Project: Wolf World

by Tommy Donbavand

  WAAAAAAH!

  A loud, pulsing siren rang out and the bakery’s staff and customers looked around in concern. “This is NOT a drill!” I yelled. “Please evacuate the building immediately!”

  People began to rush out of the main entrance as Clang was coming in. The sight of a walking, talking piece of terracotta only gave them an extra reason to get out as quickly as they could. Soon, the place was empty, save for Fangs, Clang and me.

  Clang spotted us and grinned. The good news was he had left his wooden stakes behind. The bad news was that he had snapped the pole off a sign post.

  Fangs walked towards him bravely, despite his lack of weapon. “If it isn’t the hollow henchman,” he snarled. “Take a bit of advice from me – don’t try to think on an empty head. The echo might scare you.”

  With a roar, Clang raised the pole and rushed at my boss. Fangs leapt out of the way at the last moment and the pole smashed through a counter stacked with cupcakes. Quick as a flash, Clang pulled the pole free and swung it sideways. He missed my boss by centimetres and destroyed a display case of pastries.

  Fangs ran at Clang, knocking him into a cream tart and sending it to the floor with a SPLAT!

  I pulled Fangs to his feet and dragged him through a doorway into the kitchen. After a snarl, Clang followed us.

  My boss needed a weapon – but all I could find was a large wooden mixing spoon. It would have to do. I tossed it at my boss. “Catch!”

  Fangs caught the spoon, just as Clang swung the pole around again. Somehow, Fangs managed to deflect the henchman’s blow, while knocking the furious golem off balance at the same time.

  Sensing that he now had the advantage, Fangs lunged at Clang with the spoon once … twice … three times. Each time the henchman managed to duck out of the way just in time. As my boss stepped in for a fourth time, Clang pressed his pole against my boss’s chest and pushed as hard as he could. Luckily, the end wasn’t sharp enough to pierce Fangs’s skin, but he did fall backwards into a wedding cake. He slumped to the floor, covered in cream.

  With the pole above his head, Clang gave a furious yell and lunged at my boss. Fangs raised his legs in the air. He waited until Clang’s stomach was pressed against his feet, and then he thrust back with all his might.

  Clang was thrown backwards through the air. He smashed into an open fridge that was packed with eggs and exploded into a thousand pieces.

  I ran over to Fangs, my feet squelching and slipping on the ruined cakes. “Are you OK, boss?” I asked, helping him to stand.

  “I’m eggs-cellent,” he said, grabbing a cloth to wipe cream from his sunglasses. “But he took some beating!”

  Thursday 2141 hours: 80 Via Francesco Cilea, Naples, Italy

  We parked the motorbike and sidecar a few blocks away from the house Cube had identified as Claw’s. As I unfastened my seatbelt, I noticed that Fangs was examining a handful of rolled-up pieces of paper. “What are they?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Fangs admitted. “I found them among the broken bits of Clang.”

  “They’re scrolls,” I said, taking a closer look. “It’s how golems work. Whoever wants to control the golem just has to write down what they want it to do on one of these scrolls and pop it in the creature’s mouth.”

  “That’s what I call cheap labour,” said Fangs.

  I took a couple of the scrolls from Fangs and unrolled them. “‘Kill Fangs Enigma, but bring me the werewolf alive,’” I read on one.

  Fangs took that scroll back and tore it up. “I don’t want anyone to accidentally swallow that one again.”

  “Why would Claw want to keep me alive?”

  Fangs shrugged. “Maybe he’s got a crush on you?”

  “Trust me,” I said, “The feeling is far from mutual.”

  Number 80, Via Francesco Cilea was a huge, gothic mansion with arched windows. We skirted around to the back, where I slipped a claw into the lock of one of the ground floor windows and twisted. There was a faint CLICK!, and I slid the window upwards.

  We climbed inside. The house was silent. We crept from room to room, expecting to bump into Claw or one of his cronies at any second – but they were nowhere to be seen. We headed upstairs and into one of the bedrooms. Purple curtains ran along one wall, and in the centre of the room was a bed. A figure was lying beneath the duvet.

