“Two credits to see the feral! No passes, everyone pays!”
Quiggs grabbed Brooke’s shoulder. “Stop this! Beau’s a master herder. He deserves to die with dignity in a hospital.”
Brooke spat on the ground. “Best you accept the creature inside the jail cell isn’t our Beau any more. He’s in transition.”
“Beau can’t transition!”
“No mistaking it’s Beau we found. A herder spotted a flock of carrion feeders circling a storage shed near the outbank. A team of volunteers, me included, armed ourselves and checked it out. We dragged Beau from a burrow he’d dug beneath the shed. He was sleeping like he was drugged and throwing off heat like a furnace. His belly was bloated from the goats he’d eaten. Never would have found him if he hadn’t tossed out the entrails. Probably bait to catch more food.”
“Beau would never harm—he loves his goats. He names them!”
Brooke’s eyes hardened. “We identified the collars. The goats belonged to Beau.”
Quiggs steeled himself to speak the awful truth. “The feral you dragged out… it must have eaten Beau too.”
“Your Beau is that goddammed feral. I wanted to kill him while he slept, but the others voted to bring him back alive. Medical’s never studied a live one during its transition. The thing woke up and sprouted the longest claws I’ve ever seen. He kicked out the sides of the cage and bit through the ropes. We jabbed him with poisoned stakes to kill him. Fucker’s body kept oozing out the poison like pus from a wound. We jabbed him over and over to keep him weak while we hauled him on a stretcher to the jail. It’s the only place with bars to hold him.”
Beau had claws? Quiggs had slept with him the night before he disappeared. If Beau had transitioned during the night, would Quiggs have met the same fate as the goats? No, impossible. The captured feral had killed and eaten Beau, who’d died defending his herd.
“If it’s Beau, he would have asked for me. And Beau yowls when he’s unhappy.”
Brooke let a crack of laughter through his yellowed teeth. “He can’t speak. Just keeps growling and throwing himself at the jail bars to get at anyone coming close to stare at him. Damn scary sight when he swipes his claws through the bars like he’d enjoy gutting you.”
Quiggs struggled to connect the creature described with his goofish little friend.
Brooke tapped his herding staff on Quiggs’s head to snap him out of his shock. “After you get a look at what he is, we’re exterminating him and sending the body to medical for dissection.”
If this feral ate Beau, Quiggs would deliver the death blow himself.
Brooke cleared a path with his staff. “Make way for Cadet Quiggs Fallon! I got Cadet Quiggs Fallon here!”
The policemen lowered their batons and let them pass. The smell of putrid flesh saturated the humid air inside the downward tunnel, like something vile from the bottom of the canal had been dragged this way. Quiggs buried his nose in the crook of his arm and wove through the jammed tunnel behind Brooke. When his shouting couldn’t be heard over the deafening ruckus, the herder used his staff to clear a path.
The jail was a simple facility with three cells and a booking office. The large holding cell was at the end of the tunnel on the left. The three sides of metal bars offered no privacy from leering visitors. To the right, down the hall from the holding cell, were the office and two enclosed solitary cells for serious offenders. Any man guilty of a serious crime met a swift execution. For infractions, a man paid his fine and was released. If he couldn’t pay the fine, he serviced clients in the rental rooms until the debt was paid.
At the bottom of the tunnel, a jailor warned visitors to stay behind the yellow line, away from the bars. “He snags you with his claws, he’ll pull you through the bars easy as water through a sieve.”
Brooke’s staff connected with the broad back of a bargeman blocking them, and a brawl erupted. When Quiggs squeezed sideways around Brooke, impatient to reach the cell, another bargeman grabbed his braid and hauled him back.
“Get back to the end of the line, whelp!”
He swung a meaty fist at Quiggs’s jaw, pulling back at the last instant when he recognized only one person owned a braid below the knees. His fleshy face paled. “Oh, fuck. It’s you. Sorry.”
Others recognized Quiggs and raised their arms shouting, “Pass him overhead!”
