Marie always followed her regimen, now matter where she was or who she was with, it didn't matter anymore that the child she was carrying wasn't wanted by the people who'd chosen her to carry it. She'd be the best mother she could be, eighteen or no, hell her grandmother had had four kids by her age and her mother had given birth to her just after her nineteenth birthday.
The memory of family surfaced like a silver fish in a dark pond, the pain of it cutting deep into her emotions. Her mind opening to show her the event that had started all this, all this running, all this fear.
The touch of the doctor on her skin as she'd been for her scan, the sudden rush of thoughts and emotions that had come from her. The fears for the baby, the child she was carrying that the `parents' would suspect something was awry when it was born with brown eyes.
She'd been sedated on the gurney as the doctor had fainted dead away, her mind able to sift through the information she'd gathered by her touch on her bare skin. Realising something was wrong with the doctor, something she'd done to her by the doctors touch on her skin.
The thoughts that had been going through her head as she'd been preparing her stomach for the scan, trying to keep herself calm as she did it. That the child wasn't the one they all thought she was carrying, it was something else, or someone else's. The doctor knew both parents were blue eyed and they'd have to be convinced that the child really was theirs. It'd have to be done as soon as the birth was over, they'd been lucky with the surrogate, she was healthy, strong, malleable. It had been those words that had caused her to run, to take off as soon as she could; the words of the doctor had
sounded as if she was a specimen to be dissected. Now it was clear she was also a mutant she knew what would happen to her if she stayed still here, the doctor had a very curious nature and very few scruples, she'd seen that from the mind invading her own.
When she'd awoken there were restraints on her wrists and ankles and her mother had been sitting by her side. Marie could remember the tone of voice she'd had, as if everything she'd ever known had been taken away from her. Telling her that she was a mutant, that her skin had hurt the doctor and that there were people coming for her. Her
mother had said the word `people' in a tone that reminded her of the day they'd taken her old dog to the vet to be put to sleep. Her eyes had met hers then for a moment and she'd known everything she'd had to know. Whoever was coming was going to hurt her and the baby she was carrying, she hadn't spoken just cried as she'd tried to get out of the restraints. Her struggles making the leather cut deep into her wrists, she'd struggled for what felt like an hour next to her almost comatose mother. It had been when her father had come in and seen his daughter trussed up like a sacrifice to science that she'd finally woken up from her stupor.
He'd unbuckled her, helped her to take the straps from her body pushing her to get out of bed. Her mother had tried to stop him but he'd just held her tight in his grip and pulled her frame around into his angry gaze. The words she'd always remember, still burning in her heart, "She's our *daughter* Anna! No matter what those people tell us she's our Marie!" Her mother had tried to get away to call for help but he'd put his hand over her cries, urging her to move, to get out of there. He hadn't done anything else for her but that, he'd set her free, let her get lost in the vast hospital. Dressed in her own
clothes, covered as much as she could be, she'd stolen money from the nurses station in paediatrics and took a taxi home.
Packing everything including her passport she'd high tailed it out of there just as she'd heard the cars coming around the corner. Taking the family credit card had been a bonus; she'd maxed it at the first
opportunity at a bank and had posted it back home. She had money, her drivers licence and a child she'd been paid to carry for someone else. Not the greatest start at a new life but one that was better than being somewhere she didn't want to be.
So here she was sat in a small diner, taking her vitamins, the bottles she'd been given by the hospital, the folic acid, the multi- vitamin and the dreaded iron pill. She'd been diagnosed as anaemic when she'd first been to see if the implantation had taken, the umbilical had been strong on the scan and her body was using
resources she didn't really have in reserve. Hence the vitamins, it was good for the baby her mother had told her so she'd done it for the first four months of her pregnancy and she wasn't going to stop now. Her hand dropped to the bump under her layers of clothing,
remembering what had brought her here, her good intentions, her will to serve something higher than her own needs.
