by Cheree Alsop
I pushed the button for level four. My heart thundered in my chest and I had to remind myself to breathe. The smoke that rushed in when the door opened was white and billowing. The scent of chemicals was stronger here, mixed with a stale smell of werewolves and humans, but Kaynan had returned and entered the elevator again.
I rode down to level five and began to question what would happen if I didn’t find my brother. My breathing was rapid and smoke clouded my nose, making me fear that I wouldn’t smell him if I did finally reach the right level. When the door to the fifth floor opened, a heavy scent of decay and rot hit me so hard I had to fight back the urge to vomit. Part of me felt like I should find out the source of the smell, but the other half reasoned that Kaynan had returned, so I needed to keep going.
I stepped back and pushed the button, then cringed when the elevator started with a rocking jolt. Nothing prepared me for when the doors opened on level six.
Kaynan lay on the floor halfway down the smoke-filled hallway in his wolf form. His deep red hair was singed and smelled of blood and fire. Smoke poured from the rooms around him and flames lapped out from several doorways. The heat was so intense I could barely look at him. I had to pass at least three raging fires from open doorways to reach him. He outweighed me by more than fifty pounds and I knew I couldn't move him in my wolf form.
I raced into the room next to me and glanced around quickly for anything I could use to protect us from the heat. The room was empty save for a few beakers and a microscope on a lone table. I braved the flaming hallway again and in the next room I was relieved to find several hospital gowns, scratchy hospital blankets, and a sink along with rows of tables covered in beakers, microscopes, and stacks of slides that smelled of strange chemicals.
I willed my heart to slow, but it was hard to be calm with my brother lying in the middle of a torrential fire while children waited in the desert far above for us to take them to safety. Too many people depended on me to make it, and I wasn’t about to let them down now. I closed my eyes, found the calm place deep inside myself, and centered on it until it blocked out the roar of the fire, the panic at the edge of my thoughts, and the urgency to phase. My heart slowed and I felt control over my body return.
I phased as quickly as I could, doused the hospitals gowns and blankets in cold water, then pulled a gown and a blanket over myself before I ducked back out the door and ran down the hall to Kaynan's side.
His red eyes stared off unseeing into the distance. I touched his singed fur, afraid to find him not breathing. My heart started again when his chest rose and fell shallowly under my hand.
“I'm getting you out of here, Kay,” I said between gritted teeth. I wrapped the remaining soaked blankets and gowns around his body, picked him up in my arms, and ran as fast as I could toward the elevator.
Chapter 16
I was almost there when the first vision struck and staggered me against the wall.
Kaynan's ability to share images when he was in his wolf form came especially helpful with Grace, but when he was asleep or unconscious, he passed the memories he saw in his mind to whoever touched his fur.
I watched the door to the elevator open on the third floor. The chemical scent I noticed before lined the walls as though coated. Kaynan stepped slowly into the hall, his knife from his wristband held ready and my bomb shoes around his neck. He peeked through the doors and found each room empty until he opened the last door.
Wolves that looked so much like Rafe's pack my breath caught lined the walls. Wolf heads, wolf hides, and whole wolves took up every corner of wall space and most of the floor. It would have looked like an ordinary trophy room except for the eyes.
Somehow, the taxidermist had figured out how to preserve the eyes of the wolves, and I, through Kaynan's memory, stared into the gazes of over fifty wolves whose eyes told that they had been werewolves. The place was a trophy room for werewolves who had been killed in their wolf form, and the wolves' eyes held expressions of pain, hope, sorrow, joy, and love that reflected the lives they had lived in their human forms.
Kaynan turned and hurried quickly back up the hall to the elevator, feeling no doubt the knot in his stomach that I felt in mine.
He rode down to the next level and when the door opened to reveal the same chemical scent, his steps dragged down the hall and my stomach turned over in fear of what he would find. He glanced in the empty, but strongly-scented rooms that lined each side of the hallway, then hesitated in front of the door at the end. I knew he wanted to turn back, but both of us had to know what was beyond.
He opened the metal door and his werewolf eyesight made out human forms standing in the dark. For a second, he froze as though his fight or flight instincts were battling to take over, but the forms didn't move and there was no scent of life in the room. He blinked and the grays and blacks separated to show humans mounted on the walls and on platforms like the wolves had been.
Kaynan stepped slowly into the room. The human forms stared back at him with their real eyes, the scent of werewolf thick in the air. They had been mounted in action forms as the wolves had, crouching by a pretend fire, running after a stuffed deer, and kneeling together by a plastic stream.
The one that haunted me most took four werewolves and stood them in a row in different stages of phasing. The first one was partially hunched, but still in human form. The second's hands were almost touching the ground, his nose and mouth elongated into a muzzle and his fingers and toes retracting into paws while a slight protrusion of a tail showed from his backside. The third was on the floor on his hands and knees, gray fur running up his arms and sides and his ears moving to higher points on his head. His face had mostly phased to that of the wolf and there was a haunted, wild look in his eyes. The fourth body was pure wolf, but the sadness and pain on his face was unmistakable.
