Chapter 5: As Catherine Sierra Awoke From Uneasy Dreams…

 

When I woke up, I felt better. Way better. I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up, and all of the pain had dissipated from my head, my stomach, my joints, and my everything else for that matter. I opened my eyes to see a soupy peach-colored blur, blinking to clear the sand from them. It didn’t clear. 

I tried lifting my hand to rub whatever this gunk was out of my face, when the real problem became clear. My hand couldn’t move more than an inch or two. As my senses started returning to me, I realized that I was sitting down, encased from head to toe in some sort of soft, leathery material.

Hopefully people will sympathize when I proceeded to freak the hell out. Writhing and pushing and straining, I started pushing against the bindings as best as I could. There was no seam I could feel, and each of my limbs was contained in a separate little pouch. Whatever this stuff was, I’d never heard of it before. Then again, that just about matched the sort of technology I’d seen on the “spectrademons” before I went under. 

Something was different about me. My heart wasn’t beating quite the same tune as it had before, and when I inhaled, my chest didn’t rise and fall. As my sense of touch slowly began to filter in, things were off, especially around my legs, my midriff, and… other areas. 

It took me maybe three or four minutes to get the first tear in the material around me. I stretched my arm as far as it could go until the tip of my finger tore through. Once I had a tiny opening, I was able to claw it open until I had my whole arm free. From there, tearing open the rest of the weird sack thing was as easy as ripping open a paper bag. I fell forward, gasping for breath. Blinking my eyes clear, the image resolved into my bedroom, exactly where I’d fallen asleep. Where the hell had that stuff come from, I thought, just before I made the mistake of looking down. 

What I saw was not me. My hands and arms were thin and slender, and they were… purple. Instead of skin, they were covered in some kind of hard, shiny material, like a shell, with little gaps at each joint in my fingers. My eyes trailed up my arm, the purple color darkening until it turned black at my shoulder, until I was staring down at my own chest.

I was so completely overwhelmed with shock at this point that my own brain started latching onto random aspects of my body as being out of place. For one thing, I wasn’t fat any more. Quite the opposite; my chest was downright lithe, narrowing into a thin waist with two extra arms sticking out of it. My torso was a speckled black and white, black background with white speckles like a negative version of those tests psychologists used to give before they all got put on the internet. 

Also, I had an extra pair of arms. They were basically the same as my normal pair, except lower down, and with a different kind of hand on the end, those ones having only three fingers and a thumb. I slowly reached down with my right arm, and my lower left arm lifted up to meet it. My upper right arm and my lower left arm shook hands. 

So my parents had been right. I had been changing. The thing I’d been changing into was a giant freakish humanoid bug with four arms. As I sat on the floor, slowly learning how to move my extra pair of arms, the ramifications forced their way through the logjam that was my brain. I had turned into a giant bug monster for no clear reason, and I’d probably never turn back. I screamed. It came out as a high-pitched, inhuman trill. 

Adding onto the list of things that had changed, I no longer had a tongue. Probing around my mouth with my hand, I confirmed that I didn’t have lips either, just a thin slit that I could open up to make noises. 

“What?” I tried to say, but my mouth wasn’t shaped right to make the words work. It came out as a series of chirps and hisses. 

Tottering onto my tiptoes (not like I could walk on my heels anyway, with my feet elongated until my ankles were eight inches off the ground), I staggered over to the only mirror in my room. It was small, something I had used to make sure I was combing my hair properly. I wasn’t going to be using it for that purpose anymore, not having hair, so it might as well let me see what my face looked like. 

The face looking back at me was deeply alien, slightly cute, and incredibly confused. It was stark white except for some purplish streaks on my neck, fading into the darker colors of my torso. The eyes of this face were mostly humanlike, with a green iris and cross-shaped pupils, but instead of eyebrows I had six extra eyes, each one a tiny black dot compared to the main ones. I tried blinking the small eyes, and they did, tiny membranes covering them like a lizard eye. I winked my main eye as well just to make sure that I could, which is when I discovered that my eyelids came up from the bottom now. 

