Chapter 31: Alexis

Chapter 31: Alexis

Of all the things that Ralph could have done, I would never in a million years have imagined him flying away from me and crashing through the window in an attempt to flee.

Well, he succeeded, and here I stood, unable to comprehend what had just happened. As far as I knew, vampires only knew how to fly in movies, and not even in all of them. Was it just Ralph who had this ability, or were all of the vampires able to fly? I dared not think about the possibility of hundreds of vampires being able to fly.

After my telepathic conversation with Will ended, I only had one goal. I had to track Will somewhere on the upper floors and help him escape from where he was stuck. It did not help that the reinforcements were arriving faster than either of us had anticipated and were quickly filling up all the hallways and corridors. Who were these men anyway? Private guns hired by Blair as an overkill way to ascertain our deaths? What was next, that we’d find out that they were all carrying silver bullets in their guns?

Even though we did not communicate this part explicitly, my bond with my mate had strengthened enough to make me realize that he needed a diversion if he were to escape from where he was stuck.

I had only one card left to play. It was not something preplanned or even something I had thought up more than a minute ago. It was only after taking a good look at one of the soldiers and realizing that they were all wearing night vision goggles that this idea occurred to me.

I fished my phone out of my pocket. Amidst all the shifting and unshifting, my phone had lodged itself deep into the pocket of my flexible jeggings. Whenever I shifted, my jeggings merely tore just a little as opposed to any other clothing. That was the secret to being a werewolf and still remaining clothed—I chose loose and flexible clothing. Sweatshirts and hoodies for my torso and jeggings or pajamas for my legs.

Maliha’s number was already on speed dial. It only took a press of a button to call her.

“Are you in a gaming zone without telling me? What did I tell you about playing multiplayer games without me? I hate it!” Maliha protested.

Rather than tell her that the bullets she was hearing in the background were not sounds coming from Call of Duty or Battlefield but actual shots being fired by actual mercenaries, I said, “Maliha, turn the lights back on. All of them at once. Right now.”

“Oh, we’re still fucking with Beckett Pharma, are we?” Maliha asked. “So you’re not gaming?”

“I’m not. And hurry up!”

“You better give me some explanation for whatever the godforsaken din is coming from your background,” she said.

She was stubborn, often irritating at times, but at least she always complied with my requests. Right after I told her to turn the lights on, the power came back to Beckett Pharma and tripped the alarm as well as the emergency red flashing light, leaving the entire building lit with off-white fluorescent lights.

I might not be gaming right now, but I knew this much thanks to Maliha’s adroitness in multiplayer first-person shooters: whenever someone turned the lights on in the face of a soldier wearing night-vision goggles, the soldiers were always blinded.

Hopefully, this would serve as a distraction enough for Will to escape.

I could already hear the sounds of soldiers screaming orders to take off the night-vision goggles. Making use of this diversion myself, I fled across the laboratory and took the elevators. The stairs would be flooded with soldiers. There was no telling how many mercenaries Blair had hired. With his resources pooled with those of Maurice and Ralph, there was no telling what lengths he had gone to. The only hope I had was that fate was on Will’s and my side. In my not-so-long life, the most important thing I learned was that fate was the strongest force that existed, capable of moving mountains and parting the seas. With this hope, I reached out to Will.

Which floor do you want to regroup on?

The thirty-first, Will said.

I pressed the button on the elevator, closed the doors, and headed up to the thirty-first floor.

As the elevator ascended, it came to a halt at one of the floors, and the doors slid open. The sight that awaited me was downright pitiful.

Maurice lay sprawled on the floor, having dragged himself from across the hall. He had tracked blood all over the corridor. His hand was an inch away from the elevator button, and his body was severely bruised. Upon looking at me, he immediately recoiled and fell back.

My first impulse was to kill him. Will had spared his life, presumably because of my earlier imploring for mercy, but I was not bound by any such promise. I could kill him here, and no one would know. It would put a stop to his antics in the town. There was no guarantee that he’d sober up and disappear from this town if I spared him. If anything, given what I knew about him, Maurice would only serve to be a perpetrator of more chaos.

However, on second thought, after seeing him in such a weakened and compromised state, I chose not to do anything. Even if I did nothing, he was sure to die from weakness and blood loss. Better his death be because of natural causes than me. At least this way, my conscience would remain unburdened.

The elevator doors closed before I could make a decision. The elevator resumed its ascent, and for a while, it seemed I’d make it to the intended floor and regroup with Will.