All of the figures were naked like the wolves, posed as though for study and learning, but it was impossible to think of them as less than human. They had lives, joys and happiness that had been taken from them by this place so that they could be displayed like museum dinosaurs.
I felt so sick it was all I could do to lean against the wall and carry Kaynan to the elevator. The fact that the bombs were about to go off somewhere echoed in the back of my mind, but Kaynan's visions swept the warning aside, demanding to be seen amid the smoke and flames of the hallway we traveled.
In the vision, he staggered into the elevator and pushed the button for level five. His hands shook and he studied them as though he didn't understand. The elevator door opened again and decay and filth colored the air. Kaynan took a steeling breath of the remaining fresh air in the elevator, then entered the hallway.
This time, instead of being lined with doors, the short hallway led to one giant room. Kaynan opened the door slowly, then leaned against it and stared at the neon-lit room beyond.
Rows upon rows of tables contained human corpses like those brought by the dump trucks. I.V.s and machines stood by each corpse, reading vitals and pumping red fluid that looked like blood into the bodies. The bags had a big W written on them; it took me a minute to realize it was werewolf blood. They were infusing the bodies and the monitors told them which specimens took to the fusion. The monitors beeped, but only to show the infusion percentages. Heart rates were flat-lined and the bodies stunk of decay. None of the fusions had taken, but fluids were circulating through the bodies to keep them from rotting further.
Kaynan left the door open and ran back to the elevator with jolting steps. He pushed the button to close the door, then hesitated, staring at the button for level six. His hand shook when he raised it to press the number of the last floor. The elevator gave a slight shudder, then lowered slowly.
The scent of decay from the floor above was replaced by fear, pain, anger, and blood. Kaynan walked in slow, resigned steps to the end of the hall, his bare feet hitting the tile with soft thuds; the sound of each door handle echoed loudly as he turned it. The rooms along each side of the hall w
ere mostly empty, containing nothing but beakers, slides, microscopes, and the occasional sink and workstation.
Light showed through the bottom of the door at the end of the hall and strange moaning noises and the occasional shriek emanated from it. Kaynan approached it slowly, then paused a minute as though to gather his strength.
He pushed the door open, then slid to his knees on the floor.
The tables had been changed for hospital beds, each of which contained an occupant. At the sound of the door opening, rows of mutated faces turned toward Kaynan. There were similarities between their faces and ours, and my heart beat painfully in my chest when I realized these were our clones, the failed experiments Dr. Verus had referred to, kept alive for some cruel, demented, unfathomable reason.
Several of the creatures that looked at Kaynan had his deep red eyes, while others bore the brown ones that he had before the accident. Others, with mixtures of blond or black and purple hair, stared at him through violet eyes or blue ones, or one of each, at least those that had eyes with which to stare.
The facial features had come out distorted and confused with those of both human and wolf. On the face closest to us, rows of canine teeth stood out through one cheek while the eyes, crooked and full of pain, blinked from down by where the chin should have been.
The creature across from it bore a muzzle that was split in half so that the nose sat in a distorted center of human teeth and a canine tongue. The creature's eyes were missing, and several overlapping layers of skin took their place. A wheezing, growling sound emanated from its throat.
Giant gaps showed through the skin of the creature at the next bed. It looked mostly human, but the gaps across its face revealed teeth and claws and the gaps bled freely as if the workers had given up on bandages. The bed across from it showed a wolf-like creature with blond hair and purple eyes, but its skin hung loosely from its body as though not attached to the bones which showed sharply through the skin.
Rows upon rows of distorted figures writhed in agony, held down to the beds by ropes, handcuffs, and leather straps that caused deep wounds in arms and legs from where they had rubbed raw and never been treated. The I.V.s and machines that kept the creatures alive hung like grim sentries above each bed and beeped in a cacophony that would have driven any sane person crazy.
The creature closest to Kaynan, the one with the teeth protruding from its cheek and the eyes at the bottom of its face, met my brother's eyes and held them. Kaynan's own crimson eyes stared back at him with such pain and sorrow that there was no doubt what the creature wanted.
A sob escaped Kaynan's chest. He pushed up to his feet and tore the shoes from around his neck. He slid the soles to the side, pushed the immediate activation buttons, then tossed both shoes into the room. The creature closed his eyes as though in a silent prayer of thanks. Kaynan slammed the door and staggered halfway back down the hall, then tore off his clothes like he couldn't stand being human anymore. He phased and collapsed on the floor. The bombs detonated the same time that his body hit the ground.
***
I had almost reached the elevator when another series of explosions sounded from down the hall, blasting us both into the open door. I pressed the button for the first floor and prayed that the elevator still worked. I refused to question the sanity of riding in an elevator up an exploding underground building and held Kaynan close.
The elevator door took its time closing. Heat beat down on us from the fire that roared at the other end of the hallway. A door on my right blasted open and fire shot out with angry red, orange, and yellow fingers that reached in our direction. I worried for a second that the elevator was dead, sealing us in, then the doors slid slowly shut and we began to rise.
A group of blasts shook us, but the elevator continued up. We finally reached the first floor. The doors opened slowly, then stopped halfway. I shoved through and carried Kaynan across the empty room, through the door to the smaller room we had entered only a short while earlier but which felt like an eternity ago, and exited the last door to fall to my knees in the desert sand.
