A New Species of Man Ch. 01

What the fuck am I? That's been the question on my mind for quite some time now. The name is Clarence Wendell, and I'm a young man of African-American and Puerto Rican descent living in the City of Toronto, province of Ontario. My parents, James Wendell and Anna Maria Suarez met while attending university in Boston, where they got married and had me. Dad has family in Canada, and I've always been fascinated by the Great White North. I guess that's why I moved to Canada's capital region from my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts, two years ago. I attend the University of Toronto, and for the most part, life has been okay...until everything started to go wrong.

Exactly a year ago, my life drastically changed. I was visiting the Yukon town of Watson Lake with my then-girlfriend Stacey Adams. We were walking through the woods when I fell into a hole, deep below the earth. The fall should have killed me, but it didn't. I fell in a cave, one littered with skeletons that looked human, but clearly weren't. It was the anthropological discovery of the century, in more ways than one. That's all fine and good, and for years afterwards, scientists far and wide would come to study these remains in the Yukon, moving here to be close to them like pilgrims at Mecca. Me? I would have blown up these frigging bones had I known what effect they would have on my life.

The human-like skeletons among which I fell belonged to an ancient race of beings that lived and supposedly died out in the continent of North America hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were humanoid, but clearly distinct from all known species of apes and human ancestors such as Neanderthals, Homo Habilis, Cro-Magnon man and Homo Erectus. They weren't our ancestors or even our distant relatives. These creatures were another species altogether. Their resemblance to us was superficial, the way eels and snakes resemble each other, that's all. All this, of course, I would learn later, and by then it would definitely be too late. Too late for me, and in some ways, for mankind as well.

When I fell among the piles of bones, I injured myself quite badly. One of the ancient monsters bones went right through my sternum. I should have died, that's what the doctors say, but I didn't. not only did I not die, but I also made a miraculous discovery. By the time I returned to Toronto, I was...changed. For some reason, I've become really sensitive to sunlight, feeling downright lethargic whenever the sun comes up. I force myself to go to class and go about my day as usual, but things aren't the same. I just don't feel like myself, I don't know how to explain it.

I've undergone quite a few changes, in unexpected ways. I can't eat normal food anymore. I used to love steak, omelets and coffee, but nowadays these things taste like cardboard to me. I can only eat raw meat, it's the only thing I can digest. I also drink blood. My system cannot tolerate anything else. Food, sugary or bland beverages, alcohol, I can't even taste these things anymore. They're about as appealing to me as tree bark would be to you as a meal. I kept these changes to myself, of course. The last thing I wanted was end up in a lab somewhere, being dissected by government scientists. I thought I could hide, but in the end, they came for me. The first one to suspect that something might have been missed in my hospital evaluation was Dr. Josephine Yamamoto, this Asian chick from Whitehorse General Hospital, the biggest medical facility in the Yukon. She was one of the physicians who treated me that night when I came in, carried by my friends, with a sixty-thousand-year-old monster's bone in my sternum.

The good doctor wanted to run some more tests, just to make sure everything was alright. She flew all the way from the Yukon to Ontario just to check up on me? I might have been altered by whatever lay buried in that cave but I wasn't dull in the brain. This lady doctor wanted me in her lab, and I wasn't going out like that. She came to the University of Toronto campus downtown, flanked by a couple of flunkies from the Ontario Health Board, and tried to persuade me to come along. Oh, and she had a couple of armed guys with her too, RCMP guys in civilian clothing, but still armed to the teeth. I made a run for it, and I've been on the run ever since.

What's a guy to do when he's infected with a mutagenic virus that is slowly transforming him into something other than human? Run like hell from the government agents that are hunting him down, that's what! I'm on the run, but I don't hide. I got a lot of people after me. The Canadian government is cooperating with American military scientists. They want to find me, discover how I became what I am, and find a way to turn me into a weapon. Governments the world over are always thinking of the next arms race. There's something inside of me, and they want it. Well, I don't know what I am becoming but I'm not about to unleash it upon the world.

In the movies, whenever a guy gets exposed to something that turns him into something other than human, it's seen as an upgrade. The reality is far different. Do you honestly think I like feeling sleepy and downright dead-tired during the day but energized to the point of being frigging hyperactive at night? Honestly, eating raw meat and drinking animal blood isn't fun, or glamorous, it's downright disgusting but if I don't do it, I'll die. I miss drinking beer and eating pizza on Friday nights. I miss my friends at U of T. I also miss my parents down in Massachusetts. I want to get in touch with them but I can't, because if I do, the governments of Canada and America will go after them. God I miss my old life! I miss making love to my girlfriend Stacey, whom I haven't seen since this nightmare began. She's probably seeing some other guy right now and I don't blame her because my life is fucked up, man.

I wish I could say that whatever I am becoming has some positive aspects to it, but I can't. During the day, just getting up to walk feels like I'm carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Whatever I am now, sunlight saps my strength, and hurts my eyes. I wear suntan lotion and sunglasses, and even with those extra protections, I'm barely able to function in daylight. I don't have superhuman strength and speed, but I have excellent night vision and my hearing is much better than before. I used to have asthma and diabetes, but they're gone now. I must feed by consuming raw meat and blood every three days otherwise I feel like something is consuming me from the inside out. A hunger so great that it's beyond human. I'd die to escape this. Unfortunately, I cannot die. Since I became...this, I've been shot, stabbed, run over with a truck, and hurled off a twenty-story building. I still walked away relatively intact. Whatever I am now, I heal quickly and I am quite hard to kill.

I've been doing my research and it seems that the only person capable of helping me is a reclusive scientist named Muriel Kensington. She was born in London, England, in 1963 to a Catholic family and graduated from Oxford University in 1987 with a degree in molecular genetics. She's written a ton of books about everything from human evolution to the extinction of the dinosaurs. She's considered the supreme authority on the human genome today. If anyone can figure out what's happening to me or how to stop it, it's her. The good doctor is a professor at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. Looks like I'll be heading back to New England after all.

Makes a sick kind of sense, when you think about it. It's where my life began, it's where my parents still live, and interestingly enough, my ex-girlfriend Stacey is down there, studying for her master's degree in civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She transferred from the University of Toronto to MIT according to the U of T website. Yeah, my life, my future and quite possibly my death await in Boston. For if I've figured out where the cure of my ailment might be found, the bad guys have definitely figured it out too. I've got no choice but to go down there, though. Dates with destiny are something no one can turn down, even when you're who and what I am. Wish me luck, eh?