A Wolf Stalking: A Supernatural Thriller: The Risen World, #4

By Andy Graham

Joe Urban has a choice: save his daughter or the world. He can't do both and he's running out of time.

 

When a reclusive scientist realises his cure for the disease killing his daughter has apocalyptic side effects, his university destroy his lab and demand his research. They don't want to be the people who unlock the human lupine gene. No one wants to unleash the so-called werewolf disease on humanity. But without funding, Joe will lose his daughter. So when a vicious stranger promises him resources in return for a finished formula, Joe faces a choice: infect the world or save his child.

 

As Joe wrestles with the implications of what he has created, the deaths begin. Always at full moon. Always horrific. The disease is spreading. Joe makes his decision. As he does, he is forced to reveal a secret he has hidden for years, one which changes the world for ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Graham
• Release date: Apr 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393238966

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THE TALLEST MAN

The Tallest Man

folding kind

breaking up the dotted line

the space is there, it’s always gonna slip through

truth is leaked, talking in double speak

the tallest man that ever did set root

and it won’t be seen, dealing out fate in a minor key

and it won’t be clean, that’s what makes it strong

closing ground

periscope going down

biding time ready for the next play

underhand, leaving no place to stand

my feet are still but you’re in the wrong lane

and it won’t be seen, I’m dealing out fate in a minor key

and it won’t be clean, that’s what makes it strong

Lyrics & Music Copyright Guy Bennett 2018

1

EMAIL

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: Your notes

Josef,

I was expecting to see you this morning. You agreed to come in to discuss the termination of your work. I know this is the last thing you want to do at the moment, but I can only reiterate what I have said before: what you are doing is dangerous.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Alex

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Prof Alex Browning

Subject: RE: Your notes

No. Not doing it. You know I can’t.

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

Josef,

We have spoken about this before. I understand your frustrations and you have my deepest sympathies. I do not have a child of my own, as you know, but my niece means the world to me. That said, we cannot continue with this project. It is not ‘an exciting development’. It is, quite frankly, one of the most dangerous discoveries I have seen in all my years in genetics. Your lab has already been shut down, your work erased. Please do as I have asked and bring in your laptop and any backup drives you have.

My office door is always open. You have had a rough run recently and I am happy to help, but I need your personal notes on this project.

Best wishes,

Alex

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Prof Alex Browning

Subject: RE: Your notes

You’ve destroyed my research? The lab, too? Why not cut my heart out while you’re at it?

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

Josef,

This attitude is not helping. I told you we were going to do it. You were given the option of being there. I thought it may help give you some closure and prepare you for what was coming. But, if you are right, your potential cure for this disease is worse than the disease itself. The negative publicity could ruin all our reputations and shut down the uni should word get out. There are livelihoods at stake here. And have you considered the government’s response? What the military would do? Those short-sighted idiots will want to weaponise your ‘cure’ and I am not sure I have the patience to listen to a scientifically illiterate psycho in a uniform giving me a speech about how they will be able to control it. Never happens. Not in fiction, not in reality.

I am sorry for what happened to your wife and what is happening to Sophia, but I have to think of the big picture.

Alex

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Prof Alex Browning

Subject: RE: Your notes

Alex, please. I need a little more time. I’m almost there. I’m begging you.

(And my daughter’s name is Sophie, not Sophia!)

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

Josef,

I am sorry. Truly I am. But time has run out. I realise the implications of what I am saying but I cannot take a chance on this cure of yours, at least not without further information. I am happy to come round to your place to help you but I need those notes ASAP. Let me know what you want to do.

Alex

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: Your notes

Josef? Can you respond to last night’s email, please?

Alex

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

Josef,

It has been over a week since my last message. If you do not comply soon, I will be forced to take further action. I do not want to go down the legal route, but I will if I have to.

