Chapter 18

Raven was conscious again, once again not remembering when she’d fallen asleep. Her tongue went to her teeth, hoping not to find the sharp predator’s points. But she had not awoken from her living nightmare. Her tongue found a bit of food from earlier, triggering her memory. After her tryst with the men in black, she’d been rewarded with a large meal. The creepy quiet men in lab coats laid out a range of options, unsure what this creature would want to eat. Well-done hamburger? Raw meat on the bone? A nicely-prepared vegetable dish? Even cat kibble.

Even though she’d been vegetarian since her last birthday, her cat-like instincts drove her straight for the meat. She had ripped most of the raw meat off the bone before her human side stopped herself, disgusted. After failing to convince herself to eat salad, she reached a compromise on the burger. She played the good kitty, not hissing or scratching at all.

She must have fallen asleep in a food coma soon afterwards, or more likely they’d drugged her. Now she was awake again, her eyes as wide as they would go, staring at the door where she’d heard the slightest noise. Sure enough the door was opening again. Whoever was entering probably wasn’t supposed to be here. Their movements were delicate and surreptitious. Maybe this was the chance for escape she’d been hoping for.

The dim red light came on and Raven could see the wide frame of one of the men in black. It was Thick. Back for more, maybe?

“Kitty is awake,” he said in a low voice.

Raven felt a hiss rising in her throat and beat it down. She needed to be a good cat until the last possible second.

“My partner is pretty good with the computers and he knows which buttons to press. I’ve never wanted to fuck again so soon after cumming in my life.”

Raven recoiled involuntarily, pulling against her restraints. The man just smiled patiently. And then Raven felt a shiver deep inside and a powerful wallop of need that caused a moan to escape her lips unbidden. Whoever was working the controls had none of the gradual, experimental subtlety the kid had. This was getting turned on like a dildo set to “earthquake.”

Now she tugged at her restraints in the other direction, reaching for the man whose precum she could smell through his clothes. Thick wasted no time freeing himself and Raven squirmed around in an impossible position to get his dick in her mouth. She reached for him but the restraints kept her hands too tight.

Past Thick, Raven could see Long enter the room as well, shedding his clothes methodically. Raven paused briefly. She realized she was getting that feeling again, that she was drifting back down into her body, slowly regaining control of herself. She waited, expecting to get yanked out of herself again, but it didn’t happen. A minute passed as she focused on giving Thick a good blow as Long approached the gurney and tested her wet pussy with his fingers. She was still in control.

The kid must have forgotten to tell them something, something about the control effect wearing off and needing to be reinforced. She pulled her mouth off of Thick’s cock and deftly slashed one of her cuffs. The men were far too distracted to notice. She gave Thick a big, wide smile, full of sharp teeth.

The soft tones of his alarm woke Jenkins up seemingly as soon as his head hit the pillow. But the clock read 4am as it should. It’d been like trying to go to bed on Christmas Eve: too much excitement to fall asleep properly. Part of his excitement was because of the incredible success of the subject’s transformation (and subsequent performance of course), and the other part was eagerness at what he’d done for himself once he was off duty. He glanced at the injectors on his nightstand, one empty, one still full. The empty one because he finally trusted his nanotech enough to inject himself last night, the full one because it was always good to have a fallback plan.

He hadn’t done anything drastic, nothing like the full rewrite the subject had gotten. Just a near-total fat-to-muscle conversion, a boost to the obvious part of his anatomy, and a few other tweaks. He reached under the covers down to his crotch and gripped his new cock. The mass of coiled flesh definitely felt like success. And given the early alarm he had at least an hour to go to the lab and give it a test drive.

With top system administrator access, sneaking around the base was easy. His new, taller body didn’t steer quite right and he bumped into more than a couple door frames. Jenkins didn’t even bother to cover his tracks. The person who’d be checking for unauthorized accesses was him. He walked through the dark hallways to the lab knowing all the turns from memory. The door to the control booth beeped and opened smoothly.

He slowed down when he noticed the glow of light from the control workstation. He was sure he’d turned it off last night. Jenkins quickly looked around for any other disturbances. His chair was shoved aside instead of tucked in neatly under the desk. Someone had been in here.

