#samsquantches are involved
available to read on AO3 HERE
Story Synopsis: All things considered, there’s a lot of strange things a man could find in the back-bush of his own farm, rural as it may be. Some of it he could be aware of and do his best to work around, but a lot of it went so far under the radar it almost wasn’t worth thinking about. Mostly it was animals- a goat or a sheep that hadn’t been bedded down proper wandered out overnight and didn’t wander back come morning. Turned up the next day in the bush in a strange, disemboweled sort of way.
It’s coyotes that do it, Wayne reasoned. Wolves, maybe, but whatever it was it certainly wasn’t anything living under his very nose.
Chapter Word Count: 3133
Pairings: (background, minimal) Wayne/Daryl
Genre: Dark/black comedy with a lil bit of drama
Next Chapter:2
Chapter Warnings: blood and some bones being kinda funky, but nothing graphic
Notes: now, i know what youre all thinking. youre thinking, ‘duke, what are you doing! dont start another werewolf fic while youre still tryingta get no shade done!! are you coocoo banans or what!’ and the answer is yes
yes i am
(tho this is supposed to be short and funny and its mostly all written out anyway. this first bit is a lil dark but i swear to GOD its supposed to be funny. pls believe me. pls laugh.)
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THE STORM
The storm that hit the farm was one that the local meteorologists had been nervously talking about for days, warning both farmers and locals alike to start taking serious precautions against it. ‘Make sure your delicate crops are appropriately cared for, and be sure your livestock have a proper, sturdy shelter to take cover in, because, folks, this is going to be a bad one.’
Spring storms often were. Wayne’s mother liked to put it in his head when he was younger that it was because the winter and summer seasons used springtime as a battleground of sorts, fighting it out like gods from some old mythos. Spring storms, as she put it, happened because winter was taking too long to leave and summer was quickly growing impatient. Their clashes turned violent fast, and that’s how spring got a reputation for its disastrous weather.
If his mother were still alive today, he was sure that she’d say this storm was going to be a real battle for the ages. It was winding up to be one of the worst the area had had in awhile, aiming to hit Letterkenny in the dead of night when its people were at their most vulnerable.
Should probably just surrender there, bud , he sometimes found himself thinking whenever he heard new reports regarding the storm, each incoming update worse than the last.
Expect heavy gusts of wind and moderate to severe structural damage, quoted the forecasters. Hail was guaranteed, and it was going to bring plenty of thunder and lightning with it. The rainfall was expected to be heavy, so be wary of localized flooding. Isolated tornadoes would be a strong possibility- make sure there was a way to receive alerts if one should pop up.
“With the way they’re talking, you’d think the sum’bitch was gonna be rainin’ fire and brimstone on us,” McMurray grumbled one day, and Wayne found that he agreed that they might be talking it up a little bit. He couldn’t remember a time when an unnamed storm warranted so much precaution.
Wayne’s thoughts on the impending weather notwithstanding, he understood how important the farm was to his livelihood; he and Katy depended on it to get by, so if there was any sort of threat to it that could be prevented, then it was only right that they ought to do something about it. Nothing worse than being caught with your pants down, so to speak.
With the enlisted help of Dan and Dary, they’d gone around reinforcing all the windows and barn doors, checking for any fundamental flaws in the integrity of their buildings while Katy went around making sure the crops that could be saved were secured before extending that same courtesy to Dan’s estate. It was hard work, and they were all bedraggled and worn out from all the extra hours that had to be put in on top of everything else they’d been dealing with as of late, but they all felt a little more secure from their efforts.
(They’d paid special attention to fortifying The Garden as they’d worked on making sure the farm was secured; they couldn’t risk its contents being exposed, and if anyone asked why it warranted so much focus, well, they had to protect Dan’s perennials.)
By the time the storm finally rolled into town with its thick, voluminous black clouds slouching ominously towards Letterkenny to be born, Wayne again found himself mentally calling for its surrender. All his blustering with McMurray left him feeling slightly foolish as he stood out on the back deck of his small home to face the bastard’s approach, lightning already beginning to flare out of the clouds to illuminate itself against the backdrop of a rapidly darkening evening sky.
