A new idea came together as Dr. Miller tapped her fingers on the desk. She’d been getting worried, and quite annoyed, at the repeated failure of the guide scent in swaying Hope’s attention. On the other hand, the children’s scent worked far too well. That it was not of her design caused a pressure to build under her skin, into her head, pushing out until all she wanted was to release it on Dr. Yevon’s hide. Too bad she’d already done that.
Still, she knew how to work with what she had. If the children were the answer to controlling Hope, then she needed to know how deep that control could go.
Dr. Miller dropped her hands to the keyboard. Her fingers flew across the keys as a command screen opened on her computer’s desktop. A quick login and a list of hyphenated numbers appeared. To an outsider, it resembled code, or gibberish, but she knew them all by heart.
She’d been a part of each strain created, each patient molded under experiments, and her desires. The security department had advised her to use number strings to classify each experiment for ease of cataloguing and obfuscation, to which she’d readily agreed. The others wouldn’t have appreciated her inspirations, anyway.
Dark nights huddled in the cold. Worthless adults passed out on the couch, drunk and high, leaving her to nurse wounds and escape into even darker, colder landscapes. Library books read by candlelight, full of horrors beyond her miserable life. How she longed to bring those horrors to life, to use them against every person who touched her.
She’d thrown herself into experimental genetics for that very reason, working every spare minute to fund her path to her goal. Then came the funders. Rich fools so sure their side was the right one, their abuses worth the outcomes, their use of horrors justified. The atrocities of her childhood echoed on a worldwide stage. She let them do as they pleased. As long as they paid, she made monsters. Yet they weren’t ever good enough.
Dr. Miller hissed through her teeth as she continued to scroll through the numbers. The idiots wouldn’t know perfection if it bit them in the ass. All they wanted were dogs on a leash. She made hellhounds.
There. Series twenty-nine, strain twelve. She’d put so much effort into making the perfect predator, revisiting the genome over and over. She succeeded. Her monsters could clear humans from a city in hours. They didn’t need sleep, and they got ninety percent of their energy from the sun, yet the morons still called them a failure. The funders had whined that the monsters couldn’t be leashed, that they’d be a liability if they spread. Dr. Miller chuckled. What if, indeed. But she’d still needed their money, and the monsters’ blood thirst didn’t distinguish between human and animal. So, she shelved the project and started her next. Her true vision. The result of a decade of genetic research and application now hiding in Hope.
She’d expected to use the guide scent, to trace a path to the idiots so she could watch them get ripped apart. However, if the children truly worked as well as they seemed to….
A click, a bit more typing, and a bar slid free from two sets of large double-doors in the research building’s basement. Dr. Miller grinned as experiments twenty-nine stepped cautiously from their holding cells. If Hope’s maternal instinct ran so high, what would happen if one of the children had a bit of an accident?
*****
Lucy finally released Allie’s hand and ran off to one of the desks in the back of the room. She pulled a bundle of paper, wrapped like a scroll, from under it, then ran back, tugging Allie over to the nearest empty table.
“I found this a couple of days ago, in a drawer,” Lucy said as she unrolled the scroll.
Black lines etched squares, rectangles, and half-circles. Allie’s eyes grew wide. She’d seen plenty of these while doing art exhibitions.
A floor plan.
This particular floor plan had large rectangles drawn side-by-side, thick black lines separating them from each other, with smaller squares and rectangles inside. Apartments. “Is this the floor with all the homes?”
“Mmhmm.” Lucy jabbed at a semi-circle sitting at the top of the paper. It stood at the end of a hallway that bisected the entire floor, leading to what looked like outside the building’s walls. Allie’s breath caught. “Does that… lead outside?”
“We think so.”
“You think so?”
“Well, the door doesn’t say anything on it. Kyle looked.”
“Kyle didn’t open it?”
“It’s locked.”
“Oh.” Allie sighed. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Sarah’s dad is an electrician.”
Lucy looked up at Allie with a wide grin. Allie stared. The girl seemed to be waiting for a reaction, but other than disappointment, Allie had nothing.
“The lock’s electric!”
“Oh… okay.”
“You’re going to have to just tell her,” Kyle said in his self-assured tone. “Not like she’s gonna figure it out.”
Allie gritted her teeth. If not for the scent telling her not to, she’d have smacked the boy.
“There’s a breaker room. Here.” Lucy pointed to a small room in one apartment, barely the size of a closet. Sure enough, it was labeled ‘breakers’. “At least, that’s what Sarah said ‘breakers’ meant. Anyway, she also said if we switch them all off, the lights and the locks should open.”
Allie studied the floor plan as she chewed her lip. Lucy’s, or she supposed, Sarah’s theory seemed solid. Electric locks without power should release, she assumed. She wasn’t an electrician. “So why haven’t you tried it already?”
Kyle snorted. “Because we need your help.”
“Excuse me?”
Kyle crossed his arms and frowned. “Lucy and I are the oldest, biggest, and bravest. We’ve been trying to get the others out of here, but they’re too scared.”
