Primal Instinct - No time to think

The last thing I remember is drifting in the sadness, grief, anger and loneliness of my mind. I remember feeling the cold claws of death reaching for my body and grabbing hold of me as I started to fall. I fell for what seemed like years….decades even. But then a light scared them away. Slowly I opened my eyes and saw someone there, reaching for my hand, a warm smile on his face. His amber eyes and strangely slitted pupils gazed into my deep green eyes as I heard his voice echoing around me.

You aren’t done yet little one. You still have so much left to do. Your fate is the one that will change the world forever. Your thoughts, your powers, your sadness and grief….it’s time to let it all free. Come to me and take my hand. I will show you the way home.

Hearing this man’s words, all I could do was numbly reach for his hand. I watched as it finally got to his outstretched hand and I could feel the warmth emanating from him as it finally took my hand in his. I couldn’t help but cry, my body warming up quickly as he tugged me away from the darkness that I’d been drifting inside for so long. I felt like such a baby, crying out of happiness.

When next I awoke, I was in a large white room. I could hear a heart rate monitor, beeping quickly next to me as I felt the warmth of the brown, fuzzy blanket that had been draped onto my body. My eyes strained in the sudden bright light, adjusting quicker than usual as I started to hear my breath. I was alive. I didn’t know how or why but I was alive. But as I looked around the room and spotted the old man with the long white hair and long white lab coat around his body, shaking some vials of colored liquid into a beaker, I started to wonder why I’d lived. I’d felt myself perish in that house hadn’t I? That was my blood that’d come from my body wasn’t it? I gave a pained cry as I tried to sit up, feeling a patch on my chest and back crinkle and move as I quickly laid back down out of pain. My injury from before was still there. It hadn’t been a dream after all. My little sister was still gone and my parents were still dead. But then as the man in the lab coat looked over with his blue eyes and smiled at me, I wondered….what happened?

“You’re awake at last I see. Good to know that you survived the procedure.” The man said as he started to move the warm blanket away and put his hand onto my chest with a stethoscope firmly in his grasp. I couldn’t feel my voice as I opened my mouth, a strange feeling but I moved my hand over to his and tried my best to slap it away from me. Surprisingly I found it easier than I thought, the man stepping backwards out of surprise. It was then that I spotted the needle in my arm, a tube running to a catheter next to me and draining a strange, iridescent red fluid into my arms and into my body. I reached for it and the man rushed over and put a hand onto mine to stop me, shaking his head. “No no no! Don’t remove that just yet! You’ve lost too much blood for that to be removed yet.” He warned me, prompting me to slap his hand away again as I reached for the needle and tore it from my arm. Instantly my mind made my vision dizzy and I held my head in pain, the pounding inside of it making me open my mouth wordlessly. The man simply sighed and started to put the catheter away. “I tried to warn you about doing that. How are you feeling? Dizzy? Are you in any pain? Can you hear what I’m saying?” He asked me quickly, shining a flashlight into my eyes and making me cover them.

I growled at him, finally finding my voice once again as I barked at him. “I was fine until you started to feel my chest!” I yelled at him, hearing the odd, underlying growling in my tone as I suddenly stopped talking and let my voice echo through my mind again. What was going on? My voice didn’t growl like that before….did it? It was then as I moved my hands to feel my long, dusty blonde hair that I felt two furry ears, big as a fennec foxes ears and the same exact shape, protruding from the top of my head. As I felt them I could hear my hands moving across their surfaces, flinching at the scraping metal noise that the man had just made when he moved something off of the table next to me. I felt those same ears flatten against my head involuntarily when I heard the sound of a knife being drawn and I looked over at the man next to me. He had a scalpel in his hands and a needle in the other, drawing some kind of strange dark blue liquid from it. I struggled to sit up, grunting through the pain in my chest as I soon began to feel something of a nearly identical texture to the fox ears that were on top of my head. I looked down and saw a large tail, bushy and fuzzy with a white ring of fur near the end of it, moving out of my way. What was going on here? I didn’t remember having foxes ears and tail last time I was awake! I whipped around to face the man, now approaching me with the needle with his hands out in front of him as if he was asking me to be calm. “What’s going on?! Why do I have these ears and a tail?! What did you do to me?!” I snapped at him, growling the whole time.

The man blinked and his shoulders started to relax as he backed up slightly. “I’m sorry….You were dying and Ultima wanted to save you. The only way I was able to do so would’ve been to splice your genes with the foxes DNA that I’d had on me. But even that wasn’t enough so I had to take more drastic measures and splice your DNA twice….with something else too.” He admitted to me.

I tore the heart monitor patch off of my body, the shrill, loud sound of a stopped heart echoing through the room as I suddenly had to hold my head with my new ears flattened firmly against them. The shrill sound was hurting me! “Agh….what did you do to me?!” I demanded, shutting my eyes tightly as the sound echoed through my head. It disappeared soon after that and I heard a man’s voice behind me. It sounded gentle and calming as I whipped around and spotting a young man with rippling muscles and short brown hair on his head. Around his neck was a semi-damp white towel and his warm amber eyes gazed into mine as he replied to my question in a smooth, calm tone.

“You’re like me now. You’re a half-breed. A new species that was bred to fight against the Scarclaws and restore peace to the world. A fat lot of good it’s done for us so far but you’re alive now. You should be thankful for that. You would be dead by now had I not found you when I did.” He told me, making my head spin with an unending amount of thoughts. What had he just told me? I was some monster that was meant to fight other monsters?

I felt the fox ears on my head swivel as I heard a loud crashing sound in another room, the man in the white lab coat looking to the other man near me and nodding before I felt him pick me up in his huge, muscular arms and sling me over his shoulder.

I cried out as I felt the injury in my chest pulse with pain and felt a needle being slipped into the crook of my arm. I soon began to feel my consciousness slipping once again as I saw a large group of creatures crash into the room and begin to shoot their guns at us. The very last thing I remember before my mind slipped from the world again was being laid down into a large, pale blue capsule and a glass door closing in over me. My body began to feel cool air rushing over my skin and the bloodied white dress that I’d been wearing. I saw the man tap on the glass and give me a reassuring smile.

“You will be fine in there.” He said, my ears only sensitive enough to hear his next sentence before I slipped away. “Live to fight another day. Remember who I am and never forget your name.” He told me, pointing to a collar that had been around his neck that I’d not noticed before. On it was a tag with a number on it and a name. His name was Ultima. He pointed to me and smiled, the jingle of a two metallic tags of my own sliding across each other’s surfaces being heard as my vision began to darken. “You’ve got a name too. Never lose it like I did. And never forget what you are.”

These were his last words to me before I could no longer hear or see him. I felt my senses dull until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. Soon my mind began to drift off again and I fell back into the darkness that was my mind. It was all so much to take in….and I had so little time to think. The only thing that had kept me alive before....the only thing that still kept me going even now as I slipped into the dark pits of my subconscious.

They were my instincts.