by Lexy Timms
Taylor gave her a dubious look and shook the thin garment out. He slipped it on, keeping the makeshift cloth in place. He wasn’t sure what was worse: the realization that he wasn’t going to see any real clothes anytime soon or that the good doctor was truly crazy. It was the sincerity that terrified him. She thinks she’s doing something that will benefit mankind. How do you fight someone who’s completely convinced she’s one of the good guys?
Melinda leaned against the nurses’ station where she could easily see inside each cell. Her expression was benign. A woman at peace with her job, interested and curious about what she didn’t understand. “I’ve observed the transformation many times, Mr. Mann. I’ve seen men and women, children, change into lions before my eyes and back again. But when they are induced to do so...” She indicated the cannister. “The results are always so much... harder. For them, I mean. Some actually do not survive, and I don’t know the reason for the difference. What should it matter if the change is voluntary?”
For a moment Taylor was speechless. Here he’d been starting to... well, not sympathize with her, but at least understand her. She was a doctor for fuck’s sake, and she was trying to help people—even if going about it entirely the wrong way. He’d thought he could maybe reason with her when she’d come back. Find a way to convince her to let them go.
But this was cold. And more callous than he’d expected.
“You bitch,” Taylor spat the word, then had to remind himself that he needed to stop before she could see that she was getting to him.
Calm. Stay calm.
“Not helpful.” She took a sip of her coffee. “What is groundbreaking is that you told me about how fighting the change is ‘normal’ and that you’re taught—taught, mind you—to accept the change. This indicates another supply of test subjects. All we need to do is a little research into your family and your place of birth.”
Taylor felt his blood run cold. He thought of his family, his community, and his hands clenched. He’d brought danger right to their doorstep with this.
“Not that we weren’t already looking into this,” she said, leaning against the counter. She waved that particular train of thought off negligently. “Be that as it may, you’ll be pleased to learn that I’ve isolated the genetic signature of the change. The DNA strands themselves. I’ve been able to recreate the... aberration that is you, Mr. Mann. Well, I shouldn’t say it that way. I didn’t know were-tigers existed before now, even though I’d been informed before your arrival. No, I mean that I’ve duplicated the lion changing gene. I can now create shifters.” Melinda shrugged. “Theoretically.”
Create?
“What do you mean theoretically?”
“I mean, Mr. Mann, that the experiments to recreate the beast have been less than successful. The subjects all complete the change, but they’re usually dead before fully realizing their true potential. You see, that forced change, and the engineered change isn’t successful. Yet. So... we try again. And again.”
She turned a valve embedded in the counter on the nurses’ station. “In order to create tiger pheromones, I will need some female shifters to extract it from. Males, for some reason, have very little. I’m sure that my investor will procure some for me, now that we know where to look. In the meantime, the experiments will have to continue with what we have. Lions.”
Taylor’s head whipped over to Angelica who was sitting with her eyes closed, curled up around herself. Her face shiny with sweat. “No.” It all made sense now. A deeply, sick, distorted sense.
“It’s the best way to heal, Dr. Truman,” Melinda said, making a note on a clipboard in front of her. “You’re getting the pheromones introduced through the ventilation system.”
“How?” Angelica asked, raising her head sharply. “You can’t possibly have a CRISPER! That’s an enormous amount of expenditure. Even the local government couldn’t spend that much and hide it!”
“What the hell is a crisper?” Taylor demanded.
Melinda looked at him as if he were a toddler interrupting the adults. “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,” she said. “It’s a naturally occurring mechanism found in bacteria.” She began warming up to her topic. “You see, some viruses feed on bacteria, so the little buggers found a way to defend themselves. They slice the DNA of a virus with surgical precision. All you need is to supply it with a marker to tell it what to look for and it will alter DNA to whatever the hell you program it for.”
“But you have to provide the genetic marker,” Angelica said. “That’s not something you can just cook up in your kitchen. It has to be created...” She gasped as another wave of pain lanced through her. “It’s an enzyme, so it requires sophisticated equipment and trained personnel.”
“Oddly enough,” Melinda chuckled, “you can order it online.” She laughed at Angelica’s expression. “I know, right? You go online, create the marker with their tool, and they ship it to you overnight express. It’s the most remarkable thing, really. Not nearly so expensive as you’d expect, but terribly easy to make a mistake. You have to be very sure before you add the product to your shopping cart.”
“You’re serious?” Taylor asked in a voice he didn’t recognize.
“Who’s behind all this, Melinda?” Angelica asked, sitting up a little straighter, wincing a little with the movement.
“It’s an odd thing.” Melinda chuckled. “Did you know that the UN spent a fortune to clear the jungle around the camp as a humanitarian gesture? They had no desire to get their hands dirty, of course, so they dropped the cash off and let the locals handle the details. You saw the delicate hand they took in cleaning that up.” She laughed and took a big swallow of her coffee. “But can you imagine holding the patent on a cure for pain? A cure for disease? A cure for suffering? What can your cells tell us, Mr. Mann? Can you prolong life with the right adjustments? Can you provide us all with immortality someday? Think about it. No more death, no more enfeeblement, no more paralysis from accidents. Can you understand why my investor is so motivated? What a glorious future you have provided for us, Mr. Mann, if only we can grasp it.”
