"The Benevolent Doctor"
10. Experimental Introductions
Sometime in New New York
It wasn't the first time Brittany dreamed of cats, and it probably wouldn't be the last, only this time was different. This time the cats in her dream were tall as she was, and they had clothes, and they could talk.
It had been a fairly pleasant dream, too, so it wasn't hard to figure out when she wasn't dreaming anymore, because as she started to wake, so did her headache.
"Ow…" she muttered, reaching up to her head.
"Don't try to move too fast now," a girl's voice spoke nearby. "It'll make dizzy."
"I'm already there," Brittany complained. She didn't try to move, though she did open her eyes. When she did, she spotted two cats staring down at her and she startled. "Wait, you're real?" she looked from one to the other, and then it started coming back to her, the cats, the alien, the ship… the store, and the bad feeling that had made them run, right before everything had gone dark. "Where are we?" she asked; this was not the store anymore.
"Don't panic, we're… Well, it looks like a cage," the boy cat, Alfred, she remembered, revealed.
"It's a cell," a new voice spoke, and Brittany sat up and turned, feeling her world lurch left and right for a moment before she saw the bars around them, and beyond the bars another row of the metal things, keeping others penned in, men and women and even a couple of children. Not all of them looked human, but some of them did. The Doctor man, he looks human and he's not, so how do I know?
"Mr. Arpen?" Agnes crawled on her knees over to the edge of the bars.
"I've seen you around the library," the man observed her carefully.
"Agnes Brannigan," she introduced herself. "I was wondering why you weren't there anymore. Have you been here all this time? It's been weeks, months."
"Has it?" the man nodded to himself. "Sometimes it's hard to keep track, but then…" he came closer to his bars, into the light, and Agnes let out a shocked sort of hiss. She had recognized him by his voice, his stature, but she hadn't seen his face properly. Now that she did, she was stunned to see his eyes had gone milky white, almost like… "It's been harder to know day from night, you see." After a moment, he laughed, finding his own joke clever enough.
"What happened to you?" Alfred asked.
"Side effect," the man shrugged.
"Side effect of what?" Agnes was getting so close to the bars, her face was becoming squeezed as far as it could get between two bars. "What is this place?"
"Agnes, what happened to your neck?" Brittany asked, and now the cat girl looked back at her.
"My neck? I don't…" she reached to it, and she felt it, something stuck to her fur. Whatever was underneath, as soon as she pressed there, it hurt, and she pulled her hand back. She looked to her brother, turning him about so she could see, while Brittany reached to her own neck. They were all the same, a sensitive area, covered by a bandage.
"That'll be the sampling," a woman called up from another cell. "First they take you, then they sample you, then they look you up."
"Who's they?" Brittany asked. The woman stared at him like she thought the answer was as evident as could be, and just as soon her face shifted into uncertainty and downright ignorance. She looked frightened at her not knowing.
"It's alright, Erlin," a small girl in the cell next to the woman's reached between the bars and tapped her shoulder. There was something strange about her. The closer they had the chance to observe her, it seemed evident that, though she was small in stature, she wasn't a child, couldn't be. They could see the side of her face, and it was old, wrinkled, and her hair was gray, streaked with white, and dry like it would break if you even touched it. Only then she would turn, and they would see what was on the other side of her face. That side was smoother, softer, as close to a child's as one might get, and even then, the features surrounded in sleeker but very much white hair might have belonged to someone closer to their twenties. Her posture was all wrong. She stared at the cats and the girl across the way from them. "She has trouble remembering," the old girl explained. "My name is Risha, who are you?"
"Agnes… Brannigan. This is my brother, Alfred, and that's Brittany. Only met her today."
"Well, Agnes Brannigan, you are now the scientific property of Doctor Everett Wallace Benedict. If he brought you here, then like as not, it means he has no intention of letting you go again." There was a weighted silence, and as they looked around, the trio of new arrivals found faces who had been exactly in their position at one time or another; they remembered what it was like, the moment when they realized it was what their lives were shaping up to become.
"The Doctor was right?" Brittany mumbled to herself, crawling to the back of the cell, blinking. "He was right, wasn't he? About that man…"
"It can't be," Alfred shook his head, staring back at his sister.
"This is a joke, isn't it? To try and scare us?" Agnes held to the bars, hoisting herself up to her feet. She was still too dizzy, and she half stumbled and half slid back to the ground.
"Sweetheart, this is no joke, and the sooner you understand this, the more likely you'll be to make it through," said a second man, with a bandage around his head, which was looking oddly shaped. They might have liked to think he was of a species with particularly lumpy head, but they had a feeling he was not, that this was a new condition.
"Make it through?" Alfred asked, his voice trembling.
"They'll be looking at your sampling now," the woman Erlin nodded. "Then the doctor will know what he will do to you."
TO BE CONTINUED (SUNDAY)