Against Lilly’s best advice, her complaints and her cry of, “Get that out of your mouth, you idiot!” I tasted it. It was a taste incomprehensible to my poor, mushy, shocked mind. A thing of meat, and imperfection.

It was incomprehensible, and it tasted like the best goddamn thing I have ever put in my mouth. It wasn’t a taste that accompanied the sensation of the glowing core thing in my mouth, there was no flavour, not really, or if it was, it was a vivid flavour that tricked my brain into thinking it was something else.

Much like its doubtful physicality, its ‘flavour,’ for lack of a better term, was beyond strange.

It was a fresh night of sleeping in cozy pyjamas, eating pancakes with your favourite thing in them cooked by someone else while drinking the best coffee of your life.

It was that feeling you got when you did something perfectly the first time and the moment when you puzzled over something and suddenly got a Eureka moment and all the trouble felt worth struggling with it.

It was the euphoria of watching the sun set and rise and so, so much more.

It was euphoria. That’s what it ‘tasted’ like.

The black gunk or blood or whatever was something else, but I was caught up in the moment and didn’t taste that, just the rock that wasn’t a rock that made my mouth glow from inside.

It made every synapse in my brain fire like a rave, in the best possible way, heady and light and I tapped my foot to an invisible song I could not hear, one that wasn’t possible because it wasn’t instrumented. It was the music of the spheres, the music of the black of the void, a white noise hallucination you got on spacewalks or when high as hell, a song of planets as they slid along the firmament. The music of the whole goddamn cosmos played like I was right in front of a stage, but in my brain, and it was perfect. I felt perfect, a content part of a greater whole.

I was whole.

And then I swallowed the rock and roll, and my body tingled, and the music didn’t falter but faded into the background, down and down, until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

And I was back in the hallway with Lilly freaking out in my head, the taste of vile black blood in my mouth, stinging foul and acrid, burning hair and plastic and chemicals in my mouth, and I started to spit.

I crashed hard almost immediately. The euphoria simply dropped out of my system as I ceased to be there and returned to here, and it was all the more depressing for it, because I felt nothing, not just a lowered state of mind, but a lower state of being, an emptiness, hollowness.

Empty.

It was like becoming a heavenly being the church talked about back home, and then god almighty cut my wings, and I fell back to earth, my ascent a divine mix-up.

The world had less colour, and it was less… Real. More like a shadow of what the world was like.

“Oh gods, what have you done? What… What is that? That shouldn’t be there. Why do you have an active vector in your bloodstream? What is it doing? Jacalyn, why did you do that? Oh god, you can’t even tell me. Oh god, this better not kill you. Oh, goooood, I’m talking about god like he’s real? Oh, what the hell, it’s not like it’s going to ruin my chances of stopping you from dying or anything.”

Lilly’s panic was a distant noise in my head.

I moved to spit, then I didn’t. And I began to hurl instead, coating the ground in another fluid, just another thing that was no longer with me. Then I needed to hold myself up by the wall as I started to be violently sick. As my body started to purge, the taint in the black fluid from my body and onto the ground instead.

The light, however, did not leave me, it was different from the black ichor.

It didn’t fill my stomach with black ichor and kill me, it was already a part of me. It was not a stone; it was light, or something like it, and it had shined through me and done what it had done and whatever it had done, it was not what was causing me to hurl.

And that for whatever reason gave me a little more heart, because it was still with me, in spirit, like a buddy.

That reassured me not at all as I spewed but it would later.

My vision was blurry from my sudden sickness, but I knew it was just the black ichor I had gotten into me that was the cause, the same way before you got sick, you sometimes did something and went, ‘I’m totally going to get sick from this,’ or could pick out one of those moments in hindsight. Not the light, though, whatever it had done, it was with me and not harmful, at least in the short term.

I couldn’t talk to her, tell her anything. I didn’t even know why I did it.

It was reactionary and not intentional; it was like scratching an itch, a base reaction. All I could really do now was hurl until I got it out, and I got my hearing back, assuming I could get my hearing back.

Oh, fuck, what if I couldn’t get my hearing back, what if I… No, wait, my entire body can transform, and I was melting in acid, even if she didn’t fix my hearing, it would be fixed when I transform, right?

I cut my panic off in the bud, she had told me she could fix it, she could fix it.

I managed to start getting some air down and moving forward.

It was haltingly, then less haltingly, then, with a lot of cussing from Lilly, cursing me for getting infected with something, I finished.

I felt like I had just survived a poisoning, and I had a bunch of gross stuff on my pants, but I could move properly again.

Or at least I could walk while holding myself up by the wall.

I started making my way up and out of the area while my body periodically tingled, and Lilly cussed about protein folding, gene expression and pathogenicity, which just confused me. It wasn’t even a normal tingle, it was in weird blotches of my body that made it feel like I was being punched.

The longer it went on, the more it felt like I was bruised inside.

My ears started tingling, and I almost retched again but managed not to before my ears popped, and I could hear my breathing.

