by Rebekah Blue
Chapter Sixteen
One thing you’ll find plenty of at a carnival is rope. Byron and Gus each sat on a heavy coil of the stuff, which they’d loaded into the back of a gaily-painted wagon that smelled powerfully of horses. Naomi sneezed. She was travelling in the back with Byron, Gus, the heavily muscled dude – whose name turned out to be Anton – and Felix.
Gus and Anton were asleep, unused to having eaten their breakfast in daylight. Anton’s head had fallen sideways onto Gus’s shoulder and he was drooling onto his shirt. Byron and Felix were still bristling and snarling at each other, and not just in the usual dogs-and-cats way, but they’d just have to dial the Alpha shifter testosterone levels back a notch or fifteen. Felix wasn’t just on their side…he was their secret weapon.
The wagon rattled along the road, surrounded by a phalanx of burly men on powerful, purring motorcycles. If anyone tried to intercept the convoy before it got where it was going, they’d have a fight on their hands. Naomi had spoken to a couple of the Road Wolves when they’d roared up to the carnival grounds, and despite their tough swagger and leather-and-grease fashion sense, they were a bunch of really sweet guys. Misfits, sure, and a bit gruff and growly, but sweet. Despite the name, there were all kind of shifters in the group, not just wolves, and even a couple of humans. Apparently species wasn’t as important as the brotherhood.
As they approached the Dynamic Earth Rehabilitation Center, the Road Wolves peeled away one by one, leaving the wagon to drive the last few miles alone – at least to the casual observer. Naomi knew that some of the Wolves were grouped at rest stops, keeping in touch with trucker buddies by CB and monitoring the radio channels used by the police and emergency services. Others ran in the woods beside the road, keeping pace in their animal forms. Nothing and nobody was going to prevent Byron from returning to the Zoo.
When they got there, though… Brute force wasn’t going to help. If their plan was going to work, they needed the element of surprise.
As the last of the Road Wolves peeled away, Felix flipped open a sleek silver cell phone. He hit a sequence of numbers, and when his call went through, he said, “Felix. The job’s done. Yeah, the girl too.” He snapped the phone shut.
“That’s it?” Naomi was surprised. She’d been half expecting code words, or some kind of exchange of random-sounding phrases, like Russian spies in old movies. It seemed like there should have been more drama.
“That’s it,” Felix confirmed. “It’s not a very chatty job. What were you expecting?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t you have to send proof or something?”
Felix gave a brief shout of laughter. “Like a severed ear, maybe? I could slice a few bits off the Big Bad Wolf here, if you like. Who knows? The lopsided look might suit him.”
Byron bristled. “Watch yourself, pussy cat,” he growled, with the emphasis right where it would be the most insulting.
“Guys,” said Naomi, “this is bad enough without you fighting. We’ve got to hold it together if this is going to work.”
“Are you certain about the timing?” Byron asked. “You’re sure he’ll hold a press conference right away? I mean, he’s just been told…” He trailed off. Dr. Atkins had just been told his daughter had been killed in cold blood, on his orders.
“I’m sure,” she said mournfully. “My father’s the ultimate PR machine. A death would only stop him from spinning the situation to Dynamic Earth’s advantage if it was his.”
They parked a little way from the gates, and made their way into the grounds easily enough. The facility housed dangerous criminals, semi-feral shifters, and those whose paranormal powers made them too dangerous to be allowed to go free. The security guards weren’t worried about people getting in – especially since the word had gone out on the grapevine that Byron and Naomi were dead.
Naomi crept close to the window of the family room and saw her father preparing for the press conference. He looked relatively calm and unruffled as he bent his head in quiet conversation with Professor Stanhope. If anything the scientist looked more distressed – like her father, the stress of his work had been affecting him lately, and his hours had been getting longer and longer, but today he looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. She felt a little pang of pain in her heart at the idea that, of the two of them, he might be more distressed about her supposed death.
