The Hybrid Series | Book 1 | Hybrid

by Stead, Nick

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Escape

  I threw myself at the bars and they bent with the force, but nothing else happened. There was no pain, no crackle of electricity. I smashed into them again and was rewarded with the creak of tortured metal. A third attempt and they snapped in two.

  I burst from the cage to the sound of gunfire. The guards were blind in the darkness, firing in wild panic and praying they found their mark. A lucky shot tore through my arm. The pain was mere background noise beneath the roaring of the hunger, and now rage was building. It was going to take more than a flesh wound to stop me, and the guards knew it.

  Fear poured from them in waves, intoxicating and thick in my nostrils, their hearts calling to me to set them free. I didn’t need sight. Scent and sound led me to the nearest one, his screams all but drowned out by more gunfire. I dragged him to the side, growling my displeasure as his gun connected with the side of my muzzle – another lucky blow. It would be his last. My fangs tore into him mid-scream and fresh blood mixed with the old stains at our feet, thick and warm and delicious.

  Another bullet grazed my ear and the stinging was enough to distract me from my meal. I pounced and killed a second guard, and then a third. There was just enough time to swallow a few mouthfuls from each, a little of my strength returning with every bite.

  Guns clicked empty. I heard a scream of frustration and someone banging on the door, trying to get out. One of them started to cry.

  The man by the door was nearest. He must have felt my breath on his neck as I closed in – I was greeted by the punch of a blade stabbing through muscle and I fell back with a yelp, crashing into the other one with a knife sticking out of my shoulder. His cries became screams and I turned on him, ripping him apart with savage joy.

  A second blade found its way into my back, just beneath the ribcage. With a roar, I twisted round and swiped at the guard, sending him flying into the wall. He had no time to recover, my claws skidding on the metal as I raced after him and grabbed hold again, one arm round his throat, the other around a leg. Then I twisted.

  A sharp crack rang out and I dropped him to the floor where he lay still, spine broken. Paralysed from the waist down and out of weapons, he was helpless as I ate him alive.

  The lights came back on a moment later, his eyelids flickering as he hovered on the brink between life and death. He was too far gone to see the unnatural way his legs splayed to the side or the cavern I’d opened up in his torso, chunks of muscle and viscera quivering beside him as they fell from my jaws.

  Blood and bits of flesh covered the floor, like some grisly soup. Body parts lay scattered around, a gruesome jigsaw puzzle even a biologist would struggle to put back together. Four faces had frozen with the expression of the terror and agony of their final moments. The other looked as though it had caved in, the shards of his own skull piercing his brain the thing that killed him.

  Organs lay strewn across the floor, most bitten through, some half-eaten. A couple of limbs lay a few metres away from their owners. I picked up a leg and gnawed on it like a dog with a bone. Then the hunger was gone and the beast grew docile. And somewhere, deep down in my brain where I had been more than just instincts, I knew I had to escape and I was dimly aware of what to do.

  I crawled over to one of the men and ripped a hand clean off his arm. With the power back on, I was able to use it to open the door. The hand left a bloody imprint on the panel, but the door opened and I was on my way to freedom.

  Outside, the corridor was deserted. I scented the still air and picked up more prey to the left. There were no clues as to the way out so I ran towards the humans, bounding across the floor on all fours. My hunger was satisfied for the moment but the primitive brain liked blood and violence. That belonged to the human alone, and somewhere deep within the wolf growled in disgust.

  The metal floor turned to a blur beneath my feet. I was spurred on to greater speeds by the smell of blood up ahead, and then there was the sound of more gunfire and I raced towards it.

  The two humans – a man and a woman this time – had heard me coming, but they hadn’t had time to aim before I was upon them. They shot at me in desperation, but luck was on my side now and I avoided being hit. I took both down at once and crushed the man’s neck before he even had time to scream. The woman I ripped apart like the men outside my cage. These latest victims had been guarding a door, and beyond it lay the smell of blood.

  I went through and was met by yet more gunfire. They’d all heard the woman screaming before she’d died of her wounds, and they were all terrified.

