The Hybrid Series | Book 1 | Hybrid

by Stead, Nick

  Our game of cricket had been all but forgotten whilst we watched.

  We hit the arcades after dinner. I went up against David on one of the fighting games, the only real male best mate I had. Our friendship stretched back right to the beginning of primary school, and this was but one of many virtual bouts we’d competed in, both evenly matched. That day I was winning.

  He swore furiously as I knocked his character to the ground and proceeded to beat him to a pulp, smashing the buttons in a desperate attempt to get back up and give as good as he was getting. A bead of sweat rolled down from under his light brown hair, which he wiped away before it could trickle into his blue eyes. His hair was trimmed short but not shaved like mine. We were of a similar build and in a real fight we would probably have been fairly evenly matched too, though I think he was maybe a little stronger, while I was definitely the faster. He was probably fitter as well with his love of football, something I just never got into. I did have a kick about with him from time to time but I’d never found any real passion in it.

  On the machine next to us, Fiona and Lizzy jumped around on the dance mat. Lizzy would have been equally as happy on the fighting game with me, or shooting down enemies of some description, or racing, but the dance mat was Fiona’s favourite. She wasn’t really a gamer like the rest of us. Her dark hair was bouncing up and down as she switched from arrow to arrow with an agility Lizzy lacked, the game awarding her A grade after A grade, regardless of the song.

  Of the girls in the group, she was definitely the fittest, partly because she did gymnastics and dance. It was easy to see why David fancied her. That nicely toned body was the kind any straight guy lusted after, and her skin was a lustrous shade of golden brown, as if she had a permanent tan. I noticed him watching her while we waited for our next game to load, all but drooling. Unfortunately for him, her heart was currently owned by a guy who’d been in the year above us, until finishing school and moving on to college. She had eyes for no one else.

  Fiona scored highest on most of the dances they did but Lizzy just managed to beat her on the odd song, with more exclamations of “Yay me!” each time. It had been her saying for as long as I’d known her.

  “Well that showed me,” Fiona said after Lizzy’s latest win. “Nice one, Lizzy! I guess I’m going to have to get more practice in before we play that song again.”

  Ava and Becci were to my left, shooting down zombies. They each wore looks of deep concentration on their faces.

  “Son of a bitch!” Becci swore as her character went down and the continue screen came up. “And I’m out of change, fuck’s sake.”

  “It’s time for the film anyway,” I said, glancing at my watch. “We don’t want to miss the start. Come on!”

  We bought our tickets and ordered popcorn, then headed into the cinema and ran straight to the back row.

  I ended up between Lizzy and Fiona. David had made sure he was sat on the other side of his crush so he could comfort her, and I found myself feeling a bit sorry for him. It seemed like some cruel twist of fate that the one girl he’d really fallen for was already in love with someone else, which was exactly why I’d never had any interest in relationships. Sex was all I wanted.

  “Food fight!” Becci screeched without warning.

  Popcorn started flying from all directions. There was barely any left to eat when Ava called a truce.

  “Come on, guys, we can’t let all this popcorn go to waste.” She grabbed a handful to stuff into her mouth. “I want some to enjoy with the movie.”

  “Here, you can have mine,” Becci said.

  Our battle over, we chatted more about what we’d done during the holidays. It was only when a bald man in front turned round to glare at us that we fell quiet, mainly because of the muscles rippling beneath his shirt. Apart from him, the cinema was all but deserted.

  The film itself was great once it got going. It was well written with a decent plot, and awesome visual effects. But what really made it for me were the werewolves. They were half men, half wolf creatures, resembling everything I thought a werewolf should be and more. Not like the kind of lycanthropes that barely changed, or wereapes as I liked to call them. Anything that was little more than a hairy man with a slightly bestial face was a disappointment, and if they didn’t meet my expectations it often ruined what would otherwise have been a good movie for me. But for once I was treated to everything I wanted to see, including some great blood and gore effects. It was one of those rare films that I found so good it filled me with an excitement, almost sexual in its intensity. I felt so alive in the cinema that night.

  The others were enjoying the film on some lesser, more normal level. Had we known what was soon to come, we may well have been screaming like the characters on screen. But even if a psychic had told us our future, we wouldn’t have believed it. My life as a care-free, mostly average teenager was about to come to a brutal end.

  How I long to go back and change the path fate was about to set me on. But of course these are only memories, and no matter how completely I might lose myself in the telling of them to you, I am powerless to change my past.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My Entrance into Lycanthropy

  We emerged from the cinema to find the world in shadow, the sun having long since set as we whiled away the hours in Leisure X. It was a mild, dark night and a full moon hung overhead like a dead eye, the only light save for a few street lamps. I remember it well. There was a cool breeze, so I put on my jacket as I stared up at the glowing white orb.

  Clouds suspended it like the muscles of some great face as it held me transfixed in its blind, milky gaze. That feeling the movie had filled me with intensified and I felt more alive than ever. Some part of me was vaguely aware of the others talking but I was so caught in the lunar spell that I wasn’t following the conversation, until one of them placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “What?” I said, flinching at the touch. Seconds later the moon slid behind a wispy eyelid, throwing the world further into darkness and breaking the spell. I turned my attention back down to earth, but my heart continued its excited drumming.

