Wolfkind

by Stephen Melling

  Divo Serefini looked at his arm and squealed. Joshua grabbed him one handed by the lapels and walked back along the corridor. He needed answers. Needed to know why Genna had to die. But he already knew: she didn’t have to die. “Why?” Joshua shouted anyway.

  He slammed Serefini against the wall. “Why!” The image of Genna, wounded and bleeding, fed his anger. “Why Why! Why!” He slammed him into the opposite wall. Again, then again... When he reached the stairway, the man was no longer struggling.

  Joshua brought before his eyes Divo Serefini’s gore streaked face. With his neck broken, his head lolled so far forward he appeared to be listening for his own heartbeat. A futile operation, for this man’s heart beat no more. In a final act of fury, he roared in the gangster’s face.

  Joshua returned to the stairs. Genna’s body was as he had left it. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung slightly open. He turned his face away and conjured an image of Genna on the beach. She was smiling. At home and happy along the sun-kissed Pacific shoreline.

  Lovely Genna. Always in the shadow of her sister’s martyrdom. Her flesh was weak, but her heart was strong.

  He found he could not look at her body, so he turned away, and started down the stairs. When he got halfway down he saw the Beretta lying on a riser. He blinked, thinking he must have dropped the gun whilst shielding Genna. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands.

  The gun symbolized his mission. Hunt. Kill. He looked up. Any concept of right and wrong obliterated in the midst of such carnage. Nathan insisted humans were as violent and ruthless as the renegades. Perhaps he had been right all along. Although capable of deep compassion, humans were also capable of horror beyond belief. The world was far from perfect – it was greatly flawed, yet it was precisely that which made Wolfkind dangerous.

  Joshua became aware of footsteps, quiet and slow, in the corridor at the foot of the stairs. He raised the Beretta, realizing this episode was not yet over. Two assassins remained – Nathaniel and the girl. Silently, Joshua stepped off the stairs and in full view of the corridor and confronted who walked there.

  It was his brother.

  At sight of Joshua Nathanial stopped. In his arms he cradled the body of a naked girl. Her flesh peppered with bullet wounds and blackened by fire. Her left leg had been burned or blasted off below the knee. Renegades were not as resilient as Wolfkind. She must have been overwhelmed.

  Instinctively, Joshua thrust out the Beretta, aiming for his brother’s chest. He no longer had any compunction about using the gun. He was blooded now. All his inhibitions crushed. No doubt in his mind. But he did not pull the trigger.

  Though fully aware of the Beretta’s fatal sting, Nathaniel made no leap for safety. He appeared fully human – even his eyes were normal, with no trace of crimson. For the moment, the beast in him lay dormant. His human identity was totally dominant. His eyes conveyed no anger, no blame – only hurt. But it was not the hurt in his brother’s eyes that made Joshua falter.

  It was the tears. Real tears on his brother’s cheeks, discolored by the blood on his face. This stone-cold assassin, who had brutally murdered more than a hundred a fifty people, this creature who existed only to kill and to spread the Wolfkind disease, weeping over the death of one of his kind. Wolfkind did not shed tears – could not shed tears. It was one of the subtle, yet fundamental differences Barlow highlighted to illustrate that they were not human.

  A first for Wolfkind; or Barlow had lied.

  Perhaps their introduction into society and the close interaction with humans had triggered an evolutionary process. Maybe all the horror and mutilation acted as a necessary catalyst for this change to occur. If that were the case then the development of a species, the turnabout of behavior, was possible. Sadly for Joshua this breakthrough came too late in the day. Genna was dead and so were hundreds of people. Too high a price.

  Embracing the instinctive side offered a life uncomplicated by conscience or reason. A human existence was infinitely richer, doubly rewarding, but carried much emotional baggage. Nathaniel had opted for the bestial side, but in doing so perhaps learned a few human truths. Standing with the gun thrust out in front of him now, Joshua saw the revelation in his brother’s eyes.

  What should he do now? In the light of this realization, could he still kill his brother? Assassinate him?

  He started to lower the weapon, when he sensed a sudden and dramatic shift in Nathaniel’s chemical balance. Quick as a cat his brother’s animalistic side reasserted itself. Nathanial went into transformation.