Hands hoisted Quiggs passing him along like a sack of flour until he dropped breathless on his feet in front of the cell. He glanced down, alarmed he’d landed over the yellow line. Fighting broke out behind him as men shoved each other to get a closer view of Quiggs’s reaction. A surge in the crowd knocked him face-forward against the bars and squashed him there. The stench from inside the cell folded over him like a coat of muck.
Then everything faded—the crushing pressure, the fighting, the stench—when he stared through the bars.
His first thought was absolutely not Beau.
The creature squatting at the back of the cell, with its long stringy arms wrapped around its chest, bore no resemblance to his little friend. Its gray skin was rotting. Shriveled strips of the stuff littered the floor along with stones thrown through the bars. The stench came from the yellow fluids oozing from the lacerations covering its body.
The pathetic creature lifted its head, sniffing the air. Pale green eyes pinned Quiggs like a predator sighting a juicy hare.
No way this was Beau. Beau’s eyes regarded the world with a trusting innocence, and Beau had a funny lopsided head. This thing had a strong neck supporting a head that had not yet transitioned into the elongated skull and sloped forehead of its kind. Its lean jaw hung crooked from transitioning as if a brutal kick had knocked it off its hinges.
As a violent shudder passed through it, the tendons in its neck strained. The shoulders visibly broadened. The skin stretched, then split over a new layer of raw muscle growth, and more yellow fluids oozed out. The growth spurt left the feral panting. Its arms dropped to its sides, revealing the outline of a heart fluttering inside an unformed ribcage. One thrust of a spear, one stone hurled, and the vulnerable heart would burst.
The feral crossed its bony arms over its chest and slowly, jerkily got to its feet. So skeletal, so fragile, it stood a bit shy of seven feet, short for a full-blooded feral. Someone threw a stone at its shoulder. A growl rumbled in its throat, and its upper lip curled back revealing gleaming white teeth. It hadn’t grown fangs. Its ears were rounded and tight against its skull, not pointed and protruding.
With a distance and speed it shouldn’t have managed given its suffering body, the feral leaped from the back of the cell to the bars. Its arms reached through, one encircling Quiggs’s neck, the other his waist. It held Quiggs in a bruising grip against the bars, dangling his feet off the floor and squishing the last breath out of him.
Screams rang out as the feral fastened its jaws around Quiggs’s throat. Brooke shouted at the guards not to kill it, or its jaws would snap in a death reflex.
If it was this strong in a weakened state, Quiggs could only imagine the ferocity of a fully transitioned feral. He closed his eyes and fought the panic by focusing on, of all things, blocking the urge to piss his pants.
A slimy tongue swiped the hollow of his throat. As the jaws pulled away, Quiggs heard a rip and knew the sound was his throat torn out. He experienced a curious resignation at the wetness oozing down his neck. So this was how he met his end: his worst nightmare come to life, sharing the fate of his parents.
In the next ticking second, the creature leaped back, releasing him. Quiggs’s feet hit the floor, and his hands clutched the bars. As the feral devoured what he assumed was his bloody flesh, he pressed a hand over the gaping hole in his throat. Any effort to staunch the bleeding was futile. He sucked in a breath, waiting for blackness to descend.
How could he breathe without a throat?
He held up his sticky hand and saw strands of yellow fetid drool between his spread fingers. He would have gagged if he weren’t so shock
ed he was alive. Glancing down, he saw the pocket where he’d stuffed his sandwich had been ripped out, exposing his boxers.
Quiggs staggered back behind the yellow line, watching the feral lick crumbs off its huge hands. Another violent shudder traveled through it. The long back rippled, the skin splitting down the spine like a rotten fruit striking the ground. It braced its feet apart with its arms outstretched, absorbing the pain as instinct directed.
The ribcage closed, and a layer of muscle formed over its chest. The ripples ceased, and the feral weaved on its feet, paddle-sized befitting its great height. Its lean loose jaws broadened and clicked into place as it gazed at Quiggs. It sheathed its claws inside thick finger pads before holding out its hands for more food.
Its guttural cries sounded like, “Ka… Ka… Ka...”
Quiggs rubbed his throat, amazed the thing hadn’t pulled him through the bars and eaten him since it was starving.
Green eyes with dilated human pupils fixed on his as the feral scuffed his feet to the bars and reached out. “Ka … Ka … Ka …”
Quiggs shook his head at the entreaty. No way he was coming closer.
