Endangered Species

Pain. Pain like I’d never known coursed through me. I couldn’t move without making it worse, so I lay there in silent suffering, praying for it to end.

No such luck.

I was feverish and in and out of lucidity with the temperature spikes. When I could think, I prayed to pass out again. My entire body hurt like I was being consumed by fire. My bones ached, my muscles were sore, and my skin was flushed. Where the sheets or the cool cloth someone was running over my feverish skin touched me, it gave scant comfort compared to the pain of its contact.

If that wasn’t enough, I could feel my wolf deep inside my brain. She wanted out, and my body wasn’t helping her. She was forcing her way into my brain, personality, and body. All of that hurt.

Eventually, and I had no idea if it had been hours or days, the pain started to fade, and the fevers diminished. I became more aware of my surroundings as my temperature went back down. Two candles provided a small amount of illumination to the room. Looking around, I could see I was in a room with no windows. A woman in an Air Force flight suit was next to the bed I was on. She wrung the cloth in the bucket next to her as she looked me over. “Are you back? Angela?”

I let out a groan, finally focusing on her face. She was in her thirties, tall and thin, with black hair to her shoulders and glasses. “Where am I?”

“Joint Base McChord-Lewis, specifically the second sub-basement below Air Wing headquarters,” she replied. “I’m Major Debbie Burkett, senior flight surgeon assigned to the 62nd airlift wing. You’re lucky to be alive. That fever was intense, and we don’t have working facilities to do more. You coded on me once, but I was able to get your heart restarted. If you feel like you have a broken rib, well, sorry. Shit happens when you’re saving lives.”

“Everything hurts,” I replied.

She grabbed a water bottle with a straw in it. The water was warm, but I needed it badly after sweating so much. They’d stripped my clothes off, so I was lying on the soaked mattress cover. “Do you want to try sitting up?”

It would hurt, but I needed to move. “Please.” She helped me sit up, then moved my legs until they were over the edge, and my bare feet touched the cold tile floor. Debbie used the time to wipe the sweat from my back and hair. Twenty minutes later, she helped me to my feet. “I need to speak to your Commanding Officer. It’s urgent.”

“You’re going nowhere, Angela. You’re in isolation for twenty-four hours after your fever is gone, and I’m stuck in here with you. Whatever illness you have, we haven’t seen it before. It might be a new strain of influenza or another disease. With the amount of rot and decay in the city, I see diseases I never expected in America.” She had me hold onto the sink while she changed the sheets on the hospital bed.

What to do with her? I knew I only had a few hours between the end of the fever and the start of my shift. “Where are my people? The ones who brought me here?”

“The base is on lockdown, Midshipman Summers. We took you in because of your condition and your military ID card. They said they were heading home and would try to check back in a few days.”

It was what I expected. I had hoped to have Melanie here to help my wolf after it emerged. Alone and surrounded by humans? That wasn’t any good. “What I have isn’t contagious, Doctor.”

“What is it?”

What was I going to say now? If I said a werewolf had bitten me, she’d still think I was hallucinating from the fevers. It’s not like humans had experience in turns. “I’d rather explain this once, with the Commanding Officer present. Time is short for me. Send for him, so I can give him the message I’ve come so far to relay.”

“He can’t come in.”

The door to the room had a window, now covered by a magnetic sheet to give us privacy. “Can’t he sit outside, and I can relay the message through the door? What is your clearance level?”

“Secret,” she told me.

“We’re a dozen levels above that,” I told her. “You’ll have to leave for part of it. When I finish with the classified stuff, I’ll have you called back in.”

She shook her head. “Protocol is that I can’t leave the room. We can’t risk anyone else getting this, Angela. I have no idea what it is or how it is transmitted. All I know is that I can’t stop it.”

“I told you it’s not communicable, at least not airborne or by contact.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s from an animal bite.”

She laughed at this. “I examined every inch of you for clues as to why you were feverish when you came in, Angela. You don’t have any bite wounds. I didn’t find any scars or blemishes at all! How does an athletic woman in her senior year of college not have a single cut, scar, or skinned knee?”

I wasn’t ready to tell her that I had plenty, but the werewolf super-healing coursed through my body. “Can you get the Commanding Officer, please? Ask him to bring the key members of his command staff. We are wasting time I don’t have.” I finished the water bottle and reached for another one on the table next to the bed.

“Fine,” she said. Everyone knows that meant it was FAR from being ok. “If you don’t tell me the truth, I can’t figure out what this is.” I chugged the water bottle while she stared me down. “There are scrubs on the shelf. Get dressed before I take the window cover off.”

I was feeling better by the time I got in my clean clothes. In the meantime, the Major had talked to the guard outside the door about getting the General. “How can we handle your classified talk,” she asked me.

“Lock yourself in the bathroom until I come to get you,” I told her.

Five minutes later, the window covering was off. I looked out to see a very unhappy Lieutenant General Payne, US Army, First Corps Commander, and senior officer on base. He’d brought a bunch of officers with him, all lower-ranking staff officers, including the Colonel in charge of the airlift wing. I sent Doc into the bathroom, then introduced myself.

“Welcome to my headquarters, Midshipman Summers. Your note said you had flash traffic from the USS MAINE?”

“I do. You’ll want to write this down, General.” I slowly repeated the message that Captain Grimes gave me to deliver, then repeated it. “Can you make contact with my ship?”