Dr. Atkins checked his watch and spoke briefly to the gathered journalists, who made last-minute checks of their cameras and microphones.
It was now or never.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” her father began, “thank you for coming. This is an extraordinary situation, and I know the public is anxious for answers. I do have an announcement to make today, and I would appreciate it if you could keep any questions until after I’ve made my statement.”
As the cameras rolled, Felix and Naomi slung coils of rope over their shoulders and started to scale the wall, pushing their fingers into shallow cracks between bricks and clawing their way upwards. For a leopard and a cat, even in human form, it wasn’t much of a challenge.
Gus, Anton and Byron stood below, squinting up against the sunlight as they watched them climb. Dr. Atkins’ voice was clearly audible to shifter hearing.
“I regret to announce that a security operation late last night resulted in the deaths of the man going by the name Byron…and of my daughter, Naomi Atkins.”
Heavy coils of rope tumbled from the roof, unspooling as they fell and hitting the ground with muted thumps. Byron, Anton and Gus hauled themselves up hand over hand.
Standing on the roof, it was possible to look down through the skylight and see a bird’s-eye view of the press conference. Camera flashes stuttered and strobed, and Naomi’s father was sweating in the heat of the lights. From this angle she could see the very faintest glimpse of pink scalp where his glossy, expensively styled hair had begun to thin, and it gave her a tender pang in her heart. It made him look vulnerable, somehow, despite his carefully polished public presence. But this was no time for sentimentality. He certainly wasn’t showing any as he lied through his teeth.
“…attempted to contain the situation…”
Gus and Anton nodded to each other. The skylight was made of reinforced glass in a heavy steel frame. They set their fingers underneath the edges and, muscles straining, heaved.
“…resisted arrest, leading to a violent altercation. Despite medical attention at the scene…”
The skylight began to shift. Mortar drifted down onto the people standing below. It settled on Dr. Atkins’ hair and shoulders like snow. His voice faltered. He looked up.
As Gus and Anton wrenched the square of glass and steel away, Naomi and Byron dropped through the skylight.
Chapter Seventeen
Naomi should probably have said something clever and snappy. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” maybe. Or, “Sorry for dropping in unannounced.” But she just said, “Daddy…”
For a long moment they stared at each other. Naomi could feel the hurt and betrayal brimming in her eyes. Her father looked like he’d seen a ghost, and in a way she supposed he had.
Byron didn’t hesitate, though. He punched Dr. Atkins hard in the face and, as Felix dropped into the room with silent, catlike grace, pushed him into his arms. Anton seized Professor Stanhope from behind in a muscular bear hug and dumped him unceremoniously in the nearest chair, while Gus shot the bolts on the door, to the consternation of the stunned reporters.
A couple of security guards stepped forward, but Magnus, the big bear with the ability to hear the dead, got slowly to his feet. He didn’t threaten, but a low, steady rumble came from his massive chest, and the guards stepped back.
The room fell still.
Then as if a switch had been flipped, the reporters realized their story had suddenly become a hundred times more interesting. A shrill babble of questions was punctuated by camera flashes.
Byron raised his hands, gesturing for quiet, and as the cameras rolle
d the noise abated apart from the occasional shouted question, quickly shushed. When he started to speak, his voice was calm and confident, and Naomi was reminded that he was a showman. Her father wasn’t the only experienced spin-doctor in the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, you have been lied to. Naomi Atkins is alive. I am alive. And we are here to tell you what else the Dynamic Earth Corporation has been lying to you about.”
Dr. Atkins struggled fruitlessly in Felix’s hold. “This is an outrage!” he shouted. “This man is a known criminal!” But he couldn’t fight dirty and he knew it – not if he was to have any chance of coming out of this with his polished, people-person reputation intact. He subsided, but Naomi could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, and she could see something else in his face. Something she’d never seen there before. Uncertainty.