It was for the second time that the elevator doors slid open, and this time around, it wasn’t the sight of Maurice lying on the floor that greeted me but ten armed soldiers, all of them aiming their rifles at me, the red lasers of their guns fixated on my body.

Before any of them could so much as pull the trigger, I jumped up and broke through the elevator ceiling entrance. That was a narrow miss. Had my reaction been delayed for more than a second, I would have looked like Swiss cheese.

Shouts came from behind me, some faceless man barking orders to his subservient soldiers to pursue me. Bullets grazed past the elevator roof as soldiers flooded inside the elevator and tried to climb up. I closed the hatch and jammed it, allowing myself some momentary relief in which I came up with the next course of action. The elevator roof was riddled with bullet holes through which I could see the soldiers standing underneath. They were trying to open the hatch which I had jammed. It was a wonder how I had avoided the bullets so far, but I could not stay here any longer.

At that moment, my eyes fell on the air ducts that had passage through the elevator shaft. How could I not have thought of these before? I kicked open one of the air ducts closest to me and threw myself in it, crawling safely away from all the bullets and soldiers. But that hatch that I had jammed would not remain jammed forever. They’d climb into the elevator shaft and follow me.

Unless…

I rolled in the opposite direction and headed back to the elevator shaft. The taut metal wires that held the elevator were stretched beyond their recommended weight. There must be at least eight or nine soldiers in the elevator trying to open the hatch.

As I unbuckled the elevator harness to the wire, the jammed hatch swung open, and a soldier popped out, aiming his rifle at me. I looked at him and smiled, shaking the last of the harness bolts in my hand. The elevator creaked loudly, and before the soldier could understand what had happened before he could pull the trigger on me, the elevator lurched and fell, crashing against the walls of the shaft as it hurtled with terminal velocity.

I turned back and crawled through the air duct, climbing up, counting the floors in my head, and stopping only when I reached the thirty-first floor. Here, I undid one of the vent entrances and slid out of the wall panel.

To my right, the elevator entrance had smoke coming out of it. In front of me, soldiers were honing in on my location. There was no sign of Will on this floor. I looked at the elevator entrance again and saw that I had skipped a floor, and instead of thirty-one, I was on the thirty-second floor.

There was no time to alert Will of my predicament. The soldiers had made a formation around me, their knees to the floor, their guns against their shoulders, their fingers on the triggers.

I had a better bet of avoiding bullets as a werewolf. Immediately upon shifting, I leaped beyond the soldiers in one swift motion and landed behind them. Before they had time to register that they had just emptied their clips into an empty wall, I attacked them from behind. They might be soldiers, but they were humans and, as such, stood no chance against me. With a sweep of my paws, I swept them off their feet, and with a jab of my claws, I threw away their guns. Once I hammered them hard enough, they were knocked unconscious. Those who stayed conscious knew better than to butt in again and instead lay groaning and tending to their injuries.

Taking the guns away from around a dozen soldiers and knocking them out was too laborious a task. It did not drain me of energy, but it left me feeling that my time could have been better spent searching for my mate and assisting him with finding Blair.

Will? I’m on the floor above you. Where are you?

I am caught between a rock and a hard place yet again.

Hold on; I’m coming.

It was not our fault that we were finding ourselves overwhelmed. Whatever we had planned, Blair had planned something two steps ahead. And the fact that we were in too deep to call it quits only made the struggle more pertinent. The good thing, however, was that even though they had numbers on their side, we had power.

I traversed the body-ridden floor, leaving groaning and unconscious soldiers in my wake, and ascended the stairs. Here, on this floor, once I opened the door, I understood what the rock and the hard place were.

Will was entangled in a fighting match with ten soldiers at once, all of whom were using batons, nets, and bats to bludgeon and trap him. He was holding his own remarkably well, but it was only so that the other soldiers surrounding him with guns wouldn’t shoot at him. If he were to disengage from this one-sided fight, they would shoot at him.

I rolled along the length of the floor and hit the soldiers lined with their guns held up from behind, making them topple almost as a bowling ball topples over pins. When I rolled back to my feet, I saw that there was only one more soldier formation left, aiming their guns at Will.

I soared across the hallway, over the fight that Will and the soldiers were engaged in, and landed on top of the formation of soldiers below. They tried to adjust their crosshairs and aim at me, but my body tackled them before they could shift their line of sight.