Marjorie and Derek Chalmers, friends of her fathers had been childless for almost all of their marriage, Marjorie would get pregnant but would miscarry at nearly four months every single time.
After five attempts the doctors had told her she was incapable of carrying a child to term, it had destroyed them both. Many a night they were at her mothers kitchen table, crying over the unfairness of it all, Derek was a successful businessman, he had a car dealership in three counties. Had money coming out of his whazoo but he couldn't have a child, not with Marjorie. At first she'd told him to divorce her, trying to ease the burden on him, taking all the blame herself.
That he should go find a `nice young filly' and knock her up, that way he'd have a son to give the business to like he always wanted.
Derek was a man who most would have thought that he'd have jumped at the chance, but her father and mother had known different. Derek hadn't been changed by the success because he knew how fickle it could be, one day on the top the next at the bottom, so he'd stuck by her and it had been Marie herself who'd brought up the idea to them
all.
It had been part of her Humanities class, the idea of surrogacy and the joy it brought to families who needed their help. Several of her classmates had been dead against it but Marie had been all for it, to bring joy and life into the world even if there were some monetary
rewards at the end of it. So she'd broached the subject to her family one night when Derek and Marjorie had been there, the silence that had followed her offer of help had made her wonder if she'd said the right thing but the look of pride in her father's eyes had sealed the deal. If they said yes she'd do it, her college fund wasn't anything to write home about and if she did this, she could pay her own way and everyone would be a winner, including her mother. She'd have a sort of grandchild in the child she'd given birth to, thing was not everything went as well as you expected. Especially when she'd tried
to contact Derek after she'd run out of the hospital, he'd been calm, frighteningly so on the phone to her. Telling her he'd made an account for her for her trouble but she was never to contact him or his wife again. She'd moved the money as soon as she could, into a small post-office savings account under a different name, her soon to
be child's name, Lewington. She kept the small pocket book in her underwear, packed at the bottom of her things, even if she got robbed of the cash she had she still had the account number to get money transferred to her.
The process had been simple really; she'd taken note of her cycle, following it regularly until she knew her most fertile period. When that had been mapped she'd been taken into the town to the clinic for the implantation, a few uncomfortable moments and she'd been pregnant with what she'd thought had been Derek and Marjorie Chalmers embryo.
Only that knowledge had been stripped from her when she'd seen into the doctors mind that had touched her, she was carrying a baby that she was sure of but who's it was she had no idea. A little like her, lost and alone, unloved and uncared for Marie just finished her routine of breakfast her eyes looking for a way to the next town
where she felt safe enough to buy a car. A pregnant woman travelling alone tended to get attention; she needed a mode of transport that would get her away from trouble and attention faster than she got it.
Shaking the bottle she had to get a refill of her vitamins too, she wasn't going to let her circumstances stop her from fulfilling her duty to the child she was carrying. A solitary tear rolled down her cheek as she stroked her covered belly, "Just you and me kid, no
matter what happens out here Ah'm not going to leave you behind. You're part of me and nothing is evah goin' to change that ya hear?"
Her whisper was lost in the clatter of dishes being stacked and people asking and given their orders over to the staff of the small diner. Marie stayed a little longer as the rain began to fall outside, the sky mirroring her own feelings of loss.
"Where is the subject?" Her hands were playing with her second cigarette of the interview; she'd only been in here for just under a minute. The voice she heard was coming from a two-way mirror, she was alone in the room with her smoke, no chance of a passive death in here. Clearing her throat she answered, "We don't know. She took off after her father released her from her bed, she left the hospital and we lost her." The silence from the other side of the mirror made her nerves spike, she knew it wasn't good but she didn't know how bad it could be, not yet. Tapping out her ash into the small foil tray her
nerves prodded her to fill the waiting silence, "We can track her though." The silence was cut by the sound of the intercom buzzing and a deeper voice asking, "How?"