  “Nathaniel, wait...” Joshua reluctantly reset his aim. But he found he still could not pull the trigger.

  His brother made the decision for him. Nathaniel moved with the swiftness and surety of his kind. He placed the girl’s body on the floor and launched himself at Joshua. His ruby eyes blazed with so much hate and fury that Joshua saw no option but to shoot. The alternative was a fight to the death.

  But as the Beretta bucked in his hands, as the chunk of doctored ammunition buried itself in his brother’s collarbone, he noticed that the look of seething hatred in Nathaniel’s eyes was directed not at him, but at a point beyond his shoulder. But then Nathaniel fell, the poison acting upon him. His snarl of anger became a cry of pain.

  Joshua spun around.

  On the balcony by the rail, the tube of a rocket launcher perched on his shoulder, his eye squinting as he aligned the sights, stood Salvatore Durant. Joshua could see the old man trembling. Behind Durant, where several minutes ago was only a paneled wall, he saw a dark, oblong doorway that opened inwards, revealing a secret room. Durant stood in the foreground, his finger applying pressure to the trigger.

  Click! Behind Durant, the rocket’s propulsion glow illuminated the room in which he’d been hiding.

  As the rocket left the tube, Joshua leaped forward, his feet tearing up the wooden floor. His only hope to dip below the rocket’s trajectory. A whip-like gust dragged at his hair; the rocket’s exhaust, which passed within a foot of his face, burned his cheek.

  His momentum carried him across the hall and into the side of the west staircase. As he struck the wall he turned to face his brother. One instant Nathaniel was there, the cyanide poison raging through his body, the next a ball of fire bloomed in the corridor, pushing out a wave of heat so intense several of the discarded weapons exploded. The ground heaved. Every window left intact in the house exploded. Flames mushroomed toward the ceiling, leaving the east wing in flames.

  When the crashing noise of the explosion subsided Joshua heard screaming. On the balcony above him Salvatore Durant wailed from within a pillar of orange flame, thrashing and beating at his body with his hands. His hips struck the banister and like a trained gymnast he flipped over, but instead of landing on his feet, he landed on his back. His hysterical screams ended abruptly.

  Joshua remained crouched, shielding his eyes from the flames. The Beretta lay on the floor by his knee. He stretched for it and pushed the barrel into the waistband of his torn jeans. Intense heat caused his skin to blister. Thick smoke and hungry flame lapped up against the ceiling.

  At the top of the stairs he saw the outline of Genna’s body. Horrified at the thought of leaving her at the mercy of the fire, he ran up the stairs, his face turned from the spreading flames. She lay as he had left her. Specks of soot and flecks of debris settled on her clothes and her face.

  “Genna?” he whispered. “Genna…” He reached out desperately with his receptors, probing the air before him, searching for the slightest sign of awareness.

  But he divined nothing. Only a hideous blankness. An empty vessel, a shell from which the Genna Delucio he knew had already departed. “If only you could hear me.”

  Weak as a distant radio transmission, as though straining through a hundred feet of deep, murky water, he sensed Genna’s foundering spirit. He concentrated with all his strength. The signal became stronger and more persistent, reaching up to him. A tenuous, almost imperceptible connection occurre
d on a superhuman level, and her thoughts floated up from the depths of her condition.

  But all too soon it was over. The gossamer-fine connection snapped and Genna retreated into that bottomless pool, sinking ever deeper below the surface, until the signals became too weak to detect.

  An insane idea seized him, one that he had kept on the outskirts of serious contemplation. He knelt at her side and lifted her limp hand: “Forgive me, Genna,” he said, and sank his teeth into her wrist, releasing copious amounts of his saliva to mingle with her blood, forcing the fluid into her veins.

  Then he rose and stepped back.

  Her blood on his lips.

  From a near death state Genna Delucio suddenly inhaled, held it for a moment, and then exhaled. She started breathing for herself. Large, voluminous gulps of oxygen. Bruises on her face paled, shrank, disappeared. Puckered edges of wounds knitted seamlessly together. Color flooded her cheeks and her lips became voluptuous and red.

  Her eyes opened.

  “Oh, Joshua!”

  The End