Chapter Ten
Every part of my body hurt. My spine burned and there was a railroad being constructed in my head. Each muscle, tissue, and tendon contained hundreds of sewing pins while the corresponding sewing machine stitched thread-less at my bones. Where bone met bone, boiling agony scarred the cartilage. I wanted to die—that’s how much I ached.
Even if I could’ve moved without hurting, nearly every movement was impossible; I was attached to a wall. Freedom might’ve been mine if super glue held me, but alas it was cold steel. Wrapped around my arm was a bulky chain; my tail was lashed to my arm with the same chain. From my bicep region, the chain was bolted to a chrome wall before looping back over my arm and tail. The pattern of constricting and constraining continued three times, once around my upper arm, once around my elbow, and once around my lower arm.
My tail, being significantly longer than my arm, was contorted into painful arcs and chained to the wall at each bend. Though the last three or four feet of my tail was numb, I saw at least a dozen black and purple bruises where steel met flesh. My tail looked and felt like it was being bent to its limits; vertebrae ground against their neighbors. As flexible as my tail was, it wasn’t that flexible.
My feet and left arm weren’t restrained, though both ached just the same. From their free-floating nature, I gathered I was in space. The series of events between my fight with the Catrions and arriving in space, I didn’t know.
If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost ignore my agony and examine my surroundings. The oval door of the room I was in was slightly ajar. Three of the walls (one of which was the floor from my perspective) were blanketed with a rank imitation of the former carpet; in many places but especially in the corners, the fibers had rotted away, revealing the yellowed metal surface beneath it. On many of the walls were the jagged scars from the numerous unknown objects which had once been bolted there. The ceiling was battered beyond repair; a dozen or so ceiling panels were missing and two of the recessed lights were burnt out. The only light really working was the one farthest from me yet it was blinking erratically; looking at it hurt my eyes and compounded the jackhammer in my skull.
From somewhere beyond my door came a moaning as agonizing to my ears as any of my other grievances. The pathetic note of the incessant moaning was terrible; if my eyes weren’t already sopping from my own grief, I would have cried over the morbid expression of misery. I wanted to investigate the source of the anguished cry, but alas, the chains holding me to the wall prohibited such an action.
Cursing the pain I was in, I struggled to remember why I was in this situation. Thinking was almost as painful as the horrible bends in my tail. In a flash of remorseful remembrance, I realized I was here thanks to my own stupidity. If I hadn’t been so self-assured, so self-doubting, everything would be just peachy; if I could do one thing over again in my life, I would’ve introduced Alaric to the four knuckles on my left fist and never left home.
Honestly, the deafening pain resonating through my body was nothing compared to the heart-ache I had. A large globule of a tear tumbled away from my eye as I prayed to see my beloved family again. Having been without my mother and father for so long was paralyzing; I would have given everything I owned if only to see Drib’s smiling face again. Even my uncle Doctor Charles McLeod was sorely missed.
From out in the corridor, a rhythmic clacking silenced the terrible moaning. With this sound came an unexpected numbing sensation. It started as a strange flashback; from a third-person perspective, I watched myself tangle with the Catrions on the golden Saharan sand.
The moment I glimpsed myself, I noticed the color of the sand beneath the tailed figure changed from gold to burgundy. The next thing I noticed was that the figure wasn’t wildly swinging two swords, one in hand and one in tail; the tailed human I saw only had a machete grasped in his tail. That was another detail I noticed: The person was no longer a fifteen-year-old girl by the name of Préyhen Griffin. She—I—had shorter hair, a flatter chest, and the same nose. Unless I was mistaken, I was seeing a mental image of my father, barely a few years older than myself, fighting on Mars.
As if my ears were filled with shower water, I heard two voices in a frenzied debate. For some reason, I felt the images I’d seen were connected to the words I was hearing.
“Is it the Animal? I can’t remember properly.” One voice asked. Like the phantom images I was seeing, I was hearing the conversation in my head.
“No, no, I don’t believe it’s the Animal.” The second voice responded with uncertainty. “If memory serves correctly, the Animal was of a different subspecies.”
“Ah yes,” The first voice was beginning to sound like it belonged to a balding man in a coffee shop. “I didn’t think it could’ve been the Animal; too many Reproductions have passed for it to appear as young as it does.”
“”That is true; maybe the specimen we have is a clone of the Animal.” The second voice reminded me of a fraternity scholar.
“What is the likelihood of that happening?” Baldy seemed a little unsure of this theory.
“It’s a possibility,” Frat-boy actually didn’t sound too confident either. “If it is the Animal or not is irrelevant now. The important thing is that this specimen poses as much of a threat as the Animal did.”
“Hardly!” Baldy spoke with more exuberance than I would’ve expected from the way his voice sounded in general. “The Animal decimated the predecessor of Lords Harmend and Nosamar, Lord Theoro.”
“I was talking about the damage the Animal exhibited in melee.” Frat boy had a tremor of fear in his voice; at the same time, I felt a jarring fracture separate my third bodily section from the other two.
