Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Will

As I shifted and paced down the countryside with Alexis by my side, my eyes saw red with rage, and my muscles felt as if they were pumped with iron. I stampeded past the trees, over the streams, and raced as fast as my body would allow, utilizing every bit of my innate strength to cover this great distance in as short a time as I could.

Vince had always been like a younger brother to me. He had been one of the first people at the commune to take me in and treat me as if I was a family member. After Alexis, he was the only one who had truly been a friend to me. I could not stand the thought of losing him. But deep in my heart, I knew that Vince could hold his own against those soldiers. He was a survivor.

Whether they had attacked him or kidnapped him to use as a hostage, it was now our responsibility to bring him back to safety.

Especially now that he had been kidnapped.

After all, I had some experience in that arena. I knew all too well how it felt when a werewolf was overpowered, treated like a brute animal, mistreated, tortured, and then thrown into a cell. I had endured that violence for decades. Earlier today, I had to relive that memory when I had recounted it all to the Clandestine Court. And now, it seemed that I was being forced to relive those moments yet again in a peripheral way.

This is a trial for Vincent, I said to Alexis, tapping into my bond with her to communicate non-verbally.

A trial? How so? Alexis asked.

When an Alpha is about to take his position as the leader of the pack, fate throws a trial in his path. For me, the trial was the Second World War, and bearing through it while ensuring that my pack was safe. For Vince, it’s this crisis in the form of super-soldiers. They’re hell-bent on destroying the commune. You can draw an analogy between his plight and the plight that I had to suffer all those years ago, I said.

Talking to Alexis helped steer my mind away from the harrowing thoughts that were occurring to me. Those soldiers had a track record of being deranged and overpowered. With everything flowing in their veins, it was a miracle that they had turned into some strange mutated beings. There was a reason why the old practitioners of magic and potions never dabbled in altering the composition of a human’s body. The consequences were always dire. Back when I was being experimented upon, I was constantly expecting that something terrible would happen to me at any given moment because of all the chemicals that had been injected into me.

Could it be that Blair had decided to use Vincent as a lab rat? I shared that concern with Alexis.

Blair is a madman who treats this world as a playground. He sees you as his prime adversary. Not Vincent. I doubt that he’s going to experiment upon him, Alexis said.

Then she added, I never had any brothers or sisters. Vince was the closest person I had to one. He’s been empathetic, kind, and considerate of me every time when I needed him to be. If you believe in karma and that sort of thing, Vince has positive karma coming out of the wazoo. And if this is indeed his trial sent by fate, then I am certain that he will emerge victorious and unscathed.

After that talk, we continued running along the countryside for another half hour without talking to each other, our eyes scanning the environment around us for any signs of soldiers. But it was all abandoned even when we entered Fiddler’s Green.

Alexis and I skirted around town and bypassed the commune as we headed towards Vincent’s last known location—the forest where he had gone tracing those soldiers.

The first sign that I picked up on was Vincent’s broken phone lying by a ditch. Next to it were a lot of footsteps traced in mud. Alexis and I kept our noses to the ground, sniffing the scent coming from those footsteps and from that broken phone.

But it turned out that we didn’t need to do that. Vincent had laid out our path for us, dropping hints along the way. For instance, there was a giant scratch on one of the trees to the north. A scratch that only a wolf’s claw could have made. Following that trail, I came to a broken piece of belt that looked like it belonged to one of the soldiers. There was blood on that belt. I picked up the scent of the blood and followed it through the traversing path in the forest.

Alexis was right by my side, alerting me every now and then to some of the hints that Vince had dropped along the way. A soldier’s armor plate here, a claw mark on the ground there.

By the time we reached the clearing ahead, we were certain that Vince had guided us in the right direction, straight to where he was being kept.

There’s something off. I said to Alexis as I scanned the clearing.

What is it? Alexis asked, peeking behind me.

There were no soldiers in this base. There was a giant cage in which Vincent—in his wolf form—was being kept. He kept colliding against the cage, trying to break free, but the cage was made from reinforced steel.

Vince had mentioned that there were around twenty soldiers that he had been tracking. There was no sign of them anywhere here.

From across the clearing, Vince saw us, and instead of snarling or howling, he simply shook his head and pointed it to the north of the clearing. Not knowing what he was saying, I quickly shifted back into my human form and went to where his cage was. Alexis came behind me, also shifting into her human form.

As we neared the cage, Vince shifted back as well.

“Will! You have to run. It’s a fucking trap. They’re not soldiers anymore!”

“What are you talking about? We’re not going anywhere without freeing you first,” I said, grabbing hold of the lock and tugging it with all my strength, causing it to come loose. As I swung open the cage’s door and pulled Vincent out, I saw that he was right.

We were surrounded from all sides by soldiers, except they weren’t soldiers anymore, just like Vincent had said.

“Fuck, man, we have to get out of here! You haven’t seen what they can do,” Vince said, holding me tightly by the arm and pulling me away from the clearing.