“Before you ask, I don’t know why I did that,” I croaked to her, clawing the words out of my throat.

“I’m not going to ask. Well, I have some good news and some bad news.”

“Tell me, doc, what’s wrong with me.”

“So… Some good news and some bad news. You did that, and you got a disease from it. The soreness is me kicking off your immune system, and it’s going to be a while before that subsides, so you’re going to feel like shit for the better part of a few days... or longer.” She told me.

Fair enough. I ate gross alien goo, I got sick. Considering it was being pumped into a man mid-transformation into a monster dog, I wouldn’t complain about it not happening to me.

For a moment, I thought about where that man could have come from and then immediately shut that line of questioning down. I didn’t want to think about the screams again.

“Ok, so that’s the bad news, what’s the good news?” I asked her.

“So there are two pieces of bad news, and the new one is that was the good news… The bad news is that you are now exhibiting alien resonant properties. Whatever it is you ate caused radiation damage to your DNA and… well… now you're expressing it as a part of you.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Huh?” I asked.

“You got a new talent from eating that rock thing. It hit your DNA and caused specific mutations to the viral DNA that was being replicated in your cells and… well… I stabilized your condition by replicating it in additional cells so it would stop spreading so fast, and now you’re part alien.”

I took a moment to parse that last bit.

If I was still vulnerable, like when I woke up, I might have cried, but I didn’t.

I had already woken up changed. I started yesterday… or today, or whatever day the decent was on as not a human, not really, suddenly, having a claim to more than just two species was not quite the same shock. I just really hoped I could pass myself off as one of the fuzzy types of people out there and not, like, scare children or something.

“Am I going to start changing now? Into, like, a dog-human hybrid, that is.”

I was resigned. It was just deserts for eating the magic rock that made me feel like something bigger than myself. I would have to get a hood, a hat wouldn’t hide the deformity. At least I might be less hideous… maybe. It was fifty-fifty on whether or not I would stop looking human enough to count myself as good-looking or go straight into the deep end and be like... the dog version of MC.

“What? No, that’s what the primer you drank, and I stopped, was doing, Jacalyn, this is far worse. It’s a bio-resonant talent, and it hasn’t stopped since you got it! It could be a signal! There could be a… I don’t know a pack. They could be coming for you! Right now! It could have been some kind of final attack. It could cause you to explode, for all I know! Oh no, you’re going the wrong way. Back! Go back! You took three left turns, go back!”

I had been wondering when I had walked in, I was too focused on the colour through the wall to remember the turns.

“Shit…”

I turned around and started moving, pushing myself as well as I could back down the way I had come.

“Can't you do, like, anything with my body? Can’t you, like, I don’t know, turn it off?”

I found myself focusing, focusing on walls, on the ceiling for more turrets, down hallways and on corners, taking in everything I could, trying to spot anything that could possibly be a sign of other dogs, signs of inhabitance scratches on the floors or marks where any more might have marked their territory.

“I could turn it off, but then the remaining pathogen in you would continue to attack your body, your immune system isn’t done fighting off the virus yet. The only reason it isn’t causing damage anymore is it thinks your body is infected already. If I turn it off, your body stops making the stuff that does both. I could try and finagle it, but I don’t know how it works! I can change you because I know everything your DNA can do, Xenobiological DNA would be hard enough, but Viral DNA? Not a chance.”

Not good. When she started getting dorky and using big words like infected, pathogen or immune system, it was her being flustered, I could pick that up from a mile away. She was getting better at talking more normally by the minute compared to before, but that was like a tick.

I knew it; I didn’t know how, but I knew it. It came to me like the instinctual knowledge of how to work with tools, like any other talent.

I redoubled my effort, pushing myself and calling out, “Focus on my shoes, Lilly, I’ll do the rest, I dropped one of them already, I can do it for anything chasing me, too.”

I said it with confidence I didn’t have, trying to carry myself in a way that projected it and looked the part as well as someone covered in their own sickness and feeling their body bruised inside could, I held myself with the right posture, which conflicted for a moment when I remembered my gun was mostly empty, and I stopped doing that and reloaded as I moved.

The sudden boost from the shoes working kicked me off and pushed me forward a bit too fast, but I caught myself and kept moving.

I made it back to the scene of devastation and the hallway that would bring me back the way I came, careful not to slip in case I fell in the gore, which was smoking slightly, and noticed the corner of the wall was loose.

I didn’t know what about the wall was loose, but it was.

It was a sixth sense, like knowing how to make things, and messing with my guns. It was loose.

It was behind the devastation, not directly hit by the explosion that had wrecked the sterile hallway, but it was loose.

And then it started to smoke.

I turned the corner after punching it over the now smoking gunk and almost slipped as I took it, running almost fast enough that my feet flew out from under me, but I saw the corner, and I knew that there was only one thing down here other than me and no way that it should be down here.

There had been no way for it to get through the door, not for the dog. It had no chit to get in.

And my brain clicked those two pieces together before I did.

