A Pack of Dogs in Manhattan

I stayed with Mateo for the whole day, assisting the doctor with the injection, and made my reports for the day to be sent to Marc. The annoying thing was that I had to cover my face every time someone came in.

But even if I had my back on them, people would still ask me, “Hey, you look really similar to the girl on TV this morning.” There were two nurses who asked me about it. As soon as the question came out, the doctor got interested in the topic as well.

“Really?” I acted surprised. No way would I reveal to anyone that I was in fact that girl.

“Yeah. You got that red hair and your clothes are… very similar.”

I had buttoned up my lab coat to my neck so how did they still recognize my outfit?

“You must have gotten the wrong person.” I laughed to emphasize how ridiculous it was for them to ever think that the girl was me. When it was actually me…

“I don’t know…,” said the brunette nurse. She was so short and tiny compared to the other nurse who was tall with gorgeous smooth black skin. God, I want to ask about her skincare routine.

“Well, whether it’s truly you or not,” the nurse with the amazing skin said, “Good for her to throw that coffee on him.”

“You reckon?” the brunette nurse asked, “Renald has been known as an American Sweetheart. If the girl doesn’t want to be his girlfriend, why couldn’t she just say so instead of watering him down in public?”

“You mean coffee–ing him down?”

They both laughed at the joke. *Coffee–ing him down*… I forced my laugh too. If only they knew what Renald told me before I coffeed him. They would not even question it. They would have glorified my action.

They walked out as soon as they were done. And I spent the rest of the day in Mateo’s room talking to the boy and his mom. About anything. It was so much fun talking to them that I ended up staying until late evening.

I think it was around seven pm at night when I saw Mateo dozed off in the bed. Gently, I tucked him underneath the blanket. His mother made sure the pillow was comfortable for him. Then I kissed him goodbye on the head and finally got out of his room.

Marc was not in the lounge when I got there, so I just put my report with a post-it note on the table and stormed off to get home. Along the way, I covered my face whenever I saw people looking at me longer than three seconds.

I just walked fast. Really fast. Until I got out of the building where the night’s darkness would embrace me and hid my face.

On my way, I googled up his name. ‘Renald Davis’.

Time to really find out who this mother fucker is.

There were about 195 million results.

My jaw dropped instantly. Even Stephen Hawking only had 30,3 million searches.

At that moment, I started to question my own life. Had I been living in a cave? How come I had not known anything about him? His name did not even register as someone familiar in my mind.

I clicked the website with the title ‘Renald Davis’ Movies and TV Shows’. There must have been at least one that I have watched if he was that famous.

Take a guess at how many movies and tv shows he had been in.

I will give you a clue, Tom Cruise has been in 52 movies and he is 58 years old now –still smoking hot.

Renald Davis?

He was only in 4 movies and 1 TV show so far and he was only 24 years old.

Beelzebub. How in the world did this man get so famous then?

Then I read his Wikipedia page. It turned out that he had only started acting a year ago. He was a supporting role in his first TV show, a morning drama. But when he spontaneously kissed the female lead in one scene, the directors immediately cast him as one of the lead actors. His fame was sky-rocketing in a forth night.

Well, he got the looks and the swag. And he was a jerk, which was why lots of girls loved him.

No wonder, I could not recognize him. This past year, I had been so busy working as … a Sugar Baby while investing in stocks. It took me day and night to learn the basics of stocks and how to read the algorithm, when to buy and when to sell.

*I should’ve gone for a business major.*

Basically, I did not have any time to watch or follow the newest trends this past year. Even if I had time, I used it to reread my class materials. I did not want to get back to university being the dumbest person because I had forgotten everything. And I used Netflix to watch documentaries instead of high school romances.

But again… achieving this level of fame in just a year was still shocking.

I sighed heavily to the night’s air. My head looked up at the sky where stars started to emerge because the moon would not.

*Please… let people forget the news by tomorrow.*

I had high hopes that people would have moved on by tomorrow. After all, it was just a chick throwing coffee to the most famous movie star in the current date. Ha! Nothing too big, right?

My apartment was near but I had to pass this one small back alley to get home exactly in five minutes. If not, I would have to detour the block and got home triple the time. I used the alley all the time, but I never walked past it this late at night.

When I checked at my watch, I noticed it was eight pm at night. It was the beginning of autumn so the night went dark faster. And since I was in a hurry this morning, I forgot to bring my jacket. So, I took out my lab coat from my purse and draped it all over my body. It was still cold, but the coat would have to do.

Just when I was about to start walking again, I heard it. A howl.

A wolf’s howl in the heart of Manhattan.

Instead of panicking, I sighed. I should have gone to a doctor about my hallucinations today.

I kept on walking casually, carefully placing my step because it was dark when another howl was heard.

Then another. And another.

And another.

At that point, the hairs on my skin started to stand up. A paralyzing chill crept on my spine and my legs became frozen on the spot.

