Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (37 page)

The alligator ceased moving, giving in to the hordes of rodents as they devoured its body. The water around it turned pink, and it floated, the rat creatures using it as an edible raft.

There were three feet separating Burns at the top of his pole and the newly formed ramp to the landing where the others waited. He sized up the distance.

Nicole shot at several of the rats at Howard’s feet, sending two of them back into the pit below where they were instantly set upon by their brethren. There were still four of them approaching Howard, even as he kicked out at them.

Michael leaned down, said to Sandy, “Grab my feet.”

The woman did, and he scrunched forward a few more inches, shoving his hand into Howard’s. The dancer grabbed at it as one of the rats crawled its way onto his pant leg. It latched onto him, holding tight even as Howard was dragged up the last remaining feet of the ramp and into the doorway at the top. It clawed and chewed at him, and he screamed. John cowered, wanting to help but weakened from blood loss.

Nicole grabbed the rodent on Howard’s leg by its back and tossed it into the pit. It plopped into the water and was immediately set upon by the others, which were swarming in blood frenzy.

Howard pulled himself up to the ledge with his elbows, sitting on the floor, his arms around his legs, shivering. Sandy went to his side, started rubbing his arms to warm him up. His skin felt cold and clammy.

Nicole shouted to Taylor Burns, “You’re going to have to jump for it, sir!”

“I know! Give me a second.”

He swung himself back and forth on the pole, slipping a bit. His hands were getting sweaty, and the metal was harder to grip. He leaned away from the ramp a bit, and the pole tilted with him a few inches. Swinging his weight in the other direction, Burns shifted the pole toward the ramp-like structure. The rail stopped two feet from the platform.

Several of the mutated rats eyeballed this new action. To Nicole, they resembled an audience observing a tennis match, their pointed heads rotating left and right as Burns continued to swivel the pole back and forth.

Finally, he was close enough to jump, and he leapt off the pole, using the propulsion of the swinging weapon to launch him onto the ramp. When he landed, he came down in a squat, and he skidded several feet backwards toward the water.

The rats knew an opportunity when they saw it, and they scurried for the ramp, climbing on it by the dozens. Burns got his feet under him, balanced himself, and pushed upwards. He took several steps before he noticed the moorings at the top of the ramp were protesting this new burden. They groaned, slowly pulling out of the wall. In a few moments, the whole structure would collapse into the pit.

And Burns would be rat food.

He leaned into the slant of the ramp, pushing himself. He heard the rats scrabbling behind him, trying to find purchase on the structure with their black claws. He didn’t dare turn around to look, afraid he would see them advancing faster than his ascent, so he drove himself, pulling with his arms until he got a hold on Nicole’s extended hand. She hauled him up to the ledge as he felt the catwalk vibrate and moan beneath him. Suddenly, his lower half was dangling into empty space, and he heard a splash behind him in the water-filled pit. The catwalk had given in, the bolts yanked from the brick wall.

“I got you,” Nicole said, pulling Burns to safety. “Just don’t let go.”

“Don’t worry,” he said as he scrambled up the side of the wall and into the doorway.

He sat next to Howard on the floor, his arms trembling from the strain of holding his entire body up for so long. He had a difficult time catching his breath, and he concentrated on regulating his lungs, filling, then emptying, then filling again. Slowly, he regained his normal breathing while Sandy, Nicole, John, and Michael looked down on him and the dancer sitting next to him.

As Burns turned to give Howard a slap on the back and a hearty congratulations for surviving yet another tribulation, his hand swept through a puddle of crimson on the floor. He pulled his fingers into the beam of his flashlight and saw them covered in blood. Shining the light around, he found a spreading pool beneath him and the black man. He stumbled backwards, away from Howard, feeling himself all over for any scratches or bites or broken skin. He didn’t discover anything on himself. His eyes turned toward the other man, still huddled against the wall, his arms around his folded legs, his face buried in his crossed hands.

“Howard?” Burns asked. “You all right?

