Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (7 page)

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, then 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.”

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.

Kelly realized there were only two more seats left before the monsters reached her. Rafe seemed to be in shock, paralyzed with terror, so she grabbed his arm and started pulling him toward the aisle.

As the first of the two-foot-long rats scrambled to the second level, the bus swerved hard to the right, and the vehicle hurtled onto the sidewalk. Kelly was thrown to the floor as the bus plowed into the glass front of the New York Times Building, lodging itself under the news ticker, the wave of headlines turning into a shower of sparks over her head. Rafe, who had been standing, was neatly cut in half, his bottom segment flopping down in front of where Kelly had landed in the aisle.

The news ticker billboard groaned, then, amidst a shower of blue sparks, it tilted forward, falling on top of the double-decker bus. Kelly screamed as glass shards fell around her. The structure settled on top of the bus with a loud thud, and the vehicle came to a jolting stop.

Raising her head, Kelly saw that the news ticker was resting where it had dropped, on top of the seats of the open-air part of the bus, like a new roof only a few feet from the floor where she had fallen next to Rafe’s dismembered legs. She gave a little sob when she saw her boyfriend’s lower half, bleeding and oozing.

Streams of sunlight peeked through holes in the collapsed news ticker. Here and there, blue sparks still sizzled and popped, briefly illuminating the gloom like a mistimed strobe light. Kelly could see battered and torn bodies all around her in these quick flashes. Some of them were squirming, in the middle of their metamorphosis into Lycanthropes.

Then, something moved in the darkness near the front of the bus. One of the beasts was crawling on all fours down the aisle, its back scraping against the fallen news ticker. It had spotted her, and Kelly decided then and there that she wasn’t going out like the others.

Finding the daylight near the back of the bus, she crawled toward it, heedless of the glass embedding itself in her hands and knees. She left a trail of crimson as she headed for the light and the relative safety of the street. She could hear the beast growling behind her, its talons clicking against the aisle floor. She moved faster.

As she reached the hole at the back of the bus, she stuck her head out. It was only about a twenty foot drop. She might break a few bones, but she’d be in the street. People were scattered all along Times Square, and as she watched, several of them were changing into Lycanthropes. They were everywhere, as were the rats streaming out of the sewer grates. Taxis and cars swerved, striking pedestrians and crashing into storefronts or each other.