Fifty Seven. Ambushed by a Roided Out Madman
I let Grace out of her prison in the attic before I set out back to the animal clinic. I’m free of all my chains, and I have Kathy’s spare set of keys now. But it’s still going to be tricky to let out Grace without ever directly touching the door.
I keep my fingers carefully pulled back as I fit the key into that silver lock, then I knock on the base of the door with my sneaker. “Hey, Grace? I just unlocked the door, so you should be able to open it now.”
“Jase?”
“Yeah, it’s Jase.”
“Where’s Felix?”
I give a nervous swallow. “He’s downstairs. He’s not himself right now, but I can fix that,” I swear. “I can cure him, the same way I did you, but for now you need to get out of here.”
She pulls open the door, still half-hiding behind it as she makes a nervous study of my eyes and fully human hands. “What do you mean he’s not himself? It’s the middle of the day. Shouldn’t you all be…?”
“I can’t really explain it,” I confess, “not now. But you’re feeling completely yourself still, right? You never changed last night? Kathy never had to sedate you?”
Grace shakes her head. “She just told me to go to my room, so I did. I heard her lock me in later on, but she seemed to have her hands full dealing with you and the others. That thrashing, and the howls...”
“Definitely a cause for concern.” All of them are acting rabid, more agitated than I’ve ever seen even dad behave before this. “I will fix it, but I need you to come with me.” I need to take one last look at her blood again, with Carson’s equipment, just to check how his drugs interacted with Grace specifically and with this sulfur laced disease.
“You want me to just leave him…?”
I know she’s talking about Felix, and I give her hand a gentle squeeze, leading her off down the hall. “He would not want you to see him just now. Trust me.”
She does. She keeps her eyes fixed rigidly forward as we hurry down the stairs and out to my car. “Where are we going?”
“Carson’s lab. There should be another entire case of the same vaccine I gave to you.” Assuming crazy Carson hasn’t destroyed it, but that is a fully irrational worry. Just because he never wanted us to get better… That does not mean he would destroy his own work, his own safeguard in case my dad or me ever lost it and bit him.
I break the speed limit by a good sixty kilometers, and I’m grateful there’s no cops around to chase us down and pull me over. I would not have the patience to talk to an officer today. I’d probably punch him out and just keep on driving.
We get to the clinic in a record thirty minutes. The sign is flipped to **Closed**. Weird, for the middle of the day on a Saturday, but maybe Nick has given up helping out here, now that he’s set his heart on dentistry. It can’t be easy for his father to be looking after everything alone, especially now that I’ve cut off his supernatural blood supply, leaving his healthy in jeopardy.
I no longer have keys to this place, so I give Nick a call to ask him to open up and let us in.
He doesn’t answer.
The last time that happened… He was fine, just ignoring my calls in favor of calling up Ravenna…
I ring him again. Then a third time.
Then I tell Grace irritably to wait here in the car, and I head around back to kick down the door.
There’s no alarm blaring out at me this time, even though the security panel I cut up with my keys looks like it’s been fully repaired. I guess Carson might still be here working, even with the clinic closed.
I really do not want to speak with him, but I guess it’s unavoidable.
I head through the lobby, then on through the kennels.
I expected at least some of our rescues to be happy to see me after all these weeks. I was their primary food and playtime provider, but all the cages are eerily silent. Most of these animals are nocturnal, but... That smell…
I go right over to Rex’s cage and rip open the door in sudden panic. He’s dead, clawed up and bloody. They are all of them dead, every hawk, and the wolves, and that lynx we rescued – there’s hardly even anything left of that corpse, it’s so clawed up and pulverized.
“Mike.” My first thought is that he came here last night. He came for revenge on Dr. Carson. Maybe a subconscious need that drove him here after he lost his own senses and changed into a wolf…
I sprint down to the lab, shove open the door, and stop dead in my tracks.
He’s lying on the floor in a blood-stained lab coat, clutching at his bleeding chest… Not Carson. Nick.
I drop to his side in an instant. His torso is shredded with claw marks, his breathing ragged, but at least he is breathing. His eyes focus on me. “Jase…”
“I’ll kill him,” I promise. I’m going to rip Mike in half, just like he did me. Why would he attack Nick? Was he just attacking anyone that crossed his path again or--?
“Don’t,” Nick gasps, clutching at my shirt. “Just… help.”
“I will. I’ll get you fixed up. Don’t worry.”
“Not… me. Dad…”
So Mike did attack Carson. I don’t see a body anywhere, but…
Shit. A dark shape draws up from the corner of the room, hands tipped in claws and lab coat torn, exposing patches of thick black hair in place of human skin. His eyes are burning blood red.
“Jason,” he snarls. “Just look what you’ve done, stealing so many of my samples. I needed more…” His head twitches, thrashing against invisible restraints. “Blood!”
Carson was the one. He killed his own patients. He attacked his own son. I look to the open, empty refrigerator in front of him, and I know exactly why this happened.
He drank all of the remaining blood bags harvested from Subject V. He drank down the untreated, most advanced form of my family’s disease, and now he’s turned into a full-blown wolfman, probably triggered by the moon last night in the same way as my dad.
Now all he feels is bloodlust, and he tackles me to the ground, teeth chomping down hard into my collarbone like a psychotic vampire set on piercing my jugular and draining it all.