“No,” came the reply. “I’m not fucking all right. I’m bleeding, you fool.”

Sandy leaned down to him, and she examined him. His chest and shoulders were clear, but the pool of blood continued to grow, and Howard wouldn’t look up from where he’d hidden his eyes. She moved her hands down his body, feeling the muscles in his arms and torso, looking for any place where a rat could have bitten him. He was sobbing into his hands, the sound muffled, low.

“Oh, Howard,” she said. “Let me have a look. I don’t see anything.”

“Leg…” he stammered, but he refused to meet her eyes.

He extended his right leg, and she saw the torn fabric of his pants. The rodent had chewed and clawed him through the material, tearing long, bloody furrows in his dark skin. The blood glistened around the wounds.

And small hairs had sprouted all across his calf.

“Howard?” she asked.

When he raised his head, she saw that the transformation had already started. His ears were elongating, and his mouth was punching itself outward into a snout. His nose was blackening, and fine dark hair sprouted all over his face. His teeth were shuffling within his growing lips, pushing out in every direction until he looked like a shark.

“Please,” he said, holding his hands out towards them. His speech was warped by the unnatural number of fangs that filled it. “Please… kill me.”

They understood, but Sandy shook her head, even as she stepped backwards away from him. “No.” She turned to Nicole. “I can’t.”

Nicole said, “I don’t have any bullets left. I can’t just shoot you. All I’ve got now is a knife.”

“Please…” Howard said again, although the word was unrecognizable. “Kill…”

“It’ll be hard,” Nicole said, pulling the knife from her jacket. “And this’ll hurt.”

“Please…”

Howard held his hands out to her, and he cried out in pain as extra joints snapped into place and his fingers elongated and became webbed in the corners. His eyes were turning yellow, as though someone had dropped dye into the whites, the coloring pluming out in several directions, filling the
oculus vitae
.

“Please…”

“Christ, just do it,” Michael sobbed, turning away.

John had his face in his hands. He sobbed quietly.

Sandy stepped closer to him. “You can’t,” she said to Nicole.

“Honey, look at him. He’s hurting, and you know what he’ll become.”

“Yeah, but I know him. I liked him. He could have been a friend.”

“We’d be doing him a favor.”

“You’d be killing him. Killing someone we knew, someone we liked.”

Howard fell forward, catching himself with his expanding hands. He arched his back, and his shirt ripped down the center, exposing a backbone that was growing sharp, pointed ridges. Hair was spinning out of follicles on his bare skin in twirls of brown. He cried out in pain at the transformation.

“It’s horrible,” Nicole said. “But it’s necessary. You know that.”

“Sandy,” Burns said, stepping up to her. He had also removed his knife and was pointing the eight-inch blade toward the agonized man at his feet. “He doesn’t want this, to turn into an animal.”

“But, to just slaughter him? It’s not human.”

“Well, sweetie, look at him. He isn’t human any longer. He’s something else, and he’ll be coming after us if we let him finish the change. He’ll become a hunter, a killer.”

In her mind, Sandy knew Burns and Nicole were right. It was the only thing they could do to save them and to give Howard some dignity in death. Yet knowing it in her head didn’t prevent her from feeling the ache in her heart. On some level, she had connected with Howard. She wouldn’t call him a friend, but after all they had been through together, they were close comrades, and that could have one day developed into a friendship. Now, he was grunting and sobbing, arching his back, his bones snapping into bestial positions beneath his dark skin. He was becoming a monster.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Nicole said, and she straddled Howard’s back. He swung his head around, opening his mouth to expose the long, darkened tongue and the rows of teeth. Nicole grabbed him by the fur behind his pointed ears and pulled hard. Then she plunged her knife into his exposed neck, drawing it across, severing the jugular. He thrashed a few times beneath her, his life blood spilling out around his feet. His death cries were terrible – loud and savage and like the last scream of a species going extinct.

