Pets 2: Pani's Story (2 page)

Almost human, but not quite, another giant leaned over hers, taking the place of the first.

This one had flecks of silver streaking through his neatly brushed hair and he was very careful of his claws as he touched each of her eyelids in turn, pulling them gently back as he studied her pupils. He glanced briefly at the monitor’s glowing display, then back down at her when a softly keening sob escaped her lips.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be real!

Except that every sense she had was screaming otherwise. She could hear the misery in the forlorn wails that cried out all around her now, both men and women pleading for release or help. Her heavy body began to shake, which the giant above her noted. He left her side, reappearing only a few seconds later with a doll in one hand and something that looked suspiciously like a bright yellow pacifier in the other. What he spoke to her, Judy barely recognized as words. Still, he laid the doll upon her chest, nestling it between her breasts before pinning it into place there with her own leaden right arm.

When she mewed again, a sickly protest that held barely any sound, he brought the pacifier to her lips. She simply hadn’t the strength to turn her head away. She could even close her mouth against the soft rubber-like tip that gently worked her teeth apart until the smooth plastic was pressed to her lips and the nipple filled her mouth.

6

He rolled her onto her side towards him, and for the first time Judy caught glimpses of her surroundings around the hips of the man who was slowly and methodically filling a glass syringe with transparent liquid. The room was made of dark metal, lined on both sides by cages stacked one upon the other, from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. Narrow and squat, each housed a single human being lying flat on his or her back, all of them just as naked as she was.

Judy blinked, and then again, slowly re-focusing her gaze until she could see past cages and beyond the twin seats where two more giants sat pressing buttons on a wide display of electronic monitors and dials, beyond the lens of a massive observation window, all Judy could see were stars. Like the headlights of hundreds upon hundreds of on-coming cars, faster than she could count, they streaked past the window and disappeared from sight.

Her trembling intensified; her stomach began to cramp. The streaking of the stars began to blur, the wails of her fellow captives grew into deafening octaves. Shivering in the cold of the sterile metal room, Judy barely felt it when the needle pricked her hip and the syringe emptied into her.

She was dreaming, she thought, as the darkness again began to close in on her. She had to be dreaming because this—her eyes overflowed with tears—this was the worst of all possible nightmares.

7

Judy dreamt of her mother, bathing her face with a warm wet cloth, rubbing her stomach through the sickness and the cramps, folding a soft, stuffed doll into her arms and putting a bright yellow pacifier back into her mouth whenever she tried to spit it out. She wanted to go jogging in the park, but her mother wrapped her in a warm blanket and lifted her up instead. The darkness beckoned; she needed a nap; Mommy knew what was best for her little girl. So Judy sucked on the pacifier and let herself be carried, as if she were small again, small and sleepy, with the darkness coaxing her to close her eyes as she was carried from the cold metal spaceship, down a long ramp and through an open and massive warehouse door.

She dozed until the sudden brightness of ceiling lights disturbed her. A whine escaped around the edges of the pacifier. Turning her face into Mommy’s masculine shoulder, she reached up to wrap an arm around his neck and accidentally dropped her doll. Someone tucked it back into the crook of her arms again and all of Mommy’s friends gathered around her, sighing soft oohs and smiling.

Close your eyes, baby, Mommy whispered. Go back to sleep.

And Judy did, because she was a good girl, and the darkness was calling to her, and good girls always did as they were told when the darkness crawled up over them, all heavy and warm.

Such a good girl.

She certainly tried to be.

Judy paid heed to the sleepy darkness, barely opening her heavy eyes when Mommy laid her down on the floor, covering her with a blanket before walking back out of the otherwise empty, white closet and closing the tall door. The lights overhead dimmed.

That was better. Judy slept again and dreamt of voices in the black: some were crying, some were screaming, some were just talking back and forth though she couldn’t for the life of her make out even one recognizable word. Her stomach cramped; she got sick again and back on came the lights. She squirmed, rolling clumsily from her back to her side as she tried to crawl out of the mess. The door opened and monstrous giants filled her closet. They reached for her, but she reached for Mommy, whose rippling, dreamlike visage kept fading in and out, sometimes appearing the way Judy remembered her mother looking, and sometimes looking just plain hideous—big and masculine, the unfamiliar features of a too-large face seeming more angular and not quite human behind those wide-rimmed glasses and thick black hair.