Behind me, there was a noise, and I turned to see colour in the corner of the wall, and with it, another dog, circling like its less horrific cousin before it lay down, walked out of the corner.

Like the wall was not even there.

Like the wall was loose. Like something could force its way through, a thin membrane pulled apart like the skin of a dumpling, or a babe pushed from a womb and into the world. It was slick in a goo of some kind, which immediately started to steam off of it.

It was bigger and howled in a lower pitch as it surveyed the dead, smoking corpse.

There was no sadness or loss, just a call, a horn, a siren of attack.

I kept going, and it turned to face me, and I fired a wild shot back at it.

The pellets of shot coned out behind me, but even with them spreading, the shot was wide. The beast hesitated, but I was clear, turning another corner back down the hall.

“Lilly, this thing is supposed to hit stuff, right? It said it could track stuff or something, right?”

“Yes, it’s unpowered. I will have to draw from your reserve to power it, can I assume you want me to?”

“Do it. I am not proficient in shooting behind me while running,” I snarked at her.

The tingle of energy carried from my back where it pathed to the bag continued up my arm, the hand that held the trigger, tingling my skin before it finished.

The gun made a few whirring noises, the front had a flange of some sort that spun once, and I could hear a small hum from it.

The beast was howling, its voice came closer to me before skidding out from behind the wall, sliding across the floor on its fingers, I fired a blast out towards it.

The barrel lit twice from fire, and a ring around it, the choke, I thought, at the front moved for both shots as fast as lightning.

They curved mid-air, a tight pattern of metal and slammed into the dog from afar as it stopped its movement and started running towards me, blue blood that was not blue spilled from its form as a screech of pain jerked out of its maw and I took a corner running again.

I hit the wall, fumbled and kept going.

Ahead of me, at the intersection that I was moving towards, another corner smoked, and I readied myself as the dog came out.

I fired, the kick from the gun slowing me slightly but well worth it. The tightened spread slammed into its neck and head, tripping it up as I passed.

More turns, more smoking corners, more and more came, the pack building behind me, as they bayed for my blood, I reloaded again and almost got bit as one came out. I got past its jaw, but its tongue extended, and like a blade, the needle thrust out and stabbed my arm.

It sucked, and I felt it draw blood. I flinched but managed to bash the appendage and knocked it free of me. I turned as I passed and shot it in a less-than-stellar movement, but the shot got straight in its eyes, and it crumpled behind me.

I turned, and I was in the entry hallway. Turning back as I ran, I reached into a pocket, pulled another orb, and swung like I wish I had earlier before turning in and around another doorway to the elevator room.

I started to slam the stupid little button.

“Come on. Come on, come on!”

I turned to look behind me as they approached, trying to puzzle out where they were in the twisted, warped hallways of the facility, trying to put together how long I had until they tore into me before their pointed tongues found my flesh and they drained me. Or worse.

I didn’t want to find out how new puppies were made and if the man, with his tattoos, had a life before becoming an unwitting baby abomination in the making.

Behind me, the elevator hummed, and hummed, and to take out my frustrations with it, I turned around and decided to slam the elevator button a few million more times in complete and utter silence because I was totally in my right state of mind and I was not afraid of getting mauled at all.

I heard the elevator stop and the scrambling of paws at the same time.

A blast that was audible this time reached me as the grenade blew a significantly further distance away, and it carried with it a riot of sound. I crouch a little, a whole body flinch before the elevator door opened, and the blast wave pushed me into it.

I took all of a second to turn from the push, but it felt like a million years as I pressed the smallest number there and got ready to fire for my life.

“I don’t suppose I can lighten the mood by saying you’ve earned contribution points?”

The door closed before I breathed out, “No, but how many?”

“Well, we didn’t confirm the kill, but with the blast radius and the number of hounds we saw? I am awarding 60 contribution points, the cameras were destroyed, unfortunately, otherwise, it might be as high as 90, and you might have been able to activate one of the shards on your first day.”

“Well, let’s hope I get jumped by a few at a time until I get back to the Junker.”

“I would say knock on woood, but there is no wood here, and that’s superstitious.”

“Look at you growing up,” I told her, in a tone that was more tired than what I wanted, “you’re growing up so fast, it feels like just hours ago we were strangers, and we already shared a trauma and a dick joke.”

“You are a bad influence,” she told me, “I am developing an urge to pick up everything not nailed down and perform overly macho nonsense, which is firmly your area of expertise.”

I laughed wearily.

She laughed, tired.

The corner started smoking, and I turned and fired every shell I had left into the dog as it came in while screaming like a little girl.

The thing was half in the wall, goopy gross stuff pouring out of the hole I couldn’t see in the wall. It was a smaller specimen with a burn on part of its body. A familiar burn.

“Huh, I’ve shot this one before.”

“68, that one’s obviously a juvenile.”

I grumbled to myself, but I was still too shaken by my own scream, it was just like alien monsters to put the fear of geometry into me. And a fear of elevators. After all, now that I thought about it, every corner was loose.