Bred

Chapter 1

There is drip, drip, drip sound as something falls on my face. Or maybe it is more of a blop, blop, blop sound. It is wet and sweet smelling as it falls on my cheek and slides down to the crook of my eye. I'm lying down, my face upwards. The substance gathers in a little puddle in the inner corner of my left eye. If I open my eyelids, I will get the substance in my eye.

I open my eyes, one eye immediately becomming blinded, but the other works perfectly, and it catches the movement of a tiny red drop as it closes in on my face. Another drop falls. And another. I look upwards, trying to seek out the source, only to find there is none. Just endless drops falling. I reach up, one drop hits the tip of my finger and paints it red, I bring it to my mouth and lick it off. Blood. Familiar blood.

I look up, where there just was nothingness, there is now a pair of eyes, they look like mine, but not quite, and they're crying.

Blop, blop, blop. Crying blood.

The eyes belong to subject W53F, the woman who brought me here. My mother. I try the word out on my tongue.

"Mom?"

As soon as I wake up an alarm goes off, signalling to everyone that the beast is up and running. "Hansel!" I shout when I see he isn't here to greet me, and I continue to shout until he finally shows up.

"You're an impatient one aren't ya?" he says with an annoyed tone, but smiles at me nonetheless.

"I had a nightmare," I say, my voice surprisingly weak. It's not like me to sound weak, I'm not weak, I growl so he hopefully didn't notice.

Still, he looks at me strangely, "A nightmare?" he scoffs, "Since when do you get those?"

"I get bad dreams just like everyone else," I defend, "I'm a person you know."

He slides a tray into my cage, "Yeah, yeah I know, now eat your food, I'm just surprised that's all, I don't think you've told me about a bad dream since," he stopped, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to remember. "Since you were very young," he finally concluded.

I shrugged, I had bad dreams from time to time, but none like this one, "Well this one was weird?"

"Weird?"

I picked up a cube of meet, it was pre-cut, no knives for me. I threw the piece up in the air my teeth making a loud snap sound as they caught it. Blood from the deliciously raw meat coated my lips and I slowly licked it as Hansel watched, badly hiding his disgust.

"Do you have to do that every time, you're not an alligator you know?"

"Yup," I said and threw another cube of meat in the air before I caught it, "It's fun," I laughed at his expression. "But anyway, the weird bad dream," I swallowed, "I saw my mother."

His forehead wrinkled again, "Your mother?"

"Subject W53F, remember her?"

"Yes, of course," he shook his head, as if jumbling his brain would help him understand something, "But I don't think you ever met her, besides birth I mean, so I don't understand how you could have a dream about her, you've never seen what she looked like."

"I didn't see her, only her eyes, they looked like mine."

"Her eyes?"

"Yeah they were crying blood, and it dripped onto me, and the blood also tasted familiar, I don't know why," I looked at my wrist, at the blue veins that branched under my skin, "Well it would probably have tasted the same as my siblings' blood I suppose."