Mommy sang a lull-a-bye in strange, alien words, and in an even stranger, masculine, rich tenor voice—sleep, baby, sleep—Judy obeyed, giving into the heaviness despite the light and the warm wet washcloth that gently bathed her face and mouth.

She dreamt she went swimming, down in the turtle pond behind her grandpa’s house. Only the water here was warmer than she remembered the pond ever being, and the turtles felt soft as they brushed against her, wiping the smell of sickness away.

Time to come in, Grandpa called. Only when Judy opened her eyes, the man she saw lifting her out of that warm tub of water didn’t look anything like her grandpa. He was big and his hands were both short one finger and dotted with claws.

8

“No...” Judy pushed at him.

Don’t you sass me, girl. Grandpa put the pacifier back into her mouth and rubbed her briskly down with a towel before putting her back in her newly-cleaned and antiseptic-smelling closet.

He covered her with a blanket again before gently brushing and braiding her hair.

Dolly...She raised her head to look just as he tucked it back into her arm. Then the lights grew dim, and Judy slipped back into blackness, too tired now even to dream, except for one short moment when she thought she felt someone take her hand, stroking both her fingers and her hair. This time when she struggled herself to wake, her eyes didn’t feel quite as heavy as before. The darkness and the lethargic weight lifted just a bit, taking away the nice dreams and bringing back the nightmare as she focused on the alien hand that gripped her own.

Two more of these strange, tall people were leaning over her again. One was trying to steal her blanket, slipping his hand beneath the hem as he caressed the length of her from shoulder to waist and up over the rounding curve of her hip.

She tsked. Aliens. Not a one of them knew how to keep his hands to himself.

And where was her nuk? She sucked once, experimentally, but couldn’t feel it in her mouth anymore. He must have stolen that, too.

Her head flopped back on her arm as she drew a breath to protest. A simple ‘Go away!’

would have worked, but what came out sounded more like a mew.

She was a kitten. The need to giggle bubbled up inside her. I’m a kitten, you’re a kitten. In her mind at least, she licked her paw and washed her face while the two giants spoke to one another. The blanket was tucked back in around her, and the men left her cage.

Kitty in a cage...a gilded cage...here puss-puss-puss...

The lights dimmed again, and Judy giggled softly to herself. Left alone, she rolled onto her other side, cradling her doll in her arms and finally found a sleep completely without dreams.

* * * * *

Her muscles stiff and her head aching, Judy reluctantly opened her eyes. Her throat was sore, her mouth felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. She sucked once, trying to make the moisture come, and weakly pushed herself over onto her back. In the process, she slid off the thin round cushion beneath her and flopped over to lie instead on the naked, carpetless floor.

“Mm,” she groaned. Her arms felt funny; she looked down. It took several long seconds before her brain processed the doll that she was hugging to her naked breasts. Where was she?

Where were her clothes? Oh God, had someone slipped her a roofie?

Judy pushed the doll away and then pushed herself up to sit. The floor felt cool beneath her; the comfortable cushion beside her a veritable mountain that she just didn’t have the strength to climb. Reaching for the thin blanket, she pulled it around her like a toga until everything that needed to be was covered once more.

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she then scratched her head and finally, stifling a yawn, began to look around. It took her several bleary-eyed blinks before she realized she had no idea where she was. Like a doll in a mis-sized house, everything was much larger than any adult human would find useful, but maybe that was because she was still sitting on the floor.

She shifted her sore legs, rolling from her hip onto her knees and then, after a brief rest while 9

she waited for the room to stop spinning, Judy pushed herself upright. She staggered on her first step. Thank God for the wall. Otherwise, she’d have fallen right back down again. Facing into the corner, Judy bent with her shoulder against the plaster until she was certain her queasy stomach wasn’t going to jump up into her throat. Then and only then, did she risk pushing herself vertical enough to hazard taking another step.