He wasn’t a man who’d ever really been affected much by storm anxiety, but as he stood there thinking about it, flicking his unfinished dart away, he reckoned he might be feeling it now.
(Although, to be fair , his anxieties weren’t because of the storm itself, but rather, were in anticipation of the storm’s aftermath and what it might dredge up. Things had been oppressively ominous around the farm the past few months, and of course it was only suitable that a storm of this magnitude should serve as a catalyst; he just hadn’t yet figured out what it was a catalyst to.)
His mind weighed down with his thoughts, Wayne turned his back on the stormfront and stepped inside as the first strong gust of wind surged past him, slamming the door shut after him with a loud bang.
The suddenness of its closure made him flinch, and the uneasiness harbored in his chest squeezed tightly for an instant. Gus jerked up from where he’d been sleeping by the door and whined pitiably at the noise. Wayne crouched down as he stepped by him to pet his head reassuringly as the distant, Delicate Sound of Thunder announced the storms arrival.
“Oh, it’s alright,” Wayne muttered lowly in a babying tone before stepping away, ignoring the miserable way Gus plopped his head back onto the tile with his eyes turned nervously towards the door.
He peeked his head into the living room to check on Stormy before making his way upstairs, mentally going over the emergency plans he’d made with Katy and Daryl (who lived with them now for safety’s sake) in case the worst should happen: where their emergency supplies were stashed, which one of them was going to round up the dogs, and where they were all going to go if a tornado should whip up.
They were as well prepared as they could be. All that was left to do was sleep through it; there was choring that needed to be done in the morning, and a man needed his rested energy to do them efficiently, impending doom or no.
The door to the guest bedroom where Dary had been staying was uncharacteristically shut when he reached the upstairs landing. Wayne stopped by it and considered checking in on him, but decided against it before settling into his own room and getting ready for bed, where he laid sleepless for hours, listening to the storm as it came to town, bringing all its rage with it.
The wind outside wasn’t just howling as it blew past, but screaming , screeching like a mateless fox in the night. Every thud and thunk of debris as it slammed against the house had him calculating the damages in his mind ( casualties of a seasonal war), leaving him to wonder if his barn would even still be standing by the morning.
But if not, then it could be rebuilt, the livestock replaced. It would be a financial hit, sure, but all the family animals were inside, and unless a tornado really did come bumbling through, then everything would be fine. Stock could be replaced; his family couldn’t, but they were all safe and accounted for. If he stayed awake worrying about it, then he’d be too tired to make any needed repairs by the time the storm finally did peter out.
He inhaled and exhaled slowly, trying to ease his mind, and felt all the stored up tension he’d been holding slide out of his body. As he focused on the machine-gun rhythm of the heavy rain hammering down against the roof, he could almost tune out the screaming gale, and adjusted to the aggressive white noise as being something soothing.
Later, he wouldn’t remember falling asleep; it was only after he woke up that he’d realized he’d even slept at all. He woke up feeling disoriented, his phone pinging an alarm at him from where he’d set it down. Grabbing it, he checked the tornado watch alert and then set it back down, an anxious little curl forming in his stomach.
He sat in bed, alert and awake despite feeling as though he hadn’t gotten more than about an hour’s worth of sleep. Something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t just because the storm was still there and lingering, thrashing Letterkenny hard enough to provoke an early morning alert.
It was preternatural, the way it was lingering, hovering over his home as though it had some sort of vendetta against them.
A loud bang came sharply and abruptly, capturing wholly Wayne’s attention. He fixed his head in the direction it came from and heard muffled voices coming from somewhere downstairs. The howling wind rushing by his bedroom window masked the urgency with which they spoke, but all the same he was able to understand that something bad must have happened sometime in the night.
Had the barn collapsed? Was a funnel cloud forming? He hoped that whomever it was pounding their way hurriedly up the stairs wasn’t about to tell him someone he knew had been hurt.
