Red Moon: Chapter 12
#18 of Red Moon
Red Moon: Chapter 12
Trevor heaved as a sickening feeling came crashing into him. His very being seemed as if it was being violated; something was trying to force its way into his mind and push him out and he had no strength to repel it.
It felt as if thick tendrils were being shoved into his head. Cold and slick, entirely unnatural in its every being. They wriggled, creating an intense pressure that compounded his headache. He was afraid that his head was going to just explode and send his matter everywhere.
What did those people do to him? It was but a fleeting thought, the last vestige of sanity that managed to eke out of him as this thing in his head laid siege to his mind, his soul... his humanity. Trevor tried to resist it, something in him knew that he couldn't let it win, but he just couldn't. It was relentless in its assault. He felt mental barriers fall like dominoes and his mind being torn apart.
His earliest memories were the first to go. Images of his first bike he got for Christmas came flashing before his very eyes. How he ran on short legs down the stairs of his parents old house in San Diego, nearly tripping over themselves in excitement as he came to a crashing halt on his knees before the multicolored shrine that was the Christmas tree. At first he didn't notice it, the oddly shaped lump of Santa Claus print wrapping paper sitting off to the side. Then... he couldn't remember it anymore. Trevor struggled to remember the fond memory, but he simple couldn't. It was gone, flung into the void of nothingness.
This happened to all of his other memories. Trevor had spent an entire year of the third grade without lunch, saving up his daily lunch allowance to buy an Atari when it first came out. It was all he ever wanted after hearing about it from a friend. What was his name? Trevor couldn't recall, it was gone. His parents' names... gone. Watching the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in person... the last thing that he could quickly grab onto was the sound of the pitter patter of the feet of the marathoners and even that soon turned to the dark.
Each memory was before his very eyes and cast aside, slowly building into his young adulthood. Everything was going. Absolutely everything. More of the barriers that he had to protect his most precious of memories were shredded apart like thin tracing paper. The day he lost his virginity to his roommate at college. It had been a sloppy, drunken affair between to friends. Maybe it was the friend that had told him about the Atari? Trevor didn't know and now he didn't even know what state he had been in or even if they did it in their dorms or possible even outside. Bit by bit, it was taken apart.
It went on for what seemed like hours. The man's mind slowly succumbing and then being taken over by a new force, a new consciousness that built itself on the tattered remains of Trevor's mind. New feeling emerged in Trevor, ones that he had felt before, but so much more intense. His whole body became hypersensitive allowing him to feel the horrendous things that were happening to him. His brain had blocked all the pain signals that were coming, but his brain was now shattered and those signals came flooding in like a tsunami.
He couldn't even cry out, the pain was so intense and pure. He could feel his bones shifting rapidly, tearing his tendons and forcing his muscles aside into new shapes. His skin was pulled apart as it could not stretch enough under the duress and the sickening wet rips reached Trevor's ears that were also being dragged across his scalp to their new positions on top his head. His skull did shatter as his nose was pulled away from his eyes and his face elongated. He felt it all. There was no stopping it. So he thought as a blinding searing pain flashed his across his head for the head for the faintest of moments before everything went dark.
Agent Henson stood on weak knees holding onto a .357 revolver so tightly that his fingers were digging into his palms, drawing blood. He didn't think about the pain though, he thought about the horrendous abomination that laid on the bed before it. An agglomeration of meat, skin and bone could not be called a human anymore and had to be ended, what they did to the man was not forgivable. If he had known what was going to happen, then he would have shot him through the skull, splattering matter across the floor in a gory mess, he would have shot him at the very start when he had sat down next to him in the park. It would have been a mercy.
Tears streaming down his face, Henson shot the thing once more in the head, sending a new cascade of sickly pink and red splattering into the air which rained back down to the cold hard cement floor. Little under half of the man's disfigured head remained, it's one eye that was still attached was, thank god for it, closed. It didn't move, the horrible sight of seeing its entire body just twist and shudder as if its insides were just sand, kept together by the bag that was skin was over. It was all over, the deed was done.
Carter could only stare on, unable to avert his eyes even as the phone rang for the local police department. He had called a special number that would connect him to another agent that was implanted into the local police network and a team would be sent to clean up the mess. If any word of this got out to the public, if they ever figure out what horrors existed and even walked among them, then there would only be panic.
Seeing the transformation occur, watching how the man struggled against his bonds with his mouth agape in a scream that was made silent by the cascade of blood that had poured out of his every orifice had left him feeling putrid. He had fought back the urge to vomit, he had tried to avert his gaze for the sake of his sanity, but he couldn't tear his eyes away as the man was torn apart from the inside out. At least it was over.
Agent Henson inched closer and closer to the the body, if it could still be called that. He needed to make sure that it was dead. Werewolves were resilient, capable of surviving the most heinous of wounds, but they were not invincible, not by a long shot. The two shots to the head had destroyed it brain. There was no way it could survive.
