Another hard day working in the big city. Toronto Police Service Constable Jean-Louis Stephens took off his boots and collapsed in bed, clothes and all. Silently the young man thanked God for sparing him earlier, when a gun-toting White guy with tattoos walked into Scotia Bank, shouting at the clerks to point him to the safe. When the shit hit the fan, Jean-Louis or J.L. as his friends call him was in the parking lot of a nearby Tim Horton's restaurant, wolfing down his sandwich and hash browns while his partner, constable James Hoffman, used the washroom.
J.L. stepped out of the squad car after radioing to dispatch, informing them of the situation. Of all the times Hoffman had to pick to go take a dump, why now? Figures. The chubby White cop was busy when his partner needed him the most. J.L. drew his service revolver and stepped into the bank, where the suspect had his gun aimed at a shivering plump White female clerk. J.L. took a deep breath, then yelled "police! freeze!" at the top of his lungs. The gunman whirled around, cursing and firing. J.L. fired and the bullet slammed into the gunman's chest, stopping him cold. The guy dropped to the floor, and lay still.
J.L. took a look around the bank, noting with relief that the gunman had acted alone. He looked into the faces of the bank tellers and clients, ordinary men and women with the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Smiling in a way he hoped was reassuring, J.L. checked on the still-breathing perpetrator before telling everyone to stay calm. Then he called for an ambulance. Moments later he was joined by constable James Hoffman. The chubby cop looked at J.L. then at the gunman. What did I miss? He asked sheepishly. J.L. groaned, and shook his head.
As J.L. tried hard not to think about the day's events, he tried not to think about what would have happened had he gotten shot. His secret would have been out, and his life as he knew it would be over. Being who and what he was meant a life of discretion. The ordinary mortals around him couldn't handle what they didn't understand. After all, even in a vast and multicultural metropolis area like Toronto, he still got stared at simply for being a six-foot-three, dark-skinned man of Afro-Caribbean descent. The humans were obsessed with differences in skin color, nationality, religion and sexual orientation. In the Middle East, Christians were persecuted by Muslims and the two faiths clashed in countries like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. In South Africa, even after Apartheid ended, Blacks and Whites were still distrustful of one another. In Somalia, gay men and lesbians were routinely rounded up by crowds of intolerant creeps in their own hometowns and either stoned, beheaded or burned alive. Yes, the human race was savage indeed. What would they do if they knew how truly different he was from them?
J.L. remembered how truly frightened he felt the first time he realized he was different. He was still in Montreal, Quebec. Just another faceless and nameless dark-skinned youth abandoned by his family to be raised by the system. So many African and Afro-Caribbean brats got abandoned by their biological parents that the system didn't know what to do with them. His foster parents, Louis and Michelle Tremblay, well they were the truest examples of redneck Quebecer, and not in a good way. Some people become foster parents because they care, others do it for the money. The Tremblay couple fell in the latter category. All Jean-Louis was worth to them was the paycheck they got every month for his upkeep. They treated him like shit, and called him slurs, the racial kind. Parents of the year, those two.
Since his home was pure hell and nobody gave a damn about him, J.L. hung out with some guys from the neighborhood, Joel Sanderson and Miguel Fernando. They were roughnecks his own age, from the wrong side of the tracks. They were definitely no angels but they were the only friends he had. Joel was half White and half Jamaican and Miguel was Hispanic, originally from Colombia. The three of them were hanging out by the train tracks, smoking cigarettes and talking about girls when six White guys walked up to them. They were with a radical group that advocated not only Quebec separatism but also the removal of all visible minorities from French-Canadian communities in Canada. So they didn't like three minority guys hanging around their lily-White neighborhood, to say the least.
Miguel and Joel wanted to fight even though they were quite outnumbered, but J.L. wanted to turn tail and run. The last thing he needed was a beating from these racist punks. Besides, the police in Quebec always sided with White people when it comes to conflict with ethnic minorities. Racism was alive and well in la belle province. Anyhow, as J.L. and his buddies turned to leave, the punks attacked them. One of them, a burly guy with red hair and tattoos, swung a baseball bat at J.L. That's when it happened...something inside J.L. just snapped. His body began twisting, changing. Without warning, he surged forward, growling like an animal. All he remembered was running at the nearest assailant...the rest was a blur.
When J.L. came to, he was in his bed. In Le Journal De Montreal, his favorite newspaper, he'd read about a vicious multiple homicide which left dead eight people, six of whom were identified by police as members of the radical organization known as Purete Du Quebec ( purity of Quebec ). The other two were a pair of young men from the wrong side of the tracks. That day, Jean-Louis realized with horror what he'd done. He'd accidentally released his inner beast, and killed eight people, including his only friends. At least, that's what he initially thought. What he didn't know was that he was a monster. One of the last true monsters left out there.
The eight people he killed that night didn't stay dead. In the movies and poorly written novels, if a vampire, a werewolf or a zombie bits you, you become one of them. Basically everyone starts off as human and then becomes something else. J.L. was different in that he was never human, he simply thought he was. So he subconsciously suppressed his inhuman side. Of course, he didn't know those things when he woke up that morning. He had no way of knowing that he was the last of a race of ancient monsters that walked the earth long before the ancestors of humans came down from the trees. Whatever he was, he only turned into it in times of stress or danger. The rest of the time he was human.