Finally, he collapsed face-first into the expanding puddle of gore, and he became still. Nicole stepped away from him, wiping the bloody blade against her pant leg. Sandy watched her with wide eyes.

She had always known what Nicole did for a living, had even been proud of her lover’s job. She kept everyone safe, kept the monsters at bay.

By killing them, she now realized. It was disturbing, bloody work, even more so when you had to watch the person you loved committing what amounted to sanctioned murder. Knowing she killed Lycanthropes was one thing; seeing it in Technicolor and close up was another situation altogether. Nicole’s hands were wet with Howard’s blood, these beautiful hands that had touched her with love and tenderness, these hands which had opened her up and delved deep within her body and soul, these hands that had filled her with so much love and pleasure. These same hands were being wiped clean on her jacket, but the bright red stains remained on them, and Sandy wondered if she could ever think about those hands in the same manner again, if she could kiss them or allow them to hold her and caress her.

She turned and vomited across the floor, and Nicole moved to her, rubbing her back. She was startled when Sandy flinched away from her caress, huddling away from her as she wiped her mouth clean.

“Don’t touch me,” Sandy muttered. “Not now. Please.”

“Sweetie, you know we had to do it.”

“Yeah,” Sandy said, standing up straight and looking her lover in the eye. “But now all I can see is you killing him.” She pointed toward the corpse, which was nearly halfway back to Howard’s human form. The fur had withdrawn into his dermis, and his ebony skin was bathed in sweat and blood. His face almost looked normal again, although the eyes were still a jaundiced shade of yellow.

General Burns moved toward Sandy. “We don’t really have the time to stand around debating this. We need to keep moving or we’ll all end up like Howard. Dead or changed.”

Sandy moved up towards Michael and leaned into him. The homeless man put an arm around her shoulder and said, “This way.”

He led them, keeping hold of Sandy as he walked, and she pressed herself into him, anxious for the human contact. John stumbled behind them, finding it easier to get around. He felt immensely better, if somewhat weakened.

“Sandy…” Nicole said, and Burns gave her a slap on the shoulder.

“She’ll be all right,” he said. “Give her some time.”

“I can’t lose her, Taylor. I’ll die if I lose her.”

“It’s the brutality of it all,” he said, and he started following Michael down the subway tunnel. “She hasn’t seen what we’ve seen, and now it’s all right up in her face. She’ll come around eventually.”

“She looked at me like I was some kind of savage. She has to know what I did I did for all of us, Howard included.”

“She does know that. Inside. Give her some time. She still loves you.”

“Thanks,” Nicole said, walking next to her commander and friend. “Guess I just needed to hear it from someone else.”

“No problem.”

“This whole situation sucks.”

“It does, indeed.”

The tunnel echoed with their footsteps.

“Do you smell gas again?” Nicole asked.

10:40 p.m.

They trudged onward, each person in the group lost in their own disparate thoughts. The emergency lights in the tunnels had dimmed to a faint glow, so their flashlights and headlamps pierced the darkness in shafts of stretched-out illumination that picked up every dust mote but withheld any details in the shadows. They all remained alert, even though they were exhausted, and they raised their feet as they moved, careful not to accidentally cause a spark. The smell of gas still suffused the air of the tunnel. It wasn’t as strong as before the fireball swept through, destroying everything in its path, but they didn’t want to take any chances.

Sandy kept replaying Howard’s death –
killing, murder –
in her head, like a gruesome piece of Zapruder film footage on a loop. The way Nicole had straddled the transforming man, how her face looked when she plunged the knife into his throat, the blood spilling from the wound she’d created. She could still hear his pleas ringing in her ears, but the thing that disturbed her most was the expression on Nicole’s face when the knife went down into his skin. It had been a grimace, animalistic, a primeval leftover from when human beings were little more than the savage creatures outside the caves. It frightened her, and it made her doubt the life that she and Nicole had built together. As she walked silently along the tracks, Sandy wouldn’t allow herself to look over at her lover. She was terrified that she would once again see that expression play over Nicole’s eyes.