At times like this – perhaps only at such times – Liz missed her father. A grumpy old sod, who had never really grown up, but she had no other family. She hadn’t seen him in months, not since they’d had that last bitter argument and major falling-out. He’d been caught smuggling cigarettes into Britain from France, and had asked her to ‘pull some strings’ to get him off. When she refused, he’d tried to put the blame for his problems on her. She’d promised herself she’d never speak to him again, but she regretted that now. She didn’t expect him to change, but if he could just admit he was wrong and apologize …
But that hardly seemed likely. He was a stubborn bastard. She wondered where he was right now, and what he was doing. Out on the road, most likely, although in which country was anyone’s guess.
‘I miss you, Dad,’ she half-whispered to herself, then shook her head incredulously. What was she thinking? The only time she wanted him anywhere near her life was when he was nowhere to be found.
The boy in front of her looked up with a concerned look on his young face. ‘Is problem?’ he asked.
‘Shall we open a box of chocolates?’ she asked him.
Mihai’s eyes went wide as saucers. ‘I like chocolate,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ said Liz. She fetched a box from the kitchen cupboard and let him open them.
‘How many can I have?’ he asked.
‘As many as you like.’
He helped himself to three, then passed the box back to Liz. The smell of the chocolates hit her like a wave of noxious fumes. Suddenly she felt sick. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and rushed to the bathroom. She made it just in time.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Sevenoaks, Kent, England
Kevin Bailey would have liked nothing better than to visit his daughter, Liz, as he passed through London. It was almost Christmas, the season for families to come together. But Kevin’s family was probably too broken even for Christmas to weave its spell.
Liz was the only living relative he had. His own parents were long dead, almost like they’d lived in another age entirely. His wife – Liz’s mum – had taken her own life when Liz was still a teenager. A broken family for certain, and hardly anything left of it now except ruins. Liz was probably still mad at him after his last visit. He’d behaved badly, even worse than usual, and her expectations of him had already been low. It would probably be better if he kept his distance.
He signalled to pull his truck over into the next layby. He’d set off that morning from Nantes in France, stopping briefly en route for his mandatory break time and to pick up some illegal immigrants, and he was tired and fed up. He hadn’t quite reached London, but this would have to do. He was only a few miles short of where he’d agreed to stop.
There’d been a hell of a row coming from the back of his trailer earlier. Screams and shouts, and who knows what. These asylum seekers were like bloody animals. He’d gladly keep them on the other side of the English Channel, but they paid good money to come across. A grand each. It was as much as he earned in a whole month. How a homeless refugee got his hands on a thousand quid was none of his business. They could sell their own grandmothers for all he cared.
Two Afghans and a Syrian this time. They’d already told him too much, telling him that. They were cargo. He didn’t want to hear their sob stories. Just pay the money and he’d get them from Calais to London. Or thereabouts.
He parked the truck by the roadside and checked his mirrors for traffic. It was pretty quiet now that he’d pulled off the motorway. At this time of night all the London commuters had already driven home, and only a few other long-distance drivers still cruised through the night, making the most of the quiet road conditions. It may be the night before Christmas Eve, but freight didn’t stop just because of that. Kevin would be out on the road on Christmas Day itself. There was nowhere else for him to go.
He jumped out of the cab and walked round to the back of the trailer, listening for sounds coming from inside the shipping container. All quiet now. They’d finished their bawling, thank God.
He opened up the doors at the back of the container and shone a light inside. ‘Oi, you can come out now,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve arrived.’
Silence. Had the buggers gone to sleep? He needed to get some kip himself. ‘Oi! I said, come out!’
He heard the growl before he saw anything move. A sound like a wild animal or a dog. Then a flash as a man leapt out of the darkness straight for him. Kevin dodged aside as the man jumped out of the truck, just missing his head. Kevin had been a minor boxing champ in his youth, and he still knew how to move. And just like his daughter, if he lacked for height, he made up for it with ferocity. He landed a hard punch on the man’s back as he flew past, and swivelled to face him.
The man landed on the ground and rolled. Now he crouched on all fours, snarling like a lunatic. Kevin didn’t wait for the man to attack. He lashed out with his foot, catching the man in the jaw. A loud crack was his reward.
The man wailed in pain, blood spilling from his mouth, and lurched toward Kevin, scrabbling at him with his long fingernails. Kevin dodged again and delivered another punch to the man’s head. This time the bastard went down and didn’t get up. Kevin kicked him, but he was out cold.
‘All right, you can come out now,’ Kevin shouted into the back of the container. The only response was the echo of his own voice.
The man who’d attacked him was the Syrian. Maybe he’d had some kind of row with the two Afghans. It had been a mistake to put them in the truck together. You never knew if these foreigners might end up fighting each other. They were probably hiding at the back now, too scared to move. He hauled himself up into the container and shone his light into its dark depths.
The container was piled high with crates of aircraft parts or something. At least that’s what the documentation had said. Kevin really didn’t care what was inside. He stepped along the narrow space by the edge of the wooden crates, holding the flashlight out in front. The bright light cast wavering shadows against the metal walls of the container as he moved.
