Genetically Altered Complete Box Set

by Sarah Noffke

  Sirens rang overhead, making the already deranged pack crazy with dread. They couldn’t be captured. They couldn’t go back to that lab.

  “Move,” Zephyr yelled, and it was that one command that sent the pack scurrying in different directions. Each wolf took his own route toward safety. Some scaled the nearby buildings. Some escaped through the adjacent alley. And some ran straight for the streets. All were too fast for the approaching security and none of them would be caught tonight.

  But in the lab, a prisoner stirred from his sleep that felt too real to be a dream. He’d heard commotion, but it made itself a part of the nightmare playing in his head. Now he stared out at the locked gate in front of him and at the empty lab, devoid of the other eleven men he was used to having around him. Like a lone wolf, separated from the pack, Connor had been abandoned.

  Chapter One

  “One never knows what a man can withstand unless put to the test.”

  – Olento Research Employee Manual

  One month later…

  Zephyr only saw the sun on his days off. Since the change he had become nocturnal and therefore had taken the nightshift as a security guard at a twenty-four-hour drugstore. Yes, as a discharged Special Forces captain he could have gotten a job as a private contractor or anything more illustrious than catching college students stealing cheap bottles of vodka. However, he wouldn’t have access to pharmaceuticals in another job. It hadn’t been hard to steal the store manager’s keys and make a copy. He’d accomplished that on his first day, right after his interview. His speed and prowess made him the perfect thief. And his x-ray vision made it so he could find anything he was looking for, even those things hidden.

  Now every night that Zephyr worked he disabled the security cameras while the clerks played poker during the slowest store hour. He just knew there had to be a drug inside the locked pharmacy that would change him back, take the canine out of him. Make the strange dreams stop. But no matter how many pills he swallowed the attacks still came. Every week the change happened. Twelve excruciating hours. For half a day Zephyr was stuck in the form of a man and a wolf. And although he had been fast and agile all the time, he was a blur of movements as a werewolf. He could do things that he’d only seen in movies. He had always associated these ridiculous werewolves with a full moon, but that rule didn’t seem to dictate his change. However, he had been an experiment, just like the other men he’d escaped with. Often he wondered where they’d run away to.

  Zephyr stood in the shadow the neighboring house cast, watching and wishing his x-ray vision worked from this distance. He found that he needed to be ten to fifteen feet from whatever he was trying to see through. This skill had come on when the lucid dreams started. He half expected that he’d have super strength like Rio, but that hadn’t been the case. Instead, he could see through things.

  He smoothed down his black mustache and then the short hair on his chin, wondering what they’d done to him in that lab. He spent every night at the drugstore recalling the memories that were covered in images of syringes and bright overhead lights. And yet, none of the pieces connected. Zephyr didn’t know what had happened, but worst was that he didn’t know what he was anymore. One moment he’d been leaving his parents’ house, strolling to his car, and then he awoke to find himself imprisoned in the cell at the lab. His military training had been more extensive than that of a surgeon. Never had someone snuck up or attacked him without him being aware, but still…

  He shook his head, bringing himself back to reality. It didn’t matter how it happened. Whoever had taken him, changed him, it didn’t matter. Now he had to deal with it. He wasn’t under their thumb anymore. And the changes that happened every week weren’t the greatest stress on his heart. It was the sight he was looking at now. A woman of around sixty smiled as she marched out onto the front porch. She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Hello, world,” he saw her mouth. This was what she did every day upon greeting the rising sun. Then she turned back to the open front door.

  “Are you coming?” she sang to someone inside the house. The woman turned her attention to the purse tucked under her arm and began to rummage through it.

  “You forgot your keys,” Zephyr said under his breath. “They’re on the kitchen counter.” A fond smile slid onto his face cloaked in shadow.

  The woman, who wore a salmon-colored sweater, turned again to the door. “Charlie, I forgot my keys,” she yelled.

  A man with silver hair similar to Zephyr’s which was sprinkled with black still, walked through the door, pulling it shut as he did. He shook the keys in the air, ringing them like a bell. “You know I’ve got them,” the older man said.

  “Oh, what would I do without you?” the woman on the porch said.

  “I don’t know,” he said, handing the keys to his wife. There was a sadness in the man’s eyes when he cast his stare out to the sky and the rising sun. There was a loss in them.

  “Shall we?” he said to the woman beside him.

  She nodded and they continued to the car, to complete their daily errands as they did most days.

  Zephyr pushed the large sunglasses up on his face, also pushing away the yawn. He’d need to sleep now. Now that he’d completed his daily ritual of watching his parents living their lives without him. He could still live his life. He could do so much. However, he couldn’t be in their lives again. He didn’t trust the beast inside of him. This was as close as he’d allow himself to the people he loved.

  Chapter Two

  “We do not help others because it’s honorable. We do it because it’s our responsibility. Seeking honor only leads to ego and that only leads to mistakes.”

