Omega's Run

by A. J. Downey

  Of the lot of us, only Ava looked remotely like a person that should even be out in public. The males were all wearing loose pants and jackets with no shoes, while Sharon and Chloe wore light sundresses, their bare feet padding silently across the ground. Ava in her boots, cargo pants, and shirt with her jacket over it looked downright formal next to us.

  Around the side of the building was a small metal door with no knob but a deadbolt. Pulling a knife from her pocket Ava slid it into the small gap between the door and the frame and with a quick twist of her wrist the door popped open.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” Craig muttered, staring wide eyed at the door. “That kind of crap only ever works in movies.”

  “I wouldn’t shit you,” she muttered in a saccharine sweet tone of voice. “You’re my favorite turd.”

  “The latch is taped open, genius,” I scolded him. “Ava’s inside man, helping us out.” He shut his mouth, lips pressed into a thin line and I could tell I’d upset him. Oh well, suck it up buttercup, time to move on. We didn’t have time to deal with Craig acting like a yokel when we needed speed and stealth.

  The inside was dark, all the lights out and as soon as the door closed behind us, Ava pulled a small flashlight from somewhere inside that Joe Rocket jacket of hers and turned it on. The beam was plenty bright for such a small light, and even though the rest of us hadn’t needed it, Ava still did.

  The thought rose, unbidden for a moment, and I considered it, startled that it had even occurred to me as my body moved on autopilot, following behind the scent of jasmine and gun-oil. Wait; still? As in there was a possibility in my mind that Ava might one day join me as wolf-kind? I nearly scoffed at the very idea, but aware of our situation, I was able to keep myself silent and simply shove the idea to the back of my mind, focusing on the dangerous task ahead.

  Ava stopped outside an elevator and turned to look at us. “I’m not positive we’ll all fit,” she muttered, eyeing us all. I looked at the elevator doors. It wasn’t a small elevator. One human woman and six wolf-kind should fit just fine.

  “How long does it take you guys to change into a more combat ready form?” she asked, and suddenly I understood her concern. If all six of us went hybrid we would seriously tax the amount of available space in the elevator.

  “Only a few seconds, but of all of us I believe William is the fastest. Fucker always was quick.”

  “You’re just slow,” William muttered and I could hear the grin in his voice even though he was behind me. “And actually, you didn’t get a chance to see her before, but Chloe is a natural Alpha. Her change is even faster than mine.”

  I had to admit, I was impressed by that. I had seen as much when she didn’t change immediately on her first full moon, but I hadn’t seen any more of her after that until I had been sentenced and branded, and we hadn’t exactly been showing off transformations at the time.

  “So what I’m hearing,” Ava cut in. “Is that you four,” she pointed at me, Markus, Craig, and Sharon. “Should get your game faces on and you two can change on the fly. Close enough?”

  I grunted and nodded. “For government work.” She shot me a grin.

  “Alright, people. Get pretty.” As one we all started shedding clothes, even William and Chloe. Once we were all naked, Ava watched with a kind of horrified fascination as four of us began to change. Her eyes were centered on me and somehow I felt a pang that she would see the monster underneath my skin that had always been here. The beast she’d spent most of her life fighting.

  I was already tall to her but as I changed I grew and she seemed to shrink before my eyes, getting smaller until my head touched the ceiling and I was forced to hunch over slightly. There was a sickening sound of bones breaking and reforming, an almost liquid sloshing noise as my internal organs shifted and moved inside my body. My knees suddenly cracked loudly and bent backwards as my feet grew longer and I stood up on the balls, heels in the air. Lastly my arms lengthened as thick short fur sprouted along my body and my face pushed out into a short snout, mouth filled with two rows of wickedly curved teeth.

