Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) Page 5

  “You watching the news?” he asked, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.Sighing, Nicole flopped down next to him. If Sandy came back now, they would end up spending the whole day talking about how to destroy more werewolves and how the country had gone into the hairy-assed toilet. Burns was staunchly anti-Lycanthrope. After the things he had witnessed in Cincinnati over the three-day outbreak, he found himself dreaming about transformed Lycans. He often had nightmares about the dead and the monstrous things that had massacred so many innocent people.

  And he would always be certain to tell Nicole all about these feelings he had. It was as certain as the tides.

  “Yeah,” she answered, sitting next to him, preparing herself for the oncoming tirade.

  “You can’t tell me these giant rats have nothing to do with the Lycan Virus. You see where some of the people they’ve bitten have started turning into beasts. It’s just too similar to be a coincidence.”

  The television was showing a hospital in New York City where a tired looking reporter was interviewing a series of doctors. They were announcing an influx of rat bite victims in the past several hours, and the patients were being observed.

  “There are rumors,” the reporter said, “that those who were bitten have changed into Lycanthropes, just as though there was a full moon outside. Can you verify this claim?”

  “No comment,” the first doctor said, turning and leaving the interview.

  “That’s as much as an agreement,” Taylor Burns said, shifting on the bed.

  “Seems like it,” Nicole said, biting her lip. “General…”

  “How many times have I told you, Nicole – you can call me Taylor. We’re just friends here, not superior and inferior officers. Matter of fact, we’ve worked together long enough, you should call me by my given name any time you want to.”

  “Thanks, General, but it’s not that easy to curb old habits.”

  “Ain’t that the goddamn truth?”

  “And, well, about old habits. You know I came here with Sandy, right?”

  He nodded, not taking his eyes off the television set. The cameraman was following the reporter down the hospital hallway.

  “Well, we hoped to kind of get away from it all. Have a nice little vacation. We’re, um, very close, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. Nice girl, that Sandy. I like her.”

  Nicole rolled her eyes, wondering if she would have to bluntly tell him to screw off while she had a date with her girlfriend. Instead, she took a long breath and calmly said, “I like her a lot, too.”

  “It’s good you have a friend,” Burns said.

  “Yes, but she’s more than that. She’s a lot more than a friend.”

  The news reporter was saying something about sneaking into the room of one of the rat bite victims, a woman who was attacked near Central Park. The camerawork was extremely shaky.

  Burns was concentrating on the news footage with intense interest, paying little mind to Nicole’s pathetic attempt at coming out of the closet. She gave a long sigh, and he held up a finger to shush her for a moment while he finished watching the program.

  “I need to see this. We both do.”

  When Nicole turned her attention to the television set, she saw the cameraman open a door and creep into a hospital room. The room was dark, and everything went black for a moment before he got his light operating with a high-pitched buzzing sound. The reporter snuck in front of the camera, brushing a hand through his wavy, dark hair. He smiled brightly, motioning his comrade to follow him to the bed. His teeth were distractingly white.

  “In this room,” the reporter droned, “is Christina Brunner, who was bitten by one of the monster rats this afternoon while walking through Central Park. Let’s see how she feels.”

  “I don’t think this is gonna be good,” General Burns said in a low voice.

  The reporter pulled back the curtain, revealing a large creature strapped down to the hospital bed with long leather bindings. It was one of the Lycanthropes, teeth gnashing, eyes rolling. It made feeble, sad attempts at freeing its arms, but it was obviously drugged to the gills. It looked over at the reporter, its movements sluggish. Its body was covered with coarse black and brown hair, and its snout was long and pointed like a wolf’s. The teeth in its head seemed to be going in every direction at once – an orthodontist’s nightmare – and it snapped angrily at the cameraman.

  “My God,” the reporter gasped. “The rumors are true. The rat bites seem to be infectious, spreading some new variation on the Lycanthrope Virus. Are you getting this, Fred?”

  The cameraman got closer, zooming in on the rolling yellow eyes of the beast. The creature struggled for a bit, seemed to get its bearings in the confines of the bed. The reporter inched closer, careful not to step out of frame. Heedful of the beast’s slavering jaws, he reached behind himself and yanked the curtains open, letting the bright afternoon sunshine flood the room.

  The beast howled, shutting its eyes tightly against the glare. Its pointed ears lay back flat against its triangular head.

  “As you can see, folks, this is the middle of the day. This is a live broadcast, and this monster isn’t turning back into a human being. This new form of the virus doesn’t appear to be affected by the full moon as the original Lycanthrope Virus was. This new strain seems to be…”

  With a triumphant growl, the creature pulled its arms forward, snapping one of the leather straps in two. A piece of it hung from the thing’s thick, muscular wrist. It whooped in triumph, slashing out at the reporter and catching the side of his face in its long, black claws. Blood gushed from four parallel wounds that opened up on the man’s cheek and nose, and he fell out of the frame, screaming. The cameraman backed away from the scene as the reporter cursed and held his hands against the wound.

  “Hoo boy!” Burns said, and whistled. “Here we go again.”