“Fact number one,” said Byron. “In the 1930s the government was conducting research into the creation of super soldiers. Men and women with the strength of a bear, the grace of a big cat, the savagery of a wolf. Activists released the experimental serums into the water supply, and the shifter races were created. As some of you know to your cost, the ability to shift sometimes carries with it other abilities. Pyrokinesis. Clairvoyance. Berserker strength. And we are all at risk of turning feral – of our animal natures taking over.”
“You aren’t telling us anything new,” piped up a reporter in an unconvincing toupee.
“Yeah, this is Shifter Origins for Dummies,” agreed his cameraman.
Dr. Atkins saw an opportunity. “Dynamic Earth is dedicated to addressing those fundamental concerns—” he began, then gave a choked gurgle as Felix tightened his arm around his throat.
“Let the man talk,” the feline assassin said in a low, deadly tone.
“Dynamic Earth is engaged in cutting-edge biomedical research,” said Byron. “That much you know. Clinical trials into microbiology, vaccines, and mapping differences in human and shifter genomes. It has extensively studied the records from the original 1930s trials – what little of them survive. It has recreated at least some of those trials’ results.”
He held his audience spellbound now.
“Decades ago, scientists mixed some amazing things in their test tubes. The ability to shift into a wolf or a cat or a bear. The ability to walk through a hail of bullets, or kill with a thought, or burn out your enemy’s brain. And Dynamic Earth has been replicating those results. Ask yourselves why.
“In its laboratories, it has been creating subjects with the ability to shift into more than one animal. It’s been pumping people full of a serum that mimics berserker strength. How many of you recall the reports in the newspapers of humans killed by berserker bears? Hell, you probably wrote some of them, based on press releases from Dynamic Earth. Did you ever speak to any witnesses? Find medical records or police reports? A few months back, all of a sudden those reports dried up. Find out what changed.”
There was a murmur of interest.
“Doesn’t anyone remember two years ago, when a company called TerraDyne was shut down and its principals prosecuted because it was snatching cubs from families with fire-starting genes? Don’t you know that powerful men always have a fall guy? Some of you must know Latin. Terra. Earth. Dynamic Earth is TerraDyne. It’s the same monster with a different face, and we’re letting it eat people because it has good table manners.”
The murmur had become a hubbub of shouted questions and exclamations of disbelief.
The guy with the toupee raised his voiced above the row. “This can’t be true,” he said plaintively. “They wouldn’t be so stupid as to use the same name. It’s too obvious.”
Naomi stepped forward. Her voice was a little shaky, but that was no bad thing – the reporters had to quieten down in order to hear her.
“It wasn’t stupidity,” she said, the truth suddenly clear. She couldn’t take her eyes off her father. His face was ashen and Felix wasn’t so much restraining him as holding him up. “It was arrogance. He… They don’t think other people are as clever as them. They don’t really think of them as people at all.”
She turned to face her father. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “My father…never really thought of me as a person at all.”
The stunned silence was broken by slow, sarcastic applause. Professor Stanhope had got to his feet.
“Oh, very good. Very dramatic. And so very noble.”
He looked enraged. His cheeks were flushed and his hands were shaking. His breath came with a catch and a wheeze, and out of sheer habit Naomi wanted to ask him if he had his inhaler – he’d always been part of her life, and she could tell when his asthma was bad.
He didn’t reach into his pocket, though, just dragged in a labored breath. Anton stepped up behind him and seized his thin upper arm in one huge fist, but he ignored him as if he wasn’t there, and went on. “The problem with you people is that you’re so small-minded,” he said. “So limited. Your thinking is so mundane.”
He coughed and struggled for breath before continuing. “Yes, my labs have been working to recreate those extraordinary abilities that are so wasted on such ordinary people. Strength… stamina… power… they shouldn’t be under the control of common criminals.” He pointed to Byron. “Half mad animals.” He glanced at Magnus. “Feeble halfwits.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm that encompassed the whole room.
“You don’t deserve it. Do you hear me?” His voice had a tinge of hysteria now. “You don’t deserve it."