  I knew my eyes had taken on an amber gleam and I growled as my senses grew even stronger, a low rumbling deep in my barrel sized chest. In hybrid form I was just over eight feet tall and just as massively muscled as in my human shape. Throughout it all I never once took my eyes from Ava’s and I didn’t see the fear or revulsion that I expected. I sniffed lightly at the air and all I could smell was jasmine and gun-oil. There was no fear in her scent as she stared at me and I resisted the urge to yip with pure joy at that realization.

  “Come on little doggies,” she said in a sing-song voice. “We’ve got damage to do.” And with that she pressed the button to open the elevator doors.

  I was in the far back in the corner as the largest of our group with Markus and Sharon next to and in front of me respectively. Craig stood closest to the doors with the still human William and Chloe standing with Ava by the bank of buttons. Beneath the buttons for the floors above us Ava used her knife to pry open a small, locked panel, to reveal another set of buttons that any of the regular staff and volunteers that frequented the building would likely never have found.

  The line went down seven floors and Sharon whined slightly, her ears lying flat to her head as she saw the ascending row of numbers. I was sure she had her own memories of a place like this, and I couldn’t say I wasn’t feeling a bit of trepidation myself. Psycho Doc Helen was all too fresh in my mind at the moment but I pushed it down and growled quietly, a reassuring sound that seemed to calm her some. Ava glanced back at me once before she nodded and pressed B7.

  “Alright. We’ve got a few goals here,” she said, and we all gave her our undivided attention. “Goal one; destroy the communications hub in the server room. That’ll be located on the bottom floor at the end of the hall directly opposite the elevator doors when they open. We want to take that out before we do anything else, because if they manage to get word out that something’s happening then we’re as good as fucked.

  “Item two; we need to destroy any research data that they’ve collected. Tissue samples, blood samples, computer files and hard copies. Everything needs to be torched.” There was a general rumble of agreement from all of us at that.

  “Item three; rescue any wolf-kind being held hostage in the facility. Item’s two and three will both be on level 6. So Craig, you and Sharon will take out the server room.” She reached into her weapons bag and pulled out an oblong silver canister with a round metal loop at the top and a long strip of metal running down one side. I shifted my weight nervously. I knew a grenade when I saw one, and I didn’t enjoy the idea of being in such a small room with one of those things.

  “Get to the server room, pull the pin, toss it in and duck behind the wall. Try to get it as close to the computers on the far wall as you can, then hoof it up the stairs to meet us, got it?” Craig and Sharon both nodded and he reached out to take the grenade in his massive hand. The device looked almost comically small in comparison but that thought did little to ease my discomfort.

  The doors opened and we all tensed, prepared for a battle before we even got out of the elevator but the hall was empty. It was a very long hall though, far more than I’d expected. I could see the door Ava had been talking about easily two hundred feet down a perfectly straight hall. There was absolutely nothing to provide cover in the corridor, in the event that someone came out of any of the doors lining it with a gun, before either Craig or Sharon could reach the end of the long, stark line of linoleum.

  Still, without hesitation they both growled quietly and slipped out of the elevator, loping down the hall with long, ground eating strides. They were a quarter of the way down by the time the elevator doors closed. Ava hit the next button up and the elevator started carrying us up to level 6.

  I felt it more than I heard it. Before the elevator doors had even opened one floor up there was a vibration that ran through the entire elevator. The grenade had just gone off.r />
  “Someone probably noticed that,” Ava muttered, holstering her 9’s and bringing her automatic weapon around on its strap. She checked that it was loaded for bear and held it at the ready.

  “Then we’ll just have to move fast,” Chloe said for all of our benefit. I grunted and nodded my head, bumping it against the low ceiling. I really didn’t like this damned elevator.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of a wait, the doors slid open with a quiet chime and we surged out onto the floor. And I do mean floor. Where below there had been a single narrow hallway, up here the elevator opened out onto a wide open space. Work stations set up at regular intervals throughout the room marked it as a lab and while the Red Cross facility upstairs had been a ghost town, down here things were humming along.

