Free Lunch

                            by Sam Hanken

   Branches whipped her body from all sides as she fled deeper into the 
forest, the needles and leaves catching at her muddied orange fur. Her 
breath came in hissing pants, her canine teeth bared instinctively and 
unconsciously. She had left off with her fierce growls in favor of her 
breath’s relative stealth and silence. Yellow-green tiger eyes scanned the 
dark of the forest ahead, making sure they hadn’t anticipated her moves. 
No nets. No sign of tranquilizer guns, or she’d already be down. Her tail 
lashed angrily behind her, instincts urging her onward. 
She felt the ground underneath her bare claws give, heard a sharp crack 
from her lower calf. The ground ahead rose up to meet her, cracking her 
teeth painfully together as her chin hit. Damp mosses and the musty scent 
of leafy decay assaulted her sensitive sense of smell. With a hard yank and 
a fiercely determined growl, her leg came up out of the ground, bent to the 
left at a visibly unnatural angle.
   She still had to run. 
   She knew what she had to do.
   Grabbing at the dangling limb, she twisted it back into position with a 
sickening snap. She let loose an unearthly yowl as she screamed in pain, 
black dots of nausea swimming up from her stomach to dance in her vision. 
It threatened to overwhelm. She mewled as she felt herself siding into the 
dark, "Please, no.. I can’t.."

                            *     *     *

   Rowan sat nervously in the starkly white waiting room, idly crumpling 
the medical history records balanced on her knee. Her legs crossed, one 
ankle crushing the file over her knee, her fingers were busily plaiting 
the front of her burgundy hair. Her hazel-green eyes surveyed the clock 
and she sighed. Anything to kill time and nerves. She took a moment to 
sign the last of her release forms, scribbling 1/31/98 in all the 
remaining date blanks.
   "Rowan Connor?"
   She jumped up, spilling her records all over the floor. With a bright 
grin and a playful salute, she ignored the mess and responded. "Present."
   The voice belonged to a seemingly sexless blonde intern in coke-bottle 
glasses and a white lab coat, complete with clipboard and pocket full of 
pens. "Follow me."
   Rowan wordlessly grabbed up all her paperwork, following the intern. She 
barely kept an eye on the institutional white halls as she reshuffled her 
files, looking up often enough to track the intern’s retreating back.
   She remembered the strange ad in the paper last week for this job. At 
first, she’d thought it was a joke. ‘Volunteers with a sense of adventure 
and pioneering spirit wanted. Accepted personnel are guaranteed housing 
and compensation in excess of $45 per hour.’ A joke perhaps, but one that 
was hard to ignore. Below that in the fine print, she’d noticed ‘Full 
medical disclosure required.’ Not that it mattered, since she’d never had 
worse than a cold in her life. Unemployed and with bills to pay, she needed 
this sort of job, if it were real. Badly. Whatever it was. So she called 
the number.
   And ended up here. 
   The blonde intern ushered her inside a room with what looked like a 
dentist’s chair and a large mirror set in one wall. Another intern sat in 
a chair across from the dentist’s, this one male and dark haired. He 
hardly looked up from his clipboard as he motioned for her to take the 
seat.
   "Your files, please."
   The files changed hands, with Rowan flashing a coy smile in hope of a 
response. Nothing. The room was dead silent, except for the scratch of pen 
recording name, birthplace and date on paper.
   "I need to ask you some questions." His voice was monotone, as if he’d 
done this a thousand times already. Perhaps he had.
   "Go right ahead." She shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable. 
There was something disturbing about dentist chairs, not unlike medieval 
torture devices.
   "Do you swear these files are correct?"
   "Yes." She had made sure her doctor filled it out to the letter.
   "Any allergies?"
   "None." Dust, but dust made everyone sneeze.
   "Have you recently engaged in sexual intercourse?"
   Rowan bristled inwardly at the question. "Define recently."
   The intern didn’t bat an eye. "Within the past twelve weeks."
   She eyed him suspiciously, watching for some reaction. "No." 
   He didn’t react except to mark on the clipboard. "Any phobias?" 
   She thought of syringes, and then the paycheck. "None." 
   He nodded and made a last check mark, handing the papers over. "Please 
sign on the dotted line, Miss Connor."
   Rowan scribbled on the line, a nagging little sense tickling the back 
of her mind. Pushing it away, she handed over the signed forms with a 
flourish and a forced smile. "When do I start?" 
   The intern didn’t bother to return it, blank as ever. "Right now."

   Rowan was subjected to mental and physical tests for the next week, 
along with many other people. Drug tests, blood work-ups, urine and stool 
samples. Psychological tests. From dawn until late into the night, they 
were tested, prodded, poked, and sleep-deprived.
   It was unnerving how they were all kept more or less separate -- Distant 
from each other. Rowan tried, but couldn’t remember a single name apart 
from her own. 
   It was policy, the nameless interns told her. Not even the staff knew 
everyone, who they worked for. She had best get used to it. 
   Finally, on the seventh of February, there were maybe fifty of them 
left. 

