While he traveled across the destitute farms and down dirt roads, the swirling snow seemed to cloud his thoughts. He debated whether he was actually on the right track, whether he could truly segregate the two halves of man—the bestial and the human. His mission, his obsession, was to repress the animalistic side, to prevent another Holocaust. But hadn’t similar experiments caused the noble Dr. Jekyll to morph into the evil Mr. Hyde? Could one immunize a person against evil?
Every time he grew doubtful, he glanced at the numbers tattooed upon his right hand, and his resolution grew stauncher.
At the outskirts of Kirskania, Jean’s sledge driver abruptly stopped. He would go no farther, and as soon as Jean stepped out, the driver turned his team of horses away from the small thatched buildings and lashed out at them. The horses galloped away in a burst of fear and pain.
Kirskania had no inn, but Jean found a bar with an extra room upstairs. After agreeing on a fair sum with the owner, he began his research by haunting the pub, eating all his meals there, warming himself by the fire.
To his great surprise, the villagers had no qualms about discussing what they called the area’s “beastie.” It had been in the village for so long, they had become accustomed to its presence. One old woman, straight out of a Gogol short story, had advised him to remain inside when the moon was full; she told him that if he kept himself hidden during those three nights, he would be safe. Allegedly, the beastie rarely harmed human beings, preferring to devour a stray goat or dog. There had been incidents when a man or child had been attacked, but accounts of deaths were infrequent.
Jean had asked the old woman, “These people who were injured—did they also become shape-shifters during the next full moon, as described in the fairy stories?”
The woman had laughed, exposing black, rotten teeth and mottled gums. She drew her black veil around her head, so that only her wise brown eyes showed, and she said, “Of course not, sir. Those are tales for children. What we have in the village is a beastie. A shape-shifter. Nothing more to it than that.”
Eventually, Jean found a man who had seemed afraid of the questions. Sidestepping many of the most important inquiries, he had uttered, “I dare not say more.”
With this as encouragement, Jean asked, “What more is there to tell?”
The man left the pub, and Jean followed him, continuing his barrage of questions.
In frustration, the villager spun to face Jean, and the scientist could see the man’s naked terror. “If you need to know so much,” the man shouted, “then stay outside tomorrow. It’s a full moon, you know. Then you’ll see. Oh, yes, then you’ll see.”
The next evening, as the moon rose, it covered the snowy plains in pale, indigo light, glistening off the ends of icicles and along snowdrifts. Jean bundled himself up in his heaviest coat and gloves, covering his head with a furred cap that had earflaps. Through his interviews, he’d discerned that the monster preferred to prowl the outskirts of the village. He bought a lamb from one of the local farmers, paying far too much, and he pulled the wailing animal to the end of the main road, where the plains began. After he’d slit the poor creature’s throat, he placed the bleeding lamb on top of a small mound of dirt. He took his position behind a tree a few yards away, video camera in one hand, notebook in the other.
Then he waited. Eventually, he grew tired, and he leaned back against the tree, sighing. The blood of the lamb seemed to have frozen to the ground, an ice slick of deep crimson.
At last, he heard the howl of the beastie from the east. A dark shape, outlined against the blanched landscape, raised itself on its hind legs like a man, sniffing the air as an animal would. With several powerful bounds, it rushed to the lamb’s corpse, and in six or seven bites it devoured the meal, licking its black lips with delight.
As Jean videotaped the creature, he got his first good look at the lycanthrope. He was astonished by its size and musculature. Everything about the animal disclosed its power—the firm, gigantic stature, the length of its teeth, the gargantuan paws tipped with black talons. It was terrifying yet somehow exhilarating to watch.
The beastie turned its head, sniffing the air, and it stared directly into Jean’s camera. It snarled, revealing its blackened gums, and its chest swelled with indignation.
Jean dropped the camera and began to climb the tree. His adversary snorted with each leap that it made toward him. The old man climbed as he hadn’t done since he was a child, grasping each tree limb, hand over hand. He hadn’t realized that he could still be so agile.
Surprised to find himself at the top of the tree, twenty feet above ground, he looked down at the monster.
The beastie leaned against the trunk, glaring up at him with golden-yellow eyes. It snorted once, the air steaming from its nostrils. For a moment, Jean thought it would leave him alone, continue with its business.
Instead, the creature tore at the bark of the tree, shook it beneath its paws. Jostled, Jean clutched at a nearby limb with all of his strength. Luckily, the tree was sturdy and very old.
Finally, the creature relented, choosing to wait Jean out. It paced and glared up at him every few minutes, its huffing breaths forming little clouds of condensation.
Jean grew tired, but he maintained his hold on the branches. His joints grew stiff, and his arthritis flared into staccato bursts of agony.
The old man wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but his inflamed joints made it feel like an eternity. The creature grew tired of the game, and, as the sun was about to rise, it loped off toward the east. When the sun crept over the horizon, flooding the plains with a subdued yellow light, the beast fell to its knees.
Cautiously, Jean crawled down from his perch, hugging the trunk of the tree as he descended. He snatched his video camera from the ground and turned it back on. The battery light still working, and he approached the changing monstrosity, filming its transformation.
