Epidemiologists should have spotted the signs a long time ago. But perhaps because of its early associations with witchcraft and superstition, nobody had taken the stories seriously. Scientific orthodoxy had not permitted it. Only Professor Wiseman had been brave or foolish enough to study it scientifically, and he had been ridiculed by the media and betrayed by his colleagues. Well then, people deserved whatever they got.
The machine beeped one last time and the nurse, Dawn, returned to remove the needle and to secure the blood.
‘Take care of that,’ said Samuel. ‘I hope it can be put to good use.’
‘I’m sure it will, Mr Smalling.’
He waited patiently while she applied a dressing to his arm.
‘Keep the dressing on for at least six hours,’ she advised. ‘And now go and relax for a little while before you leave. You should drink two cups of tea or another beverage, and help yourself to the complimentary snacks too.’
‘Thanks,’ said Samuel, standing up. ‘But I’m good to go.’
Chapter Fifteen
Church of Our Lady, Mayfield Avenue, South London, crescent moon
James sat on the wooden pew at the back of the church waiting for the other boys to leave. He was scared. Shit scared, if he was honest, although he wouldn’t say it out loud. Swearing was a sin, though not a mortal one. A mortal sin was one bad enough to send you to Hell. In the seventeen years of James’ life, he had committed a mortal sin only on three occasions. Once, when he had missed Mass on his birthday because he’d wanted to play on his new Nintendo. Once, when he had masturbated, and once when he had looked at porn on the internet. All three of these things were grave offences against God, and sufficient to damn him to Hell unless he repented.
Of course he had confessed, and Father Mulcahy had pardoned him. He’d had to repent his sins and resolve to sin no more, and the priest had given him some stern words and fixed him with a severe gaze. At each new mortal sin, the sternness of the words and the severity of the Father’s expression had worsened. James hadn’t realized that there was a hierarchy of sin, although it should have been obvious that masturbation was worse than skipping Mass, and that watching porn was worst of all. The fact that it had been gay porn had particularly incensed the silver-haired priest in his black robe and white collar.
Now James had two new sins to confess, and they were far, far worse than anything he had confessed before. He had killed a man. And perhaps even worse than that, he had developed a lust to taste human flesh. He hadn’t eaten any. Not yet. But he couldn’t get the thought out of his mind. He feared what he might do, if he couldn’t put an end to that desire.
So he had no choice. He would go to Father Mulcahy and tell him about his bad deeds and his bad thoughts. The Father would tell him what to do, and he would be forgiven.
While he waited, James made the sign of the cross and said a quiet prayer, asking the Holy Spirit to help him in what lay ahead. Usually this made him feel more relaxed and able to make a good confession, but today his thoughts were too agitated. He could not still his soul to let the Holy Spirit enter, and God remained silent. As he sat staring up at the crucified Christ that looked down upon him from above the altar he found himself becoming more and more scared. He almost fled from the church at one point, but forced himself to stay. If he did not confess his sins now, he would only be making things worse.
When the last of the other boys had left, James entered nervously into the confessional. He crossed himself again at the door and closed it firmly behind him, finding immediate solace in the still, calm gloom and familiar musty smell of the enclosed stall.
‘James,’ came the priest’s voice from the other side of the wooden screen that separated them. ‘I am so pleased that you’re back from the hospital. Tell me, how do you feel?’
‘Bad, Father,’ said James nervously. ‘Forgive me, for I have sinned.’
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ came the reply.
‘My last confession was eighteen days ago,’ began James, intoning the ritual words. ‘These are my sins.’
When he fell silent, the priest prompted him gently. ‘Yes? Go on. Tell me, how have you sinned? Do not be afraid to say what weighs most heavily on your heart.’
‘Father, I killed a man.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the Father. ‘I have heard all about that, of course. To kill another man is one of the most serious sins against God. Every man is created in God’s image and all human life is sacred.’ The priest paused. ‘But there were mitigating circumstances in your case. The Bible speaks rightly against the murder of the innocent, but from what I have heard the man you killed was not innocent.’
‘He attacked me first,’ admitted James. ‘But still, I killed him.’
‘James,’ said the priest, ‘the Church teaches that under some circumstances it is not only justifiable to kill another man in order to prevent greater harm, but is in fact a duty. We must all stand up for the common good, must we not? Sometimes it is necessary to act as you did in order to protect yourself and others. You saved the lives of four children, I hear. Now that is a brave act, not a sinful one.’
‘Yes, Father, but how can it be right to commit a sin even to prevent another one?’
‘Well, the Bible says that if a thief is caught breaking into a house and is struck so that he dies, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed.’
James thought about the Father’s words for a moment. ‘I do not feel brave, Father, only guilty.’
‘I understand your wish for atonement, James. I will ask you to make an Act of Contrition, and I will give you your penance. Then God will forgive you. But first, tell me, is there anything else you wish to confess?’
James took a deep breath. ‘It is hard for me to say it, Father.’
‘I have heard all kinds of confessions in my years as a priest, James. You would be surprised. Say what is on your mind.’
