Hybrid

by Wild Wolf Publishing

  As I walked further into the room, one man shot at my head, aiming for the brain, but he was shaking so badly the bullet grazed my cheek. Almost in unison, another man tried for my heart, and it went too high, embedding itself in my shoulder. Anger reacted to the pain and I roared as rage took over again. Before they knew what was happening I was before them, and with a single swipe I sent one man flying into the wall across the other side of the room. He hit it so hard his neck snapped on impact. Other bones broke but he was already dead, beyond the pain.

  More bullets thudded into my chest, though I barely noticed. Thanks to the rage I too was beyond pain, and the bullets didn’t even slow me down. I killed the others, thirteen in total, until the room was almost silent, my ears still ringing from the gunshots and the screaming. Almost silent, if it hadn’t been for the scientists, most of whom hadn’t moved throughout the onslaught. One had tried to sneak round me while I tore the limbs off a guard but the movement had caught my eye and he now lay dead with the others, in pieces. One of them clutched a phone to him, his last lifeline. He’d been screaming into it minutes earlier. I turned my attention from the scientists to the source of the blood I’d smelt outside. There was a vampire chained down to an operating table. They’d cut him open, apparently to do some kind of tests, and he was still alive, despite the fact I could see his beating heart and his lungs, swelling every time he took a breath.

  Looking beyond the vampire, I found jars full of some clear liquid, with organs floating in them. Something about this disturbed the beast, and I fled the room.

  Footsteps sounded down the corridor, somewhere behind me as I entered another lab, much like the first, only a young boy lay in this one, no more than eight or nine, and he wasn’t a vampire. He was alive, barely. He looked at me with pleading eyes, wanting it to end. Little dots of blood covered his right arm, just above the veins where needles had been plunged beneath the skin; the other was missing. His stomach had been cut open, though his chest lay untouched. His legs were intact, though the skin had been scraped away in places. And sickest of all, a wolf’s head had been grafted to his neck, for no apparent reason. There was no reason for it, just man’s ego, torturing things because they can. The glassy eyes looked out on the world, unseeing and definitely dead. If they’d tried to reanimate it they had not succeeded. Or perhaps it was merely somebody’s idea of a sick joke.

  The lifeless flesh of the second head had started to decay. There were bald patches in the fur where the skin had rotted away exposing bare flesh, flakes of it falling to the ground, curling like greying rose petals. The jaws gaped open, the tongue hanging out between a gap in the teeth. Maggots ate away at the flesh on one cheek. Some of them had spread to the boy’s head. As I watched, one crawled into his ear. The boy couldn’t have much longer to live. Once they were inside his head, it couldn’t be long before they wriggled their way through his brain and ate him alive.

  He made a weak sound, a cry for help, and I reached out to him, whining softly. The boy’s eyes widened and I turned and caught the arm of another scientist, just as she was about to plunge a needle into my neck. She screamed and I roared with anger. The beast didn’t like what they’d done to the boy. It was angered by the gruesome experiment. I’d thought I was the last but I was wrong. There was at least one other survivor, one other living werewolf, reduced to a plaything for the humans to butcher. I roared again and ripped her arm off. Blood spurted from the wound, running across the floor to mix with the boy’s blood, and my own.

  I hadn’t noticed the blood dripping from the bullet and stab wounds, but my fur was soaked with it. I had yet to pull the blades out so that stemmed some of the blood flow from those two wounds, but the bullet wounds bled freely. If I’d been mortal the blood loss would have finished me off by then. After the prolonged starvation it should have made me weaker again, but if it did I didn’t feel it. The anger gave me strength and I pulled the woman’s head off her neck like I’d seen my sister once do by mistake to one of her dolls, though this was considerably messier, but just as effortless. Blood jetted out in a high arc from the stump of her neck and it dripped from the severed head, jaws wide with the scream that she had never had time to make, eyes wide with shock and horror. Tendons and ligaments hung down from the head, and part of the spinal column snaked out beneath it. Reinforcements were coming down the corridor. I threw the head at them and followed in its wake.

  Once they were dead I turned back to the boy. The beast didn’t know what to do for him, so it helped in the only way it knew how. I took the boy’s head in my hands and twisted. There was a sharp crack and the boy lay dead, free of suffering at last. I left the body in search of more death.

  After I’d worked my way down the corridor I was on, through more science labs and a couple of empty holding cells like the one I’d been in, leaving a trail of blood and death and destruction wherever I went, I finally came to a torture room. Excitement coursed through the beast’s mind, through my veins, as I smelt yet more blood, lots of it in there, some old, accompanied by the smell of old death, some fresh, still spilling from the living. It was growing hungry again.

  There was something familiar about this room, though the beast knew it had never been there before. It crept towards the room, the faint sense of recognition making it wary, despite the bloodlust.