This time, knowing that this was the last of the formations, I tore the guns from their hands with my teeth, clawed violently at their Kevlar armor, and thrust my legs and paws into their bodies to send them flying, leaving no soldier standing.

Now, I turned my undivided attention to Will and the horde he was holding back. I bit at their necks, latched onto them from every surface I could find, whether it was their holsters or the straps on the back of their armor, and tore them away from the deluge attacking Will, thinning this horde within a minute, leaving just a few stragglers now barely able to hold their own in a battle with two monolithic werewolves.

Before either of us could get to them, the stragglers ran off unsoldierly, arms flailing, voices pitched high, and legs trembling.

Will shifted back to his human form, rescinded on his knees, and panted heavily as he took a well-deserved break from all the fighting he had been doing. He took off the net the soldiers had thrown on him and sat down on the floor, staring at the pile of bodies on either side of the hallway.

I shifted back with him.

“Maybe it’s time we start using guns,” he said, his thumb gesturing at all the rifles lying strewn on the floor.

“As cover fire or to kill?” I asked.

“Does it matter now? Look at what we’ve done. Fighting them one on one is not effective, as we’ve surmised. There’s no point in going the way of force if our opponents aren’t playing fair, either. Let’s just use them.”

“You’re a stronger wolf than I am,” I said. “So, how about this? I will advance through the remaining floors, rifles in hand, laying suppressing fire for you as you move forward in your wolf form, and confront Blair on the roof before it’s too late. If he escapes on the rooftop choppers, this will all have been for nothing. I’m going to divert the soldiers. You do what you need to do.”

“Or,” Will said, going through the equipment of one of the unconscious soldiers on the floor, “We can use these.” He was holding smoke grenades in his hand. “No bullets. No guns. This is going to be stealthier and will allow us both to make use of our true natures, the wolf form.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I had never wanted to use guns. People often said that fire must be fought with fire, but what they didn’t understand was that after the battle was done, the aftermath was just ashes. If we had used guns like the soldiers, that would have made us no better than them.

Once Will and I had plucked out the remaining smoke grenades from all the bodies of the unconscious soldiers—a feat that took a surprisingly little amount of time—we headed back to the staircase, this time our destination being the rooftop.

As I headed into the staircase, I saw more soldiers coming up from below. Will pulled the pin on a couple of smoke grenades and threw them down the stairwell, filling the whole place with thick white smoke.

Amidst the cacophony of smoke and screams, we climbed our way to the top of the stairs till the only floor above us was the roof. Here, the stairwell ended, and a giant door hung open and askew. From the other side, the full moon peaked from behind the clouds, lending me strength as its beams fell on me.

I pulled the pins on a couple more of the smoke grenades and threw them behind me, covering the staircase entirely in smoke. When Will and I had made it past the door, we pushed it together and slammed it shut. A crowbar lay beside the door. Will picked it up and jammed the door with it.

“It’s not gonna hold for long,” I said, taking stock of my new surroundings.

“We don’t need a long time. We just need to stop Blair from getting on the chopper,” Will said.

But once he saw what I was seeing, Will became just as quiet. This rooftop was not a plain surface. It had many different levels, all of them forming a haphazard maze of air conditioner units, vents, electrical transformers, and fences. There were more stories on top of the roof, creating levels that started from where we stood and ended on the far east of the building, at the top of which was the helipad.

I could not see the helipad clearly from here, nor could I make out the shape of the chopper. To make matters worse, there wasn’t any sign of Blair, Ralph, and Maurice either.

“Will, it’s too damn quiet here,” I said.

“Calm after the storm or before it?” Will asked.

“Neither. We’re in the eye of the storm,” I said. “Shift now!”

As both of us shifted swiftly, soldiers emerged from around us, holding riot shields, wielding tazers, and holding guns.

“Hold!” the captain of the soldiers yelled from behind. “Hold!”

We were surrounded, but what the soldiers could not see was that we were standing on a pile of smoke grenades. Will pierced them with his claws, and almost at once, the air filled with dense, impenetrable smoke, making it impossible for anyone to see anything.

Before the smoke engulfed Will and me, I caught a brief glimpse of Blair standing at the edge of the helipad, looking over the development taking place below,

Will, there’s Blair! You have to stop him; I said as the gunfire started roaring around us, as we parted ways and fled for shelter amidst the confusion of bullets, bangs, screams, and smoke.