Freddie turns, wades back up river for ten feet. Again, the creatures remain parallel.
“Jesus!
Hayley ducks down in the water, springs back up and lobs a stone at the two wolfmen waiting on the bank. “Fuck off!” The stone lands with a thud, several feet away from their target. The larger male barks and darts towards the river, then pulls back.
“Damned monsters, why can’t they just fuck off!”
Freddie puts an arm around Hayley’s shoulder as the creatures continue to yap and snarl and run backwards and forwards along the bank.
“They’re fucking demented.” Her voice cracks. “Fuck … Off!” She screams and this time grabs a handful of stones from the river bed, lobbing them in rapid succession as hard as she can at the hideous creatures. One hits home, bouncing off the smaller male’s temple. He growls at her, gnashing his teeth. Bone white incisors snap open and closed.
“Hayley, listen. The river will take us out of the forest. We follow it as far as we can.” He turns back to follow the flow of the river, his arm tucked through Hayley’s and they wade together towards the forest boundary.
The scene playing out on the screen is terrifying, but utterly fascinating. Marta kneads Blake’s shoulder as the drama plays out. It is like watching one of those found footage horror films, only far more absorbing. This is real. This is happening within the forest, the now black and utterly terrifying forest, that surrounds her as she watches. Another bottle of wine sits on the desk, half empty, but Marta is stone cold sober. Blake’s hand squeezes her arse cheeks as he leans forward, his running commentary barely noticed as Marta continues to watch. In the room three more screens have been set up to relay back the live feed from the drones. Two had followed the pack and the other bikers as they made their bid for freedom. Marta’s pulse throbs with a dull, but rapid thud at the base of her neck; she’d watched with fascination as the two females fought. What was truly fascinating was the way in which the creatures were now working together. The female had howled, although the audio wasn’t very clear, the howl was audible and obvious from the way the female, which she had identified as Lois Maybank, had tipped her head back. Even more interesting was the other female. She and Lois obviously had some sort of rivalry.
Marta had barely been able to watch as the heavier set blonde had dragged the biker into the ferns, but instead of tearing him apart, eviscerating him as she’d expected, the woman had bitten his shoulder then dragged him away. She’d ordered the drone to follow them and to her surprise the woman hadn’t killed him. The creature had watched the man buck and twist, his face contorted in agony, and then guarded him when the others arrived. That too was a twist Marta hadn’t expected. Lois had howled and less than ten minutes later a whole horde had arrived. That group had then followed the survivors to the river.
Back in the forest, Max had appeared, circled the well-endowed blonde with her infected biker. Both had snapped and snarled. The woman had been fierce, taking great swipes from Max that had sliced the flesh of her stomach, but hadn’t backed down. She’d torn into him, then run back to the still writhing biker, hovered over him, pulled him into her arms, and gnashed her teeth at Max. What she’d watched, she felt sure, was the woman claiming a new mate. Certainly, the woman hadn’t gone on with the rest of the pack.
“Blake. I want these two targeting for tracking.” She points at the screen. His attention is on the scene at the river.
“Why?”
“Because I think they’re forming a new pack.”
He grunts, his attention absorbed by the other drama.
“It’s fascinating, Blake. We could develop entire squads of … dog soldiers.”
He grunts again and taps at the screen. “We may have a problem.”
Irked at his indifference, she snaps. “What?”
“They’re afraid of water.”
His words are sandpaper. “Shit!”
48
The sun is in its final decline as Freddie and Hayley reach the edge of the forest. Still parallel, along the bank, are the two creatures. Twice they have disappeared. Twice Freddie has let his hopes that they have finally given up hunting them rise. Twice he has been disappointed. Now, as he stares at the point where the river leaves the forest he is crushed. The river narrows before disappearing underground. In itself, this is a disaster, the creatures would attack as soon as he and Hayley set foot on dry land. Worse is the fence of narrow rods that lies across it.
“It’s a dead end.”
“What’s the fence for?”
