Werewolf CEO 4, page 19
“Samantha, listen to me,” I said softly. “I’m not going to let him hurt you anymore.
“You… You mean that?” the Omega asked, and her sunken blue eyes stared at me in disbelief.
“Yes,” I said and squeezed her hand. “We’re going to get you out of here. But I need you to tell me whatever you can about these doors.”
“They…” She took a deep breath to steady her mind before she continued, and for the first time, I could see some semblance of the girl that had been in all of the photographs at her house. “They’re automatic. There has to be a control room that he uses to open them.”
“Good girl,” I said with a reassuring nod. “Which way does Mitch come in from?”
Samantha reached a shaking hand out through the bars and pointed to the glass door on the left side of the room.
“Alright, we’ll try and find the control room,” I said as I reluctantly let go of her hand.
“Wait!” she cried out and lurched through the bars to grab my hand. “What’s your name?”
“Josh,” I said as I wrapped my other hand around hers. “Josh St. James.”
“I know that name…” the dark-haired Omega said as her brow furrowed in thought. “I saw you in the papers weeks ago.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said with a weak smile. “Resident orphan.”
“Right.” She let out a weak huff of amusement. “Thank you, Josh.”
“Thank me once you’re home safe with your mom,” I said, and I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze before I let it go so I could turn back to my pack. “Let’s go find this control room before Mitch comes back.”
My pack nodded, and I forced myself to turn away from Samantha, who was still pressed up against the cage and looking at me with wide doe eyes and hope. She had hope.
And that was all I needed to make myself leave that room and find a way to get her out of there.
The glass door Samantha had pointed at opened automatically as we approached, and when it did, it revealed another long hallway. There were four doors lining either side of the wall, and I knew there was no point asking Samantha for any more information, because Mitch definitely didn’t give her a tour of his secret lab.
I paused in the middle of the hallway and sighed as I tried to figure out which one to go through first. We didn’t have much time, and no doubt Mitch had this place rigged with surveillance cameras. Time was ticking, and if we were going to get everyone out, we needed to act fast.
“Let’s split up,” I said somewhat reluctantly. “Klaus, Finn, you take that door on the left. Katie, Luke, Emily, you take the one next to it. Amy, Tyler, Mia, you guys take the one on the other side. Hallie, you stay with me.”
“Got it,” Finn said as he walked to the door I’d allocated him and opened it.
“You run into any trouble, or if you find the control room, you let us know through the bond,” I ordered.
“Understood, Alpha,” Katie said as she opened her door.
Tyler nodded and opened his door, too, and each of us started to branch off into the different rooms. I grabbed Hallie’s hand and kept her close to me as we walked into a barren office space.
It was just as jarringly bright white as every other room in this foul place. The only difference was that there was a white desk, a white desk chair, and a small white bookcase positioned against the back wall.
Hallie and I took a few tentative steps toward the desk like we were expecting an alarm to go off at any second. But there was nothing, and I let go of her hand so I could start looking through the drawers on the side of the desk.
They were neatly organized, and the first drawer was full of white files that were arranged alphabetically. I picked out a random one and put it on the desk so Hallie could see, too. And when I flicked open the page, we both grimaced simultaneously at the horrific sight before us.
The entire file was filled with pictures of decaying and rotting wolves. The pictures looked like postmortems, and as I shuffled some of them around, there were wider shots taken that revealed the bodies were laid out on a metal table.
The victims’ bodies were contorted in odd poses, and their jaws were always open in an eternal snarl. The stages of decomposition ranged from mild to completely unrecognizable, and I could hear Hallie take a few ragged breaths as she tried to compose herself.
“I don’t want to look at that anymore, Josh,” she whispered as she turned her head away.
“Okay, babe,” I said softly, and I closed the file and slipped it back into the drawer. “But there could be something we could use in here.”
Hallie nodded, and I heard her gulp before she turned her head back to the desk and waited for me to pull out another file.
This time, it was just documentation of various experiments. They were sick and twisted, and the scientific and cold recollection of using early formulas of the Z-TECH serum on test subjects showed how much of an evil son of a bitch Mitchell Moore was.
I felt my stomach turn the more I read, especially when Mitch wrote about how some of the early patients would tear off their own skin because they felt like it was on fire. Some patients would even gouge out their own eyes, because the early serums would come with a boatload of hallucinations. Apparently, it was that batch of serum that led him to develop a nerve toxin that paralyzed the subject and caused hallucinations to torment them. There was no doubt in my mind that was what he had used on me, and I gritted my teeth at the thought of everyone who had to suffer just so he could have a trick up his sleeve for people like me.
When he started writing about the intricacies of the subject’s self-mutilation, I closed the file and put it back into the drawer with a deep sigh.
“I’m going to kill him,” I said in a low voice. “He’s a goddamn psychopath.”
“Yeah,” Hallie said breathlessly. “What are you looking for in there, Josh? We already know he’s insane.”
“I just feel like there’s something in here,” I said as I opened up the bottom drawer and started rifling through thicker files bound by white string. “Something that can tell us exactly what he’s been planning rather than all of the cryptic bullshit he spews.”
