The Shapeshifter Chronicles Read online

  “It’s to keep you safe in case you have a negative reaction,” Gretchen added, failing to soften Dr. Jupiter’s own answer with her own. She then pulled a rubber tube around my arm and drew a vial of blood.

  “What is this, Doc?” I said, being so used to blood draws that the needle itself didn’t bother me. He ignored my question entirely.

  “What are you waiting for?” Dr. Jupiter said at me, yet not to me. He picked up a scope and started looking all over my face, my chest, my arms. For what, I didn’t know.

  “Tell me, number five, have you ever had pets?”

  “Name’s Trent, Doc. I had a cat.”

  “Tell me about your cat,” he said.

  “His name was Tony. Black and white tabby. He was at one of the foster homes. Only lived there a year, but Tony sat on my feet and purred from the first night I was there until I left. Had a heck of a time fallin’ asleep without him after I moved.”

  Dr. Jupiter began dictating.

  “No signs of activation or conversion. Subject describes emotional detail of feline encounter with no effect. Will attempt direct influence to prompt activation through a series of stimuli. We will begin with auditory stimulation.” Gretchen scribbled his thoughts in my folder.

  The doctor stood up stiffly and walked to a stool sitting by a computer. The nurse took my arm and led me to that ominous steel door, and her touch startled me. In the six months I’d been at the facility, Gretchen had been all business, which made it all the more surprising when she gave me a hug. She whispered in my ear, “Don’t forget who you are.” It was so unexpected I didn’t fully process what she had said until I was on the other side of the door, in a reinforced room. The concrete walls and steel ceiling wasn’t the strangest part, either. As the lights warmed up in the room, I could see it was full of fake trees, ropes, and what looked like a fresh bunch of bananas.

  I went to the window, about to yell my questions to Gretchen when the assault began. Think of the loudest concert you’ve ever been to. Now imagine your seat was directly in front of a speaker at that concert. Also, you decide to go ahead and put your ear next to that speaker. That’s the volume of the noise that assaulted me, only it wasn’t music or static. It was gorillas. Gorillas talking, arguing, fighting, and doing whatever it was gorillas do. I pushed my hands against my ears, but to no avail.

  Then the hunger began. And the hunger was worse than the pain my ears were enduring. I ran to the bananas, the only food in sight, and began shoving them, peels and all, down my throat as fast as I could. I’d gone through at least two dozen when a chute opened from a higher wall and more fruit poured into a large bowl set into the wall. I had to climb for my next meal. But the incessant noise was unrelenting—I could hear distinctly a dominant male challenging me in the audio feed. I had to keep reminding myself it was just a recording. I reached high to grab at a manufactured branch for the climb to the food, and my forearm skin tore so violently I could hear it rip.

  I pulled my arm back to hold it together only to find my skin had grown back gray and thick, around a muscle more massive than I’d ever had. Between the hunger, the noise, and the pain, I screamed with a guttural agony that echoed off the walls and threatened to bend them to my will. With my new arm, I pulled myself up to the fruit bowl in two easy swings and ate between the pain as each of my extremities ripped apart and healed again. The last thing that changed was my head, but even as I felt my skull breaking, I knew there was a male challenging me and that keeping my position in the herd was the utmost priority. I swung around the room until I was satisfied the male was not in the room with me. I stood in front of the window and beat my chest in warning, then beat the glass, adding lines to the already damaged pane.

  The noise stopped and I paced the room, trying to figure out how I had gotten there. And how I would get out.

  “Number five, can you understand me?” the doctor said from behind the glass. I had a vague idea of what he meant but it was inconsequential to my own problems: how to get out, or at least how to get more food. Where to rest if I was tired. How to keep from being ambushed by the male that I’d heard earlier. I wandered off from the window.

  “Number five, if you climb up to the bowl, I will allow more food to be passed into it.”

  I didn’t acknowledge the demand, but I did obey, finding myself at the bowl quickly. The food came quickly as well.

  “Number five, if you do not clap six times, I will turn the noise back on.”

  I grunted loudly at the threat. Then I clapped, concentrating as I counted. One, two, three, four, five, six.

  “Very good, number five. You may return to being a human now.”

  The words seemed strange to me, but burned my soul. With the room calm and the hunger gone, I perseverated on the idea of being something other than the animal I was. My memories cascaded on top of each other until I was so lost in thought that I lost my grip and fell to the floor. I caught myself with my massive new muscles, but as I considered those arms, they started constricting, tightening around my bone like a vice. I grunted in pain and then I began vomiting, shedding, sweating, and… let's just say I was excreting in ways you don’t even know are possible.

  When the agony finally stopped, I was exhausted, prone, and staring at the floor. Gretchen was in the room with a towel and supported me all the way back to the lab. She tried to clean me up, but I was a putrid mess.

  “Excellent!” It was the first emotion Dr. Jupiter had shown. “First successful conversion and reconversion trial.”

  I managed to gasp out a question. “First?”

  Gretchen patted my hair dry with a clean towel. “He means he’s glad you're you again.”

  “Gretchen, leave number five alone and take notes.” She dutifully put down the towel and picked up my folder.

