Sandpaper Kiss

by Angel Wedge

  The creature from the laboratory.

  Every instinct told me to run, but my body wouldn’t respond. Trying to sit up just increased the rate of the hammer-blows throbbing in my shoulder, and my muscles burned with effort but didn’t manage to lift my body more than an inch. Those eyes met mine for a second, and I couldn’t read any emotion in them at all. Then her head moved down to my hip, and I closed my eyes as I focused on redoubling my efforts to stand. I felt her breath on my injuries, could almost imagine the monster sniffing at my wound. Were these creatures like sharks, drawn to the scent of blood? Instead of pain, though, I felt a rough but not unpleasant sensation, like soft sandpaper gently wiping away the excesses of mud, dead skin, and plant matter around the injury. A little stabbing pain, pulling away the shards of bark embedded in my skin.

  It took me a moment to realise what I was feeling. Soft and warm and rough, it could only be the creature’s tongue. It’s well known that some animals, from rats to dogs to antelope, lick the wounds of their pack members. Maybe their saliva contains antibacterial agents, or hormones to promote healing, or maybe it’s just an instinctive desire for animals to show that they care for the injured one. In any case, it didn’t seem this creature was going to feed on me, and so I allowed myself to lay back and relax as she continued her ministrations. She hadn’t dragged me out of the canyon as prey, and I started wondering if she was more human than I had initially thought. Maybe this creature wasn’t just a predator, but an animal with the compassionate instincts of a dog or a dolphin. I just had to hope that this kind behaviour would last.

  Chapter 18 — Fever Dreams

  As the pain slowly faded, I drifted in and out of consciousness. I was aware of a girl cleaning my wounds, or sometimes I imagined she was a cat. I guess neither description was accurate, but in a way she was both. I was lightheaded from all the blood loss and the trauma, and from lack of food and sleep. Maybe I was having a psychotic break, triggered by finally experiencing hell in the jungle after all those years of watching and reporting other people’s torment. Maybe I was hallucinating, maybe I was dreaming. Maybe some bits were even real, there’s no way I could tell.

  I dreamed that we talked, and she told me all about her life at that terrifying research facility. We ambled through the jungle, which now seemed more like a wild garden. We found hidden groves and beautiful, sparkling waterfalls. I imagined that despite her form, she acted like a person. She told me about her life at the research facility, the pain she’d suffered in horrific experiments. She thanked me for saving her, and said she loved me.

  It was crazy, I know, but those disjointed visions seemed so real. At times she was an animal, and I was rescuing her from a mad scientist. At others, I was playing the damsel in distress role and she fought off predators for me. In either case she never spoke, but it seemed we could understand each other. There was one recurring dream where we danced together in a clearing, the branches above stretching over to claim the last of the sunlight before it reached the ground. Thin shafts of light were all that remained, dust motes sparking as they passed through. We danced, and somehow we spoke even without words. We decided to take on the world together, to take on both predatory corporations and the more literal predators that hunted us.

  I realised I was thinking of her as a person when she went in to kiss me, and I couldn’t see any reason not to. Then the dream faded, and I was back in another scene that might or might not have some grounding in reality. Sometimes, I experienced adventures where I wasn’t even present; composite memories made from the stories I’d been told and the passages I’d read in that diary, mixed in with scenes that were pure fantasy. From one experience to the next, I couldn’t tell what was real any more.

  * * *

  Lucy sat and cried. She kept thinking that somebody was going to walk past and see her, and ask what was wrong. But they all had their own errands to do. There were many different groups of people at Lucretia Falls, and they all had a purpose. Some people who’d come from the city had expected to find that all outsiders were rich. She’d laughed at that when she heard them talking, because now they were the outsiders. They got less money than most people here, but they seemed to be happy with it. So taking as many breaks as they could to laze around and drink the horribly bitter juice drinks they liked, they swept the corridors and cut back the trees, and did all the heavy lifting in the compound.