  The cameraman was at the door when a doctor in a white lab coat and two police officers stormed past him toward the bed. They reached it as the monster freed its other arm. The cops drew their weapons, standing in a firing stance as the doctor pushed a hypodermic needle into the creature’s leg. It screamed, sounding almost human, and then it slashed out at the doctor, tearing out half the man’s throat. He fell to the tiled floor, tubes sticking out from his neck, arterial blood spraying across the white walls of the room.

  General Burns inched his butt forward until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. Nicole discovered she had already perched on the corner of the mattress, anxiously watching the gory live footage. She chewed a fingernail, a nervous habit she’d often tried to quit.

  The creature attempted to stand, pulling the hospital bed over onto its side as the police fired at it. Bloody holes appeared on its rough fur, and it stumbled, the bed toppling over onto it. The cameraman had backed into the doorway and the focus was getting sloppy, but he was still shooting the scene.

  Bullets pinged and ricocheted off the metal railings of the bed as the creature tried to hide underneath it. In the background, by the window, the reporter was on his hands and knees, the sun silhouetting him as he arched his back…

  …and leapt at the cameraman in the doorway. The television screen filled with the feral visage of the reporter, half changed into a monster. His eyes were yellow, covered by a protruding brow. His nose was inching out of his face like a telescope, and his new teeth were sprouting out of bleeding gums. His clothes were ripping and tearing, and he launched himself at the camera operator, who screamed and dropped his equipment.

  The television screen went to fuzzy static, then a test pattern.

  “I repeat myself, holy shit,” General Burns said, not taking his eyes away from the empty screen. “That poor bastard was changing minutes after getting bitten. In the middle of the day, nonetheless!”

  “It looks like it happened fast.”

  “Worse than that, if these rats are streaming through the streets of New York, randomly biting people, and those people change into Lycans, th
en they start biting and clawing people…”

  “Gonna be a hell of a lot of monsters on the streets come nighttime,” Nicole said, feeling perspiration break out on her forehead. “And they won’t even have a full moon.”

  The television picture returned to the CNN studio and two women started discussing what they had just seen, pointing out the obvious points that the rat bites seemed to carry a new and more virulent strain of the Lycan Virus. They smiled, but their eyes kept returning to the corners of the studio, as if they were afraid of what was lurking there. No amount of pancake makeup could cover up their fear.

  In the hotel room in Brooklyn, Nicole turned to General Burns, fixing him in her sights. She said, “Sandy’s in Manhattan visiting Ground Zero.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “Geez, she’d better be hightailing it out of the damn city.”

  “She’s my lover,” Nicole blurted out. “I … I need to get to her.”

  “Then, you’d better get going,” Burns said, sounding more and more like John Wayne. “Not a very safe place for her to be.”

  Flabbergasted, Nicole asked, “Did you hear what I just said? Sandy and I are—”

  “I know what you said, and do you really think I’m so stupid? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you two are inseparable. Plus, I’ve seen the way you two look at each other. I have eyes, you know?”

  “And, um, it doesn’t bother you?”

  “Should it?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at her. “Pretty much figured it was none of my business.”

  “I love her,” Nicole admitted, as much to herself as to this man sitting next to her. It felt really good, really empowering to say the words aloud with someone other than Sandy in the room.

  “In the words of my twelve-year-old nephew, ‘Well, duh!’”

  She laughed at him, and he grinned back at her. Then she remembered herself and the situation unspooling around her.

  “Let me call her, warn her to get out of the city,” she said, reaching for her cell phone.

  It started ringing before she snapped it open.

  She glanced at Taylor Burns, and he shrugged. Then his phone started playing his ringtone – “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”

  He said, “You picked a hell of a time to come out of the closet.”

  Chapter 9

  12:20 p.m.

  The theater was only half full for the matinee of the newest Walt Disney animated movie, but the kids watching the princess singing with the forest animals were enthralled. Some of the parents watched with wistful smiles on their faces, while others prayed for the credits to start rolling so they could get back to work. Josh Kleiner was one such parent.

  He was already a week behind schedule with his latest building project, but his little girl, Aimee, had begged him to take her to the movie until he couldn’t put her off any longer. Glancing down at her, he saw her wide eyes. She was totally lost in the movie’s magic. He glanced at his watch again, wondering how much longer this bitch could sing before the inevitable happy ending.

  Aimee looked up at him and grinned, exposing her missing front tooth. He grinned back at her; it was impossible not to. Despite having to endure every princess movie known to man, he loved his own little princess more than he ever imagined he could. Since his wife had died, she was everything to him, and he’d endure a hundred more musical royal wedding movies to see her grin just a little more.

  He just wished he could get back to work today as soon as possible. His clients had been making a stink because he was taking due diligence with their plans. They couldn’t – or didn’t want to – acknowledge the difficulty of the zoning in their particular location.

  Something brushed against his pant leg, and he reached down, hoping it wasn’t a bedbug. There were articles about infected theaters in the newspapers every week, and it was near impossible to get those things out once they found a way into your house. He’d even seen giant inflatable bedbugs in Times Square with warning signs posted on their corrugated breastplates.

