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Melissa never understood why. Why they were doing this to her. Or how. She just knew it was happening.
But why? There seemed no point to her torment. The men in the white coats talked of the experiments conducted on her as if they were mundane things. To Melissa they weren't. She could think of nothing else.
Now she sat in a dank cell, curled up in a corner, opposite the bed and toilet. Moisture dripped from the ceiling onto her blond hair. She glanced about with deep blue eyes, trying to ignore the sensation in her arm. She wasn't the first to inhabit this cell. Brown stains splattered the walls and floor, and in some places, the ceiling. Part of the bed's frame looked melted from intense heat, and the large steel prison door looked slightly dissolved from acid burns. Covering one wall was a series of picket fences, counting out three and a half years, and sighed 'Jack Crowe.'
This was just background to Melissa, whose eyes kept swiveling back to her arm. What had they done to her? Her left arm, from the shoulder down, was no longer human. It was boneless, rubbery and with no fingernails, more like a sucker less octopus's tentacle, which was tipped with five short thin rubbery strands. Remnants of her fingers, she knew.
If she concentrated, she could flex it and curl it up, stretch it or move it like a human hand. But it was too much effort to get her head around the strange feeling, and she was in too much shock. Currently, she held it in her other hand, and then let it flop to the floor. Holding her head in her other hand, Melissa cried openly.
Why?
"Quiet in there, you freak!" shouted a guard outside, banging on the door with the butt of his gun. Melissa sobbed, curling up into a fetal position.
They had come again in the night. They always did. When she was asleep. They pumped some sort of gas into the cell, to keep her from waking while they mutilated her once quite pretty body.
She discovered to her horror that, when she woke up, she no longer had any legs. Levering herself up on her good arm, she took one look at what they had done before she threw up over the edge of her bed.
Looking back, she saw clearly.
"Oh, God… why me?"
Her two legs had changed to a pair of thick tentacles about the same length. Three slightly shorter tentacles were also there, attached to her hips. Around her midriff were dozens of tiny tendrils, all writing around of their own accord.
While she had control over her former legs and arm, and these three new limbs, she couldn't control these ones.
"Lord help me…" she whispered. Something slithered between her back and the grimy mattress. She could move the thing herself. She pulled it out. It turned out to be yet another tentacle, attached to her left shoulder, with a tear shaped paddle on the end.
Melissa heard voices outside the cell door. "And this experiment is our attempt to induce elasticity in the subject," Melissa slid off the bed and crawled to the door. There was a small barred slit for a window, through which she could see silhouettes of faces. Melissa managed to pile her movable limbs underneath her human torso and abdomen and push herself up to the window, pulling the last few inches with her arm. She felt so weak…
"Ah, there she is," a man with a hollow sunken face said. Various phrases along the lines of "My God…" and "Professor, what have you done?" could be heard from behind him.
"What… have you… done to me?" Melissa panted.
"Oh, just a little test. Gentlemen," the man said to the other scientists, "the side effects usually happen about now. They're… disturbing to say the least. Well Melissa, we'll leave you to it. You two," he snapped at a pair of guards, "take her to the lower levels when she's done."
Melissa, after they had gone, slowly slipped down the door, weeping. Whatever was changing her hadn't finished yet.
Half and hour later, the 'side effects' happened. Pain seared across her back and she threw her head up and screamed as dozens of tentacles grew out of her spin and ribs. She could feel and move all the long, arm like ones, but not the small thin ones. They writhed all to themselves. Two of these smaller ones erupted on her left cheek, slithering over her face, and she felt her teeth sharpen to points. Several small tendrils sprouted all down her still human arm. Finally, her blond hair fell out to be replaced by yellow strands of skin the thickness of her finger.
She clutched her scalp with her one good hand and screamed again, this time in despair, over her loss of humanity.
She never noticed the guards come into the cell to take her to the lower levels, where all the rejects were kept.
"Well, Prof, how is the girl?"
The sunken faced man sighed. "Little more than a mass of tentacles now. The serum failed again."
Karcer grunted, sipping his coffee like it was a normal day. "You and your elasticity," he joked.
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