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Crimson Claws

4.

Trigger warning: SO much Trauma and Death and Alice in twisted Wonderland vibes

"Man, is Dok pissed," whispered one of the guys pushing the laundry cart as they were in the elevator down.

"This one was one of the Drugdes - I saw him sometimes. Inconspicuous - easy. If this ends up on the doctor's table... you think..."

"Man, don't jinx it. It doesn't happen to us. We have families. The doctor's not that bonkers."

"Yeah ... let's hope so."

A short time later, in the basement of the building, the employees pushed the laundry trolley onto a lifting platform in a small room and anchored it to the floor. They then left the room, only able to observe through a small porthole in the door what the buttons were doing, which one of them was now pressing on a remote control. One button lifted the laundry trolley. Another opened a heavy iron hatch in the wall. A third tilted the laundry trolley, shaking it a little so that the contents tipped out. It was absolutely reminiscent of garbage collection. And wasn't this basically the same thing?

The fourth button lowered the laundry trolley again, the fifth lowered the lifting platform. After a quick round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, the loser fetched the laundry trolley, which he would immediately rinse with sterilizing solution.

"Man, even if the hatch is closed - good that the week is over - the stench is building up in there - hey, what's wrong?" he asked as his colleague frowned at the remote control. A red light was shining on it.

"Oh fuck no," said the first one.

They both knew what the glowing light meant. Some bits of the carcasses were clogging the hydraulics. This had been happening since the number of tests per week had increased but not the number of authorized incineration runs.

And they both knew what was needed to free the hydraulics from the blockage.

"No. No-no-no." stuttered one of them, and he wouldn't do it for any money or thrashing in the world. His colleague was just as reluctant, thought about it, then grinned wickedly.

"Let's leave it ... Yes, let Hamilton do it. He still owes us from the last poker night where he couldn't pay."

"Hamilton doesn't work again until Monday."

"So what? They won't file a complaint in there. And the doctor will now spend the weekend brooding and not producing any new "laundry".

His colleague smirked spitefully. "Cool."

.

.

I woke up with a jolt and a loud gasp as if someone had hit me in the solar plexus and my heart was hammering against the blow and was swollen at the same time. Everything hurt but not like before. I gasped against the pain and immediately began to retch. GOD, what was that smell! Memories came flooding back to me of the days when I had guarded my mother's body. Of the hungry rats that I had killed with stones so they wouldn't get her. The HUNGER that the bites into the rats' bodies couldn't quench and my desperation and abhorrence when I had helped myself to my mother's body because I was afraid of starving to death. I vomited nothing but bile and even that acrid smell couldn't mask the decay that covered everything here including me.

What was that! WHERE was I! Was this hell? My own hell? Punishment for what I had thought I had to do back then.

I tried to get my breathing under control, to push back the panic and at the same time not to throw up uncontrollably. And suddenly the deep darkness wasn't quite so dark anymore. My skin didn't tingle quite as much as if there were ants underneath. I couldn't describe it but suddenly I saw light. Light that - in waxing and waning unison with my breathing - illuminated a room that had no window and no visible door. I stared at a ceiling covered in black-brown gunk, but underneath was metal. Everything here was metal.

I groped in the flickering darkness for something. Anything. I lay softly. On smooth and too damp, very irregular ground. I found something that felt like a hand. Ice cold and slimy but it was a hand and fingers and I closed mine around it. Not alone! Not alone, I told myself inwardly like a mantra as I breathed heavily and the light stabilized. This other person was unconscious like I had been but I was not alone wherever I had landed. When I lifted my hand after a few minutes, I saw that thin white threads were dancing over it, making the light and filling the foul air with the smell of electricity and ozone. Anything was better than that foul smell, which was still so dominant that nothing could completely block it out.

It took a few moments for my battered brain to classify what I was perceiving. It was my hand, but somehow not my hand, because apart from the black and red coating that seemed to coat everything, this hand was covered in a thin layer of fuzz - like fur. And-, the other hand I had found in the dark was also covered in lighter fur. But sporadic and mangy and it came automatically that I read the letters on the knuckles of this other hand: LOVE. My eyes widened and without thinking I raised my light-producing arm, which also lifted the hand I had grabbed. Together with the arm that came next. And thus raising the body that was hanging from it.

Eyes angry even in death stared at me from a face I could not have imagined in my worst nightmares. A shaggy feline monster face with a snout too big for a human face, giving the impression that the numerous fangs gleaming in the light were almost trying to snap at me. I let go of the hand with a loud scream that monstrously filled every corner of the room. Without the light my body seemed to emit fading, I crawled backwards on aching arms and legs, trying to get up, to run away, slipping as I rolled over, face-slapping into a wet mass, and as I lifted my dripping head from the puddle that tasted like rotten blood because it was rotten blood, an eye I knew stared back at me.