More importantly, I needed to figure out if I could still talk. I started by just reciting the alphabet. “Aay, Bee, Cee, Dee…” I tried to say, only to have it come out as more raspy clicking. My mouth opened wrong, my cheek-plates splitting open into a pair of mandibles whenever I lowered my jaw.  I thought back to my memories of how it had felt speaking as a human, wishing that I’d paid attention to how enunciating words worked before that day. Then I tried again, forcing my mandibles and other mouth parts to make the sounds of English.

I slowly slumped back down onto the floor. If I was capable of crying anymore, I would have been. There was something protruding from where my tailbone used to be, preventing me from sitting down. I curled up into a ball, balanced precariously on my feet, all four arms tightly hugging onto my knees as I rocked back and forth. 

My parents had said I had been changing. The headaches, the venom… it all made sense, now. But they hadn’t told me, not once, not in the entire eighteen years I’d been alive. How was I supposed to trust them when they’d kept something like that from me? They weren’t even my real parents. Had I been taken from some genetics lab, an experiment gone wrong? Or had they just kidnapped someone else’s baby and turned them into this monster? 

And then there was the problem of what I’d been turned into. I was a bug. A freakish, disgusting, ugly insect who’d never be human again. This body would never even be able to pass for human. Nobody would ever even stand to look at me; the government was going to cut me apart and examine what had happened to me. I was a monster, a freak, a horrifying abomination of science gone wrong. 

My thoughts started turning chaotic, echoing through my head like a drum kit getting destroyed by a machine gun. I was still reciting the alphabet, over and over, like a mantra, and with each repetition the sounds coming out of my mouth sounded more and more like the sounds I was trying to make. After that, I moved on to phrases, words.

“I… am… Alex,” I finally said. The sentence came out high-pitched and oddly raspy, like a crow speaking or an eight-year old girl with a bad throat infection. 

Absentmindedly, I started moving. The rocking back and forth helped, but I needed more than that, I had to have more than that. I waved the fingers on my lower arms, listening to the soft clack of the shell around my knuckles bumping into itself. I opened and shut my secondary eyes one at a time just to make sure I could. 

It didn’t help me feel better. What was I going to do, where was I going to go? There was no way I’d ever be able to go back to school, or go to college, or really show my face in public ever again. The only thing that the stimming did was to keep me in emotional equilibrium, right below the threshold where I started slamming my head into the wall and breaking things. 

A clicking, rattling noise came from the door. Someone or something was trying to open it. I shot up to my feet, nearly leaving the floor entirely. Frantically, I looked around for something to defend myself with, eventually settling on a heavy hardback book. I wasn’t going to let the spectrademons take me without a fight. I pressed myself against the back corner of the room, the book gripped in all four hands, the taste of venom in my mouth, waiting. 

The clicking continued for a few more seconds until the door to my room lazily swung open. Quinn stepped through and quietly closed the door behind him. He scanned the room, making a confused expression when his eyes landed on my frozen figure. 

“Wow, I’m more fucked up than I thought I was,” he muttered.

I dropped the book at once, taking one cautious step towards him, then another. Quinn ignored me entirely, looking around the room inquisitively. He checked the mirror, scanned down my bookshelf, things like that. After a few seconds, he stopped.

“Wait a second… I haven’t taken anything since yesterday,” he said, turning towards me. “Which means… that… that there’s a…”

I lunged forward, pressing my upper hand over his mouth. And not a moment too late, because he started screaming through my hand.

“I’m Alex, I’m Alex!” I said, half-whispering. 

Quinn tried to scream again, but cut himself off halfway. He grabbed my hand and pulled it off of his mouth. “What the fuck? You can talk? What the fuck are you?”

“I am Alex! Please…” I struggled to piece the sounds together into words for a moment, “no yelling.”

“You aren’t Alex,” Quinn hissed. “You’re some freaking weird bug thing that’s in Alex’s room for some reason. What did you do with Alex?”

“I am him,” I said. I was starting to get the hang of this whole “talking” thing, which was good because I was going to have to do a whole lot of it to get Quinn to believe me. “Quinn, it’s me. I woke up like this.”

Quinn’s eyes went wide. “How do you know my name? What did you do with Alex?”