Papers wrinkled under her feet as she shuffled around to face the room. The furniture was still too big.

Where was she?

“Hello?” she called out, her voice croaking. Her throat felt raw. She needed something to drink. She needed to go to the bathroom, too.

With tiny, unstable steps, she followed the wall around the cushion, trying not to disturb the spread of papers that had been so carefully laid out around her makeshift bed—layered as one would do for a puppy that wasn’t quite housetrained—until she reached the couch. The blanket became a hindrance when she—like a three-year-old struggling to climb onto a grown-up chair—hooked her leg up over the top cushion and heaved herself up. It took some readjusting to get herself covered again, but once she was, Judy collapsed into the crease of the cushions, resting her head against the well-stuffed arm as she tried to wake up.

“Hello?” she croaked again, really not feeling well at all. “Is anybody there?” She moaned.

“I think I need help.”

She didn’t know where she was, she didn’t know where her clothes were, and yet she felt a huge flood of relief when she finally heard the soft tread of approaching footsteps. She closed her eyes with a sigh, whispering, “Thank God.” And when she opened them again, a little louder said, “Hello? I think I’ve been dru—”

She broke off sharply when the giant man came around the corner, exiting the hallway to join her in the living room. She’d never seen anyone so tall in all her life. He was huge. Were she standing, he’d have towered over her by a good three feet and did, she abruptly realized, her jaw dropping in shock, fit this furniture perfectly.

She lifted her head off the arm of the couch, the only movement she could force herself to make as he slowly approached the opposite end of this big (and, all of a sudden, entirely too small) couch. He looked at her, his broadly pronounced brow beetling into a frown of mild disapproval. He pointed at her—Judy stared on his hand, three fingers and a thumb, each digit crowned by a claw, holy shit—and then quite deliberately pointed down at the floor.

“Pani,” he said, his voice deep and low. He snapped his fingers, and Judy felt a sizzle of complete and unadulterated panic jolt through every nerve inside her. When he gestured at her again, ‘get off the couch’ was all over him, but it wasn’t until he took another long step towards her, reaching out with that malformed, three-fingered hand, that she totally lost her mind.

She screamed, scrambling to get up and over the well-padded arm of the couch, knocking a small Picasso of a statue and a lamp off the end table as she fell practically nose-first off the other side and onto the floor. He made a grab to catch her but snagged the blanket instead; Judy had no problem whatsoever leaving it behind.

Naked as the day she was born, she ran back along the wall, screaming non-stop until she had plastered herself into the farthest corner. She dropped and hunkered there, knees drawn up to her 10

chest, her back against the cool paint and her gaze locked on the gigantic man. “Wake up! Gotta wake up now! Wake up right the fuck up right now! Bad dream! Really, really bad dream! Oh shit oh shit oh shit!”

The giant held up his hands, a universally non-threatening gesture, and tried to hunker down too. Then he smiled, his lips twisting back to reveal a mouthful of huge and sharp-looking teeth.

“Oh shit!” Judy screamed again, and when he sidled a half-step closer, she dove out of the corner and scrambled with military commando precision under the nearest overstuffed chair.

The space was just barely big enough to squeeze into, and it protected her not one bit when he squatted down to hook his fingers under one corner and half-lifted, half-tipped the whole chair back.

He looked at her, speaking softly, soothingly almost, as he beckoned for her to come out.

Judy scrambled to get out all right, but at the side farthest from him and dashed into the next nearest corner. She tried to hide behind the window drape, as if he’d forget all about her if only she could hold herself still long enough. In reality, she trembled so hard that she shook the whole curtain and her own rapid, quaky breathing sounded loud enough to wake the dead.

The giant didn’t pursue her. Not that she could hear anyway, and after a long and terrifying silence, she surreptitiously inched her hands up high enough to push at the glass pane behind her. It didn’t budge. Locked. She tipped her head back, but the latch was higher than she could reach.