  Nearly a dozen people wearing lab coats, gloves, and surgical masks stood about, working on various samples and peering into microscopes. Not a one of them looked much like combatants but the five guards, each armed with semi-automatic assault rifles that wandered the floor certainly did. Ava took a low, tactical crouch and brought up her weapon.

  “It’s Martine!” one of them bellowed and the few that hadn’t turned in our direction when we’d exited suddenly did, guns coming up as the scientists screamed and scattered for cover. It rapidly descended into chaos and bedlam after that. Guns fired, lab geeks screamed and dove for cover as we scattered, putting as much distance as we could between us.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw William changing, his transformation smoother and less disturbing than my own but still disgusting to watch or hear. Whereas directly to my right Chloe didn’t so much change as blurred. Her form became hazy for a moment and when she was back in focus there was suddenly a six and a half foot razor clawed beast where my petite sister-in-law had been moments before.

  Damn she is fast, I thought. Then I didn’t have time for thought. Ava had opened up a split second before and I couldn’t hear shit over the rapid staccato of automatic weapons fire.

  One of the heavily armed guards popped up in front of me, gun barrel leveled at my chest as I ran. Without thinking I dropped to the ground, sliding on my hip across the polished floor as the barrel suddenly spat fire and silver coated bullets into the empty space I had just occupied.

  I slid far enough that I was able to kick out, the sharp claws on my toes opening his belly and a gout of blood erupted from his mouth, gun dropping from suddenly nerveless fingers as he hastened to wrap his arms around his middle, struggling to hold his guts inside.

  He wouldn’t last half a minute with those injuries so I ignored him after that, grabbed the gun that he dropped and leapt to my feet, throwing the weapon at the first enemy I saw. The gun spun end over end and hit the man in the side of the head so hard that his skull caved in. He was thrown violently to the side to skid on the floor, leaving a streak of red for several feet before he finally came to a stop.

  Amidst the screams and yelling, interspersed with harsh breathing and gunfire a single shot rang out and a line of pain flared high across my upper arm. I jerked, stunned by the sudden pain and growled angrily; turning to find one of the guards had hung back a bit. He had a nine millimeter raised and pointed at me. A disgusted snarl twisted his lips and I could distinctly see the muscles in his forearm tensing as his finger applied pressure to the trigger. I watched him carefully, trying to determine which way I would need to dive to avoid the shot.

  A loud report echoed in my ear a moment later and I flinched as the guard jerked, a spray of blood filling the air behind him and his gun arm suddenly fell limp beside him, blood spreading across the shoulder of his uniform. Several more shots rang out, Ava coming into view on my right, gun pointed directly at the Hunter as her finger pulled the trigger steadily, over and over, until no less than eight bullets had penetrated the man’s body before he finally slumped, boneless, to the ground.

  There was a pause in the chaos and I glanced over at Ava. William was on the far side of the room, chasing down the last of the hunters as the man attempted to escape with his life. Not honestly sure why William was chasing the man, he was missing his left arm at the elbow and was more than likely going to bleed out before he got very far, but to each their own.

  “Don’t make a big deal out of it,” Ava muttered without looking at me. I grinned and turned my attention to the wound in my arm. It burned and itched like crazy, telling me more silver was involved. Not surprising since we were being shot at by Hunters. It was only a graze on the outside of my upper arm, and not even as bad as the one Ava had done to my face. I would survive.

  “They weren’t very good shots,” I noted, changing back to my human form as most of the rest of us did to.

  “They weren’t an active team.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They didn’t go out and hunt wolf-kind down. They were just stationed here as guards. I’d be willing to bet this was the first time they’d ever actually had to fight wolf-kind before.”

  “Works in our favor.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” She noticed the odd look I gave her and clarified. “That means that we’re more likely to run into better trained and more experienced Hunters the longer this takes. Sooner we hump it the fuck out of here the better.”

  Nods happened all around and we set to work. Most of the floor was empty past the lab we first occupied. The lab geeks had all high tailed it out somewhere so Ava and I explored deeper into the facility while we left William, Chloe, and Markus, still in his hybrid form, to start destroying the research material and samples gathered in the lab.

