Werewolf Apocalypse: Rise of the Lycans

The chase

The stairs were a narrow concrete tube, and every step we took sounded like a gun went off.

"Keep moving!" I whispered as if that helped anything, pushing Clara ahead of me. "Don't look down!"

Behind us, four floors below, the heavy steel door gave out with a sound like tearing sheet metal. Then came the scratch, it was a wet, rapid shhh-shhh-shhh of massive talons gripping raw concrete. It wasn't climbing the stairs, it was leaping them, three or four at a time, its heavy body bouncing off the walls with dull, bone-shaking thuds.

Clara lost her footing on the landing of the sixth floor. One of her hands held the railing and the other held her chest. Her breath were coming in ragged, whistling gasps.

"Leo, I can't—my chest—" she said, breathing heavily.

"You can!" I grabbed her around the waist, taking half her weight, and shoved open the heavy red door marked ROOFTOP ACCESS.

Night air hit us like a bucket of ice water as we ran out into the roof of the eight-story parking garage. Under normal circumstances, we would have enjoyed it, but not this.

I turned around and shoved the iron tire iron through the door handles, relieved that we had outrun the creature.

"Look," Clara whispered as I walked towards her.

I turned toward the edge of the roof, and for a second, I almost died. The city... Every part of it was on fire. Headlights were jammed bumper-to-bumper for miles, but nobody was driving. People were running across the tops of cars, while huge shadows of long-limbed shapes leapt from the tops of buses into the crowds, dragging bodies into the dark side streets.

Every subway grate along the main strip was spewing black smoke and huge, grey-furred bodies. I watched as the police shot in futility, their weapons weren't stopping them. Down by the bank, two police cruisers were flipped upside down, their tires were still spinning while a beast the size of a minivan tore the doors off a third car like it was paper.

"It's not just our street," Clara said in a small and broken voice. "Leo... it's the whole city."

A sudden BANG startled us and we turned to see the rooftop door bulging outward. The iron tire rod I'd jammed through the handles bent into a sharp V-shape and dust puffed out from the hinges of the door.

"Back up!" I yelled, pulling Clara toward the far ledge of the roof.

I searched for an escape route. To our left was an eighty-foot drop down to an alley and to our right was the street. In front of us, across a ten-foot gap, was the glass face of a lower office building. Maybe that could be our escape.

The door tore completely off its hinges with a loud BOOM! And came flying across the roof and crashing into a row of air conditioning units.

Then the creature stepped through the doorway. Up close, under the pale glow of the moon, it was nearly nine feet of absolute nightmare. Its chest was twice as wide as a silverback gorilla’s and was covered in matted, dark grey fur that smelled like wet dog and rotting meat. Its snout was long and jagged, and filled with rows of yellowed, knife-like teeth. But the worst part was its eyes. They weren't dumb, animal eyes, they were intelligent and furious.

It dropped on all fours with a roar and began to circle us, I could hear its long front limbs clicking against the gravel roof.

"Leo," Clara whimpered and gripped tightly my. "What do we do?"

I held up a jagged piece of broken metal I’d picked up near the AC units and held it straight amid shaky fingers. "Stay behind me."

The beast pulled its lips back, exposing black gums, and coiled its hind legs to spring.

Then, three red laser dots appeared on the creature’s head.

THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.

The sound was tiny like a suppressed air rifle, but the effect was brutal. Three heavy steel darts slammed into the wolf's neck, and the creature let out a high-pitched, wet screech and staggered backward as blue sparks erupted from the wound sites.

I turned to see the source of the fire and noticed it was a person descending with ropes from a silent pitch-black helicopter hovering high above the cloud, dressed in tight, matte-black tactical gear with no markings. They gracefully landed on the roof with complete silence, the first held a short-barreled weapon made of polished silver and black carbon fiber. Two more figures dropped down behind the first and the lead tactical officer raised his weapon and fired.

With another THWIP, a heavy silver slug caught the grey beast right between the eyes. The monster’s head snapped back, and its giant nine-foot frame crashed onto the gravel roof, stone-dead.

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. "Thank God... are you guys police? Military?"

The lead officer turned toward us. Underneath his dark helmet visor, his skin was unnaturally pale, it was pale like chalk, like it was completely bloodless. He moved his head with a slow, terrifying precision that didn't feel human at all.

He raised his silver weapon again, pointing the barrel straight at my chest.

"Witnesses," he said with a cold, smooth voice through the officer's helmet communicator. "Clean the roof. I don't want any survivors."

"Wait!" I yelled, throwing my hands up. "We're uninfected! We're just trying to get home!"

The officer ignored me as his finger made to squeeze the trigger.

With a roar, a second wolf that was even larger than the first, with dark reddish fur erupted from the stairwell door and slammed full-force into the side of the tactical squad. One officer was thrown forty feet over the ledge into the dark alley below. While the remaining two fired blindly, their silver weapons lighting up the roof with bright blue flashes.

"NOW!" I screamed.

I grabbed Clara’s waist, locked my arms around her, and together, we threw our bodies off the edge of the roof toward the office building across the gap.