This voice held a tone that the good doctor recognised, she'd used it herself on interns, it read `whatever you're going to say next may just save you' and here it was something much more important than a job she'd be saving.
"Her meds, the amount and dosage are very specific, there's even some trace elements that she needed. Her diet wasn't as good as it could be and she'll need to take the vitamins every day of her pregnancy."
The intercom buzzed again as the voice answered.
"She could just buy generic from any drugstore." The doctor shook her head from side to side, watching her reflection get lost in the cloud of blue tobacco smoke wreathed around her face.
"No she can't. Every pharmacy has a hospital database on its system; a request is given to the hospital that first filled the prescription just in case an error is made. The trace elements we have in her vitamins will be hard to get other than in a pharmacy within the hospital system. We can track her by that."
Silence filled the room again as the doctor felt the air around her loosen, she'd given them a chance of finding their little experiment of colouring outside the lines. "Does the subject know of her own ties to the child?" She watched her own head shake as she looked in
the mirror, when had these lines appeared on her face, when had her eyes looked so sunken and her skin so sallow?
"No she has no idea that it's her own child, she thought she was impregnated with a donor embryo, not sperm." Although she'd had a niggling feeling that the girl had taken something from her when she'd touched her, that the pain she'd felt coursing through her body had been accompanied by the plundering of her memories too. She
wasn't going to tell the voices this, if she did she might not walk out of here alive.
Silence returned to the room and her hands shook as she lit yet another cigarette from the embers of the last one, if she managed to get through this nightmare she might have the luxury of dying of lung cancer one day. But right now, she was counting the seconds as a bonus on her life, the voice returned and she almost swallowed her
tongue when she heard what it had to say.
"I want you out there, get yourself packed your leaving in an hour."
Crushing her cigarette in the tray, she stood up smoothing out her coat.
"You want me to find the pharmacy she uses and track her down?"
The voice when it spoke was the original one that had questioned her and the humour in it was obvious to her ears, dark and brittle.
"No, of course not, that's what field men are for. You're much too valuable to the program to lose out in the world, we want you to see the donor, get his vitals back up. Turn him into our little breeding bull, you're coming with us Doctor Howard, the girl will be picked up if it's as easy as you say it is. Just give our operatives the list of things they should be looking for and they'll bring her home, safely."
When she finally saw her reflection again her skin had become like paper, waxy and pale, the cigarettes dangled from her hand and she knew her plans for a long drawn out death by cancer were no longer viable. Leaving them behind on the table she walked out and began making the her will in her head, no-one who'd gone to see the donor
had come back and in her heart she knew she wouldn't either.
She'd been sat inside the hospital pharmacy for nearly an hour now, she'd spent the morning trying to find a pharmacy that carried her type of vitamins, she'd searched all over St. Joseph only to find she had to go to the hospital to get her prescription filled. So she'd
entered the queue of people waiting for their meds, just another woman waiting in line. She'd been given a chair at least when she'd uncovered her now proud bulge, the relief had been evident on her face as she'd sat down and Marie indulged herself in a bit of people watching.
There were several families in there some with children holding broken arms, others with bandaged fingers and body parts but it had been the quiet group off by the corner that had caught her attention.
It was just the way the father almost had his body as far away as possible from his son and wife that made her watch them. The son, a small lad, dusky brown hair cut short to his scalp, his head down and a scarf wrapped around his throat.
It looked out of place in here and when she caught his mothers pained look she knew why he was wearing it, he was a mutant, somehow her child had become a mutant and they didn't know what to think or do with him. His father had obviously made up his mind about the whole thing already, the boy flicked his gaze to the side to look around him and Marie found herself falling into black pupiless eyes. The scarf slipping a little to reveal gills in his throat, their surfaces bright red and beautiful to her eyes, watching his long thin fingers
pull the scarf back up to cover them again before anyone else saw.
