‘I closed my eyes then, not daring to look. I prayed. Then it was silent. I opened my eyes and saw you standing in the middle of the bodies. You were still the gigantic cat. You heard a noise and moved to the desk. The young scientist was crouched under the table. He was wounded and terrified. You moved to him and dragged him out from under the table. Then you stopped, looked around and backed off. You seemed smaller. That was when you changed back to how you are now. The rest you know.’
The story had taxed him.
I remained silent.
‘Enough’ he said, ‘we must rest, tomorrow we talk further, now we sleep.’ I nodded my agreement.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Julio lay down on the hard earth, closed his eyes and was soon overtaken by his fatigue. I, on the other hand, was not so lucky. I was haunted by what he had told me. It made sense to rest, but I had so many questions and no answers.
Finally, I sank into a restless sleep.
The dreams returned.
In the dreams everything was even more exaggerated than it had been in real life.
The blood coloured everything red. My claws seemed enormous, too big and heavy for me to lift. The General, his throat ripped to threads, refused to die. He kept coming back no matter what I did. Kept repeating the same guttural incantation ‘You can’t kill me, I will return and make your life a living hell.’ Wasn’t that what he had already done? What more could he do?
In my dream, I was the helpless one. Weighed down by my claws, my mouth unable to close because of near sabre teeth. All the scientists and the soldiers that I had killed crowded around me and started shouting and screaming. I was helpless.
I woke with a start Julio was shaking me. I stopped myself from attacking him. Still lost somewhere in the dream.
‘You had a nightmare—a bad one.’ He said and indicated my right arm. The hand had once again morphed into a paw with long claws. I had been clawing the wood of the shack wall. Shocked I tried to get my hand back to its normal shape. I was filled with dread at the thought that I could have wounded or even killed Julio in my sleep.
He understood my anxiety. ‘I am all right, you did not hurt me. You won’t, otherwise you would have done that in the lab.’ His voice was soft. ‘I was the reason that you escaped your bonds.’
‘Yeah and killed all those people.’ I added in my mind.
‘Now breath slowly, try to let the energy go.’ He almost whispered. I had to concentrate to hear him. Slowly I breathed, tried to relax all the tense muscles. I closed my eyes and listened to his slow and sure speech.
‘You can turn this around’ he continued ‘like you did in the cave, when the Partisans came.’ I felt the tension ebb. The joints and muscles in my hand pulled and strained. Slowly, everything went back to normal. Or as normal as it would ever get from now on.
‘We must teach you to get this under your control’ Julio said. ‘It must become something conscious, not part of your instinct. It will take time—but that—we have.’ I marvelled at this quiet and wise man. He had seen what I was—am capable of—and still he wasn’t afraid of me. My own disgust at what I had become was one of the main feelings I had at that moment. I could not reconcile myself with what I had done. Sure, they had not been innocents. The doctors and the soldiers had tortured me, and others to get at me, in every way thinkable. They were responsible for so much death and pain and anguish. They might have deserved to die, but not like that. Not to be massacred, pulled apart, faced with a monster without a hope in hell of getting out alive.
Julio was reading my thoughts or maybe just the anguish on my features. ‘Don’t rebuff yourself so much, they brought their deaths upon themselves. It was not of your choosing.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They travelled by night. Hiding from probing eyes in the daytime. The trip was reasonably relaxed as long as they avoided any areas where there were settlements, skirting major highways and civilisation in general. Sleeping in the morning, they awoke halfway through the afternoon and practiced. Julio insisted that she work at changing as much as possible. Reluctant to go too far, she restricted the change to small parts of her body. She found out that she could control the area of the change reasonably well by focused—and conscious—thought. Concentrating on her hand and channelling the blood through that specific area, she was able to determine where the change would take place. The speed of the change was beyond her control. Sometimes it would be instant, sometimes it would take excruciatingly long minutes. The pain was intense. The first few times it seemed impossible to continue, but in time she got used to it and was able to funnel the agony away as she had learned in the past years at the lab. Her first unconscious reaction was to concentrate her healing on the body part that she was changing. But that stopped the transformation process and she was forced to bear the pain if she wanted to practice. Foremost in her mind was the fear that the change would come over her fully, and that she would not be able to control it or herself, and that she would hurt Julio. So, she was restrained and only let the change go as far as she felt comfortable with. After her hands had transformed to paws she inevitably started to feel the pull of her facial muscles and the creaking of the bones as her jaws attempted to morph into the feline form. There she stopped.
With practice she came to enjoy the sensation and the enormity of the change. It was fascinating. Concentrating on her hand she would see the nails grow longer, curved, thicker, harder and much, much sharper. A fine haze of ochre coloured fur pierced though her skin, starting on the back of her hand and moving down over her fingers and up to the top of her arm. It tickled. Turning her hand over she saw that the skin on the inside of her hand was toughening and darkening—the pads becoming visible. The fingers fused between the last knuckles and the hand. The outer digits lengthening and bending. Her hand enlarged into the paw of an enormous feline with claws more than twelve cm long, curved and vicious. The feeling of power in her paw was addictive—she wanted to continue the change. Let it roll over her whole body. Let loose of the stupid human form. Reluctantly she stopped the process. Subdued the feeling of elation that so often accompanied the pain of the change. She alternated between hands. Sometimes even changing her feet, but that process was much more painful. The bones between her heel and toes needed to extend more than ten times their current length, the effort and the pain was enormous, the toes bending, the nails elongating into claws. Her legs warped, but she always stopped the process when it neared her knees. Her face and head were out of bounds for the practice. She was too scared that she would lose control. Her body was screaming for the change, but she didn’t dare. The frustration sometimes seemed unbearable, but the guilt from the massacre was heavy on her conscience.
