by Hopeflower » Sat Aug 06, 2011 1:34 am
As Lydia moved on, she stopped in front of another cell. "Ah, sh*t. Sam, we've got another dead one in here!" she called, looking at what used to be a human. The face was completely distorted into some hideous mockery of a narrow canine muzzle. Pink-tinged froth still lingered at the corners of the black-rimmed lips. The mouth was wide open, revealing a bloody and bitten tongue as well as canines that had lengthened and sharpened. The eye sockets were empty - judging from the clawmarks around them and the blood and bits of skin trapped between and underneath the fingernails-turned-claws, the poor girl had gouged them out herself. Fur had begun to sprout along the girl's spine before the warring genes in her body had torn her apart. Her ears had been changing too, getting bigger, more pointed.
Lydia unlocked the door and went inside, gently turning the body onto its back. She laid a hand on the abdomen, feeling for the internal organs. Normally you felt some resistance when you poked at someone's stomach; that was the muscle, any fat there may be, and the organs. This girl's stomach was completely soft, yielding under Lydia's gentlest touch; in fact it felt rather like a water bed does. The abdominal cavity was obviously full of blood, and nothing but.
She rocked back onto her heels and blew a frustrated breath between her teeth. "Fox mix was a failure?" Sam asked, walking into the cell behind her, wheeling a stretcher. He winced when he saw the state of the body. They'd only injected the solution about a week ago. She'd started changing so rapidly they'd hoped maybe this one would be what they'd all been waiting for - a breakthrough. Instead it was another dead body to bury. "A miserable one," Lydia sighed. She frowned at the body as if it could tell her why some genetic combinations rejected each other so fiercely.
"Well, hey," Sam said as he stepped around Lydia and lifted the failed fox-hybrid's body by the underarms. "We'll learn more from our failed attempts than we will from our successes, at least for now. Hey, could you get her feet?"
Lydia picked up the girl's feet - half-morphed into paws by the look of them - and helped him place her on the stretcher. "Yeah, but that's because we haven't had any successes yet."
"We knew this was going to be difficult when we started our project," he reminded her, laying the girl's sheet over her before pushing the stretcher out of the cell. "Hell, we even knew it might not go anywhere. Dean seems to be taking to his animal well though. Maybe we'll actually get somewhere with him. What did we inject him with again? I keep forgetting."
Lydia shrugged, looking at the puddles and splashes of blood in the cell, not answering the question. "Maybe. I wouldn't get your hopes up though. He's puking blood like the rest, and nine days in, he's barely started to change."
"Slower changes are probably better," Sam said. He turned to meet Lydia's frustrated brown gaze. "Look at poor Olivia here. She changed too fast - her body couldn't cope with it."
She sighed. He was probably right, of course. "Well, we'll see I guess. I guess I just hoped - " She cut herself off, looking away, not wanting to sound childish.
"...Hoped that we'd have gotten somewhere by now?" Sam asked, guessing what she was thinking. "Don't worry. We have to be close by now. Hell, who knows - maybe the answer's right under our noses and we just need another set of eyes to spot it."
"Gotta have a little sadness once in a while so you know when the good times come."
"Talent is a pursued interest. In other words, anything that you're willing to practice, you can do." ~ Bob Ross
"The future is always uncertain and painful but it must be lived." ~ Unknown