The metamorphosis from beast to human was difficult and painful, but when it was over, Jean found himself standing before a muscular, thick-necked man. He was naked and mumbling in Russian. Without an interpreter, Jean couldn’t understand a word the man said, but he removed his long jacket, wrapped it around the man’s naked shoulders, and walked him to his home on the outskirts of town.
That evening, speaking through the carefully worded translations of a teenage boy, Jean learned the man’s name: Andrei. He had lived in the village for his entire life. His wife, Betta, sat beside him, holding their infant daughter. An older child, a boy, clung to his father’s cotton shirt. They were a poor family of farmers, eking out a meager living from potatoes and beets.
Since he had turned sixteen years old, Andrei had been changing, morphing into his bestial form for three nights with every full moon. He had a root cellar in the small house where Betta and the children spent the nights when he changed. His father had built it in order to protect his own wife and child.
“This curse goes back in his family as long as anyone can remember,” the boy said, translating Andrei’s words into rough English. “He say that his father don’t remember when it start. It always happen to the Sokosovich family. They turn to these beasties.”
Jean promised Andrei that he would find a cure for his genetic disorder—for he was certain that’s what it was—and said he would pay Betta well if Andrei would come to America to be studied. Crops had been especially poor that year, and Jean recognized the concern when the huge man looked down at his eight-year-old son.
“It would mean a better life for them,” he said. “They could live off this stipend alone, if they needed to. And maybe we could cure you, stop this plague before it touches your boy. You’d like him to lead a full, normal life, wouldn’t you?”
As he’d expected, Andrei traveled back to America with Jean, back to Bio-Gen headquarters in Cincinnati. Within a few months of study, the scientist had isolated the cause of the lycanthropy.
The pattern of transformation was always the same, beginning on the first nig
ht of the full moon and ending three moons later at some point that lay unpredictably before dawn. It never varied, never altered in any way, except the precise moment when the final reversal to human form took place.
Rick laughed, breaking Christian’s concentration. “We only have one more day of this shit to get through! Three nights and it’s over, and we’ve made it through two already.”
“Until next month,” Chesya said with a sigh. “Until the next full moon. You want to go through this every month? I don’t think so.”
“There’s a bit more …,” Christian said.
Jean determined that the metamorphosis was caused by strange bacteria in Andrei’s blood. None of Bio-Gen’s experts had ever seen such a thing before, and they suspected it existed only in specific genetic bloodlines. That was why there had been so few accounts of the lycanthropy. Jean had suspected it existed in several places around the globe, but only within a few tainted families. That was why so many various cultures had shape-shifters within their mythologies.
The scientists isolated the bacteria and attempted to destroy it. The prokaryotic nature of the cells didn’t give them a distinct shape. It also made them hard to destroy.
In various cultures, the Bio-Gen scientists tried to kill the microscopic bugs, but nothing seemed to work except waiting for three days. In a manner similar to the moon cycles, the bacteria always perished after three days outside of its host. It couldn’t survive any longer, and the outer shell, the capsule, liquefied. Within the host, the bacteria thrived.
While the other scientists studied the way the disease worked within Andrei’s body, Jean developed a serum that could destroy the bacteria within a petri dish; he designated it Serum A, as it was his first attempt, but he wasn’t sure if it could work on a human host. He needed to test it. Fortunately, Andrei agreed to be his subject. The Siberian understood the dangers, but the hope of liberating himself and his family overruled his fears.
They never got a chance to test it.
On the day before Andrei was to be inoculated, the day of the first full moon, the cells Jean had been experimenting with took on a new shape, appearing more like spirals. They had mutated, and this new strain did not die like its predecessor. It was distressing, and Jean had been studying the new bacteria when …
… the journal abruptly stopped.
“That’s all there is?” Chesya asked.
Christian shrugged.
“Goddamned scientists,” Rick shouted, kicking an uprooted plant across the lobby floor. “They leave the fucking bacteria out in the open to study, probably got it in the air, and it spread from there. Who knows how many people were infected before they started changing?”
“It’s gotta be pretty widespread,” Chesya said. “We haven’t seen anything but local news. No radio. Cell phones weren’t even working.”
Outside, visible through the windows, naked people milled about in the streets, confused. A few of them covered their nudity and hurried out of sight. Others wandered aimlessly, unaware of their nakedness, while some attacked each other, emitting streams of hysterical laughter. One couple writhed in the throes of passion on the hood of a SUV.
Chesya asked, “And this guy … Andrei … he’s being held prisoner? Upstairs?”
Christian nodded.
“Then we need to go up there. If only to talk to the poor man.”
Rick added, “And to get away from all the crazies. They can see in that window just as easily as we can see out.”
“This way,” Christian said, nodding to the stairs. “The elevator’s not working.”
“What the hell is?” Rick asked, and Chesya giggled, despite herself. The man beamed.
As they walked toward the stairs, several sets of red-rimmed eyes observed them through the glass, watching them as they left the foyer. Then the eyes looked elsewhere as someone else started screaming from the streets.
