Wolfen (9 page)

“Okay!” Aiden said, psyching himself up. “You remember when
the con—the, uh, Grays took over?”

She nodded.

“Good. Where were you?”

Sinna glanced from Aiden to Bryce and back. What did that
matter? “I was in San Francisco. At home.”

“With who?”

“Gerry, my den mother. That’s what I always called her. She
wasn’t my biological mother, though.”

Aiden and Bryce shared a look. “What about before that?”

Sinna’s face grew cold. Darkness. A hole in the ground,
thirteen stories deep. Climbing up one rung at a time. The cut on her arm
burning, tearing open, soaking her bandage with blood. She couldn’t see it; she
smelled it, though.
Keep always looking up. See the light, your guiding
star. The dark at the bottom is where the monsters are.

“Sinna?” This time his voice was softer.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I know,” he said, “but try to remember.”

She didn’t want to! The shivers came back, and she hugged
her knees to her chest, feeling tears sting at her eyes.

Bryce curled his hands over her shoulders, and she was so
out of it, she forgot to be afraid of him. “Calm.” He looked straight into her
eyes. “Calm.”

Sinna swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. “Ch-Chernobyl,”
she said.

His eyebrows twitched in a quicksilver frown, but he smoothed
it out and looked back at Aiden.

“She must have been very young,” Aiden said. “I don’t
remember her either.”

“You were there?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.” Aiden’s mouth twisted. “We were created there.”

Created
. Not
born
. Gerry had used the same
word whenever Sinna had asked about her parents. She’d always said something
vague about them being the best of the strongest and the smartest. She’d called
Sinna her “little treasure.”

Bryce ascertained her state of mind, then removed himself to
sit next to Aiden, who motioned for her to continue.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “We had to climb up this dark
shaft, and when we came out, everything was dead and destroyed. We saw a
chopper taking off, and Gerry cursed at it and cried.”

“Was she the only one with you?”

Sinna flinched. “No, umm, th-there was someone else. He
didn’t make it.”

“This Gerry raised you.” It was a statement, not a question.
Sinna nodded to confirm. “Did she tell you anything about your origins?”

Sinna tried to remember what Gerry had told her. It’d always
seemed so cryptic and secretive; she’d never answered a question straight, as
if she worried about telling her too much. “No, all she would say was that I
was special, untainted. And I had to stay hidden, or the Grays could corrupt
me.”

Another shared look between the two of them. “She must have
thought you were inert.”

Sinna frowned. “I heard that word before. What does it
mean?”

Aiden scoffed. “Oh, this’ll be interesting.” And he made himself
comfortable for what she could only guess would be a very long story.

I feel like I’m the punch line of a bad joke.

A Wolfen girl walks into a bar. “What will you have?”

“A clue, please.”

I’m looking at this girl, cute as a button with her curly
brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing her own blood like a badge of
honor, and she has no idea. None!

I don’t know whether I want to punch this Gerry person or
shake her hand. For all I know, she’s done the only thing she could to make
sure Sinna survived, given the information she had. Hell, if what Sinna’s
saying is true, then she’s the only Wolfen left in ‘Frisco, or anywhere nearby.
But the woman has done the girl no favors.

Sinna’s absolutely clueless, and if I let her walk out of
this house the same way she walked in, even with an armed, overprotective
escort, she’s going to end up dead, or worse. This new world doesn’t suffer
fools.

I feel sorry for the little bit. It’s a shitload to take
in all at once, and I’ve gotta be the one to dish it, since Bryce can’t be
bothered to say more than three words at a time. Great. I’m about to have the
“birds and bees” discussion with a baby sister. But hey, if li’l sis needs a
life lesson, she might as well get comfortable. Class is in session. Professor
Alpha presenting.

~

“All right, first thing’s first,” Aiden said in all
seriousness. “I gotta know how smart you are. Can you read?”

Bryce elbowed him—hard.

“What? It’s a legitimate question!”

Bryce elbowed him again.

Aiden hit him back.

“Yes,” Sinna said quickly, “I can read. And it
was
a
legitimate question.”

“Thank you.” He shoved at Bryce to sit farther away. “Now,
do you know what DNA is?”

She nodded.

“Good, good,” he said, then in an aside to Bryce, added,
“Not the lost cause I was afraid of,” which earned him a half-snarl. For all of
his non-communication, people often forgot that Aiden’s younger brother used to
be the nice one. Before they beat it out of him. “Okay! You’re about to get a
lesson in how the world works.”

Sinna blinked her big hazel eyes and nodded slowly, gaze
darting between them. “Oh-kay.”

Not the most promising beginning, but at least she was
paying attention. “Do you wanna take notes?”

“Aiden!” Bryce barked.

