by Mel Todd
"Three more. You can do it."
~Hell, yes I can. I played for the NFL. This is nothing.~ His bravado had humor in it and she grinned. Letting him drive the change. The cat heaved a deep sigh, lungs expanded and then bones and fur melts so slowly, giving off the waves of heat that a lifetime ago would have driven her away. Now she just accepted it, holding that glass out as he reformed.
"Drink."
Making a face, he did, gagging a bit as he forced it down. "I’m never going to like food again, am I?" His rich strong voice had faded, sounding tired and weak.
"Oh, I’m sure we will. Sugar. Fat. Think donuts."
He snorted but didn’t shift.
"Need me to make you?"
"No. I got it." Perc lay on his back chest heaving, sweat running off his body and he groaned as he began to shift again. The cat lay on its side when he finished, ribs heaving to draw in air.
"Take a minute, but you need one more shift."
The cat, Perc, whined at this but she felt a wave of affirmation in her mind. Three more deep breaths and the body shifted once more but he forced himself, a feline scream in his throat as he struggled to finish the change.
~Change,~ the order rippled out of her without thought and the last changes settled in, leaving him on the floor, tears streaming down his face, pale, and panting. He, like JD looked smaller, but his heart hadn’t stopped and he was conscious.
With a fast move McKenna tested and felt her knees buckle as Wefor declared him poison free.
McKenna looked at the exhausted man and shifted into warrior. This body had a muscle structure that made her stronger than in any other form and with a bit of effort she picked him up, he'd lost at least eighty pounds if she had to guess.
[This will give the poison time to spread again if you don't shift again soon.] The weird non-echoey quality of Wefor's voice told McKenna she had sent that just to her, no one else.
~I know.~ She let the comment hang as she got a barely conscious Perc into the bed and wrapped him in a blanket.
"You okay? I heard his scream." JD asked.
"You've been through it, you know what it is like." McKenna turned and headed back to the closet.
"That isn't what I asked. Are you okay?"
McKenna didn't turn around, looking instead at what would soon be her own private hell.
"Ask me again in an hour."
The process was usually under two minutes for a single change. With all the back and forth and the rest in between, each person took an hour or more, their body's almost breaking under the stress. At this point they'd been at this for almost six hours on top of the watching and waiting and then attacking. Her energy level didn't exist at this moment, all she wanted to do was sleep.
Hell, maybe we should be using some of the cocaine, might make it easier.
The thought had a level of bitter humor to it and she took another swallow of the liquid. Even though she hated it at this point, her body craved it with every change.
Could make a fortune selling this to shifters if we could make it shelf stable.
[Your survival percentage has dropped to 60.]
She sighed and focused on the matter at hand, changing. ~Let me know as soon as the poison is gone.~
[Of course.]
She knew she was stalling, time to get her ass in gear. She shifted to animal first and it hurt, or more accurately felt uncomfortable, since she'd just shifted to warrior not twenty minutes ago. The process took a bit but she stretched out as a cougar, then focused on being human. This time the discomfort intensified. It felt like the start of muscle cramps all over her body, all her muscles at that 'about to cramp' stage. Time lost perspective but she found herself human on the blankets and stretched trying to relieve the tight muscles.
[Again, the more time you leave between changes, the more time the poison has to start attacking new cells, cells that are already weak from previous poison attacks.]
It took too much effort to snipe back, so she just focused on becoming her cat. It took forever and a whine settled in the back of her throat as she landed in cat form.
God, how did they do this? How did I think they could survive? And it's going to get worse?
Charley flashed in her head and she bowed her head.
I will not abandon you.
She pushed through back to human. It hurt, it hurt so much, but she locked her jaws together and pushed it down. She would never leave him behind, so she would get through this. Her body felt like live wires were attached to every nerve as she melted into human. Her body twitched, with teeth locked together holding the scream in. Snot and tears dripped down her face and she didn’t want to do it again.
Charley.
She swallowed and reached for her cat. It didn’t want to come, her body didn’t want to flow into another shape, but she made it. Her body felt on fire, her skin raw and exposed and this was with fur on it. Sitting up hurt too much. McKenna lay there just trying to breathe but it hurt.
[You must change back to human, quickly. The poison has not had a chance to re-infect cells. The last of the poison will be destroyed if you can change one more time.]
A keening sound as she thought of Charley. Trying to get a breath, she couldn’t. It hurt so much to expand her lungs. She wanted to scream but that took air and she didn’t have any.
A hand, one that hurt and felt good at the same time touched her head. Another one touched her side.
~You can do it. You’re stronger than all of us. You can beat this.~ She opened her eyes to see JD kneeling next to her, his hand on her side, while Perc petted her head.
~You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. We can’t lose you. You need to get us home. You’re our heart, our support.~
All of their voices agreed with Perc, whose gentle touch never stopped.
[Your strength is greater than many of the records that were provided. You are an excellent Commander.]
The odd comment from Wefor made her laugh and she flinched.