33
SEPTEMBER 18, 8:30 A.M.
From the attic window, Cathy Wright hadn’t seen any creatures since dawn. During the night’s last gasps, they had run across the neighbors’ lawns, tearing at the partially eaten bodies that punctuated the emerald-green grass. Now only the corpses remained—at least, the parts that hadn’t been consumed by the beasts.
Cathy peeked through the trapdoor and saw no threats, so she threw down the ladder and descended, clutching the rungs tightly in case she had to retreat to the attic.
In the hallway, she stood still and listened. The silence wrapped around her, until she had to shout a few times to make sure she hadn’t gone deaf.
“Hello? Hello?”
She blushed, feeling foolish.
All around her, her house lay in ruins. There wasn’t a picture left on a wall. Every knickknack or lamp had been swept from its shelf, knocked to the floor and trampled. Windows were broken, and she noticed that not one piece of furniture had remained unscathed. Strips of wallpaper hung wearily in shreds.
This house had been her life, nearly her entire world. The consistently well-run household had been her doing, her one major accomplishment in life, other than the birth of her son. But this wasn’t her house any longer. It had been invaded, and everything that had made it hers—the cleanliness, the perfect decor, the style—had been stolen. Her country club was probably burned to the ground, if any members were still alive, and her social standing seemed rather silly at this point. Her husband, what was left of him, was dead, and her son was missing, under the impression that she was a willing accessory to his father’s filthy habits. She felt empty, raped.
Sinking to her knees amidst the ruins of her life, the tattered remnants of her home, Cathy began to cry. The tears came fast, unbidden, and they surprised her in their potency. The sobs tore at the inside of her breast, setting her heaving and gasping in their efforts to get out of her. Covering her face with her hands, she let every angry, sad, terrified emotion bubble out of her.
After a few moments, she realized that if anyone should enter her house, or even peer into the hole where the front door hung from its crippled bottom hinge, they would see her in an inexcusably vulnerable position. They would witness the tears and frustration, and she knew they would judge her by them.
She couldn’t allow this to happen—wouldn’t allow it!
Wiping her face with the back of her hand, she shakily stood up. The carpet squished beneath her sneakers, and she wondered if it was water or something else.
This was what was left of her life—this broken cage she had once called home.
Blinking, she decided it was time to begin a different life. She needed to start fresh, and there was only one way that she could effectively separate herself from Karl and the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.
It all had to go away.
Go away where she could never find it again, where it couldn’t call out to her, where it couldn’t remind her of what she had once been.
With a startling burst of energy, she pulled the overturned sofa into the center of what had once been the living room, and she piled table legs and lampshades and everything else she could find on top of it, including her wedding photograph, in which she seemed so young and naïve. She swept up stray glass and bits of garbage, and she dumped this on top of the pile. Looking around, she saw the spotless floor, the bare walls, and she nodded to herself. It was nearly finished.
In the kitchen, she searched through her pantry, which had been dumped on the floor, the doors torn from their hinges and tossed through the back windows. She picked up an assortment of bills that had been waiting to be paid. The paper and cellophane crackled beneath her fingers. Finally, she found her candle lighter, and she marched back to the living room, a look of triumph on her face.
She scattered the bills over the pile of furniture and debris, then set them on fire with the lighter.
Leaning her back against the fireplace, Cathy admired the way the blaze caught, spread from one area to the next. Smoke billowed from the sofa cushions, and she had t
o open a window, her eyes never leaving the fire. She half-wondered if the smoke was toxic.
She watched as her previous life went up in flames, a conflagration consisting of everything she’d once deemed so damned important.
And she smiled. A weight seemed to have lifted from her shoulders. She felt light, as though she could fly.
Soon, she noticed the floorboards had also caught fire, trails of flames emerging where the varnish was thickest. She was coughing, the smoke growing too thick to disperse through a single window.
Cathy took a final look over her shoulder. The room seemed alien to her, empty, devoid of any relevance to her life. It was an exhilarating notion, as though with this one crazy, defiant act, she had severed all links to Karl and her past role as one of Cincinnati’s most important hostesses.
As she left the house, she saw Karl’s cell phone and wallet on the table by the front door, where he always left them. This seemed to be the only part of the house that had been undisturbed by the monsters’ rampage. Taking it as a sign, she put the wallet in her back pocket and shoved the cell phone deep into her jacket pocket. She left his keys on the table.
Then she stepped outside and admired the huge, dark clouds that dotted the sky. It looked like rain. She was only guessing; there was no weatherman to confirm her forecast.
For some reason, she wanted to see the back garden one more time before she started her new life. Stepping around the lawn, she walked through the rosebushes, stopped, and smelled a few of them. When she reached the garden shed, she saw the doors that had been ripped from their moorings, tossed across a bed of perennials. A dark, musky odor emerged from the shed, the scent of what had once been her husband.
It appeared as if he had gone straight for the doors. The interior of the shed remained orderly. A small table of tools, coffee cans filled with various nails and screws. A small pile of firewood, stacked neatly. Her bike, leaning against the wall. Touching the seat, she couldn’t recall the last time she had taken a ride.
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