Adam had already reached the other end of the pipe and was swimming towards the shore when Bran fell off and started swimming. The men swam quickly and silently to shore, ran for the shelter of the forest where they would transform into wolves, and come nightfall, set off to find out where they were. Adam reached the shore first and cursed because the boat had no name, and no identification, but it would be traceable when they found out what country they were in. The men waited for the evening in their wolf forms and then silently took off running through the thick forest. They ran for two days before coming to a small village and then transforming back into humans.
Bran went out to scout. He went into the village and listened for a while. The people spoke Portuguese. He went to a shop and wandered around for a while. Then he went back to Adam and Samuel." We are in Portugal. I haven't been able to contact anyone yet because I'm so far away but we need money and a phone." Samuel said "It won't be a problem, I have friends in Portugal and as soon as we find out where we are, I know who to ask for help. "Samuel had been a doctor in Europe several times and had contacts.
Samuel went to talk to the locals and was soon directed to a house where a large bearded man with black hair came out and rushed to hug Samuel. Samuel had rescued the man's twin daughters when they were children and Sergio, which was his name, was more than willing to help. one phone call to Charles, who rigged Bran's private plane to fly to Portugal. They would soon be home. Adam tried to think of how to rescue Mimi. Eventually, Samuel took Adam outside to sit on the swing and explained how Mimi wouldn't last long, they wouldn't be able to save Mimi. Mimi was going to die and pretty soon. Adam was silent. He felt like he was going to explode. A rage and a powerless ball of pain were building inside him. They ate at Sergio's and after eight hours they drove to the private airport where Charles landed. Samuel thanked Sergio and the men boarded the plane. Adam was completely silent the whole flight and when they finally arrived, Adam took one of the cars and drove off before anyone could talk to him. Bran and Samuel told the vampires about Mimi's condition and prognosis. The vampires were silent for a moment, thanked him for the news, and then they too left. Someone would have to pay.
Dr. Morrisey wasn't worried. Yes, the werewolves had escaped, but he had all the material he would need. On their little tour around South America, he'd built up a decent nest egg by leasing werewolves and now he'd finish the job. Subject Omega had been under anesthesia, almost dead, and preliminary lab tests indicated that she should have died. But the ship had now served its purpose and it was time to move to the Canadian facility. The ship was anchored in Portugal and from there they would take a private plane to the Canadian facility where he would be able to test his serum at last.
The facility was located on the Canadian-Alaskan border, in a remote location, and had been designed from the very beginning for just this project. He didn't need to do much more to the Omega, just little steroids and chemotherapy and radiation, and the rest of her immune system would be destroyed. Then once the immune system was permanently gone, he would put in new stem cells that had been grown in the serum. These stem cells contained retroviruses and werewolf genes. The subject would also receive a serum infusion so that the retroviruses would be everywhere. He had already tried a couple of experimental individuals with his serum but because they didn't have the right genes the subjects hadn't survived. Morrisey was sure that Omega would succeed.
They were at the Canadian facility three days later when the target Omega began to wake up. First, there would be full body radiotherapy, then chemotherapy with steroids until her immune defenses would no longer grow back, and then. It would be the start of a new era.
I woke up in a strange place. I was tied to some kind of metal table, almost naked. The machine was like a giant X-ray machine. Dr. Morrisey came into the room. "'Ah, you're awake. Good, then you'll get to experience your radiotherapy." Then he left. The machine went on and I felt a burning tingling sensation all over my body. The machine went off for a while. And then it came on again. the machine must have beamed me about twenty times before a stretcher came alongside the table, where I was lifted and carried down a long white corridor to another room where my veins were cannulated and IV tubes was attached to both my arms. My hands were tied to the support arms with metal shackles. The drip stands had some sort of counters on them, meaning the drip speed was adjusted. The racks each had four bags. So I had eight bags dripping at the same time.
