Marmageddon: The Paranormal Romance No One Wanted (An Excerpt)
“I've tried to tell this story a thousand ways. When you get to my age…” “You're twenty-four.” “Ahem. When you get to my age, you realize that stories aren't as simple and straightforward as they seem.” “You're not my grandpa. Cut to the chase.”
It started when that marmot bit me. I mean, obviously that's how it started. He was underneath my truck when I—well, that part isn't important. It started when that marmot bit me, and the first full moon after that, I transformed into a marmot. I'll spare you the denial and disbelief. I mean, would you believe it if you woke up in the body of a rodent, lying in the middle of your front lawn in a pool of decapitated grasses, hands and face smeared with mud? I had become a monster. I had become the thing I feared most.
“You’re being extreme,” “You can't understand. You're not were.” “And you're not a were-wolf. You didn't bite anyone or maul any innocent villagers.” “Still. The shock. The horror. Like I said, I'll spare you the details about coming to terms with who I had become. It wasn't pretty. In time, I’ve come to accept myself. That I have appetites for things that normal men don't.” “Oh my gosh, Hunter. People eat vegetables all the time.” “Rabbit food. It's not natural.” “Are you going to tell the story, or are you going to keep being ridiculous?”
You have to understand that when you first become a were-marmot, the changes aren't voluntary. You can be in the middle of driving your truck, and hear a strange noise, and BAM, you've got your little marmot paws clinging onto the steering wheel and no way to reach the brakes. Or you'll be in the middle of scurrying into the burrow when suddenly you get this funny feeling in your gut and WHAM, you're raising the roof. Literally. That's a problem for people like us, of course. Lot of the new guys don't ever make it through the first few months.
It wasn't like I could just call into work for four months straight. And who was I supposed to tell? “Hey can you come check in on me at the house? Might turn into a marmot and not be able to reach the door handles.” No. This was the kind of thing I had to handle on my own.
So there I was at work, standing out by the shed with the guys and waiting to see if the rain was going to let up or get worse, but then I saw this marmot running through the field. Every now and then he'd stand back on his haunches and wave his little paws in the air like he was trying to get our attention. Shoot. I knew right away it was Swiftpaw. They would have sent him to warn me, but only if there was a real problem. The guys were starting to notice that something weird was going on, and worse, Emma had decided he looked tasty.
“Emma,” I said, leaning down next to her ears. “Calm down, girl. That's a friend, not a food.” But her eyes were fixed on him, and she was getting that crazy predator glint in them. Maybe I could have gotten her to calm down, only at that moment, I felt a weird twinge in my gut. Not a “shouldn't have eaten those pickled eggs” twinge. A transformation twinge.
“Uh,” I grunted. “I gotta..” I started running for the corner of the building, hoping I'd get there before I shrunk enough to notice, especially since all the guys had turned around to watch me run, laughing and calling encouragement. For all they knew, I’d been making an awful lot of sprints to the bathroom lately. You're wondering about my clothes, right? When I told you that I kept transforming in the middle of daily activities, you wondered what happened to my clothes every time. This is what: I ran right out of my shoes first, and then collapsed, writhing as fur sprouted from every inch of my body and my teeth and snout elongated. When it was over, I was surrounded on all sides by denim. I've chewed my way out of more pairs of pants than most folks have.
I managed to wiggle out of this pair without chewing and dragged them to a corner where I hoped they’d go unnoticed by the guys. I didn't want to answer the questions if they found every article of clothing I wore that day dropped on the floor of the shop. Again.
After wrestling around with my clothes like that, I'd lost some time, so I scooted on out to see if Swiftpaw was still in the field.
I stood up on my hind legs and sniffed the air, sensing the many details that human noses just don't get. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are a lot of different poop scents around a farm. A whole mosaic of them, really. But I didn't have long to stop and smell the, uh, roses. Emma had chased Swiftpaw to the top of a fencepost and was leaping around, barking her head off. Most of the guys were just standing there laughing. At least Hinkley was trying to call Emma off whenever he managed to catch his breath.
This was going to call for a decoy run.
Letting out a chittering whoop, I scurried down the hill.
You notice how fast marmots are when you hunt them. I've noticed it before. They’re fast. They boogie. But you don't realize until you've been one of them how fast it feels to go flying over the ground, the long grass whipping against your cheek pouches, paws barely skimming the earth.
“Okay, you're not a thoroughbred racehorse, either.” “Well. No. But it feels really fast, okay?” “Sure. So you were sprinting majestically across the field.”
To rescue my friend from Man's Best Friend. Right.