Besides the change, they practiced languages. Julio taught her Spanish and his local native language. The last was used by the resistance as their formal communication language. It passed the time while traveling and she found it a nice challenge. It kept her occupied, her mind distracted from the other worries. Most afternoons, when they woke up and waited for the camouflage of night, Julio told her about the world outside of the lab. The world she had missed for more than five years. There was so much she had to catch up on. Five years was a long time anyway, but the past years seemed exponentially long because so much had happened in the outside world that she had been isolated from. She enjoyed the long talks, quizzing Julio about points that she didn’t understand. Slowly she came to understand and sympathise with the resistance.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We were travelling again, this time to the southeast. We’d probably crossed the border between Mexico and Guatemala about two weeks ago. As usual, Julio determined the direction and the destination.
‘My brother lives a few miles to the east’ he said, after we had walked for most of the night. It was nearing the morning; the sky was no longer black but that strange dark blue that heralds the rising of the sun.
‘We’ll stay in this area today and in the evening, we can s
ee if we can make contact. He may be able to help us, and at least let us know what the situation is in this region.’
I had my doubts about the idea. We should keep as low a profile as possible. Not make contact at all. For our safety and for that of his brothers’ family. But Julio was getting excited about seeing one of his siblings again. He was desperate for news of his kin. I knew that he was scared that his wife and children had been taken prisoner or maybe even worse.
‘It’ll be good to see my brother and his family. He has two children, a daughter—a teenager now, and a son, who is a few years younger. He lives on an isolated farm near here. Maybe he will be able to help us with some kind of vehicle or something.’ He babbled on happily. Julio had walked part of the day. The past two hours he was back in the sling on my back.
‘Now we must find a place to spend the day’ he said and motioned to the right. I walked on another mile and we came to a cluster of trees and bushes that offered some protection from the sun, and camouflage from any passers-bye. We settled into the centre of the bushes, careful to make sure that no tracks led to our hiding place.
We wouldn’t be making a fire today. Just huddle in the clothes we had and hope that the bushes and trees sheltered us. The day would warm up, so that was no problem. It was more the moment; it was cold now that we had stopped moving. In the course of the night we’d tried to gather some roots and other edible plants. The darkness complicated things, but we at least had some cacti fruits and roots to gnaw on.
After we settled, I broached the subject of his family and our intended visit later that day. ‘I don’t think it is a good idea to visit your brother.’ I indicated.
Julio looked up from the knots in the sling that he was repairing. I refrained from looking directly at him. I didn’t want to disappoint him, but this was eating away at me. My instincts were all over the place.
‘You have been thinking about this a long time’ he stated. In some strange way he instantly knew how I had been mulling over my remark all day. ‘That’s why you were so quiet.’
‘Why do you think this?’ he finally asked.
I raised my head and looked at him. The light was dimmed because of the leaves of the bushes. It danced over his features, enhanced the lines in his face.
‘They know he’s your family. They probably guessed by now that we’re going south, so they’ll expect us to come here and may even be waiting for us.’
‘You overestimate their tenacity’ he remarked. ‘They will not have followed us for so long, nor will they look this far away.’ He seemed very certain. But I was also sure of my case. Sometimes when we walked I would pick up scents. Scents that I allied with the soldiers at the lab. They knew where we were headed. More or less. And Julio’s kin were slap bang in the middle of the route.
‘Please Julio’ I tried again ‘We shouldn’t go there. We’ll endanger them and us needlessly.’
But he would not take “no” for an answer. He could be very stubborn, as I had found out several times in our long time together. He would not be swayed.
‘Where exactly is the farm?’ I asked.
He motioned to his right. ‘You see that hillside, there between the large trees?’ I nodded. ‘Well after that hill is a lower one. On the far slope of the second hill lies the farm.’ He explained. ‘So maybe an hour’s walk.’ That surprised me. It was also much too close for comfort. I would have preferred to camp further away from any inhabited area, even if there were sympathetic people living there.
I decided to stop pushing the subject. We were relatively safe in the enclosed area we were in now. No one could see us without actually entering the bushes themselves. That would cause a lot of noise, so we would be alarmed. I was not afraid of animals. They shied away from my scent. The practicing that we had done in the past weeks had resulted in that I was able to start and stop the change when I wanted. Oddly enough the first thing that happened when I started the transformation of one of my hands or even a foot, was that the nails grew in to claws. No matter how I tried to make something else the first step, I always ended up having claws before anything else. It was confusing. I could determine which major part of my body was to transform, but the change in that part still followed its own template. I wondered why but could not find any other answer than that my body was protecting itself when transforming. The change itself took time, and it would not do to be helpless while it happened.