Marie tore her gaze away, her own hands and skin were uncovered, she'd found something that could let her seem normal as long as no one looked too closely. Spray plasters, who'd have thought that the military would actually have something that she could use to pass as
human, well apart from super glue that is. The thin invisible barrier kept her skin safe from contact as long as it didn't tear and she was careful not to touch things that could rip it. She could pass for human and that was her greatest disguise at the moment, she still didn't have a plan, just wandering until she became bored with it or the baby became too much of a burden to move safely with.
Her car was small, a little three door Ford, dusky blue, not a thing anyone would look twice at but it had room enough for her to sleep in when she needed it and it had had a full service history. As long as she looked after it it'd look after her, it was parked outside in the
warmth that was slowly becoming heat as spring turned to summer. St. Joseph was near the state lines of Missouri and Kansas, she'd chosen here because it was a place to get herself organised before changing direction.
Now she was wishing she'd waited until she'd gotten into Kansas properly, the ticket display changed again and her eyes flicked to the five counters, each one showing a new number. Her own being one of them, smiling she pushed up out of her chair and went to get her prescription. Glancing back she caught the eye of the father with the
bad attitude, he looked through her as she passed his gaze, his eyes dropping to her stomach as if he wished her baby was his. That he had another chance at having a normal child, thing was Marie wasn't even sure that the baby she was carrying was normal. Pushing her fears to
the back of her mind she approached the pharmacy window with her number on it. The kind face smiled as she approached, the name tag reading `Sylvia'.
"Marie D'Canto?" Marie nodded to the woman who held her three bottles in her grip. Watching as she dropped them into a plain white pharmacy bag, pushing over the paperwork for her to sign and pay for as she did it. Marie took the pen in her fingers being careful to grip it
tightly; the spray plaster made things hard to grip seeing as it smoothed out the skin. Holding the pen, she carefully wrote her name and her old home address and the non-existent one she was heading for in Phoenix. Handing the form back over with a few bills, she expected the bag to be handed to her but the woman hadn't moved. She was
looking at the screen with a small frown on her features, Marie felt her stomach clench as the air around them changed from friendly to hostile. Leaning over to have a look at the screen, Sylvia moved it away from her view and just took the forms and money away, leaving her items in front of her.
Snatching the vitamins Marie almost ran out of the building, moving through the unfamiliar corridors, trying to follow the signs that would lead her to her car and freedom.
She was almost flying across the ground when she saw the men enter the end of the corridor she was running down, without even knowing why she screamed as they locked onto her form. Clutching herself tightly Marie ran back the way she'd come, back into the maze of corridors knowing this time she'd be lucky to escape. She was tired, her baby had grown and she couldn't run as long without pain lancing through her muscle. Finding an empty room Marie flung herself inside and hid under the large bed, praying to a god that she hoped loved mutants as much as the rest of humanity she got her wind back listening for footsteps.
*********************************************
They'd been checking every single hospital this side of the country; they'd only been forty minutes away from St. Joseph when the computer had flagged the request to their own laptop. The prescription matched perfectly, even her name and old address, it would be as easy as they'd said it would be. They both knew the file inside and out, hell
they'd even bought gloves especially for this case, they knew her by sight, even if she'd changed her hair and her skin tone. She was five months pregnant and the projection of her growth would make it hard for her to run, she was a small woman.
Reaching the hospital they'd double-parked, flashed a badge at the rent-a-cop security and were heading for the pharmacy when they'd spotted her running toward them. Smiling they'd just pushed through the few people that were there and followed her progress, watching as she'd ducked into a room, her breath laboured and her scream still echoing in their ears. She hadn't run far thankfully they needed both of them healthy and complete, she looked in good health but you couldn't tell until they got her out of here.
Rent-a-cop was coming and he nodded to his partner to deal with him while he got the job done on the girl. Pulling out a small hypo gun, he slotted the tranq in and opened the door a crack, dropping down he scanned the room, including behind the door through the crack in the
hinges, seeing nothing he saw the dark huddled shape under the bed.