“Like what?” Hallie asked.
Her question only hung in the air for a few seconds when I saw the biggest file yet, with a black stamp over the front that read ‘CONFIDENTIAL.’
“This,” I said as I pulled it out and slammed it on the desk.
I ripped off the string and started flicking through the file frantically. It was filled with loose papers, notes, and crude drawings of wolves transforming into even bigger versions of their original forms.
I pulled out one and held it in between us, and I felt my breath hitch in my throat. At the top of the page were the words ‘Super Wolf: Final Serum,’ and below it was an incredibly detailed sketch of a huge, bulging wolf with wide eyes and an unhinged jaw. The muscles were grotesquely big, and veins protruded from its bare and hairy body. The only thing that was colored was the bright green eyes that stared hollowly at me through the page.
Even though it was just a sketch, I could see Arlo within the drawn picture of the ‘Super Wolf.’
I hardly even noticed Hallie reaching across the desk and picking up the file as I continued to stare at those hollow eyes on the page. My heart thumped in its chest as I thought about Mitch creating an army of these monsters. Arlo had been a handful, but he hadn’t been a good subject. Mitch had said it himself. But if he found victims who could handle the serum better and fight more viciously, then New York was in more danger than it realized.
“He’s toying with genetics,” Hallie mumbled and snapped me out of my trance.
“What?” I asked as I put the drawing down and turned to see what she was looking at.
“The serum… it remodels wolf genes,” the brunette reporter said as she pointed to a paragraph on one of the pages. “He’s found a way to change us on a molecular level. It’s like it regresses us to a feral state. It makes us even more like a real wolf than a human.”
“Jesus,” I mumbled in shock. “How the hell do we combat that?”
“I don’t know.” Hallie shook her head. “But I sure as hell hope the lab at Lunar Corp. is cooking something up, because this is on a whole other level.”
I grabbed the file from her hand and started flicking through to the end. The writing on the loose pages became more scrawled and erratic, and as I scanned my eyes over each word, my worst fear was confirmed.
He was building an army of super wolves. Every person he’d kidnapped, every person inside this horrific lab, only served to be the test subjects to make his perfect weapon. They told him how much was too much, how little was too little. They mapped out the timeline of the perfect number of doses to make sure it wasn’t introduced too fast. They were helping him create the perfect formula so he could spread it across New York City and build his army.
“No,” Hallie whispered under her breath as she read the same page I was on. “No way. He can’t seriously be considering doing this?”
“This is what it’s all been for,” I said. “He’s going to find the tallest building in New York City and disperse the virus in gas form from the top of it.”
There were even notes on how Mitch planned to combat the wind and other obstacles-- like the size of the city versus the size of the dose-- but it all got a little too-sciencey for me to fully figure out.
Then again, if Mitch had the smarts to create and perfect something like the zombie serum, I was sure a little wind wasn’t much of a problem for him.
“Jesus, Josh, we’ve got to put an end to this,” the brunette Beta said in a shaking voice. “We’ve got to find a way!”
Josh, come through the door Klaus and I came through, Finn’s voice said in my head. And quick.
I gave Hallie a grave look before I handed her the file for safekeeping. She kept it close to her chest as we both rushed out of the office and went through the door Finn and Klaus had gone through.
There was a white stairway that led up three floors, and when we finally reached the top, Finn and Klaus were standing next to a control panel.
“What are we looking at, guys?” I asked as I stood beside Finn and looked down at the numerous buttons and levers.
“We’ve got no idea what any of these do, but there’s a kill switch,” Finn said and pointed to a big red button in the center of the panel. “Only problem is, if we press that button, we open all of the doors.”
“And that includes the ones holding the… too far gone wolves,” Klaus added with a concerned frown.
“Shit,” I hissed under my breath. “There’s no way to figure any of this out?”
“Not if we want to get out of here without getting caught up in a whole different kind of shitstorm,” Klaus said. “This is our only option. Otherwise, we’re sitting ducks for Mitch or his guards.”
“But there’s a lot of risk,” Finn added.
“It’s either release them all, or leave them all,” I said. “And I’m not leaving the ones who aren’t too far gone behind just for them to meet the same fate.”
“Then let’s release them all,” Hallie said and put her hand on top of the red button. “That’s what we came here for, right?”
I placed my hand over hers and nodded in determination.
“Let’s do it,” I said as I looked at Finn and Klaus. “Are you guys ready?”
“Born ready, Alpha,” Klaus said with a nervous smile.
What about the rest of you? I asked down the bond.
We’re ready, Josh, Emily quickly replied. And we’re with you. Let’s get these people out of here.
I took a deep breath before I pushed Hallie’s hand down on the red button. The white lights flooding the room shut down, which plunged us into darkness for a brief few seconds before the entire laboratory lit up with a bright red light.
An alarm blared in every single room, loud and obnoxious, and it made the floor beneath us vibrate with every thrum. But then the sound of the feral screaming from earlier joined the horrendous cacophony of noise, and I knew all hell was about to break loose.
