Bow Ties and Chickens

Prologue - Abigail

This wasn't good. 

No, no, not good at all. 

"Let me go!" I demanded, thrashing around in a feeble attempt to break free, to no avail. I looked around wearily at the chickens in cages and the people in lab coats tending to them.

"Test subject refuses all methods," a woman with a clipboard said, glancing wearily at scratches raking down her forearm. Scratches from me. "This is our last try." 

"It better work," a voice said, a voice I had learned to hate in the past three days that I'd been held here. "If it doesn't, you're fired." 

"I know, sir," the woman with the checklist said quickly. "I promise it will work this time." She turned and pressed a blue button on the console behind her. My arms were freed and I tried to run away, but a semi-transparent blue force field blocked my escape routes. Damn. 

I watched in horror as as the silver liquid - the same stuff they had tried to put in me with a syringe, which they couldn't because of my 'uncooperative activity' - was put into a canister and became a silver mist. The woman took the canister, clicked another button on the console, and put it through a hole in the force field, which quickly closed as it went in. 

The silver mist billowed from the canister like fog rolling in, and I barely had enough time to take a deep breath before it filled the entire force field, making it nearly impossible to see outside its translucent walls. 

I closed my eyes tightly, but I couldn't hold my breath forever. 

I couldn't keep this up. My lungs screamed for air, begging me to just take a little breath. 

Finally I gasped for the silvery air, which smelled pleasantly of lemons, and my vision faded away - just before seeing a man with a bow tie take a feather from one of the chickens they were running tests on and disappear back into the shadows.