latches.
You can smell Clay as you move through the living room and down the hall. He's in your room. There's nothing left of your bedroom except the werewolf. Everything else has been destroyed.
Ignoring your torn-apart, pissed-on clothes, your ruined books (dissolved into pulp and putrescence), and your smashed computer, you approach Clay.
"Took you long enough," he wheezes. The old werewolf sprawls monstrously across your bed. He looks half like a Garou in crinos war-form, half like a marshmallow dropped in a campfire. His face is mostly intact, muzzle glistening wetly with blood and filth, but his lower body is a nightmare of corruption, especially his bowels, which have swollen monstrously. Your cereal bowl rests beside the bed, full of cigarette butts, and the air is hazy with tobacco smoke. Your green backpack, normally stored carefully beside the bed, is gone: either it dissolved or Scarper took it again.
"What have you found to fix this, boy?" Clay says. Black blood dribbles down his hairy chin.
"Do you think I give a damn about Black Tarn, Morgan Teegarden?" Clay wheezes. "Look at me! What have you done for me? Nothing, you useless shit. Your mother was right about you, even before you—"
He starts coughing, and he doesn't stop, even as his intestines swell more and more, leaking sticky white pus over your bed sheets.
Scarper crashes into the room, red-eyed and bloody-fingered.
"What did you do to him?" he shouts.
"I just told him about Black Tarn," you say. "We still don't know where—"
"Shut up and move," Scarper says, shoving you out of the way and running to the ahroun. But he's no healer, and who knows where Black Tarn is?
"He can't help!" Clay roars as his muzzle rots, exposing yellow bone. "He never helps!" The old werewolf's flesh boils and he thrashes, overturning the bowl full of cigarette butts and splattering ash on the carpet. Then he closes his eyes and slumps down into unconsciousness, wheezing pathetically.
"Get the fuck out!" Scarper shouts at you, shoving you out of your room. You stumble through the trash-strewn hallway that connects your room to the living room and the kitchen. You can see the yellow van through the dusty horizontal blinds above the faded sofa.
An Erie County sheriff's office police SUV is parked next to it. Maybe someone found the bodies in the woods, or evidence of a dozen other things Clay's pack has done over the years. Two cops get out of the SUV, stomp their boots in the snow, look around. One points out the van, but they're not in any rush.
It's time for you to go.
Wait, your thoughts? No, it's me again. The Stormcat, your friend from the caern east of here.
The Stormcat sits on the dirty sofa, paws folded daintily. Over bangs and shouts from your bedroom, I remind you that there's nothing for you here. And I think you know where to go.
The Wheel is turning, cub. But it's rusted and jammed. The smell of burning metal, the scream of failing machinery: that's what awaits you. That's our world now. I close my shining blue eyes, open them slowly. The air smells like ozone. I'm trying to change things, Morgan Teegarden. I just don't think it will work. Have you ever imagined what it's like, to see what's coming, and know that you can't change it? I've done this a thousand thousand times, and it never works. But here we are again.
The cops reach the door and start knocking.
I used to be bigger. You should get going, pup.
You grab a fanny pack because you can't see your green backpack anywhere. Back through the trash-strewn hall, past Scarper screaming for Clay to be quiet and Clay screaming in mindless pain. Out the busted screen door, into Black Tarn's frozen garden. A sudden bang, and you jump. Gunshots? No, a peal of thunder overhead, in the white sky. When you look up, lightning crawls slowly across the pale heavens, passing from west to east, then over the horizon.
You know the woods behind the recycling center, and though you have no problem avoiding the cops, you're faced with so many possibilities now that you barely know what to do. It's clear that if you want to help the Garou Nation, you can't start here. Something has gone wrong out east, but it might have gone wrong in a way you can fix. The question is how to get there.
You've got enough money to take a bus across the state line. That's safe and reliable. And warm. Or you could try hitchhiking. That's risky, but you'd save money. Or you could Change. In wolf form, you could run and hunt during the day, seek shelter at night. That could be glorious, assuming you didn't freeze at night.