ALEJANDRA'S EYE in Alejandra's face, crusted with grated blood, distorted into a screaming grimace with cat ears and the other eye huge and feline golden in my unnatural light. And her body, twisted and broken, half-buried under Carla's equally monstrous body with bloody sharp bones growing out of her back and clawed hands reaching for me. I involuntarily kicked at the bodies of the creatures and my bare foot, which was no longer my foot, got stuck between their bodies and those below. For there was a below and above because my cruel light was so bright that I saw I was lying on a mountain of half-human corpses.

And from piles of arms and legs and wings and tails, dozens of eyes with slit pupils stared at me. Countless corpses, motionless and yet stirring, encircling me, burying me beneath them, performed a dance of the dead in the flickering light around me that I couldn't turn off. This was hell, my hell, and I screamed and screeched and howled with no hope of redemption or salvation. I screamed away the last traces of my human voice.

.

.

August 29.

" Jesus, guys, I hate you so much," he said as he got into the full body suit, zipped it up to his chin and then put on the hood that covered everything but his eyes and nose to protect his face from "contamination". Yesterday it had sounded like a good idea to pay off his poker debts by dragging whatever it was out of the hydraulics in the incinerator. But those assholes hadn't told him straight away that 10 days' worth of fucked-up experiments were rotting away in there. Not until he had agreed. And now he'd had to wait another day because there was no way he'd been allowed himself to eat anything before descending into this carcass soup. He had now fasted for a whole day just so he wouldn't puke in a gush down there. God, he hated his life. No one had it as bad as he did!

"I'll do the same to you if you lose the next game," he grumbled after putting on his safety goggles and face mask ... which of course caused his goggles to fog up immediately ... great - but seeing less in this dark pit would certainly be a mercy. He would have nightmares - 100%.

"But that will settle your debt, Hamilton. Not a bad deal for you. Thirty seconds in and basically 400 bucks made."

His "buddy" rapped enhusiastically on the closed hatch of the incinerator, making a loud metallic echo in the anteroom. Incinerator - a fancy word for crematorium.

"Yeah, asshole," he said and had his other snickering colleague strap his headlamp around his head and turn it on. He could hardly move in the waders that came up to his hips and the rubber boots attached to them. But he had to clear the blockage. If they couldn't start the system, there would be problems. What would be the alternative? At some point, all the odor filters would no longer help. Even though this was a sparsely populated neighborhood - if the smell wafted far enough, people would ask questions.

No one wanted any authorities snooping around here for - no idea - environmental pollution and illegal disposal of industrial waste and finding the doctor's little mutant screamatorium? The longer they put it off - and it had already been four days - the more unpleasant it would become.

One of the other two went out to press the button that opened the hatch.

Hamilton - so close to the hatch - flinched as a thud sounded beside him. But it hadn't been his buddy. The two men looked at each other with wide eyes.

"What was that?" he asked quietly.

"Shit!"

They both jumped back as the next hammering made a dent in the metal plate of the hatch. FROM INSIDE. Something that the third person outside hadn't even noticed on the remote control. Which he now pressed.

Hamilton jerked his arm up: "Wait, inside there is-"

The hatch flapped open and a huge THING slid out in an instant. Dripping with blood and shit, bringing with it the stench of pure hell and inhumanly rumbling and wheezing, it splattered on the floor in a perversion of a birth and the men screamed and fled the room, slamming the door behind them. Hamilton ripped the goggles and face mask from his mouth where the other two were retching or vomiting straight away. He went to his walkie talkie, opened a channel that would reach almost anyone who was privy to it.

"Fuck, call the doctor, call the security guys with the tranquilizer guns, something's alive by the incinerator! I think."

.

I heard footsteps and shouts from outside.

There was once again an outside. And light, even if it was artificial. I wanted to laugh, hysterically disbelieving because I was surely still among the other monstrous corpses. With the love-hate guy and Carla and Alejandra. But I was outside. And as if I were carrying the decay and the contamination with me, as if I were all this myself, I vomited even though after countless hours of roaring my throat itself was raw and bloody. I vomited everything I had eaten in my fear and burgeoning hunger and madness. Down there. History really did repeat itself. And even that should have been laughable. Which it probably was.

When I lifted my head - just after something sharp bit me on the hip - some dart I'd managed to wipe away, I heard quiet laughter. The doctor stepped out from behind some horrified looking guys with guns, presumably shooting these little dart things. And he looked overjoyed. He looked at me with a fire in his eyes like I'd never seen before.

