Escape
Story by Knightpony on SoFurry
This is a start for a new SF story line. Wile tagged with gore its not to graphic.
Awareness came slowly to her and her first thoughts were to wonder if this was what it felt like to be an unborn child. That the thought had form and substance more than an unborn infant’s mind would be able to understand was lost on her at first. She drifted in the warmth, the soft sound of a beating heart providing comfort. Disturbing that comfort and serenity however was the nagging feeling that something about her situation was not right.
It took hearing other sounds for her to truly begin to focus. It was a combination of thumping and knocking. She wanted to know what it was. Was it a threat?
Her eyes opened. The light stung for long moments and it took longer for things to come into focus for her. She blinked slowly, seeing a world she knew to be distorted, because everything was tinted blue.
The blue liquid that she floated in and the distortion were familiar to her. She was in a regen tank, used for the worst injuries when body parts needed to be regrown. A slow tedious process to go though, and not a cheap one. She did not feel injured, why was she in one?
She saw someone in a white lab coat working in the room. There was, she thought, music playing but she couldn’t be sure. She knew now there was something else in the background. The heartbeat she had been hearing had been her own. The more she saw the more she woke up and took in.
She felt whole, flexing her fingers one by one, her arms, toes, legs, everything felt functional. Her head hurt, not like a head injury but like she was hung over. Every thought felt like it was a struggle to form. She stilled as the one in the lab coat came over to her tank. She heard swearing, but it was hard to make out. Something about a job not done right?
She saw the one in the lab coat reaching for something and her mind snapped into focus. The container the lab coat guy was handling was sedatives. No! She didn’t want to go back into oblivion! She didn’t understand why she didn’t want to be sedated but she acted, reaching up and groping for the emergency release that had to be installed into the tanks. She punched the emergency release and the person in the lab coat looked up shocked, and then panicked.
The tank began an emergency purge, the blue viscous fluids being pumped out and air forced in. There were larms were sounding. She hated the next part, knew it was coming and knelt down as the fluid levels dropped. When they dropped low enough she started forcing the fluids out of her lungs, coughing and hacking as she forced her lungs to pull in oxygen. Even as she did so she reached up with one hand and yanked the IV connection out, justa s the woman was trying to run an emergency sequence. Never once didshe wonder who she knew how to do these things.
Her first word came out in a snarled shout, “NO!” The forceful commanding statement caused her to cough and hack again. She looked around, things looked odd. Somehow colors seemed flattened out. Something was off with her focus as well she thought. The one in a lab coat, a man she saw ran out of the room, screaming for someone.
She stood up on shaky legs and pushed the blinking green button to get the tank to open. It slid down around her and she wobbled without the tank walls to give her stability. She stepped down from the short platform and lost her balance, falling on her ass in what was left of the blue fluids.
She yelped in pain and rolled onto her side, her tailbone and tail hurting. Looking behind her she saw she had a long thick tail. She had a tail long and thick boned and she stared at it in confusion. How had she not known that she had a tail?
She rolled onto her feet and spent a moment finding her balance and tried not to breathe too hard. She felt like she had run 20 kilometers with a full pack. Was this what it was like to be born? To feel weak and drained without having done anything?
She looked about, everything familiar and yet alien at the same time. She began picking up scents, other than the chemical smell of the fluid. Ammonia, a cleaner, was strongest and under that was a ham sandwich with a spicy mustard on it. There were other scents but she had no idea what they were.
Two men rushed into the room, they were in white lab coats. Big men, muscular and one was carrying a syringe, clearly intent on sedating her. There was nothing subtle in his rush and she watched him come with contempt. She was, she was; she shook her head unable to complete the thought, a spike of pain going through her mind as she tried. Her moment of confusion unable to complete the thought almost let the man stab her with the syringe. She sidestepped at the last moment focusing back on the man.
Everything about him was wrong to her though. His lab coat had no identification, nothing, there were no medical markings, no rank tabs, nothing to indicate why he should be allowed to stab her with the syringe, as he tied a second time she grabbed his arm, and smashed her other hand into the back of the elbow, in a blow that forced the joint past the point it could bend. The snap of bone and scream that followed was something she was sure she had heard from others, there was a familiarity to it.
The second man moved in getting over his shock at what had happened to the first, grabbing a baton from his belt. She didn’t think just reacted, stepping towards him inside his reach almost chest to chest with him. Her knee snapped up even as she grabbed his head, as he stumbled back a step trying to get room to swing. She felt like she had all the time in the world, as she did so. He seemed so slow to her, like he was plodding along at one quarter speed.