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

Josef,

If I do not hear from you within twenty-four hours, then I will seek to recover your personal notes by any means necessary. Neither I nor the department can afford this kind of trouble — the damage to our finances and reputation would be too much to bear. I am sorry it has come to this. You have one of the greatest scientific minds I have come across, but this kind of research is unnatural.

Alex

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Prof Alex Browning

Subject: RE: Your notes

Tomorrow. I’ll let you have it tomorrow. Laptops, external drives and passwords. All of it.

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

All of it?

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Prof Alex Browning

Subject: RE: Your notes

Yes. All of it. Seeing as you obviously don’t trust me anymore, I swear on Sophie’s life.

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: RE: Your notes

Thank you. I appreciate it. I know this is hard for you and I appreciate what this means for you and your daughter. I do trust you but I simply cannot allow you to finish this research. Had you kept it on uni premises, I would be able to cut you some more slack. But now you are working from home — and how you are doing this is beyond me — you have forced my hand. I do not wish to be harsh, but you have brought this on yourself.

As I have said, my door is open for you at any hour. I have tea and wine. I even have some of that home-brew plum brandy you brought me from your village in Czechia, if you fancy a tipple of something stronger. :-)

Alex

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Prof Alex Browning

Subject: RE: Your notes

Save me your internet sympathy. I’m close to stabilising the cure. Maybe once Sophie’s buried, you’ll realise what you’ve done.

From: Dr Josef Urban

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: Backup files

See attached.

Password - F3nr1r

2

Midnight chimes rang out across a city bathed in moonlight. With each strike of the bell, the brightness crept a little further. It picked its way across roof tiles and spires, past curtained windows and drainpipes that plunged down the walls of an Old Town alley. The whiteness shone out of the beady eyes of the crows perched on a wall. They were watching the cobbles below, a murder witnessing a murder. It was over now.

The corpse on the floor was dressed in a blood-stained work shirt with the name ‘Steve’ curling across the pocket. A hand still clutched bowling shoes, their soles shiny and smooth. Spotless. There was even a flat cap on the ground. It had a patch of scalp stuck to its label. The wet tearing sound as the body was ripped apart was lost in the brass clanking that marked the day’s end. There was something else in the alley — a creature made of muscle and claws and teeth. Its red-furred muzzle was buried in the dead man’s guts. The distant part of it that was still human counted those moonlit chimes as it feasted. Even now, with warm flesh in its mouth, it couldn’t bury the thought that when the bell stopped, a day that had been decades in the planning would begin. How would it end? Only God knew that. But the plan had to work. Time had run out.

The clock chimed its last. The creature howled at the sky and the murder of crows scattered into the dark.

3

Cold. Dark. Blackness tinted pink. Something pressing into my back. My neck. Something watching, too. Breathing on me. Rancid air. Warm but foul.

Joe Urban came to with a start. Unfamiliar surroundings span before him. A room silvered in moonlight: damp walls, bare floorboards, a tatty curtain that flapped in a midnight breeze. What happened? Where am I? The light shifted to reveal a girl lying in a bed, and the memories of the previous day burst through the confusion. Prague, I’m in Prague, he said, his tongue raw and dry. Twenty long hours after leaving the UK in a hastily bought car that had rattled a headache into him, Joe was home in the Czech Republic, his life in tatters and in a body that seemed to have aged twenty years overnight.

Who filled my joints with sand while I slept? Every month he woke with more pains that he couldn’t explain. But as the aches faded to their usual background throb, his attention turned to a more pressing issue: the girl. Skin the colour of ash. Hair the colour of midnight. And eyes, had they been open, the azure of a summer sky. Like her mother’s had been. Sophie, he said, my little Karen. They were so similar in so many ways, for better and worse, that the idea of burying Sophie like he had buried his wife was eating away at him. Maybe that was why his joints hurt, because of the stress. He bent to kiss his daughter’s forehead. You’re cold, he said, voice cracking in his parched mouth. It’s chilly in here. Sure you’re warm enough?

