More Human Than Most

Chapter 2

________TWELVE YEARS LATER______

I jerked awake at the shaking of my cage. I flattened my ears and growled, scaring whatever woke me. Hearing a familiar squeak, I turned to the cage next to me. My friend, Luna, was cowered in the corner of her cage. I whimpered and sat out of the defensive stance I was in and reached my fingers into the bars of our cages. Luna calmed down and met my fingers with hers. I smiled softly.
"Why did you wake me?" I whispered. We knew how to talk, but we couldn't read or write. We were still learning when they took us from our parents.
Luna pointed to the whitecoat making his way to us. "They're coming to get us."
Sure enough, our cages were picked up by the whitecoat. One at a time he set us on a cart. He was a scrawny man, struggling to pick us up even though we only weighed as much a big dog. Luna didn't even weigh that much. He peered into our cages and wrote things down.
I wanted to rip that clipboard out of his hand and break it over his head. I wanted to rip those hands of of those skinny little arms. Those hands, and countless others, have hurt me and my best friend for years, poking and producing and stabbing and injecting. They all should pay. They will all pay.
Without warning, I felt my bones shift and knit into a different form. I shifted into my wolf form and threw myself against the side of the cage. The whitecoat panicked and scrambled away from me. He fumbled for his pager and typed in a code. Soon, two more whitecoats rushed in with a bag and took my cage off the cart using tough animal gloves. I growled and clawed at one but felt a prick in my neck. They were injecting me again! I tried to turn but fell to the bottom of the cage in agony as my bones were forced into my human shape. The next prick was even more painful and this time, I sank into darkness.