Literally.
“Well, that can’t be good,” Hallie said as she cast a nervous look back at me.
“We need to get down there, now,” I said as I rushed from the control panel and flew back down the stairs. “We need to make sure none of the feral wolves attack the others.”
Josh, that might be too late, Luke said through a strained voice down the bond. We’re here. And they’ve already taken out two of them.
“Shit,” I hissed to myself as I pushed myself faster and started to shift into my elite form.
My body grew in seconds, and the fabric of my suit groaned as it adjusted to my size. My claws came down like knives, and I felt my face begin to contort as my fangs came down and my ears poked out of the top of my head.
I could hear Hallie, Finn, and Klaus behind me, but I was faster than them, and I had to make sure I saved as many people in this place as I could.
When I finally reached the main floor, it was complete carnage. The feral wolves were tearing through the place, and some of the other test subjects were valiantly trying to fight back alongside my pack. Some of them were still cowering in their cells, and I could see a trail of bloody footprints leading down the long hallway that we’d entered through.
Samantha was still sitting on the floor with wide eyes as she watched the chaos unfold in front of her, and I quickly rushed over to the Omega and reached down my hand. She took it, and I pulled her up and held her to my chest.
“Listen to me,” I said in a gravelly voice. “We need to fight our way out of here. You stay close to me, do you understand?”
She nodded with a shuddering breath as her eyes darted to one of the wolves completely out of his mind who was thrashing back and forth in one spot.
“I understand,” she said breathlessly. “I… I can fight, too.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “Just focus on staying out of their way.”
“O-Okay,” the Omega stuttered and stuck behind me.
A few seconds later, Finn, Klaus, and Hallie ran into the huge room that was quickly being painted with black and green blood, and we all shared a brief nod before we started to fight.
I went for the wolf thrashing around in a crazed panic first, and I jammed my claws into his head. He roared as they pierced his skull and shoved me away from him with force. I wanted to make this as quick and painless for them as possible, but I knew they were going to put up a fight.
I pushed Sam a little further back so she was out of harm’s way before I swung my clawed hand around and tore out a clump of the wolf’s throat.
He gargled out another roar, but he didn’t so much as buckle as he started charging for me. I’d never get over how they could take a hit like that and act like it was nothing. It was jarring and incredibly off-putting, especially as the wolf snapped at me with his throat hanging out and gushing bright green blood everywhere.
I ducked out of the way of his flailing arms and spun around so I was behind him. Then I kicked his back as hard as I could, and I heard his thick spine crack. The snarling wolf fell to the ground, face first, but the kick had damaged his nerves enough to paralyze him from the neck down.
Even though he was completely paralyzed, he still tried to gnash his teeth at my ankles as I made my way around his head. Samantha looked down at him with wide eyes, before they slowly trailed up to me.
I hated doing this, especially in front of her, but I couldn’t just let him suffer any more than what he already had.
“Look away,” I said softly to her. “You don’t want to see this.”
Hallie grabbed her hand and turned her away from what I was about to do, and once her back was facing me, I stomped my foot down onto the feral wolf’s head.
His bones crunched, and his brain splattered against the white floor, and I grimaced as it coated my shoe. There was no time to dwell on his death, and I didn’t want to anyway, so I moved on to the next feral wolf that was attacking Katie, Amy, and Luke.
I growled as I dug my claws into his back and pulled him away from them. I held him in place, even as he thrashed against my grip, and that gave Katie enough time to plunge her clawed fingers into his eye sockets and pull.
The wolf roared as she yanked out one of his eyes, and Luke ducked under his flailing arms to drag his claws against his stomach. Black intestines fell onto the floor below him, but he remained standing.
“Finn, finish it!” I barked out.
The looming Beta rushed over, grabbed a hold of the feral wolf’s head, and pulled. I kept his body in place and watched from behind as the skin and tendons started to tear, and his head slowly ripped from his neck, leaving a sharp bone sticking out of black mush.
Finn discarded the head with a disgusted grunt, and I let the dead wolf’s body drop to the ground. After that, I took a moment to survey the chaos still going on around us. The majority of the cells were empty, but some had the dead bodies of wolves who had been torn apart by the feral one inside.
I ushered Hallie and Sam over to me, and the Omega grabbed my arm as she reached my side. The rest of my pack weren’t physically hurt, but they were covered in splatters of black and green blood.
We could hear the ferocious roars of more feral wolves somewhere deeper in the facility, and the sounds of doors being torn off hinges and glass smashing.
But then there was another sound.
Tires screeched against asphalt high above our heads, and then a number of footsteps started charging toward us.
“Oh, god,” Samantha whispered with wide eyes, and she tightened her grip on my arm. “They’re here.”
“Who?” I asked as I looked down at her. “Who’s here, Sam?”
“The guards,” she said in a trembling voice. “They’ll tear us apart. S-Someone escaped one night when he was getting dragged back to his cell, and t-they shot him, point-blank. The doctor would rather we be dead than get out.”
