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.