James spoke to the screen. ‘I lust for human flesh, Father. I want to know the taste of human meat. I hunger for it.’
The priest was deadly silent. ‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ said Father Mulcahy eventually. ‘I trust that this is merely a thought and that you have not acted on such wicked impulses?’
‘Yes,’ said James. ‘I mean no. I have not acted on it.’
‘Unnatural lust is a grave sin indeed. It leads inexorably to ever greater sin. What about that other unnatural wickedness we have spoken of before? Do you still think about that?’
‘I’m not sure what you are referring to, Father.’
‘I refer to the act of homosexuality,’ said the priest gravely.
It seemed that Father Mulcahy would never let it drop. And yet, the more James thought about it, the desire to love another man felt right, not wrong. He thought carefully before answering. ‘Is homosexuality worse than eating someone?’ he asked finally.
‘Do you seek to mock me?’ demanded Father Mulcahy.
‘No, Father,’ cried James. ‘I seek your help.’
‘Then you must do as I say. Put all such wicked thoughts from your mind at once.’
‘I can’t,’ wailed James. The words were out before he could stop them. ‘The desire is too great.’
‘The desire to eat flesh or to lie with another man?’
‘Both.’ It did not matter which path he chose. Eating a man; loving a man. James was damned whichever way he turned. If the priest’s words were true, James need not fear being sent to Hell, for he was already there.
He sniffed at the air within the confined space. The old priest gave off a terrible stink. His armpits stank of sweat. His breath smelled of menthol sweets. His hair was slick with wax. Stale tobacco lingered on his black cassock. And the dark space of the confessional was filled with the man’s fear, like a black liquid. Yet beneath all those offensive smells lurked a more potent scent – living flesh and blood. In such close proximity it was driving James wild.
The old man wasn’t the most delectable dish James could imagin
e, but his hunger had become insatiable. Apart from the sushi, he had not eaten for eighteen days. He had begged the nurse, Chanita, and his mother for red meat, but what he had really wanted all along was human flesh. Now here it was, close by, and his for the taking.
James’ heart pumped blood to his limbs. The priest’s words had angered him, rousing his passion, rousing his lust. He feared he could not command it any longer.
He heard Father Mulcahy speak again through the slatted wooden screen. ‘James, it is important for you to understand that God loves you, but that you can never indulge these wicked lusts. Never. You must turn your back on them and never think of them again.’
‘No!’ screamed James. ‘I cannot do that!’
He punched his fist through the wooden panel that separated him from the priest, and grasped the Father’s stout body tightly in an iron grip, anchoring his fingernails in the old man’s chest. The priest howled with pain. With his other hand, James swept the battered panel aside like a curtain and hauled the man to him. The priest’s face twisted in terror.
James sank his teeth into Father Mulcahy’s wrinkled neck, biting deep into the corpulent flesh, rending, biting and chewing. He cut through veins and arteries, seeming to know exactly where and how to bite in order to kill quickly. Hot blood splashed his face and ran down his cheeks. He drank deep and felt the coppery liquid flood his senses, satisfying his craving like oxygen to a drowning man.
After that he hardly remembered anything.
Chapter Sixteen
Manor Road, South London, crescent moon
Chris Crohn would be the first to admit that he got on better with computers than with other people. He’d made his first Myspace page at the age of ten, learned to code HTML at twelve, created his first database application shortly after his thirteenth birthday, and built a Linux server aged fifteen. He’d graduated from university with a degree in Computer Science and had hoped for an exciting job with a cutting-edge tech company. But something had gone wrong. His dream job never happened. Now aged twenty-two, he was back at his childhood school, Manor Road Secondary, working as tech support guy, a job that utilized approximately one percent of his skills and knowledge of computing. Chris thought he knew why, and the reason was people skills.
His best friend, Seth, who was basically an idiot, had got a better job than Chris because he had people skills. As far as Chris could tell, people skills meant the ability to talk to people you didn’t like, about things that didn’t interest you, at times when you had better things to do. Chris didn’t care for that, and he’d said as much at most of his job interviews.
Seth was welcome to his people skills and his well-paid job in London’s booming financial tech sector. Seth could keep his money, and his swanky Docklands apartment, and the easy way he flirted with girls.
Chris had never had a girlfriend. He didn’t know why. He liked girls, they just didn’t like him. He had studied girls in the abstract, noting their complex behaviour patterns and subtle social signals. He knew where to go to meet girls, and he had observed what other boys said to girls in order for them to initiate an intimate relationship. He could predict with a high degree of accuracy whether a girl would accept or reject a boy’s approach. But reverse-engineering all the protocols didn’t seem to help. Girls simply ran from him on sight. He must be doing something really wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what.
People skills, Seth would whisper cryptically, as if that meant anything.
Chris didn’t really mind too much. If he needed female company, there were plenty of virtual girls available online, and he didn’t need to worry about sending them the right social signals, or navigating arbitrary cultural constructions. He just had to click the computer mouse. Besides, not having a girlfriend gave him two key benefits – time and money. Of these, Chris valued time more.