Smiling he took aim and fired, a small cry was all she let out before she just relaxed and fell into a deep sleep. Pulling himself upright he looked at his partner who was asking for a wheelchair, slapping his back in triumph as the security left. They'd be back in a few
hours, grabbing his phone out of his pocket he dialled a number quickly, the other end being answered immediately. "We've got her, we're in St. Joseph Missouri, flyspeck in the middle of nowhere if
you ask me. Thank the doc for us, she saved us some time." The voice on the other end was pleased with their progress and it made him smile when he thought about what it could mean later on.
The rent-a-cop returned with the wheelchair and they used him to pull her out from under the bed, if he touched her; hell he could pay the price for doing it. They got her manhandled into the wheelchair and he had to admit she really was better looking in the flesh than she had been in the pictures. His partner noticed the way he was looking at her and he waited until they were moving her out of the hospital before he mentioned it to him. "She'd kill you in seconds man, sometimes your such a loser," looking at his friends amusement he had to laugh. Yeah he'd liked what he'd seen, not enough to die for it
though, grinning he slapped his partner around the back of his head as they went toward their own transport.
"Sure man, whatever you say," his eyes dropping down onto the sleeping face below, his thoughts telling him it might not be such a bad way for someone like him to die. At the moment his life expectancy wasn't that good anyway, after here he was on the detail
to move the donor to the same facility she was going to along with the good doctor. And where they were going not even the human population lasted long, whether it was the remoteness or the place itself he didn't know. All that mattered that was when he'd delivered her he'd be going back to the place again with the donor. He'd heard the stories about the donor, all of them had and it made his
nightmares about Afghanistan fade into pleasant memories and he'd be riding with him during the six-hour trip. Steeling himself he looked at the young girl he'd be taking there, he only hoped she never saw the thing she'd been impregnated with, yet somehow he knew she wouldn't be spared that not where they were taking her.
Strapping her in she moaned a little as they set up the iv in her arm; they needed her relaxed and the baby calm. A monitor was placed on her stomach that showed the heartbeat of the child she was carrying; it would accompany them all the way to the facility. The sound of new life growing in safety and darkness, everything it would ever need being provided by the young beauty carrying it, even now her hands were draped across her stomach as if she was trying to protect it. As he took the passenger seat he couldn't help but remember the Hail Mary's his mother had made him say every time he'd left to go abroad, whispering them under his breath he prayed she'd come out of the hell hole they were taking her to in one piece. She was still human to him, he didn't hold the views his partner did, he'd been given an order, he'd followed it anything else than that, and he'd question it. A good soldier knows when to question and this
was neither the time nor the place, setting his eyes to the road in the quiet silence; the only thing breaking it the quiet heartbeat of the precious cargo they carried.
**************************************************************
He wasn't responding, they'd tried everything she knew and then some thing's she'd researched on the internet. The donor wasn't responding to any kind of stimulus, the last set of tests he'd had before she'd gotten hold of him seemed to have short-circuited his nervous system,
he was awake but not `aware'. And they needed him `aware', she'd been given a free hand with this subject and she'd used it, the facility they had him in wasn't perfect but she'd managed to get a few interesting results from him.
She'd been here a month in total, her days were spent trying to figure out exactly what had been done to him. The scar tissue that had been documented was none existent, his skin was flawless, the medical procedures that were documented weren't to be trusted because if they had been the subject should be dead. He was improving now she had him on a regimen of nutritional suppliments although they had to be given intravenously after the last incident.
She'd been examining his nervous system, testing his reflexes when her assistant had been stabbed through the hip, she herself had only just been missed by the three metal claws that had sprung from his hands. After seeing to her colleague she'd fired the claws again using the same stimulus, watching the wounds slowly heal and seal
over the breaks in his skin. It had been then she'd gone back to the notes she had on the subject, reading about the `improvements to his natural abilities'. They were vague but the medical notes weren't, they told her everything she'd needed to know and so she'd tried to
fire his nervous system into life.