  The pale people were completely different. At one point some of them had been teachers for Lucy and her friends. They were all experts on something, and that seemed like the only thing they had in common. They didn’t even speak all the same language, so Lucy had only been able to learn a few words when she listened to them talk, and she didn’t really know which people would understand which words. The doctors were part of that group. They came into her room regularly to do tests on her, sticking her with needles or asking her to stack coloured blocks. Some of the games were fun, but the needles hurt a lot, so she’d started hiding or going out when she heard them coming, and then they just got angry. Now they didn’t seem to care much. They didn’t come in as often, but when they did there was no attempt not to hurt her. They just did what they had to do, as if she was a hunk of wood the gardeners had dragged in to whittle tools from.

  The scariest group were the ones with skin the colour of the deepest red-black trees in the forest. Many of them had no hair on their bodies at all. She’d heard from some of the scientists that the black men had killed people, and that they were there to fight anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. That was terrifying to the young girl, because she liked to explore and she knew that a lot of the places she went to in the massive building were places she wasn’t supposed to be. The guards had never actually threatened her, though. In fact, every time she saw them they would just look at her and go quiet. They never came closer, and they never walked away. Sometimes they would bend over at the waist, making themselves the same height as her in a silly way. But they would never take their eyes off her, and they would never, ever talk until she got bored or fearful enough to leave the room.

  Everyone had their job to do, whether it was talking about complicated things, or cleaning the floors, or cooking food, or being big and scary. Lucy didn’t have a job, and the few friends her own age weren’t there any more. Even Father, who had come down to her room to talk to her as long ago as she could remember, was usually busy now. He didn’t want to see her anymore, and she was sure a real father never did that. So when she felt lonely she sat and cried in one of the big building’s many stairwells. She knew that even if someone saw her, they would hurry on. Maybe they’d tell someone else, or maybe they would just go back to their work and pretend they hadn’t heard, because nobody wanted to be the one who had to help her.

  Today, her sobbing was interrupted by a hand gently resting on her head. She looked up in surprise, wondering who would be able to get so close without her noticing. It was a woman, skin shrivelled like a prune. She was one of the ones who’d looked after Lucy and her friends last year, changing beds and bringing them food, but apart from that she was just another face in the crowd. Normally if someone touched her without warning Lucy would have tried to bite them, but right now she was feeling very lonely, and didn’t have any urge to lash out. After a few seconds, she realised that the old woman’s hand running through her hair felt nice in a way; warm, and calm, and relaxing.

  “Shenmeh shur cuor deh, she-ow mou?” the words were more than Lucy could understand, but the tone was pleasant enough. She looked up and tried to smile, tried to give some sign that she understood.

  “Oh, so sorry, you don’t understand me?” those were words that Lucy at least knew the meaning of, and her eyes went wide with surprise. She heard a lot of people in the building talking to each other, and she’d listened and tried to learn until she knew what many of the words meant. But aside from her very earliest memories of being taught a few simple words, she couldn’t remember the last time someone actuall
y spoke to her. She nodded.

  “You understand me in English then, but not in potong haw?” Again, Lucy nodded, her worries slowly slipping out of mind as she devoted more attention to this interesting old woman who actually talked to her as if she was a person. “Would you like to learn?” the nodding became vigorous, emphatic.

  “Then I’ll teach you. My name is Nurse Chǎ, though I expect you’ll have some trouble pronouncing that. Nearly everyone else here gets it wrong.” Lucy tried, and as predicted, she couldn’t quite shape her mouth around the unfamiliar syllables. But it was a start, and it wasn’t long before she proved herself to be an amazingly bright pupil for her age.

  * * *

  I woke again in the darkness of the jungle. My dreams had been so clear, so vivid. It’s like they showed me everything I needed to know to get out of this situation, but by the time I awoke I couldn’t remember any of the details.