  Fear took away their ability to aim, most doing little more than shooting wildly and backing away from the door. Behind them, humans in white coats cowered behind their equipment, with no way of defending themselves and no escape. They could do nothing but wait for death.

  A bullet grazed my cheek and a second thudded into my injured shoulder, just below the handle still protruding from it. Anger reacted to the pain and I roared as rage took over again. Then I was on them with one mighty leap, sending a man flying with another powerful swipe, so hard that his neck snapped on impact with the wall. Other bones broke but he was already dead, beyond the pain.

  More bullets thudded into my chest. I barely noticed now. Thanks to the rage I too was beyond pain, and the bullets didn’t even slow me.

  I killed them all. Quiet filled the room when I was done, my ears still ringing from the gunshots and the screaming. Quiet, but not silence. Most of the scientists still lived.

  One had tried to sneak round me while I tore the limbs off a guard but the movement had caught my eye and she now lay dead with the others, in pieces. One of them clutched a phone to him, his last lifeline. He’d been screaming into it minutes earlier but now he merely sat staring into space, with the despondent eyes of a man who’s accepted his fate.

  I turned my attention from the scientists to the source of the blood I’d smelt outside. There was a vampire chained down to an operating table, his body cut open, revealing the organs glistening within. His eyes fixed on mine, still very much alive, despite the fact I could see his beating heart and his lungs swelling with every breath.

  Beyond the vampire were shelves lined with jars, each one containing an organ suspended in a clear fluid. Something about that disturbed the beast, and I fled the room.

  Footsteps sounded on the corridor, somewhere behind me as I entered another lab, much like the first, only a young boy lay in this one, no more than eight or nine, and he wasn’t a vampire. He was also alive, barely. Pleading eyes looked up at me, begging for an end to the torment. And what a torment it was.

  Little dots of blood covered his right arm, needle marks tracing the veins; the left was missing. More organs glistened where his stomach had been cut open, but his chest lay untouched. Muscle shone on his bare legs where the skin had been scraped away in places, but sickest of all was the wolf’s head grafted to his neck. If they’d tried to reanimate it they’d not succeeded, the glassy eyes unseeing and definitely dead. Or perhaps it was merely somebody’s idea of a sick joke, a product of the human’s ego, torturing things because they can.

  Decay had set into the second head, the fur patchy where skin had rotted away to expose bare flesh, flakes of it falling to the ground and curling like greying rose petals. The jaws gaped open, the tongue hanging out between a gap in the teeth. Maggots ate away at the flesh on one cheek. Some of them had spread to the boy’s head. As I watched, one crawled into his ear. The boy’s eyes widened and grew more desperate. He couldn’t have much longer to live and we both knew it.

  A weak sound escaped his throat and I reached out to him, whining softly. His eyes shifted to something behind me and I turned and caught the arm of another scientist, just as she was about to plunge a needle into my neck. She screamed and I roared with more fury. The beast didn’t like what they’d done to the boy. I’d thought I was the last but I was wrong. There was at least one other survivor, one other living werewolf,
reduced to a plaything for the humans to butcher. They would pay for their sick games.

  I roared again and ripped the woman’s arm off. Blood spurted from the socket as she fell back, screaming and crying over the loss of her limb. Then I grabbed her head, pulling it off her neck like I’d once seen my sister accidentally do to a doll, though this was considerably messier. Another gory fountain jetted out in a high arc from the stump, spreading across the floor and mixing with the boy’s blood, and my own.

  I hadn’t noticed it dripping from my wounds, but my fur was soaked with it. The blades stemmed some of the flow, probably the only reason I hadn’t collapsed from the loss yet. After the prolonged starvation it should at least have made me weaker again, but if it did I didn’t feel it.

  Blood also dripped from the severed head in my hand. Its mouth hung open in a silent scream, its eyes wide with shock and horror. Torn flesh hung in meaty ribbons, and part of the spinal column snaked out beneath it.

  Reinforcements were coming down the corridor. I threw the head at them and followed in its wake, dodging more bullets as I ripped my way through them.