Freddie takes another step forward. The creatures move closer. The narrow rods are threaded with wire.
“It doesn’t look like the one Conrad Shelby described. He said that had thick panels twenty feet high.” Hayley takes a step forward, peering over Freddie’s shoulder. The creatures yelp with excitement. One rushes towards the fence.
“Maybe he exaggerated. He’s known to be a bit of a bullshitter.”
“Conrad? He’s alright. A bit posh-”
Hayley’s defence of Conrad comes to an abrupt halt as the creature reaches out to touch the ‘fence’ and is instantly thrown back, landing in the trickling water. It lies unconscious, water lapping at its head, as the other stares.
“It’s not moving. What should we do?”
“Do? Bloody nothing. I’m not going to help it! It’s not some injured animal you’ve found at the roadside.”
Hayley is silent and he regrets his barbed response. He gets it though - that reflex - to help something that is hurt.
“It’s an electric fence.”
“Maybe for the sheep?”
“Sheep?”
“Yeah, to keep them in.”
“It looks new.”
They both stare at the fence as the creature on the bank runs in circles whilst the other lays deathly quiet in the water.
Freddie watches its ribcage, waiting for the rise and fall. It remains still. “It’s dead.”
“Yes!” Hayley fist-pumps the air then tugs at Freddie’s sleeve. “If we can’t get back this way, then we’ll have to go up river.”
“But the dam’s that way.”
“Yes, and the lake, and the village. If we can’t get out, Freddie, we need to get back.”
He grunts. It would be a long and freezing journey back, but at least they could share what they’d discovered with PC Latimer and the others.
As the minutes pass to hours, the ache in Javeen’s limbs and joints becomes unbearable as she sits cramped next to Andy in the tiny cupboard. Footsteps have come dangerously close to their hiding place numerous times and, each time, Javeen has steeled herself to jump up and wrestle whoever is on the other side to the floor. As time passes, the voices in the room grow fewer and eventually only one pair of shoes can be heard tapping about the floor. When the door of the lab opens and clicks shut for a final time, Javeen is woken from her half-sleep by Andy. He nudges her arm.
“Wake up Sleeping Beauty.”
She makes a soft grunt. “Have they gone?”
“Sounds like it.” He stands and slowly pulls the lever of the cupboard down, easing the door open.
“Oh, no!” The door opens to a dark room. Outside the sun is making its final descent behind the trees. Only their outlines, black and jagged, are visible. The sky is a ribbon of pale orange topped by a bright, but darkening blue, and the first stars are visible.
“Looks like we’re stuck here for the night.”
“Hell!”
“Well, there’s no way I’m risking going out in the dark.”
Javeen’s heart sinks and she lets out a dissatisfied, bordering on angry, sigh.
“It’s not my fault!”
“No, of course it’s not.” She can’t help the terseness in her voice. “I’m just gutted that we couldn’t get back.” The strain of the day bubbles to the surface and tears prick at her eyes. Failure overwhelms her. “I wanted to get back to the village. Now they’re all down there—just sitting ducks for tho
se monsters.”
“What could you have done, Jav? I mean seriously, what could you have done? This situation needs some serious military intervention, and from what we’ve heard, that’s the last thing that is going to happen.”
Javeen swallows, sickness swirling in her belly. He’s right. Absolutely right.
“They’ve fenced us in with them, Jav. Fenced us in to protect them, not us.
“They don’t care who dies in the process.”
The burning sensation bites again at her back as bile swirls. She glances across the greyed-out and darkening room to the bank of cages. A green light shines at the side of the one with the girl. She snorts in her drugged sleep. Javeen grimaces. “Poor thing.”
“Poor thing?”
“It’s not her fault is it. She can’t help being like that.”
“A monster?”
“Yes, a monster.” She takes another step closer. The girl shifts in her sleep but doesn’t wake. “I think I recognise her.”
Andy steps beside her, peering into the cage. “Me too. Is it Wendy, Zena’s daughter?”
“I think so. Zena and Alex were in the convoy that followed Conrad to the blockade. They have three girls.”