He slapped the palm of his hand against the metal and shouted again. Still nothing.
He rounded the last of the stacked crates and shone the flashlight into the back corner of the container. ‘Bugger me with a barge pole,’ he said. The Afghans were there all right, at least what was left of them. Arms and legs and other spare body parts lay strewn over the crates in a pool of blood. He leaned closer and shone the light to get a better look. Bite marks and scratches covered the dismembered corpses.
Kevin wasn’t too fussed by all that. His old dad had been a butcher and Kevin had lived above the shop. He’d seen more gore than most people had inside them. People, animals, they all looked the same from the inside. But what the hell had led the Syrian to do such a thing? Bat-shit crazy, obviously. They said that war did strange things to a man. It didn’t get much stranger than this.
The only problem now was what to do with the bodies.
A creak alerted him to danger. He turned quickly and saw the man coming for him again. He raised his arms, but this time the man was too quick.
The Syrian grabbed him by the collar and hurled him against the metal wall with a fierce strength. Kevin fell to the floor, winded by the impact. The flashlight flew from his hand and spun away along the floor to cast wild shadows from behind a crate. He looked up and saw the man’s foot coming toward him in a kick. Kevin twisted sideways, grabbing at the man’s ankle, and brought him down with a crash.
He was back on his knees when the man came for him again, grasping with his claw-like fingers. Kevin gave him a swift uppercut to the jaw, followed by a jab to the man’s cheek. The Syrian snarled, scrabbling at Kevin’s chest and upper arms, and tearing off a strip of his shirt. Kevin head-butted the man on the bridge of the nose and stood up, facing his opponent head on. He struck him again, this time a double-fisted punch in the middle of the chest.
The man fell backward and hit the side of his head
against a crate.
Kevin watched him writhe on the floor for a moment, then stomped his foot down on the man’s chest.
It ought to have been the coup-de-grace, and would have finished off any normal attacker, but the Syrian grabbed hold of Kevin’s boot and flipped him off-balance. Kevin fell hard, splitting the side of a crate, and landing on his back on top of the dead Afghans. Wet sounds accompanied him as he struggled to right himself, and he slipped on the bloody mess.
The Syrian sprang forward and landed on top of him with all fours. He was attacking like a beast now, scratching and kneeing, snarling and spitting. The man’s bloodshot eyes stared wildly and his forehead was slick with sweat, his matted hair sticking to his skin.
Kevin tried to push him off, but the floor was too slippery. The blood of the dead men completely covered his hands.
The Syrian opened his mouth and forced his jaws down toward Kevin’s neck. He was strong, surprisingly so, and Kevin couldn’t push him away. The sharp teeth drew closer to Kevin’s exposed skin.
So the man was a biter. But Kevin had seen worse than that in his time, and he knew how to fight dirty too. He kneed the man in the groin and followed up with a quick eye gouge.
The man howled and released his grip just long enough for Kevin to roll him over and get back on top. Grabbing the man by the collar he head-butted him again, then finished off with a rabbit punch, pinning the man’s head to the floor with his left hand, and chopping his neck at the base of the skull with the side of his right. He felt something snap under the force.
The Syrian’s body went limp, his eyes still open but now sightless. His face was bathed in blood, and his head lolled loosely where Kevin had struck him.
Kevin breathed hard, sitting astride the man’s chest in case he moved again. When he had regained his breath, he held his fingers to the man’s neck, pressing into the soft spot beside the windpipe. Nothing. He counted to thirty. Still nothing.
Damn and bugger, the man was dead.
All three of his human cargo were dead.
Kevin got back to his feet. He stared in shock at the scene of carnage before him. What the hell was he going to do now? He could hardly drop off his delivery and hope that no one would notice. Phoning the police didn’t seem like a good move either. He’d have a hard job explaining why he had three illegal immigrants in the back of his container, and an even harder one explaining why they were now in pieces.
He could think of only one good option.
Torch the vehicle. Get rid of the evidence. And if he was going to do that, he needed to do it before anyone stopped to see what he was up to.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Department of Genetics, Imperial College, Kensington, London, Christmas Eve
Early on Christmas Eve morning, the lab was empty of both students and staff, but Leanna worked on tirelessly. She’d always been a hard worker, even as a mere human, and lycanthropy had given her almost unlimited endurance.
She studied the image on the scanning electron microscope. One of her own chromosomes was magnified nearly a billion times, certain areas marked in red to highlight the changes to the DNA that had occurred since she had become lycanthropic.
DNA – it was the basis of all life on Earth, a self-replicating nano-scale machine, at once beautifully simple and astonishingly complex. Two polymer strands coiled around each other in the famous double helix form. The spirals were mirrors of each other, ready to divide and create identical copies of the original molecule in a continuous dance that ended only at the moment of death. Each strand was a chain of just four types of base units, and yet with a human chromosome containing approximately three billion base pairs, the number of possible combinations was unimaginably vast. You could hardly design a more exquisite means of encoding information at the molecular level.