~Change, Kenna, you can do it.~ Perc’s voice crooned in her head and she closed her eyes again. Their links, bright and vibrant in her mind. She locked onto them and pulled, pulling her human towards her, pulling the chance they all need to survive. Charley’s smiling face, white blond hair, blue eyes laughed at her as he morphed into a white wolf and began bounding around her. The others showed up, smiling and laughing as they cooked on her deck, and she looked at her pack, her family.
I will not leave any of you.
Human flowed towards her and she let it, the pain making her scream but she didn’t stop, didn’t fight it, just let the pain flow in and around her. McKenna opened her eyes, her human eyes, quirked up one side of her mouth.
~Safe?~
[You are poison free.]
Darkness welcomed her.
Chapter 43 - Obstacles
While everyone knows of SETI, it rarely makes the news unless you’re a science junky. But rumors of a transmission from space have surfaced and a few people claim to have heard it. Efforts to translate are underway but is this just another random space noise? Early this decade multiple streams of sound that seemed to have patterns were recorded but nothing ever came of them and they were not consistently repeated. Is this another case of random sounds or something real? ~TNN Science Commentator
The sound of voices, voices outside her head, pulled McKenna up from the darkness. She opened her eyes and realized she had been put on the bed and currently had her head laying on Perc’s chest.
She knew it was Perc since JD stood on the other side of the room, dressed in a loose shirt and the drawstring pants, talking to one of the women. His badly mangled Spanish filtered into her brain and she laughed.
"You’re asking them to fry a chicken." Her voice came out rusty and hoarse. Everyone turned to look at her and Toni stepped back into the room. McKenna didn’t see Cass.
"You’re awake." Perc’s voice made his chest vibrate and she winced at the headache that slammed into her.
"Yeah. How long was I out?" She tried to sit up but his arm held her down; it felt good and she hurt too much to fight it right now.
"Roughly forty-five minutes," Toni offered.
"Cass?"
"Watching the monitors." JD had moved over to her, and his expression told her how bad it had been. "She said she’d sit and eat and watch the TV’s. When she has to pee or needs something she’ll call but it gives her a comfy chair to sit in and feel not helpless. Wefor mentioned we should take some of your blood to get the new nanobot programs to help process the food and rebuild what they destroyed to let us shift."
McKenna blinked at him. "You could talk to Wefor while I was unconscious?"
[Yes. Your links were still active. The drug took you down to almost below involuntary brain functions. This was normal sleep which did not disable communication channels.]
"Good to know. Yeah. As soon as you want." She glanced at the woman looking at them back and forth, an odd look on her face as she watched them. "What’s up with the bad Spanish attempt?"
"Oh. We were trying to find out if they had a vehicle and where the nearest town is, and what is there. We know we need to stay here a day or two to recover enough to make travel possible but if we want a chance to get home at all, we need to get to where we can call and preferably some place with an American embassy."
"Do I want to know how chicken entered that attempt?"
JD looked away as Perc coughed to hide a laugh.
"No."
It still felt like too much effort to move but she looked at the woman and tried to smile.
"Thank you for everything you have done for us. Is there anything you need?" It still sounded so odd to have her tongue saying the Spanish for the words she intended.
"No, ma’am. We are grateful, but we weren’t sure what the octetl were asking us. Are you okay?" Her voice carried hints of worry.
Just what was life like for these people? Odds were rape for sure. I can’t fix that.
"Yes. We will be leaving soon. Another day or two." The woman bit her lip and nodded.
"Okay. But you will destroy the cacao leaves first?"
McKenna couldn’t decipher the woman's emotion and it would require too much effort to follow up on it.
"Yes, and all the processing equipment. But everything else is yours."
Relief flooded the woman. "Thank you, thank you."
"What my friend," McKenna waved a hand at JD, "was trying to ask is how far is the nearest town and do you know if there is an American Embassy in it?"
The conversation that followed required enough effort that McKenna had to crawl out of bed to write down and figure out where they were. They had slipped one of the shifts on her so she as least didn’t traumatize the woman any more. After a long conversation, which involved three other people they figured out what they faced.
The only city they knew had an American embassy in it was Bogota. They had no money, no ID, and from all indications the city was about two hundred miles away. They were far on the outskirts of a city called Mani. The closest real town would be Monterrey still about forty miles on roads that made logging roads look good.
That evening, after giving everyone the new nanobots, they sat eating slowly and discussing the trip. In the end it turned out almost anti-climatic. After two days of gorging, they were still seriously underweight, but hated the sight of food. At this point they just wanted to know, had to know if their loved ones had been harmed, or worse.
They waited until the wind blew away from the main house and torched all the drug stuff to the delight of the locals. Ransacking the house, they found about a two million in Columbia Peso, an almost worthless currency, and two hundred thousand in US dollars. Not wanting to deprive the people they were leaving, they took twenty thousand in US and about ten thousand in pesos.
They left the next day with the locals smiling and waving as they drove off with the jeep, leaving the tricked-out vehicle for them. JD had the hard drive in a small sack that he tied at his waist and all of them had decided it didn’t get mentioned to anyone. They’d deal with it at home.
