Sewer Rats: Irinushka's Beginning

Metamorphosis

"Be still!" the Russian speaking Japanese ordered her. She didn't, of course. She didn't want that long needle to bite into her flesh and disappear as it injected whatever substance it held into her blood stream. She had been living months that she lost track of, learning how to read and write in her native language as well as Japanese. She was taught the things every child her age was taught in school, even more. Those were the only times she felt she was being treated human.

"No," she grunted as she wiggled around on the bed, nurses holding her down as she fought against them. Recently they injected strange fluids inside of her. Sometimes they would tranquilize her and do something to her. She never knew what since she was out cold, but when she woke up, she could feel something different.

She noticed her senses sharped since a few weeks ago. First it was her sight, then her hearing. Now it was her sense of smell and she could almost taste everything in the air a little more than she used to. What they were doing to her six or seven year old self, she didn't know. She wasn't even sure of her age. She might still be six or else she turned seven recently.

"Stay still and this will be over before you know it," the doctor promised forcefully through her teeth.

"NO!" she shrieked out loudly. The doctor lowered the syringe and glared at the red headed girl. She barked an order in Japanese to the nurses. It was simple enough that the girl knew she said, "Let her go."

The nurses only loosened their grip on the struggling girl. The doctor looked towards the door to the room and snapped her fingers. The sound was thick and echoed in the chemical stenched air of the room for a moment. A large man, with a stolid expression nearly exploded through the door and pressed a hand down on the girl's chest. She had seen him once or twice in a part of the facility that smelled the strongest of chemicals and where strange cries could barely be heard. He grinned wickedly at the girl as the doctor raised the syringe with its menacing needle once more. The girl's heart lurched for a moment, a feeling that felt familiar to her from some life outside of the labs, but she didn't know where.

The needle plunged into her below her navel. She jerked and found her struggles below the giant man's large hand stiffen. Her legs went numb and her head went dizzy. The doctor said something in a strangely calm voice to the large man. The nurses let go of the girl, her wrists and ankles were red where they gripped her tightly.

Everyone but the large man stepped back and just waited for a moment as the large man kept his hand on the girl's chest. Then the pressure lifted off of her, like a release from a choking weight. He scooped her up into his arms and carried her out.

She was drifting into more a dreamlike state, her vision getting blurry, her heartbeat became louder in her ears as he carried her down the white corridors. These were feelings she was used to by now, but she still didn't like them.

The white hallways turned gray; the blazing white lights overhead became flickering and weaker; the hospital doors grew in more likeness to doors of isolation cells in prisons. The girl wanted to leap out of the large man's arms, but she only had the strength to wiggle like an angry worm, which was nothing to the man holding her firmly in his arms. Soon, it registered to the girl where they were. It was the hallway where she heard the faint cries. As if to prove her right, an inhuman cry similar to a howl echoed in the hallway from behind a door. Another one sounding like an angry roar of a man in pain and a large feline warning of its presence exploded out of another thick door. The girl looked up to the stolid face of the large middle-aged man with wide eyes. He only looked straight ahead, continuing his marching steps down the hallway that sounded more like a zoo combined with mental patients.