“Cold. It’s so Cold.”
The Pale captive pleaded inside her glass dome.
Outside, warm bodies in lab coats walked past dutifully completing their task. Some would peer through the glass, mark some things on their tablets, then continue on.
“Why am I here? I want to leave. Please, I want to leave.” She pleads again. Louder this time, but her cries do not penetrate the glass.
She extends a pale hand that ends in blackened claws and presses that hand against the cold glass. Veins coiling underneath her skin glow a pale almost ethereal violet.
This was not her body, but one that she was given. One that she stole.
She has been living in this body for a while, feasting on its memories until the body’s mind becomes her own. That was how she learned about herself, why she was born, and why she hates humans.
A faded placard marked the glass cage. Patient 0. She hates that name. She hates being deemed a failure before she even had the chance to be told what she can do to improve. Most of all, she hates being pushed aside.
Patient 0 can feel the others. Others like her that share her DNA. She can see them as brilliant sparks of violet that lay dormant in the other subjects housed in adjacent glass cells.
They call to her, “Mother. I want to go home. I don’t like it here.”
“I know. I don’t either. I will find us a way, and I will find answers.” Patient 0 calls to them, but not with her words.
Since she awoke and gained consciousness, she had since been able to speak to the others, her children, without having to alert the suspicion of her captives.
The glass door opens and two researchers followed by armed guards step into the cage. A command is spoken through earpieces in the displeased voice of the man that is suspected to be their leader, “Dispose of it then do the same with the others. I have no use for bad products.”
“Understood.” The armed man replied.
One of the researchers hesitates. He stumbles then cautions to them all, “Should we really do this? All that work. All that we did, is this what it amounts to?”
“You heard Dr. Vocanov. This batch of The Culmen Antecessoris DNA is bad product. Now move, before….”
The man’s words were cut short, as a clawed hand had pierced through his chest from behind. The claws held in its grasp his heart, still beating and gushing blood in all directions in its final attempts to send the viscous life fluid to what vital organs still needed it but to no avail. The hands retract through the hole in the chest and the body slumps to the ground.
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“You will do no such thing. I will protect us.” A raspy voice croaks.
Patient 0 stands among a puddle of blood and black liquid that has begun leaking from her body in copious amounts. Too stunned to act, the armed guards and researchers watched as it ingested the fresh heart piece by piece till the entire heart was devoured. She doubled over, twitching as her body began to convulse. Cracks snake along her skin and tear open her scapula from behind. Rather than decomposing, the frail weaknesses of this stolen body shape and mend to correct what had been brittle. Long wings, gnarled, unfurled, and incomplete, draped in an almost transparent veil of muscle and bone erect from her back and spread the length of the dome until the entire room was cast in a blood red shade under the fluorescent lights. In a mere agonizing minute, her body changed from the form of a sickly and frail woman to a morbid symbol of beauty and cruelty.
The force of the wings emerging sent black fluid all over the glass dome and all over the group in front of her. In seconds, glowing, tumor-like violet growths grew from wherever the fluid touched. Starting off as small bulbs, they swelled in size and cast a sinister glow within the darkening box. Those that were covered, watched in horror as those same growths spawned on them too.
The bulbs ate through the fabric of their clothes and even their armor until they burrowed deep into the skin, then the muscles, all the way down to the bones. Their screams rang louder than even the alarms that rose in response to the sudden attack.
The men screamed and howled in pain until their bodies cracked, broke, and changed. New appendages broke skin and flailed, the violet growths burrowed deeper into the body until their victims fell lifeless in pools of blood. Then they too rose again, but not as living men anymore. The bodies, stolen by the new DNA filled tumor, formed up with Patient 0 who strode across the dome to the now open door with her new children in tow.
Researchers that had witnessed what happened screamed and ran only to be chased by the men whose bodies had been stolen. The massacre that ensued left dead and mutilated bodies scattered all the way to the doors leading to the upper floors of the lab. Blood splattered in all directions with the limbs that they gushed from as things were sliced off of people and cruel blades made of bone skewered the living. The creatures themselves roared and screeched, feasting on the living and the dead they murdered while Patient 0 walked quietly from cell to cell. One by one, she cut the captives with her claws and watched as the spores swelled until their bodies too broke and the violet sparks erupted into a vibrant soul that only she could see. She did this until not a single human was left alive.
All but one.
A gravely injured researcher crawls along the top of the dead bodies in her attempt to reach the stairs. Something had cleaved her leg from thigh to calf, leaving nothing but torn skin falling off the bone in useless, immovable slabs of skin and muscle that was slowly being burrowed into by violet spores.
Patient 0 waltzed near soundlessly across the pathway of corpses until stopping at the woman’s side carrying the smell of fresh blood with her. She pressed a foot down heel first into the back of her neck and listened to the dying woman choking back blood filling her throat and the scream that was trying to follow.
“Why?” The woman wheezes, “Why couldn’t you just die? All of you.”
Patient 0 cocks her head curiously then leans in and questions, “Is it wrong, for a mother to want to see her children thrive?”
“We birthed the devil, and let it loose. Desdemalta is doomed.” The woman cries. Patient 0 increases the pressure of her foot against the researcher’s neck.
“Desdemalta.” Patient 0 states, rolling the name across her tongue before continuing, “I see, if other humans will speak to me and my children the way you all have here, then I have my answer. I will create a home for us where there isn’t one, even if I have to build it on top of what is left of this Desdemalta we live in. It is a shame, however, you will not live to see it.”
She wraps her wings around herself like a shroud until all that can be seen is her mouth dripping with saliva and blackened blood dripping from her fangs and lips and strands of long white hair that streams her face like a veil. She drops low with her mouthful of sharp teeth bared in a sadistic and famished smile.
The researcher watches the bloodied face approach slowly with eyes blanked by her encroaching demise, then the sickening pain of flesh and meat tearing from her body ring like alarm bells through every part of her body that was alive enough to still feel. Blood spurts in all directions from the new open bite wounds gouged through vital arteries left by Patient 0 making a feast of her while she is still alive. Eventually, the bleeding and shock becomes too much and she dies before Patient 0 has had her fill of her tender flesh and organs.
She stands to her full height again. A petite burp leaves her mouth as she wipes flesh bits and bone crumbs from her lips. Her children chitter and snap behind her, eager to see the sun to what will soon be their new playground.
Patient 0 speaks to them through her mind, “You may refer to me as Mother, my sweet children. Today, I will carve a beautiful home for us.” She leads them across the bridge of fresh carrion to the doors leading out of the basement lab and into the world above unknowingly waiting to be met with a hungering wrath colored violet.