Suddenly, the lights near me, on the back of a building shattered. I gasped at the sudden burst of sparks. But immediately, the lights died out and I was left in the dark. My heart started racing when I heard the growl.

In front of me, two paws emerged from the darkness. Then I saw its yellow eyes. A big black wolf just growled in front of me.

My vision became extremely limited as it was really dark, but I was pretty sure I saw several pairs of eyes behind that black wolf.

I pinched myself. You gotta be kidding me! Werewolf hallucinations out of all the possible things my mind could conjure…

But no matter how painful my pinch or no matter how hard my nails dug to my skin… the wolves did not disappear from my sight.

The black wolf howled to the night sky. I did not want to think negatively, but I thought he was calling the rest of his pack. And I was right. More wolves started to appear on top of the small buildings sandwiching the alley.

When I stepped back from the wolves in front of me, I heard a growl from behind. I quickly turned around and my legs nearly gave up at that point. There were four other wolves blocking my way of escape.

Did I mention how bizarre it was to meet a wolf in Manhattan City? Moreover, there were dozens of wolves growling at me.

*This must be a hallucination, right?*

The wolves from the building on the left side of the alley jumped to the street. I immediately stepped back from them. It might be only my hallucination, but I was still mortified. I stepped back until my back met the other building.

The wolves had surrounded me, and they kept stepping closer.

*This is not real. This is not real. This is not real.*

I kept hoping I would wake up soon. Maybe I had gone back to the apartment and because I was so tired due to not having my daily coffee, I slept and started dreaming. Maybe this was all a dream.

Or if this was a hallucination, I hoped my brain would wake up soon and came back to reality.

*This is not real. It can’t be real. It’s all just in my head.*

But when the black wolf jumped at me, in a millisecond, I realized then that it was absolutely truly fucking real. I did not even have the time to close my eyes when I saw the jagged teeth of the black wolves coming at my neck. I could not even scream as I stared at my own death.

There I was, a twenty-one-year-old girl who had leukemia and just recently quit her Sugar Baby job. In the end, I would not die due to my illness… Instead, I would die because out of nowhere and without any logical basis, there was a pack of wolves targeting me as their meal.

*What a life… At least, now I know werewolves are real. This must be what supporting characters feel all the time, having to die to progress the story.*

The teeth had grazed my cheek when suddenly the black wolf was thrown to the side by something bigger. I blinked once, making sure that I was still alive. Then blinked twice trying to register what had happened. All the while, I could not breathe.

There was another wolf. A much bigger one who had the black wolf by its neck. It was a brown wolf with dark eyes that somehow lit up in the dark night. The huge brown wolf growled, its sharp teeth were on the black wolf’s neck while its paw was on the black wolf’s stomach.

The other wolves started to growl at the huge brown wolf.

I cursed at Beelzebub when I finally realize just how big that brown wolf was. It was almost as big as a car, maybe the size of Mr. Bean’s car. Obviously, it made the rest of the wolves seemed like a pack of dogs instead. It was a monster.

None of the wolves attack the monster wolf. Somehow, my mind worked that night and I guessed because it was an Alpha thing. The black wolf was obviously the Alpha of his pack of wolves –dogs. The brown wolf… I was not exactly sure but by the sheer size of it and how he confidently stepped on the black wolf, I assumed he was an Alpha too.

It was a suspenseful minute. I even forgot if I could finally breathe watching the exchanges between the two Alphas.

Until finally, the black wolf tucked his tail between his hind legs and let out a whimper. I could not speak wolf yet I was pretty sure it meant the black wolf had waved the white flag.

The other wolves stopped growling then.

Instead of releasing its hold on the black wolf, the monster wolf instead bit down the neck and threw the black wolf behind it. I was stunned by the power the monster wolf had. The black wolf was thrown off a few meters away, it crashed into another wolf. Blood was smelled in the air as the monster wolf growled.

*Beelzebub*. His growl had so much authority that it made me almost want to kneel.

The black wolf started running from the scene, which was followed by the rest of the wolves. They disappeared from the dark alley in an instance.

Then the monster wolf turned back to look at me. As I was still standing with my back to the wall of a building, I cursed myself for being an idiot. I should have had taken the chance to run instead of gawking at the show of power the monster wolf was doing.

Because I wasted the running opportunity, I was left alone with the monster wolf. And I knew it would be more stupid of me to try to outrun this wolf that already had its eyes on me.

See, I was never a big believer in my life. I only prayed because my mom loved her religion. When she died, I abandoned the religion I had. I stopped going to church, I stopped praying, I stopped believing. I already knew I was going to end up in hell. That was why I never cursed with the name ‘Jesus’ anymore. Instead, I cursed with the name ‘Beelzebub’. Even though I did not really believe in the concept of heaven and hell either. What I believed was that when you die you’re just gone.

But right then, I felt like praying. I felt like crawling back to the religion I had.

*Jesus, please help me.*