I wrenched my hand out of his grip and stepped back. I covered my face with my upper hands, while my lower arms instinctively hugged my stomach. “I know because I’m your friend. And Miri’s boyfriend. How can I convince you who I am?” I said.

Quinn let out a little high-pitched laugh. “There’s a giant bug talking to me, and I’m not on anything. What the fuck?” he said, barely suppressing more laughter. “Well, I guess I know you don’t want to hurt me, seeing as how you haven’t tried it.”

“Because I’m Alex,” I added. 

“So, like, what are you?” Quinn said with a smirk. “Are you an alien from another planet, or some sort of mutant ant that lived too close to a reactor?  What’s… your…” Quinn stopped talking and started looking at something near my feet. He looked like he was about to throw up, which for him is really saying something. “You really are Alex, aren’t you?”

Well, at least he’d come around eventually. Given how he was in complete denial about it up until that point, it was at least nice of him to come around. Of course, that raised the question of what he was looking at that had changed his mind. I looked down.

I spent a few seconds, much longer than Quinn had taken, to trace the outline of the yellow-orange leathery thing at my feet. It was… Alex-shaped, for lack of a better word, though without facial features or hair. The thing was hollow and empty, and had been torn open when I escaped from it a few minutes earlier. I hadn’t just transformed; I had done the thing that butterflies do, chrysalis and all.

“Oh shit, that explains everything,” Quinn said. “The venom, you being sick, it’s all because you’re some kind of awesome bug monster this whole time.”

“Awesome?” I said. “I turned into an insect.”

“Oh, sorry. Um, if it makes you feel any better, you don’t look that disgusting, or anything. You just look like a weird alien.”

I crossed all four of my arms. “That doesn’t, like, make it any better. I’m still a bug.”

“Come on Alex, you have antennae, you have to admit that’s kind of interesting.”

“I have antennae?” I said. My upper right hand shot to my head, where I did indeed find two long feathery appendages sticking off of my forehead. I grabbed one and was instantly met with a stinging pain. “Ow! Sensitive.”

Quinn suppressed a laugh. “My apologies, I should know not to let people know about body parts they’ve forgotten existed. It’s just rude.”

“Shut up,” I said, smacking him on the shoulder. “I only woke up like this five minutes ago. Give me, like, at least another hour before you make fun of me for being clumsy.”

Quinn glanced from me, back to the… skin-thing, then back to me. “So that’s where you’ve been. We were worried about you, you know. Miri was trying to call you every couple of hours.”

I couldn’t furrow my brow at Quinn, but I could accomplish roughly the same effect by closing some of my secondary eyes and shifting my antennae. “It’s only been a few hours, sheesh. And I thought you were on lockdown?”

Quinn sighed. “Alex, it’s Sunday.”

I had gone under on Thursday. I guess transforming from a human to a freakish bug-monster takes some time. 

“Is everyone okay? Officer Cover got killed by some sort of… alien thing, called a spectrademon. It didn’t hurt anyone else, did it?”

Quinn shook his head. “We were on lockdown until like one in the morning, then everyone was allowed to go home. They never found the guy who did it… probably because of the demon thing, so school was out on Friday.”

“Spectrademons can turn invisible,” I said. “They aren’t going to find it. So why are you in my room?”

Quinn suddenly looked very embarrassed. “Well, you see… Miri kept trying to call you, and you didn’t pick up on account of… pupating… so eventually I thought I might go over to your house. Your moms were saying that you were too sick to talk to anyone and offered to make lunch.”

I perked up. “My parents are okay?”

“Yeah, they seemed fine. A little tired, maybe?”

A little bit of the tension that had been building up in me spilled out, my shoulders and… whatever you call the place that my second set of arms came out of all relaxing, just a little. Even if they’d kept secrets from me, my parents were still my parents. “Last time I saw them, they were defending the house against spectrademons trying to break in and kill me. I didn’t expect they’d make it out of there alive…”

“They’re fine,” he said. “Weirdly insistent that I not go into your room. They even had a lock on the outside of your door to stop anyone from coming back here.”

“I’d say that doesn’t sound like them, but I don’t really know who they are anymore.” I sighed. “They knew this was going to happen, they’ve known all along. Apparently telling me that I was going to turn into this thing never crossed their minds.”