  - Lucidite Employee Manual

  Adelaide’s hair couldn’t be described as dark auburn. Or chestnut. Or warm ginger. No, she had loud, orangey-red hair. She favored the shade of her hair, unlike most redheads. It was one of many things she’d inherited from her father, whom she missed increasingly every day. The ache was supposed to go away. The desire to see him walk through the door and tell her to “fuck off” was supposed to wane, she thought. But it never did. And more and more, she found she needed his counsel. Ren Lewis was an ornery jerk who gave people life-saving advice while insulting them. He was also British like Adelaide and therefore, in her opinion, a lot better humored than the lame Americans she worked with every day, who usually didn’t get her dry jokes. She’d also inherited her father’s Dream Traveler gift of mind control, which she was better at using than in months prior. And the only thing she didn’t appreciate that she inherited from Ren Lewis was his gift of telepathy linked to touch. It had ruined every single intimate relationship she’d ever had. Knowing what other people think was never a gift.

  The voluminous file of papers stared back at Adelaide, the brackets on the front appearing like little eyes that were scowling at her. She pressed her fingers into her own eyes, feeling the stress burrow deeper in her head, making her jaw tense. When she opened her eyes the wish she’d said in her mind hadn’t come true. The folder still sat in front of her. It hadn’t self-destructed or been stolen by the creature who took her socks.

  “You’re a real worthless piece of shit,” she said to the inanimate object, which made zero reply.

  With a sigh the girl flipped open the folder, her eyes scanning the files she’d studied countless times. She felt that she was the worthless piece of shit, projecting her own feelings on the gigantic file. There were dozens of reports in there, but they didn’t give any clues about where to look next or how to proceed with this case. Her father would have known what to do. Ren Lewis would have flipped through this file and known exactly how to handle the werewolf case.

  But for as similar as she was to her father, she didn’t have his experience. He’d warned her before he died that agents working in the strategic department for the Lucidite Institute needed experience before working high-level cases. However, he had given her the level five werewolf case, telling Adelaide that she was the best one for the
job. Maybe he just wanted her dead from a werewolf attack so she could promptly join him in the afterlife. But probably not, she thought. Her father wasn’t the sentimental type. He gave her this case and expected her to solve it. And she had to because failure wasn’t an option.

  Adelaide tossed the most recent report to the side. It detailed a sighting of a werewolf-looking man roaming the streets in San Diego. That didn’t help. She couldn’t put surveillance all over the streets. Firstly, she didn’t have the resources for such a thing. And secondly, that was the loser approach. Ren always told her to be efficient in her methods. Work backward from the end. What she needed to do was round up these twelve werewolves. She knew that was how many would be out there based on her father’s notes. Twelve men of varying backgrounds and ages had been taken around the same timeframe. Her father had pulled pieces of random information together and threaded them with what others saw as unrelated evidence. The abductions had happened at around the same time on the same day. Twelve men, all with curious backgrounds, vanished from different parts of the country. They were ex-military, previous police officers, high school dropouts, rehab graduates, or ex-inmates. The common thread was they’d all quit something and were in between life choices. Most wouldn’t have connected this thread, but Ren Lewis didn’t think like most. He was holistic in his approach.

  Of the men abducted, some were thought to have had something horrible happen to them. Others were dismissed as having purposely gone missing, based on their records. And since there was no sign of struggle, no eyewitness testimony, the cases were pushed aside. The authorities hadn’t even connected that the men were abducted together, but the Lucidites were able to run reports on crime news and link similar cases that happened in close proximity and time.

  The men went missing right after a series of wolf massacres happened. Then some key research was stolen from the Lucidite labs. After that, everything went silent. All leads dried up. Even the news reporting department at the Lucidite Institute turned up zero clues related to the werewolf case. News reporters were the team of clairvoyants who used their powers to find tragedies in the future so the Lucidites—the crime fighters of future events—could intervene if necessary.

  However, the news reporters didn’t see anything that could help Adelaide. And just when she thought her first big case had dried up, maybe gone away, one of the news reporters discovered an upcoming werewolf attack. However, the reporter hadn’t been able to supply enough details for Adelaide to determine where the attack would happen. Then it came to pass; a woman was mauled in a mall parking lot in Los Angeles. But the security cameras had been disabled, almost like the beast had planned it. Stalked his prey and ensured that there wouldn’t be any evidence. The woman passed away on the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance. But before she died, she kept repeating one word: “Werewolf.”

  Adelaide withdrew the map from the file. She circled Los Angeles. Then, pressing the marker firmly into the paper, she circled San Diego. And there’d been one other eyewitness report, this one in Utah. A boutique owner reported seeing a homeless man digging through her trashcans in the back alley. When she yelled to him, planning to offer him real food, a man with wolflike features turned around. He then sprinted in the opposite direction before scaling the side of the shop’s brick walls until he was on the roof. Adelaide pulled the pen up to the top of the map and circled Salt Lake City.

  This was all Adelaide knew about the case and it wasn’t enough. It didn’t tell her where to look next. Her father had been right that all the initial clues led to the creation of werewolves, even though no one had believed him. And now these beasts were loose on society. But she didn’t know why. Who created them and why would they let them free? That was the one intelligent conclusion she’d been able to make about any of this. These men were free. That was the only reason one would be rummaging through a trashcan.