"Gentlemen, it looks like we've finally untied the knot in our Ariadne's thread. Congratulations, Klaus. Once is a miracle, twice makes it a pattern. Let's clean up our fortuitous cub and give him a breather."

Two guys with dog-catcher poles came forward and put thin wire nooses around my neck, pulling me to my knees and into a wheelchair. Someone gagged my hands and another put a muzzle over my mouth. I wanted to say that it wouldn't fit me but all I got out was a lethargic snarl and besides, the muzzle fitted - it fitted perfectly.

"Just precautions, Klaus. Until you feel better." said the doctor as I was pushed out. I was dizzy and continued to struggle with nausea and the black grissel that hinted at another faint. Or maybe it was the dart they had shot into me.

"Man, that dose didn't knock him out at all." I heard someone say when our group was in the elevator. I looked at him and like everyone else, he lifted a rag to his mouth and looked like he was about to throw up himself. Everyone was wearing protective suits and gloves but I was sure if they could they would have put more distance between me and themselves because yes I must have stunk a lot. I didn't even notice it anymore.

"This guy is huge - we'll up the dose for next time."

"But he's as limp as dough - enough for now," said a third and nudged my hand, which was tied to the armrest and slumped back lifelessly. I stared at this hand in disbelief. My head was so sluggish but ... God, what had become of me? Was I like Carla and Alejandra down there? Down there? The guys had called it an incinerator?

"Yes, we had an incinerator in the building. But ... it was for waste. For ... biological ... waste.

I started choking and coughing and shaking again, but there was nothing left inside me to vomit.

I had been IN the incinerator! They had ... the doctor had - I had been thrown away! Like garbage. And Alejandra and Carla and the love-hate guy - they had ...all ... had been thrown away. Turned into monsters and thrown away.

I looked up at the doctor, who was the only one who seemed unperturbed by the stench and my shaking, and absolutely content. He looked like he wanted to whistle and prance around.

They pushed me into a room, untied me, literally pushed me out of the wheelchair they left in the room with me even though everyone left and locked it behind them. I wanted to follow them, didn't want to be alone, but all I could get out was a whimper. The thin silver wires on the ceiling hummed above me and something rained down on me. I opened my mouth immediately because it had to be water and I was dying of thirst and wanted to taste something other than blood and vomit. But it wasn't water. It tasted chemical and infinitely bitter and although everything continued to hurt I reared back gagging, turning to the side to spit- or vomit- whichever came first but I slapped face first onto the tiled floor. Where the liquid was already pooling and breathing heavily, blinking against the sting of the liquid in my eyes, I saw streaks of brown and red running off me. Not from my skin ... but from fur. Orange fur ... with black stripes. The liquid - probably some highly effective disinfectant - rained down on me for so long and so intensely that it soaked and rinsed my fur. Until I was as clean as I could be.

Then the streams dried up, the liquid ran away through the drains. The door opened, I didn't have the strength to look up or the energy to fight back when suddenly people were directing powerful jets of water at me. And yes, it WAS water and it tasted stale and because it ran down my face into my mouth it also tasted a bit like disinfectant but it was WATER and I opened my mouth greedily. I didn't care if one of the people was particularly merciful or particularly cruel because at least one of them held his stream of water directly into my face and I drank as much as I could between half-choked wet gasps and coughs. Then I lowered my head to the floor and tolerated the rough shower with literally anesthetized indifference.

Then the doctor came sauntering back in while I was being maneuvered back into the wet wheelchair.

I howled when, following the doctor's instructions, two members of staff broke my arm again, which had grown together crookedly in my isolation.

"So - after a thorough shower you feel like a new person, don't you? " Sevarius said, grinning broadly at his own sophistry. I grumbled in frustration but unable to process everything here into presumably adequate anger. Maybe later. I was SO tired, I just wanted to close my eyes and wake up in my body in my room. But I was shoved into another room and lifted onto a cot that was not comfortable but a hundred times more heavenly than a bed made of corpses. Someone stroked my wet hair, which was longer than the rest of my new fur, and patted me like a dog.

"Enjoy your new roommate, Fred. Klaus definitely needs some company. He hasn't had a good weekend."

I heard people leaving the room and the crisp shoes of the doctor before the door closed, turned my head disoriented and blinked in the direction the doctor must have been addressing.

Sitting on a cot, brown furred and cat-faced with tan half-developed wings too small to support its shape, one tail twitching back and forth a little wearily, a monster sat, the remote control for the TV hanging in the corner in its lap, staring at me. Before nodding at me like an old buddy and saying in Fred Sykes voice.

"Yo, Wazzup?"