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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Wild Seas Casino. Five floors of hotel and gaming facilities.
And another five of subterranean parking.
Gull righted himself in the gloom, struggling against bruises and the bindings around his wrists and ankles. After being dragged nine blocks, kicked down multiple vehicle ramps, then dropped into the sunken lower half of an elevator car stuck between floors, he felt like he'd gone a dozen rounds in a fight club. His utility pants, much loved for their many pockets, had rips at both knees. His knuckles, palms, and elbows burned with scrapes. His jacket and shirt were twisted around him, having been wrenched about in the lycans' search for weapons.
They'd found nothing but a short hunting blade and his Swiss army knife. The Tasers he and Ramesh had used on the female lycan lay somewhere out in the night's rain, where the other female, Stroya, had launched her attack.
Gull slumped against the back wall of the elevator. Darkness loomed, kept at bay by the stainless-steel panels enclosing him. Reflected flame rippled across brushed metal: trash fires in the underground space just above his line of vision.
In the dim light, he took in his holding cell.
Mouldering food wrappers and waste. Bloody rags. Assorted equipment and supplies, the contents of his pockets that'd been deemed harmless, lay scattered over carpet stiff with muck—dried bodily fluids, going by the smell.
He wasn't the first prisoner to have been dumped in this pit.
He turned his gaze back to the firelit, graffitied concrete above where he sat. The casino's lowest car-park level. The heart of the pack's den.
When he'd been dragged through it, he'd seen more than butchered, abandoned vehicles and the gruesome detritus of predators. Despite it being night, lycans' preferred time to hunt out in the city, numerous shaggy and human figures had shifted in the gloom beyond the smoke and burning trash. More had slouched on tatty cars seats torn from vehicles, in no hurry to leave the den. Most had snarled as he passed, many displaying embryonic fangs.
The pack was rebuilding its numbers.
Gull's breath locked in his chest at what that meant for him.
He had to get out of there.
A low growl overhead.
A dark body slunk past the half-blocked elevator entrance, eyes burning, claws clicking on car-park concrete. Patches of mange and a bad burn—recent, given lycans' ability to heal—identified the beast.
Stroya.
The mutt was guarding him with psychotic dedication, snarling at anything that got too close. Even moths and crawling insects.
Unfortunately, over the last few minutes, she'd attracted more serious challengers, some in the pack bored—or hungry. Numerous wolves had tested the lycan's short patience. One in particular, a heavy-set mutt with a healing scar across one eye, kept coming back. That second, it stood on the crumpled hood of a trashed BMW, a vantage point that allowed it to stare down into the elevator car to meet his gaze.
