Chp 3 – Clean Hands

Created By Brandon K Montoya

Written By Sonne Gerber

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Cold water. That’s the first thing my brain registers. Just freezing, biting cold water blasting out of a cheap chrome faucet.

I’m scrubbing my hands. I’m scrubbing them so hard the skin is raw, burning under the friction of my own thumbs. The bar of soap in my grip is reduced to a sad, useless sliver. It smells like industrial lavender and harsh chemicals.

Red suds swirl around the drain.

Thick, foamy red bubbles. They pop, leaving little copper-smelling streaks on the white porcelain.

Blood.

I stare at the suds. My brain feels like a broken radio, emitting nothing but static. I don’t know where the blood came from. I don’t know whose bathroom this is. The wallpaper is a peeling floral pattern and the air smells like stale cigarette smoke and mildew.

I just keep scrubbing. Rinse. Lather. Watch the red turn to pink, then finally, mercifully, clear.

My breathing is too loud. It echoes off the dingy tile. I reach out and shut the water off. The rusted knob groans in protest.

Okay. Hands are clean. Good. Next step. Figure out why I have hands.

Wait. Hands?

I look down at my fingers. Ten fingers. Thumbs. Pale skin. Flat, blunt nails. I flex them. The joints pop. They belong to me. I can feel the cool air hitting the damp skin, the microscopic friction of the air currents. But my brain violently rejects the image. This is wrong. This is fundamentally, structurally wrong. I shouldn’t have thumbs. I shouldn’t be standing on two legs. The geometry of my own posture feels like a sick joke.

I look up.

The mirror over the sink is speckled with age spots, but it shows enough.

I stop breathing.

A girl stares back at me. Messy blonde hair cut short, framing a pale, angular face. Wide, panicked blue eyes.

Except the pupils are vertical slits. Like a cat.

And poking out through the messy blonde hair are two triangular, fur-covered ears.

“What the hell,” I whisper.

My voice is raspy. It sounds like I haven’t used it in a decade. It feels alien vibrating in my throat. I don’t even know what language I just spoke. Was that German? Japanese? It doesn’t matter. The fact that I formed words at all is terrifying.

The ears in the mirror twitch.

I didn’t tell them to do that. Or did I? I reach a hand up, my violently shaking, freshly scrubbed human hand, and I touch the left ear.

A jolt of sensation shoots down my scalp. It’s warm. Soft fur. Hard cartilage underneath. I pinch the tip.

Ow. I flinch, and the ear swivels back, flattening against my head. They’re attached to my skull. This isn’t a costume. This isn’t a hat.

Something brushes against the back of my right calf. I look down, twisting awkwardly. My center of gravity is entirely wrong, perched up this high off the ground. Two long, cream-colored tails with darker tips lashing back and forth behind me, knocking against the edge of the grimy bathtub.

I’m having a stroke. That’s the only logical explanation. I ate a bad mouse, I caught a parasite, and now I’m dying on the floor of the Heissmeyer house and my failing brain is generating a bipedal nightmare.

Nagasaki.

The word hits me like a brick to the teeth.

Memories violently unspool in my head, tearing through the static. I was a cat. An actual, four-legged feline. My name was Muschi. I belonged to Marie. Marie was an awful, shrieking woman. Horst was worse. They put me in a kennel. We went in a shaking, terrifying airplane to a frozen place. Then a train. A laboratory. Unit 731.

I remember the smell of that place. Chemicals. Gangrene. Rot. I remember the last day. The humans were panicked. Throwing papers in bins. Talking about bombs. They locked me in. Left me to starve in an empty facility where the shadows rippled.

I remember wandering down into the dark, towards the stairs leading to the hole where the terrible smells came from. I thought I smelled tuna. I was so hungry. Then there was a screech. A massive clang of metal at the end of the hall. I panicked. I fled so fast I forgot how to land on my feet and tumbled down the stairs in the pitch black.

Then, the boom.

The whole room shook. It shook so hard the air turned solid. I remember the fuzzy, dizzy feeling creeping in. I closed my eyes in the dark and went to sleep.

That was… when was that? Yesterday?