                            *     *     *

   The rumble of a wheeled table under her, a strange sort of half-vertigo 
waking her up. She felt groggy, almost drugged, and uncertain if anything 
was real. She half-heard voices, and struggled to focus on them.
   "... ... ..doing it?"
   A blare of too-bright, too-white light. She felt like she was floating. 
Two dark figures against the light, blocking her from it.
   "...knows why ... want to ... freaks. Shame -- ... real looker..."
   She was given injections. Rowan cringed inwardly behind her shut eyes, 
body not responding.
   She was uneasy. She didn’t know why. 
   Artificial sleep took her again.

                            *     *     *

   Nothing more was mentioned about the strangeness that surrounded the 
injections. No one else in the group even seemed to remember them.
   Rowan began to think she’d imagined the whole thing, let her fears rule 
her. 
   That is, until some of those in the experiment started getting low-grade 
fevers. Along with the slight fever, she watched some of the others 
scratching at their arms, their face -- She knew what they meant. Her own 
skin felt... Wrong. Like something was being changed.
   She was told it was all in her head, and ushered to her new housing. 
The old one had been like an apartment: She had shared it with one of the 
girls who washed out. The new housing was a single, stark room -- 
Institutional again, more like a hospital room than actual housing. White 
walls, no windows save the one at face level in the door. No locks on the 
door handle.
   No one answered her questions about the reasons behind the move, either 
refusing or just giving her the same, blank-eyed stare she had seen from 
the beginning. 
 
                            *     *     *

   Half-awakened in the night, she thought she heard footsteps moving down 
the halls. The door opened, a sliver of light arcing through the darkness 
of her room. Groggy, she saw the dark shapes of people looming towards her: 
some sort of fluid-filled bag on a pole being wheeled in, though it looked 
much larger than the standard IV bag.
   She tried to raise her hands to keep the dark shapes away, and found she
was paralyzed. Her arms, her neck: none of it moved. She didn’t even feel 
it as one of the shapes grabbed her arm roughly, banding it and holding it 
out for the other. "Here... We need to hook up all these feed bags before 
morning. Be quick."
   ‘A dream,’ she decided as the other plunged an IV needle painlessly into 
her arm. ‘I am having a dream...’
   One took a syringe and fed its contents into the tube. "This should hold 
‘til the sedative inside starts working."
   Darkness took her again.

                            *     *     *

   She opened her eyes, and the world felt different. Her head was fuzzy, 
like she’d either come off a week-long bender or she’d slept too long. 
Perhaps both. Closing her eyes, she said, "'Luh.. H-h'llo?..." No answer. 
It felt difficult to talk. Frowning slightly, she realized must have been 
asleep a long time... Her voice felt raw and sounded deeper, raspier than 
she remembered. A brief rest, and then she tried to bring a hand up to rub 
her aching head -- And found she couldn’t. Restrained! 
   Her eyes snapped open and she tried to sit up, pulling at the straps 
across her arms, her hips, her legs. The strap across her chest was loose 
enough to allow her a look at herself, the room. The room was an 
institutionally white walled one, with a large, probably one-way mirror in 
the far wall.
   Her body was changed. Blinking in shock, she took her appearance in. It 
didn’t register -- No one just wakes up in some other body. But here it 
was, white fur covering her from probably chin to mid-thigh in a giant 
patch, the rest a burnt shade of orange and dark brown stripes. And she 
screamed.
   The high, feral shriek brought some doctor running in as she tried to 
tear loose of her restraints. "Shhh, shhh, quiet -- Calm, please, calm. 
Quiet down, and I’ll be happy to explain myself..." 
   She looked at the pudgy, balding doctor and growled, low in the back of 
her throat. She settled down a little, her tail (tail?) twitching in 
agitation. She could smell his unease like a cheap cologne.
   His smile was a little forced. Her growl had unnerved him. "Well. 
Eh-heh. My name is Dr. Speckman, and you’re here at this facility because 
you volunteered for our program. Or, err, perhaps I should say, your 
mother did."
   She tried to sit up again, snarling. "Buhll-sht." She was actually 
pleased at the rumbling growl that was her voice, now: It made the now 
difficult word so much more a threat.
   "Ahem. Eh-heh, no. I’m afraid not. You are not who you remember. You, 
ah, technically are no longer..." He peered at a chart on the wall, "Rowan 
Connor. You are a clone taken from one of her eggs. We, ah, engineered 
you."
   She laughed at him, a low, rumbling growl. He expected her to believe 
this? She knew clones take time to grow. "I  dohn’t ‘ink sho..." She flexed 
her clawed fingers at him, and he paled slightly under his frown. Looks 
like she’d scored a point. 
   "Err, yes. Well. If you mean what I think you do, in a normal facility, 
you’d be right. Under normal circumstances, clones take time... And how 
did you begin speaking? Eh-heh. You certainly are one in a hundred, Miss. 
Hrm." He scribbled a hurried note on the chart. He gave her a very thin, 
forced smile.
   She had a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t supposed to remember. A wrench 
had been thrown into the works. She smiled sweetly and tried to make her 
rumble match, struggling with the now-alien words. "You mayh’d me. ‘ow?"
   He looked very nervous, even if she was restrained. "Let’s save that 
for my next visit, shall we?" He crossed to the door near the mirror and 
knocked, and the knobless door was opened. 
   A tall, slender guy in labcoat came in and left the door open. As he 
came closer, she realized he was carrying a very large syringe. Her eyes 
widened and started to shrink away from him.
   The guy laughed softly, almost maliciously. "Kitty’s afraid of needles, 
hm?" He drew closer, taunting her.
   She turned her ears back and hissed at him, bearing her teeth. 
"Uhnshtr’p me. Shee whosh ‘fray’d..."
   He just laughed again and plunged the needle into her left arm. 
   She hissed again and hit the back of his head with her tail. The now-
empty needle flew out of his hands and shattered against the floor under 
her chart.
   He rubbed the back of his head and narrowed his eyes at her. "Bitch."
   She tried to laugh at him, but felt the world begin to black out again.