He turned swiftly. Naomi saw a sharp silvery flash, and Anton folded up around the blade that had been thrust into his stomach. He coughed and dark blood stained his lips.
Byron gave a heartsick howl and his eyes went wolf.
Felix released Naomi's father and turned as a stun gun crackled and sizzled behind him.
The reporters, panicked, pushed and brawled towards the doors.
And found them locked.
Chapter Eighteen
Byron started across the room towards Professor Stanhope, but when Naomi was grabbed from behind she gave a startled yelp, and he twisted suddenly at the sound.
Stanhope scurried away, pushing a cameraperson to the floor. She fell, tangled in her heavy equipment. A colleague tried to pull her to her feet, and he went over too. Stanhope kicked him in the head as he passed, furious that they were impeding his progress.
Naomi wriggled in Magnus the bear’s protective hold and shouted, “Byron! He’s getting away!”
Stanhope wasn’t fast and he wasn’t strong, but he was vicious. He fought and elbowed his way through the crush, and nobody tried to stop him – they’d seen what he’d done to Anton, who was slumped against the wall, dark blood oozing between his fingers as he clutched his stomach. His eyes were glassy and faraway.
Gus tried to force his way through the mob of panicking people to unlock the doors, but they were too frightened to listen to him. A woman screamed and lashed out at him, and with a flush of shame Naomi remembered her own reaction to Gus’s wolf man appearance when she’d first seen him in the funhouse.
He looked around wildly before fixing on the big picture window. He pushed through the crowd, and hit the reinforced glass with a massive blow. It cracked, but didn’t break.
Naomi tugged on Magnus’s fur, and they headed towards the window, where the enormous bear added his strength to the carnival wolf man’s, and they broke the glass out of its frame in jagged, misshapen chunks.
The two men – one in bear form and one trapped in a shape that was neither human nor animal – began guiding panicked people out through the window. When the reporter with the bad toupee gibbered and tried to scramble away, Gus picked him up and pitched him out bodily. He’d suffer nothing worse than a few bruises and wounded dignity.
Byron had shifted into wolf form and he was fighting alongside a sleek golden cat patterned with inky fingerprints. It must be Felix in his leopard form. The two guards who’d pulled their Tasers were putting up a brave fight
, and for a moment Naomi felt bad for them. Perhaps they hadn’t known what kind of people they were working for. After all, she hadn’t known what her own father was involved in.
But they’d heard the truth, like everyone else, and they’d chosen which side to fight on. One of them thrust his stun gun at Byron, whose fur stood on end, crackling with dancing blue sparks of electricity. But he didn’t go down. He snarled and leapt, and the guard was thrown against the wall, hands palm out, wrists crossed to protect his throat from Byron’s jaws.
Felix swiped at the other man with a huge, velvety paw, shredding his uniform shirt into ribbons.
Finally the door into the rest of the facility was broken open and wardens Jim and Pete ran in, silver handcuffs and firearms at the ready.
“Thank god,” blubbered the guard Byron had backed against the wall.
Jim nodded at the snarling wolf. “Come on, Byron,” he said calmly. “Let me do my job.”
“What are you waiting for? Shoot the fucker in the head,” the other guard yelled, his voice blurred with snot and fear. Then he goggled as Jim wrenched his wrists down and slapped on the cuffs.
“Our job is to take care of the patients,” said Pete. “Maybe you didn’t get that far in the training manual. Jim had the same problem, so he got help with the hard parts.”
“Right,” said Jim. “Pete’s missus is always helping me with my hard parts. Did you know you’ve wet yourself?”
Other guards and wardens flooded in behind them, but before they could do anything to contain the chaos, pulsating red lights splashed the walls with color and a robotic voice shrieked a warning.
Security breach… Lockdown underway… Security breach… Lockdown underway…
The guards turned as the sounds of a brewing riot echoed through the facility. The sound of happy laughter, incongruous against the emergency alarms, rose hysterically and contorted into a shrill scream. Naomi looked around wildly for Professor Stanhope and couldn’t see him.