Angelica suddenly screamed. Taylor shot to his feet and threw himself against the glass that separated them. “What’s happening?” he shouted when he saw she’d curled even smaller around herself, clutching her arm against her stomach. Her head was thrown back, eyes sightless.
“The pheromones are kicking in. You smell them now, don’t you, dear?”
“Wait—” Taylor cried. “What have you done?”
“I injected her while you two slept,” Melinda said, and made another note on the clipboard. “She’s about to change into a lion.” She blew a kiss at Angelica. “Good luck, dear. No one has survived this yet, but I have faith in you. The two of you are both rather unique.”
“ANGELICA!” Taylor and the cat screamed as one.
Unfortunately, Angelica was beyond hearing either one of them.
Chapter 20
“Don’t fight it!” Taylor was yelling. “Please. Don’t fight it!”
Angelica was buried in pure pain. She was in a blanket of agony tightly wrapped around her, suffocating, burning. She prayed for the pain of the shattered hand, the broken arm. She wept and screamed, and still the white-hot daggers tore through her body. The floor and walls and ceiling all blended together in an endless white glare that lanced through her eyes and exploded in the back of her head.
Fracture of the tibia, ulna, spinal stenosis, shattered femur, tibia, fibula... There were too many to name. 206 bones in the human body... 206... 205... 204... 207... 200... Organ damage, facial lacerations, healed, skin pull, fingernails rounding, hardening...
For the first time since medical school when she developed her tattle-tale memory, it failed her. She couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t breathe. The memory stuttered and fell silent and choked and writhed. She was dying, and then she was dying some more. The breath left her and came back stronger. She arched her ba
ck and screamed when the back wasn’t there anymore to arch, and she could still hear Taylor from a thousand miles away and his muted cries as she fell and kept falling.
She lay in a state of emptiness.
Then she breathed once, a sharp inhale that left her gasping and choking, and floundered and opened her eyes. She was on the floor, still in her cell. Taylor was screaming her name, but it was far away and it was only a sound from a raw throat that meant something because she had already known it.
That made no sense.
Nothing made sense. She held on tightly to his words. Accept. Accept. Share the burden. She blinked. She looked at her hand—the shattered, broken hand. It was larger. Furry. There were razor-sharp points jutting from it. She tried to extend the claws. They popped out so fast she nearly jumped.
She was breathing. Her heart was beating—hell, it was pounding.
Autonomic functions, parasympathetic and sympathetic systems functional. Breath, heart rate, digestion, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. Maybe later for those last two, but it was good to hear the medical memory again. A piece of normalcy in a sea of insanity.
She wanted to throw up but had no idea how. She searched for some clue, some hint how to operate a body like this, but nothing in all her schooling and during her practice had prepared her for learning to live in the body of a lioness.
What was it Taylor had said? Accept the cat? He was speaking as if there were two of them, two personalities, like one didn’t interact with the other until today. She tried to find the cat persona.
Hello? Is there anyone in here with me? I accept you!
There was only silence.
Anxiety symptoms and the resulting disorders are believed to be due to disrupted modulation within the central nervous system. A symptom of such a disruption can include talking to one’s self, hearing voices. Possible causes are an imbalance of the serotoninergic system and the noradrenergic system when one is over-used and the other is under-used.
Yeah, that was helpful.
Meaning I’m going crazy. Why the hell not? I’m a fucking LION! How do I move? How do I control any of the—how do I change back? Can I change back? Oh, fuck... I have to pee.
Pressure on the bladder can create feelings of...
STOP, DAMN IT! She tried to calm her breath. Tried to swallow through a dry throat. Don’t tell me about it, just DO IT!
For the first time since medical school, a silence echoed in her head. Her hand twitched. It didn’t matter that it was five times as big, covered in fur, and shaped differently with retractable daggers. It was still her hand. It responded as a hand would.
She moved the arm. Experimentally, she moved the other. Taking a chance, she pushed herself up on her arms and turned her head to regard the madwoman who was saying something to her. She didn’t really care to hear her. Angelica’s interest was only in him. Taylor. He was calling to her, assuring her that everything would be all right. As though transforming suddenly into a lioness of gigantic proportions was anywhere near normal. She brought the rear legs under her. She was shaking, but she managed. It felt like she should have a sway back, like her rear legs should be longer than the front, as if she were on all fours playing with her nephew.
But at the same time, it felt natural. She stretched and immediately fell on her face. She got her legs back under her and blinked owlishly at them. That smell, that sickly sweet smell was dissipating. Some part of her mind understood that Melinda had turned off the gas. She tried walking, fell against the glass wall and slid to the floor, but she stood again and managed to keep the floor under her paws. The second attempt went better.
