Zookeepers
Time to lock up, thought Trish. A third satisfying month of work, tending to the animals, dirty a job as it may have been, suited her proclivity and love for them.
Brushing past the last of the arctic exhibits, she shivered at the air-conditioning. A setup like this was expensive and time-consuming to maintain, but it brought with it the satisfaction of a wintry-wonderland, a small pocket of a foreign world, all in the confines of one Zoo.
Still, it was cloistered, confined despite giving the illusion of vast taiga and tundra. It was always a relief to be able to get back into the city--into her own native habitat.
Crash. The noise was the distinctive, if distant, shatter of glass. Trish whipped around with her keys and flashlight, unable to ascertain the source of the breach. Here was the scariest part of the job--a break out, or break in. The former likely meant an injured or dead animal--perturbed and requiring pacification by tranquilizers--the latter, a human intruder.
Trish hoped for the latter, dashing down the rubber-floored hallway, surveying each of the glass panes as she passed--underwater exhibits where seals and penguins dwelled (the latter a matter of convenience, not scientific accuracy, for there were no such birds in the Arctic)--a polar bear and her cubs in their makeshift den--all seemed unharmed, and no signs of broken panes of glass.
She came around a corner, and out onto the chilly, air-conditioned veranda that overlooked the simulated taiga. Clanking down the metal catwalk stairs, she unlocked the lower viewing area, and caught her first sight of the mess.
Oh no.
It was a large, female, arctic fox. There were several being kept who had raised kits over the past year, but this one was by far the largest she had personally witnessed at this particular zoo. It seemed to have thrown itself at the glass, hard enough to break its way through.
She was unmistakably dead, mouth open in pain, shards of glass embedded in her blood-stained fur, amidst a plethora that littered the ground around her. Trish cursed, fighting back tears.
Something seemed amiss, though. The glass panes the Exhibit used were hardly thin, and foxes were light creatures--it wasn't unheard of for something like a gorilla, or perturbed chimpanzee to smash open a zoo exhibit's windows, but this was a different sort of thing altogether. Promising herself to clean the mess up, and forgoing the urge to rush and call for help until she was certain the situation was at an end, she stepped around and unlocked the maintainance passage in the wall near the broken glass pane, and entered the habitat.
No, something was definitely amiss. Here were footprints--the faint outline of bare feet in the snowy grass. They did not match anything in the exhibit--they were human in size.
Yet each ended in the tell-tale clawmarks of an animal, it seemed. "What in the world?" She whispered, puzzled.
She shivered. She'd already been cold, and the exhibit itself only stepped things up a notch. It was time to phone for help, she thought, briefly--and then her curiosity was ignited again by the sound of rustling, of footsteps in the grass.
Brushing foilage aside, she tried to ascertain whether it was one of the other foxes, or else her mystery perpetrator, who had perhaps thrown an animal through the glass carelessly--maybe some fool conservationalist who had thought to 'save' the cute animals from the zoo. What a heedless act of stupidity!
"She's coming," whispered a male voice nearby. Bingo. A human intruder. Someone had broken in!
"Bring her skin," the other whispered. "Get it quick!"
Hearing the footsteps headed back toward the exhibit's entrance, Trish turned her back on the source of the first voice, and dashed back herself, ready to call for security. She had her hand around the seam in the wall of the habitat that was actually a door, when she felt something warm slip over her head and tighten back against her face, like a blindfold.
"Don't do anything stupid." a voice from behind her whispered, wrapping a thick, gloved hand over her mouth. "You're ours now."
Of course she bit him, blinded as she was--tried her best to elbow him in the face; but he held her with superior strength, adjusted his grip tight around her lower jaw, in a near-chokehold and laughed.
"Really, she's picked a lousy host. This one can't even fight back."
Confused and terrified, she let out an impotent whimper as her assailaint held his warm body close to her. She realized suddenly that what was touching her was not leather, but thick hair--like the pads of an animal's paws.
"Down on your knees... now." The stranger added.
She tried her best not to obey, but he pressed down firmly on her shoulders, and whispered an additional threat. Whimpering impotently, Trish complied with her assailant's demands.
"There, let's finish it and get ready to leave."
Her heart stopping, she prepared for the end. She was sure any second she would hear it--the cocking of a pistol, and the split second gunshot that would end her life.
Instead, a hot stream of something moist began to pour down on her head and shoulders. Urine.
Oh god, it's worse--they're going to rape me...
But rather than being prodded and pushed into an adequate position, rather than being yelled at to strip her clothes--something even more terrifying happened next. She felt the warm something that had been placed over her eyes respond to the urine--tighten around her face as if there'd been some kind of chemical reaction. What the hell?!
"Open your eyes now." the earlier voice, that had warned of her appearance, said. It was not a threatening order, as before, but rather, it was spoken in a comforting tone, like someone waking her up in the morning for work.
She did as instructed, and the world around her came into view--a mix of reds and yellows, instead of how it was supposed to be. What had they done to her vision?!
"You're one of us now--get used to the change." the voice continued. "We need you, and we need your keys to get out of here. You're coming with us."
She tried to shout, to scream, but her voice felt all wrong. The best she could muster was a pitiful whimper.
"It's useless to fight it--look in the glass, what's left of it. See what we've done for your body."
She hestitatingly did as instructed--and her heart stopped. What they had placed over her eyes, on her head, had not been a blindfold.
It was a skin, or fragments thereof. It thoroughly covered her forehead, like some kind of swim cap, and came down over the upper half of her face, covered in fur. She could no longer see her ears beneath it! Worse still, her brown hair was completely obscured. It was like some horrendous halloween mask, complete with catlike, contracted eye slits. She cried out, finally finding her voice, which sounded alienly rough.
