The Run

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter 25

We’d been stuck in the little room for five hours now, before we had any news of what was going on above ground. And what we heard, wasn’t good news either.

It came from dad, mind linked to everyone in the pack, pretty much yelled out. It was a technique that was painful, and reached to all pack members – even the youngest child. They only ever used it in emergencies, and werewolves had only recently realized that they could even do it. The Alpha would kind of scream into the link, and even if a wolf was blocking out everyone, they would hear him to the same extend that someone who wasn’t blocking the link would.

It was an action that would get someone’s attention, no matter what they were doing. And I couldn’t be more thankful that they had realized the trick now, rather than further into the future.

Everyone in the room, except for Speranza, Clyde and Celeste flinched, the two children crouching down to the floor and holding their hands over their ears. Zeno’s friend muttered “Shush, stop it – it hurts” miserably as the message was conveyed.

“The message wasn’t a joke. Stay in your safe positions please. Those who are above ground should find ammunition. Aim for the head. This is an emergency. Megan seems to have formed an alliance with the warlocks. They’ve raised the dead, literally.”

I could hear the underlying panic in the Alpha’s voice as he tried to keep a calm outer shell for the rest of the pack. Even as I resisted the urge to protectively hold my own ears, I knew that we were, for a fact, in deep shit.

I ran over to Zeno and his friend, and held them both in my arms as I partially shifted, my cat ears straining to hear anything through the thick walls of the safe compound.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit. We are so dead. If they get down here, we’ll be trapped with no way out. There’s only one way to enter and to leave. I suppressed frightened shivers as Oratio wrapped his arms around us, Clyde and Speranza copying our movements on the other side of the room.

I suppose, in times like these all you can do is hold one another and wait. I breathed in and out slowly, trying to calm myself as I thought of our options and possible outcomes for the situation.

So, the spell might wear off after a day or two, and then we would be alright unless they re-activated the spell, but then again it did take them two weeks to act, so I guess it took them two weeks to prepare for it. They’ve probably strengthened it to last…

We could stay down here until they all rotted or fell apart, but then that would probably take six months or so and I’d be stuck down here trying to give birth.

Plus they might move out into the forest and infected other towns, and other packs. That’s if the stupid warlocks haven’t thought of that, which I hope they have. They did take two weeks of preparation after all. Because if that does happen, then no-one is safe and they’ve just set a death sentence on the entire world.

I wasn’t taking my information from movies, either. During the first war the warlocks and witches had done this, only the spell was week so it only lasted two days. But they hadn’t thought it through, and soon thousands were infected from the parasite that they had created.

Where did you think zombie movies came from? The stories had eventually turned into myths, then legends, and then just a stories you would tell around a campfire to scare others. Not that I would want to be outside, around a campfire right now.

If the warlocks didn’t remember what they had caused before, then we were definitely in a lot of trouble. Considering that none of the other races remember what had happened, I’m pretty sure that they haven’t realized the trouble that they had just caused…