  “Well, well,” whispered Fangs. “Who’s been sleeping in this bed?”

  “Could it be Lucien Claw?” I asked.

  “Only one way to find out.” Fangs whipped back the duvet. “Wakey wakey, Claw, old chap! Time to greet the—”

  But it wasn’t Claw. It was a woman. There was something about her eyes that gave her identity away. This was the female werewolf we’d seen in the video – now back in human form. “Now there’s a sight to wake up to,” she said. She sat up and kissed Fangs on the lips.

  Fangs staggered backwards, his fingers rubbing at his mouth. He’d kissed a lot of girls in the time we’d been working together, but I’d never seen a kiss have an effect on him like that.

  The woman climbed out of the bed. “My name is Scarlet Canis. I’m Lucien’s business partner. You may recognize me from our video chat.”

  “Enigma,” Fangs replied. “F-Fangs Enigma.” He shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it. “We came here looking for Claw.”

  “He had to nip out,” said Scarlet. “We knew it wouldn’t take Professor Cubit long to track us down, but we were expecting you tomorrow.” She yawned and made her way to a small bar in the corner of the room and began to pour out a glass of milk. “Just as you like it, I believe – with a drop of human blood.”

  “Thank you,” said Fangs with a smile. He seemed to be more like himself again. “What time are you expecting Claw back?”

  “He didn’t say,” said Scarlet, handing over Fangs’s drink. “But you’re welcome to wait. I’m sure I will be able to answer your questions. And I’m friendlier.”

  She kissed him again – causing Fangs to stagger once more. Milk slopped over the edge of his glass. Either this woman was the best kisser in the world, or there was something more sinister going on.

  “Are you all right, boss?” I asked, hurrying over.

  “He’ll be fine,” said a familiar voice.

  Lucien Claw!

  I spun round, expecting to find a werewolf standing behind us but, instead, it was a smartly dressed man with a goatee beard. This was Claw in his human form!

  “Miss Canis seems to have this effect on men.”

  The woman smiled and began to reapply her blood-red lipstick.

  “Where’s s’other werewolvesss?” Fangs slurred. “There wasss sssome others here.”

  Now I really was concerned. Fangs seemed to be having difficulty focusing on Claw.

  “I’ll take that drink, boss,” I said. “I think it may be drugged.”

  “How dare you, Miss Brown,” Claw scolded. “I would never drug the drink of a guest!”

  “Then answer his question,” I said. “Where’s the rest of your little gang? The two bald wolves?”

  “They’re in London.” Scarlet Canis smiled. “Giving away our special ice cream – ice cream tainted with werewolf DNA.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this. “Werewolf DNA?”

  “Indeed,” said Claw. “Our fellow wolves have been shaving off their fur so that it can be chopped into fine dust. This is then mixed with ice cream and devoured by gullible humans.”

  Scarlet Canis produced a small remote control from her pocket and pressed a button. A pair of curtains drew back to reveal a bank of TV screens. One by one, they flickered into life to show live feeds from CCTV cameras all over London. It was already night-time there.

  “Some of the more susceptible people began to howl right away,” she said. “Others required an extra dose. It’s been such a lovely hot couple of days in London and our friends decided to give away lots of free ice cream…”

  I remembered the van parked outside Westminster Abbey
yesterday. No wonder the queue was so long! And here we were, in Naples, while the British public was being poisoned! I didn’t want to let on to Claw and Canis that I was concerned, though, so I faked a yawn. “Are we going to watch more people howling?” I asked. “I hate repeats.”

  “Not exactly,” Claw said. He pointed to a camera which showed the half moon above the River Thames. “I advise you to keep an eye on the sky…”

  Then something impossible happened. At least, I thought it was impossible. Scarlet pressed another button and the moon exploded with light. I was forced to cover my eyes to avoid being blinded and, when I looked back again, the moon was full!