The door to his room slammed open, banging against the wall. Katy stood there in the opening, breathing hard, her face shadowed by the darkness of his room.
“ It’s Dary,” she said urgently, panting. Her slender form, backlit by the hallway light, was visibly shaking.
He didn’t have to be told twice. Wayne sat up in bed quickly, shucking the blankets off of himself so fast that he flung them straight to the floor as he came to a stand.
“What’s the fuss?” he asked as an eerie sound came drifting up the stairs behind her. She stared at him with dazed eyes before turning her head to the side to listen to it as it crept up from down the stairs, and before he could kindly ask what the fuck is going on, she turned around suddenly and left.
He listened to her footsteps race down the hall and back down the stairs, utterly alarmed. Her panic was uncharacteristic and unnerving, spurring him into action as he heard another loud bang emanate from downstairs. He took long walking strides as he made his way after her, subconsciously coming to realize that the sound that had lured Katy away was of someone moaning.
Katy’s voice, shrill, disappeared as someone ( Squirrely Dan , he realized belatedly once he was halfway down the stairs) furtively whispered to whomever it was that was making that awful, miserable moaning that it was going to be okay.
“You’re alright, Dar. I gots you, I gots you.”
Making it to the downstairs landing, barefoot and full of purpose, Wayne turned towards the kitchen where all the noises were being made and was stunned still by what he saw.
There was blood everywhere . Splattered on the floor, on the furniture, and in the center of a small pool of it was Dan, cradling Dary’s limp, motionless body amidst the overturned dining chairs. Wayne’s mouth dropped open, his eyes blinking hard as he both tried to get over the shock of what he was seeing and processing it all in the same second.
Dan looked up at him when he stepped close, pale-faced and covered up to the elbows in runny blood, fresh and staining his denim overalls a dark, grotesque burgundy. All Wayne could do in that moment was stare, even as he realized that what was making that horrid noise was Dary.
Dary, who looked ridiculously small as Dan held him in his trembling arms. Dary, who was naked and coated in blood and viscera, looking more like a newborn than a man. Dary, whose eyes were open wide but rolled back and blind, exposing nothing but red-veined white as his mouth hung limply open, releasing that droning moan in one continuous breath.
One of his hands was clutching at Dan for support, and his legs-
“What the fuck,” Wayne choked out, because as he stared down at him, he could see that both of Dary’s legs were hideously broken.
“I don’t knows,” Dan gasped, his bearded face wet with tears. “I don’t knows what’s happening.”
“Where’s Katy gone?”
But before Dan could even respond to him, her screams supplied the answer.
“Gus!” He heard her screech, her voice pitching wildly as she screamed furtively into the wind. “ Gus !”
Though it was hard, Wayne managed to tear his eyes off of Dary to turn towards the backdoor, alarmed to see that it was hanging weakly off its hinges, rustling as easily as a leaf in the breeze, opening a portal into the horrific grey rain that came in to splash against the linoleum. A flash of lightning illuminated her briefly as she stood in the yard shouting, her hands cupped around her mouth as she screamed for Gus over the sharp crack of accompanying thunder.
In the back of his mind, all Wayne could think of in that moment was of the tornado alert. All their precautions had been tossed aside, and if disaster struck now-
Well, it almost wasn’t worth thinking about.
Leaving Dan and Dary in the kitchen, he rushed out after her, striding into the snow and mud barefoot to grab her roughly by the arm, her hair whipping around in the harsh wind in long wet strands that struck at his face.
“Inside!” he bellowed, trying to pull her back towards the house.
“Gus is out here!” she cried out hoarsely, pulling her arm out of his grip. “He’s out here, Wayne! He got out when Dary came in! Gus! ” she continued to scream, heedless of the danger she was putting herself in.
Wayne’s heart sank as he both saw and felt the desperation in her voice. He looked around briefly, trying to discern if he could see any sign of where his beloved dog had gone, but it was impossible to see anything in the torrential downpour.