  “Hey, are you okay, man?” David asked.

  My friends were all looking at me with worry.

  “Yeah I’m fine, just thinking I guess. So a full moon, huh? Coincidence or what? That werewolf could be waiting for us just round the corner. If we’re lucky it’ll kill us before it rips us apart, or if we’re even luckier it might turn us!”

  “Give it a rest, Nick,” Ava replied, ever the scientist. “Werewolves aren’t real. The only thing we have to fear is lunatics who think they’re wolves, and since you used to do taekwondo there isn’t much harm they could do.”

  Despite the strangeness surrounding her family, she was in the top class for nearly every subject and she did have a real passion for science. As we neared adulthood and were encouraged to think on what career paths we wanted to follow, she had set her sights on becoming an astronomer – space had always fascinated her.

  “Why would anyone want that?” Fiona asked with a shudder. “Why would you want to turn into a man-eating monster?”

  Why? Good question. I never really knew why. It was the actual ability to gain the more powerful wolf form I wanted, to become a wolf or at least a wolf-man creature, not the death that always came with it in the movies. With that power I could deal with the bullies that had taunted me for so long for a start. But why a werewolf specifically and not some other supernatural creature, or a comic book hero like most guys, I had no idea. To Fiona, I just shrugged. “We all have our dreams.”

  “Come on, before he starts howling,” David said, throwing an arm around her. She shook him off and moved over to Lizzy. Undeterred, he fell into step beside her as we started for home.

  “I feel like howling right now. Weren’t the werewolves great? Not like all these crap, hairy men with fangs that some directors are so fond of. I mean, they could make them more wolf-like! The ones in this film were perfect.”


  “Nick, werewolves are just myths and legends. Call them what you will but the fact is, they aren’t real, so no one knows what they look like. You could be called a werewolf,” argued Ava.

  “I wish,” I muttered. “Legend has it that they’re humans who turn into wolves, so in the films they should use real wolves! Or at least make them look wolfish, like we just saw.”

  “It is hard to get real wolves to act like humans though,” Lizzy said.

  “Ah, but that’s the point. Legend also has it that their minds become wolfish as well as their bodies so they act like wolves! All they’ve gotta do is film a wolf hunting, but use a computer or something to make it look like they’re hunting humans. That’s why, in most stories, the werewolf wakes up the next day with no memory of what they did after shifting, because they weren’t in control.”

  “Whatever,” Ava answered, looking away.

  The conversation turned once again to Becci’s favourite subject, namely: sex.

  Somehow the subject of whether I was a virgin or not came up.

  “You’ve never even had a girlfriend!” Becci said, her face caught somewhere between amusement and disbelief.

  “So? That doesn’t make me a virgin,” I retorted.

  David laughed. “Yeah, Becci, you should know him well enough by now. He doesn’t do relationships! Heartless, aren’t you, mate? You wouldn’t know love if it punched you in the face.”

  “Aye,” I agreed with a grin, taking it as a compliment. I dreamt of being famous one day, for what I didn’t know, but it would be something to do with horror, so that’s how I wanted the public to see me: heartless, with a twisted sense of humour. Sometimes, if I was feeling really big-headed, I would fantasise I could change the world, though for better or worse I didn’t know. “It’s true, I never felt nothing for no one, not in that way. Besides, why bother with a relationship? Do or say whatever it takes to get ’em into bed and move onto the next one.”

  Becci snorted. “I’m still not convinced. If you ever feel like finding out what you’re missing, you know where I am.” She gave me a wink.

  “What about your boyfriend?”

  “Oh, what Gavin doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  We were all laughing then. My playful side took over and I started a game of darting behind the girls, attempting to make them jump. It didn’t work, but I kept on trying anyway until Lizzy said “Will you quit fooling?”

  I stuck my tongue out and laughed again.

  Without the moon or any artificial lights on this stretch of road, our surroundings were barely visible, and I found myself wondering if the myths about werewolves could really be true. I wanted more than ever to believe they were, young fool that I was.

  The eerie feeling that someone or something was behind us cut through my thoughts. I froze and turned around. There was nothing there. I turned back to see my friends had come to a stop, questioning looks on each of their faces. I told them to look around. Nothing. Not surprisingly, they thought I was making it up and rolled their eyes, carrying on walking. I followed, uneasy.

  A man appeared, out of nowhere. The cloudy eyelids parted to reveal a sliver of the pale orb they’d shut out and a beam of moonlight fell on the stranger, revealing a mess of black hair and ill-fitting clothes. His head was down and he was groaning in agony.

  “Hey, shouldn’t we see if we can help?” Fiona asked as he ran past us.

  I shook my head, trusting my instincts. “Some things are best left alone.”

  She paused a moment, her eyes still fixed in the direction he’d gone, and I thought she would argue. But then she shrugged and continued on with the rest of us. The stranger was soon forgotten in the midst of our idle chatter. He’d probably just been suffering with a bad stomach ache; nothing weird about that.

