Hi everyone! Um this came to me while I was on a bus ride on a really bumpy old bus. This is my first non-assignment horror story. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE COMMENT AND DON'T BE A SILENT READER! I don't like it when people are silent readers, I can't know if you're reading and what you're thinking about it if you're silent. Again, please please comment. Preferably about one of my stories, but if you wanna comment about your cat, or lunch, or the weather, that's ok, too I guess...Anyways hope you guys like Lab Rats. As always, ENJOY!

-8Tickles


The bus ride was bumpy and long. The windows of the old creaky vehicle were painted black so that we couldn't see outside. My memory was nothing but a haze, little bits and pieces of my past. My hands were shackled to a bar on the seat in front of me, and my feet were chained to bolts in the floor. I have no idea what I've done to deserve this, or to even be here, for that matter. I stir and sit up, craning my neck to see the rows and rows of other gangly teenagers just like me.

Every single one is passed out, cold. I am the only one awake. A throbbing in my arm catches my attention, and I notice a bright red bandage wrapped around my right bicep. The kind of bandage you get at the doctors office after a shot. I unwrap the edge of the bandage slowly and peek at the mark on my arm.
Now I wish I hadn't. It is raised and has turned an ugly purple. I don't want to know what they've shot me up with, but a part of me is still curious. I turn towards the front, prepared to ask the bus driver where we are, when I realize that our section of the bus, and the part of the bus where the driver is, is separated by Plexiglas, also painted black. There is no way for the front and back of the bus to communicate.
I scratch at the black paint on my window with one finger, trying to get any visual of where we are. No luck. That was when I looked down at my fingernails for the first time. They were short, meticulously clipped, and unnervingly clean. Clearly the work of a professional, like a doctor or a nurse.
I set my hands on my lap, and that was when I noticed my attire. I wasn't wearing any shoes, but I was wearing a cotton blue long-term patients gown, it was more like a nightdress than anything, and it had little cap sleeves. On my right wrist was a patient band. It read #0835-881 chip. 3, Laura. I guess that was me...as I looked around, I noticed that all the girls had wristbands like mine, and all the boys had dog tags, the kind that the military used to use.
All of the boys wore knee-length baby blue shorts with the same color blue partial button up shirts, while the girls were all in the baby blue nightdresses. At one point, the bus lurched to a stop, and my head banged the wall behind me, due to my curled up position. That's when I noticed that my hair was clean and pulled back in a French braid. I pulled the tail end around to my nose. It smelled like hospital soap.
As the ride went on, other kids started to gain consciousness. But the confused looks on their faces told me all I needed to know. They were just as confused as I was, if not more. Regardless, I tapped the boy in front of me, who was now sitting up, and said, "what have we done and why are we here?" The boy spun around to face me, and I gasped.
His lips were sewed into an everlasting smile, and one eye was a normal, vibrant blue, while the other was obviously filled with mercury, or some other liquid sliver element. The blue eye pleaded with me for help, but the other eye rolled around lazily, never focusing on anything, permanently messed up. The blue eye widened at me, then suddenly, the boy whirled around in his seat and faced forward, seemingly afraid of me. I touched my face, hoping that I wouldn't find anything as horrifying as his face, but my investigation turned up nothing.
No stitches, nothing weird growing, no odd textures. I felt pretty normal...but as the bus ride went on, and more and more kids awoke, I realized that everyone on this bus was far from normal. The girl across from me had one eye stitched shut, she grinned evilly, and her teeth were a strange see-through shade, while instead of fingers on her right hand were live and wriggling piranhas , flopping about and gnashing their jaws open and close angrily. I looked away from her quickly. The boy a row behind her had 2 sets of eyes, and all four were different colors, and the front of his neck was covered in bloody staples buried under his skin. I pulled further into myself and played with the chains around my wrists.
I sat in silence for at least 20 more minutes when the bus finally came to a full stop, and the loud speaker above our heads crackled to life in a monotone voice.
It said, "This will be done in a orderly fashion. Do not leave the bus until your assigned officer is with you. We will unload from the front of the bus to the back. When you are off the bus, please stand in an orderly line and stay silent. Thank you for your cooperation." For a moment, the whole bus was silent. Then what followed is something I will never be able to fully explain. One of the teenagers in the back with a better memory must've known what was happening, because he stood up as far as he could while still shackled down and shouted furiously, "they're gonna experiment on us again, EVERYONE MAKE A BREAK FOR IT!" Then there were kids all around me, screaming and shouting struggling against their chains, and some kid must've socked another accidentally, because it turned into a full out brawl.
I ducked down and covered my head with my hands, trying to get around being beaten to a pulp. Several teens thrashing around hit me over the head, but I stayed mostly untouched. Then, the bedlam turned into pure insanity when the bus was flooded by men in yellow hazmat suits with cans of stuff and shots. They began spraying the cans everywhere, emitting a green gas that smelled like hospitals and death. Within a matter of minutes, every single person on the bus was passed out...with the exception of me, but I pretended to be asleep to see what would happen to the others.
After several long seconds, one of the men pulled off his gas mask and muttered, "every time, the creepy little bastards just won't give up." The men laughed and began lifting the limp bodies off the bus. I watched the figures go by again and again, making trips to get all of the people off the bus and to…wherever we were. Finally, one of the men reached out to grab me, and I played dead, imitating all of the others who'd already been carried off the bus. "Look at this kid." The man carrying me said to his friends. "Why is she here, she looks normal."