Her knee sunk into the man’s groin hard enough to lift him off the ground, he less screamed as squealed in agony, at least till she was able to gide his falling head into the second knee strike. The impact came with a crunch, a splatter of blood and silence from him at least.
She looked over at the first man, who was staring at her in shock. He reached for what she thought was a weapon, she snatched up a large metal tray sending the supplies on it flying as she slammed it into the man's neck, hard enough she could feel the snap of his neck. The man hit the floor with a thud and didn’t move again. Dying she was sure.
The door they had come in filled with three people. One was an older man, another the younger man in the lab coat from before and a third an older woman. She did not know any of them, but she recognized the trankgun when it was leveled at her. Without so much as pausing to think she flipped the tray up as she saw the man’s finger twitch. There was a metalic *pang!* and a dent appeared in the tray as the dart deflected off of it.
Even as the man was lowering the gun and reloading with the practiced speed of an expert she flung the tray at him like a frisbee. The man had just enough time to catch the motion in the edge of his vision to look up with a look of consternation on his face before the tray impacted hard enough to knock him back into the others.
She charged the three as they tried to untangle themselves from one another. The man desperately scrambling for the trankgun, the older woman cursing in more than one language, and the younger man screaming about not being paid enough for this.
Her foot landed on the trankgun, just as the man's fingers wrapped around the grip. With a curse the man rolled away yelling, “I told you we needed better security protocols!” Even as he yelled she grabbed the younger man around the throat lifting him up.
The man she held by the throat gurgled as the older woman looked up with an expression of annoyance. The man in her hand thrashed as her grip tightened and blood flowed as claws extended from her fingers into his flesh. She stared in wonder at the claws ignoring the man’s thrashing. She ignored the blood even as it began to gush with arterial pressure. Her claws were the only thing she saw, somehow shocked by the fact she had them.
Some instinct pulled her attention away from her claws, and she looked past the younger man, his thrashing weak now as blood loss got to him, to the older man. He was on his feat and he had taken a shooter's stance with a pistol in hands. She didn’t think or hesitate and used the dying young man as a shield as she rushed the man. He cursed as he opened fire. The body in her arms barely twitched as the bullets tore into him. While the man wasn’t heavy, the rounds didn’t go through. She wondered idly as she plowed into the older man with the younger man’s body if he had used some kind of high impact low penetration ammo.
Bowling the man over with the body she brought a foot down at his neck and clawed. He managed to avoid lethal injury by using his forearm to block but his form arm was opened to the bone blood spurting as she tore his forearm half off of him. The older man, grunted in agony but didn’t scream. Even as she was getting her bloodied foot down on the ground she dropped the dead younger man to the side and snarled at the older man.
The older man wasn’t done yet though and brought up a hold out pistol, small caliber. Her hand snapped down and grabbed the man's wrist pushing the small weapon to the side as it went off. She felt the round pass along her side but the pain told her it wasn’t something she needed to worry about just now, a flesh wound at most. She yanked hard on the hand holding the gun and the older man came up off the ground like she was helping him up. Her balled up fist punched him hard enough in the gut to fold him around her fist. Breath wooshing out in what sounded like a, “Fuck!” from the man.
She wrenched the arm she had by the hand around, facing him away from her as she did, until with faintly audible crack something in his shoulder gave. Holding him up by the broken limb she reached around his neck with her fingers, claws extended and ripped his throat wide open in a shower of blood. She let him drop as he tried to stem the red fountain as it spurted from ruined neck.
Doctor Kervorkian watched the Ferox kill her chief of security. She made it look easy, yet the man had been well trained and quite experienced. She would have tried to run for it but the Ferox was between her and the only way out of the room. Clearly she needed to go over what had happened and plan better next time.
She was impressed over all. “Well this was unexpected. Still qualifies as a success though,” she mumbled to herself softly as the Ferox turned towards her. She saw it in the eyes. Speaking had been a mistake. Somewhere in there there was memory of the pain that had been inflicted, the eyes lost what semblance of reasoned thought there was and almost seemed to glow with berserk rage. She had no doubt that the thing was going to do its best to kill her. Thankfully the emergency protocols in her cybernetics had already gone into an active state.
“This next part is going to be unpleasant though I can tell,” she sighed.
