"A werewolf wouldn't bite a skunk," Hollis said.
"Why not?"
"Why would it bite a skunk? Would you bite a skunk?"
"I wouldn't bite a skunk today," said Mortimer, "but if I was a werewolf, I think I'd bite a skunk if there was one sitting there. You'd have to bite it gently, y'know, so that its whole head doesn't come off, but I think, y'know, werewolves can bite gently when they want to, even though they usually don't. They couldn't use their whole jaw or, y'know, anything like that, but if they just used their front teeth and didn't close them all the way, I think they could bite a skunk without its head coming off."
The other cub scouts murmured their agreement.
"Y'know," Mortimer added.
"And what if the werewolfskunk bit a deer?" asked Theolonious. "Would it turn into a werewolfskunkdeer?"
"I want to know how one werewolf ate all of Troop 192," said Cecil. "How big is a werewolf's stomach?"
"Haven't I already explained that twice?" asked Hollis. "The werewolf didn't eat their whole bodies. He ate the best parts, then scattered the rest of them all over the place so that the kids couldn't turn into little werewolves. Do you want a demerit? Do you?"
"I need toilet paper!" Billy yelled from the woods.
"Use leaves!" Hollis hollered back.
"I tried! They're all stuck to me!"
Fredrick raised his hand. "Would a werewolfskunkdeer try to eat people? Or would it just forage for nuts and berries?"
"You don't even know what 'forage' means," said Silas.
"It means to search for provisions."
"Well, you don't know what 'tourniquet' means!"
"Yes, I do. We learned about them last week. It's that thing you twist around your arm or leg to stop bleeding."
"Well, you don't know what 'hypothesis' means!"
"Silas! Enough!" Hollis clenched and unclenched his fists a few times. "Anyway..."
Theolonious frowned. "So is a werewolfskunkdeer a person who changes into something that's a wolf, skunk, and deer all at once, like it has fur and Bambi eyes and sprays skunk spray, or is it a person who can change into a wolf or a skunk or a deer?"
"I have no idea," Hollis said.
"I think he changes into one of them, but he can't control which one it is. So he'll be fighting Bigfoot and he'll want to change into a wolf because wolves are better at fighting Bigfoot, but he'll change into a skunk instead and Bigfoot just steps on him. That's probably why you don't see many werewolfskunkdeers around anymore."
"What if a werewolf bit a Dracula who bit a zombie who then bit the werewolf?" asked Cecil.
"My baby brother bit the babysitter, but she didn't turn into a baby."
"Shut up!" said Theolonious. "That's not what we're talking about!"
"But what if a werewolfskunkdeer bit a wolf? Is it a werewolfskunkdeerwolf, or does the wolf part just not matter because it was already a wolf?"
"Werewolfwolfskunkdeer sounds better," said Anthony.
"Soon the full moon will rise," Hollis said, raising his arms theatrically. "And then the werewolf takes its supernatural form and..."
"You mean the werewolfwolfskunkdeer."
"No. I mean the werewolf. There's no such thing as a werewolfskunkdeer."
"You forgot the extra wolf. It's werewolfwolfskunkdeer."
"I did not forget the extra wolf. We aren't talking about the werewolfskunk deer."
"The werewolfwolfskunkdeer."
"We're talking about a werewolf! A regular old werewolf! That's it. Just a man who turns into a goddamn wolf, okay?"
The scouts went silent. Hollis knew he'd gone too far by using the g.d. word, but the punchline to his story was so amazing and they were ruining it.
"Mr. Hollis, is this poison oak?" Billy asked, walking back to the campfire holding some leaves.
"Yes, Billy. Put that down."
"I wish I'd picked different leaves. Can I go home?"
"No. There's some baking soda in the tent. Let me finish my story and I'll get it for you."
"Could a werewolf eat a baby whole, in one bite?" asked Anthony.
"I suppose one could," Hollis said. Actually, he knew that one could. Firsthand. Heh heh.
"So when it pooped out the baby, would the baby be a werepoopwolf?"
"What if a werepoopwolf bit a werewolfwolfskunkdeer?"
"It would be a werewolfwolfwolfpoopskunkdeer."
"Enough," Hollis said. "The next person who says something gets a bad report to their parents and they won't get to come on any more of these trips. Got it? See that full moon up there? That ties into our little story, doesn't it? Do you see the connection between what happened to Troop 192 and the lunar cycle of today? You get it, right? Do you know what Troop 192 was doing on that fateful night? They were--irony alert--sitting around listening to scary stories from their scoutmaster! Do you get where this is going?"
The scouts remained silent.
Hollis stood up.
"That's riiiiiiiiight! The story I was trying to tell you is foreshadowing what's going to happen tonight! Ha! How about that, you little brats? The reason there are so many similarities in the fate of Troop 192 and our situation at this very moment is because I am a werewolf!"
He stood there, facing the moonlight, waiting for the inevitable transformation.
"What story did you tell the other kids?" Cecil asked.
"Excuse me?"
"Were you telling them about another werewolf attack before that one?"
"Yes. That's right. It's all a vicious cycle. Each story I tell the scouts is about the previous massacre. I'll tell the next troop about you guys."
"If you killed all of those Cub Scout Troops, who keeps hiring you as a scoutmaster?"
He adjusted his angle. Change, dammit, change!
Theolonious raised his hand. "So if you bit a mummy--?"
Screw it, Hollis thought. He'd brought an axe.
Frederick was first, right in the middle of another stupid question when the axe caught him under the chin. It cleaved his jaw in half, his tongue waggling through the gap, blood spurting like a lawn sprinkler.
Hollis pinned Billy under his foot and hacked his arm off, then dangled it above his face, teasing him.
"Stop hitting yourself!" he yelled in Billy's face, slapping him with his own hand. It was good fun until shock set in and Billy stopped screaming.
Cecil got a straight chop to the throat, but the axe wasn't sharp enough to decapitate him fully, and his head flopped backward, still attached to some sinew.
As he'd warned earlier, Hollis drove the axe head into Anthony's ribcage, cracking it open, then diving in the feast on the child's still-beating heart with his razor-sharp werewolf fangs that seemed rather flat and dull for the job. He did manage to bite off a piece of something that could have been a ventricle, but might have been an atrium. Hollis always got those confused.
Theolonius watched, eyes wide, hugging his knees. He was covered in blood that wasn't his own. Hollis raised the axe, ready to make a lupine feast of the boy's small brain, when Theolonious began to scream.
No, not a scream.
That's more like a howl.
First the boy's nose extended, becoming hairy and snoutish.
Then claws burst from his fingertips, curving into the shape of scythes.
Hollis dropped the axe, dumbfounded, as the miniature werewolf then grew...
Antlers?
Theolonious quickly spun around, lifting his giant black tail, one that had a white stripe running down it ala Pepe Le Pew.
"Oh no..."
The werewolfskunkdeer sprayed Hollis with its anal scent glands while the scoutmaster was screaming, and some of the spray got into Hollis's mouth. The smell...the taste...was so bad, Hollis had no choice but to whip out his Swiss Army Knife, thumb open the mini scissors, and immediately begin snipping away at his own nose and tongue, snip snip snipping until...