March 25, 1985.

My name is William Carter, although that’s only what they tell me it is. For the better half of my now 35-year-old life span, I had no title whatsoever. I was only a nameless, malnourished, and presumably frightened child raised by savages. In truth, however, my brutal upbringing provided me with strength and speed outmatching any civilized human, and most importantly, with love and respect, of which I am now devoid.

Perhaps a little back story is in order here.

According to records shown to me by the British Committee of Housing and Census, only once I was able to read them of course, I was born on February 15, 1950, to a fairly well off family of 3 living along the majestic river Thames in the woods far south of London. There, secluded in the cold temperate forest, I spent the first 7 years of my life living with my mother, father, and brother in a 2 story modernized cottage, complete with electricity and clean water. So far, this lifestyle must seem idyllic to many, as it appeals to the 2 most common human desires concerning housing: peaceful and quaint, yet up to date and advanced. Indeed, such a home seemed too good to be true, and unfortunately for my parents, it attracted the wrong kind of attention, the kind they worked so desperately to avoid.
I have spoken with numerous old friends of my parents, most of them now in their 70’s, and asked their reasoning for why mother and father chose to live such a distance from the nearest town. The response among them was unanimous. My parents, well aware of their relatively high wealth compared to the average citizen in London at the time, took note of the obvious aggression among such vagabonds following the debt brought on by World War 2 and realized that they would be in constant danger should they stay in the city. Or, at least that’s what they claimed. Some of the old friends thought the real underlying reason was paranoid fear of retaliation from a group of Italian commandos my mother had captured as prisoners of war during her work as a spy. They were released after the fighting stopped and may have very well been tracking us. Others insisted my father had enormous debts to the local Irish mafia who ironically helped protect us from said Italians. Whatever the case, it was clear that they had some form of enemy out there and sought only to protect me and my brother from whoever they were. Noble as that may have been, it proved to be overall unsuccessful.

On the night of November 12, 1954 at the Carter estate, as fresh powder settled outside and muffled any and all sounds of intruders, a 7-year-old boy sleeps innocently ignorant to the threat that has been after him his whole life. Luckily, due to my superb response to the rehabilitative methods of Oxford University’s medical school, my recollection and overall memory has improved enough to let me remember crucial details about these vital first days when my new life began.

I wake from my stifled slumber to a cool breeze wafting into the room. Strange. I didn’t remember the window being open. I raise my head towards the dim moonlight and notice shattered bits of glass covering the floor. The stars were reflected in each and every shard, making the signs of a break in obvious, yet my primitive young mind didn’t piece that together until it was too late. A hand enshrouded in black leather shot out from dark and grabbed my shoulder in a tight grip, pinching a pressure point and causing me to scream in pain. A second hand follows and grabs my neck, closing my throat to stop the yelling. The ruffian who did this apparently underestimated his strength, as his choke hold proceeded to knock me unconscious. The last thing I can remember before passing out is just a mishmash of sounds: my father yelling, a wooden chair smashing against the wall, the accomplice of my captor yelling to him (In what language? Russian, German? I have no idea.), and the crunching of heavy boots running atop snow.

Hours pass between then and my awakening. I open my eyes to an early sunrise... and strangely enough, the sound of crying. I touch my face. Whoever is crying, it isn’t me. As my eyes adjust to the light, I look around and realize just how far I had been dragged overnight. I’m lying on a pile of leaves propped against a pine tree in the absolute untouched wilderness. I don’t recognize where I am at all, and a quick survey of the horizon in every direction yields no evidence of civilization.

The crying grows louder and snaps me out of my worried trance. I walk around the tree I had been lying on to find the man who had kidnapped me on his knees, leaning over something in his arms, sobbing. As I step closer, a branch snaps under my foot and the crying stops on a dime. The man turns around and our faces meet. He’s disheveled and weary, mud and moss cakes his clothing and hair, and his eyelids droop in anxiety. In his arms, he carries a mass of flesh that I soon realize was once his accomplice. If it wasn’t for the watch and and bits of jacket stilling clinging to that lump of meat, I would have never assumed it was once human.

I fall backwards, tripping over a stump, my face frozen in fear, my lower jaw quivering. The man’s scared look soon turns to anger at my rude interruption of his mourning. He produces a knife from a holster on his belt and crawls over to me with it, yelling something in his strange language. Perhaps he blamed me for what happened to his friend. Just as he begins to descend upon me with the dagger, a howl rings out through the frosty air. Panting that seemed to originate from nowhere grows louder, and within seconds, a flurry of teeth and claws lash out at my attacker. Before my eyes, the criminal is torn to shreds under a mat of fur, and his counterpart is dragged away. A trap, I thought. The body was left out as a lure for his friend to retrieve, leading them back here to more food, or so I reasoned. As my mind raced to make sense of the situation unfolding before me, the largest of the wolves, the alpha male, reared up from his meal to greet me with a low, threatening growl.

The pack has found me.

End of part 1.