Missed Bit 3? Check it out here!
Or go ahead and start the story from the beginning!
Fading in and out, Felicia didn’t know how long she had been in the bed. Her ears picked up a flurry of movement around her. Shoes clicked on the hard tile floor. Lab coats swished about in the air. Mumbling voices spoke in hushed tones. Squinting through blurry eyes, she saw what looked like a hawk perched on the bed in front of her. It squawked, and the noise crashed through her brain as a team of nurses and doctors stood around it with clipboards.
She stretched, and her body felt limp, almost rubbery. Before she could look around anymore, she passed out.
Another time she woke up to a lion’s roar, or she dreamt it and her mind was playing tricks on her. There was a doctor standing over her bed and he shone a light into her eyes. Her body melted into the bed and she decided the LSD might still be causing her to see and feel these strange things. She blacked out again.
“We’re going to have to sequester them,” she heard someone say when she came up a third time. “They can’t control their shifts. It’s happening randomly and it’s dangerous. We need to get them contained until we can figure out a treatment. Tell everyone we’re going to quarantine protocol.”
“You’re going to quarantine us,” Felicia said, but her voice was not working. Her words came out only in her head. And somehow, at the same time, she felt smaller—the edge of the bed now feet away from her. The doctors and nurses looked bigger too. Then a tremor echoed through her bones and she stretched, and her body somehow lengthened so that her arms now draped over the edges of the bed. Both she and the medical staff were back to their right sizes.
Testing her voice, she found it worked. “You’re going to quarantine us?”
“Just a minute, dear,” the nurse said. “You just lay back and relax.”
Felicia didn’t want to relax. She couldn’t. Her body was changing again, and the nurse grew bigger. At the same moment, she saw a long needle catch the fluorescent light of the room and immediately tried to move away, but the nurse held her steady and she couldn’t escape. Why did she feel so small? The needle slid into her flesh and she faded away again.
Coming to, she found they had moved her to a bigger bed. Her arms and legs stretched out in every direction. It wasn’t until she looked down and saw fur that she realized why the strange feelings were surging through her every muscle. She had changed. Why her arm was covered in red fur, she could not fathom. But her arm was also much smaller, and a little brown paw with long claws replaced her hand and fingers.
“No,” she mumbled. Moving her mouth to speak, she found her lips stretched and unable to talk with ease as she normally did. Getting out of bed, she fell to the cold floor, twisted and tangled in the bedsheets. Freeing herself by wiggling out of them, she stood up and the world appeared to tower above her. Looking to her feet, she was on four legs instead of her regular two. What the hell was going on? That LSD sure took things to the next level. Moving forward, she found she didn’t know how to coordinate the use of her new legs and tripped over them.
After stumbling on her four furry limbs, she let out a single yelp.
The door opened and a nurse rushed in, looking Felicia up and down. When Felicia looked down at herself again, her arms, legs, and hands had gone back to normal.
“What the hell is going on?” She jumped up in the nude—too preoccupied with her current predicament—and ran into the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry, miss, the shot we gave you,” the nurse said, “it changed you just a little bit.”
“No kidding,” Felicia yelled. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
Stay tuned for Bit 5! Coming Soon!