“No,” Lucy said. “You’ve been trying to get everyone out. We both know it’s too dangerous. Or, it was.” She turned to look at Allie. “Now that we have you with us, it’ll be fine.”
Images of all the zombies, crab men, sea creatures, and whatever the hell she’d fought in the office flashed through Allie’s mind. She’d become… something else. Whatever she was now, it wasn’t someone these kids should be trusting.
“I…. No. I don’t think—”
“They’ll follow,” Kyle said. “We all will. Just tell them to.”
“You kids shouldn’t stay with me.”
“So we should stay here? Lady, we’re running out of food, and so are those things down below.”
“But I’m—”
“Our only chance, as stupid as that is. Or should we just wait around to die?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“No.” The word came out with a vehemence Allie hadn’t intended.
Kyle stepped back, eyes going wide as his arrogance slipped.
It was stupid. She’d just as likely get the kids killed as much as save them. Hell, she could be the one to kill them. She’d attacked not once, but twice, without thought. If she was a killer of monsters, what chance did children have, even if they weren’t entirely human? Still, the thought of them staying, of dying without her help, sent rivulets of fire through her blood.
Allie snatched the floor plan from the table and yelled, “Finish up and follow me. We’re getting out of here.”
Over a dozen faces turned toward her as her words echoed in the sudden silence.
Then, chaos.
The children dropped their food or shoved the remnants in their mouths. Trash crunched under foot as everyone huddled around Allie, a small, thin army standing at attention with chocolate and chip dust smeared on their faces and hands.
“Uh… right.” Allie’s resolve faltered.
“Let’s go, lady,” Kyle said from the crowd.
“Allie,” she snapped back. “My name is Allie.”
“Okay.”
The small voice he’d replied in made a small trickle of guilt worm its way inside Allie’s mind. She sighed. “Right. Let’s go.” She turned in place, unsure of how she was meant to pierce the huddle of kids, only to have them sidestep out of her way. It was unnerving. “I made my bed. I guess I’ll lie in it,” she mumbled as she walked toward the door, kids trailing behind her.
They made it into the hallway and halfway to the nearest stairwell when the smell hit. The scent she’d been ignoring since finding the kids had got stronger. Behind it came a new one, a sharp musk reminiscent of the one time she’d agreed to draw a man’s pet ferret, dialed up to a hundred. It made her eyes water and her neck prickle. “Stop.”
The little army halted in an instant, going quiet. A tapping echoed from the stairwell. It was barely audible at first, then louder and louder. More taps joined in until it sounded like rain on a metal roof.
The stairwell doors burst open.
The creature in the stairwell had human looking skin and human eyes. Everything else about it was wrong. Its legs twisted backwards, forcing it onto all fours. A wide grin split an emaciated face in two. A forked tongue lolled out from between fangs.
“Shit.” Allie spread her arms on instinct, shielding the kids from the monster.
More followed behind the first. The leader clacked its teeth and growled. Allie blinked. No. Its mouth hadn’t moved. The others answered it with clacking of their own. That’s when she noticed it.
A dog's head, covered in matted fur, sprouted from each monster’s back. The dog heads opened their mouths, then snapped them shut again. The human heads hissed. A kid screamed, and the floodgates opened.
The lead monster lunged, a whip-like tail lashing out. The tail stuck, a hook at its end sinking into her shoulder. More kids screamed as the clamor rose to a crescendo. Allie’s ears rang. Darkness crept in on the edges of her vision as more creatures lunged past her. To the children.
She changed faster than before. Her hand shot out, grabbing one monster in mid-air. Something gave in her shoulder. The pain barely registered before it dulled to nothing. Allie spun, slamming her captive into the one who had stung her. A satisfying crunch, and both monsters lay still. A pivot, and she was on top of another just as its tail lashed towards Kyle. The tail came off with a snap of her jaws.
The surviving monsters abandoned the easy prey and focused on the threat, rage clear in their bared teeth and wild eyes as they spun toward her. Wicked hooks sank into her flesh. Lava traced its way down her body, through her limbs, then vanished. The pit in her stomach yawned once more, unbearably deep and agonizingly empty. This pain wouldn’t go away on its own.
Allie yanked a barbed tail from her chest and bit down. Bittersweet copper. Sweeter meat. She wanted more, needed more, and all her prey had lined up to feed her.
*****
Chimeras. That’s what she called them. Dr. Allie’s funders had balked at the idea at first, for some strange reason. Transgenic hybrids were fine, even preferable, as long as it meant something stronger, faster, and less human. Yet the thought of letting multiple species’ genetics split at certain points had made every black-suited businessman on the board squirm in their seats.
She’d twisted it, of course, made it palatable. Psychological warfare. What was more terrifying than an abomination with multiple teeth-filled maws? She’d even added paralytic venom from cone snails for good measure. It could make resource grabs far less bloody. Throw a chimera at a strategic spot, let a few poor bastards escape, then let fear do the rest.