I don't know how long this went on. If I wasn't attached to the table at the time of the drip I was always almost in a radiation state. Eventually, they sealed me in a plastic bubble. So I was apparently without immune defense. The chemotherapy caused nausea, muscle pain, and nerve pain which was intensified by the radiotherapy. I lay in bed listless, unable to move and every now and then I would vomit helplessly into a container on the floor. I was dizzy, lightheaded, aching all over, and in pain. After an eternity, two men in spacesuits entered the bubble. They hung an IV bag of green liquid from the overhead of my bed and attached it to my cannula. They tied my hands and feet and drilled a hole in my shins to put the cannula in, the same for my thighs, shoulder bones, and ulna, and radius. More drip trays were brought into the bubble and a small blood bag looking like a drip bag was placed in each cannula. I guessed it was bone marrow.
Then all hell broke loose. It started with a headache that spread behind my eyes and felt like my head was splitting from the pressure. The nausea doubled, but the men had put a nasogastric tube up my nose, I couldn't get anything up, even though I was retching helplessly. I was so cold I was shivering wildly. My jaw was trembling, I knew I had a fever and a lot of it. My head felt heavy and my muscles burned, everywhere I felt aching, my bones hurt. It felt like every internal organ was in knots. All I could do was lie there helplessly and watch as bag after bag of that green poison dripped into me. "Tip tip tip tip... If I'd hated IVs and cannulas before, now that hatred turned to disgust, to rage, to something I wouldn't tolerate. I struggled, I pulled my hands, I tried to get out of the restraints, to get the damn IV out.
In the end, it felt like years. Then they wouldn't drop the thing and they untied me. I curled up in a ball and tried to wrap a blanket around me. I just tried to be. I felt absolutely horrible. I was racked, anxious, aching, sick, desperate, just trying to be and hoping I was going to die. Slowly I started to feel better. My fever broke, and as a result, I was drenched in sweat and powerless. Men in spacesuits had been coming every day to draw blood and today the men were no longer wearing suits. They took their blood tests and left.
Dr Morrisey was in a state of bliss. It was a success. The subject had developed a new immune system and all the samples from the subject contained werewolf genes. Now all that remained was to wait and see what this substance actually did.
Bran was worried about Adam. Since they had returned a month ago he hadn't heard anything about Adam. Then he started finding newspaper articles about strange fires at various facilities that no one actually knew the purpose of. The police had no suspects and there was not even a suspicion of arson but something about these left Bran wondering. Then Bran decided to call Nicholas to see if he knew anything about it. Nicholas replied," Well done, isn't it, Adam is very good at finding these pharmaceutical plants, a few anyway, then we interrogate a few people there, and then the plant goes bang." Nicholas added, " Those facilities are not easy to find and Hauptmann doesn't want to talk to you, so so long..." He hung up. Bran sighed, put the phone down, and mentally noted that there was nothing he could do about that at the moment.
I was weak, but I was hungry, I was hungrier than ever and I felt like all my senses were working too efficiently. I could see clearly and far and the sudden movement in particular caught my attention for some reason. I could hear very well. Footsteps, murmurs, even though the door to the room was quite thick. I couldn't move yet, so the nurses walked around my room without a care in the world. I was not a threat. They brought me a big tray of food and I started to gorge myself. I ate it all and I felt like I could have eaten some more. After a couple of days, I tried to stand up. My legs barely supported me. I resembled a skeleton with skin pulled over it. Every bone was sticking out, and my muscles were non-existent, but at least I could stand for a while. Every day I did more and more, I could stand, take steps, eat, and drink. I still resembled an anorexic except when I ate, then I was like some starving child in a developing country with a bubble stomach.
I also started to get my rage back under control and wanted to get away and run away. I was getting fed up with this institution, these people. I felt my rage grow into a white-hot ball again and at the same time, I felt something inside me waking up. Its power, its essence was alien. It wasn't part of me, but we were connected. The voice in my head spoke. " We must prepare ourselves." Prepare for what, I wondered fine I thought, I've then gone completely mental and now I have a voice in my head telling me to prepare. The evening was getting dark and I was irritated because the moon was bright even though it wasn't quite a full moon, one day it would be and for some reason, that fact irritated me to no end. The voice in my head said, "I warned you, start preparing, don't fight it, just let it happen, it's easier that way." I wondered what I should prepare for and what I shouldn't fight. I wonder if I've got a transmitter in my skull and some doctor is having a bloody good time. If this is even the job of a shrink.