  We crossed the road and rounded the corner onto a new street, the laughter dying in our throats as we came to another stop. This time there was something waiting in the darkness at the end of the road.

  “What is that?” Lizzy whispered.

  No one answered. It was too dark to make out what it was exactly, but we could see its two eyes, and it was almost as if we’d been caught in their burning ferocity. There was such hunger in that gaze. They told enough about the creature to know that we were in trouble. But they told me something else, something my friends wouldn’t know. Except it couldn’t be. Not here. Not in England. And yet it was.

  The night’s great eye opened once more and the street was bathed in moonlight, making the creature’s eyes glow with an unnatural menace and revealing its identity to the others.

  A huge wolf blocked our path. From its size I guessed it was a grey wolf, or a timber wolf if you’d prefer, though this one had black fur rather than grey. Canis Lupus. I assumed he was male since he was so big and muscular, though not freakishly so.

  “Erm, Nick, what do we do?” Fiona asked, voice trembling.

  I gawped at her for a moment, my brain still reeling at the wolf’s very presence. There’d been no mistaking those eyes, not after all the books I’d read and the pictures I’d looked at over the years. Of course my friends were looking to me for what to do, since I was supposed to be the expert. But the last wild wolf to prowl the British countryside had been shot centuries ago. What was one doing in the town centre, of all places?

  “Come on, mate, do we run or what?” David asked.

  “No!” I replied, snapping out of it. “No, if we run he’s only gonna give chase. Erm, maybe back away slowly.”

  “Maybe?” David snorted. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  I glared at him and he refrained from making any more unhelpful comments. They all followed my suggestion, our gazes fixed on the wolf, waiting to see what he would do.

  At first I thought it was working. The wolf just stood there, hulking and impressive in the moonlit street. But before we could turn back round the corner, he charged us.

  “Oh shit, run!” I yelled.

  The others didn’t need telling twice. We broke into a sprint, desperate to escape the predator that had decided we were prey. And yet no ordinary wolf would attack a human. I had to assume he was either rabid or weakened in some way which prevented him from hunting his natural prey. Weakened enough that he had been forced to turn to a much slower animal, one that made for an easier kill. I hoped for the latter explanation. If he was rabid one bite would kill us, not to mention he would easily run us down. If he had been weakened we might actually stand a chance of escaping.

  It didn’t take long for me to pull ahead of my mates, pushing my body to its limits. Ava was the slowest but it was Becci who was stupid enough to turn round, wanting to know if the wolf was closing in. She didn’t see the lamp post until it was too late and she crashed into it with a startled cry.

  Realising what had happened, I swore and turned back to see her lying in a crumpled heap on the concrete, staring at the oncoming danger in a kind of horror filled daze. I couldn’t just leave her there for the wolf to feed on.

  Lizzy followed me without a word. The others never even slowed down.

  I pushed myself harder than ever but I knew I was never going to make it back to Becci in time. The wolf was just too fast – he would be on her in seconds. Becci seemed to have recovered enough to realise what was happening, her screams a dinner bell no predator could resist. Yet the wolf kept on going. He was coming for me!

  “Bollocks!” I shouted, skidding to a stop. I might have been willing to risk my life crossing the road, thinking I didn’t fear death. But when it came right down to it, I was terrified. In that instant I didn’t want to die, not yet.

  As soon as the wolf was past her, Becci managed to pull herself up and run in the opposite direction, leaving me to my fate. But Lizzy wouldn’t leave me.

  She desperately cast around for something to defend ourselves with. There wasn’t much on the ground, just a few small stones. Grabbing one, she threw it at the wolf as hard as she could. The beast barely even flinched, n
ever once wavering from his chosen target. And then he was on me.

  I threw an arm out to protect myself, feeling the power in the wolf’s jaws as he grabbed hold. But his teeth didn’t sink as deep as I expected. It was almost like he was being careful with me.

  My jacket sleeve ripped but his fangs barely raked the skin underneath. I fought free of the garment and let him have it, hoping it’d distract him long enough for me to escape. The material hung limp and lifeless in his jaws for a moment, like the carcass of some small animal. Then he dropped it and launched another attack, leaping and knocking me to the concrete. Something in my chest throbbed.

  I brought my arms up in an attempt to keep his jaws away from my throat, or I knew it would all be over. More pain erupted along the now exposed flesh and blood gushed out, my strength ebbing with it. I strained against him with everything I had but it wasn’t enough. His jaws were drawing closer and closer to my throat until his fangs pierced my skin, even with my hands being in the way. I let go and tried hitting him instead. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Run, Lizzy, there’s nothing you can do!” I managed. I guess it’s true what they say, you find out who your real friends are in these situations. She alone had tried to save me. But it didn’t look like I was getting out of this alive and there was no sense for both of us to die.

  My fear faded and I felt a strange calm. No matter what awaited me on my final journey, be it some form of afterlife, reincarnation or oblivion, I would accept my fate.

  I closed my eyes and waited for the end. The pain in my neck soared to new heights, but then I felt the fangs slide back out and the wolf rose off me with a yelp.