Pets 2: Pani's Story

Pets:

Pani’s Story

By Darla Phelps

© 2010 by Blushing Books and Darla Phelps

Pets: Pani’s Story

By Darla Phelps

© 2010 Darla Phelps Blushing Books

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Judy Baker pulled her copper-red, waist-length hair back into a straight-hanging ponytail and checked herself in the mirror that hung on the bathroom door. Deciding she looked good enough for an early morning jog, she snagged her windbreaker from off the foot of the bed and headed for the living room. Her last stop was at the stereo to change out yesterday’s CD for the new selection she’d burned last night. Nothing fancy, just an assortment of 80s and 90s pop rock to help put that extra little bounce in her step and make her jog through the park that much more fun. Then, fastening her CD player into the jogging pack around her waist, she headed for the door.

She did her stretches on the front stoop, listening to the opening tunes of Bel Biv DeVoe’s Do Me and side-stepping the paperboy as he biked past her, hurling a rolled paper onto her neighbor’s porch. By the time it had switched over to Aerosmith’s Ragdoll, Judy was on her way to the park. The morning was crisp and cold and still semi-dark. The reflective tape on her jacket sparkled as she passed beneath the occasional street lamp, although by the time she reached the park bench that was her one mile marker, the horizon was already brightening into a lovely smog-induced, orangish-pink and the street lamps had begun to switch off.

It was the perfect morning for a run, and Judy was virtually alone while she took hers. On the very far side of the mist-laden pond, a man in an orange sweatsuit followed the same manicured path back around to her side of the water. Apart from him, it was just her and the ducks cutting rippling swathes across the calm surface of the pond. It was, in fact, a perfectly peaceful morning, the stillness of which was briefly broken by the grating cries of a few disgruntled crows as Mr. Orange Suit passed beneath their tree and then disappeared around the bend of the path behind some heavier vegetation.

Judy turned down the volume on her headset, her gaze tracking a half dozen black birds as they took flight. The man seemed to be taking an unusual amount of time reappearing on the other side of the bushes. A city girl born and raised, a prickle of caution had her pausing at the next bench. On the pretext of stretching, she hooked her ankle over the back of the bench and bent to grab her toes, sneaking peeks under her elbow for signs of an orange sweatsuit moving behind the calm green foliage ahead. Nothing stood out as unusual, but still the man did not reappear.

Righting herself slowly, Judy switched legs and, as she bent to grab the tip of her sneaker, she glanced behind her to gauge how far she was from the park entrance. Not only had her fellow jogger disappeared from sight, but there was no one else coming down the track behind her. She was now completely alone.

Tiny hairs rose upon her nape. Still, the day was early yet, and it was a weekend. Maybe people were sleeping in, Judy rationalized.

She took her headset off so she could hear better anyway. But after standing for a moment in perfect statue stillness, only the whisper of breeze-rustled leaves and the distant arguing of the crows disturbed the budding dawn. Unhooking her ankle from the back of the bench, she walked a little further down the trail. Still nothing moved up ahead—or at least nothing beyond the 3

gentle dip of an occasional tree branch, nudged by the softest of breezes.

She was being silly. The other jogger wasn’t lying in wait for her in the bushes like some pervert. He had probably just gone out the park’s southern access and here she was, scaring herself for nothing.

Casting one last glance behind her (there was still no one else in the park), Judy shifted her headset back over her ears and fell back into step on the jogging path. She had only taken a few running steps, however, when she suddenly gave in to her irrational premonition and turned around. Without making even one full turn around the pond, she headed back the way she’d come with every intention of going home.

She’d only gone four steps when the bee stung the back of her thigh. Her whole body jerked and she stumbled, reaching back to grab her leg. She would have jogged to a stop, except that both legs chose that exact moment to go suddenly, completely numb.

Momentum carried Judy into her next step even as she crumpled, falling face-first down onto the not-so-soft dirt path. The impact punched the air from her lungs and dirt puffed out and away from her mouth. Her eyes rolled in panic; they were the only things that she could still move as she gasped. She would have screamed, except that, as she lay there on the ground--the whole of her world began shrinking into a sea of stark blackness. As it crept in around her peripheral edges, the bushes ahead of her rustled, parted, and a very large, rather Neanderthalish man stepped out to look at her.

It wasn’t Mr. Orange Suit, she thought. But that was the last coherent one she had before the darkness claimed her completely.

* * * * *

Judy woke up vomiting. The nasty bile filled her mouth and choked her throat, burning her esophagus. Lying on her back, she tried to roll onto her side but couldn’t move. It spewed from her lips when she coughed instead and, unable to clear her mouth, she breathed it back in with her very next gasp for air.

She panicked, vomited again, and fought to roll sideways. So impossibly heavy, her limbs lifted by the barest half of an inch before exhaustion overwhelmed her and she collapsed again, choking on hot, burning bile.

