CHUPACABRA

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Doctor

Dr. Taft owns a dog. Unlike the little yappy ones at Paul's house, this one is large, black, with a jowled face and sunken eyes. It sits silently at Dr. Taft's feet, taking up the entire length of the table. Forty watches it nervously out of the corner of her eye. It stares at her with an unblinking intensity, its large teeth on display.

The apartment is on the topmost floor of the compound, the one completely bordered by sky. Where the lobby, green floor, and blue floor are built into the sheer limestone cliff on the edge of the tree line, this room sits above even the gray floor, which sits like an overhang on the top of the grassy hill. It also has windows lining each wall, with absolutely no privacy as far as Forty can see. She feels like she's in a glass Petri dish.

Dr. Taft clears his throat. Forty looks up quickly, drawing her eye away from the piles of old clothes and paper clutter. It smells inarguably human in here, like Dr. Taft has lived in this room for decades. "I see the surgery was successful," the gnarled man says. If Forty squints, it looks like his flesh is melting off of his bones.

"I'm so high on painkillers I can't eat properly," Forty says back. She can't quite get her jaw to recognize it's attached to her face, and her lips are so numb that blood dribbles past.

"Small price to pay for a cure," Dr. Taft says coldly, reaching down to scratch the head of the beast at his feet. "You can't fathom how invaluable your venom is."

"It's all I've heard lately," Forty grunts, reaching up to scratch at the metal placement in her cheek. Dr. Taft's hand shoots out and snatches her wrist, forcing it down to the table. She's struck by how strong his grip is.

"No. You don't get it. None of you do. All of this—" he says, gesturing at the neglected room, "is all for a greater purpose. You can't see beyond your selfish pain."

"That's easy to say when you're the one benefitting," Forty snarls, feeling her nails start to poke out. With the loss of her facial senses, her predatory form is much more eager to come out. She feels constantly anxious, like danger is just a breath away.

Dr. Taft sighs, steepling his hands. "Let me tell you a little story, one you might recognize."

Forty rolls her eyes. What could this man and her possibly have in common? He looks at her like a caged animal, like something incapable of reason and emotion. Forty wants to bury her teeth in his throat and shake him until his brain reboots. Still, she's here for a reason, and no matter how much she hates entertaining him this is her only shot at seeing Thirty-Seven. She gestures for Dr. Taft to continue.

"Once, way before you were even a fucking whisper of an atom in the universe, there was a boy. He grew up in a town you could travel in one step, and his dad was a right mean bastard. He'd hit him, cuss at him, threaten to put his cigarettes out on him." Dr. Taft's eyes go dark, angry, his hands shaking. "He'd– the boy was never safe, even where he was supposed to be the safest of all, so he ran away to the neighbor's house, who had a daughter." He smiles wistfully, curling his fingers against the table to get them to stop tremoring. "She had the prettiest red hair I've ever seen, and she liked to take me out to the river and we'd fish all day, find little ammonites and skip rocks. We got really close, her and I. Much like you and Thirty-Seven, if my hypothesis is correct."

"You don't get to say his name!" Forty spits, lunging at him. The dog jumps to its feet, putting two ginormous paws on the table and snarling at Forty. Her head swims with movement, the latest opioid dosage making her bones quiver.

Dr. Taft pats the dog's back and it curls back around his feet, waiting like a coiled snake to pounce on Forty. "Actually I do, Four-Zero, because I named him. I named you too."