Hope’s reaction to the destruction she’d wrought was a bit disappointing, yet not unexpected. Dr. Miller rested her head in her hands and grinned. Each patient’s transition differed, but there were some common elements. Preliminary disassociation was one of them. As Hope tapped into her abilities more, her mind would rectify the new with the old and reach a stable state of compromise. Most likely.

Her reaction to the guide scent was far more interesting. Other patients had needed to reach stability before recognizing it, yet after Hope’s trance-like tracking of the rogue scent to the holding floor, it seemed plausible she’d already be susceptible. And so she was.

Dr. Miller reached over and opened a cabinet drawer to reveal a line of folders stuffed with papers. She grabbed one. One side was blank, while the other was adorned with numbers and schematics. Nothing important.

Writing had always been her refuge. Life was a series of masks. Always pretending to not see the filth underneath. Always pretending to not be a part of the filth yourself. But where she could never bleed in public, she could always bleed onto the page, and with Hope’s trial in full swing, she wasn’t about to leave it undocumented.

She didn’t care if no one was left to see her magnum opus in person. In fact, she preferred it that way.

Dr. Miller placed the page blank side up on the desk, pulled a pen from her lab coat’s front pocket, and wrote.

*****

The smell led Allie on as surely as someone taking her hand. This time, she kept her eyes open. Up the stairs, past the door leading to the floor she’d woken up on, and up again. It led her through a stairwell door and into another hallway.

Fluorescent lights. Pristine tile floors. A long hallway only changing course at the ends, and only at ninety-degree angles. It was enough to give anyone déjà vu, if not for the doors. Only half were metal. The other half, dotted in-between the familiar doors, were plain wood. Light brown, with simple door handles that reminded Allie of the office she worked in before attempting to be a full-time artist. They were all closed, and all potentially locked. Still, the glaringly normal sight almost brought tears to her eyes.

“Stop it.” Allie shook her head. “There are probably poltergeists or something behind them, anyway.”

But what if there wasn’t?

The thought nagged her, rooting her to the spot until the scent that guided her lost its interest. Almost immediately, a new one took its place. The first one. The comforting one. It led in a different direction than the other scent. She followed it down the hallway to her left and around the bend. It grew steadily stronger until she stood in front of an office door.

Something clicked from the way she’d come.

Allie froze. Wild images of zombies and crab-men danced in her head, with a spider the size of a house joining in the fun of her imagination. She strained to hear, not daring to breathe. Nothing made a sound.

“Maybe it was nothing.”

Her eyes locked on to the turn in the hallway as her hand shot to the door handle in front of her. A slow, questing twist and the door unlatched. She slipped in and eased the door shut. Only after did she think about what might be in there with her.

An office desk complete with a desktop computer and chair sat against the far wall. A filing cabinet next to the desk and a small couch on the left wall completed the setup.

If not for the right wall being made entirely of glass, it could have just been an office. Allie gawked at what lay beyond the glass divider. Another room, easily four times the size of the office attached to it, held what looked like a cross between a hospital exam table and the kind of autopsy table Allie had seen in movies. Leather straps lay where the arms, legs, and head would go.

Counters edged the room. Above them, a myriad of blunt and sharp tools hung like a back-alley weapons market. A shiver ran up Allie’s spine as she noticed a particularly large serrated blade attached to a small motor.

A gasp.

Allie spun toward the sound. Large brown eyes, half-hidden in black bangs, peered out from beside the couch. A boy of maybe ten. Allie’s mouth opened to greet him, then shut. It looked like a child, but it couldn’t be that simple. Not after what she’d seen.

The boy stood, a hospital gown barely hanging on to his thin shoulders. The scent, its pull shattered by the sudden noise, returned. It warred with her caution.

“Uh… hi,” she said, against her better judgment.

The boy grinned, and Allie flinched.

“Hi.”

Despite what Allie had imagined, his teeth were normal. No fangs, no hinged jaw. His voice sounded normal, too. But if he was just a kid, what was he doing there?

They stared at each other. The boy’s eyes were calm, expectant. Allie frowned. If he was expecting rescue from an adult who had it all figured out, he was in for a nasty surprise.

The office door swung open. Allie turned in time to see a pale hand tipped with long, hooked claws swipe across her jaw.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Agony washed over her as she fell. She hit the computer desk, numbness blooming down her arm. Her vision blurred. A roar, oddly muted by the whining in her ears. Then, clarity. Her vision snapped back into focus. Cold heat traveled up her jaw and down her arm, mixing with the copper on her tongue in a bizarre shade of mint. A deep ache opened in her stomach.

A gaunt woman stood above Allie and hissed, showing a nasty array of teeth more at home in a shark’s mouth than a human’s. Wires and tubes hung from one arm, which whipped back to prepare for another strike.

Allie rolled off the desk, hitting the glass divider with her shoulder as the woman’s claws cut grooves in the wood. Another slash across Allie’s chest. Blood sprayed over the woman and the couch behind her. Allie tried to gasp at the fresh pain exploding in her chest. Her lungs refused to respond as hot liquid poured from her throat.

The boy yelled.

Predatory grin widening, the gaunt woman turned away as black crept in on the edge of Allie’s sight. More cool heat. Allie fell to her knees, her diaphragm locking up, her lungs spasming as she heaved up a puddle of blood. The ache in her stomach grew into an empty pit, more painful than any of her injuries.