  At the far end of the room was a heavy door, the kind you’d seen in a bank vault or securing the entrance to a movie villain’s secret lair or some shit. The outside had an electronic scanner of some kind.

  “What the fuck is that?” I asked, pointing at the scanner.

  “Fingerprint scanner.” Ava grabbed the severed arm of the guard William had been chasing and placed the hand flat on the scanner. Some blinking lights and electronic chirping noises happened and a second later there was a dull thud as restraining bolts slid away and the door popped open half an inch. Without being asked I reached out and grabbed the door, hauling it open all the way.

  The stench was the first thing to strike me. Filth and waste, and below that, but more pungent somehow, was the scent of fear and pain. The feral scent of an animal mistreated and abused by humans.

  The room beyond the vault door was bare of anything save a metal cage, much like the one I had been imprisoned inside of in Indiana. This one was stronger though, actually meant to contain the beast within as opposed to being just for show. The bars were easily thicker than my wrists, the whole thing bolted to a three inch thick steel plate, which was further bolted to the floor underneath. A low humming sound filled the room as well and I notice thick electrical cables hanging from the ceiling and attached to the steel frame at the top. The whole thing was electrified.

  “William?” I called quietly, never taking my eyes from the contents. “You might want to come over here. I heard several sets of footsteps as all three of them made their way over to Ava and I. Chloe gasped quietly as she and William stepped into the room beside me.

  Sitting in the center of the cage, covered in filth but still glaring defiantly, sat a young woman, maybe in her late twenties. Naked as most of us were, but equally uncaring. Lying on the ground beside her with his head in her lap was a man, equally filthy but unconscious despite all the noise and chaos that had occurred in the other room.

  “She’s wolf-kind,” Chloe breathed, a slight hitch in her voice.

  “Yeah,” I said and nodded to the man. “And he will be too, if or when he wakes up.” The girl frowned, her eyes softening a bit as she looked down at the young man, gently stroking his hair out of his eyes. On his naked left thigh, over a mass of scarring, there was a distinctive bite mark. The kind of bite mark that indelibly removed the man as a member of the human race… again, if he survived.

  C
hapter 24

  Ava

  Craig and Sharon nearly crashed into me, skidding to a halt on the blood-slicked linoleum. I frowned and put my hand over my nose and mouth, striding over to the power source and throwing the Frankenstein-esque handle into the downward position. The power shut down with a whine, the buzzing stopped and I looked to Remus and Craig.

  “Get them the fuck out of there and let’s move! I got business.” I slid past them as they went for the cage, looking at it like they didn’t know what to do. I rolled my eyes.

  “You got a metric fuckton of dead Crusaders in the hall, tear off uniform pieces and wrap your hands to protect from the silver. Do I have to think of everything for you guys?”

  Craig startled and Sharon went out the door first, a gunshot rang out and she pitched back into the room, stunned. She hit the floor and slid, eyes wide, blood blooming in the center of her chest and I hit my side and slid into the open door way firing out the open portal from down low.

  I took out the three Crusaders out in the hall but they weren’t just guards. They were tactical and as the last one hit the floor, the alarm system started with its grating rhythmic buzzing.

  “Show’s over! Let’s fucking move!” I bellowed.

  The boys ripped off vests and wrapped their hands and between Craig, Remus, Markus and William, they managed to put their backs into it and rip the door clean off the cage. The girl got up, and snarled.

  “You want to live, Sweetheart, you better move your fucking ass!” I cried.

  Markus slung the unconscious dude over his shoulder and the girl shifted, going low to the ground.

  “Take fucking cover!” I barked, pulled a flashbang out of my pocket and the pin with my teeth, I slid it out into the hall. It went off; smoke filled the hall and there was cursing. I opened up and the cursing stopped, turning to cries. A couple of wolves flowed past me into the hall and finished the downed men off.