P Is for Prisoner

Chapter 7
End

Chapter Seven

When Jennifer woke, it took her a few moments to remember where she was. The first thing she saw was the shadows of the bars running down her nursery print blanket, and the image immediately recalled the prison that had been her home for the past three years. As she roused herself further, waving a black furred paw in front of her face, it all came back to her.

Oddly enough, she didn’t feel the raging terror that she become so accustomed to regarding her fate. It could have been a mote of acceptance, but Jenny filed it away under the realization that the old doctor was harmless, and eventually, he’d make a mistake and she’d be free. She just had to keep vigilant, and watch for that opening.

Suddenly, with a start, she thought for a moment that she had a roommate in her crib, as another skunk, clad in identical clothing sat staring wide-eyed back at her. It was a moment before Jenny realized she was looking into a mirror.

But it hadn’t been there, had it?

Staring at herself, she finally did feel that slight shiver of fear as the mirror brought to mind her traumatic arrival at the Slider Station. All those shifty, dirty Theran scientists in their bleach white robes, all chattering and laughing as though they weren’t playing god with her life. And that possum doctor...Cade. In another life, she would have broken his knees with a baseball bat. In this one, however, her height barely made those boney appendages of his. Also, she noticed that she was dressed differently this ?morning’, and that burned away most of the nice, fluffy feeling she had when she had woken up, because it meant that either Dr. Solonis or one of the other ?caretakers’ he had mentioned had undressed her while she dozed. Grimacing, she tried to stand up, finding to her further annoyance, that she needed the assistance of the crib rails to keep steady. Her legs held her weight, but her knees shook and wobbled, and it felt as though she had gained a ton in proportion.

Hadn’t she ran from Theresa and this lunatic asylum yesterday? What was going on?

Annoyed by the unexplained change and a slight throbbing behind her eyes, Jen turned back towards the mirror, studying herself. After a few moments of glaring at the unfamiliar image, she could nonetheless see that changes had indeed occurred. Her legs, short and stubby to begin with, seemed even shorter now, and her arms seemed longer and chubbier by proportion. Her blue eyes, which were the most arresting feature on her new face, seemed even larger now, all but dominating her head. When she tried to turn to assess the fluffy thing that kept batting at her roundly curved ears, her neck wouldn’t allow it, and Jenny found herself turning in a slow circle like a dog chasing its tail. Losing her balance, she landed hard on her padded rump, but felt no pain, only a jarring sensation that kind of tickled in a way. It was a pleasurable feeling, and were Jenny not in her right mind, she might have gotten up to do it again a few times more.

She had gotten younger. That much was certain. Not by a whole lot, but at this age, even a few months mattered either way. Leaning forward, Jenny groaned and banged on the mirror. Why were they doing this? Everyone was talking about this being some ?new’ procedure. Were they going to just continue to regress her into nothingness? A pile of DNA and atoms, to be re-grown in the womb of some surrogate Theran? The thought disgusted her to the core. Hands spread across the glass, tears came again to the little girl, who was frightfully in danger of letting loose a full-on bawl. But taking a deep, gulping breath, she found herself, and remained silent.

“Awww...wook at da widdle baybee.”

Jerking her head up, Jen turned from the mirror to see who had spoken, but oddly enough, the room behind her was empty.

“Over here, bitch.”

Facing the mirror again, Jen was horrified to see her reflection...suddenly...stop being her reflection, as the theran in the mirror stood and began pacing around in the confines of it’s crib in an agitated manner.

“What the...”

The mirror person scoffed. “Oh, it’s not that hard to figure it out. Clear your head, Jenni-girl! You’re losing it!”

Padding closer to the mirror, Jen reached out to touch the shimmering wall. “But how can...are they...”

Mirror-Jenny folded her arms and whipped her face away from the girl, her nose wrinkling. “Dear god, you stink. Hopefully, that long-eared idiot will be in soon enough to deal with that. Nursing from a bottle? Messing your ?dia-dees’ while you sleep? Have you already surrendered yourself to this damnable program of theirs?”

Gasping, Jen felt around her mid-section just as the smell hit her. She wouldn’t have even noticed it had the mirror not brought it up, not even when she had fallen back onto it earlier. “Bu...bu...who...what am I supposed to do!”