“We can try,” General Payne replied. “We’ll do what we are ready for their next scheduled attempt. What happened out there?”

I looked over to the bathroom door. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to bring my doctor into the conversation. The fevers I had are part of the story I need to tell you.”

“As long as you don’t go into classified activities on the sub, that should be fine.”

Twenty minutes later, he was wishing I’d never shown up with this bag of flaming poo at his front door.

The brass listened in silence as I described the loss of communications, then surfacing to find no one transmitting. I talked about the floating coffins that were ships and private vessels offshore, then the decision to send the two midshipmen ashore with the message. Doc’s eyes went wide as I described the solar radiation levels we found; their instruments had fried early on, so they had no idea the radiation doses they were dealing with until it was too late.

I told them about our landing, then the kayak trip around the Sound to land at the Bangor submarine base. “It was hell on earth. Bodies floated in the water or lay in the streets and homes, bloated and decaying. Nothing was moving, and no one was alive. Boats were drifting free, vehicles were Cities were burning, and there was nothing to stop it. We paddled past the dead and the ruins; the only one who challenged us wanted help for his wife, and we couldn’t supply that. We paddled through the night until we reached the triangle docks at Bangor.” Just remembering that night turned my stomach.

“What did you find when you arrived?”

“Nothing at first. There were two submarines at the docks when the USS Maine departed; both were gone, and it looked like they cast off lines and floated away. Nobody was around; the pier was quiet, and there was no power or lighting. We cleared the docks, then headed up the hill towards the headquarters building. That’s when we found the first Marine.”

“Dead?”

“Quite dead, but not of exposure. A single rifle shot to the head, and he never saw it coming. We found more bodies as we got closer to the building. We saw evidence of a pitched battle that ended in summary executions. We found one survivor in the basement who told us what happened before he died.”

“Who did it? The Chinese? The Russians?”

It was time to peel the band-aid off. “No. He told us the attackers were werewolves.”

A few men laughed while General Payne’s mouth dropped in shock. “Werewolves. Like in the movies?”

“The movies are fiction. This was not.” I waited for them to stop laughing. “We spent the day in the basement, then headed out after dark to find anyone in charge. We hadn’t gone far before I got captured and Midshipman Newman killed.”

“Why didn’t they kill you?”

“I was a female of breeding age,” I told them. “They were the only ones spared in the attack. Hundreds of women on base were captured and enslaved by our new werewolf masters.”

“These masters, you said they are werewolves? How do you know?”

“It’s hard to ignore a two-hundred-pound man becoming a two-hundred-pound wolf in front of you,” I told him. “I’m serious as a heart attack here. Werewolves exist. Werewolves attacked the base and took it over, killing almost everyone at Kitsap. And warriors still hold it.”

The General was losing patience with me, and his mind couldn’t wrap itself around what I was telling him. “Why would they take Kitsap?”

“It’s the safest place to hide from the shit going on topside. It has miles of underground bunkers built for Trident weapon storage and repair, underground maintenance and command facilities that still have power and utilities, and working vehicles. There are nearly five hundred of them holed up in the base. They send raiding parties out at night, collecting food and supplies from the entire area. They have years worth of food stored in those bunkers already. You’re not going to wait them out. Hiding behind yards of soil and concrete or steel blast doors, you’re not going to destroy the bunkers without using a nuclear weapon. If you do, there may be other nuclear weapons underground. Do you want to vaporize multiple ballistic missiles with an attack? You’d irradiate the Pacific Northwest.”

General Payne shook his head. “A base like that has security forces, Marines, procedures! How did they get overrun so quickly?”

“The werewolves are far better suited to the post-apocalyptic world than we humans are. They heal ten times as fast, see in darkness, have far better hearing, can scent like a military working dog, and are stronger and faster than us. They can fight effectively in conditions where we cannot. The defenders had no chance.”

“So, how in the hell do you beat them?”

“You don’t, General. You have to find a way to live with them. You know they own the base, and I’m telling you, it is suicide to take them on. In my time there, I was able to make some headway. If I survive, I might be able to broker a peace agreement.”

He shook his head. “Peace agreement? With a hostile force that has already massacred thousands of our sailors and Marines? Are you mad?”

“It’s better than the alternatives. I have a unique perspective on this, General. I can bridge the gap between our people.”

“Because you were held captive?”

I felt a sharp pain in my leg along with hearing and feeling a loud snap. My left leg bent as the ankle lengthened and reformed. The Major screamed and backed away.

The change was starting.

I breathed through the pain and looked back at him. “No, General. I’m becoming one of them. A werewolf bit me two days ago. Twenty minutes from now, I’m either dead or a wolf.”

“NO,” Major Burkett said. “Get me out of here!”

“You’re in isolation, Major, and you ordered that. We can’t let you out,” the General replied.

I looked at her with tears in my eyes. “Stay away from me, and lock yourself in the bathroom when you feel like you aren’t safe. Stay there until it’s over.” I looked at the General. “There’s no one else in this room, General. Keep everyone clear in case my wolf comes out feral. If I don’t calm down in a few hours, send people to shoot me in the head.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Another bone broke, bringing a fresh scream of pain. “I can’t stop it, General. God willing, I’ll survive it and tell you the rest of the story.”