Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (9 page)

He led John another hundred feet or so before stepping into a small cubbyhole that the reporter couldn’t graciously call a closet. There was a filthy single mattress along the far side of the wall, wet and stained with God knows what. A shopping cart was parked on the left side, overflowing with black trash bags and a broken tennis racket. A small bowl full of what looked like dog food lay at the far end of the cart. A huge rat was devouring the chunks of kibble, and it looked up at them, hissing. Its yellow eyes glowed under a protruding brow in the near-dark. It started for them, its two-foot-long body sliding along the wall.

Without a word, Michael pulled the tennis racket out of the shopping cart and started whaling on the beast. It screeched, snapping its jaws, but the homeless man made a perfect swing into its skull, and it fell to the damp floor, its body shuddering for a moment before it died.

“That bastard’s huge,” John said, pulling his camera from his pocket and snapping pictures of the deceased rat.

“There are bigger ones down here,” Michael said nonchalantly.

“Bigger than this monster? Jesus, how do you people live down here?”

“Never said it was easy. You do what you have to do.”

John was thinking,
Monster rats. I don’t know how much longer I want to stay underground. I need a weapon, and I need it now.

He said, “Doesn’t look like your friend is here. He has a dog?”

Michael nodded. “Old man by the name of Jones. He has a little brown and white mongrel. They keep each other out of trouble.”

He stepped across the room, peering down at the stained mattress. When he flashed his light across it, the stains went from an indistinct dark color to a bright red. Michael put his hand to it, drew it back, and showed his wet, stained fingers to John.

“Blood. Still wet. Whatever happened didn’t happen very long ago. I just saw the man this morning.” He wiped the blood from his fingers onto his dirty jeans.

“I’m thinking this tour’s about over,” John said, ashamed when his voice cracked. “What do you say? Time to head back to the surface?”

“I should look for him,” Michael said. “He’s really old. Fairly sick, too.”

“With that kind of blood loss, he’s probably fairly dead,” John said, trying to sound as if the whole situation wasn’t scaring the shit out of him. “Not to sound cruel, but maybe we should watch out for ourselves. How many of those rats did you say are down here?”

“The underground is full of them. The closer you get to the sewers, the more you’ll see.”

“And the sewer is … where?”

Michael pointed, “Just past that wall.”

“Okay, yeah, we need to get topside right now. Sorry about your friend, but I don’t want to face another mutant. I’m sorry.”

Michael nodded. “All right. I’ll get you back to the surface. Then I’m coming back and looking for Jones. The poor guy’s had a hard enough life, and now this. I hope he’s not wounded.”

They turned toward the door of the little room, to face a pair of glowing yellow eyes in the blackness of the corridor. They were positioned higher up than the rat’s, a good foot and a half off the ground. With a low growl, they advanced forward, slowly, toward the light.

Michael lifted the tennis racket above his head, and John scanned the room for some kind of weapon – any kind of weapon – but he saw nothing. He turned back to the creature that stepped out of the darkness and into the beam of his flashlight.

It was a dog, or it had once been a dog. It stood almost three feet high on twisted, gnarled legs. Its snout was huge, out of proportion to the rest of its body, and sharp teeth poked out of its slavering maw from every direction – too many teeth for one mouth to contain. Its brown and white fur was patchy, long in some areas, almost piebald in others. Its talons clicked on the brickwork as it stalked towards them, its head lowered, the hackles on its back rising. It growled low and deep.

“Jake?” Michael said. “Oh my God, it’s Jake.”

Then, the beast lunged towards John.

12:35 p.m.

Nicole dialed Sandy’s Blackberry number again as more footage of destruction played out on the flat-screen television in her hotel room. Once again, there was no answer. She bit her lip, blinked her eyes to prevent tears from emerging. She couldn’t show this kind of weakness in front of her superior officer. She wouldn’t allow herself to openly display emotion like that.

General Burns was on his cell phone, sitting at the little desk in the room and taking notes on hotel stationary. He grunted every once in a while. Nicole knew he’d fill her in when he was ready. In the meantime, she turned her attention back to the television, a hand in front of her mouth as she watched the footage.

Buildings were on fire, as were several cars. In the streets, amidst the black smoke and the running, panicking people, towering Lycanthropes loped, grabbing at helpless victims and burying their muzzles in the screaming pedestrians’ throats and chests. At their feet, huge rats scurried, occasionally followed by something bigger – mutated dogs and cats – that snapped at the vermin. Most of the footage was taken live from the air, the cameraperson safe within a helicopter, but some of the closeup video came from daring (or stupid, thought Nicole) camera operators in the streets.

She shook her head in disbelief. It was spreading so fast. It appeared as if the slightest scratch or bite would mutate a person within a minute or two. One piece of footage, taken by a videographer already referred to as dead, showed a man being bitten by one of the rats. He was beginning to transform even before he fell to his knees, his nose extending into a longer snout, his teeth pushing each other out of the way. It was a sobering piece of film.

If things continue this way,
she thought,
the whole state will be infected come morning.

Yet, inside her military brass-bound heart, she knew the army wouldn’t allow this to happen. Steps would be taken. The disease would be isolated and quarantined. She was already overhearing things General Burns was saying into his cell phone that confirmed this train of thought.

“We’re lucky Manhattan is an island,” he said with a glance towards her. “You might be able to contain it if you work fast enough.”

Nicole knew what this meant—bridges would be blown sky-high, any escape route off of Manhattan Island would be blocked…

… and her lover, Sandy, would be trapped right in the middle of a Lycanthropic Outbreak.

On the television screen, she saw a bus, roaring out of control, go hurtling into the side of the New York Times building. The huge electronic ticker tape dropped onto the roof of the vehicle, sparks flying in every direction from the wreckage. A fire ignited in the nearest alley amidst the trash, spreading swiftly.