Her studies had already isolated the genes that were alien to her original human specification, that were wolf in origin. How wolf genes had mingled with human chromosomes was a mystery lost in the mists of time when early humans and proto-wolves had collided on the Eurasian plains and mountains, countless millennia ago. Maybe it pre-dated even that, originating in some shared ancestry millions of years before the first humans walked in Africa. Leanna had no way of knowing. All she could hope for was to understand the mechanism by which wolf genes passed from one host to another.
Professor Wiseman had uncovered much of the basics of how the condition spread, but there was still a lot to learn. Wiseman had discovered that a virus was responsible for transmitting the wolf genes from one host to another, and Leanna had identified the virus as one that occurred naturally in wolves.
Viruses were broken relics of the molecular world, unable to reproduce on their own. But they were capable of hijacking the cells of their host, tricking them into becoming lethal chemical factories that replicated the virus. But here was the twist. Lycanthropy had reversed this process, enslaving the virus for its own ends, replacing its DNA with wolf genes, and transforming the virus and its molecular machinery into a means of spreading wolf DNA from one host to another. It was a fascinating topic to study, and she was just scratching the surface.
The structure of the virus was even more complicated than HIV and had a capacity to mutate rapidly. It would be almost impossible to find a cure even if she had wanted to. The DNA payload it carried varied enormously too. Every person infected would receive a different set of genes, and acquire different unique abilities.
Not everyone would survive the transition from human to superhuman. Only the strong would live. But filtering out the weak was all part of the process. Evolution always worked to eliminate weakness, but Leanna’s work would accelerate the process a hundred-fold.
Leanna had never doubted her own strength. Her first trial had been as a baby, when a bout of bacterial meningitis had threatened her life. The disease killed more children under the age of five than any other infectious disease in the UK. Many of those who survived were left with severe brain damage or loss of limbs. But Leanna had been strong. She had survived unharmed.
She had survived the onset of lycanthropy too. Many would not, but their deaths would leave the human race stronger and better able to survive and thrive. Everyone had a part to play in Leanna’s grand plan, and for some their contribution would be to die.
The new genes would be Leanna’s gift to the world. She would free humanity from weakness, and replace it with strength, endurance and beauty. And so what better time to work alone in the lab than on the day before Christmas? The season was the time for giving.
Chapter Fifty
J.D.’s Cafe, A312, South West London, Christmas Eve
Kevin Bailey tucked into his steak and kidney pie with relish. Not many places served offal these days, but this greasy-spoon cafe off the A312 cooked it just the way he liked it – the way his mum had done when he was a boy. Happy days, but they were all gone now. Gone far, far away. Life had got worse since Kevin was a boy, a whole lot worse, and just kept lurching downhill. But at least there was still steak and kidney pie to look forward to once in a while.
He’d hitched a lift here with a passing trucker, and that had been an awkward journey if ever there was one. ‘I just passed a burned-out trailer by the roadside,’ the guy had told him. ‘Not yours, was it?’ Kevin had said nothing to that. The dark red blood stains all over his jacket had been a talking point too. ‘How did that happen?’ the trucker had asked nervously.
‘Cut myself shaving,’ Kevin had told him, treating the man to a cold, dead stare that had kept him quiet for the rest of the trip. Kevin had felt bad about that. The man had just been doing him a favour after all. He hadn’t deserved the psycho treatment. But when had life ever given anyone what they deserved?
Now that he was alone, he was thinking through his next move. The way it looked to him, there weren’t many choices on offer, and none of them held much appeal.
He could have kicked himself in frustration. Running from the scene of a triple murder had
been the stupidest idea ever. Torching the vehicle even worse. He might as well have left a note for the police saying, Call me, I’m guilty. Now his options were very limited indeed.
He could keep running, heading west out of London, hoping for something to turn up. Or he could turn around and try to get out of the country before the border police got wind of him. But did he really want to spend the rest of his life abroad? He’d never get to see his daughter again if he chose that option. No, he would stay in England, whether it was on the run or in prison.
His best option, though he was loathe to admit it, would be to call on Liz and throw himself on her mercy. Liz always knew what to do. He would tell her what he’d done, endure another lecture about how unbelievably stupid he’d been, and then ask her to decide what to do. If she turned him over to the authorities, so be it. He would face his punishment with dignity.
He crammed the last of the pie and chips into his mouth, mopping up the gravy with a slice of bread, and headed outside into the rain. This cafe served food to a lot of truckers and he might find someone who would drop him off near Liz’s place. As long as his serial killer looks didn’t frighten them all away.
No matter. He would walk if he had to. The rain didn’t bother him. It would help to wash the blood from his clothes.
Chapter Fifty-One
Brookfield Road, Brixton Hill, South London, Christmas Eve
It was pitch dark when the alarm went off. It always was, in the winter. Liz groaned, hit the snooze button and rolled over. She’d felt a little better after throwing up the previous evening, but then she’d woken in the middle of the night with a fever and had hardly slept since. No amount of painkillers seemed to make any difference. Her limbs ached right to her very bones. Sweat bathed her bedclothes, and she could no longer tell whether she was too hot or too cold. She listened to the gurgling and creaking sounds of the central heating swinging into action and wondered what to do.
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