  No guards stood outside. They’d probably followed the rest in an attempt to stop me, and lay dead somewhere with the others. As for the room, it was empty except for a girl tied to a wooden chair in the middle. If they had any of the big, medieval style torture devices they must have been in a separate room. A few handheld devices lay scattered on the floor. The beast didn’t know what they were or what each one did, but it smelled the blood on them and knew what they were for. It snarled and stalked further into the empty room, closer to the girl. Blood dripped down, the wood soaked and stained with it, the floor slick with it. Her bare wrists bled where the rope bit into them, the skin rubbed away where she’d struggled. One eye was bruised so badly she couldn’t open it. Her nose was broken. Her ears bled where the earrings had been ripped from them. Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth and her lips were red with it, cut to shreds. The little finger had been clipped off her left hand, the stump glistening with congealing blood. I could see the severed digit lying at her feet. There were a few deep cuts over her body that would scar, but it didn’t look like they’d had chance to use many of the torture devices yet.

  The beast drew close enough to touch her, hunger pounding its stomach, and brought its bloody snout to a wound on her neck. It sniffed the wound, drooling, and opened its jaws, as if to finish her. The girls eyes widened with fear and pain, when it drew back, some form of recognition keeping the hunger at bay. I looked at her with my mismatched eyes and whatever was left of the boy I’d been knew we couldn’t kill her. Pity stirred deep inside, alien to the mind of the beast. The human inside me rose up, resurrected by the sight of the girl, and slowly intelligence started to seep back into my mind. Whining in sympathy, I pulled the ropes apart and, free at last, she fainted from loss of blood and fear. She didn’t understand what was happening, and she didn’t know who I was. All she saw was the beast I had been, the monster I still was. I caught her as she fell forward and carried her in my arms, much like I had with the body of Melissa that winter night, knowing I had to find a way out.

  I walked back through the bloodbath, careful not to trip on any corpses, and searched for a way out. Now I was able to think more clearly, I saw that the corridor had been sloping downwards. That made me think I was in some kind of underground compound, a short stop along the way down to Hell, hidden from the rest of humanity. Which meant I’d been heading deeper into the compound, so I needed to retrace my footsteps, back upwards towards the light and the entrance above.

  I followed the corridor upwards until I reached a point where it branched off to the left. If I carried straight on I’d be heading down again, while the other corridor was level. I turned left
and continued down there until I was faced with another decision. I tried to keep heading upwards but eventually I reached a dead end, and when I tried to retrace my steps I found my sense of smell was no good, the scent of blood drowning all else out, and there was nothing to see or hear. Before I knew it I was lost. Anger and frustration bubbled up, threatening to turn into rage again. Lizzy needed to go to a hospital, the sooner the better, and I was lost. I was angry with myself but I was angrier with the people who had done this to her. So when I came upon Aughtie while exploring more rooms for any clues as to where in the compound I might be, and how close to the surface it was, it wasn’t surprising the rage took over again.

  When she saw me stood in the doorway she began to back away, until she was pressed against the wall. She flattened herself against it as if she wanted to fall into it to escape me, her face full of unconcealed terror instead of her usual haughtiness and superiority. A part of me was pleased I could inspire such terror in even the leaders of the Slayers, and who could blame her? I knew I must make for a fearsome sight as I advanced towards her, threads of blood and saliva hanging down from my gaping jaws, my tongue and teeth stained crimson with bits of flesh caught between them. My breath must have stunk of raw meat and viscera. I fixed my mismatched eyes on my prey and watched her quail before the anger burning in them. My muscles rippled beneath my fur with every movement as I gently laid Lizzy down on the floor and then charged my enemy, coming to a stop with the end of my snout inches away from her face. I’d knocked a tray of some unknown liquid in test tubes to the floor while I’d run. The glass had smashed and the liquid caught fire the minute it was given chance to react with the air. I didn’t care, and Aughtie was too scared of me to notice. She screwed her nose up at the stench of the warm air coming out in pants from my nose and mouth. I rested my hands on the wall either side of her, digging my claws into the metal while I tried to control the rage. I wanted to kill her, but I needed some questions answering first.

  “How did you know it was me?” I snarled.

  “What?” she said, pressing herself against the wall so hard I could see her knuckles turning white.

  “The last ‘rogue wolf’ that’s been terrorising the streets. How did you know it was me?”

  A sly smile crept over her face as she answered “I would have worked it out for myself of course, but I was saved the trouble. Imagine my delight when my contact told me they had not only discovered who the new werewolf was, but they had met him and even gained his trust.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.

  Some of her usual smugness crept back into her voice when she spoke again. She ignored my question and went on to say “I had my suspicions after you fell asleep in my lesson, but without the information from my contact I couldn’t have been certain until you were admitted to the mental hospital, where we had chance to study your behaviour. You showed all the signs of a newly turned werewolf: increasing violence, increasing aggression, unprovoked rages, insomnia, restlessness. And then you were taken over by the urge to mate and there could be no doubt.”

  “Then if you knew what I was all along, why didn’t you just take me when you had the chance?” I chose to ignore what she’d said about a contact for the time being.

  She was about to answer when Lizzy groaned, regaining consciousness. I turned to look at her and Aughtie took the chance to slip past me.

