The Lost Wolf
The warehouse stank, an acrid miasma of fear, pain, and death that filled his nose and made his teeth hurt. Wren pulled his blankets higher around his shoulders, wishing he had clothing to wear, but the guards took his clothes from him the night he was thrown in his cage. He couldn’t remember when that was, or how long ago. He had no concept of time—the nights and days were all cold and dark, damp seeping into his bones. He shivered, curling in tighter.
Footsteps came down the long aisle between the cages. His was at the very end, next to the area where the surgeons did their bloody work, only a thin plastic curtain blocking off most of the gruesome activity. Boots rang out on the concrete floor, and he hid his face and eyes, doing all he could not to draw attention to himself.
There was no sky to see and nothing but shadows, echoing corners, and the sound of water dripping.
And screams.
The screaming never really stopped. It came and went in waves, but there was always some sound of pain and fear that reached his ears. Sometimes he thought he would carry the sound for the rest of his miserable life, ever present and haunting. Even now an unfortunate soul somewhere down the line of cages was crying softly, begging to a deity he had never heard of— someone called the Great Mother. He didn’t know what religion that was, but like every god he’d ever heard of, there was no answer to desperate prayers.
He risked taking a quick peek out from beneath his arm, and quickly hid again when he saw a pair of shiny leather shoes walking past his cage.
“Any progress? You’ve had weeks now to correct the procedure.” That was the voice that haunted his nightmares. It was the voice he heard when he was first dragged into the dark and stripped of his identity. The voice that called him an experiment and a failure and yet never got around to throwing him away. Maybe that was the point. He was here for amusement, for them to hurt, and was still trash.
He had a name once. A place he called home. A mother he never remembered, but he remembered his father. Or the man who adopted him, gave him a name, a place to stay. A toddler with no one to love him, he’d clung to the man he came to call father. Even if he was learning that Dr. Harmon was never really his father, but the man who made him in a lab. He was something impossible.
A monster. Child of wolf and man.
The longer he spent in his cage, the more certain he was that he had been here before, or a place very like it. When memories and nightmares collided, fitting together like two separate puzzle pieces, he was struck by a sickening sense of familiarity and déjà vu. It was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. He couldn’t tell if his very first memory of a lab similar to this one was real or not. The brief experiment that was his life began in a cage and was going to end in a cage.
The butchers who call themselves surgeons and scientists were speaking with the man who walked in his nightmares. They discussed what they did like they were normal everyday things, like budget meetings and chatting around a water cooler. Instead they discussed dissecting living creatures and splicing genes.
“Mr. Remus, with the combined resources between our lab and what you brought us from Dr. Harmon, we’ve made some progress. The original specimen you brought us hasn’t shown any changes in behavior or physiology since it has been kept here on the main floor with the other specimens.” He winced, the thought he wasn’t considered a person painful to hear. “We hoped it might show some similar traits, but so far nothing has happened. We’re using it right now as a control specimen in case we succeed with another hybrid. The current clone is at 94% vitality and can be freed from the incubator in a few days. From the progress we’ve seen, Dr. Harmon decided not to go the humanoid route with this attempt. We hypothesize that growing it in animal form will force it to present the werewolves’ natural abilities. Once it’s at 100% vitality, we should be able to see whether Dr. Harmon’s hypothesis was correct.”
There was a glowing tank of weird fluid and a dark mass in the far corner, two guards stationed next to it like they were afraid whatever was in there would burst free and start killing. Whatever it was in there, it didn’t move on its own, just floated, oblivious to the horror of its creation.
The horrible man with the cruel voice was talking again, he wished he was unconscious so he didn’t need to hear it anymore. “Dr. Harmon was only ever able to make one viable hybrid that actually had a functioning brain, but the tossup was no abilities whatsoever. All he did was make a prettier version of a person. This idea better work. You will figure out how to take those damn animals’ abilities and give them to humans— don’t need to keep making more of the damn monsters! This experiment doesn’t work, take all the samples you need from the hybrid and this clone, and then destroy them.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll do our best. Going back and growing the specimen itself and using Dr. Harmon’s cloning techniques may be the key to what we’ve been missing. Cloning a werewolf is the first step in identifying which genes can be cut out from their DNA and grafted onto human DNA.”
The men, the surgeons and doctors and scientists, their voices and words all blended together, a nameless group of evil men who caused nothing but pain and suffering. They didn’t even see him as a person—he was an ‘it.’
“I let Dr. Harmon get taken by these monsters for his repeated failures. If I see the same failure in you, I won’t hesitate to toss you into these cages and watch them tear you apart.” The man sounded as vicious as always, disdain and arrogance dripping from every threat he tossed out with impunity.
Wren huddled quietly in his cage, only a few feet away from where Simon Remus threatened the doctors and scientists who were doing their best to destroy every shred of his humanity and sanity. He hated Simon Remus with all his heart and soul, and if the chance ever came, he would feed Remus to the giant wolves in the cages next to him.