Heat, cold, pain, pleasure (she almost blushed when she remembered that one, remembering that his notes told of the bulk harvesting of his sperm. It was as if he could keep producing as long as he was aroused, no wonder the orderlies called him `the bull'.)
It had been just such a sample she'd implanted into Marie D'Canto, the motility of his sperm were impressive, nearly 80% were viable compared to the normal 55%. He was a walking baby factory if the cycle was right and she'd known of at least seven other clinics who had his samples.
Looking at him strapped down, eyes open but blank to the world, his face was lined by pain, the eyes especially, she wanted to touch him but she wondered what she would do if he'd responded to it. She'd tried everything else she could think of to get him out of the miasma he was in; there was nothing in his notes about any drugs he'd been given at the other facility. But that's wasn't any guide at all, the medical notes she had covered some parts of his `improvements' and not others. So she took samples of hair and nails for a tox-screen, the results had just come back and she was dreading opening them.
Because if he was a vegetable her own life expectancy would be zero, bracing herself she opened the file as she stood next to him.
The read-out was something from a cornucopia pharmacy, there were so many different agents working in his system she was sure he'd be dead if he wasn't a mutant. No wonder his system had been so depleted when she'd first seen him, she hadn't done anything for the first two
weeks but support his system, keeping him alive. Now she had the evidence in her hand she could try to bring him back to health,
looking at the thing she could see his liver and kidneys would need more help than they were getting. Going over to the phone she pulled the receiver up and requested a dialysis machine to be brought up to her, they'd need to clean his blood of the harsher toxins first then support his body as he fought the rest on his own. His body was thin but it still echoed with the image he had been, the one they wanted her to get him back to. The photograph at the front of his file, of him in a cage fighting another man dressed in fatigues, all muscle, all purpose, his hands held low to his body, a snarl on his face and his eye dark with hate. They wanted this back, they'd broken him and she was here to put him back together, quietly, quickly and as soon as possible.
She was still thinking as the machine was brought to her, they didn't have a shunt in him but they would use his femoral arteries instead, painful but necessary. She didn't stay and watch, she had enough on her plate with the girl coming here, sitting at her desk her hand
playing with the pictures on it she jumped when the phone rang. Picking it up she answered it politely, "Dr Howard," the voice on the other end she recognised, it had been the same one that had informed her that she was coming here. Now it told her she was to get ready to
move with the donor, they wanted him ready to move in six hours. She'd be escorted to a better facility with more resources, a more `secure' facility where she could do her work in peace. The surrogate would be coming also and she would be caring for the both of them, it was better if they kept the two projects side by side and under one doctor. She heard herself say she'd be ready as soon as
they got the donor stable again after dialysis, her hand shaking as she replaced the receiver.
The cold entering her body as she walked to the bed where her subject was having his blood cleaned, his thin frame showing a little more colour than it had been but she knew that this was a bad move for both of them. He was important to them, she was replaceable, a throw away item, her skin itched as she touched the nicotine patch on her shoulder. No matter where she went now she only had herself to blame, she'd let her curiosity lead her here, down the rabbit hole into Aliceland. And it was true what they said about it, nothing was as it seemed, not even her, she'd tried to play god with the new species
and this was her reward. Being drawn in tighter to the centre of things, where the more you knew the less human you became.
Watching the blood circle the machine, seeing it return to his body through a small shunt in his armpit. He'd be aware soon enough or she'd be dead, it was that simple, when you got it down to the basics there wasn't much else to do but work. She went back to her office and began packing the things she'd need, unconsciously leaving everything she didn't need behind including her will in the top drawer. Hopefully someone would find it but she doubted anyone would care.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
This bunny came from a 'Bunny Adoption' site on LJ and I need to finish this on here. So there will be more to this soon.