Freezing water flooded down his face in such strong streams that it was all but blinding, such that he had to squint hard to keep the rain from inhibiting him totally. He could barely see Katy between the hard pouring streaks of rain even though they were only standing a few feet apart. If Gus was out there, then he was lost.
“INSIDE,” he ordered again, even though it hurt him deeply to do so, but for as much as he loved that dog, he couldn’t risk losing her over him. Katy let out an exhausted sob, but let Wayne take her by the wrist and sternly guide her back to the safety of the house.
As they rushed up the steps and out of the rain that was slowly turning to hail, there came the sound of a frightened dog hiding from underneath the porch. Wayne had never felt such relief as he did as he saw Katy to safety before sprinting back down the wooden steps, nearly slipping in the slush as he did so. There was a spot of latticework that lined the back-porch that he’d been meaning to patch up that smaller, wild animals had been using for shelter, and as he rounded the corner to it, he found Gus there lying in a terrified heap.
Ignoring the cold and the muck and the mess he was making of himself, Wayne wasted no time dropping to his knees to grab Gus and roughly drag him out of his little cove of protection. He was shaking badly as Wayne effortlessly tucked him up into his arms, carrying him back into the house with his whimpers in his ear. He held Gus by the collar for a moment as he tried to situate the door back into place before releasing him, letting him bolt into the living room to shake himself dry and hide.
Soaking wet and breathing heavily, Wayne wiped the water off of his face and unknowingly streaked mud across his forehead before returning to Dan’s side, who still sat with Dary in his arms. Neither of them had moved from their position on the floor, but even as Wayne tried to re-fix his attention on what happened to Dary to see where all that blood was coming from, he noticed something that didn’t make any sense.
When Wayne had looked him over before, his legs had been terribly broken in such a way that they’d looked almost digitigrade, the bones cracked at unnaturally sharp angles that seemed to strain against his skin, but now they looked like they were-
And even as he stared down at them, the noise Dary was making suddenly keened and Wayne was able to see the bones in his legs shift, moving back towards what accounted for normal with a sickening crunch.
“Wayne,” Dan whispered, terrified. “Wayne, I don’t knows what to do here.”
Well, that makes two of us, Squirrely Dan , he thought hysterically to himself.
“Just- fuckin’- I don’t- just- just take him upstairs,” Wayne barked, speaking too harshly in his confused panic. He honestly had no idea what to do; didn’t even fully understand yet what was even going on, but even as Dan flinched at the initial command, having some sort of direction seemed to solidify his resolution. His round face lost its helplessness in a quick second as he nodded resolutely at the order. Wayne helped him situate Dary’s unconscious, lax body into his arms before getting to it, tromping heavily up the stairs with dutiful purpose, handling the extra weight expertly and trailing blood behind them.
Wayne watched them go before turning his attention to Katy, who had picked up one of the overturned chairs and was now sitting at their table, her head in her hands. Her hair, stringy and loose from being in the rain hung in long, miserable strands, masking her face in a way that was reminiscent of a Japanese ghost.
“Where’s Stormy?” Wayne asked, throat clenching uncomfortably at the thought that she, like Gus, could’ve gotten loose and was out there in the storm somewhere. The sounds of the wind howling and threatening to blow the kitchen door down were more disturbing to him now.
“Locked in the bathroom,” Katy replied tersely, holding an unlit cigarette in her trembling hand.
“In the bathroom,” Wayne repeated with a frown, turning his head in the downstairs bathroom’s direction. The inside light was on, and from the slight crack under the door he could see the shadow of Stormy pacing anxiously by the entrance. “Well… what for?”
“She attacked Dary when he came in.”
“What?” With so much to process, Wayne was struggling to understand this strange sequence of events, such as they were. “She attacked him? What was he doing out there?”
“He wasn’t… he wasn’t right when he came in,” Katy said, her whole body shuddering at whatever memory she’d recalled. Before Wayne could ask her what she meant by that, exactly, she elaborated further, saying, “Wayne, it’s him . The sasquatch, wendigo, fucking thing. Killing all those animals. All those people- Wayne, it’s Dary. Daryl.”