  I raised my paws up in front of my face, expecting my own transformation to have been triggered – but nothing happened. I ran to the window and stared up at the night sky. A quarter moon still hung over Naples – but in London, it was full.

  “Impossible!” I gasped, turning back to the screens. “You can’t change the shape of the moon, and you certainly can’t do it over just one city.”

  “Oh, but we can.” Lucien smirked. “And it appears to be having quite an effect…”

  On the TV screens, people were falling over in the street, clearly in agony. Men in business suits, taxi drivers, tourists – they were all transforming into werewolves. They writhed in pain as their limbs bent, their backs twisted and their noses stretched into snouts. The lack of audio only made their silent screams more distressing.

  “Enjoying the show?” Scarlet asked.

  I watched in horror as, one by one, these people sprouted fur and fangs and claws. Within minutes, the humans had gone. The streets of the capital were now populated entirely by werewolves! They raised their heads to howl at the full moon.

  “I have the technology to redirect the sun’s rays directly onto the moon, day or night,” Lucien Claw boasted. “What’s more, we can pinpoint the light of the full moon onto a single street, a whole city or even an entire continent! The vampires won’t stand a chance against so many werewolves.”

  I turned away from the screens. “It’s horrible! Stop it!”

  “Ssssssstop it!” Fangs slurred.

  Claw sighed. “Miss Canis, if you would be so kind…”

  Scarlet Canis grabbed Fangs by the collar and then spun him round. She kissed him again, longer and more passionately than before. When she pulled away, Fangs had red lipstick smeared all across his mouth. Of course! It wasn’t the drink that was drugged – it was Scarlet Canis’s lipstick!

  “Fangs,” I said. “You have to stop kissing her!”

  But it was too late.

  My boss’s eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed unconscious to the floor.

  Canis pressed another button, and the full moon over London vanished. Once again, people fell to the ground, crying out in pain as they transformed back to their human forms.

  “Now, why don’t we have a little talk, Miss Brown?” Claw asked.

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “That is a shame. You see, I have a little proposal to make, werewolf to werewolf.”

  “You’re not a werewolf! You’re a monster!”

  Claw laughed. “Perhaps – but you are a werewolf, and a rather special one at that. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw you during my little video chat with Fangs Enigma at MP1. Meeting you earlier would have saved us an awful lot of time and money…”

  I was beginning to feel very uneasy. “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “You’re a werewolf that doesn’t require a full moon to transform,” said Claw. “Tell me – how do you do it?”

  I glanced nervously at Fangs, who was still unconscious. “I … I don’t know. I just got stuck this way the first time I changed.”

  “Fascinating!” said Claw, running his fingers through the fur on my cheek. I batted his hand away. “Here’s the thing,” he continued. “Controlling the moon is impressive – but very expensive. And in addition to those costs, our friends have even started to demand payment in return for their fur.”

  I started to back away. “So? What does that have to do with me?”

  Claw smiled in the half light. It wasn’t pleasant. “So … what if I infected our free ice cream with your fur instead of theirs? Your DNA would mean the population of the planet would stay wolfed up twenty-four hours a day. “

  “No… No, you can’t.”

  CLICK!

  Scarlet Canis had clipped a dog collar around my throat.

  “Oh yes we can!” snarled Claw, as he pulled a sack over my head. “You’re our little doggy now.”

  Time Unknown: Aeroplane Cargo Hold, Location Unknown

  “Fangs? Fangs, can you hear me?”

  There was no reply – but then, in all honesty, I hadn’t expected one. I’d been calling for help into my blue tooth almost constantly for hours, and no one had yet spoken back. I tapped the tooth with my tongue to turn it off.

  I was in a crate, and the crate was on a plane. I was in total darkness, so I guessed I’d been put in the cargo hold. I wasn’t going to get a complimentary packet of peanuts and the in-flight movie anyway. That was about all I knew. I didn’t know for certain how much time had passed since Fangs had been knocked out, but my guess was at least two hours, maybe closer to four.