“Wow,” Quinn said. “And I thought it was bad when my mom forgot to tell me that the cat had been put to sleep.”

“How did you, like, get in here?” I asked. “You said there was an extra lock on the door.”

“I may have picked up certain skills from a friend of mine,” Quinn said. “Skills which prove very useful when it comes to getting into locked rooms. I am, after all, a man of mystery and action.”

“You picked the lock on my door.”

“I picked the lock on your door.”

I rolled my eyes. All eight of them. “So what do we do now?”

“Go and talk to your parents, I guess?”

“No!” I said with a hiss. “No, I’m not talking to my parents… not right now. Not after everything they kept from me. Who knows what they’re going to do with me now that I’m like this. You said they’ve been keeping people away, right?”

Quinn nodded. “They said you didn’t want visitors.”

I shook my head, trying to deny what Quinn had said even though I had no reason to think he was lying. “I don’t think my parents would keep people away like that if they had good motives. We need to go somewhere else, somewhere where I can think.”

“My mom wouldn’t react very well to you showing up,” Quinn said. “I’m pretty sure she has a phobia of insects.”

I looked down at my body and got a little queasy. “I’d have a phobia of me too. Look at me, I have four arms, eight eyes, and no skin!”

Quinn glanced up at my forehead area. “Those are eyes?!”

I nodded, shutting my main eyes. At once, all color drained from the room, and everything got really fuzzy, like I was seeing it through thick smoke. “These are eyes. I can still see where you are, though it’s blurry.”

“I pity the doctor who has to get you fitted for glasses,” he said with utmost solemnity. “Also, I have an idea. Have you ever been to Miri’s house?”

I opened my eyes again just so I could look at him funny. “Uhh, yeah? We’ve been dating for eight months, and this house is too small for me to do anything with her. Why do you ask?”

“Her parents are nice enough people, and their house is pretty huge. I bet we could go there,” Quinn said.

“Oh my god, we can’t just… actually, it is the weekend. That’s a good idea! The only tough part would be getting out of here without my parents knowing.”

Quinn gestured towards the window. 

“Okay, fair enough. I just need to sneak out of the window of my house, across town, and somehow get in without anyone seeing me, because if they do they’re going to panic and probably call the National Guard.” I laughed nervously, though to someone who wasn’t me it probably would have sounded more like a series of chittering squeaks. “This is a wonderful plan!”

“Yeah, of course it is,” said Quinn, throwing open the window. “Now come on!”

“Wait, I can’t go out like this!” I ran over and shut the window at once. 

“And why would that be?”

I hugged my lower arms around my stomach. “‘Cause I don’t have any clothes on. I can’t go out naked!”

Quinn glanced down briefly, then right back up to my face. “Alex, I didn’t even notice until you pointed it out. It’s not like you have anything down there to—”

“Don’t remind me!” I snapped.

To be entirely fair to Quinn, I hadn’t really noticed until I’d thought about going outside and realized that I hadn’t put on clothes. Normally when I wasn’t wearing anything there was a background level of discomfort, especially when other people were around. I’m not a nudist, after all. Not that there’s anything wrong with people who are. This new body had only been my body for about five minutes, and I hadn’t had the time to really internalize that it was mine, I suppose. Plus, my entire body was covered up by a smooth shell, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to start perving over a weird messed-up bug person anyway. 

“It’s not like you have any clothes that would fit on you like this. I guess if we had a sewing kit and a few hours…” Quinn said, with a shrug.

I did in fact have a sewing kit, though I doubt I had the skill to make that kind of modification, and I knew I didn’t have the time. “Fine. I’ll go. But if I see you looking at anything, I’ll slap you.”

Quinn was already halfway out the window. “I’m not the one who drew all those sexy mice, you know,” he said. “I’m not interested.”

“Oh my god, we promised to not talk about that!” I said.

Quinn shrugged. “Well, you also promised to never read The Metamorphosis again, and now you’re living it. Come on, let’s get you somewhere safe.”

I made a series of annoyed clicks at him, folded my lower arms as close to my chest as I could, and climbed out the window. It was the least crazy thing I’d done that day.