  She slapped a palm to her forehead. Adelaide expected more from herself. She was a Dream Traveler, the elite race who could travel to any place and time with their consciousness when they slept. This power also lent each Dream Traveler a gift. She’d inherited her father’s gifts and he was the most powerful Dream Traveler to ever live. And working as an agent for the Lucidite Institute, she had incredible technology and resources at her disposable and yet she remained stumped. With more force than necessary she slammed the file shut and threw it across the room. I’m going to fail, she thought. The one thing my father trusted to me, and I’m going to fail with it.

  Chapter Three

  “Nothing is impossible if the right science is employed.”

  - Olento Research Employee Manual

  Glowing green eyes stared through the bars of the cage. It didn’t matter how long Connor studied the lab in front of him. The chaos of broken cage doors and equipment didn’t provide an answer to how he’d escape this curse. All the men he’d been imprisoned with escaped. But they left him. Left him behind, to fend for himself. He should have been dead by now, but his cell was one of the few that included a sink with running water. It was like God knew he would be imprisoned in his cell without a warden and was trying to prolong his misery. He never much cared for God or the cruel things he did to his life. However, he almost laughed at the notion that he missed his warden, the person who brought him daily food. The only reason he was alive now was that he’d chunked most of the MREs in the corner for months. Sometimes he ate them, but usually only one of the three he received each day. Now he was still surviving off that one meal a day. Never before had he been so grateful that he’d rebelled against this devilish lab by refusing to eat. But he only had two weeks of food left. And there was no sign of anyone returning to let him out of his cage.

  The lab personnel and the man in the silver suit had returned briefly. Connor had seen the man before, during the treatments. He stood out because he wore a suit whereas the other staff members had white lab coats and the security were dressed in black uniforms and held tranquilizer guns. This man, though, he walked with an air of superiority. But he never said anything. Just observed as they stabbed Connor with needles, tortured him by injecting his body with drugs that made his insides feel on fire.

  Connor’s superior hearing told him the lab personnel were approaching one day. He awoke from another strange dream and stared out the bars of the cell to spy the scientist and the man in the suit sorting through the wreckage. Following his instinct, which was stronger now, he soundlessly ricocheted off one wall and then to the opposite until he was to the ceiling. Immediately he pushed out his arms and legs, pinning himself between the two walls that were only three feet apart. When the chief scientist peered through the bars he didn’t see Connor hovering at the top of the cell, his body pressed against the ceiling.

  “Gate’s locked, but cell is empty,” the scientist said, his words hard to understand with his thick German accent. He rattled the door, proving it was still locked.

  “They must have let him out and then shut the door back,” the man in the suit said, his hands in his pockets as he casually browsed over the destructed lab. “Well, it appears our mission has changed. Now Olento Research has to go catch some loose dogs.”

  Connor let out a sip of a breath, not daring to make any sound that alerted them to his presence. He then waited a full five minutes after they left until he dropped down to the floor of his cell. His instinct said that he shouldn’t let them find him, but now he was still stuck in a prison with no one to let him out. Every day since then he’d doubted his decision. If the man and the scientist found him then he wouldn’t be facing starvation and a whole host of other problems. But then they’d imprison him in other ways.

  Now he sat on his bed, staring out the bars of his cell with nothing to do but wallow in the fear of what came next. The worst possibility was nothing. That he’d die alone in that cell as a half man, half beast.

  Chapter Four

  “It is through serving others that we serve ourselves.”

  - Lucidite Empl
oyee Manual

  Mika Lenna’s alligator skin shoes clapped against the linoleum floor. This wasn’t a man who stepped quietly. Mika’s mother always remarked that he didn’t take his first step like most children. As a baby he marched upon his first attempts at walking. And now he still seemed to march everywhere he went.

  He halted in front of a cage, his hands clasped behind his back as he stood with his feet shoulder width apart. Mika carried himself like a soldier, but looked nothing like one in his expensive silver and gray suit. The man in the white lab coat halted just beside his boss, his eyes eagerly scanning the notes he was holding. In front of them, three lemur monkeys lay on the metal floor of their cage, their eyes rolled back in their heads because the sedative hadn’t worn off yet.

  “The operations were a success, as far as we can tell. However, we are going to have to wait to see the final results. It should only take twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Alexander Drake said, pulling his eyes away from his notes to gauge his boss’s reaction to this news.

  “And what method will you be employing to determine if the experiment worked?” Mika said, his green eyes sharp, always full of focus.

  Drake, who preferred to go by his last name like it was his first, watched Mika’s thin mustache as he talked. “Although lemurs are considered somewhat intelligent mammals, they still are unpredictable. We are going to rely on their use of intention,” he said.

  “The means by which you plan to do that?” Mika said, his voice a little louder now, his Finnish accent flaring. This man had started his own company, Parantaa Research Corp, and made his first million by the time he was nineteen. He knew exactly the ingredient to that success. Micromanaging. People couldn’t be trusted to do things on their own. Their plans were never as fool-proof as Mika’s and so he oversaw all the experiments and technologies that were created in his lab. But Drake, he knew, resented having to share all details with Mika. This German scientist was used to working alone since he had been a freelance contractor prior to Mika retaining him full time.