NERO FELT a weird kind of euphoria. It might have had something to do with being up for three days straight, but it was more likely because every single one of the new recruits had survived the transformation to wolf.
Every single one, including a surprise recruit, thanks to Gelpack. Nero didn’t understand what the alien had done, but it had worked. Wiz said he made adjustments to the activation spell. Words, tones, something that seemed completely insignificant to Nero but apparently made a world of difference. He’d also insisted that the recruits be brought here to the cage room in the basement as soon as possible instead of closer interim facilities. Good thing too, because two of the recruits had spiked fevers and gone into seizures within an hour of getting to Michigan. Everyone had written off the wolves then, because once the seizures hit, there was nothing anyone could do. But Gelpack had stared at them for an hour and the wolves had eventually settled.
It was a flat-out miracle, and Nero would never again speak of the gelatinous alien as anything but a blessing, even if he was now sitting in board shorts and nothing else in front of Josh Collier’s cage. Worse, he had taken Wiz’s suggestion seriously and there was a bright red Jell-O smear where his stomach should be in his otherwise tannish-clear body.
Gross.
“I came as soon as I could,” Nero said as he walked into the huge concrete room of steel-reinforced cages. He noted with pleasure that four of the five wolves were sleeping deeply. That was the most healing thing for them. It was the fifth who had him concerned.
Josh Collier. The charming blond-haired geek boy was now a black timber wolf with white along his lips. That made his snarling, growling fury all the more frightening because the white made his teeth look bigger, sharper, and scarier. Nero had seen his fair share of furious wolves, so Josh shouldn’t scare him. He shouldn’t, but damn it, this wolf radiated rabid fury like he’d never seen. Hatred burned through his burnt orange eyes, and even the drool looked malevolent. Then he noticed that the steel bars of the cage were bent.
“Did he break his cage?” No wolf should have the strength to do that.
“No,” Gelpack answered. “He bent the bars. They should not break. He is too near exhaustion to finish the task.”
Really? Josh didn’t look exhausted. He looked tense, blindly furious, and—
Wham.
Nero flinched as Josh rammed the cage bars. He’d leaped straight into them with claws extended at Nero and jaws that latched on to the bars like they were a filet mignon. And when he couldn’t crush them, he shook his head, growling and pulling on the metal as if to tear them apart.
The sight was bad enough, but the sounds…. Guttural animal hatred formed into an endless roll of snarls and growls. Not a single bark or howl. That would be too polite. And Nero had no doubt that if the bars broke, Josh would make those same sounds while ripping out their throats.
“How long has he been like this?”
“Since he woke several hours ago.”
Hours? Oh hell. He searched the creature’s eyes, hoping for a sign of sanity, some spark of human rationality beneath the animal hatred. He found nothing, which meant Josh’s mind was gone. The brilliant chemist was lost to the beast.
“What does Captain M say?”
“To euthanize him. No one has come back from this level of fury before.”
Even though he’d already guessed that, the words sank like a stone into his gut. He’d done this to Josh. He’d been the one to select him for the team, to stand by while Wiz activated his DNA, to plan every second of the operation that brought Josh to this rabid animal state.
His stomach cramped like a vise and he dry-swallowed to fight the pain. It didn’t help. Nothing would help, especially when he added the mental image of putting a couple of bullets into the wolf’s brain. God, he didn’t want to add one more death to his already black soul. Meanwhile Gelpack kept speaking, his voice the same monotonous underwater burble that he always had.
“Her orders are there.” Gelpack pointed to the clipboard attached to the misshapen cage. Nero didn’t have to read them to know they told him to end Josh’s life as quickly as possible. It did no good wasting resources on someone who would never come back, not to mention the danger to everyone in keeping Josh alive.
“Isn’t there something you can do?” he asked. It was a vain hope. Gelpack would already have done it if he could, but Nero was looking for any possibility, no matter how small. “You stabilized the other two.”
“Your minds are a mystery to me. That is why I am here.”
Nero pounced on the distraction. “You’re here to study our minds?”
“Thoughts and emotions are unknown to me. I studied for a hundred of your years to learn your language.”
“A hundred?” he said weakly. “How old are you?”
“Without bodies, we do not age. I am the only one of my kind to attempt a body, so perhaps I will age now too.”
Nero didn’t have a response to that and had nowhere to go except back to Josh. “Have you tried talking to him?”
“I have tried many forms of discourse. Most recently I have been reading his paper to him. Captain M said to expose him to familiar human things that will engage his mind.”
It was standard protocol, and Nero scanned the list Gelpack had made of all the things he’d tried. Every line item was followed by the words no noticeable effect. He also glanced at the array of Josh’s personal items scattered on a table beside Gelpack.
Walking over to it, he tried to see if there was anything that would help Josh. They had his suitcase and backpack, all of which had exactly what he’d expect. Tees with emblems or sayings that Nero didn’t recognize. Something was “shiny,” someone was from the Colonial Squadron. The jeans were worn soft, the socks worn old, and the toiletries cheap. His backpack wasn’t any different. There was a spiral notebook with diagrams of his big show and a laptop that they hadn’t opened because it was his and they were trying to respect his privacy as much as possible.
Nothing. Not even the crumpled receipts were interesting. A grocery store receipt for generic cereal and Campbell’s soup. Another one from Target for needles and thread, presumably to sew those shiny pockets into his wizard’s cape.
“What happens when you read his paper?”