The berserk Ferox plunged a clawed hand deep into her gut, the blow lifting her from the floor. When it pulled it’s fisted hand out it tore intestines out with it. It clawed and bit and tore at her in a mindless rage that even a wild animal could not have matched. Kervorkian was glad that she couldn’t feel the pain as her body was torn apart. Even with all the advanced cybernetics and armoring of her skull one of the blows sent her into an unconscious state.
Something in that voice drove all coherent thoughts out of her mind as she roared in fury, she charged the older woman and the world turned red as she tore the woman limb from limb in a berserk rage. She painted the walls with blood and viscera as she ripped into the body screaming in primal rage.
Finally reduced to beating on the wet smear of meat and shattered bone her rage mostly spent, she heard something behind her. A door opening, she turned and looked. Two men, in uniforms, armed, faces pale as they stared in shock. She heard one say, “Holy Mother of God.”
They both went for their sidearms. She knew on some level she could kill both of them as easily as she had the first four. But these men wore uniforms that said ‘cop’ to her. You didn’t kill cops,not unless you had no other choices. She dived through a side door as they opened fire. Bullets tore into the wall behind her as she ran into the room. Seeing a window and no other way out she charged the window. She hit the window at a run and hoped they went too high up or that the window was shatterproof.
The men in the patrol car drove slowly down the alley, scanning the waste bins for anyone hiding. Nothing like a shots fired call to get everyone in the area stirred up in a peaceful small port town like this one. Still they were almost to the end. One man got on the radio, “Dispatch negative on anyone in the alley behind the building.”
He hadn’t even released the transmit button when with a crash a creature of nightmares came hurling out a second story window behind their patrol car. Bouncing off the wall on the far side of the ally like a trivid monster it hit the ground in a controlled tumble that left it standing as its head whipped about. The head whipping about as it took in the alleyway caused droplets of blood to fly. Gore dribbled off the Ferox to make any horror trivid movie proud.
Both men swore as it looked their way and then raced toward them, frantic calls on the radio about some blood soaked creature having broken out a window on the second story on the radio. Both men were too shocked to move at first as it ran towards them. Both fumbled for their weapons knowing they couldn’t get them clear in time, sure that death had come for them.
The younger one of them mumbled, “Oh fuck me!” As it leapt onto the back of the patrol car and much to their thanks didn't stop, running over the top of the car to the end of the ally and bouncing from one wall to the other up and over the outside wall to the port city in a demonstration of parkour that would have been awe inspiring in other circumstances. It was gone in no time, moving with the speed only the natives could, only a blood trail and poor quality night time dash camera footage as proof that it ever had been there.
The younger man in the car looked to the senior officer, “Did we just see a gore covered Ferox run up over our car and then hop a five meter wall like it was a yard fence?”
The older man still pale with shock nodded, “Yea kid. Don’t know what one of the mutts was doing inside the city walls, but yea kid. We did.” He got on the radio reporting what they had seen. It was going to be a long night, with a lot of paperwork. At least they didn’t have to go outside the walls to track the thing. The olderman shuddered even as he talked calmly into the radio. Thank god that would be someone else's job kept running though his mind. They couldn’t pay him enough to follow it into the city outside the walls, it was the natives city.
The younger man tried to calm his nerves while keeping one ear on the report and his eyes moving while keeping watch. Something told him what he had seen would be in his nightmares for years to come. A blood drenched form with teeth, claws, death in its eyes and running at him. He couldn’t even feel shame when he realized he needed to change his underwear, just fear.
She ran with no destination in mind, just moving through dark streets in the night. She found that though she knew it was night time and there were few light sources she could see well enough. She moved down slope, though it was more sensed than something she could see. She could feel the exhaustion again, adrenaline ebbing from her system. The edges of her vision were darkening and she knew that was a bad sign.
She looked for the darkest, most unused paths she could find. She ran into a part of the town that looked like it would fall down if anyone so much as sneezed on it. She was still looking for cover that said safe to her when between one moment and the next she collapsed, exhaustion finally overriding her bone deep need to keep moving; to find safety.
She struggled to get back up, to even crawl but after a moment more darkness took her and she was aware of nothing more. She hadn’t really been aware for some time, and hadn't seen that she had moved from poor to poorer parts of the town, until she had hit a place where the ‘buildings’ were more scrap piled in an effort to offer shelter. She hadn’t been aware of the mud and muck she ran though, the path not paved here. She hadn’t even been aware that she had collapsed in front of a spot darker than the others.