“She’s only eight.”
“Was. You can’t think of them as human any more, Jav. She would kill you in an instant if she had the chance.” He points to the clear plastic container now sitting on the desk. “That could be her dinner.”
Inside is a mass of reddish-brown flesh, a mixture, as far as Javeen can tell, of heart, intestines, kidneys, and liver. “Gross! What the hell is that from?”
“Too small to be human-”
“Surely to God, they wouldn’t feed her human meat!”
“Who knows. If they’re willing to fence us in here, then maybe so.”
Javeen’s scalp creeps. Holy Mother of God, save them. Her knees tremble as she realises that perhaps, for real, that is exactly what the fence is intended for. Outside a howl carries to the windows and vibrates in the room. Javeen’s heart thumps and the aroma of her own fear, harsh and sour, rises to her nostrils. “I know we’re stuck here for the night, but there is no way on God’s earth that I’m having a sleepover with a werewolf!”
The journey back up the river had led Freddie and Hayley to the dam. They’d managed to clamber up its concrete sides then down into the lake. The creature that had followed them had disappeared with the dark and there had been no sight of it since. Even with the moon at its brightest, Freddie hadn’t been able to discern movement along the shore. Exhausted, but too afraid to make their way to the village, they’d decided to wade along the lake’s shore towards the marina and then swim out to one of the boats anchored at a safe distance from land, inaccessible to the monsters that prowled the forest. The boat has a cabin in its hull and is stocked with a few packets of biscuits, squash, and a six-pack of bottled water.
Freddie slumps down on the couch-cum-bed as Hayley opens a packet of Jaffa Cakes. He takes one with gratitude, his bare legs resting against the opposite seat and bites down. “Never in my life has a Jaffa Cake tasted so good!”
Hayley bites down on her own biscuit, sits opposite, her bare legs matching his across the walkway. “You’re not wrong.”
The gaslight of the tiny stove burns blue. A bright LED hangs between them, illuminating the cabin. Wet jeans hang over the railings, crystals of frost creeping across their threads. Hayley shivers and wriggles her toes. Freddie takes her foot and rubs, wriggles his toes and nods with a raise of his eyebrows, waiting for her to take the hint. She laughs and cradles his foot on her lap and rubs. Though cold in the cabin, it is warmer than the freezing lake, and the stove, with its burning gas combined with their body heat, is bringing it from uncomfortable to cosy. Freddie’s cheeks burn as his body temperature rises.
After sharing the packet of biscuits and drinking a cup of black tea, they search the cabin for other supplies. Among the ropes, wellies, and tools is a box for emergencies. Hayley grabs a tube and holds it up. “Is this a flare?”
Freddie peers down. “Says it is.”
She puts it back. “No point using that. There’s no one coming to rescue us.”
“Nope.” Freddie pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
“We’re on our own.” Another howl splits the night and Hayley pulls at her own blanket. “Let’s stay here, Freddie. On the boat. I don’t want to go back ashore.”
He ponders her suggestion as another howl, and what could be a scream, carries on the air to the boat. In the distance, on the other side of the forest what sounds like the chopping blades of a helicopter hums in the air.
49
The helicopter swings over the trees, the cameras picking up nothing but black in this part of the woods. Marv Chapman glances down to the forest below where the high intensity beam is exposing grey trees beneath the blanket of black night. This had to be the strangest, and potentially most terrifying, job he’d ever been assigned to. Blake Dalton hadn’t exactly been honest when he’d first contacted him to set up the mission, but he couldn’t really blame the man, the truth would have sounded insane. Even now, Marv isn’t sure he hasn’t imagined the creatures pictured on the drones’ video recordings. That there were large, fast-moving creatures down in the woods was undeniable, the thermal camera had picked them up, and whatever they were, they moved with incredible speed and agility.
“Gotcha!” Ryan McPherson, one of the other members of the group, blurts with undisguised excitement.
Marv turns back to the camera where untidy orange dots move across the screen.