“Okay, fine. I see this is going to be a tough crowd. Here
we go. It all started back in the day when scientists discovered DNA. It was
like giving a bored kid a brand new video game. They locked themselves in the
basement and spent the next few decades trying to beat each consecutive level.
Except, the basement was a top secret facility deep beneath the site of a
nuclear meltdown, and the game was ‘Bend or Break, the Nature’s Laws Edition.’”

“I never played video games,” Sinna said.

The breath Aiden had taken to launch into his story fizzled out
of him. He said “top secret facility” and “nuclear meltdown” and all she heard
was “video games”? He glared at her, and shook his head in disappointment.

Sinna shrugged. “What?”

Aiden forced a smile. “Moving on. Chernobyl den was built
first. But there were too many people who didn’t agree with each other working
too closely together, so they split off. The Japanese team took their assigned
specimens and the formula to make more, built another den underneath Fukushima,
and cooked up so many samples, they had warehouses of artificial sacs
developing embryos. We’re talking half a football field stacked with shelves of
them.”

“Wait,” Sinna said, making him growl. Was she going to keep
interrupting him every thirty seconds? “How many different creatures did they
make?”

“Ah, good question.” He’d forgive her this one time. “It
appeared they created three new subspecies. All of them looked human, but they
changed over time. You already know about the Grays. We call them converts.
Homo
sapiens infensus
. They were the fuck-ups, the ones where something went
wrong and they went apeshit bonkers. Then there were what they called
Homo
sapiens soporatus
, or inerts; the ones that had all the makings of
something great, but it just never activated.”

“And you said that’s what I was supposed to be. Or what
Gerry thought I was.”

“Correct.”

“But I’m not?”

She sounded worried, and Aiden couldn’t blame her. Aside
from the obvious, he didn’t even know what had happened to her today, but it
must have made one hell of an impression if that was all the reaction he got.
Most people would have been freaking out at the thought of being something
other than human. “No, little bit, you’re not.”

Sinna nodded, somewhat uneasily. “So then, what am I?”

“One of us,” Bryce said. “Pack.”

Alarm sparked in her eyes. “Pack, like Grays?”

“Actually,” Aiden said, for once glaring at Bryce to shut up
instead of speak, “converts don’t form cohesive groups for any length of time,
so they’re not really pack animals in terms of social behavior. We are. Pack, I
mean. Well, and animal, too. Sort of.” He huffed. “I’m not explaining this
right.”

Bryce stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, and Sinna
looked from him to Bryce, tense, like she wanted to make a run for it. “Just
tell me this,” she said, “am I in danger?”

“Uh, yes and no?”

“What does that mean?”

Aiden rubbed the back of his head. “Hold on a second. I need
to explain this in order, or it’s not going to make any more sense. We are
Wolfen. We’re the pinnacle of what those humans hoped to achieve—
Homo
sapiens infragilis
. Basically, we’re like a super-creature put together
with different animal traits. Humans are limited, in body and mind. With us,
they basically removed those limitations. Are you in danger? Not from us—never
from us. And now, not from converts, either. We’re like opposites of each
other. We don’t mesh. Converts will avoid Wolfen unless we engage.” He paused
to survey her reaction.

Sinna stared for a moment, looked to Bryce for confirmation,
then noted the wide-open window and the door left ajar.

Aiden nodded. “Right. We don’t have to worry about
barricades. If we leave them alone, converts don’t bother us. We carry a scent
they really,
really
don’t like, and see these?” He held up his chains,
and wriggled his fingers to show off the rings. “Silver makes that scent
stronger. It’s like a territory marker; it tells them they aren’t allowed
here.”

Sinna regarded the tight silver cuff on her left wrist,
rubbing the metal, lost in thought. “Gerry was going to give this to me the day
she died. They killed her because of me. Because I wasn’t there.”

“No.” He knew that guilt; he and Bryce carried their fair
share of it. “You couldn’t have known.”

“But Gerry must have. She kept telling me to stay close. If
I had listened to her, she’d still be alive. She was counting on me, and I just
left her!”

“Sinna, listen to me—”

“It was only for a minute, but they were so fast.”

“You were a kid.”

“I was eighteen,” she snapped. “More than old enough to know
better.”

“Okay, you don’t want kid gloves? They’re coming off. You
have two options: One, neither you nor Gerry knew exactly what you were, and
what happened to her was a terrible accident. There’s nothing to say it
wouldn’t have happened if you
had
been there. For all you know, your
scent didn’t start changing until yesterday, or the day before.

“Or two, Gerry knew exactly what you were and kept it to
herself. Wolfen crave freedom—because they can have it. Gerry was human, stuck
in some hidey-hole in the middle of a convert-infested city she could never
hope to escape, and she knew you—the experiment, the
thing
that wasn’t
even human—always had the option of walking away. Deep down, that had to scare
the shit out of her, ‘cuz if you ever figured out exactly what you were, and
who she was, and what she’d probably done back in the den, you would leave her
ass in the dust. So she decided to up her odds. She used you, kept you
ignorant, scared, and locked up tight with her, so
she
could be safe.”