Up close, the scene was even worse. Not all of the flesh was red and engorged in bloody, some of it had begun to take that sick grey color as the werewolf took over, rewriting DNA, rewriting everything. The chest was twisted and mangled, the ribs were tangled in knots, stopped mid movement where they would have stretched and snapped to make for a larger and more cavernous cavity. His hands were a mess of short and long fingers that were being pulled into the hand to create paws with the thumb snapped back in on itself and now positioned at the ball of the wrist with a thin stream of blood coming out of a where the restraints had dig into his wrists.
The restraints had barely held, the leather was stretched and contorted on the hands and waist, the leg ones had been snapped already by legs that had spasmed and folded back into shapes that shouldn't have existed on any beast.
Agent Henson stopped next to the bed, his black leather boots ruined in the thick congealing pool of blood that surrounded the body, a small sea of it. He looked up and down the body, it wasn't the first time he had seen a dead body and it helped his resolved a little, but it still got to him. The body, once recovered by a sterilization team, would most likely be incinerated. No, it would be sent to a research lab somewhere, to be studied in the hope of finding a way to reverse the transformation process without risking incidents like Trevor.
Agent Henson heard Carter begin to talk which meant that he had gotten through to the station. It wouldn't take long now, it would just be a few minutes for the team to arrive and cordon off the area. They would call it a crime scene, most likely a murder to explain the blood before ferrying all evidence away. Within an hour, the place would be spotless. There would be no evidence of what had occurred there and life would go on. For him, life would be more precious and his resolve stronger to help those who he could.
He turned to walk away and find a bottle of water to help wash the sour taste in his mouth, but a wet popping sound stopped him in his tracks. A slick sound of wet flesh moving got Henson to turn around quickly with his gun trained only to have his throat grabbed. It happened so fast that he couldn't react. The arm snapped the bindings like taffy and something that resembled a hand took hold of his neck. The gun, Henson's only line of defense, clattered to the floor and his hands reached up automatically to wrangle with the fingers that were now strangling him.
He let out an unintelligible gurgle as he gazed at his assailant. The dead mass of meat had come back to life, it moved quicker than before as wounds resealed themselves in seconds and bones hurried to adjust themselves as it they were behind schedule. He watched in absolute dread as a single yellow eyes watched him. He didn't see the eyes of a man, he saw death, he saw a demon in them.
White bone soon crawled across the ruin of Trevor's face, sealing the hole that had been formed when the two bullet had passed through it. The brain inside reformed, appearing to just materialize out of nothing as everything else set into place. It only took several seconds before it all stopped again.
Agent Henson managed to let out a cry to his partner who had wandered off as the grip on his neck tightened, cutting off blood and oxygen. Black, oily dots appeared on the edge of his vision as fingers fug into his neck, his muscles and veins bulging out under the pressure until it all just gave out.
Carter came around a stack of crates just in time to see his partner and friend's head roll off of its body, smacking onto the floor with a solid thud that echoed across the room. He still had the phone pressed up to his ear, the Inquisition agent on the other side still talking about procedure on how to set up the scene for their arrival. He was no longer listening as the thing dropped the body and broke the last of its bindings with little trouble.
"Hello?" The voice of the person on the other end of the line brought Carter back into reality, a reality that he had been wishing was some nightmare. "You still there Doctor Carter?" It called out again.
"Send everything." He whispered out as he stumbled back behind the boxes to do the only thing he could do, escape and hide.
Trevor heard the other person behind the box, but he didn't care. The transformation wasn't complete, he needed more mass to finish, more meat to put on his bones. His eyes, one of which was newly formed and a light sky blue in color, looked down at the closest source of mass, food. He was so hungry, so very hungry as he slid out of the bed that was soaked in his own blood, leaving behind the last scraps of clothing that had managed to hold into him. He fell to the ground next to the body of the man who he had killed and dug into it. He tore at it with tooth and claw, shoveling everything into his mouth and swallowing without chewing. He needed to sate his hunger, it was the only thing on his mind, the only thing in his mind.
With a new source of mass, the transformation continued. Fingers became paws, mouth into a snout. He began to take on the form of a wolf as fur sprouted from his skin, coloring him an autumn red. Soon he could no longer use his hands to tear at his meal, forcing him to snarl and bit with his mouth. Each bit left behind teeth, dull human teeth that were quickly replaced with new sharp canines that made feeding easier.
When the meat was no longer there, Trevor began to lap up the blood that was everywhere and even the remnants of his head that had been scattered about when he was shot. He ate it all, using it as fuel to help him build up mass. The once 174 pound man was now a 310 pound wolf that, on all fours, was as large as a tiger.
He was still hungry. It was all Trevor could think of. He needed to find more food to fill his stomach to stop the gnawing hunger. He raised his nose to the air and took in a sniff. He could smell the other person. He was still inside the building and he was ripe with fear. He was prey.