“I’m so glad you asked that, Jen-Jen. Turns out I’m in a great spot to help you out.” Grinning a wicked smile that looked simply demonic on a baby’s face, the mirror child extended out a claw and ran it across it’s side of the mirror. As it did so, a razor-thin crack began to appear on the outside of it, and Jen ran her round little fingers across it. It was real.

“You said before that you weren’t afraid of dying. You said that as long as you’d go into that quiet night as you....YOU...that you could do it. How long did you spend readying yourself for this day? For the day when they’d strap you to that rusted metal chair, affixing you with diodes and transistors, and finally, that neat little salad bowl to top it all off?” The mirror Jen giggled. “And how appropriate...did you know that they make you wear diapers and rubber pants when they do it? I guess that way, clean up is...well...it’s a lot easier to peel a dirty diaper off a dead inmate then to scrub clean an execution device. Not that I’d know...just saying.”

The smell was getting stronger, and as Jenny stood again, she felt her stomach contract once more, pushing more of the mess out into her diaper. There was no way she could have known that the formula that Dr. Solonis had within it a fast-acting laxative to help keep children regular, and that this was just a by-product of that drug. Now that she was aware of it, the feeling was horrible, and the rank stench almost made her gag. Her headache from earlier hadn’t quite gone away either, and on top of the nausea, she felt dizzy, lost. “I...don’t...want this!”

“Then do it!” Her doppelganger cried, smacking her paw against the mirror. Cracks spiraled down Jenny’s side of the mirror, and in an instant, several larger pieces of it came loose, showering her in a radiant bath. Screaming, Jenny raised her arms to shield her eyes, forgetting that they were the only things that kept her balanced. Falling forward, the little skunk’s forehead hit the mirror with a solid thunk, and pain exploded behind Jen’s eyes. In a near frenzy, her paw clamped convulsively onto one of the razor-sharp glass shards. In another life, it would have been a small sliver. In her current form, it could have been a bowie knife. In the shard, her reflection reappeared, colored red by the thin river of blood that tricked down from her hand, and in that child’s visage, with it’s innocent blue eyes, twitching pink nose, and wide mouth agape, it nodded. This was the only way she could take control again. Let the Therans to their pathetic experiments. Let them collect another inmate to play their games with. They wouldn’t fuck with Jennifer Dancette. Not anymore. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a faint melody, a beautiful song, and then nothing.

Jedin Solonis hummed a tuneless lullaby as he walked through the teacher’s lounge, seeking coffee. He grinned softly as a trio of children ran past his knees, heedless of the ?adults only’ sign so obviously scrawled across the entrance. In truth, the adults here encouraged such minor infractions...the inborn curiosity of their race made it hard to curtail.

Ahh, too be young again, he mused. Unbidden, his mind returned to a simpler time, growing up on his family’s land, tending the soil with his brothers and sisters. A farmers and agriculturalist by trade, Solonis never saw himself in his current position, assisting in the Project. But when the call went out for learned men and women to lead the expedition to the human world, he had gladly volunteered, willing to do anything to save his race from the disease that had claimed all of his siblings. Even when things didn’t pan out as well as they had hoped, the small victory found within the human’s genes was like a breath of life upon Jedin’s soul. And now, standing on the precipice of a new future, one in which Devra no longer haunted his people’s nurseries and hospitals he could -

His feet were moving even before the sub-dural alarms rang off in his head, blaring. So lost in his thoughts, he had not heard his latest charge shuffling around after her nap, and inexplicably, some mundane sound had well masked the sound of the mirror breaking. But nothing could drown out the cries of pain, of sorrow, of rage, that now emanated from Jen’s crib.

Even as he rounded the corner in the hallway, Jedin’s sensitive nose could smell the coppery traces of blood in the air. Bursting into the observation room, the smell intensified a thousand-fold.

“By the watchers in the sky,” was all the doctor could manage.

Laying on her side in a pool of blood, was Jenny. She had somehow broken the mirror that sat with her in the crib, and pieces of it lay strewn around her, catching the light and shining like little disco balls. A steady flow of red oozed from the little girl’s wrists, and her eyes, once sparkling when they regarded him, so full of hate, where now dull and cloudy, staring at him, and yet, staring through him.