Then the pain hit. I collapsed on my knees and felt a huge cramp hit my other leg, felt like my knee was going to dislocate. The pain hit my back, my shoulders. A voice in my head reassured me. " You're doing fine, that's it, just relax, let it happen, let me come out." I didn't know how to fight I just tried to hold on as the pain attacked whenever, wherever my face hurt, I kept my eyes closed, it felt like my mouth was suddenly full of teeth and somewhere in there I realized I was changing shape. But into what kind of monster?
Eventually, the pain stopped and I felt this other creature in my head take control of my body. I couldn't see anything because I sort of kept my eyes closed. Finally, I dared to open them. I was almost on the same level as I was in my human body. I watched as this other being walked in front of the mirror. I was a wolf. I was a huge wolf. I was tri-colored, the main color was white and then there were red and black patches. On my right shoulder, I had a night black and a shiny patch, otherwise, my colors were a bit pale. I was also fluffy. Clearly longer-haired than normal. I asked this other mind. "do you have a name?" "no" the wolf replied. " Then may I make a suggestion? I am Mimi. Now your coloring brings to mind one very dear to me. What would you like to be called Mimosa?" "Mimosa," it said thoughtfully, "I like it." "Okay, I'll say, nice to meet you Mimosa." Mimosa was skinny too, greyhound skinny and I could clearly see every rib under her fur. Mimosa said, " We are not in the best of shape but if you can wait until we get stronger, we will get out of here."
Mimosa sniffed every square inch of the room and let me have a go for a while. Walking as a wolf was strange at first, so four legs and a tail, were not worth thinking too much about as I did fall over a couple of times while practicing. Mimosa said " Right now you probably can't yet change shape other than at full moon but you'll practice when we get stronger. "The night was soon over and changing my own shape hurt just as much. Finally, exhausted, I crawled into bed and fell asleep.
Dr. Morrisey had watched all night as the Omega had successfully changed shape and moved and still managed to change back to human. When morning came, he went with the guards and fired three powerful tranquilizer darts at the target. They then retreated for fifteen minutes to wait for the drug to take effect. It did. The target hadn't even moved. They removed the darts and tied the target down and began taking many of their samples.
I finally woke up with a head full of cotton wool and found myself in another IV. I tore my arm free of the restraint and shredded the cannula off. I knotted the tube, destroyed the bag, and went to wash up. The room had a rudimentary Shower and even that was better than nothing. I found myself covered in stitches a bit everywhere, but some of the wounds were clearly healing, so I shredded the stitches out of them. I put on what clothes I could find and stayed in my bed waiting for food. Eventually, a hatch opened in the door, and a tray was pushed through. I greedily took it and ate it all. Every day I grew stronger. I saved my strength as much as I could, ate, and ate.
I was gassed almost every day and more than once the result was stitches somewhere in my body. I also had my first lesson in silver when a guard shot a silver bullet at me. Goddammit, that hurt. The wound didn't heal, it almost smoked. They left the bullet on my side for four days. Then they just removed the bullet. The silver weakened me considerably, I decided at that point that I should avoid that. The next experiment was aconitum. Just as the wound from the silver had healed, the guard shot me with aconitum. I vomited for 48 hours without being able to do anything.
I thought as I recovered that " Fine, I seem to have kryptonite too, and bad ones it is." the full moon was only a few days away, and only a few more days to escape. the season was heart winter, January, the air here was as low as -50 degrees below zero at night and 20 to 30 degrees below zero during the day. I just saw an escape route outside, freedom.
Adam, Nicholas, and Elias had heard that there are several medical facilities in Alaska and Canada. Adam was filled with rage, the kind of rage that was hard to control, a consuming rage. He hadn't felt such rage even since Mercy died and then switched to another plane. Mimi had somehow slipped under his skin on the ship and the very thought of her dying alone and tortured kept the flame of rage well alive. It was the same with vampires. For them sometimes family had been the most important thing but one of the sisters repented and turned human to spend the rest of her life with Nicholas' adopted son and the other sister lost her wife and child and went mad about it, well their only existing brother who had abandoned his whole, the family was living who knows where with his witch wife.