  “Subject appears to have successfully morphed into species Gorilla beringei graueri without becoming disabled or deceased by the disfigurement. Subject showed ability to follow simple commands and maintained basic knowledge learned before conversion. Subject was able to convert back to Homo sapiens by his own volition. Will continue with other subjects to replicate results.”

  I slept for two days.

  Everyone had a turn. All twelve of us survived. Then the doctor left and it was back to spending all our time doing nothing again for months. One of us, Rufus, cracked. He said it wasn’t natural, that God would punish the world for what we had done. He left in a padded wagon.

  What do a bunch of military people do in a situation like we were in? We speculate.

  “Anyone figure out what the U.S. government is going to do with an ape army yet?” I asked.

  Jerry was a thin teenager who was mostly bald but shaved his head every day to give the appearance he was bald by choice. He answered me first. “Yeah, gorillas are stronger and weigh, what, a ton? Imagine going hand-to-hand with one. Ya wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Robin was the thinker. I was never sure why he was picked for this project. “When’s the last time there was hand-to-hand combat, Jerry? It’s not for that. And they only weigh three to four hundred pounds.”

  “Maybe it’s for a medical application.” Diego was our team’s Pollyanna. “I mean, if they can make our bodies make changes like this, they can make a diseased dude well again, right? Or maybe grow back a lost limb?”

  “I wish that were it, but they wouldn’t have done the testing on us, would they? They’d go grab a bunch of injured guys,” Robin answered.

  “Then tell us, O Great One, what do you think we’re doing here?” Jerry asked.

  “Covert ops,” Robin replied.

  I scoffed. “Nah, dude, apes ain’t covert.”

  “I’m serious. If they can make us gorillas, they are probably working on making us other animals. Imagine putting a unit at a compound as an animal that the enemy sees every day. Once inside, although our brains may be scrambled, we can do simple things like put a surveillance device somewhere, or we can change back into humans and do a
complicated mission.”

  “That wouldn’t work,” Jerry said. “I don’t care where you are from, you ain’t letting a gorilla near you.”

  “Other animals, Jerry,” Robin argued back. “You can’t shoot every dog, cat, and bird you see outside your base. You’d end up insane trying to protect yourself from wildlife, if you even knew about this program, and chances are you wouldn’t know.”

  Turns out Robin was right. We started pairing up in the room we started calling the Changing Room. I’ll be honest, as gorillas we fought each other a lot before the little part of us that remained human pieced together we were friendlies. After that, we could accomplish basic logic tasks together. Eventually, we were placed in larger groups. It took months to perfect, but we managed some complicated maneuvers as a unit. That’s when Dr. Jupiter finally graced us with a return trip.

  “They are successfully working together as a team,” Gretchen said as we stood for inspection. As humans.

  “Good,” Dr. Jupiter said while he inspected the tears and scars we’d grown used to over the past year. “What about the munitions task?”

  “They are able to move the components of a rifle and successfully assemble it while still in changed form,” the nurse reported.

  “And they can hit a target?” he asked.

  “That was not part of the mission training detail,” Gretchen said.

  The doctor turned to the nurse, keeping his ever-straight posture. “You should have expected this is what we were working toward. There are other projects, you know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One of the projects is showing promise.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is not the one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I caught her eye and widened mine in sympathy. I had not been dismissed, so I risked no more than that.

  “Take them to the lab and let them try a target.”

  “Sir, we need to work up to that,” Gretchen said. “I formally request three months to—”

  “Request denied. I am this close to closing down Project Twelve. We have a much more interesting subject to study now. This” —he waved his hand at all of us— “is just a distraction. Convince me otherwise. Take them to the lab.”

  If there’s one thing us military types know how to do, it’s follow orders. We went to the lab, and our flesh ripped and our muscles grew while we stuffed our faces with calories and Vicodin to help lessen the pain of transition. The rifle was in pieces, but our animal minds were well trained on how to put it together. After that, the doctor started calling on the speaker. “Now shoot the bowl on the high wall.”

  Somewhere in our heads, our human selves were trying to push through, to help us understand the commands, to help us remember how to fire a gun, what this metal stick was for. Robin the Brain, of course, was the first to come through. Better human brains turn into better monkey brains, I suppose. He held the gun against his shoulder, aimed for the bowl on the wall, and placed a shot through an apple peeking out the top.

  “Excellent.” The doctor was pleased.

  A week later, we found ourselves in a South American rainforest, casually running at twenty miles an hour toward a drug lord’s stronghold. When we got to the outskirts, we assembled our gun, and Robin was able to place a bullet between the eyes of a man who had been terrorizing the locals for years. It was an unofficial mission, but it was proof our little unit was useful, and after all I’d been through in my life, it was nice to be a part of something good.

  That’s the story I like to tell myself, because then all the agony and experiments would have had meaning.

  But it’s not the truth.