Joe opened the window a notch. Outside, the sound of the midnight bells faded across the sleeping city. They left a sound hanging in the air. The wind howling through the alleys. A siren? A boy racer on a motorbike that would take a limb before long? Or something else? Something alive… Dogs, he decided, stray dogs. It was the safest answer.

He twitched the curtains closed. ‘Course you’re warm enough. I’ll leave the window open, though. Don’t want you burning up now, do we? One foot hovered over a creaky floorboard. There wouldn’t be an answer, not without a miracle, but he asked the questions anyway. It helped him deal with what was going on. There was no reply, no miracle today. So he eased his weight down onto the squeaky wood and crept from the room. Sleep, Sophie, he whispered. Sleep as long as you need. Daddy’s gonna fix this.

The room beyond was as cluttered as his daughter’s new bedroom was sparse. He was becoming a cliche: the scientist who forgot to clean his teeth and would skip meals; a man who could create a new soap that would ‘ecologically eliminate 99.9% of all known body odours’, but rarely used it. Then there were the books.

The sofa, the armchair, the mantelpiece, the hearth, the floor and the table were covered in all manner of them. There were papers and scribblings: heavy-weight academic tomes written by a select few and understood by fewer; genetics text books and their better-selling popular science cousins — what he called knowledge without the fat: insubstantial and unsatisfying. He had a biography of the heroine of DNA research, Rosalind Franklin, and an old retelling of Ragnarok. Its dustcover was wrinkled and torn, its pages covered in black-ink annotations. There were medical textbooks and books on canine anatomy. Next to those pages were a variety of fiction novels, incongruous amongst all the highbrow academia. A pristine copy of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There was even a collection of pages he’d ripped out of Sophie’s books about the teenage wizard who risked his life to save his magical world. (The boy didn’t interest Joe; a cardigan-wearing teacher who died in the final showdown did.) In short, Joe Urban, knew an incredible amount about not very much at all. It was a problem with many senior academics. But in Joe’s case, his knowledge focused on something rare to the point of legend, something buried deep within the genetic code of all humans, something that had already made irreversible changes to his daughter.

He kicked a collection of almanacs across the floor and picked up a notepad. "What can trigger a gene to flip from recessive to dominant and vice versa?" he read. He had crossed out dominant and replaced it with virulent a few weeks ago, only to change it back as the word seemed to be mocking him. This was the question that consumed his every waking moment and most of his dreams. It showed. He felt like one of the pictures Sophie had drawn of him: distorted and scraggly. His black hair was spattered with grey. The stubble his wife had once described as ‘inappropriate for a scientist wanting his female students to concentrate’ clung to a sallow face. And he was beginning to stoop. That was the thing he felt the most. The hours spent hunched over his desk and his books, the weeks spent at Sophie’s bedside, holding her hand. The posture was sinking into his body. He hated it. All he needed to do was go for a run, a swim, bang out a few push-ups or squats and the problem would fix itself. His pain would ease, too. But that meant time away from Sophie and his research and he hated that even more.

A noise. A creak? Or was it a moan? His note pad thumped to the bare floorboards. He sprinted for Sophie’s room, papers scattering in his wake. Yanking the door open, he barrelled through the entrance. Silence. One curtain fluttered in the winter breeze. The chair where he had sat his vigil by Sophie’s bed had fallen to the floor.

How does a chair fall over on its own? he mumbled, righting it. The draught from the window wasn’t that strong. Sophie couldn’t have done it. She was as he had left her: tucked under her blankets. But unless this new rental of his was haunted — an idea that didn’t seem as crazy as it once had — his list of answers to the fallen chair was vanishingly small. Worse, all of them scared him.