"Think they’ll make it?" Cass asked, glancing backwards at the women waving at them.
"I don’t know. They’ll need to kill any of the contacts that come around and make sure they protect the area. But they might." McKenna didn’t add any inflection at all.
Cass sighed as the compound disappeared from sight. McKenna focused on getting home and Charley. The drive to Bogota took about six hours. They needed to fill up once and get food a few times. The bots were still supercharged trying to get them back to where they wanted to be. JD and Perc came in handy with their intimidation factor. McKenna wanted to protest but frankly didn’t give a fuck. If people saw them and changed their minds about giving any of them any grief, so much the better.
They pulled into Bogota and parked down the street from the Embassy.
"We ready? You know they aren’t just going to believe us, right?" Toni said. But McKenna could see her tension at the idea that she would be getting closer to her children.
"We’ll make them believe us. Mostly I’m hoping, between me and Perc, we are famous enough to get us in the door." She glanced at JD holding a small backpack. "We still have the hard drive?"
"Nice and safe but I don’t plan on explaining that to anyone unless we have no choice."
"Agreed. Ready?"
Everyone nodded in agreement. They got out of the car and headed towards the embassy gates.
They walked towards the milling police officers who were watching everyone approaching the embassy gates with sharp looks. Behind the six-foot metal fence stood Marines in their MARPAT camouflage uniforms. A gate for cars to enter sat in front of the squat looking building.
McKenna glanced at their group and cringed. They looked like refugees from a disaster. All of them still gaunt and a bit underweight, dirty, sweaty, and wearing the minimum clothes. Riding in an open jeep over two hundred miles had ensured they were covered with road dust. Only Cass and Toni had shoes, everyone else had feet too big for anything at the compound.
Whatever. After everything else, we'll get through this. Almost home.
She had to swallow past the lump that formed. Charley would be frantic for her and she wanted to hold him and be home. They were still exhausted and Wefor had warned it would take weeks of eating to really get healthy again and all of them were sick of food.
As she was the only one that really spoke Spanish or at least could be understood in Spanish, she took the lead walking up to the officer that had stepped in front of them on their path to the embassy.
"Halt. This is no place to beg. Go to the aid station on the other side of town."
"We are American citizens and need to talk to the Ambassador." The dichotomy of thinking in English but speaking Spanish, still stuck her as odd and she just wanted to be home.
He cast a look at their rough clothes, the dark complexions of Toni and McKenna, then glanced at JD and Perc, though his eyes lingered over the slight form of Cass. He snorted. "Whatever. Go away, you have no business here," he growled in English.
McKenna exhaled slowly through her nose, trying to figure out how to deal with this without violence.
"No! I am done waiting." Toni pushed past her, finger in the officer's face. "Let us through! The Marines can deal with us if they have an issue, but I am going home to my kids."
The man lost the half-bored look on his face and his hand dropped to the butt of his pistol. "Be careful, or I'll arrest you for assaulting an officer." His tone dark and other cops were starting to look at them.
"Toni, calm down. We'll get through," McKenna urged trying to placate her.
"No. I have been gone from my children for over a week. Forced to do things I never wanted to do. Been attacked by an alligator. Almost died from forcing changes. I'm done." She moved forward and started walking to the gate and the man stepped in front of her a snarl on his face.
"Watch it
, bitch, or I'll enjoy taking you in." At this point the Marines had noticed them and were gathering as were other cops and people in the vicinity.
The smile that stretched across Toni's face could only be called a smile because it involved lips and teeth.
"Go for it," the words deepened and came out as a growl as she flowed into warrior form walking forward.
The cop gasped, his eyes widening, falling backwards and shouting as he yanked his gun from his holster.
~Dammit, Toni, this isn't the way to do this.~ McKenna protested.
Toni spared one backwards glance at her. ~I am going home to my children.~
~Not if you get killed. Perc, I need you. Come on.~
She moved to be walking in front of Toni, hands in the air and talking as loudly as she could without shouting, hoping the Marines would hear her.
"We're Americans. I'm McKenna Largo, the shifter cop. We were kidnapped. This is Percival Alexander, the American Football player. We just want to go to the embassy."
The police were all waving guns around now and McKenna didn't know if crying or screaming in frustration would help. Toni had locked onto the gates and moved in her warrior form to the gates and men were starting to aim at her.
~Damn, damn, damn! Toni, stop!~ But she didn't put a command into it, not on this, she wouldn't take that from anyone if their lives didn't depend on it. Right now the bullets might fly regardless of whether Toni stopped or not.
The cops were yelling “Halt!" and “Stop!" She didn't know if they were the same words or different and she kept trying to block them from shooting Toni, who in full cat-woman form stalked towards the Embassy.
"I repeat, we are Americans!" She had given up and shouted now as the Marine looked decidedly panicked. The gate opened and an older man, maybe in his forties as opposed to the twenty something men holding rifles behind the fence, stepped out.
She kept glancing back and forth between the cops but JD and Cass had moved in closer. She saw claws coming out of their hands but nothing else as they protected Toni with their bodies.