The board had eaten her speech up. Or at least enough of them to get the funding she needed. She’d always been good at figuring out what people wanted to hear, weaving truth and lies into an enticing tapestry. It had kept her safe in her early years, and profitable in her later years.
Really, she just wanted to create another monster from the horror stories embedded in her mind. It hadn’t gone to plan, as none of her projects did, but she’d produced a creature worthy of a few missions—until an idiot of a handler forgot to properly lock a transport cage.
She’d lost a field-proven chimera, and all the men in suits clamored about was the loss of their transport crew and the need for a kill switch. Dr. Miller chuckled as another chimera ended up in pieces in the second-floor hallway. Too bad she didn’t have Hope back then. She could have sent her as the kill switch.
*****
Hunger and rage boiled in Allie. She knew what she was doing this time. Did she have control? Such a vague concept. Her body did what it needed, with little input from her brain. That was fine with her. It soothed the pit with bittersweet and kept the creature from touching the children as she danced as well as any ballerina, and delivered death as well as any executioner.
When the last monster fell, she almost felt disappointed.
A slip in the tempo of her mind, and the fur receded with the fury, leaving her with yet more gunk on her tattered clothes and skin. At this point, her own odor threatened to cover up all else.
“Wow,” a child whispered.
All of the children were huddled behind her, holding hands and staring with wide eyes. Even Kyle’s usual confidence seemed to have fled.
“Are…. Is everyone all right?” Allie asked. Hardly the best thing to say after going full monster in front of them and mutilating a crowd of two-headed freaks, but it was the best she could think of.
Lucy nodded. “They never got to us.”
“Oh. Good.”
The huddle broke. The kids moved toward Allie, murmuring to each other, surrounding her as they’d done in the classroom.
A tiny boy of perhaps four gripped Allie’s hand. “You the best.”
“You’re not scared of me?”
“No.”
They weren’t human. No way a normal child watched what she’d done and didn’t shriek in terror, let alone want to hold her hand and give her compliments. Asking was pointless, though. Whatever they were, they were still children, and Allie had told them she’d get them out. She wouldn’t go back on her word.
Allie squeezed the little boy’s hand and smiled. “I’m glad. Let’s keep going, then.”
The rest of the way to the breaker room stayed clear. The room itself sat nestled in the back of an apartment half the size of the one she’d found Kyle in, hidden behind a simple closet door. Allie’s steps quickened when she saw it, a sliver of hope rising. All she had to do was throw some switches, and she’d leave the nightmarish building behind. She couldn’t leave the monster part of her behind with it, yet the thought didn’t bother her as much as she figured it would.
She grabbed the doorknob and pulled. The door jiggled in its frame, but stayed shut. She tried again. Nothing.
“It’s locked.”
Kyle again. Allie sighed. “So it is. Anyone know where the key is?”
A smattering of nos came from the kids.
Allie leaned her forehead against the door’s cool wood. Freedom lay behind the lock. Their one chance. She turned the knob and rattled the door, pulling harder and harder. She hadn’t come this far to get stopped by a damned lock.
The anger she’d felt when the two-headed monsters closed in welled back up. She growled, reared back, and buried her shoulder into the door. It buckled with a deafening crack. Allie jerked back on reflex. A jagged hole now sat in the middle of the door, splintered edges disappearing into the dark of the room behind it.
“Awesome!” a kid said.
A flurry of agreements, then a shouted “Open it!”
“Right.” Allie shook her head. She really needed to get a grip on what she was capable of. She reached into the hole and undid the lock. A few seconds, and a few more good pulls on the now warped door, and she had her prize.
Large breaker boxes covered all three walls. Allie flipped one open to reveal dozens of breaker switches. Each breaker had a label next to it, with a string of printed letter and numbers Allie couldn’t make sense of. She turned them all off.
*****
The research facility Dr. Miller had given the last decade to went dark, but the security cameras stayed operational, as did the electricity to the security building. They had backups. The containment cells within the facility’s basement were supposed to have backup generators as well. Too bad she’d sold them to fund unapproved experiments.
Every door in the facility opened with a click. Dr. Miller chuckled. An automatic distress call had been sent the moment the first breaker got thrown. The funders, or rather their hired guns, would soon descend on the site with all the firepower money could buy. However, they’d be expecting a few loose experiments, maybe some mutinous scientists or saboteurs. Instead, they’d find her darkest dreams come true, frolicking in one of the last vestiges of wilderness. It would be truly beautiful. She was disappointed she wouldn’t be able to stick around to see it.
A ping sounded from her e-mail. The cargo ship was closing in on the nearby port. It would be ready to board in twenty minutes. More than long enough. Not all the money she’d hidden away went to experiments, and money really could buy anything.
More pings rolled in as concerned parties pressed their secretaries into service. Dr. Miller shook her head. Leeches until the end, only worried about others when something threatened their power. She didn’t have the time, or care, to lie to them anymore. It was time to go.