Luckily, Emma seemed to think that a sprinting target was even more fun than a fixed one, and she ran after me, which gave Swiftpaw enough time to get down from the fencepost and make for the burrow.
Unfortunately, Emma seemed to think the sprinting target was more fun than the fixed one, and within seconds she was hot on my heels.
“No!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Emma! Bad dog. No chase. Go home.” I swear I saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, even though I didn't speak with my human voice. It was almost like she knew who I was. Which would have been impressive if she hadn't watched me transform in front of her own eyes about fourteen times since I'd been infected.
“Emma!” I shouted. “It's me! I buy you dog food and let you sleep in my bed. Do not kill me.”
Her momentary confusion bought me enough time to scoot my butt into the burrow, and she couldn't follow. She sniffed and scratched around the entrance for a few moments, and several of the marmots in the little burrow turned to give me irritated looks.
“Sorry,” I offered. “She followed me home.”
Loosetooth's head popped into the room. “Hunter. You're here. We sent Swiftpaw to warn you of the danger.”
I grimaced. “Yeah. Maybe next time he should—you know, kind of sneak around the back instead of running up doing semaphore signals.”
She waved away my suggestion. “There's no time for subtlety now. Rumor has it the Marmoth has been spotted to the east.”
I chill ran through my fur, even though I didn't know what she was talking about. “The what?”
“The Marmoth” she repeated solemnly. I saw several of the nearby marmots pause to look at her, their eyes seeking confirmation.
“It cannot be,” one of them said in a hushed whisper.
“We believe that it is true. That the Marmoth has returned,” she turned back to me, and I could see that her fur was standing on end and her eyes were huge in fear. “The Marmoth is like you and I. He once was human and now is marmot. But he is—really, really large.”
“Okay…”
“He never settled between human and marmot. Instead, he is caught between. A marmot the size of a man.”
“Okay…” I repeated. I was waiting for, something scary. Like, he was really big and could shoot snakes out his nose. Or, he was really big and had an army of snakes. Or, he was really big and—
“Well. Don't you see?”
I squinted. “Uh, no? You're saying he's the size of a human. But so am I, most of the time.”
She dismissed this too. “I should have known one of the new pups would not understand the danger we face from the Marmoth. But rest assured, those of us who remember know the danger. He destroyed more than one den when last he passed through.”
Murmurs of agreement spread around the group, and several of them were looking at me with expressions of disgust.
“Okay, okay!” I held my paws up in front of my chest. “He's a big deal. We need to chase him off. Is that right?”
I'd made the mistake one time of saying that I could shoot something while I was in my human form, and the entire marmot community had shunned me for a week. It left me feeling strangely bereft. I'd put my gun in the back of the closet and replaced “shoot” in my vocabulary with “chase off.” Where it was appropriate, I mean. I wasn't about to go ask the guys if they wanted to chase off some pool. There was a lot of context involved with switching between forms like I did all the time.
Anyway, the marmots looked at me like this was a really shocking suggestion. “You wouldn't say that if you'd met him. If you'd seen what he could do. What he has done.”
How scary could some oversized rodent be? I wasn't trying to downplay their fear, but I was pretty sure my colony could “chase him off” if need be. “You speak of what you do not know,” she intoned. “Go home. You will see the devastation there.”
That was enough to make me want to human back up, but I couldn't just flip the switch. Besides, I was still stuck in the middle of the burrow, and I needed to scoot on out of there before turning back into a human.
“Great,” I said. “I'll see you there.”
I'll be honest. When I first turned, I didn't think I was going to get too involved in the inner workings of the marmot people. I mean, they were animals, and I was a human, so what could we possibly have in common? But it's a lonely thing, being a were-marmot. Even your own dog will turn against you, and eventually you start turning to the company of those like you. Or like you in some way. Within the marmot colonies, there were a lot of folks that were pure marmot, never human. There were a number of were who, once they could actually control the shifting, chose to stay marmot most of the time. There were those of us who'd been made through an infected bite, and were-marmots that had been born because their parents were were. We didn't all have the same view on everything, but they understood better what I was dealing with than any of the full-time humans I knew. None of them had even heard of were-marmots. So even if my colony was a little extreme sometimes, and even if they did like to eat unspeakable things, I liked them. If this Marmoth was a danger to them, I couldn’t take it lightly.
“Were they right? When you got home, I mean, was it as devastating as they said it would be?” ... “Hunter? Hunter, are you okay? You're kind of spacing out.” “Oh. Oh, right. I was just remembering.”