  We never went to South America, never had a mission at all. When we were sent into the Changing Room to fire the gun, Robin was the first to remember how a gun worked, or at least remember that he was supposed to pull the trigger. The bullet didn’t go through the apple, though. He remembered the trigger, but not what would happen when it fired. With a bang, Robin was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

  After we transitioned back to our human selves, we could hardly believe what had happened. The exhaustion of the conversion kept us from questioning the doctor when he said he wanted to run another test. He took Jerry and put him back in the room. A new audio file was played through the sound system. We couldn't hear it, but soon enough we saw Jerry leaching all his fluids and other unpleasant things as he shrank smaller and smaller. When the ordeal was over, we were looking at an animal no bigger than my head.

  “A crow,” I said.

  “Yes. A bird is much more useful than a gorilla, don’t you think?” The doctor never turned to address me directly.

  “Mr. Windrom, you may return to being a human now.”

  Jerry flew to a higher branch in the room and looked around.

  “Mr. Windrom, you may return to being a human now.”

  Jerry didn’t even cock his head in curiosity at the request. The doctor pulled open the steel door and demanded the bird come down to see him. It never happened. Dr. Jupiter left the room with a furrowed brow. “This project is becoming more and more of a disaster. I’m shutting it down.”

  “Sir,” Gretchen said, “I’m sure given some time—”

  “I’m shutting it down. That’s final. Project 32, Gretchen. There’s a man out there with real superpowers to study and we’re playing around with incompetent birds.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I went into the military to be a part of something after being abandoned and here I was being abandoned again. I don’t even know what word describes my life. Unfortunate? Ironic? Tragic?

  Back during World War II, there was a U.S. military program using bats to carry small bombs into hard to reach places before exploding. I saw a documentary on TV about the bat bombs one time. The idea was that a few thousand fires would start up around a target city at the same time. It was an ingenious plan and would have wreaked havoc had it ever been used. You might already know why the program was never used in the war—the atomic bomb. The epitome of destruction on a scale hitherto unthinkable came along, and the bat bombs were nothing in comparison. The program was abandoned.

  I was now a bat. Something better had come along for the doctor to study, so my team and I were abandoned. We were sworn to secrecy, given a pension, and released into society, mutilated skin, mental scars, and all. Trust me when I say none of us ever went near a zoo and not just because it was on the agreements we signed on the way out. But here’s what I realized: back when I saw that documentary about the bat bombs, they never said what happened to the bats. Obviously the bats were destined to die in the program had it been successful, so why would the military be motivated to treat them humanely after the program was cancelled? Why would they be motivated to treat me any better?

  My pension was a pittance and my scars made me a monster. I hid inside a rental mobile home, but I wasn’t alone. I took Jerry with me. Me, a nobody whose only skill was changing into a gorilla, and a crow who used to be a man. We lived in something one step above a cardboard box. If there’s a joke to be made, I don’t know what it would be.

  I think back to that injection and I think of it as a moment that irrevocably defined the rest of my life. But it wasn’t the end. It took a year after leaving the military for my phone to ring. To be honest, I thought it was a wrong number. No one called for me and certainly no one called for Jerry. I let the phone ring until my head hurt before I answered.

  “This is Colonel Hindall. We have a breach of security and need to put you on active duty.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “It’s not a request, son,” the colonel said.

  “Look at my file and you’ll know you have no right. None. To ask me to do anything ever again,” I told him.

  “What I know is I have one of you freaks out there blabbing about DRJ Project 12 and I’m told he could be a handful to contain. You know him, and you get to retrieve him for us.”


  “Not interested. Ask someone else.”

  “You’re the only one left.” No affect, just a statement. I love the military brass.

  “What do you mean, I’m the only one left?” I asked.

  “That’s classified.”

  “Of course it is.”

  I’ll spare you the threats that were made to get me to comply. I heaped bird food on the table and opened a window before I left. When I showed up for duty without my uniform, wrapped head to toe to cover all my scars, no one said anything. I was handed a duffel bag and put on a cargo plane headed for Africa. On the plane, I was given headphones and directed to a computer station.

  My assignment was simple enough. Turns out Diego went to Africa and volunteered at a clinic. At least he adjusted to the outside better than I did. The information contained a static-filled audio clip.

  “But what of my soul?” It was Diego.

  “Your soul was forfeit the first time you became a monster.” This voice was older, more strained.

  “But my work here, it has to mean something, Father,” Diego was pleading.

  “Good works don’t earn you a soul. It’s not a prize to be won.” The old man followed up with a scream. At first I thought he’d been stabbed. Then I worked out that Diego was in confession while the priest was dying. A deathbed confession like none other.

  I hit the heavy glass screen in frustration. I was being asked to contain an information leak that happened during a confession to a dying priest. If the military had just left Diego alone, their precious information would never get out. After the outburst, I continued reading through the mission, and that’s when I understood why they wanted me. I was to force Diego to change, a one-way conversion that would keep him quiet. They wanted me because I could get close to him, and if successful, would keep the failures of Project Twelve from being disclosed to anyone new.

  A day later, I was face to face with the man I was to capture.

  “Diego.” I unwrapped my face and arms. He was dressed in a loose shirt and shorts, his disfigurements out for the world to see.

  We were in a room. Alone. His own cloth-walled tent of a home. Several men with guns were waiting outside for good measure. They thought I was only there to retrieve a bird. Good soldiers following orders even if they didn’t make sense.