Sinna was breathing hard, eyes huge and glittering with tears
in the moonlight, jaw clenched so tight against them, Aiden could see the
muscles twitching.

“Now
you
choose,” he said. “You tell me which reality
is easier for you to accept, because there is no option C.”

Sinna shuddered and ducked her head to wipe her eyes. She
didn’t look at him for a long time, staring out the window instead.

Aiden didn’t force the issue. Whatever inner battle she
waged, he couldn’t win it for her. He waited until her breathing evened out and
she’d calmed herself some before he continued with the lesson.

“Converts develop a hell of a lot faster than humans, or
even Wolfen, which is how the Fukushima den got into trouble in the first
place. They had too many, got overpowered, and
boom
. Those who escaped
brought the surviving specimens and more converts to Chernobyl, but the
facility wasn’t equipped to handle so many. It’s like they feed off of each
others’ strength. The more converts there are, the
more
they become:
stronger, faster, hungrier. No one was prepared for that. Chernobyl didn’t have
enough time to compensate, converts overpowered the puny humans, and the den
imploded.”

“They evacuated and left me and Gerry for dead,” Sinna said
suddenly. “She climbed thirteen stories up a ladder with me in tow to get to
the surface. And once we got there, we had nothing. The clothes on our backs
and a whole lot of strained muscles. Gerry didn’t even try to find the others;
she knew they wouldn’t bother coming back for us, so she got us plane tickets
bound for San Francisco and prayed we were leaving the nightmare behind.” She
looked him dead in the eye. “She saved my life.”

Aiden nodded. “Fair enough.” He wasn’t about to argue that
point, and Sinna unclenched, and dipped her chin in acknowledgment.

“You’re right,” he said. “No one went back to Chernobyl.
They figured there was no one left anyway, and the converts in the den wouldn’t
be smart enough to find a way out. But given what happened in Europe shortly
after that, I’m pretty sure they underestimated a convert’s survival instinct.

“The rest of us went to a U.S. military base. It was
supposed to be a layover point until the new facility was built in Montana. But
once we got there, outside of controlled conditions, some of the inert children
converted and broke free. Lesson number one: if you have a stick of dynamite
that failed to go off, don’t toss it back into the box with the others. There’s
no such thing as an inert. The potential is
always
there, and sooner or
later, it
always
activates. When the mini-converts escaped, everyone freaked
out and sent soldiers to go hunt them down. In the meantime, scientists decided
to hedge their bets with the remaining inert kids—slaughtered all of them.
Didn’t care that some might have grown up to become Wolfen, like you. Most of
the escaped converts got taken out, but at least one breeding pair went
unaccounted for. And that’s all it took. The world went
boom
on an epic
scale.

“Two continents went down in a matter of months;
communications shot to shit, infrastructure crumbled, to say nothing of commerce.
Cities fell first, then converts spread outward to the ‘burbs, countrysides,
and even places where humans hadn’t left their mark yet. Extreme climes fared
better than mild ones; not enough food in the desert to feed a convert, so
he’ll stick to where he can hunt. Bryce and I figure, by now, Europe and most
of southern Asia is beyond redemption. There might still be some holdouts in
Africa and around the poles, and islands went largely untouched, because
converts don’t have an instinctual ability to swim, so Greenland, Iceland, and
Australia are still safe bets for human strongholds. Also, whoever managed to
escape on cruise ships and the like might have had a fighting chance, until
their food ran out, that is. And South America is kind of a question mark.”

Bryce nodded along with that assessment.

“So there are more survivors,” she said.

“Most of them are opportunists who managed to find a
loophole or learned how to exploit a natural resource.”
Like Wolfen
.
“But yeah, there are some. Not enough. Basically, by now, our big blue marble
belongs to converts.”

Sinna shook her head. “But, how did there get to be so many?
One breeding pair isn’t enough to sustain a population, even I know that.”

“It is, if they reach sexual maturity at age four and aren’t
discriminating about mates. Only the original ones were human to start. From
then on, each species naturally produced offspring fully Wolfen or fully
convert, regardless of the other half of their parentage. A convert’s gestation
period is about three months, and they’re born with a full set of teeth.
Carnivores from the go.” That was as simple as he could make it, without
getting into too many nasty details, like how a convert could rape and
impregnate a human woman or force a human man to be physically receptive and
give up semen—all while getting devoured; or how female converts needed no
recovery period and could birth up to three young every three months.

Aiden gauged Sinna’s reaction, but by that point she was
beyond exhausted, physically and emotionally. She didn’t ask any more
questions, simply fought to keep her eyes open.

Bryce nudged him, and made a circular motion with his
fingers. He would check the perimeter.

Aiden nodded. When Bryce was gone, Aiden tilted his head at
Sinna. “How’re you doing there, little bit?”

Nothing.

“Sinna?”

She blinked. “Huh?”

“You should get some sleep. We have a long drive ahead.”