"Wha.. dij you do to me?"
"Do for you, might be the better word, pup." her assailant's voice admonished. "Don't worry, you'll understand soon. Just let it take you in."
With horror, she took tally of the damage. The pelt they had given her ran down her back, all the way past her buttocks, and was adhering to her piss-soaked clothing. Rubbing her hands over herself, she felt the fluffy fur of an arctic fox.
With an audible hiss, the fleshy inner layer of the pelt coiled and tightened around her skin, hot and moist. Soon, it began to burn like an insatiable itch anywhere her skin did not touch the pelt's, including on her arms and legs. She felt her shirt and clothes, moistened by the touch of the hide running down her back cause the fabric to cling to her uncomfortably.
Unable to resist the temptation, she brought her left hand to her right arm to scratch, and watch in astonished horror as the skin stretched and spread, enveloping her fingers--finally conquering her fingertips, which burst forth with black claws.
"Just let go, pup." the first voice said. Looking up to finally see her malefactor, her mouth spread open, silent disbelief issuing forth from between her blackening lips.
It stood hunched forward on two humanoid legs, a form slightly more compact than a man's--mimicking the posture of a caveman, the human comparisons ended there. Doggish paws, a muzzled, flat head, full of teeth, sporting triangular, furry ears.
The tail... it had a tail too... alive, curled about it as it sat, watching her with all too intelligent fox eyes.
It too had no head of hair. It too sported the same coat that was enveloping her.
Helpless, she felt it fill her--both the realization, and the presence of the creature she was mutating into. Raising her padded finger to her face, she felt that her nose had given in. There was a seamless connection between the animal hide, and the tip of what was now a beastly, wet rhinarium. She traced it down her face--to where her moistened philtrum meet her upper lip. She felt newly sprouted whiskers--palpable, sensitive--hers, both about her nose, and where her eyebrows had been.
"Welcome to the Zoo, pup. Get comfy, you're going to like being an animal." Her former aggressor--the one who had given her the cursed skin, chuckled.
Speechless and aghast, she brought both hands to her face as if not in belief of what she had just felt. The changes had not gone away, if anything, they had grown even more cemented in the seconds that had passed. Shrieking an alien, canine yelp, she ran clumsily into the brush and hid.
She could feel it not just on her body now, but as a part of it. The front of her shirt was flaking off in strips like newly fried bacon--wet, useless pieces of fabric that dissolved on touch, exposing her skin to the pelt for further transformation. What had been touching her scalp before, moist and hot, now had become indistinguishable from the rest of her body. She tried to reach under, to feel for a sign of her brown locks, to try and pry the awful thing off--but it only brought stinging, septic pain. She would die of infection, surely--her skin was being disolved and merged with that of another species, here in an unsterile environment! It was something out of the worst science fiction--made no sense and...
And her human brain had given up thinking about how it couldn't happen, because it was taking place at an incredible rate, now. She felt it in her head--felt the changes, which were no longer just skin deep, in places. And with her loss of reason, she began to grow unafraid of the transformation. A sort of uneasy acceptance came to replace her panick, like a bitch has during sex, unable to disjoin from her mate--eventually calming despite being unable to escape her fate.
She could bear the damp pain of her waistline, legs, and rear end no longer, and tugged off her pants with fervor, feeling the pelt immediately cup her buttocks the moment they touched fresh air. It seemed to be feeding off her mass, warping itself accordingly to her body as if proximity to her human skin were all it needed to grow or shrink, moving parts into place with elastic tightness.
The rapture of an animal mind took hold, telling her what to do. It became her voice, her identity--melted into her. She was no longer a zookeeper. Just some stupid fox. There was no more reason, no more fearful imagination of what was to come--just action. She hesitatingly stooped, and let her urges hit her in one great wave, shitting in the grass for almost three minutes, as the furred skin of her rear stretched out, vertebrae by vertebrae, until she had completed her business.
The realization of the taboo she had commited was dull, but ever present in her mind, and shocked her back to reality. I just crapped myself like an animal. She thought, for a brief second, passing over the idea in her mind.
But it felt good. To just let go. her mind continued, in a haze, as what had been a mostly-human looking woman only half an hour ago stooped for a second round, pissing a heavy torrent of urine as she squatted like a dog, newfound tail raised over her back. From the backside, she was now nearly indestinguishable from a large canine.
"Coming around to our way of thinking, I see." the first voice, that of the less callous of her captors, spoke.
She turned her face to him, showing the starting signs of a muzzle, and silently watched him as she finished eagerly relieving her bladder.
"You'll find you have an easier time controlling your ability to talk and think like a human as time goes on. Maybe. Or you might just end up becoming like many of the rest--a simple fox. It really depends on how much you want to hold onto the past, I suppose."
What the other fox had said didn't make any sense to the creature now, but it sounded comforting, so she softly whimpered, and brushed her head against its flank. What had been a woman only briefly surfaced in the creature's mind now, to take notice of things she could not make sense of.
"You should be thankful she sacrificed her life to be a part of you. You'll come to like the way we live--"
The other creature stooped and picked up a ring of keys that lay amongst the tattered remains of khakis and fox scat, and the first one broke off and eyed his fellow fox-man for a moment, before continuing.
"That is, if we can get out of this cage, and back home. But you've helped with that, so this will be your reward, for now... Take good care of that new body."
The creature slunk off to let his newest compatriot enjoy her world. He smiled as her teats began to form, pelt closing threateningly over shrinking human breasts, as the hide continued to encroach upon the rest of her body--legs, privates, and all.