The boy yelled again, answered by the woman’s snarl. Allie’s eyes snapped up in time to see the woman rear back, eyes locked on the kid cowering beside the couch. A snarl rumbled from deep within as Allie lunged. Her teeth sank into the woman’s neck with little more than a pop.

Sweet, warm copper. It filled her mouth, and she drank it greedily. The woman shrieked, reaching up to dislodge Allie. Too slow. Allie yanked back and swallowed her prize. The hole in the woman’s neck gushed red, filling the air with an intoxicating scent. Allie tensed for another lunge.

What the hell?

The woman writhed and spun in place, slashing at air, each strike growing weaker. Within seconds, she collapsed and lay still, her eyes glazing over.

Allie’s mind ground to a halt. What the hell had she done? She hadn’t been thinking. She’d just acted and….

Her eyes dropped to her hands. Long, black claws adorned the tip of each finger. Her hands and forearms, painted in blood, were covered in a thin layer of light-brown fur.

Ice traveled down her spine even as her face heated up. Her heart echoed in her ears. It made sense now. Why she was here. She was a monster, and she was right where she belonged.

A creak from the door made her jump. The kid had run. She didn’t blame him. Lucky for him, she didn’t feel like hunting him down.

Allie dropped to the floor beside the dead woman as hot tears ran down her cheeks. The fur vanished into her skin; the claws shrinking back into nails like a reverse time-lapse video. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.

*****

Dr. Miller leaned back in her chair and grimaced. Hope had slumped to the ground, where she wallowed in what appeared to be self-pity. Dr. Miller saw no reason for such pathetic emotions. She’d given Hope a great gift, and so far, her trial run had gone perfectly. Well, almost perfectly.

Hope ignoring the guide scent for the child once again was a wrinkle, but one that could work. It could even save effort in the long run. The guide scent was difficult and expensive to make. It required specialized equipment and funding she’d find hard to get in the future. Finding a child to inject… far easier. Hope’s pity party was another matter.

It showed a weakness in her psyche. An unwillingness to compromise and accept. Still, other experiments with similar weaknesses tended to retain a higher level of intelligence. They also tended to go insane.

No.

Dr. Miller pushed the paper she’d been writing on aside and pulled a keyboard forward. She wasn’t about to watch her last chance go up in flames. If Hope had lost her reason to go on, she’d just have to give Hope another.

*****

“Thirty-One-Seven. Can you hear me?”

Allie yelped, jerking away from the voice before she realized it had come from the computer’s speakers. One speaker hung from its cord over the side of the computer desk, knocked off by either her or the woman colliding with it. The other sat upright by the cracked monitor, as if nothing had happened.

“What?”

“I need you to get up.”

Allie’s thoughts struggled to find coherency. She was a monster, in some sort of hellish lab, and now the computer was talking to her. “I… what?”

“You need to get up and get out of the building.”

Allie attempted to laugh, but only choked out a sob. “No. I’m a monster, like everything else here. Hell, maybe I really have been hallucinating this whole time, and I’m just a mass murderer. Does that make me a defective monster, or just a defective person?”

“You are not defective.”

The computer’s words had gained a certain vehemence. Allie felt like she’d offended it.

“You are incredibly important to this world.”

And now it was giving her a pep talk. She gripped her head and giggled.

“Get up and fight.”

The scent that had led her up the stairs came back so strong it made her head swim. She didn’t move. She was done being controlled. “No.”

Silence. Allie grinned, a childish sense of accomplishment welling up.

“Then fight for the children.”

Allie’s stomach dropped. “Children?”

“That boy’s not the only one in here.”

The boy had run. Allie was glad he did. Yet the mention of him, of more, grated like glass under her skin. She needed to move, to go to them. But that was stupid. “So what? It’s not like I can help them.”

“Every building has an exit. You won’t ever find it sitting here feeling sorry for yourself. Get up.”

“You’re damn insistent.”

Allie stood up, some of the fog in her mind lifting. Her stomach growled. All the surrounding insanity, and she was hungry. Although, she supposed even monsters had to eat.

She stared at the remains of the computer. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Follow the trail.”

Prodding the computer with more questions accomplished nothing. Whether a hallucination born of her desire to find another human being, or something else, it seemed to have done all it wanted to.

Allie stepped once more into the quiet, clean hallway. It was all a lie. A sickeningly sterile curtain hiding abominations in its bowels. She didn’t know why such a place existed, and she supposed at this point, it didn’t really matter.

The kid’s scent tickled the back of her nose. She was too tired to question it. Out and up it went, higher into what was assuredly just a new layer of hell.

*****

Hope had proven harder to control than expected. She resisted the guide scent far too easily, had even fought against the idea of following the boy. Using the children as a guide would work if Hope would track one for a long enough distance. Nonetheless, having to use multiple, or worse, having to find ever bigger motivators, wouldn’t.

Dr. Miller rubbed at her temples, where a steady beat gained strength. Hope could keep her intelligence. It was better if she did. But she needed to listen.

An e-mail notification pinged on the computer. Her investors wanted an update. The lab had gone dark days ago. She was impressed it had taken so long for someone to get antsy.

Dr. Miller scanned the e-mail and hit reply. She’d skip the recent failures, the sudden loss of personnel. They were all necessary. Besides, her investors wanted data, not administrative breakdowns, and she had a fresh stream of data just for them. A treat before the end.