Joe slammed the window fully open. To hell with the noise. The wood squealed in protest as flecks of paint showered onto his hands, flecks of white on light brown skin. Prague spread out before him. The spires of the city pierced the blackness of the night. Below him, streetlights burned golden and amber. And above, amongst the occasional star that struggled to outshine the light pollution clogging the sky, was the moon. It hung there as if it was watching him. Wisps of cloud curled across its surface. Something caught his eye, silhouetted against its paleness. Something moving. Joe squinted as the soft wood of the windowsill crumbled under his grip. The clouds drifted on to reveal that what he had thought was a person was nothing but an aerial. ‘Course it is. Not gonna get stray dogs up there, or boy racers on their bikes. What else would it be? he muttered, not wanting to answer that question.

Joe was a scientist, a researcher. He had as much time for coincidence as a chicken needed socks — an entertaining idea but nothing more. He had even less time for superstition. But his hurried move from London to the country of his birth, bringing only his daughter, a second-hand car stuffed full of his research and a handful of clothes, had brought him here on a full moon. A natural phenomenon he had come to loathe. And on his first night, chairs were falling over and he was imagining people and worse on roofs. Maybe he should learn how to knit chicken socks after all.

You’re being silly, he said. Tired and worried. New city, too. A new place meant new sights, new sounds. It was always the same. People who lived next to tram tracks (as he once had) couldn’t sleep in the countryside because of the deafening silence. People who grew up on a farm (like his wife had) would be deafened by the never-ending chaos of a city. Now he was back in Prague and it was all alien. It wasn’t just the decade that had passed, it was the circumstances. The city had been fun. There weren’t many better places to study in. It was big enough to have all you needed and small enough to be able to afford it.

The libraries were world class (if the staff were a touch stuffy); the universities, too (their staff were very stuffy.) He had worked out his own mini-tour of the attractions for visiting academics and colleagues. Not Charles Bridge and Wenceslas Square. Not the castle and the Old Town, where he and Sophie now rented a top floor flat. But the pubs and bars where his guests could drink the best beer in the world and the various ways it was poured, with table service, no less. The morning after, bleary and hungover, he would stroll his guests to the hidden coffee shops on the way to the castle. Then, when his charges were beginning to irritate him, he would hit them with some culture — the Museum of Communism, the Torture Museum, and for the prudish ones, the Sex Museum. There had even been a night when he and an ex-girlfriend had wandered the streets looking for a place to buy a condom. She had been naked under her long coat; he had struggled to do his jeans up knowing exactly that. But that was before he had been headhunted and started his job at the Lord’s University in England, met his future wife, had a daughter and lived a near-perfect life. Until one fateful night. Then his life had crumbled. And now, the city he had once been able to lose himself in seemed to be watching him.

If I’d come back to Prague earlier, would it have been different? Would Karen have lived? Would Sophie have developed the disease? What had triggered it? Was it a timer embedded in her DNA or had some environmental factor flipped the genetic switch? If so, what? And could it be ‘unswitched’?

And as predictably as that, Joe’s mind was no longer consumed by memories but questions. He made his way to his cluttered work desk and accessed the backup files he had promised to delete. There was a vague pang of guilt at having lied to Alex, he couldn’t have asked for a better person to work for. But this work was his only way of finding a real cure. Loyalty to his blood outweighed everything else, even when that blood was diseased.

4

EMAIL

From: Prof Alex Browning

To: Dr Josef Urban

Subject: Your house!

Josef, where are you?

Your phone is disconnected. Your landlady let me into your house. It’s half empty. Your wardrobes are still full of clothes, there’s even drinkable milk in the fridge. She’s furious, by the way. You knocked out a supporting wall downstairs and turned the entire floor into a lab! It looks like a cheap film set for Frankenstein’s Monster, complete with manacles set into the floor and gouges in the walls. She’s threatening to sue the Lord’s University in place of you. I don’t think she has a legal leg to stand on but she is determined to get some money out of someone. The place looks like it has been ransacked, too. She thinks you must have been robbed but I am not so sure. The only thing missing are your books. Not even academics would steal those, they would wait for your research. I suspect you took them.

This leads me to my next point: I know you promised, but did you delete your notes? I need to know, Josef. The university wants to know why I have shut down the project. I told them the data was flawed and there was a fire