  “No!” I roared. With one powerful leap I pinned her to the ground, one hand wrapped around her neck. She cried out as she fell face first, the skin ripped from her knees. “Who was the boy? What were you doing to him?”

  “What boy?” she said, stalling for time. She must have thought the longer she kept me talking, the longer she lived. But maybe I’d just kill her and ask someone else if she didn’t answer me quick enough. As it was, I wasn’t in the mood for games. With my long fingers I was able to put pressure on her windpipe until she started to choke. “Research. We needed to know more about your kind, that was how I came to know so much about you. We hoped to find a cure, impossible though it was. Still, it proved useful. We used it to find more efficient methods of torture. We discovered more about vampires too. Over time the knowledge will prove invaluable when we uncover a way to rid the earth of the undead forever. The dead should stay dead.”

  “And the boy, who was he?” I asked again, ignoring the bit about making us extinct. Actually, I agreed with her. The dead should stay dead.

  “Why do you care? How many men have you massacred today? What’s one more life to you?”

  Why did I care? It was a good question. I supposed it was because the sight of the boy had disturbed even the primitive beast I’d temporarily become. And more than that, he was like me, and he probably hadn’t asked for this life either, but he’d been dragged into it all the same and had then become just another casualty of war. And because I needed to know, feeling it was important somehow. It was important to the wolf. I could feel it in there, mourning the loss. It still felt the need for a pack and beneath all the horror and the anger it felt cheated of the pack it could have had, if it hadn’t been for the Slayers. How many more like the boy had there been? How many had they killed? I felt another surge of hate towards the wretched woman, and I squeezed her neck a little tighter. “Just answer the damn question.”

  “My nephew,” she spluttered. I released my grip in shock. She rubbed her throat, still coughing, and repeated “He was my nephew.”

  “No,” I said. “No, he can’t have been your nephew. You idolised him. You never stopped talking about him, about how proud you were of him, how good at English he was.”

  “Yes, and then he was bitten,” she spat. “Cursed for eternity to be undead like the rest of you. He died a long time ago. That thing you found was not my nephew. I gave it over to our scientists for research and in that it proved most useful, enabling us to kill off the rest of your wretched pack. And just when we thought we’d exterminated them all, you surfaced. He was the last free survivor, the werewolf who bit you, and when we hunted him down and he impaled himself on the railing trying to escape, we thought it was over. I could not believe the curse lived on. For years we have been employing midwives to test newborn babies for the presence of the wolf genes passed on to them from their lupine ancestors. Every child that tested positive we killed. It was hard to keep what we were doing from the world, but we managed. We had to hide the bodies in lorries, where they could be taken to be burned. You were a mistake. You should never have been allowed to live. How you passed us by unnoticed I’ll never know. I should have killed the boy too, but I had hoped the wolf would never be awoken within him since lycanthrope numbers were decreasing.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She’d tortured her own nephew! I didn’t care if she said it was in the name of science, it was still torture. And I’d thought I was evil. And all the babies she’d killed! I tried not to imagine a lorry full of tiny corpses being sent to burn to ashes. I wondered what they told the parents and how they got away with taking the bodies from them. Then I decided I didn’t want to know. And I had more pressing questions, questions that needed answers. Flames were rising higher around us. They’d spread to some paperwork that lay scattered on the floor, greedily eating their way through months of research. Time was running out.

  “Why did you take him and not me? He was your own nephew! I’m nothing to you. Why didn’t you take me when you had the chance? And why take Lizzy?”

  She sneered at me and I was about to beat the answer out of her like she’d tried to do to Lizzy, but a door burst open on the other side of the room that I hadn’t even noticed was there and more guards appeared. They opened fire and reluctantly I left Aughtie where she was, untouched. One of them hit some kind of gas tank, and it exploded in a ball of flame. The fire raged to a greater inferno, given new life. Still the guards fired, more afraid of me than the flames. I didn’t want Lizzy caught in the crossfire, and if I didn’t take her to safety she really would be swall
owed up in the flames as I had seen in my dream, so I picked her up, semi-conscious by that point, and shielded her with my body as I ran from the room.

  Bullets followed me out into the corridor, but no one came through. I heard them retreating but didn’t look back. My eyes were stinging from the searing heat. If I didn’t find a way out soon the whole compound could go up in flames. Most of it was made of metal and there was a good chance it would be contained in that room, but I wasn’t going to take that chance. If the flames came into contact with any more of that liquid, or the gas… God only knew what they kept in their laboratories. They were probably experimenting with different substances, looking for new ways to kill us. I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

  Smoke snaked beneath a door further down the corridor as I passed and rose up, slowly becoming a deadly cloud above. I ran blindly in any direction. I had no idea where I was going, just as long as I kept moving. If the smoke was anything to judge by, the fire was indeed spreading, though what was fuelling it then was anyone’s guess. I’d only seen a small section of the compound. I didn’t know how much of it was flammable. I tried not to think about the vampire chained to the operating table, still alive but not for long. There was no time to save him.

  I kept running until finally I came to a staircase leading up. I fled upwards and was relieved to find the faint smell of fresh air. The exit couldn’t be too far ahead.