“Hold your ground,” Alexis said.

“We have to run away right now. They’ve been torturing me for the past hour. I’m in no shape to fight,” Vince said and then fell to his knees.

Seeing him like that, all beaten up, bruised purple, and bleeding from places, drew me into such a berserk rage that I shifted immediately and advanced all by myself at the mutated soldiers who were closing in on the clearing.

Their bodies had contorted and morphed into giant, bulbous, grotesquely red growths that were utterly disproportionate. One arm was longer than the other, while one leg was short and stumpy. Their eyes were bulging out of their sockets. Their hands had shifted into a pathetic imitation of wolf claws. I could see from afar that their teeth had turned vampiric, all pointed and jutting out of their mouths.

I counted twenty of them all around the clearing, just like Vince had warned. I shot a look back and saw Alexis taking Vincent out of the clearing just before the soldiers—or whatever they were now—formed a circle around the clearing.

Now that their bodies had morphed and distorted out of proportion, none of their armor was properly fitting their bodies anymore, leaving undefended critical areas that could be used to my advantage. Their necks were completely bare, and so were their arms and torso.

As they advanced around me, forming a closed circle, I perceived that they could no longer speak. They were merely grunting, howling, jeering, and screaming as they thrashed their arms and stomped their feet.

For a brief moment, I felt pity for them. Once upon a time, these were men. Men who had parents, relatives, probably wives and partners, and now they had been warped by Blair into these hideous creatures. There was no return from this state.

Killing them would be a mercy.

Get Vincent out of here while I deal with them, I called out to Alexis.

Are you sure you can deal with them alone? She asked.

Yes, I’ve got this.

These mutated soldiers were no longer wielding guns or batons. Their high-tech armor was deactivated. But I was still careful. If they had been altered and disfigured to such an extent, it must have affected their brute strength.

The soldiers all howled and pounced upon me at the same time, momentarily taxing me with indecision, but then, at the last moment, I jumped higher than all of them and perched upon a tree branch, staring below at the small horde that had assembled at the base of the tree.

Above, the full moon shone, its lunar presence strengthening my resolve and bringing out my power.

As I jumped down from the tree, I calculated my moves with precision. There were five mutated soldiers right in front of me. I broke my fall by falling on top of them. I crushed one with my sheer weight, killing him instantly. One of them tried to get away from under me. I bit down on his head and tugged it free from the rest of his body, sending blood spraying everywhere.

I could only imagine what the sight of a blood-soaked, red-eyed, spectral wolf would do to an opponent. But these were not ordinary opponents. Their minds had been erased by the mutagens that had been injected into them. They knew no fear. Senseless, they all attacked me as a horde.

I charged into them headfirst, bludgeoning them with my swift body, making them all fall as I raced through them and to the other side of the clearing, where their weapon stash was lying: machine guns, rifles, shotguns, grenades.

As I’d already overused grenades recently, and as these mutated soldiers were scattered all over the place, I had to resort to using another weapon if I wanted to eradicate them as quickly as possible.

I shifted back into my human form and grabbed hold of one of the machine guns lying in the weapon stash. I aimed it in front of me, where eighteen frenzied mutated soldiers were stampeding towards me, their mouths foaming, their eyes bloodshot and lifeless.

I pulled the trigger and braced myself for the massive recoil of this machine gun while holding it straight ahead of me. The bullets pierced the skins of the approaching soldiers, sending blood, guts, limbs, and viscera flying in every direction.

It was hardly a fair match, what with their senses being dissolved by chemicals and their armors compromised as a result of their distorted figures. By the time my magazine ended, there were no more soldiers left standing.

I threw the machine gun down and picked up a shotgun from the stash. One by one, I walked over to the bodies of the mutated soldiers and shot each of them in the head just to make sure that they were really dead.

And there I stood in the aftermath, one lone wolf amidst a pile of corpses. I threw the shotgun on the ground and looked wearily around me. This was the second time these soldiers had kidnapped an innocent person. The second time that I had come across one of their remote bases in the forest.

I decided that it was about time that I stopped playing on the defensive. There would be no more of these bases, no more of these soldiers anymore. I’d do whatever it takes.

As I crossed the clearing and came to the path that Vince and Alexis had taken, I saw them standing way up ahead, looking at something that I could not see from afar.

“Alexis! Vincent! Are you guys all right?” I asked.

“Will. You have to come and see this,” Alexis called back.

I braced myself for another disaster lying in wait ahead. But when I reached them both, I saw something that completely baffled me.

“Did either of you do this?” I asked, inspecting the dead body.

“We didn’t do anything,” Vincent panted.

“Then who killed this mutated soldier?” I asked, stooping to inspect the dead body.

“You won’t believe this, but he came charging at us from the clearing. He must have gotten away from the rest of the soldiers. As he was coming at us, he just fell to the grown, writhing and shivering. And then he just contorted, yelled, and fell limply to the ground. He’s been dead for a whole minute,” Alexis said.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, looking at this dead body that defied all explanation.