ONC 2022 shortlisted: The Emergence of a more virulent lycanthrope virus decimated civilisation. As a street scavenger, Gulliver Chase risks his life in his home city's derelict streets hunting for resources for his fellow survivors. But it isn't fo...
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Gulliver Chase fought for breath—then wondered why he bothered. The creature on his back, crushing his face and ribs into rain-slick asphalt, was everything it smelled like.
Wet dog and death.
A lycan—fully matured, savagely at home in its mutated body. No clumsy, newly bitten 'pup'.
Its breath roiled hot with the fetor of past kills and the iron of its most recent. Strings of drool dangled past his hiking jacket's hood. His mini LED torch, dropped amongst the city street's weeds, supplemented the wet moonlight, revealing glints of red.
Blood in saliva.
Ramesh's blood.
His scavenger partner hadn't got a single shot off. The tough Colony soldier assigned to watch his back had lost half his throat before he'd even known he was prey. His body, a shadow beyond the torchlight, sprawled beside what should've been the night's only victim, a lycan mutt they had tracked and taken down; had mistakenly thought was alone.
Gull strangled his grief with the knowledge his friend hadn't suffered. As another foul snort tossed damp copper hair across his eyes, he prayed his own end would be as swift.
That was how shit his ambitions had become.
In his late teens, a sports scholarship, running a four-minute mile, and climbing the world's wildest rock formations had been his top goals. Now, he just wanted his jugular to be torn out without fanfare.
Bitterness should've accompanied that knowledge. But he was no longer the smartarse nineteen-year-old who'd believed life owed him success and high-octane thrills.
At twenty-five, he'd lived six years longer than most.
Five years longer than his father and three siblings—half his motley, unruly adopted family gone.
Along with nine-tenths of Bell Harbour's population. Maybe the world's. Lycanthropes had hunted for centuries in the shadows, staying under everyone's radars, their number few. Just enough to spawn legends and B-grade fiction, such as werewolves ruled by the moon or the French's loup garou, a more accurate portrayal of creatures able to change form at will and keep their human intelligence. But then, in the cursed cells of some mutt's blood, a random mutation in the virus they carried changed the status quo.
Few people had survived the first year of the Emergence, either succumbing to the more virulent strain or becoming food for those who had.
The Changed now consumed the world.
A stuttering growl, heart-attack close to his ear.
A bloody canine muzzle moved past the edge of his hood.
Teeth—millimetres from his cheek.
Heart slamming his ribs, Gull stared past the russet strands of his hair to eye—wistfully—the puddle in front of his slightly too generous nose. A person could drown in only a couple of inches of water. And he really did not want to face what came next.