  Once they were dead, I turned back to the boy. The beast didn’t know what to do for him, so it helped in the only way it knew how. I took the boy’s head in my hands and twisted. There was a sharp crack and the boy lay dead, his body too damaged for the curse to save him, freeing him from suffering at last. I left in search of more death.

  After I’d worked my way down the corridor I was on, through more science labs and a couple of empty cages like the one I’d been in, I finally came to a torture room. Excitement coursed through the beast’s mind as I picked up the scent of yet more blood, lots of it in there, some old, some fresh. The beast was growing hungry again.

  There was something familiar about this room, though the beast knew it had never been there before. The faint sense of recognition made it wary now, and it crept forward, listening for threats.

  No guards stood outside. They’d probably followed the rest in an attempt to stop me, and lay dead somewhere with the others. No more attacks came as I stalked into the room.

  A chair stood in the middle, a girl restrained in it. To the side of her there was a table with a few tools displayed along its wooden surface, the metal dulled by a crust of blood. Otherwise the room was empty.

  Snarling, the beast stalked closer to the girl, each step slow and careful across another floor slick with fluid. The girl didn’t seem to notice, her head slumped against her chest. Her wounds were many. There was the bruising round her swollen eye, just visible beneath her bushy hair. There was the broken nose, and the holes in her earlobes where jewellery had been ripped from them. Blood shone round her mouth like gory lip gloss, the skin cut to shreds, and it glistened from the stump of her little finger where the digit had been clipped off. Then there were the deep gashes carved into her flesh, each one sure to scar, and the angry rings on her wrists from the bite of the rope where the skin had rubbed raw.

  The beast moved closer still, drawn to a wound on her neck. Drool dripped from its jaws as it sniffed the flesh, and the girl’s head shot up, her good eye widening.

  Recognition pushed aside the hunger and the beast drew back. I looked at her through my mismatched eyes and I knew we couldn’t kill her. Pity stirred, alien to the mind of the beast. Whatever was left of the boy I’d been rose through my consciousness, resurrected by the sight of a friend, and intelligence seeped back into my mind.

  Whining, I pulled the ropes apart and, free at last, Lizzy fainted. She didn’t understand what was happening, and she didn’t know who I was. All she saw was the beast I’d been, the monster I still was. I caught her as she fell, carrying her in my arms much like I had with Mel’s corpse that winter night, knowing I had to find a way out.

  Now I was able to think more clearly, I saw that the corridor outside the torture chamber had been sloping downwards. That made me think I was in some kind of underground facility; a short stop on the way down to Hell. Which meant I’d been heading deeper into the Slayers’ base, so I needed to retrace my footsteps, back upwards towards where there had to be an entrance above.

  I followed the corridor upwards until I reached a point where it branched off to the left. If I carried straight on I’d be heading down again, while the other corridor was level. I turned left and hurried on, trying to keep heading upwards wherever I could. But eventually I reached a dead end, and when I tried to retrace my steps I found my sense of smell was no good with the scent of blood so strong, and there was nothing to see or hear. Before I knew it, I was lost. Frustration threatened to turn into rage again. Lizzy was in desperate need of a hospital – I didn’t have time to be lost.

  My need for violence had all but taken over when I came upon none other than Aughtie, screaming into a walkie-talkie and clutching some kind of a rifle.

  “I don’t care how many ghouls you’re facing, I’ve got an angry werewolf on the loose and I’m telling you to send reinforcements. Now!”

  Her fury was but a shadow of my own. The growl thundered up from my chest of its own accord, and the hated woman froze, knowing what it meant. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the rifle tighter, and she turned to face me with a look of horror.

  A part of me was pleased I could inspire such terror in even the leaders of the Slayers, and who could blame her? I knew I must make for a fearsome sight as I advanced, threads of blood and saliva hanging down from my gaping jaws, my mouth stained crimson and bits of flesh caught between my teeth. My breath must have stunk of raw meat and viscera.