They arrived at the Canadian/Alaska border and went first to New Foundland to destroy or investigate a facility. The facility was absolutely nothing. However, it was almost a full moon and Adam wanted him and Nicholas to run like wolves for a couple of nights, catching what they could. Nicholas got a phone call, however, that his crazy sister was causing trouble again and he and Elias had to leave. Some instinct told Adam to stay at the cabin and spend a few nights as a wolf. Adam had once had a pack, back in Mercy's day. However, around the time of Mercy's death, he had turned his pack over to Beta the Darryl and had left Washington. He had led one pack in Chicago but that had then merged with another pack and Adam had concentrated on his business. He'd always been there to help Bran with any problems he might have.
The full moon was coming. I had eaten as well as I could, but I felt that the silver and aconitum were far from all gone from my system. I knew that now we were on the run. The transformation hurt as much as before and I had to work for a while to relax. Eventually, I was in Mimosa form. Mimosa now let me be in control at first. I had previously managed to cut a slit in one of the window panes so my idea was to jump through the glass straight out. I was on the ground floor and this window was behind a building and you could see the forest from a distance. The goal was to jump through the window and run into the woods as fast as you could. "Now or never," I thought determinedly as I set off running as fast as I could and then jumped, the window shattered surprisingly cleanly and we flew into a snowdrift. There was no time to wait and I started running as fast as I could towards the edge of the forest.
We were almost into the woods when the searchlights started sweeping the ground. Soon, men in overalls flooded out of the facility and started starting up snowmobiles. There wasn't that much snow in the forest, so Mimosa ran like a whirlwind. It was snowing and windy and it covered our tracks. I don't know how long we ran but when we stopped we didn't hear any snowmobiles. We listened for probably another 10 minutes, just silence. Mimosa said, " Let's find some food and then we'll go on." We started to walk now quietly in the forest, sniffing. Soon Mimosa got a scent. A moose. We walked silently and saw a huge bull moose eating lichen and moss from a tree. We crept closer and then attacked. Mimosa bit into the moose's throat and bit as hard as she could. The moose struggled for a few minutes and then it was dead. We took no time as Mimosa rushed up to the moose's belly and started tearing open the soft belly skin. I don't know which one of us had the upper hand, we ate, ate the fat that was under the skin, ate the liver, the heart, the spleen, the pancreas. We didn't touch the intestines, we started eating meat. Suddenly I smelled a new smell. Another wolf. A male. I didn't know how I knew but I said " We're about to have company, sniff." Mimosa growled, "Yep, and still strong, probably Alpha." I thought we'd better slip away, but Mimosa disagreed. "This is our prey and we're not giving it away willingly."
Adam had given the moon an invitation to visit and was now running in wolf form. Suddenly he smelled blood, a moose. Hmm someone's got the prey, Adam thought "I think I'll go for the dividends." The night was already turning to morning and Adam figured he didn't have to change form if he didn't want to. The moose roast would be a boy. He moved closer and sniffed. A female werewolf, alone. Werewolf females are rare and they are always in a pack. Adam moved closer. Is this some kind of rebellious teenage wolf that has escaped or what? Female wolves are usually smaller, and more delicate than males, and even when females do get prey they are usually rabbits or deer. A moose, well that's rare Adam thought.
We were plowing for meat when the moon started to set and I felt the first cramp. " Oh no," I thought, then realized what a thoughtless escape plan this was. " Well, at least the end will probably come quickly." I knew I wouldn't last many minutes in this frosty weather with no clothes on. Then I saw the moose carcass. I could wrap myself in it no it was ideal but it was still steaming warm and we'd eaten quite a lot of offal already so... then I remembered the male. Well, let's see what happens here as the transformation really took over and I succumbed to its ravages.
Adam watched with amusement as the big tricolored female wolf flopped to the ground and began to change shape, a teenager, he thought. "'Once I find out whose pack this runaway is from, then that girl will know she's alive." Adam knew that such expeditions were sadly common among young people and were dealt with severely. This girl might even end up in a cage. Adam waited patiently. Usually, the shape of the wolf is in proportion to the human form. A tall person a big wolf and a smaller, more delicate person a small wolf. That wasn't always true, but as this female's transformation progressed and her paws became slender into slender hands. Eventually a skinny, skeletal girl or woman lay in the snow, her dirty hair hiding her face from view. Then the woman lifted her head and Adam was shocked.