  It was dark, but I had no way of knowing if it was night, or if the sun was merely blocked out by the dense, stifling canopy of leaves above as every tree strove to take more than its share of the life-giving light. A dull red glow from beside me was the light of my campfire. Could it still be burning? Something had happened, I knew, but I couldn’t be sure what, and the pounding in my head made me feel I’d been unconscious for hours, days even. I knew this wasn’t the place I’d made camp, with the trees more widely spaced and bright splashes of yellow flowers among the foliage all around. I could smell food cooking, too. Was I back in civilisation, or the hostage of some cannibal tribe? I blinked, and tried to focus. I knew that was a thing purely from Hollywood fantasy; the tribes around here were probably more humane than the so-called civilised men at the Lucretia Falls facility.

  A hand thrust food in front of me. No, that wasn’t a hand. It was a claw, stubby talons serrated along the bottom edge. The fingers were close to the size of a human’s, but the knuckles were spaced oddly and the skin was hidden under a thick coat of short, white hair. I didn’t know if I should think of it as a claw or a hand, but in either case my stomach rumbled at the smell of what it was holding. It was clearly meat of some kind, steaming and freshly cooked, but I didn’t know of any animal that yielded joints in that shape. I could refuse, but offering meat wasn’t exactly a hostile act, and my stomach was craving something more solid.

  As I came to focus more clearly, I could see the creature sitting beside me. Part human, part something else. The offering of food could be some kind of large rodent, I guess, larger than my fist. It was soot stained, and occasional fragments of burned hairs and dried mud on the surface, but I reminded myself it was better than anything I’d had in the last few days. I pulled off what I could of the dirt, and did my best to skin the creature with clumsy fingers.

  On the ground beside us was a small fire pit, ringed with stones. There were more of the tiny creatures, coated with a thin layer of mud and lying in the heart of the fire. I’d seen primitive peoples cook like that before, when they moved camp too often to be worth building a proper oven or spit. My rescuer – or my captor, I wasn’t even sure where we stood at that point – was poking the fire with a branch with the bark stripped away. She had fur over her body, but now also a piece of some kind of hide draped around her waist. That must surely be a sign of modesty, which I’d always understood to be a uniquely human trait, though she’d made no attempt to cover her chest.

  Making clothing and cooking food, I realised I’d made entirely the wrong judgement when I saw her in the lab. Even there, she’d tried to hide herself from my eyes. She wasn’t some Frankensteinian abomination, she was a person who had been subjected to horrific experimentation. I wouldn’t allow myself to think of her as ‘the creature’ again; I must treat her as if she were a normal human being. If I forced myself to think of the fur and claws as a genetic defect, then I realised she looked more human than some people with natural disabilities.

  As I stared, she seemed to realise that my stiff fingers were having trouble with the food. She reached out and took it from my hand, and then with the tiniest twitch of a muscle her claws changed. When she had handed me the meat, she had something I could possibly think of as fingernails; just an unusual shape and with a sharp edge on the bottom. Now suddenly they were vicious claws, as large as the first joint of my thumb. She tore off the remaining mud, decapitating the rodent with a couple of easy slashes, and used her teeth to rip away the last traces of skin, mud, and soot. A flick of her head sent skin, tail, head, and entrails sailing off into the darkness, and this time she handed me a bundle of just meat and bones. It smelled as good as any barbecue ever had, even if there were flavours I couldn’t quite place. I took it from her, carefully avoiding those lethal claws, and bit in.

  It tasted kind of like pork. That kind of surprised me, as I’d been half expecting it to taste kind of like chicken. Most exotic meats do, in my experience. It was a little greasy, but certainly better than the few snacks in my pockets or the berries I’d cautiously experimented with since leaving the lab. I wasn’t sure how long it had been now. The wounds on my hip and leg had started to heal, so it must have been a few days since she’d dragged me up that cliff. Had she fed me in that time, while I was lying in the grip of fever? There was probably no way I’d ever know.