It sank to the floor, cross-legged, and its head drooped. The skull’s soft plates had allowed its head to squeeze through the bars and latch onto Quiggs throat. Now they began to acquire the high straight forehead… of a human. The high-bridged nose forming from slits was human. The strong brow jutting over slanting green eyes was human. The anguish pouring out of those eyes was human.
“B-Beau?” Quiggs’s voice was a bare whisper.
It looked up and held out its hands.
Quiggs pointed to himself.
It nodded and rocked. “Ka… Ka... Ka…”
Qu… Qu… Quiggs. It was trying to say his name.
Quiggs shook off the shock. This was his Beau transitioning. All the yellow oozing wasn’t good. He needed fluids and food—lots, if he was still starving after eating eight goats.
“For fuck’s sake, people, it’s Beau! The transition’s burning him up. He’s starving. Bring food and buckets of water. And someone needs to hook up a hose and spray down the cell.”
Men reached into their pockets. They tossed fruit, cheese, nuts, jerky through the bars. Beau scrambled on all fours and devoured every scrap.
Brooke stepped up beside him, careful to stay behind the yellow line. “Look at him,” Quiggs said. “He’s eating fruit. Mature ferals are strictly meat eaters.”
“He went after your neck,” Brooke reminded him.
“He swiped his tongue on my neck. That’s Beau’s way to show affection. He remembers me. I need to get inside to help him.”
When Quiggs moved toward the bars, Brooke yanked him back. “Stay behind the line. The transition’s not over.”
“I can’t stand out here and watch him suffer. He’s my friend.”
“He’s as likely to eat you as to shake your hand. We’ll keep feeding him and let the doctors study him. But don’t get attached. The law exterminates ferals.”
Quiggs studied the ears and skull. Those slanted green eyes shone with intelligence. “Look at his head. Beau’s transitioning into a human.”
“The doctors will decide what he becomes.” Brooke squinted at the prisoner. “What a waste. He was a damn fine herder when he was a runt.”
Chapter Eight
Three days later, after Beau had consumed six roasted goats, dozens of buttered loaves, wheels of cheese, and anything edible passed through the food chute, the putrid growth spurts triggering the ravenous hunger stopped. The lapuncerations healed without scarring, leaving behind smooth golden skin. He topped out at six foot ten with wide shoulders and a leanly muscled frame designed for speed. The paddle-sized hands and feet laughed at by cadets suited his new body. He had inherited the claws and the double-jointed flexibility of a feral, but his human appearance dominated. He had the slanted green eyes of a feral, but the round pupils were human, and the expression was pure Beau. His shoulder-length hair was the same white-blond, but the thick tawny hairs around his hairline were new.
Quiggs considered him handsome and showed him off like a proud new father to the stream of paying visitors. The new Beau, like the younger Beau, enjoyed attention. He bounced around the cell, swinging off the bars as agile as a sucker-toe. He was massive but friendly, a point Quiggs stressed to visitors as he urged them to protest a vote being debated for benevolent extermination. Men traveled from the other ports to view him, and the fees collected went into the treasury. The substantial amount mollified the Ruling Mothers into postponing the vote while doctors and professors evaluated Beau.
Which nature dominated, human or feral? Quiggs argued his friend was human with enhancements, able to serve the Triangle like Commander Bronn.
Quiggs received an exemption from curfew to set up a bunk bed, chair, and desk outside the cell, with jailors acting as his chaperones. In return, he promised not to cross the yellow line before the prisoner’s status was ascertained.
There were flaws that questioned whether Beau’s human side dominated.
At first Quiggs thought Beau required schooling in speech like a toddler. He soon realized Beau grasped language but was mute, communicating only with gestures.
When Quiggs asked if he had a voice, Beau shook his head. He gazed at Quiggs, then pointed at the ceiling.
“Beau, I know you want out, but you must prove you’re human.” Quiggs took a step toward the line when Beau squatted and rocked. A jailor thrust a baton at Quiggs’s stomach to block him. “How can Beau prove he’s human if we keep treating him like an animal?”
Beau gripped the bars glaring at the jailor.