  Sharp pain in his thumb made him cry out and raise the hand to his mouth, instinctively sucking at a small, bleeding wound. Had he caught his hand on something sharp like an exposed nail? Leaning forward, he peered under the seat and saw a pair of yellow, beady eyes glaring back at him.

  “Jesus, a rat!” he screamed.

  At the same time, someone down front cried out and leapt up onto their theater seat.

  The rat raced away, and Josh could see dozens of the vermin scurrying down the aisle, biting at exposed ankles or hands that fell down from the armrests.

  He grabbed Aimee and placed the little girl on top of her chair. The seat folded up, and her legs dropped into the newly formed crack. With her feet turned forward, she was stuck. He couldn’t extricate her from the jaws of the seat no matter how hard he pulled. She screeched, trying to free herself, but her feet were too big to fit back through the hole, and she wasn’t thinking about how to turn them sideways.

  Josh reached for her, but he fell over onto the floor, the victim of a sudden overwhelming dizzy spell. His head hit the concrete, and he saw hundreds of black jujubes stuck to the bottom of the seat where his daughter was trapped.

  In the front of the theater something howled, an animalistic roar as though a lion were loose in the theater. Without thinking, Josh answered it with his own bestial baying. He felt strange, as though millions of insects were burrowing through his skin. He could hear bones snapping like a socket wrench twisting.

  He reached out a hand tipped with newly formed black talons and snatched one of the foot-long rats from the floor, one of the smaller ones. It squealed, and he tossed it into his mouth. When he bit down, he could feel new, unused teeth penetrating the rodent’s skin, teeth that hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier.

  And it felt oh so good, tasted even better.

  Raising himself up onto his back haunches, half transformed into a Lycanthrope, he looked down at the trapped little girl wailing at him, tears streaming down her face. She seemed familiar, somehow. He sniffed the top of her blond head, and she smelled vaguely familiar as well.

  Then, something pulsed through his muscular torso, and any vestige of humanity shivered into submissiveness. His fur rippled.

  He leaned over and took Aimee’s head off with a single skull-splintering bite.

  The taste was almost orgasmic, so he took another mouthful, then another, his body shivering with the pleasure of all his senses working in tangent.

  He leaned back and howled, licking the blood from his lips.

  Dozens of transformed people from the front rows of the theater started leaping over the seats, swiping at each other, attacking the people toward the back of the place. They fled through the doors into the lobby, where loud screams followed. Glass broke as they exited the building and streamed into the street, trailed by a horde of rats.

  * * *

  Kelly Laymon put her arm around her boyfriend, Rafe, admiring the sights from the top level of a double-decker sightseeing bus. Leaning into his shoulder, she wondered why she had demanded going on this tour. The autumn air was chilly, blowing through her blond hair, and the red bus seemed to stop at the numerous red lights more often than it went past anything remotely interesting. As it headed towards Times Square, she hoped the tour guide would say something she didn’t already know.

  They were visiting from Michigan, having a wild New York weekend. At least that’s what they had planned would happen. The musical they’d hoped to catch was sold out. The hotel was cramped and more than a little sordid. Ground Zero was still just a big construction site in the middle of Manhattan. Surely, the lights of Times Square would be more exciting.

  The light turned green and the bus started again. She heard loud shouts from the bottom deck of the bus. Turning towards Rafe, she asked, “Wonder what’s happening down there?”

  People appeared at the entrance to the top deck, running up the little staircase, pushing each other out of the way. One woman fell to the floor and the
tourists behind her trampled on her in their rush to get to the top deck.

  “Rats!” One of them screamed. “Hundreds of rats!”

  Kelly snuggled in close to Rafe as the bus lurched to the left. The driver must have been trying to regain control, but he smashed into the sides of two yellow taxi cabs before swerving to the opposite side of the street, taking out a mailbox. A Chinese man fell over the railing, plummeting to the street below.

  As Kelly held onto Rafe, she saw the last of the lower-deck passengers leap onto the upper deck. Although wearing torn jeans, the thing wasn’t human.

  Kelly knew what this was. She’d read all about the Lycan Virus, had been perversely fascinated by it. This was one of the beasts, and it flung itself at the nearest victim, the woman who’d fallen at the top of the stairs. It sank its teeth into her throat, shaking her, then it sprang to the first row of seats, clawing at the fallen Chinese man’s wife.

  In seconds, the woman whose throat the beast had ravaged was changing into a monster, too. The wound seemed to heal itself as brown fur grew over her entire body. Bones snapped, rearranged themselves.

  People at the back of the bus were jumping onto the street to escape from the monsters that were attacking everyone at the front of the vehicle. It lurched to the left, and several more passengers spilled over the railing to the pavement below. Kelly heard them land with a sickening crunching sound.

  The beast moved on to another victim, and the Chinese lady began to change. The woman with the wounded neck had finished her metamorphosis and leapt over a seat to land on an elderly couple, her claws tearing and shredding flesh.