2345

by **Creation of Pokerus** Sat Nov 17, 2012 10:38 pm

2345
A wtf novel

Claire 'Clary'
Jameston Correctional Facility
24-07-23??

“The year was 2356, a week before the supposed ‘end of the world’ everyone had been chattering about. I, of course, didn’t believe in that bull. Of course, I was also a mere child at the time, so what exactly was there for me to believe? Not a much as you’d think, considering how strict the policies were back then,” I shook my head, sipping my tea and staring at the group of high school students. Story time was always my favorite because, since I was half fox, I was a way of keeping people’s attention. I went on.

“Half-bloods like me, not quite human and not quite animal, weren’t exactly at the top of the food chain and things did not play out well for us if we got in trouble. More often than not a half-blood would go missing during an investigation and would never be seen again. See, the Old Earth we riddled with hate crimes, crimes against religion, race, and species. However, us half-bloods got the worst of it, because we weren’t full human. Not that it’s anything new, of course; shit like that had been happening all the way through history.

See, back in 2289 Swiss scientists found a way to combine human genes and animal genes. This turned out extremely successful in several ways with many different species; except religion and governments absolutely hated it. Extremist groups destroyed the lab and every specimen they could find. Except they didn’t count on them to have fabricated several hundred of a certain animal line they had the most results with, the canine. From wolves to dogs to foxes, they had already been integrated into several 3rd world countries as an experiment, which proved to be successful. By 2300 governments of the world had accepted them into society in several of the less racist countries, including Polish-Russia, the Northern Korean Union, and even the United Countries of North America,” I paused to sip my tea as a student raised her hand. Judging by the small pair of dog ears protruding from her silky blonde hair, she was half or quarter dog. Since she was lacking fur across most of her body, she obviously didn’t have two half-blood parents.

“Yes dear?” I asked her, looking directly into her eyes, causing her to glance away out of instinct. I had been told a long time ago that there was a fierceness in my eyes that startled people, no matter how hard I tried to soften them. That was the consequences of my past actions, I could only assume.

“U-um Miss Clary,” the timid pup yipped, “what does this have to do with your past?” I couldn’t help but chuckle, nodding gently in response. The girl, of course, was right in a way, as I was supposed to be telling these kids about how I had survived the great purge, which had ended only three years ago. My mind flashed back to where it all began for me…

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Claire 'Clary'
Jameston, United Countries of America
??-??-2345

I stood at the edge of the crime scene tape, looking at the body of a man who had fallen out a five story building. I was merely 12 and didn’t really know what was going on. At the time they had retinal scanners and fingerprint machines to keep track of who had witnessed a crime. I didn’t even think of it at the time, but the real purpose of them was to keep track of half-bloods.

Personally, I was terrified of those stupid scanners. Last time my mom had looked into one some men had taken her away and I hadn’t seen her since. I had been living on the streets as a stray fox girl for the past two years, dodging kicks and hits the entire time. More than often my dinner came from a dumpster or road kill. I wasn’t above eating dead things, it was in my instincts. That was part of the cost of being half animal: you were half animal.

I didn’t even notice the men in blue uniforms scanning people until another half breed like me, a girl about my age who looked like she was part husky or gray wolf, tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to follow. “Quickly, we gotta go,” the wolf child, I’d find out later, said, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the crowd. Unfortunately, some rather large woman stepped on my abnormally long tail, causing me to yelp. This attracted the attention of the men in blue suits who shouted at us to stop, causing my new found friend to pull on me hard, wrenching us into the open where we bolted down a market street.
Now, when you’re part animal, you have a natural advantage over humans, like an uncanny sense of balance, claws, and better endurance and speed. This allowed us to dash through the crowded street with ease, slipping between the confused masses and ducking between merchant shops faster than the men could keep up. A few grabbing hands and kicking feet swiped at my, but out natural sense of danger allowed me to dodge away from them.

Sensing a road block ahead, I glanced at my new friend, who pointed up at the rooftops. “To the roofs!” Her voice was oddly sing-songish an almost like a howl. Understanding, I went along with her, hopping up on crates and boxes, earning a few shouts of anger as I jumped for the nearest building, scrambling up the side with whatever foothold I could find, every nook and crevice and protruding jutting handhold making my climb for the roofs, my bare feet and light clothing hardly holding me back, until my shirt snagged on a jutting nail, tearing most of it off.

Ignoring my lack of a shirt, it was dirty and ragged anyhow and didn’t even keep me warm, I made the rest of my ascent with no more trouble, meeting my newfound friend on the roof. She had beaten me to the top, which proved she had been climbing buildings a hell of a lot more than I had, and the fact that she wasn’t even tired only went to show that she was definitely not new to it.

“Th…thank you…” I coughed out, my vocal chords not used to talking, for I had never had much of a use for it in the treacherous city. The wolf girl gave me an odd look and wiped her nose. Getting a closer look at her proved that she wasn’t too different than me; an orphan or homeless girl judging by her scent, her clothing seemed a bit newer than mine and at least she had a bit more than I had. From what experience I had with other orphans and street kids, she couldn’t have been on the streets long than a month.

“For what? Us canines gots to stick among each other, right?” she grinned, flashing razor teeth, yellow from lack of care, “Hey you needs a new clothing? It ain’t proper for a lady like yourself to going around showing your boobies.” Her speech kind of confused me, like she wasn’t completely literate. My mother had made sure to try and teach me the best English she could, but that was before she was taken, so I had kind of fallen out of the habit of proper speech. And speaking at all.

“Do I needs a shirt?” I cocked my head to the side. Somewhere, a memory of my mother telling me that a lady needed to cover her chest always. I shook my head to clear the sad memory.