General Burns snapped his phone closed and glanced over at Nicole. She raised her eyebrows, asking without speaking. They’d been working together long enough to know what the other was thinking. It was almost a telepathic link.

“They’re gonna blow the bridges,” he said. “Sort of like Cincinnati, but this time we can really call it an island. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. After they cut the place off, I don’t know what they plan on doing. They might bomb it.”

“Sandy’s out there someplace.”

“And I’m really sorry, but you know we have to stop this thing from spreading. I mean, look at the TV.”

It was now showing footage of a city block on fire, cars stopped in the middle of the road, some crashed into each other. Any pathway a fire department could take was blocked by the abandoned vehicles in the middle of the road. As they watched, a woman cowering behind the closed windows of her Saab was pulled from the vehicle by a creature that smashed the glass and yanked the screaming victim out by her long blond hair.

Nicole sighed, lowering her head, thinking.

Burns put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a few uncertain, hesitant pats. “I really am sorry.”

There was a loud boom outside, and they rushed to the window where they had a good view of the Brooklyn Bridge. A plane was flying over, launching missiles at the structure. It hit the base, and the bridge wavered for a moment, then it tilted to one side. The street down the center of the monument, full of cars and pedestrians fleeing the city, went sideways. The vehicles slid off the pavement, skidding into the river below. A second jet came from the other direction, and it launched more missiles. The middle of the bridge was engulfed in fireballs that rose two hundred feet into the sky. The bridge groaned, and then gave in to gravity. The Gothic arches crumbled into the East River, and pieces of wood from the pedestrian walkway burst into flame. The suspension cables snapped with loud
twang
noises Nicole could hear even within the insulated walls of their hotel room. Smoke billowed out of the center of the bridge, and the water beneath it roiled in fury. By the time the smoke cleared, the bridge Walt Whitman had once called “the best medicine his soul had ever experienced,” the world’s first steel suspension bridge, a mile of brilliant design and architecture, was little more than rubble in the churning water.

The jets returned, their missiles firing at the Manhattan Bridge this time.

Nicole turned her back on the window, unable to get images of Sandy caught in the crossfire of the planes out of her mind. She saw her lover burning, trapped beneath bricks and wood and rubble.

She frantically dialed Sandy’s Blackberry number again.

She had to reach her. She had to know what to do.

Behind her, General Burns gawked at the destruction out of the window, wondering if it was all going to be enough, if they could ever contain something so virulent, so evil.

12:44 p.m.

In the stalled subway car, deep beneath the streets of Manhattan, Sandy and the other people with her listened as a deep, muffled boom sounded. She thought it could be an explosion, which would explain the power outage and the immobilization of the train, but shouldn’t the explosion have come before the subway stopped running? And where exactly was this explosion? The sound reverberated in the tunnel, making it hard to figure out if the noise came from above or underground.

She was nervous in the dark. The lights had all extinguished with the exception of a few red emergency beacons, which encased the tunnel in a crimson glow. Sandy felt as though she was in Hell. All that was missing was a demon or two.

“Well, if we’re gonna be stuck here for a while,” the young black man said, “we ought to know who we’re stuck with. I’m Howard Reigel. I was on my way home after a rehearsal. I’m a dancer in the new Disney show at the Palace. I hate to say it, but I play a chameleon. Eh, a job’s a job.”

The Latino woman, never removing her arm from the teenage girl’s shoulder, said, “I’m Beth Chavez. I’m a volleyball coach in Newark, and this is Alice Smith, my star player. We were going to visit Alice’s grandmother in Brooklyn when the train broke down. I grew up here in the city, but I’ve never seen anything like this happen.”

“Me either,” Alice said, her voice high-pitched, almost babyish in tone.

The tall Latino woman had shoulder-length brown hair and green eyes. She wore a suit that screamed “off the rack but trying hard anyway,” and her voice was tinged with a blue collar Brooklyn accent. Her ward, Alice, was nearly as tall as Beth Chavez, but she seemed so much smaller, as if diminished by proximity. Her hair was a bit longer, blond, in a ponytail, and she had striking blue eyes. Sandy figured she would be exceptionally beautiful once she grew out of the gangly, coltish stage of adolescence.

Beth Chavez continued, “Alice is being scoped by several major colleges, and when she graduates next year, she’s going to have her pick of scholarships. Isn’t that right, honey?”

The sixteen-year-old girl nodded, but she kept her eyes lowered to the floor. Sandy figured she was shy and probably more than a little embarrassed by her coach’s praise.

Sandy volunteered to go next. She introduced herself and told the little group that she was in New York to see the site where her brother had died. There were comforting noises from the old Jewish lady, Sylvia Levy, who instantly took Sandy’s hand in her cold, arthritic one and patted it.

“You poor dear,” she said. “So many people lost family on that awful day. I hate to say it, but I rejoiced when we killed Bin Laden in that compound.”

“You don’t think that’s what this is, do you?” Sandy asked. “An act of terrorism or retaliation? We all heard that explosion a few minutes ago.”

“Probably just typical city noise,” Craig Chew said, taking off his suit jacket. He had rings of perspiration under his arms that were alarmingly large. His hair was red and pasted down with some kind of gel. His small brown eyes rested like pebbles on the shores of his chubby cheeks. He had more chins than a Chinese phone book. He said, “You hear all kinds of weird noises when you’ve lived here long enough. That was probably just construction work.”

“Sounded like something blew up to me,” Howard Reigel said, shrugging his muscular shoulders. He had removed his iPod and had put it in his shoe bag.

Alice inched closer to her coach and whispered, “What if it is the terrorists? What if we’re trapped down here forever?”