Oh, fuck. “Beau, be good. The guard’s only following orders.”
Beau pointed to the ceiling.
“Be good and we’ll let you out.”
Beau gave a very human sigh.
If the Ruling Mothers observed Beau, Quiggs believed they’d vote to save him. Unfortunately, the jail was off-limits to women because Beau couldn’t be trusted to keep his clothes on. Even a loincloth irritated his new skin.
What impressed the visitors was not Beau’s friendly disposition. It was his penis. Long and thick, it had a pronounced spongy ring around the middle. Unconcerned with his nudity, Beau sat cross-legged on his pallet and fondled himself as if wondering what the fuss was about. He never showed wood. Instead of drawing tightly to his body with pent need, his new ball sac swung loosely.
Dr. Keith called Beau’s impotence a blessing. The Assembly viewed a sexually active but untrained male as aberrant and would have exterminated him.
The next obstacle to freeing Beau was proving he was employable. Idleness created deviant thoughts, so the law required every able-bodied male to work.
The Herders Guild offered to hire Beau if he could be trusted to handle a herd without eating them. While doctors and professors argued over who, besides Quiggs, was brave enough to step over the yellow line and test Beau’s control, Master Herder Brooke answered the question. He simply opened the food chute and shoved a weakened two-day-old baby goat with a crooked foreleg into the cell.
Beau immediately pounced on the crippled infant. Everyone clapped their hands to their mouths, horrified, as he whisked the baby to his pallet at the back of the cell. He sniffed, examined, and petted the trembling animal until it quieted. His worried gaze on Quiggs, Beau pointed from his mouth to the baby repeatedly.
“He wants permission to eat it!” Dean Cagney was the first to speak, his crisp diction reduced to a girlish soprano.
“I can’t watch this.” A professor of language knelt with his head between his legs.
“For fuck’s sake. Beau wants a bottle to feed it,” Quiggs informed them, watching the baby goat suck Beau’s fingers. Yeah, Beau still had the magic.
Brooke passed bottles of milk through the chute. The baby goat sucked its fill for Beau, then slept in his arms while he gently massaged the crooked leg. The next day the baby was hopping around the cell.
Convinced Beau was useful again, Brooke secured the guild’s promise to employ him once he was released and trusted to wear clothes. “Can’t have him wagging his new cock in the street,” Brooke told Quiggs. “Officers of the Herders Guild will speak to the Assembly. I reckon herders carry more clout than a bunch of doctors submitting papers on how much pee he produces and professors teaching him to match circles and squares.”
With employment settled and Beau’s sex drive undeveloped, communication remained an obstacle.
Though Beau couldn’t speak, his human perception clicked into place, expanding as rapidly as his body had. He read first-year primers as if he grasped the words, but he struggled with writing. The professors pointed out if he couldn’t write legibly, he failed his communication skills.
Quiggs told the professors to give him a fatter marker. Beau’s thick fingertips hampered his writing.
Problem solved.
Once he mastered a fat writing marker, Beau demonstrated the skills of a second year… third year… fourth year… fifth year and rising.
Beau wrote on a slate and held it up, gesturing it was for Quiggs to read.
I want to go outside and hug my Quiggs.
“When the Ruling Mothers vote yes.”
Beau paced, staring up at the ceiling before writing, I need to feel sunlight.
“Archers will shoot you on sight. People are afraid of you. You must show them how good you are. Be patient.”
I am good. I am patient. I want to hug my friend Quiggs. He stretched his arms through the bars, silently pleading for a hug.
Quiggs blinked back tears. “I can’t step over the line yet. The guards will spear you. We must wait until the Ruling Mothers vote yes.”
Beau dropped to the floor and rocked back and forth in a silent yowl, his head butting the bars. He was caged without privacy to wash or use the toilet. He slept on a pallet. His cell was hosed down daily. Guards fed him by sliding food through the chute. He studied his lessons and performed on command. He masturbated when asked and seemed amused by the visual stimuli the sex clinic arranged. He agreed to wear a loincloth. Yet if he approached the bars and held out a hand to touch, visitors yelped and scampered further back behind the yellow line. Their fear wounded him.
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