Gelpack lifted the printed paper in his hand and began to read. The words were strange enough, but in his weird voice, they were downright creepy.
“To confirm that the defects of NOB mutants result solely from telomerase binding deficiencies, we performed primer extension assays with a series of chimeric proteins—”
“Okay. Never mind.”
Josh hadn’t reacted at all to the string of words. If anything, the creature’s eyes had glazed over as much as Nero’s had. Frowning, Nero ran through everything that had been in Josh’s file. The guy’s social media had been minimal, his family tree, all the way back to the ancestor with the werewolf gene, was useless, and even his grades, which had been excellent in the sciences and lackluster in liberal arts, couldn’t help.
“Wait a minute…,” he murmured as he looked back at Josh’s threadbare socks and the generic chips on his IGA receipt. Everything indicated he lived a stripped-down, impoverished lifestyle. Nero hadn’t thought it odd because that had been his own life before lycanthropy bit. But Josh’s father owned his own business making Volcax for the government. Though it sounded blue-collar, it was actually a multimillion-dollar company that was run like a fine-tuned watch. He knew that the Collier family’s income was in the top 1 percent. Josh had attended Harvard at full-price tuition. From his sister’s Facebook pictures, Josh ought to be wearing designer jeans and shopping at Whole Foods. Instead, his sneakers were ripping in two places, which sure as hell would be cold in the winter. Obviously the guy was living on his graduate stipend from the University of Michigan. He’d bet that not a cent was taken from dear old Dad.
Josh wouldn’t be the first guy to have an overbearing father. Maybe Nero could reach him that way. So he turned to the glaring, growling wolf and spoke in his sternest tone.
“Joshua Dyer Collier, look at you drooling on yourself and destroying your cage. I spent all that money sending you to a fancy school, and what do you do—?”
Josh went insane. Where before he’d been simply growling and chewing on the cage, now he slammed against the bars over and over again. And when those didn’t break, he howled with rage loud enough to make the other wolves stir in their unconscious state.
Nero’s insides stiffened, his body tightening unbearably every time Josh hit the cage bars. Which would break first? Josh or the bars?
Gelpack spoke above the din. “I do not believe this violence is a good sign.”
Maybe not, but then again, it was certainly more of a reaction than anything else they’d seen. He decided to keep going.
“Four years at Harvard and now how many at Michigan? You don’t have a trade, you certainly don’t work for a living.” He winced at that. He didn’t know anything about higher education, but he did know about being the lowest grunt on the pay scale. He would bet anything that PhD students were the slaves of the academic world. “You’re just lazy, freeloading off of my money. You will quit playing around at school and learn a real trade. Now change back to human and talk like the man you claim to be.”
The frenzy in the cage doubled, then redoubled. Josh was a whirling blur as only a werewolf could be. He thrashed at the cage on all sides, including the top and bottom. He snapped at the bars and exploded upward to try to break the lid. The sounds he made were no longer identifiable. Snarls or growls were indistinguishable from yips of pain or howls of fury. It was all one explosive disaster, and Nero saw blood and spittle fly from the bars. And still he couldn’t stop.
“Good God, what a disappointment you are!”
The cage broke.
One of the hinges snapped and Josh bashed at the weakened side until the seam split. One slam to break the hinge and a second to burst through.
Shit, shit, shit. Nero was about to die.
There wasn’t time to react. And after being up for three days, Nero didn’t have the reserves to go wolf. All he could do was step in front of Gelpack and hope the alien would become goo instead of die like Nero was about to.
Josh hit him square in the chest and they tumbled backward into the table of belongings. Nero got an arm up and felt a flash of pain as it got shredded. He kicked Josh in the ribs, knocking the wolf sideways, because this wasn’t his first wolf-on-human fight. Josh was back before Nero could draw breath, and it was all he could do to dodge in time to save his face.
Bzzzzz!
The cattle prod. Gelpack had it in hand and was shoving it in Josh’s near side. The wolf yelped in pain and slammed sideways. Nero’s legs fouled the wolf’s footing and the two ended up tangled together on the floor.
Bzzzz!
The next electric shock carried into Nero’s body, but it was nothing compared to what Josh must have felt. The wolf scrambled to get his feet under him, but he didn’t have the coordination. Nero did, and he pulled himself aside barely fast enough to avoid losing a kneecap to Josh’s bite.
Bzzzz!
Gelpack got him again, and this time Josh’s wolf body rippled in agony from the impact, but he wasn’t jerking away. Instead, his head was coming around and his lips were peeled back from his very sharp teeth.
Bzzzz! Bzzzz!
Nero got his feet under him. His breath was quick and tight, but his hands were steady as he grabbed a pistol from the locked cabinet on the far wall. He didn’t want to do this. God damn it, he didn’t want to kill someone who’d just had the misfortune of being born to the wrong family tree. But he didn’t have a choice.
Josh was rabid. There wasn’t a choice.
Bzzz! Bzzzz!
Nero raised the pistol. He took a breath and sighted Josh, only to see the wolf body begin to shimmer. Nero’s heart pounded and his brain screamed to pull the trigger, but he didn’t do it. Not yet. He couldn’t—
Josh resolved into a human form with pink skin and dark red welts on the side.
“It’s telomere-ace, fuckface,” Josh bellowed. Then he launched himself at the cattle prod. He got ahold of it and ripped it through Gelpack’s gelatinous hand. Nero’s finger twitched on the trigger, but there was no time to save Gelpack.
“Josh, no!” he bellowed, but it was too late.