Bite Me (London Undead) by PJ Schnyder

cascade of sights, scents, sounds, touch and taste. Humans might experience some particularly strong memories that way, but not always. The wolf might be older than his two pack mates, but he still had a long way to go before he had the control the senior wolves had.
    “Go on.” Seth didn’t need to prompt for details. The wolf would have trouble not giving every detail. The trick was only sharing the key points.
    “The dead, all normals. Zombie stink everywhere. Trails all around the building, like they came from every direction. The humans in the building had no escape route.”
    Danny gave Seth a worried look.
    Zombies usually hunted in the open, preying on the stray humans wandering out in the night. One might find its way into a building, but only if the doors were wide open or if it were directly following live meat.
    “Any survivors?” Not his favorite question. The way the situation sounded, they might have to go put survivors out of their misery. The hospital wouldn’t do what needed to be done—not until it was too late. By then more innocent people would be infected.
    And wouldn’t that be fodder for the news-hounds?
    The reporting wolf shook his head. The action seemed to clear his head some. “There were ambulances, sir, but no survivors loaded up or taken back to the hospice. Mostly police on the scene, investigating, and standard gawkers.”
    Seth cocked his head. Something off, there. “Rubber necking, but no one upset? Crying?”
    A pause. One of the very junior pups answered. “No, sir. No crying. All the humans smelled of fear, but no one grieving. None of the gathered crowd were friends or family.”
    Smart pup.
    Friends and family would have been summoned to the scene if the news hit the telly. Still, even if it hadn’t aired yet, someone in the crowd should have known the residents, suffered for the loss.
    “Have the three of you gotten sleep? Fed?”
    “Fed before the patrol, sir,” the original reporting wolf assured him.
    Good. It was standard procedure to send out well-fed patrols, but never hurt to confirm. Wouldn’t do for a younger wolf to lose control and start feeding on a dead body. None of them would be tempted by one of the rotting zombies, but a fresh human kill before it made the transition? It could happen and the humans would turn on the shape-shifters in a fear-driven monster hunt. Too easy to lump all the supernatural under the “things that need to be destroyed” category.
    “Rest up, feed again, then I want you to go back and scout the scene a second time. I want to know if any friends or family show up.”
    Something. There was something odd about that building and the change in the zombie attack pattern.
    Nods all around.
    Seth stood, allowing the rest of them to stand and leave the room. It didn’t surprise him when Danny remained.
    “You’re hunting.” And Danny wasn’t talking about fat bunnies in Hyde Park.
    Seth shook his head once. “I’ve got a gut feeling, still no real trail to follow, yet. Something’s not right about the changes we’re seeing in the zombies. You see anything different in those samples we got for you?”
    “Tests can take more than a single night.” Danny grimaced, sitting on the arm of a sofa. “Based on my initial findings though, the virus is still active in the tissue samples we’ve seen and looks to be the same with the limited equipment I’ve got. It hasn’t mutated. Whatever the source is for this new behavior, it doesn’t seem to be the virus itself. I’ll ask the boys to bring in samples on the next patrols just to be sure.”
    Seth made a mental note to track down some of the new ones—the faster corpses.
    “It’s not the virus and it’s not the hosts, because the humans aren’t evolving or some of them would be developing an immunity to the virus.” Seth had done his time in university not once, but several times over the decades he’d been a werewolf. “There’s some external factor, something