I was getting used to the idea that it was a part of me, but I was still no closer to understanding what it was, or what that made me. Julio was equally fascinated by what I could do. He was an educated man and knew—as I did—that this defied all rules of nature. Or science for that matter. As did the longevity and the healing that I could do, but nothing was as dramatic as seeing parts of a human body change before your very eyes.
I noticed that I’d practiced a lot the past few days. While we were moving, and also before I slept. It was becoming easier. I had the pain under control and didn’t wince anymore when the bones popped and stretched. That was probably one of the most painful parts, up till now anyway.
My senses had become even more astute. I had twenty-twenty eyesight—even at night. My sense of smell was incredible, and I could hear a mouse move in the under-growth. The heightened senses had come in handy in our travels. I was able to recognise danger before it was anywhere near, saving us from many a confrontation. It gave me an edge when hunting Night vision made traveling in the dark possible. All in all, it seems that the changes in my life were not all bad.
We had been moving now for almost four weeks.
I practiced a while and then decided to get some sleep. Julio was already in a deep slumber. Thankfully neither of us snored. We didn’t want to give away our position. Not even by something so rudimentary as snoring. Lying down on the dry leaves under the bushes, I closed my eyes. My senses remained on high alert even though I slid into a fitful sleep.
Once again, I found myself back in the lab.
There was chaos.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Numerous voices were shouting at the same time and it was difficult to make out the individual words. A shot was fired, and then two more.
I opened my eyes, and a forth shot battered my ears. This was no longer in my dreams. I heard the rhythmic sound of hooves on the hard soil and granite valley floor. I woke Julio and indicated that he kept quiet.
A horse came past our hiding place about a hundred metres to the right. It had come from the general direction of where Julio had indicated that the farm was. The rider was hunched over the saddle. It was a man, or rather a boy, sliding further and further down in the saddle.
I could smell the blood. He was wounded. I connected this to the shots I had heard.
In the distance were more horses. But they were mulling around. I estimated three.
The horse stopped, and the boy fell from the saddle.
‘Alejandro!’ Julio exclaimed. We left the safety of the bushes and went to the boy. I already smelt death on him.
‘Julio.’ I said, ‘Get the horse, there are more people coming.’ He wanted to refuse, go to the boy. ‘Please Julio don’t argue. The horse won’t come to me. Get it and take it over the ridge, hide there. The boy is dead, there’s nothing we can do for him anymore.’ I reached the body and sure enough, he was dead. I estimated him to be about eleven years old. He was shot in the back, between the shoulder blades.
Julio just stood there. Too shocked to move.
‘Julio. Now. Move!’ The urgency in my voice snapped him back to the here and now. He grabbed the horse’s reins and coaxed it away.
Mounting, he turned the animal and directed it towards the ridge. And none too soon. The pursuers had determined their direction and were coming our way. I ran back to our shelter, careful to go over the hard ground so as not to leave any tracks. Just as I was flat on my stomach, three riders came into the clearing at a slow walk, scanning the track for any signs. There were two Latino and one Caucasian�
��soldiers, all brandishing rifles. The Caucasian was obviously in charge and extremely impatient. The Latino at the point saw the body and called out to the others.
‘Capitan, there.’ He pointed to the boy. Looking around. ‘The horse is gone, he must have fallen off.’
The soldiers approached the boy’s crumpled form. Following an order from the Capitan, one soldier dismounted and turned the boy over to inspect the body.
‘He is dead Capitan’ he stated the obvious. ‘Should we look for the horse?’ I desperately wanted them to leave as soon as possible, not extend their search any further. Finding Julio with the horse would be disastrous. I started the change—only my hands—but it was enough. The result was as I had intended. The scent of an unknown predator invaded the already skittish horses’ noses and they became noticeably terrified. The officer had difficulty controlling his steed, the urge to flee from this unidentified but very present danger was so strong in the animal. The dismounted soldier’s horse shied away from him and it was all he could do to grab the reins and hang on. He calmed the horse a bit, but it was temporary at most.
‘What’s gotten in to them?’ the Capitan was perplexed.
‘There are wolves here in these hills’ the second Latino soldier explained. ‘Maybe they are near.’
The answer seemed to be sufficient for the Capitan, who basically only wanted to leave the scene, so his horse would calm down.
‘Do we leave him for the wolves?’ The soldier asked the Capitan.
After a moment of thought he answered. ‘We take him back with us. The Major will want proof that he is dead. He can burn with the rest of them. Give him to me.’
Handing his companion the reins to his horse, the soldier picked up the boy. He was unceremoniously flung over the Capitan’s horse in front of the saddle. As the body was so small the horse barely noticed. Choosing not to wait for his subordinates to mount, the captain turned his steed and galloped back the way they had come. Cursing in Spanish, mumbling something about the waste of killing the young girl at the house so quickly and the missed fun, the private remounted his horse. Joining his companion, he followed the Capitan. I waited for a few more minutes, listening intently to the sound of the three horses galloping off in to the distance.
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