I heard a voice from far off say, "Could be one of two reasons. Either she's new and she's just a control, or she's here because of her mind, those are the worst!" My mind? Was there something wrong in my head that the boy in front of me had been able to sense? I stopped speculating and focused on the situation at hand. Pretending to be limp is harder than it looks!

I heard sliding glass doors, felt the whoosh of them opening, followed by the cooling sensation of air-conditioning and a smell that made most of my brain and recoil in agony. Hospital antiseptic and sterile places. It smelled so artificial, it made my skin crawl. I heard a new voice, one as smooth as satin with a defined crispness to it. Whoever it was had to be extremely good at controlling their emotions. "Ah, this one's special. Bring her over here." My capture changed directions sharply and headed towards the voice.

The cool male voice spoke again. "Such a beautiful specimen. We're lucky that Penhurst would let go of her." He stroked my cheek gently, almost lovingly. I had to use every ounce of my strength to keep from pulling away, thoroughly disgusted. He fingered the sleeve of my blue gown sighed contentedly.

"We'll do a full examination today, we start experiments first thing tomorrow morning."

"Yes sir. She should be coming around very soon." Hazmat suit man replied, and with a brush of air, he was gone. Now it was just me and Mr. cool voice. I carefully blinked one eye open and looked around. The clean smell was everywhere, but the room I was in was far from modern.

Old green and sepia tiles checkered the floor, and I was laying on a metal gurney under a hanging light directly in the center of the room. Cool voice stood with his back to me at a sink, mixing god knows what in vials and using tons of hydrogen peroxide, according to the bottle label, at least. Even from the back, I could tell that he was handsome. He had mahogany colored hair with caramel streaks running through here and there, he was slender with a tall frame, at least 6 feet tall, he wore men's black shoes that were perfectly polished and he had on a white lab coat with a black stethoscope hanging around his neck. I slowly and carefully sat up, trying to make as little noise as possible.

I surveyed the room fully now. Behind me was a glass wall that must have been at least 100 feet high, with individual glass cells in each. Every cell held a teenager just like the ones I'd seen on the bus, and some were even more messed up than my fellow bus mates. Several in particular that scarred me were a boy writhing on the floor with skin made of honeycomb surrounded by a swarm of bees, a girl a hole straight through the middle of her, and twins, one boy and one girl, attached at the hip on up with rats scurrying around their feet, which were made of cheese. I felt sick. What was this place, and if I'd been in anything like this at all, how come I couldn't remember it? My only real memory that isn't fuzzy at all is just a room full of dead of petrified people, all with their gazes fixed on me with glazed, endless stares.

Did I do that to those people? I honestly don't remember. I was pulling the memory forward and searching for details, honing in on anything at all that could help me remember it, Mr. Cool voice spoke. "They told me you'd be awake soon."


Dahhhhhhhhhh I freaked myself out writing it...LAWLS