Chapter #2Begin the story by: Seuzz   You wake in an inferno: Sheets of fire—white and hot—flame around you. Desperately, you run through a gap where a large piece of machinery has separated the flames. But the fire is everywhere and spreading, so you have to duck and weave your way through the hanger, pausing only long enough to find and dart through more gaps. Dimly, you wonder why you don't feel your heart pounding or sweat running down your face.
You finally run into one of the small rooms at the back. It is filled with smoke—again, if you were capable of thinking things through, you'd wonder why you're not coughing—but you stumble your way over to a window. Outside, you scurry back over to the fence; voices are coming closer. You raise your hand to grab it—
--and only then do you notice that you no longer have a hand.
Instead, where your arm should be, is a long, glowing blue tentacle, the same color as the stuff that had been in the jar. You stare at it in shock, and then feel your knees buckle. You look down, but only have a brief glimpse of the rest of your body similarly transformed before you collapse onto the ground. You try to raise yourself up again, but it is no use. You feel nothing like bones or muscles. Instead, as you flail about in the dirt, you see bluish, goo-like pseudopods shoot out and pull back into your body.
But do you even have a body? You try to look at yourself, but as near as you can tell you are only a puddle of goop. You try to roll along the ground, and find yourself forming into a serpentine coil. That's good enough for the moment, though—the shouting voices are almost upon you—and you slither through the chain-link fence and up into the brush-covered hillside.
When you've recovered your wits you look around. Smoke pours from every crack and window of the hanger you'd been snooping in, and soldiers have surrounded and are pouring water into it from multiple hoses. You can't see Caleb, though. But then, he'd said he was leaving. You hope he made it out, and that you can find him. You also find yourself wishing you could sigh or gulp or do some kind of basic human act. Instead, you just slither along the ground back the way you came.
As you go, you wonder what has become of you. It seems clear that the stuff in that jar, when it fell, did something to your body, turning you into this goop. But what was that stuff? And is there any way to reverse the effects? You pause briefly, wondering if maybe you should return to the base. But then you realize there is no point. You have no mouth, so how could you communicate with anyone? Chances are they'd just stick you in a jar and do experiments on you. A shudder ripples through you, and grimly you continue back up the hillside.
But when you arrive at the trail head, you find no sign of either Caleb or his car: apparently he bugged out as soon as he saw the fire and explosion. The thought that your best friend abandoned you rekindles your earlier rage. The son of a bitch. You knew he could be undependable, but not actually this untrustworthy. Treacherous, even, the thought forms in your head. If you ever get out of this, you swear to yourself, you will make him pay for leaving you behind.
* * * * *
You're not sure how long you sit, trembling with anger, by the empty parking lot. But eventually your mind clears, and the problem of what to do now forces itself back upon you. It's nearly twelve miles back to town, and it would be ugly trying to make it back all the way by slithering along like a snake. And what would you do then? Go back to your house? You're filled with yearning, a desire to take back the entire afternoon, and return to normal. Your dad might know what to do—your mother would probably suffer a nervous breakdown—but how could you communicate to them who you are, and what happened to you? Incongruously, you also have a sudden vision of your sisters screaming at the sight of your transformed body. Together, it forms a dispiriting tableau: a grim, angry father; a distraught mother; and horrified sisters.
Your thoughts wander in widening circles. There's Mark Taylor, who indirectly got you into this mess. He's not in the military, but his company is a small military contractor. You don't dare return to the base, but if you went to him ... Oh, but again, how would he recognize you? Even a chemical engineer— Wait, that's right, he's a chemical engineer. It's a slender thread, the only one you can grasp at ...
But it's still not enough. As dusk falls, a chill falls upon you. You don't feel physically tired, but you are mentally exhausted. Whatever your troubles, dashing about in a panic probably wouldn't be conducive to solving them. So you return to the trail and plunge deeper into the woods, looking for a place to hide, away from wildlife, where you can get some rest and do some thinking. Eventually you find a hollow log and curl up inside.