  Mismatched eyes fixed on my prey and I watched her quail beneath the rage burning in them with dark pleasure. Muscles rippled beneath my fur with every step I took, pausing only to lower Lizzy to the floor, as gently as I could manage. Aughtie took advantage of the moment to squeeze off a couple of shots but her hands were shaking and the bullets passed harmlessly over my head. We were in another of the scientific labs and there came the sound of glass shattering and liquid pouring out, something squishy falling to the floor. She didn’t have time to do anything else.

  I charged my enemy and pinned her against the wall, the end of my muzzle only inches away from her face. A tray of test tubes clattered to the floor beside us as Aughtie attempted to bring the rifle up to shove into my mouth. The glass smashed and the liquid they’d been holding caught fire the minute it was given chance to react with the air. Neither of us noticed. I caught the rifle in one hand and squeezed the barrel, the metal flattening in my fist and losing the shape needed for the bullets to pass through, rendering the weapon useless.

  Aughtie whimpered and screwed her nose up at the stench of the warm air coming out in pants from my great maw. I let go of the gun and rested my hands on the wall either side of her, digging my claws into the metal while I tried to control the rage. She would pay for what she’d done, but I needed some questions answering first.

  “How did you know it was me?” I snarled. Forming the words was a challenge with my altered jaws and tongue, but my vocal cords were still human enough to make it possible.

  “What?”

  “The last ‘rogue wolf’ that’s been terrorising the streets. How did you know it was me?”

  A sly smile crept over her face. “I would have worked it out for myself of course, but I was saved the trouble. Imagine my delight when my contact told me they had not only discovered who the new werewolf was, but they had met him and even gained his trust.”

  I frowned, my lupine features made all the fiercer for it. “What are you talking about?”

  Some of her usual smugness crept back into her voice then. “I had my suspicions from the moment you walked into my lesson at the start of the year, knowing you’d been absent on the first day back and I could see how tired you were in my class. My suspicions only grew after you fell asleep, but without my contact I couldn’t have been certain until you were admitted to the psychiatric hospital, where we had chance to study your behaviour. You showed all the signs
of a newly turned werewolf: increasing violence and aggression, unprovoked rages, insomnia, restlessness. And then you were taken over by the urge to mate and there could be no doubt.”

  “Then if you knew what I was all along, why didn’t you just take me when you had the chance?”

  She was about to answer when Lizzy groaned, regaining consciousness. I turned to look at my friend and Aughtie took the chance to slip under my arms and make a run for it.

  “No!” I roared, chasing after her. She didn’t even make it as far as the door before I was on her again, crying out as she fell face first, the skin ripped from her knees. My fingers wrapped around her throat. “Who was the boy? What were you doing to him?”

  “What boy?” she said, stalling for time. She must have thought the longer she kept me talking, the longer she lived. But maybe I’d just kill her and ask someone else if she didn’t answer me quick enough. I wasn’t in the mood for games. My long fingers pressed against her windpipe, cutting off the air supply, and her next word came out as a wheeze. “Research.”

  I relaxed my grip slightly. “Go on.”

  “We needed to know more about your kind – that was how I came to know so much about you. We hoped to find a cure, impossible though it was. Still, it proved useful. We used it to find more efficient methods of torture. Over time the knowledge will prove invaluable when we uncover a way to rid the earth of the undead forever. The dead should stay dead.”

  “And the boy; who was he?”

  “Why do you care? After all the people you’ve massacred in here, what’s one more life to you?”

  Why did I care? It was a good question. I supposed it was because the sight of the boy had disturbed even the primitive beast I’d temporarily become. And more than that, he was like me, and he probably hadn’t asked for this life either, but he’d been dragged into it all the same. And because I needed to know, feeling it was important somehow. It was important to the wolf. I could feel it in there, mourning the loss. It still felt the need for a pack and beneath all the horror and the anger it felt cheated of the pack it could have had, if it hadn’t been for the Slayers. How many more like the boy had there been? How many had our enemies killed? I felt another surge of hate towards the wretched woman, and I started to squeeze her neck again, a little tighter than before.