Confused, I thought the agonizing experience related to a Catrion more than it did to me. Though I was no medical professional, I was pretty confident that humans, even mutated genetic anomalies, didn’t have three snowman-like spheres. The closest I knew humans could come to the cracking sensation I’d felt was the breaking of a bone; I’d never broken a bone before but I imagined it didn’t feel like one was an egg in a bakery. Needless to say, experiencing the sensation I had was strange for numerous reasons.
“Point taken,” Baldy replied. “It is true that the specimen we have in custody rivals the melee capabilities of the Animal.”
“I hope that having this specimen on board does not prove detrimental to the success of what we intend to do.” Frat-boy worried.
“Nonsense!” Baldy, in my opinion, sounded too confident for the tentativeness I’d sensed in them both earlier. “As long as we keep it properly restrained, there should be no cause for alarm.”
Floating around the corner came two orange shapes; they looked crusty and fragile. They were Catrions.
When they saw me, they froze, continuing forward only because their inertia wouldn’t let them stop so easily.
“It’s awake!” Frat-boy cried in shock.
It was a while before Baldy responded.
“Relax, it’s restrained.” The quakiness in his voice betrayed him. “We should be safe.”
“The same had been said about the Animal, the renegade being crafted from anonymity.” Frat-boy spoke quietly, barely louder than a whisper. “I was lucky, but I had a comrade who had four reanimations destroyed by it.”
Baldy didn’t seem to find encouragement in Frat boy’s testimony.
Approaching with a lot of caution, I counted the seconds until they were almost within reach. For almost two minutes, they stared at the restraints on my tail; it was as if they dared it to break free.
At that point, I was too disheartened to bother with violence; even if they sat me free, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to push one of them aside.
One of the two Catrions moved back towards the doorway. The odd thing was that it didn’t turn to leave; it moved as if it were already facing the door, which couldn’t be so if it had been facing me. Moments later, it returned with a fuschia-colored glass orb carried by two of it’s three glass arms.
I couldn’t see what exactly the Catrion did but the pink contents of the orb escaped the confines of the glass. The pink substance was gaseous in nature, much like flour after accidentally fluffing the bag. It burned my eyes as it billowed around me yet the ocular stinging wasn’t the worst sensation it caused. My diaphragm heaved in spasmodic bursts as I struggled to not vomit; the gas had the same stench stale urine did.
Tears welled on the inside edge of my eyelids, more so than before. Even so, I fought against the fierce pain. Anger fueled my intense battle more than anything; I was infuriated that with all the pain I was in, they could pile on more misery.
Drowsiness overcame me but before I succumbed to the sleepiness, I thought I heard Baldy proclaim that it wasn’t working, that I was able to resist what I shouldn’t have been able to.
All faded to dark.
Blinking several times, I startled out of unconsciousness. My eyes still hurt, but it wasn’t from a cloud of gas. No, this time, my eyes hurt like I’d splashed shampoo in them while showering, or perhaps opened them underwater in a chlorinated swimming pool.
That might have been because I was submerged in some sort of cloudy liquid with a crude oxygen mask strapped to my face; from what I could see of the mask, it was held together by duct tape. The liquid’s cloudiness was caused by the thousands of fine particles floating in it; the liquid’s viscosity didn’t exactly permit the particles to move around much. With the consistency of motor oil, the queer fluid felt slick and gelatinous on my skin.
Because liquids could not be contained without a container, there was a solid metal tank holding all the liquid together. Judging the size of the tank was difficult yet I could tell it was huge. While I floated in the relative center of it, there was about a foot above my head and below my feet. To the left and right, the tank continued farther than the poor lighting let me see; it looked like it curved off, forming a doughnut-shape.
The only light in the tank came from a half-inch wide strip of yellow LEDs. The amount of light they produced was comparable to a candle at the end of a dark hallway; it wasn’t enough to read by.
That’s when I realized something was missing, namely my clothes.
Shocked, I had to stare through the darkness at each part of my body for several moments just to confirm the fact. Simply put, my situation wasn’t very promising.
After I’d recovered from the shock of being naked, I found a few improvements upon my former situation. As I was no longer in the room I’d been in before, I was free!
Well, actually, I was only free to move my arms, legs, and tail. Basically, I was only as free as the tank and oxygen mask allowed.
Another detail I had overlooked was my stamina. While suspended in the strange liquid, I discovered how much better I felt: I hadn’t yet recovered all the way, but I was close. Even though my body was still exhausted, I welcomed the absence of pain.
With my hair swirling around me, I heard talking.
“Which specimen did you place in this tank?” This voice didn’t sound like either Baldy or Frat-boy. It was more precise and scientific than the other two had been.
“It is the enigmatic semblance of the Animal, my lord.” The second voice sounded kind of like Baldy, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Have you run diagnostics yet?” The first voice, the one with apparent authority, asked.
“Yes my lord,” Baldy answered. “They are on the human computer over there.”
A few seconds passed before the authoritative voice responded.
“It is not the Animal, I should know.”
“If I may my lord, then what is it? We have never been able to craft a lethal class five spinal appendage.”
“It’s the Desert Arachnid.” From the sound of his voice, he looked like a Lordy to me.
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