Several more blasts sounded. I knew I couldn't rest so close to the building and with the children left out in the desert. I mustered what was left of my strength and picked Kaynan up again. His wolf head lolled against my shoulder. Tears streamed down my face at what he had seen. I beat myself up for letting him go down there alone, but neither of us could have left the compound without making sure all of the children were safe, and with my phasing it had been the only way.
I marched slowly up the dune that shielded the children from the exploding building. I could barely concentrate on placing one foot in front of the other. I knew I was in shock from what I had seen, but the survival instinct of the wolf wouldn't let me give up.
I reached the top of the dune with a slight feeling of accomplishment, then staggered with the rush of rage that ran through me at the sight ahead.
The children had been clustered into a group, older ones comforting crying little ones while a circle of armed guards kept them under control. Two men in suits similar to the one Dr. Verus had worn stood with their arms crossed loosely as though I had kept them waiting.
“Let them go,” I growled, too exhausted to care about the guns that pointed in my direction at my tone.
One of the men cracked a shallow smile. “You're outnumbered.”
I glared at him. “I'm not afraid of you, and by the number of guns you brought you can't say the same about me, so I figure we're even.”
His eyes narrowed. “Our orders were to bring you back alive, but I'd feel no remorse at saying you attacked me and had to be killed.”
“Funny, I feel the same way about you.” Kaynan's body was starting to feel a lot heavier as my werewolf strength receded, but I refused to put him down. I lifted an eyebrow. “And who are you going to tell?”
His smile widened. “Dr. Verus.”
I was about to tell him that would be a bit difficult when the thud of a helicopter's rotor blades reached my ears. I fought back a smile when I recognized the sound coming from the same craft that had dropped us off.
“I think you're about to regret ever listening to that fool.” I tipped my head in the direction of the helicopter and he glanced sideways. His eyes widened as the chopper neared.
“Form two lines and have the children kneel on the sand in front of you. Keep a gun at each head and pull the trigger when I tell you to,” he barked. The soldiers around the children did as they were told, though they exchanged doubtful glances at the orders.
It was risky, but I took the chance to bargain. “Let the children go. They're innocent and none of them are werewolves.” I set Kaynan’s body carefully in the sand.
“Not yet, but they will be soon if our experiments are any indication,” the leader said. His silent companion gave a ghost of a smile, then glanced back warily toward the helicopter.
I sputtered. “Indication of what? That you can kill people and make disfigured clones? You're not even capable of sustaining life at this point.”
He gave me a disgusted glare. “We created you.”
I rolled my eyes. “And obviously did a great job. Why else am I here to blow up your facility other than to make sure you don't do to others what you did to me?”
“We gave you a new life,” he shot back.
The helicopter hovered over the next dune and ropes dropped down. A few of the guards took shots, but the chopper finished its drop and flew away to safety.
“You destroyed my life, my brother's, and the lives of my loved ones just so you can profit from your experiments,” I said, hoping to draw him out in an argument and distract him.
“Form a perimeter,” the leader commanded. His men rushed to form a circle around me, Kaynan’s still form, and the children with their guns pointed outward.
Men appeared over the rise of the dune. It took a minute for the exhaustion in my mind to clear enough for me to recognize Rafe, Jaze, and Jet.
“Rafe
!” I shouted.
He waved, relief visible in his golden eyes. The head guard muttered something and aimed his gun at Rafe’s head. I hit the gun aside and punched the man as hard as I could in the nose. He swore and cupped his face in his hand, then hit me in the side of the head with the gun. I fell to the ground, but grabbed his elbow as I fell, throwing him off balance. He stumbled and blood gushed from his nose to his shirt. I looked up to see him aim the gun at my head and froze.
“Uh, Commander?”
Pain-laced glee filled the man’s eyes as his finger tightened on the trigger. “Commander,” another guard interrupted, his voice more urgent.
“What?” the man snapped. He broke his gaze from mine and looked up, then his face washed pale. He lowered his gun and I rose to my knees to see four rows of armed Hunters and werewolves ringing the guards. The helicopter had been a decoy to distract them from the real threat. The thought filled me with relief as the guards dropped their weapons with soft thuds to the sand.
Rafe ran through the guards without pausing. The hatred and threat in his eyes was so pronounced they glittered with the promise of violence. When he reached us, the werewolf moved with such fluidity that no motion was wasted. He spun in the space of a heart beat, taking the Commander’s gun and sweeping his legs out from under him. He fired two bullets into the sand next to the Commander’s head and the man cringed away from the sound. “Threaten Colleen's life again and I will tear out your heart and feed it to my pack,” he growled, his eyes flashing with anger.
The man refused to look at Rafe, but a chuckle came from his throat. Rafe glared down at him.
“Why are you laughing?” he demanded, the look in his golden eyes dangerous.
“Because nothing you do at this point matters. You can kill me, kill all of us, destroy the bodies of the children and leave them in the sand to rot, and it won’t make a difference,” he said, pushing to a sitting position. He brushed the sand from his suit as though it were a mere annoyance.