“Ah! Wait. No. That must be a herd of deer; they’re moving all wrong.”
“Let’s take a look.” From his vantage point Marv can see nothing. “Swing left, Archie.”
The pilot manoeuvres the helicopter and a beam of light shines down from the helicopter to the area of open grassland below where the forest gives way to a clearing. At its centre, a herd of deer gallops into the forest where the thermal camera picks them up winding between the trees.
“Confirmed. Let’s head to the village.”
Two minutes later the thermal camera picks up heat. The village streetlights are on, casting a dull orange haze, several of the houses glow.
“Must be some survivors down there?”
“Dunno. You’ve seen the videos. Does anything stand a chance against those monsters?”
Marv has heard the talk, listened to Blake brag about the superhuman agility of the ‘werewolves’, and watched the videos. They had made his stomach churn. He couldn’t bring himself to call the infected and deformed monsters, that now infested the forest and preyed on the people left in the village, ‘werewolves’, but that they were lethal predators with incredible speed and strength was not in doubt. They also seemed to have astounding regenerative capabilities. Marv had never seen anything like them. Marv’s best guess is that the Institute had been carrying out some possibly illegal, definitely unethical, drug tests that had gone wrong. Now the ‘patients’ had gone AWOL and were rampaging through the town and it was Marv’s job to bring them back in. The fence that was being constructed 24/7 around the village made him uneasy. It took real money, deep state kind of money, billionaire kind of money, to put up a thing like that. There had been a total media blackout about it too. He’d checked online, snooped around, and there was nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Thermal outlines of moving shapes appear on the camera’s screen. “Got some!”
“Let’s get a look at these beasts then.”
Marv reaches down to his bag and pulls out the tranquiliser gun. Marston had assured him that there were enough drugs in a single shot to floor an elephant.
“Going down.”
Two figures bound along the road then scuttle to the left. The helicopter’s side door slides open and Marv fires a shot. The beast drops to the floor. “Got it!”
“We need two.”
Marv reloads as the creature’s companion stops. O’Keefe f
ires. The second orange outline stops moving.
“Job done!”
The helicopter lands though the blades continue to rotate.
Marv jumps to the tarmac, scanning the area, the torch on his helmet flooding the scene ahead. The two monsters lie fifty feet up the road. “O’Keefe. Let’s haul them in.” Marv is under no illusion; for the next few seconds they’re vulnerable. McPherson jumps to his side, scanning the area, his rifle’s safety-catch off and ready to fire at anything that moves.
“Go!”
Senses heightened, alert for any movement among the houses, or in the front gardens, Marv makes his way to the bodies. Deep in the forest a howl erupts, carries on the wind, and makes the hairs on his neck tingle though it is too far away to be of concern. He makes quick strides to the prone bodies of the creatures. This is first contact - for him at least - and he’s eager to get a close inspection of the creatures he’d only seen in the grainy video footage.
The first thing that strikes him is the smell. His nose wrinkles. “God that hums!”
O’Keefe grunts as he shines his torch on the first body. “Take a look at this, Sarge.”
Marv leans in, nose wrinkling, a deep and questioning frown across his brow. “What in the very name of God is it?”
“It’s a woman, Sarge.”
O’Keefe puts out a tentative hand, then pushes at the creature’s leg, rolling it over onto its back. The tranquilising dart sticks out from its neck.
“That is one hairy beast.” O’Keefe snorts as he points a finger at the creature’s genitals. Thick and curling hair spreads over the rising mound, spreading across its belly and down its legs.
“Tits could do with a Brazilian too.”
McPherson snorts.
Scanning its body, the lean muscles, the curve of its belly and hips, the breasts full and rounded, it appears athletic, young. Marv crouches, inching closer for a better view. The woman’s – no, female’s – face is threaded with blue veins, and dark hair has grown over its top lip, cheeks, and forehead. Its mouth hangs open as it lies unconscious. Incisors at least an inch long hang down from its upper jaw, those on the bottom jaw are shorter, but no less sharp.
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