Lights went on all around her, and the cold, hard floor she thought she was lying on suddenly moved. It slid backwards, rolling her out of the coffin-like metal box she’d awakened in and into a painfully bright room. Her eyes snapped shut, and her whole body convulsed as she threw up all over again.

Hands quickly heaved her over onto her side, and a thin suction tube thrust itself all the way back into her throat. Judy gagged on it, her stomach helplessly rebelling again and again, only to have the mess quite efficiently sucked away. She heaved until there was nothing left inside her to cast out, and the thin tube took it all, clearing out her burning throat until she could breathe once more.

The tube removed itself and a warm wet cloth wiped across her face, washing her from her hair to her chin to her breasts with a gentleness that seemed almost loving. A soft and crooning voice comforted her as she was washed, the melody low and masculine, sung in words she 4

simply could not understand.

Judy struggled to peel her heavy eyelids apart. She struggled even harder just to get them focused, but the hand she saw wielding that warm washcloth made no sense to her. Three fingers and a thumb, each digit ending in a sharp, claw-like nail. She blinked, barely managing to follow that hand as it withdrew a short distance to the water basin resting at her hip. The cloth was rinsed, then the malformed hand calmly wiped her down again.

That strange hand should have bothered her more than it did, but right now Judy felt too heavy to care. Unable to move her arms or her legs, unable even to raise her own head, she let her eyes drift closed again and she sank willingly back into the waiting darkness.

* * * * *

Someone was crying.

It took a concentrated effort to claw her way back up out of the black enough to open her heavy-lidded eyes. The lights above her head were oblong blurs. She felt cold and heavy and so completely exhausted that she could easily have just closed her eyes and slept for the next hundred years.

And it wasn’t just one person crying; it was several. Mostly women, the pitch of their voices out of sync with one another. Somewhere, a man was shouting and beating on something metallic. The pounding matched the pounding in her head, and her stomach rolled queasily as she winced.

Please be quiet, she wanted to ask, but what crawled up out of her throat was only the vaguest of croaks. She tried to raise her heavy head, but managed it only far enough to focus on the wires and diodes connecting her naked body to the machine of blinking lights on her left.

Oh. Okay. She was in a hospital. Her head dropped weakly back onto the table, and for a brief moment, everything seemed to make sense.

The last thing she remembered was jogging in the park. Had she left it? Had she been hit by a car?

A whisper of movement entered the room and Judy once more struggled to raise the impossible, unbelievable weight of her head, to peel open her eyes and maybe even ask for something to drink if only she could somehow manage to get her dry mouth to cooperate. But she never got that far. What she saw collapsed her back onto the table beneath her. Not only was she naked, but the male nurse making his way towards her from halfway across the sterile, morgue-like room was absolutely the largest man she’d ever seen in her life.

This wasn’t right.

Judy mewed, that frail shadow of what should have been a horrified scream rising up like the vomit that was climbing the back of her throat again.

The giant of a nurse stopped beside her. He hummed, a low and soothing sound as he touched her leg. His hand caressed a three-fingered trail up from her knee to her thigh, traversing her hip until it came to rest lightly on her belly. The minute sharpness of his claw-like nails pricked the soft skin just above her pubis as he caressed a gentle, invisible circle there. His eyes beneath that heavy Neanderthal brow stayed with hers, hardly blinking, never wavering, and his hand never left her skin.

5

Judy mewed again, twitching under his loverly caresses, the whole room spinning with the effort it took just to try sitting up. In the end, all she managed was to lie there panting while his other hand reached up to stroke stray copper wisps of hair back from her face. The pitch of her mews rose into a single, shrill gasp, the sound lost among the weeping and crying of every other unseen captive in the room, and still the giant only hummed at her, stroking her hair with one hand and shifting the other down between her slightly splayed and impossibly heavy legs.

Her lead-filled body barely moved beyond the twitch of one foot and the flex of her right arm as he stroked her, combing down through the copper-red curls to part the folds of her sex. The prick of his claw-like nails against flesh so sensitive sent shivers racing through her. She groaned and he hummed, a soothing lull-a-bye sound while his fingers explored the quivering layers of her vagina, tracing the puffed outer folds until he had found the thin and sensitive inner ones. The tip of one finger grazed her clitoris as it slipped unhindered inside of her.

No! Every fiber inside her wanted to scream it, but only the barest sound escaped her trembling lips.

The giant hissed, a gargling, strangling comforting sound. If she didn’t know any better, she’d have thought he was shushing her. Shushing and stroking her with his fingers, both combing through her hair and smoothing down the curve of her cheek as he leaned down to press the softest kiss upon her brow. Fingers between her legs dipped into the moisture there, spreading slickness up and down along the folds of her sex.

A sharp command snapped out from somewhere beyond her field of vision jerked the huge man off her. He snatched his hands from her skin, and Judy was suddenly left completely alone.

Bereft.

Unable to move her head to see what was moving around her, or to lift her hand to wipe away the single tear that slipped from the corner of her eyes, tracking silently down her cheek to be absorb by the tangles of her hair.