Subject 42

Chapter 1

I was running. Trees flew past me in a blur, their branches stinging me. The thin material of the hospital gown that I wore whipped around me and provided little protection.

"Keep running," I thought to myself over and over again. "Just keep running."

Somewhere deep in the woods behind me, there were men shouting and the harsh, baying call Fear clutched at my heart. I should have had more time before they set the dogs out after me. This wasn't going the way I had hoped and I would be lucky to make it out alive, but I couldn't give up. I just had to keep running. 

Suddenly, I had to stop; grinding my heels into the earth and halting just an inch from where the ground fell away into a sheer cliff with a fifty-foot drop to the ground.

My mind was racing, delusional with fear 'What the hell do I do now?' I kept repeating over and over in my mind. I couldn't go back, I wouldn't go back, not ever again.

Suddenly, a loud growl ripped through the air. I whirled around just as three large hounds burst out of the trees. They stopped, slowly fanning out, surrounding me and cutting off any possible routes of escape back into the forest, their lips were curled back to reveal their long, razor sharp teeth. There was an intelligence in their eyes that was unlike anything that would be seen in a normal dog, but then again they weren't normal dogs. They were as genetically modified as I was, making them much more dangerous. Without thinking, I took a step back and my heel slipped off the ledge into nothingness. I managed to pull myself back before I fell. Then, one of the hounds let out a fierce snarl and leaped towards me. I looked back behind me at the cliff, then back at the dog who was mere seconds from reaching me. Then with a scream, I turned around and jumped into the abyss.

My eyes flew open and I bolted upright my chest heaving. For just a moment I didn't recognize where I was, my mind was still in the forest, feeling the air rushing across my body and hearing the furious echoes of the howls of dogs. Then I blinked, and I was back in the present again in the small, grimy room that I called 'home'. A small ray of light shined in through the only window in the room, dust swirling through it in a sort of hypnotic dance. The room itself resided in an old apartment building that had been abandoned for years, condemned by the city as being 'unsafe' and all but forgotten about. 

The room I was in was one of the only rooms in the building that still had an intact window, most of them had been shattered and broken long before I had gotten there. It was small, only about twenty square feet and probably wasn't even an apartment, more like a storage closet. The walls were covered in old floral wallpaper that, at one point, had been white, but was now yellowed and peeling, spots of mold dotting its surface. The floor was wooden and slightly warped from water damage. When it rained, the ceiling liked to leak. The only thing in the room, aside from a handful of buckets I used to catch any drips from the ceiling,  was an old, ratty mattress shoved into one of the corners of the room on which I was currently sitting. 

I let out a sigh and put my head in my hands. Ever since the night when I had escaped RCRX (The Research Center for Reformed Xenogenetics), my dreams, when I had them at all, had been plagued with nightmares. 

The wall across from me which was covered with about fifteen names, each one written with spray paint in large, black letters. Most of the names had a large slash over them that sliced through the wallpaper and revealed the wooden wall underneath. 

There were only three names left that hadn't been slashed yet. Almost without even thinking, I stood up and walked over to the wall, tracing my fingers lightly across one of the names that read 'Salvia Mitchells' imagining what it would look like when it was slashed through. My lip curled as I thought about the owner of the name.