  I’d thought it was a massive change in my life when I fled the lab. I’d ditched half the things I stood for when I went from reporting what I saw to actually putting my life on the line. But now, everything was changed again. I had an accomplice, someone with no reason to help had gone out of her way to keep me alive. That meant something, and I knew that I’d be throwing away all the ideals I’d espoused if I took my story home and left her to the mercy of Barishkov’s mercenaries, or whoever the men with guns had been. I owed her my life, and if there was anything I could do to settle that debt I couldn’t refuse.

  I wondered for a moment if she’d originally been a normal child, turned into this strange creation by torturous experiments, or if she’d started out as an animal. But that was crazy, I knew: if they were working based on Barishkov and Petrov’s research and theories, then they would be aiming to create full hybrids, not surgically altered freaks. She must have been born like this, so she could never have had a normal body of either species. She’d never know how fine evolution’s design could be, and she would always be living with whatever mistakes the scientists had made.

  If they had made mistakes. I knew that what had been done to create her was monstrous; but that didn’t make her a monster. Doctor Faulkner, the butcher, was the monster. And the travesty against nature didn’t make her life any less valuable, didn’t make her less of a person, didn’t mean her life couldn’t be worthwhile to her. If they’d managed to create a specimen who wasn’t in pain due to some conflict between the qualities of different species, who wasn’t going to suffer because of the way she’d been born, then it was especially important to see that she wasn’t mistreated through her youth.

  Nobody deserved to be locked in that stinking lab, unable even to walk around. I’d come out to the jungle to prove these creatures deserved a right to die in peace, but somewhere along the way I’d failed to notice that there weren’t just the two options. Now I had a campaign again, a cause I believed in. It didn’t matter that it was the opposite of the answer I’d come to this country looking for, because the mark of a true scientist is being willing to change your mind when you learn more facts. With that thought, I felt more alive than I had in weeks. Never mind my still-aching body and the stabs of pain from my shoulder, I was the only person who had any chance of getting those creatures the right to live in peace.

  Chapter 19 — The Long Walk Home

  The journey back to the main highway would draw on longer than I expected. While I’d been moving through the jungle on my own, I hadn’t been able to see the sun well enough to accurately gauge its direction, so my route had been mostly guided by the assumption that I could keep going in a straight line. It became clear soon enough that
I’d made a mistake there. When I finally regained full consciousness, I looked at the vegetation around our camp and quickly realised that it was different from what I’d passed on the way to Lucretia Falls: many of the vines had small yellow flowers, and there was an abundance of one tree species with red edges to the leaves. I was sure I would have recognised this particular pattern of foliage if I was anywhere near the path I’d thought I was following.

  The big problem was my new companion. I couldn’t bring myself to leave her in the jungle, though she seemed to have a much better idea about surviving here than I did. Maybe I was lying to myself, and I stayed with her out of fear that I’d end up nearly dead again. Or maybe my heart was still holding over some memories from that crazy dream. I decided straight away we should stay together, and for all the times I tried second guessing my own motives, I never really questioned the decision itself. But how would I get her to understand which way we needed to go? If we were in an unfamiliar part of the jungle (though pretty much all of it was unfamiliar) then I had even less idea which way to head than I had before. So reluctantly, I decided that I’d follow whatever path she chose until I saw some sign of people I could speak to.

  Before long, I realised just how bad my navigation before must have been. We were in a maze of twisty little canyons, all alike. This could only be the area downstream of Lucretia Falls, which Paul’s two variant information packets had both described as the result of the river cutting into irregular layers of metamorphic rock. All four of my pre-jungle briefings had mentioned the area, though no two agreed on the possibility of mineral wealth in the ground, the value of panning for gold, or the ownership of the land. The geography was pretty distinctive though, so after one sharp turn after another along one of the streams the river had split into, I knew where on the map we were. Between forty and a hundred miles downstream of Lucretia Falls, in an area that would have looked like some kind of Victorian hedge maze if you could take an aerial photograph without the even green of the canopy in the way. And almost due east of the lab; nowhere near Sante Benedicté, and not remotely close to civilisation.