  I’d been dragged, kicking and fighting, down the stairs in Claw’s mansion and dumped in this box. I had quickly ripped my way out of the sack and was then able to see through a rectangular hole in one side of the box. I was taken to an airport – I had just been able to make out planes taxiing to and from the runway before I was loaded into one of them. We took off around half an hour later, although I had no idea where we were headed.

  I hoped Fangs was OK. His lack of response to my blue-tooth calls worried me. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been unconscious, knocked out by Scarlet Canis’s kisses. What if he never woke up? Either way, I knew the wolves would want to keep Fangs and me as far apart as possible when they started shaving me. I shuddered at the prospect.

  I tried again to break out of the crate. My laptop and utility belt had been taken from me, so I had to rely on brute force. I lay on my back and kicked against the crate again and again, as hard as I could. The walls didn’t budge. In fact, they didn’t feel or sound like wood. I began to suspect that the outside of the crate was lined with metal – perhaps lead. That would explain the communication problems. I could understand Fangs not replying if he was still unconscious – but my calls to MP1 Headquarters were going unanswered as well. If the crate was covered with lead, then none of my wireless calls would be getting out. That meant I’d been talking to myself for hours.

  My neck itched. I’d made several attempts to remove the collar that Scarlet had clipped around me, but it seemed to have a numerical combination on the lock and as I couldn’t see it I had no way of cracking it.

  Suddenly, the sound of the plane’s engines changed. A motor was whirring somewhere over to my right. The pilot was lowering the landing gear. Wherever our destination, we were there. I felt a small bump as the aircraft landed and, after a few moments, we stopped. The engines died with a whine.

  Pinpoints of light invaded the crate as the cargo hold was opened. The crate was lifted out and then placed on what I guessed must have been an open truck as some light was getting through the air holes. Perfect! That meant I’d be able to see out as we drove onto our next location, and I might even be able to pick up a few clues as to our location along the way.

  The truck started up, and I pressed my eye to one of the holes to peer out. My neck was really itching now. In frustration, I slashed at the collar with my claws – but all I succeeded in doing was tearing the leather and exposing what felt like strips of metal. They gave me an idea…

  I bit one of my claws, leaving it rough and jagged, like the blade of a saw and then used it to cut the leather. After a few minutes, I had managed to rip a section of the material away. I grasped one of the thin strips of metal inside the collar and pu
lled it free. Made from tin, it was flat and about thirty centimetres long. It wouldn’t help me out of the crate, but that wasn’t my plan…

  I twisted one end of the metal strip around one of my fangs and then pushed the other end through an air hole. Then I tapped the tooth with my tongue to operate the blue-tooth communication system. A faint blue glow reflected off the inside of my prison. If I’d done this correctly, the metal strip should work as an antenna, allowing the signal from my blue tooth to escape its lead tomb.

  “Fangs! It’s me, Puppy. Can you hear me? Phlem! Cube! Anyone at MP1 – are you receiving me?”

  Silence.

  My heart sank, and then I remembered that this tooth could only broadcast my messages out into the world. It was my other front fang that picked up the replies, so even if Fangs, Phlem or Cube were answering me, there was no way I would be able to hear them. I briefly considered pulling another strip of metal from my collar and making a second antenna, before realizing that I didn’t have time – the truck could stop at any moment. Instead I concentrated on getting a message out.

  “OK,” I said. “I can’t hear anyone responding, but I’m going to presume that someone can hear me and keep talking. I’m in a crate that’s just been loaded onto a truck at a large airport. I don’t know where the airport is, but the flight wasn’t too long, so I’m guessing we’re still in Europe. Wherever I am, it’s dark outside. The only lights I can see are streetlights.”

  I pressed my eye to another hole in the crate and strained to see more of the outside world. “We’ve been driving for about fifteen minutes on some kind of major road – possibly a motorway. There are signs beside the road, but we’re moving too quickly for me to be able to read them.” I sniffed at the air. “I can smell salt water. I think we must be close to the sea. And I can hear music in the distance. Folk music…”