“Oh, no, baby no...” Jedin gasped, before spinning on his heel. “MEDIC! MEDIC!” he screamed down the hallway, “I need HELP!” Secure in the knowledge that his voice would be heard and heeded, Jedin ran back to the child, gathering her up close to him. Running over to the cabinet, near the cupboard where the other little children had gotten their exams, he pulled a thick sheet of gauze from a waiting dispenser, and quickly wrapped the child’s hands, trying to stop the bleeding. Layer and layer he piled on, until Jen’s hands resembled huge, pink-stained mittens. Applying pressure to the arterial points in the girl’s shoulders, he held onto her like that even when the medics had come with their gurney, ready to transport her to Evenswaine Hospital. He held on all through-out the bumpy hover-go ride, and all along the medic’s frantic flight to a suitable module. An orderly had to wrest him away from Jenny to allow a more field specific doctor in to take his place.

As he paced back and forth in the waiting room, as worried for Jenny’s sake as he would his own children, he did the last thing his instincts would have allowed. He phoned Dr. Cade.

“She did what?”

“I don’t understand it! That mirror was only supposed to reinforce her semblance of self...and at her current age, there should have been no way to break it in the way she did!”

The possum made a low note in his throat. “Interesting. And you say you had already administered the serum? Was it working?”

Flustered, the doctor tried to remember. Yes, Jenny had looked littler then she had when she came in. “I think so...yes, I know so. She had arrived in the two-three year old range and had regressed down to about eighteen months or so.”

“Good,” came the chill reply. “Keep me informed as to her status, Solonis. Thank you.”

And that was it. No concern. No mercy, no sympathy.

“What did they ever do to you?” Jedin asked, staring out the window. He had lost brothers, sisters, two children to Devra, but according to his file, Cade had been a single child and had none of his own. What could the humans or the Devra have done to possibly warrant such a cruel indifference?

And what had happened to Jenny?

Hours passed, and Solonis never stopped pacing. Several of the orderlies voiced their concerns to the doctor in charge of this level, but after the situation had been explained, they fell silent. Finally, the surgeon in charge exited the main operating room, his expression hidden by the surgical mask he wore, but his eyes were quiet, stormy. Silently, and without words, the ursine doctor told him what he wanted to know. Jenny would live.

She would live.

Pushing past the doctor, Jedin raced into the OR, heading straight for his charge’s bed. The nurses attempted to stop him, but seeing the panic and determination in his eyes, allowed him through. Laying back on a gurney that hovered gently over the ground, powered by the same technology as their cars, lay Jenny. She had several tubes running in and out of her, and her paws were still done up like mittens, but this time, no blood showed through. Her little chest rose and fell at the artificial respirator’s command, and a tiny mask, specially made for a child’s face, pumped oxygen into her lungs. She lived.

“Jen...Jennifer...why? Why would you do...this?” He asked of the child, not expecting an answer. The regressive solution was still coursing through her system, even as the transfusion machine pumped the majority of it out. She couldn’t be older then eight or nine months now.

“M...mirr...”

“Jennifer?!”

“The...mirror...told...me...” the child gasped out in a weak, slurring voice, “only...way...”

The mirror?

“Dis way....I die...as...as...”

The mirror? Jedin’s eyes widened. No. No no no no no no.

“Nurse!” he yelled, and a frightened looking orderly ran up to him. “I want this child tested for Devra. Now!”

“But sir, isn’t she one of-“

“I SAID NOW!”

“There’s no need, Dr. Solonis,” the surgeon murmured, quietly coming to stand behind the long-eared doctor. “I’ve already confirmed it. The child is infected.”

The bottom dropped out from Jedin’s world. “But that...that can’t be. She’s human! They can’t...”

“It appears that they can, and have, contracted Devra. The nursery’s surveillance tapes were wired to my notebook and I was able to observe Jennifer talking to herself, just before she broke the mirror. You didn’t hear any of that?”

Jedin was mute. In his head, he was calling Dr. Cade, who would not take this news well. The children of hope could contract that horrible disease. The Project was a failure. An utter, complete, failure. He could already hear Cade’s words as he explained Jenny’s situation. “A fluke,” he’d say, “and not one that I’ll allow to jeopardize our mission. Eliminate the subject, mark it down as corrupted data.”