* * * * *
On the upside—and so desperate are you to find some kind of good in the situation that you actually feel a bit happy about it—you find you have only a diminished sense of touch or temperature, so you aren't much troubled by the cold or the rough ground. You do grimly wonder if you will need to eat at some point; you don't see how you could possibly ingest anything. Your body is soft, but nothing seems to penetrate it, and you doubt you have any digestive enzymes. You can no longer see yourself in the dark, but you are at least conscious of your body's shape, and know where your appendages are when you stretch out a tentacle. It's odd that you still seemed to have something like a body—or, at least, a human-shaped body—for a little while after the accident, but now you find that you can't really shape yourself into anything at all, other than a snake or a coil or a ball or a puddle. You also notice that you seem to have gotten a lot smaller since you collapsed next to the fence. You were still human-sized before that happened, but now you doubt that your entire body is much bigger or heavier than a normal-sized human arm. In fact, you think you may have shrunk even more since then. This worries you.
As time passes, nothing like a sense of tiredness or sleepiness envelopes you. At the very least, you'd expect something like shock to set in. But instead you feel very wakeful, even watchful. There are lots of noises outside the fallen tree trunk. But it's not until you hear a soft padding that you remember that there are wolves in the park.
You freeze, keeping very still, but the footfalls come closer; there is a snuffling sound, and you sense a darker shape looming over you. You scuttle back further into the log, but the shape follows. You lash out and strike something hard. There's a yip and then a growl. You tense, waiting for a blow, dreading what will come next. And then the teeth clamp onto you.
You twist and throb, trying to strike at the creature with that part of you that's still outside its mouth, and you feel yourself shaken violently. You wrap yourself around a muzzle and strain to pull yourself out, but the jaws have closed very tightly on you. (Again, you are thankful that you can't really feel the teeth as they tear into you.) Then you feel muscles working around you: you appear to be sliding down its throat. You gather yourself up for a final, desperate gambit. If you can't pull yourself out, maybe you can make it choke itself on you.
So you plunge down its throat, filling out the cavity to block it. You are pressed and buffeted. But then, as you press outward, you feel the muscles and tissues beginning to give way. You seem to be pushing into them somehow. And then you feel yourself being pulled into them. You've just time to wonder what this means when you are enveloped by warmth—a delightful feeling to have return ...
It's dark, and you feel a tension in your muscles. Briefly, you are paralyzed, and then with a snap all the power returns. You leap up, and feel stones and sticks beneath you. The night is dark, but the scents are sharp and vivid. You feel an itch in your side, so you sit back and scratch at it with a raised leg. Only after the itch is gone do you wonder at what you've just done.
You look down, and in the dim moonlight you make out two hairy legs ending in soft paws. You sniff at them and at your furry chest. It's a fuzzy, dirty, canine smell. Your ears—you have ears again!—go back, and a whimper escapes your throat.
You sit back on your haunches. Dim memories come to you, of a wolf pack, and of exploring the underbrush, and of picking up a strange smell, and of finding the blue thing inside the log. You'd snapped at it, and caught it, and then it had ... gotten inside you ... somehow.
You sneeze and dismiss the wolf-like puzzlement. You are David Johnson, and your body was transformed in an accident. You'd lost your old body, and you'd escaped into the state park. You'd hidden in a log, you'd been attacked by a wolf, and now—
Now you are the wolf!
You wish you could break out into a grin—the sense of relief and pleasure is immense. It's not the same as having your old body back, but it's much better than the alternative. In fact, if you can possess a wolf, it occurs to you, there seems no reason you can't possess a human host. With a mouth, you could explain yourself and what happened to you. It might be hard getting people to believe you. They might think you—or, rather, the person you've possessed—is crazy. But if you could just convince them, you could get them to help you. Unless, of course, they just recoiled in fear and horror—
Hmmm. Maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to reveal yourself. At least, not right away. You scratch yourself again, and stretch a neck to lick your belly. It feels very good, and you find yourself licking longer and harder. Then there's an odd taste—pungent but pleasant. You lick at the source greedily—until you realize you are licking your own asshole.
Well, that settles at least one thing: it's nice to have a body again, but you'd kind of like to get out and into something human again. You leap to your paws and plunge down the hillside.
At the bottom, you look around. In one direction lies town and many possibilities: your house, and Mark Taylor's next to it. Caleb is down there, too. So is Dana, for that matter. In the other direction is Fort Suffolk, the scene of your accident. Instead of running off and hiding, you could tackle the base directly, and try to find out more about the stuff that transformed you, and whether there is a cure.  | Members who added to this interactive
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