He sat down carefully, his new bulk overfilling the seat, and looked at the screen, not wanting to touch anything. Two windows were up. One was a command window, the type he’d use to activate the various modes and settings in the subject. The other was a command history showing everything he’d typed in over the past day. He looked back at the command window, at the last command someone else had typed in.

He reached over to the wall and pressed the button that switched the one-way mirror from opaque to transparent. Jenkins felt his stomach drop as the dim light illuminated a scene of horror rendered in bright slashes of blood. Trying to breathe deeply and not think about exactly what he was looking at, he was pretty sure there were only two bodies in the room, both of them Bobs.

There was nothing to be done for them. He dropped the lights back down and flipped the window off.

He eyed the emergency alarm button on the wall, but hesitated. He could call in the cavalry and let the Bobs save the day, and maybe he’d be commended for raising the alarm. But what if he stopped the subject himself? It would still be at least an hour before the base woke up and the lights came on. If he could bring her in before that the old man would see how valuable he was. He’d probably get a raise. Nah, forget that, he’d ask for his own catgirl.

The taste of blood was energizing, electrifying, edifying, appetizing ... She shook her head, unable to think clearly. Part of her was horrified by what she’d done but she was overwhelmed by something deeper that was reveling, ecstatic at realizing the peak of millions of years of evolution. A hunter incarnate, a killer instinct unleashed. Slinking through the hallways, sniffing the air for the scent of fresh meat, ears pricked for the slightest sound.

It was too easy, though. These men were so noisy, so smelly, and so slow. When she pounced from around a corner, she’d already ripped out a throat before its owner realized anything was amiss. She crouched in the hallway afterward, reflexively using her tongue to clean a streak of blood that had splashed on her. Even if the prey here were dumb, it was no good to allow oneself to become dirtied by them.

Yes, they were dumb, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be fun. She twisted around, checking to see that she was spotless again. Next time she’d play a little with her food first.

Jenkins looked at his phone. The tracking app he used was still a prototype, a planned part of a much later stage of testing. It could only give him a direction to the subject, no distance information yet. All he had to do was get close enough and then the other prototype app would activate.

The indicator was fluctuating rapidly, but not randomly. Given his superior technical ability he was confident it was working correctly. The movement was a product of the subject wandering the halls aimlessly.

He rounded a corner and tripped, catching himself before he fell. He was getting used to his new size. He looked back at another Bob, a pool of blood soaking in to the cheap carpet. It was still early and most personnel would be asleep for a little longer, but if the girl kept killing the third shift someone else was liable to set off the alarm before Jenkins could get her. He increased his pace.

Eventually the indicator calmed down and Jenkins had a good idea where he was headed. He rounded a corner and saw the closed double doors to the cafeteria. The arrow pointed dead ahead. And since the cafeteria was in the corner of the building, the subject was definitely in there. He just hoped his phone had enough range to see her on the other side of the door.

Jenkins carefully approached the door and was rewarded with a soft vibration from his phone. His second prototype app, the remote control, had a lock. Everything he’d worked so hard for was about to pay off. He pushed the bodily control button and waited for the app to confirm receipt of the command. It pinged, and he pushed the doors open.

It took Jenkins a minute to locate the subject in the dim light. It was slumped in a corner, the black fur of its body making the shadows around it somehow deeper. Without looking away he tapped one light switch in the row and waited as a few of the overheads flicked on. She — it was difficult to maintain objectivity when presented with those compact but undeniable curves — was mesmerizing, like a dancer in peak condition. Her coat was spotless and glistened slightly. Her limbs were still but her eyes were scared and alert and she was breathing rapidly.

Jenkins brought up the mental control panel on his phone and dialed her terror slowly down. Her breathing slowed.

He watched the levels carefully and could see how they slowly drifted back toward baseline. He showed the phone to her.

“Those morons thought they could just turn you on and have fun,” he explained. “You kept getting stronger against it until you were able to break away.”

A blood-chilling growl emerged from the creature’s throat.

Jenkins smiled. “But I know better.” He tapped a button and watched the values spring back to their previous control levels. Ten seconds later, it pinged again automatically.

“See? Ten second boosts means no more feeding time for kitty.”

He tapped a few more buttons and disabled the growling noise. He dialed her docility up and reduced the hold on her limbs a bit. He checked the time once more. Mission Accomplished and enough for a quickie, too.

“Well, nothing you’ll sink your teeth in to, anyway.”