                            *     *     *

   Her eyes fluttered, but she kept them closed. listening. There were no 
other scents in the room, but faintly: Talking. She held her breath, 
concentrating on the sounds. 
   "...strange with ... Connor... clone..." Though muffled, it was Dr. 
Speckman.
   Almost unconsciously, she bared her fangs. She felt like she was going 
to scream. Talk louder, she shrieked mentally. Talk so I can hear you! 
She didn’t know the second voice.
   "...don’t need ... know why. Your part ... phase ... inconsequential."
   "...! Inconsequential!" That really riled Dr. Speckman. It made her 
almost smile -- Someone obviously had less of an opinion of Dr. Speckman’s 
abilities than he did himself. She listened to the doctor sputter further. 
"... Must know more to ... project..."
   The good doctor was calming down again, it seemed, though she could 
still catch the heat of his words.
   "... in time. Patience." The second voice was soothing, if still loud 
enough to be authoritative. 
   The click of her door latch shocked her into stillness, holding her 
breath and forcing a feigned sleep. A pair of worn shoes paced calmly 
away, while Dr. Speckman’s loud, frustrated breathing came through the 
barely open door.
   "Ms. Connor -- You can quit pretending to be asleep now."
   Rowan winced inwardly, a snarl curling her lips and baring her fangs. 
She still tried to keep her breathing slow and quiet.
   Dr. Speckman sighed, obviously at the end of his patience today. "We 
have machines monitoring your every vital sign, down to the output of the 
IV that feeds you. Come now. Sit up, as we need to talk."
   She grudgingly sat up as much as the arm and leg restraints allowed, 
glaring balefully at the pudgy doctor. "What you want now?" She licked at 
her fangs, running her tongue along the hard palate in her mouth: She was 
getting more used to talking now, but hated the reduction to broken and 
primitive English. 
   He pulled out her records again, the file being much thicker than she 
remembered. "As you probably do not know, we have been keeping you under 
heavy sedation and feeding you intravenously for near two months now. 
Today’s date is April 8th, 1998." He paused, leafing through the file: it 
was probably more to give this time to sink in.
   It didn’t take long. Rowan just stared as she grappled with this. Two 
months? She had lost two months of her life? She let herself lean back on 
her pillow, too stunned to do anything but listen.
   "Until this point, it had been decided to list all of you as clones -- 
Biologically engineered freaks, if you will. Most of the staff still 
considers this to be true. I, however, have seen too much to believe that."
   Rowan turned her head to eye him, nostrils flaring. He didn’t smell 
anxious enough to by lying or playing with her. Satisfied with that much, 
she narrowed her feline eyes at him, cocking one ear to listen. "Go on."
   "I have been working with a brilliant geneticist and virologist on you 
‘clones’ for longer than the first experiments. You and seven others, Ms. 
Connor, are our first successes -- Of three trials." Dr. Speckman paused, 
swallowing. He looked like something distasteful was sitting on his tongue. 
   "There are too many unanswered questions when it comes to you ‘clones’ 
-- Where the original donors are, for instance, and how you achieved 
maturity in two to three months and show no sign of physical decline: And 
I can’t readily explain these theories myself. It seems that whatever you 
are, it is not a clone: Looking at the DNA samples we’ve taken from all of 
our subjects, it appears you have been infected with a kind of virus. This 
wouldn’t be a problem for you at all anymore, since your immune and other 
bodily systems are essentially hyperactive. However, people on the staff 
have begun... Changing."
   "Change? To?" Rowan leaned forward, ears turned inward curiously. 
   He coughed softly and took off his glasses, cleaning them on the corner 
of his labcoat. "That’s the problem: There doesn’t seem to be one specific 
change across the board. But those changing are obviously no longer human."