“Why yes you does,” the wolf girl exclaimed, pulling off her black vest and tossing it to me. It would have been black, actually, if it wasn’t so dirty, which made it more of a gray. “I’m Lyne, by the ways, and you can call me Lyne! Only my friends get to call me Lyne, and you’re my friend, soes you can call me Lyne, okays?”

I nodded my head timidly, putting the grayish vest on, it somehow being too big for me. I looked down embarrassedly, looking over my muddied and torn pants covering my slender legs, my bruised and cut arms and hands caked with grime and dirt, and the incredibly dirty waist length hair I sported, running down my back and front, as I couldn’t keep it together very well. As I compaired myself to Lyne, the red head with shoulder length hair, a gray wolf tail I finally noticed with matching ears, and a black skirt which had probably matched the vest she gave me, and her torn and dirtied white blouse, I managed to squeak out, “I-I’m Claire, th-though you…can call me Clary…”

“Well it has been nice to meets us, Clary!” Lyne claimed happily, not using all her words quite right, which made me wonder how long she had really been orphaned, flaring doubt in my earlier predictions.

Below the men were setting up a ladder to get to the roof and I guessed there would be others rushing up the stairs to the entrance on top of the roof. Fortunately the roof wasn’t a pointed roof, but flat, so we didn’t have to worry about slipping.
Lyne got to her feet, stepping out of her cross legged position to peer over the edge. Shaking her head at how determined the men were, she turned to face her friend once more. “We gotta move, them mans want us reals bad, I sees,” she spat, seeming angry and excited at the same time, “Ain’t no blue shirted man bitch popo ever gots mah tail and I is gons to keep that in effect. Come on, we will leap to the roof over there and keep going til we get to my hideeholings. ”

Resisting the urge to giggle at her speech and figuring it wouldn’t be appropriate for the current situation the two of us were in, I jumped to my feet, ignoring the cracked blisters on them. Counting to three, we both leapt with more dexterity and grace than any human could achieve, successfully landing on an opposite rooftop twenty feet away, an impossible feat for many humans and especially the men in blue who burst through the rooftop door on the building we had jumped from. Down below the streets were lit up with lights and police, only increasing my worry.

“It’ll be fine, missy Clary,” Lyne grinned, having noticed my obvious thoughts, “I’ve gotten away from plenty of peoples before and we’ll be fines. As long as their rotor planemobiles don’t show up we can escape easy.”

Patting my shoulder, she hopped over to the next building, forcing me to follow in pursuit. After a couple more leaps the police were out of sight from the rooftops. Somehow we had made a clean get away, not that Lyne seemed amazed by it. The girl seemed to be full of energy and confidence, a never ending pool of morale and happiness.

“You sees now, Clary?” Lyne grinned, climbing down to a fire escape after three morn building hoppings, “They won’t even knows where us’ve gone tuh until we is gone.” I could only shake my head as I hopped down next to her, crouching on impact before bouncing upright.

“I suppose you’re… right, Lyne,” I coughed, still getting used to talking, every word scratching at my throat for some reason. I rubbed my eyes wearily, ears swiveling, listening to my surroundings. The sirens were quite a ways off, but in the distance I could hear the whapping of a helicopter’s rotors.

“We gotta get to my hideehole,” Lyne froze before scrambling down the fire escape sliding down the ladders and even tossing her acrobatically to each platform, making it to the floor in no time at all. I simply tossed myself into a near full dumpster at the bottom, miraculously not breaking anything or even hitting the sides of the bin.

As I climbed out, dazed, Lyne took things into her hands and hauled me out herself. “We haves to get going NOW,” she said sternly, hauling me to my feet and half dragged, half pulled me down another back alley. By now the helicopter’s sound was nearly on top of us. It was an older model by nature, commissioned to the under equipped police force for search and rescue when drones and hovercopters were used up. It wouldn’t take long for the helicopter to search the rooftops; soon its spot light would be searching the shady alleyways, dimly lit by the fading light of the November afternoon and the natural shadows created by tall buildings.

Considering how urgent Lyne was, I decided not to ague and hurried along with her, the two of us ducking behind dumpsters whenever the heli made a pass. It was nerve wracking, because if the metal bird found us, there would be nowhere to hide. Lyne was still optimistic, though, constantly making comments like, “We’ve gots this stuff,” and, “don’t worry, bird fliers are blind.” This oddly reassured me, though doubt was thrown in every time the helicopter passed overhead.

Luckily, we somehow made it to Lyne’s ‘hideehole’. Or rather, the entrance to it: a small, broken window to the basement of a church connected to a hospital. We were definitely small enough to fit through the opening, the broken glass cleared away by Lyne herself. Somehow, it led into a far back room, that was apparently blocked on the other side, according to Lyne; she had tried to open it several times before, to no avail. The fact that the window was still broken and not fixed was because it was at the back part of the church where nobody went, the back part covered by the main building of the hospital. However, the most important detail was the stairs in a closet that lead down to an abandoned basement where Lyne made her home.

“Welcomes to my smallings hideehole, Clary,” Lyne grinned from ear to ear, shaking my hand, “I would luffles it if yous could accompany me in my modest abode.” I truly didn’t know what to say; I had been living in dumpsters for the past two years, hoping that the clean-up crews never found me and scavenging on dirty water and bottles of unidentifiable liquids and thrown out food. Now I was offered a home where at least I’d be out of the rain and cold and, from what I could see, I’d have a blanket. I nearly burst into tears as I hugged Lyne tight, truly happy for the first time in two years.