Madness. Sheer madness.
Strange scenes torn from your darkest nightmares are arrayed about the adjoining room in a splattered mishmash of the macabre where every semblance of what is right and good in your world is snuffed out at once.
Whimpers and dull moans of pain permeate the air as humans dressed all in white go about a deadly dance, a ritual of flesh and surgical instruments.
Your eye locks onto a long, twisting tube of clear plastic, slowly filling with dark red liquid. Your mind tries desperately to escape the terrible truth. A small piece of your consciousness that isn't engaged in silent screaming conjures up a single word that you learned over a year ago in your biology classes: "exsanguination."
"They're killing them, aren't they?"
Dena's whisper brings you back to reality, and you shake your head, blinking rapidly. "I don't think so. This is something worse. The humans know we regenerate."
You return your gaze to the window, drawn by morbid fascination as you watch more than half the adults of your pack suffer at the hands of human doctors. Bone saws hack and scalpels slice, testing the limits of werewolf physiology and suffering, barely waiting for the wounds to heal before attacking again with detached, businesslike efficiency.
So this is the great secret that the elders have been keeping from you for all these years? Could these inhumane experiments have been going on week after week without your knowledge? Of all the revelations you were excited to discover, this is the very last thing you expected to find.
"Oh gods," Dena groans, pointing at a wolf on a nearby table. "Is that Lapu's…father?"
An acrid stench brings your attention back to this side of the window, and you realize that Lapu has pissed himself.
"We have to get out of here, we have to get out…" the boy mumbles again and again in a mantra of fear and revulsion.
Before you have time to flee, an armed soldier bursts through a door farther down the warehouse's western side and runs toward you, speaking into a headset. "I've found them!"
Between the harsh realities on the other side of the window and the imminent threat on this side, you finally find your legs working again. You bound away, back toward the eastern door you entered through.
We should have been more careful, you think to yourself. If I'd kept to the shadows, they might not have been hunting us.
Next
The four of you flee the warehouse, your fear urging speed out of tired leg muscles that you never knew you had. Your heart feels as though it's about to burst as you round a corner halfway back to the bridge.
You almost run straight into a lone soldier who looks as surprised to see you as you are to see him.
"Don't move! Stay right where you are!"
A combination of nerves and fear crease the grizzled soldier's forehead, collecting small pools of sweat as he steps toward you and your friends. His hands tremble despite the fact that they hold a semiautomatic rifle, and he stinks of fear.
If your mind weren't preoccupied with more pressing matters, you might wonder if the man has ever even seen a group of werewolves before.
A sharp whine catches in Dena's lupine throat, and she flinches away as the muzzle of the soldier's weapon shifts toward her in a nervous jerk. "We were only curious," she whimpers. "We didn't see anything!"
But you did see something. Something horrible. And your world will never seem the same again.
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