Chapter 3

The helicopter showed up right on schedule, and several “experts” were lowered to join us. We showed them what had happened, and the bodies still had not changed to human. One of the experts trimmed off some skin in hopes of keeping it in its present form for later analysis. He dropped the skin into a small plastic bag and sealed it closed. Hardly had he done that when there was a puff of smoke and the two bodies changed from wolf to human.

Dammit, as we had expected after discussing the situation to death before the helicopter showed up, the humans turned out to be Ed and Jane. Now we knew why it was so easy for the werewolves to hide from us so completely. All they had to do was to change into their human form and there was no reason to suspect them of being werewolves.

When the werewolves changed from wolf to human form, the expert who had cut off a piece of flesh found that his sample was still in the wolf form. Hopefully, he could find out something useful from that sample of werewolf flesh. The next question was whether or not there were more werewolves hiding in these woods. John suggested that a helicopter with infra-red detectors fly over these woods and look for sources of heat.

A skilled photo interpreter should be able to tell from the received signals if any of them were large enough to be humans. That would tell us if anyone else was hiding in the woods. If there were any, John and I could investigate in person. I could detect a hidden werewolf now because I knew what to look for. The equipment was available at Hanscom AFB, so that test could be run tomorrow.

Dammit, Jane was pregnant, and the fetus was a werewolf. At least, we had rid the world of another breeding pair of werewolves, but the potential of adult werewolves breeding new ones was enough to scare our pants off. That raised the question of what would be the result of a werewolf breeding with a normal human. What form would that child take? This thing is getting crazier and crazier. How convoluted could the trail become?

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of questions raised by every new batch of werewolves that we found. The question that bothered me the most, though, was how did the line of werewolves get started? I guessed that only the scientists could answer that question.

John and I were again transferred back to regular duty, and we were separated for we knew not how long. Oh, well, it was nearly a year later that I received an unusual package in the mail. It was from one of the experts we had met and who had cut that sample of flesh from Ed’s body before he changed into a human.

It turned out that this was the lab report from the analysis of that piece of flesh. There was a hell of a lot of boring stuff in the lab report that meant absolutely nothing to me, but the situation changed when I got to the summary. The main thing they found was that the human DNA had been altered. The investigating scientists had not found the results of all of the changes that had been made in the DNA, but one of the effects that stood out like the proverbial sore thumb was that it caused the change in form between wolf and human.

Also present in the creature’s blood supply was the agent that caused the change in the DNA. As soon as the agent was taken into the body, it began to make the changes in the DNA. Apparently they went through a lot of lab rats in checking this out. They found from the lab rats that the agent showed up in the animal’s saliva, urine, feces, and semen.

Taking the agent into the body from any of those four sources was enough to start the conversion process. Unfortunately, they did not have a sample of a female body to run the same tests on, but tests on lab rats showed that the females passed along the agent in pretty much the same way as the male did.

However, the truly frightening part of all of this research was the discovery that the agent could be spread by a mosquito. A mosquito that drew in one sample of blood from an infected animal would be converted into a factory for the manufacture of more agent, and the agent would be passed on to every animal that was subsequently bitten by that one mosquito.

Currently, work was being done by several pharmaceutical companies to find a vaccine against the agent and to destroy the agent even if it had already started modifying the DNA of its host. It was expected that full scale tests would begin within about six months.

Meanwhile, now that they knew what to look for, many health organizations were busy trying to find the source of this current infestation and eliminate it before the disease changed into a true pandemic.

There was even some talk of bringing back DDT spraying to rid the area of mosquitos. Nobody really wanted to do that, but there was the unhappy choice of swapping the extinction of bald eagles versus the elimination of the mosquitos that spread the werewolf infection. Well, that was not a decision that I had to make!

Oh, shit! There was an attack reported in Maine that had all of the ear marks of a werewolf attack. This was at a service station near a commonly used entrance to Baxter State Park. Dammit, this was too far away for the werewolf DNA trigger to have been distributed by mosquitos. Could it be that some human agent was spreading the DNA trigger?

The news media began screaming about this latest attack on Maine, and the governor was in there pitching to the federal government to send John and me to get rid of those werewolves. We were asked for by name, undoubtedly because our names had shown up in the news reports of the attacks on us and our “miraculous” survival.

Two days later, we were on our way to Maine’s Baxter State Park to see what we could do about these werewolves. We were brought in with our supplies by a helicopter to a landing spot at a Ranger station. There was a welcoming committee consisting of Governor Williams and the leaders of the various state and local police units. We were rushed into a small auditorium where there was standing room only for the news media.

As politicians all over the world were wont to do, the Governor and six different police officials gave a speech welcoming us and stating that they hoped that we would eliminate the werewolf menace in only a few days so that nothing would be done to inhibit the visits by tourists.

Since John was male, he was assumed to be the leader in fighting the werewolves, and I was in no mood to argue that thought as long as it kept the media away from me. John gave a short speech in which he renounced the deadline of a few days, saying that it took longer than that to accomplish what we did on Cape Cod, which was a much less rugged landscape. John did promise to work as fast as possible, but that was the absolute limit to his promises.

The meeting broke up and most people left the room. The only ones left were the Rangers whom we would be working with. Chief Ranger Tom Johnson was our primary contact, and, at last, we had somebody to work with who was not a politician! The first thing we did was to ask for a scan by a helicopter fitted with infra-red detection devices to search the forest within a 10-mile radius of the attack site.

Thank God that Tom was on the ball. The morning after the attack was discovered, he had ordered an infra-red scan of the area we were currently interested in and already had a preliminary report back on the analysis of the scan results.

There were four “hot-spots” that could be human campers who were registered with the Baxter State Park officials, but there were five more hot-spots that were too big to be small animals, but might be bears, werewolves, or unregistered humans. The only thing that we could do was to check them out.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to travel on foot. We were supplied with excellent maps of the area we were planning to investigate and two snowmobile-like devices that could travel through the forest without the benefit of a road, or even a game trail if we were careful.