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Wolves at the Door


by Kevin Myrick


The wolves were at the door, finally. Jackie waited for them all night long and got good and drunk in the process, and now they were pounded and pounded and pounded hard and demanded entrance.

“Little Pig, Little Pig, Let me in.” One of them yelled out from behind the door. The wolves always loved to taunt him, itched for any chance they could get to fight.

He'd fight all right. Jackie never had a problem with guts. He went after Bobby Thurman in the third grade when the boy demanded money from him in the lunch line. Jackie might have gotten a black eye, but the boy had three broken fingers after Jackie stomped on his hand. One had to fight off the wolves before they got into the chicken coop. That's what his daddy always told him.

Jackie grabbed his shotgun from the cheap plastic table and pushed shells into the tube. He chambered a round, the “rat-rat” barely audible over their banging on the door at 2 a.m. and the neighbors screamed something in gibberish down the hallway. They must have been cussing up a storm because a cop yelled back for them to go back inside.

Outside his door, the snarling beasts waited behind their plastic face plates and their body armor. A few rounds of buckshot into their shins would cure them quickly of their courage. Every animal had its weakness.

Jackie wanted them to bust the door down. He wanted those rabid beasts to beat down his door and try and take his stash. He would show them what a man would do when the wolves were at the door, would show them what the fight was all about in the first place.  

“Last chance buddy, you better come to the door before we knock it off the hinges.” They beat as hard as they could beat without hurting their fists now. “Come on jerk-off, we know you're inside.”

He took one last swig of the bottle of Wild Turkey he left on the table - 101, the good stuff - and then stuffed his last hankie into the end of the bottle and splashed it around. He lit a cigarette, then touched the flame of his lighter to the cloth. It would burn hot and fast, and the wolves wouldn't know what hit them.

The battering ram finally knocked the deadbolt loose and the door swung open, and Jackie threw the bottle on the ground beneath the dogs feet. The wolves howled bloody murder and flailed on the ground in pain as others tried to push through his door. He blasted them with load after load of buckshot until one finally put a bullet through his brains and ended his last stand as quickly as it had started.

Jackie never had a chance against the wolves. They always got their dinner.
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