All he had wanted to do was save her. Save her as he had saved countless other wayward and lost humans. Humans that had squandered their lives, made the wrong decisions. How many lives had he snuffed out, how many personalities re-wired, and for what? For nothing. There was no point to all this trickery and abduction. No point at all. He looked back down at his charge, who had passed out from her exertions. What could he do, now that he knew her eventual fate? Should he turn her over to Dr. Cade, where assuredly a swift and painless end would await her? What other choice did he have?

No.

No, he owed her more then that. He had promised her life, and he would give her life. Cade would kill her, that much was certain, and her death would be for nothing. He’d ignore this crucial data in hopes that it was indeed simply a fluke, and continue on. There were upcoming steps in the Project, so horrifying in their scope and breadth, that would not be abated simply because one little girl got sick. And what then? If such a gross misstep had been made this early, what about the fate of the other children? Delusions and madness were extremely late signs of Devra, and yet it seemed that Jenny had skipped all of the other indicators and went straight for the worst ones. This travesty had to stop.

With the surgeon still in the room, there was little Jedin could do besides pretend to study the chart he’d been handed. As soon as he could, though, he’d make his move. The loss of blood had been the most obvious of the girl’s injuries, but even though they could be treated, the Devra could not be. There was only one answer.

Earth.

With Jenny carefully swaddled in a spare lab coat, he’d head to the nearest Slider Station. As one of the 547, the general public of Thera mostly regarded him as a kind of folk hero. Those without affiliations to Cade and to the Project would ask no questions, and present him with no delays. He would take Jenny back to the world that had treated her so badly, the humanity that she had so longed to return to. Even though they had only been together a short time, a mere two days, a bond had been forged between them, he felt. He could see it all, unfurling in his mind as the monitor ticked up a steady metronome-like cadence that eased his anxiety. He saw their flight from the hospital, under the cover of darkness. He had grown up with several of the staff, and had spent many a day here in contemplation and thought. None of the trusting people that worked here would think anything of his passage.

He’d then flag down a hover-go taxi, and get the hell out of Prelude. Far and away from Tiera Raev, from the Project, from Dr. Cade. Perhaps Wreath, or Fortitude. Those were the closest frontier towns next to Prelude. Surely, there would be an accommodating Slider station there.

And as Jedin Solonis stood on the projection matrix, he would look down at the wounded child in his arms. He would keep his eyes open and watch as the black and white fur sloughed off, giving way for delicate, rosy pink skin to take it’s place. Jen’s eyes would flutter as they lost the stark blue hue of a Theran infant and faded to a color natural for humans, perhaps a light tan, or green, given her complexion. Almond shaped eyes would change into little round one, and the fierce light behind those eyes would be gone, replaced instead by an innocence she had long cast aside. And as Jedin looked into those eyes, he knew that no matter how uncertain his future, how uncertain his fate in this strange, awful human world, he knew he would be able to deal with it, for her sake. They would pull through.

"Dr. Solonis."

The voice cut through the rabbit like a knife, making him flinch. Slowly lowering the chart, he looked up as Dr. Cade descended into the operating room.

"Is it true?" he asked quietly, his thin, skeletal frame gliding through the low light like a phantom. His rat-like tail thrashed about behind him, betraying his true agitation. "Does she have...it?"

Solonis found himself robbed of speech. He could only nod mutely as Cade stepped past him to regard the little patient. Finding his tongue, Jedin whispered in a voice gone hoarse, "Who told you?"

The possum waved his hand dismissively. "I make it a point to keep abreast of matters pertaining to the Project," he said pointedly. "All matters. How did this occur? Some error in the new process?"

"I...I don’t know, Cade. There wasn’t enough data...we didn’t have enough-"

Time.

"These are not typical results. Each and every one of the other subjects have tested negative for the genetic precursor to Devra. She," he said, nodding sharply at the baby’s sleeping form. "must be an anamoly." He turned to a few of the black-coated staff that had entered with him. In his terrified daze, he hadn’t even noticed them come in. "You have your orders, Dr. Solonis."

Orders.

"I won’t let you." he whispered quietly. .

"I beg pardon?"

"I won’t let you kill her."

"You already have," came the curt reply. There was a sharp, sickeningly wet sensation, and then all the old doctor saw was darkness.

P IS FOR PRISONER, COMPLETE

END PART TWO OF THREE

 

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