Strays

Outtake #1

The Original Stray: A Strays Outtake

Coram's Fields
London
9 Years Ago

The boy jolted awake with a prickling sense of unease.

The playground around him was smothered in darkness. A lone streetlight flickered in the park further down, but the yellowy glow barely stretched further than a couple of metres. The boy narrowed his eyes, rising soundlessly into a crouch as he scanned the park. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end and he couldn't shake the feeling that he wasn't alone.

You're being paranoid, a rational voice whispered in the back of his brain. It sounded like the old him. The human.

He didn't know what he was now, but he knew it wasn't that.

Despite the darkness, his eyes drank in every inch of the park as if it was daylight. The overwhelming stench of the entire city haunted his nose: from the week-old, dried piss on the seat of the slide and the rotting corpse of a rat half-buried in a nearby bush, to the heavy weight of smog and fumes and river-water. Things no human could ever smell churned his hungry stomach and made him dry-heave. And then there was the noise: the cacophony of voices and cars and engines and sirens, whirring and screaming and piercing his eardrums to the point of insanity.

When he concentrated - like he instinctively did now - it rose above a not-so-manageable hum to a pounding whirl of chaos and pain in his head.

It was then that a familiar trembling started in his shoulders. It moved through him in a pulse, until his whole body was shaking, sweat beading his brow as he tried to stop it. To hold it back. Hold it in.

Crack!

White-hot pain sliced through his leg. His vision blurred as his fibula broke through the skin, the scent of blood obliterating everything else.

Not again, not again, not again, he thought as he cried out. His whole body began to convulse, splitting apart and breaking into pieces, before fusing back together in a haze of burning pain. No matter how many times it happened, it never got any easier.

Confusion and panic surged through him as he fought to control it. To slow it down. He could barely think through the pain; it coursed through him in sharp, erratic pulses. His limbs jerked and folded in awkward directions and he felt a marionette forced to dance some sick, twisted dance by a sadistic master.

Blood coated his tongue and seeped into the wood of the jungle gym, dripping through the cracks to the soft ground a metre below.

It felt like an age before it finally stopped, the pain fading to a gentle throb in the back of his head.

His body felt... wrong. Bent out of shape and contorted into an impossible position.

And yet, even as his brain rebelled against his new posture, there was something else, deep down, that just... clicked into place.

A gentle breeze rolled through the playground.

In this form, it was easier to distinguish between each scent it carried - to push through the fumes and water to the closer, but subtler strands. He sniffed at the air and abruptly stiffened.

Unease rolled through him, alarm bells starting to ring in the back of his head. Danger! Danger! Above the rush of panic in his head, he could hear a low, grumbling noise and it took him a few seconds to realise that the noise was coming from him.

Startled, he shied away from the lip of the jungle gym, like he could somehow escape himself.

A face flashed through his mind, wrapped in familiarity. A woman with a haggard face, but a gentle smile. Longing surged through him and he pawed at the timber ground, whimpering. She'd know what to do - his mama knew everything. She'd wrap her frail arms around him and whisper that everything was okay, that he was safe...