Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt

of the men shivered.
    “Ready?”
    The other man grinned. “Oh yes.”
    There was a moment when both of them were unmistakably human, and another moment, a split second later, when both of them were something else.
    The young security guard who was manning the CCTV monitors woke up with a start and stared at the screen. Purely by chance, that was also the moment when the moon chose to break through the clouds, flooding the perimeter with pearl-grey light. It showed up two medium-sized quadrupeds, grey-furred, long-muzzled, yellow-eyed; dogs, Jim, but not as we know them. One of them lifted its head and howled. A fraction of a second later, the other followed suit. The guard rubbed his eyes; his mouth was dry and he didn’t seem to be able to do anything with it for a while except let it droop open.
    The bigger of the two (go on, say it) wolves crouched, looked up at the five-metre-high fence and the razor-wire entanglement that topped it off like froth on a cappuccino, and sprang. The lining of the guard’s throat puckered; he really didn’t want to see a living creature, even a wolf, disembowelling itself on razor wire. But he needn’t have worried, at least on that score. The wolf sailed over, clearing the wire with ease. Then the other one did the same thing.
    The guard hesitated, then scrabbled for the playback switch and the zoom controls. First he played back the jump; then he went back a bit further, until he could see two men, with no clothes on. Fine. He’d seen naked men before. Also, since he was a farm boy from the Ukraine, he’d seen wolves jumping a fence before, too. It was the bit in between…
    His grandmother, of course, had always sworn blind that they existed. When the moon was full, she’d assured him many times, they ran free in the dark forest, and woe betide anybody unfortunate enough to cross their path, unless he’d had the presence of mind to bring along a gun loaded with silver bullets. But that was just a story, wasn’t it?
    He wound back a second time. He could make the two men out quite clearly; also the wolves, a few heartbeats later. In between— He froze the picture and stared hard at it. In the interval between the men and the wolves, there was nothing, just a view of the wire and some out-of-focus trees in the background.
    There were other explanations, he told himself. Like: two men decide to walk into a restricted area, somehow getting past all the sensors, trip-wires and other Stupid Security Tricks, and take all their clothes off. Well, indeed. And why not? But then, out of nowhere, two very large wolves appear. Naturally, the two men run off as fast as they can. The wolves, startled by the movement, escape by jumping the fence.
    He thought for a moment. In his mind, he played out two different versions of the future. In one version, he went to the supervisor and said, Chief, the compound’s been invaded by werewolves. In the other, he stayed exactly where he was until the end of his shift, keeping his eyes firmly anchored on a space precisely two centimetres above the top edge of the screen. In the first version, a whole lot of tiresome and unpleasant things happened to him, including unemployment, ridicule, depression and many long years in the clinic playing chess with an opponent who tended to eat the pawns when he was losing. In the other, he finished his shift and went home. Not much of a choice, really.
    In the end he sort of compromised: he made a log entry to the effect that two unauthorised personnel had approached the perimeter and gone away again, and that there had been wildlife activity. He also carefully didn’t erase the relevant footage, even though he wanted to very much. Then he fixed his eyes on a spot on the wall and kept them there until he was relieved. After that, he put the whole thing out of his mind, went home, had his evening meal, switched on the TV and watched a fascinating documentary on the Discovery channel about the Soviet-era munitions