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“I–I dunno,” Ashton said. “I just kind of ran up here when people started popping like balloons.”
“Okay, can you go wake up Sylvia?” Cole asked. “She’s sleeping in one of the empty dorms tonight just in case something like this happened. Ask her who is the best trained among the pack, and go wake those people up, too. This is an all-hands situation.”
“Y-yeah,” Ashton stammered, looking pale. “Um…I—I’m not saying no, but…”
I saw him look down the hall and cringe. “Is Rosie one of the people not doing well?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice cracking. “I left her to run up here, but I’m…I don’t wanna leave her alone for that long.”
“Go to her,” I said. “I’ll get everyone else.” I looked up at Cole and smiled. “Why don’t you head down, and I’ll meet you down there in a bit, okay?”
He gave a terse nod before walking off with Ashton toward the staircase. I followed at a distance to find Sylvia’s room, doing my best to keep quiet while moving with urgency. I didn’t want to wake the others and potentially wind up with more problems than we could handle at once, or extra people trying to help in ways that conflicted with ours.
I found the room Sylvia was staying in and rapped on the door with a few knocks.
A few seconds passed, but I heard her slide out of bed and pad over to the door, opening it. She was in a nightgown and housecoat, her long hair over one shoulder in a loose braid. Her skin was clear of makeup, yet slightly dewy with some sort of moisturizer or night cream.
“Everything okay?” she asked me.
“I think we have a situation with the gene therapy patients. I haven’t seen it for myself yet, but—”
Sylvia lifted the angle of her chin slightly, sniffing the air. Her lips turned down in a frown, and she turned away from me to put on some slippers. “I can smell the blood,” she said with unnerving calm. “Come on, we’re going to need as much of the pack leadership as we can spare. Where is Noah?”
“Sound asleep in bed, luckily.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way. From what I can tell, this isn’t going to be a very pretty sight.”
I followed Sylvia as she made hurried steps through the building. I didn’t even have to tell her where to go; she seemed to just be following her nose.
We’d given everyone their own rooms when they came to stay, but considering the carpets in the dormitories and the unpredictable nature of the gene therapy the visitors were going through, we’d made a makeshift sleeping arrangement in the large dining room for the therapy patients in case things got bloody. It was an eventuality we’d hoped to avoid, but it seemed our luck had finally run out in that regard.
As we neared the laminate flooring of the kitchen and dining areas, even I could smell the metallic tang of blood in the air.
But I still couldn’t have prepared myself for what I saw when I rounded the corner and saw the dozen or so people undergoing treatment.
Since everyone was in a different stage of illness or transformation and the Lanyon Clover serum was far from an exact science, the room seemed to be mostly blood and chaos. Some shifters lay curled in a ball on their sides, their arms wrapped around their bodies as if they were trying to hold themselves together. Others couldn’t seem to convince their bodies to stay on either side of the line between man and beast. Lupine musculature burst through layers of human skin like fluid from an angry blister.
In one corner, someone was vomiting what looked to be their own innards, given the blood that came out of them. In another corner, Cole was trying to convince his grandfather to sit down instead of trying to help everyone in his pack.
Ashton gathered Rosie’s hair away from her clammy, ashen face before she turned her face to weep into her pillow as her bones audibly snapped in her legs.
I felt a wave of nausea come over me. In all of everything I’d dealt with, I’d never seen carnage and gore like this. People looked like they were dying. It looked like the med tent on a battlefield rather than a makeshift room full of cots.
Looking around, I had no idea where to even begin. I almost wanted to run.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked at the source of it. Sylvia gave me an encouraging look and a little squeeze as if to say we will get through this night. Then, she looked over the room at all the chaos within and inhaled deeply, rolling her shoulders.
“Cole, you need to step away from your grandfather, take Ashton with you, and grab buckets of hot water and all the towels and linens you can find,” she instructed calmly. “River, you’re with Marley. In the bathroom on the second floor, I have a large med kit and a big roll of non-stick bandages—it looks like mesh. I need you two to bring that down, along with all the disinfectant you can find. Make sure it’s hospital-grade.”
“I don’t think we have a hospital-grade disinfectant,” I said.
“There's a bunch of bleach in the laundry room. Grab that and mix it with water in a one-to-three ratio. You got that?” she asked me.
“I think so.”
“Repeat it back to me,” she said.
“Bleach is mixed with water, one-to-three ratio,” I said.