I accept you. It wasn’t a personality she needed to accept. It was the way the body moved, the way it conformed; the feel of four legs, not two. She rolled her neck, stretching, feeling the POP of her spine as the vertebrae slid comfortably in place.
“Angelica!” Taylor called. “Focus.”
She turned to look at him. Whiskers twitched.
I have whiskers. And I can feel them move.
A sort of strange wonder came over her.
“Imagine you’re about to rise, to stretch in your human form. You’ve done it for more than twenty years; just imagine it the way it always works and stand up.”
Angelica thought for a moment. How do you think about not thinking about something that you can’t think about? Internally, she shrugged and stood.
The pain returned, the sound of bones realigning and reshaping returned, but she was more prepared for it this time. The shock wasn’t so bad. She found herself bent over, not standing, her arm—flesh, not fur, extended in front of her.
She was able to rise, though she lost her balance once or twice, and thankfully put on the gown Melinda had shoved through a similar slot to Taylor’s.
She was absolutely exhausted.
“Remarkable, Doctor!” Melinda clapped in excitement. “Wonderful! I knew you were special! The first successful transformation from a DNA alteration ever. You’re the first one to live through it!” She beamed with the excitement of a little girl who successfully made cookies for the first time.
Angelica could only stare. She had no idea what to say, or even how to say it. Her tongue felt strange and thick in her mouth, like she needed to get used to living in a human skin again when she’d only left it for a few minutes.
“I’m proud of you both.” Melinda couldn’t seem to keep from talking. Her pen danced wildly across the pages of the clipboard. “I cannot wait for the final results. This will push my research ahead by years!” Melinda’s watch beeped. “Damn! I’m sorry, my darlings, but I’m due for my damn shift at the clinic. You know what an ass Manchester can be if you’re late.”
“What ‘final results’?” Taylor yelled.
“The autopsies.” Melinda said it as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “Ta, darlings!” She flitted out of the room with a backward hand flutter and disappeared. Angelica fell back against the metal table and closed her eyes against a sudden surge of nausea.
Autopsies?
ANGELICA SLID DOWN the wall that separated her from Taylor. It was a muffled sound but she could hear him on the other side. He sat down heavily against the wall.
“You all right?” he asked.
“That really should be a stupid question,” Angelica said, and smiled because she knew it was his way of expressing concern. “But, yeah, I think I am. I just... I didn’t know how to operate my body. It felt... it felt like a cage, like a trap, and I started to panic. Then I heard you. Acceptance. I found that the body would reply to my desires and I began to be able to move it.”
“There wasn’t an inner cat?”
“No. Just the same mixed up brain I’ve always had. When I went to med school, I started using triggers to help me remember things. So if I saw someone with, say, the flu—” Symptoms include fatigue, body aches, headache, cough, sometimes fever... “I get the list of symptoms and causalities and so forth. It’s how I cope when I’m stressed. I found that part of me could actually understand the driving. I don’t know if that makes sense...”
“You impress the hell out of me,” Taylor said quietly. “Our children have years of preparation and careful monitoring long before their first change.”
Angelica smiled, oddly pleased that he’d already claimed her as one of his own. Would others of his kind be as accepting, she wondered. “Our children, huh?”
Taylor’s voice took on a lighter tone. “The children of my people,” he amended somewhat awkwardly, which sort of answered her question.
She wasn’t really one of them. Maybe she never would be. So, where did that leave her? And them? She bit her lip and dared herself to ask. “Do tigers and lions...” she said, plucking at her gown. “Do they... crossbreed?” It was a crude term, but there was no better way to say it. Tigers, and lions, and bears, oh my!
The silence following the question indicated that he was taking the question seriously. His voice was sof
ter, more tender when he replied. “Yes. They’re called ligers.”
“Ligers? Really?” She swallowed a laugh. “Does that...” She looked around the room, not really seeing it. The light from the flickering fluorescents, high above reach and surrounded by a steel cage, cast the ceiling in shadow, but there was nothing there but duct work and pipes. “Does that work with shifters, too? Crossbreeding, I mean?”
Something was bothering her. Something she hadn’t noticed before, or something she’d maybe noticed in lion form that she hadn’t articulated just yet. She looked again at the table. It shone and gleamed in the reflected light. It looked so clean, so cold.
“I don’t know,” Taylor admitted. “I never knew any other kind.”
“How do you keep from inbreeding, then?” she asked, because asking questions helped to keep her from screaming. Her mind wanted to shut down. The changes to her body, to her psyche, were too enormous to accept so quickly. She was losing sense of who she was. Angelica leaned her head back against the wall. She imagined him on the other side, leaning against her, heads together. She closed her eyes and tried to place herself back in the bathtub, lying against him. The slick, soapy water sloshing over the side of the tub as they played. The gentle relaxation of the heat against her aching muscles. But the faint hiss of cold air from the vent and the feeling of a breeze on her cheek pulled her back to the room, to the barrier between them.
“The gene stays pretty dominant,” he was saying, answering just to give her something to focus on. “So, even when one parent isn’t a shifter, the child usually is.”