Chris might spend each working day from eight to four performing trivial tasks like keeping the school’s anti-virus software up to date, connecting printers, and setting up mail accounts for dummies, but his real work began when he got back to his tiny studio apartment in Manor Road, just around the corner from the school. He’d acquired a lot of hardware over the years – unwanted CPUs, obsolete graphics cards, abandoned disk drives and old motherboards – and had used the kit to rig up quite an impressive server farm in his apartment. It didn’t leave a lot of space for cooking, but Chris didn’t know how to cook in any case. A few months back, he’d coded an app that could identify and gather intelligence on topics that were trending on social media. The app used a deep-learning neural-network technique developed by NASA for analyzing extra-terrestrial radio signals, but Chris had modified it to search for weird and interesting stuff going around the web. The results had totally surprised him.
His app had picked up a strong reading for the keyword werewolf. That was weird, even by internet standards. He’d coded another app to extract geographic data associated with the keyword and had been more than a little alarmed to find a massive concentration of incidents in London. The system had also detected a few occurrences in the north of England, one or two in France and even in Romania of all places, but almost entirely they were located within the M25 orbital motorway that surrounded the capital. The epicentre was uncomfortably close to the school where Chris worked.
He showed the data to Seth when he called round to his apartment that evening after work. ‘See? It’s happening.’
‘What is?’ said Seth, flicking his mop of brown hair away from his heavy-rimmed glasses.
Chris spoke slowly to him, the way he explained computer stuff to the dummies at school. ‘The apocalypse. Like we always talked about when we were kids. But with werewolves instead of zombies.’ He pointed at the computer screen, scrolling through the graphs and correlations, the keywords and geographic references that he’d so carefully compiled. Werewolf sightings in London. He showed Seth the chart he’d plotted showing the steady rise in frequency over the past three months. The conclusion was inescapable.
Seth peered at the screen through his thick glasses and stroked his stupid goatee beard. Chris hated the way he did that. It always preceded some idiotic remark. Right on cue, Seth said, ‘Don’t be dumb. This is just, like, some new fad.’
‘What kind of fad?’ demanded Chris. ‘How can werewolves be a fad?’
‘I dunno. But werewolf can’t literally mean werewolf. That’s a crazy idea.’
‘What else can it mean? Werewolf means werewolf.’
‘Yeah, but it might just refer to some new movie or game.’
Chris shook his head vehemently. ‘No, this is for real. Look at these tweets.’ He pulled up a screen of data and pointed at two of the entries.
Out on the town in Brixton, saw a werewolf in the park #freaky #wtf
Almost attacked at Ealing Broadway by a huge dog #werewolf #beast
‘Yeah,’ said Seth. ‘But maybe this is code for something else. It might be a neo-Nazi thing.’
‘How could it be that?’
‘You know,’ said Seth. ‘Adolf Hitler became obsessed with werewolves. He created an inner circle of followers who were called werewolves. This might be like that.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Chris. ‘Look at this.’ He clicked on a file and opened up an image taken from someone’s Facebook feed. The photo was dark and blurry but clearly showed an enormous wolf with yellow eyes lurking behind a parked car. ‘That’s not code. That’s an actual werewolf.’
‘Or just a big dog,’ said Seth, stroking his beard again.
‘One of them attacked a policeman,’ continued Chris. ‘It was in my news feed. They’re calling it the Beast of Clapham Common.’
‘Bah,’ said Seth. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.’
‘There’s more,’ continued Chris, ‘And not just on the internet. One of the teachers at school tried to eat some kid.’
‘Ugh,’ said Seth. ‘Gross.’
Chris glared at him. ‘It was Mr Leigh,
the Geography teacher. Remember him?’
Seth frowned, a thick crease appearing above his glasses. ‘He taught us in Year Nine. Nice guy.’
‘Yeah, exactly. And now he’s dead.’
‘What happened?’
‘He went berserk and attacked some kids. One of them stabbed him with a kitchen knife.’
‘And now he’s dead.’
‘I already told you that.’
Seth folded his arms across his chest. ‘Proves nothing.’
Chris looked at him in disgust. ‘Believe what you want,’ he told his old friend. ‘I’m going to prepare for the worst.’
And so Chris started prepping himself for survival. He read books written by retired special forces soldiers, he studied survivalist websites, and he made online purchases. A rucksack, an all-weather tent, flashlights, spare batteries, a compass, knives, candles, multi-vitamins, first-aid kit, matches, energy bars, tablets for his hay fever, and a fishing kit.
When the apocalypse came, Chris would meet it head on and prosper. Losers like Seth would find out what happened to those who couldn’t be bothered to prepare.
Chapter Seventeen
Royal Park Canal, North London, crescent moon
James ran and ran until he was out of breath. By then the school, the church and the body of Father Mulcahy were miles behind him and he was in a part of London he had never seen before.
He muttered the words of the Act of Contrition, speaking aloud, indifferent to the stares of passing strangers. ‘My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against You, whom I should love above all things. I firmly intend, with the help of Your grace, to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads me to sin. Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, suffered and died for us. In His name, my God, have mercy.’
Lycanthropic (Book 1): Wolf Blood Page 8