I grip the edges of the sink to steady myself. The porcelain groans under my weight.

I squeeze harder, trying to ground myself in reality, trying to force my brain to accept the tactile feedback of this bizarre new body. A massive, deafening CRACK echoes through the small bathroom.

A chunk of the sink breaks off in my right hand.

I freeze. I stare at the jagged piece of heavy porcelain resting in my palm. It’s thick. Heavy. I barely squeezed it. I didn’t even put my back into it.

I drop it. It shatters against the floor tiles, sending white shards scattering across the linoleum.

Okay. Not a normal human body. I have the grip strength of an industrial vice. I flex my fingers again. The muscles in my forearms feel dense, coiled tight like steel cables. If I wanted to, I could probably rip the plumbing right out of the wall.

My stomach lurches. The disconnect between the four-legged creature I remember being and this freakish, overpowered bipedal body is too much. The nausea hits like a freight train.

I double over the cracked sink and dry heave.

Nothing comes up. My stomach is completely empty, tight and aching. I cough, spitting a little bile down the drain, right over the faded pink stains I just spent ten minutes scrubbing.

I turn the faucet back on, letting the freezing water run over my wrists. I splash some on my face. It doesn’t help. The cat ears remain flattened against my skull. They’re reacting to my panic automatically. I can feel the muscles pulling at my scalp.

Breathe. Just breathe. In and out. Analyze the situation. Gather data.

I am a cat. But I am not a cat. I am a person. A yokai? I remember hearing Masaru, the Japanese officer at the lab, talk about monsters and demons. Is that what I am now? A demon?

I grab a dingy, stiff towel off the rack and aggressively dry my face.

If I’ve been asleep since the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, how long has it been? How did I get into this bathroom? Where is this bathroom? The air feels different here. It doesn’t smell like Nagasaki. It smells bigger. Busier. Grimy exhaust fumes and cooking oil drifting through the thin walls.

More importantly.

I look down at the drain again.

If my hands were covered in blood… whose blood was it?

I pat myself down. No pain. No open wounds. I’m wearing clothes. A drab, practical shirt and trousers that feel foreign against my skin. The blood wasn’t mine.

I drop the towel on the floor.

The silence in the bathroom suddenly feels incredibly loud. I can hear the hum of a refrigerator in the next room. I can hear the rhythmic thumping of a train a mile away. The scrape of a rat in the ceiling. The sensory input is dialed up to an agonizing eleven. My ears swivel, tracking every micro-sound.

I slowly turn my back to the mirror, facing the partially open bathroom door.

There is a smell drifting in from the main room. It’s fresh. Metallic. Salty. It smells exactly like the red suds that just went down the drain.

My tails thump nervously against my leg. I reach out and push the bathroom door open the rest of the way.

The main room is a shoebox. Peeling wallpaper, a single bulb hanging from a frayed cord, and a smell like cheap tobacco masking something sour.

I look down.

There is a dead communist leader bleeding out onto a cheap rug. Kyuichi Tokuda. It’s annoying that I remember his name, but not how the hell I got here.

He’s wearing a brown wool suit that looked terrible even before it got ruined. He lies on his back. His eyes stare at the cracked ceiling plaster. His chest cavity looks like somebody shoved a stick of dynamite down his throat and walked away. Ribs are splintered outward like a broken birdcage. It’s just a massive, wet pile of meat and fabric.

I don’t know him. But the information just surfaces in my brain like a filed report. Japanese Communist Party. Mid-level organizer. Now he’s a stain on the floor.

I killed him.

I didn’t use a gun. My hands did that. The ones I just scrubbed clean. The phantom sensation of tearing tissue echoes in my knuckles. I flex my fingers, staring at the corpse. I don’t feel sad. I just feel sick.

A low hum starts vibrating in the room.

I twitch. My left ear swivels toward the window. The blinds are drawn, but the hum is coming from outside the glass. It sounds like a radio tuned between stations, a rush of static. Then the static sharpens. It fractures into voices.

“…look at what she did…”

“…filthy animal…”

“…ripped him wide open…”

“…murderer…”

“…monster…”

“…freak…”

I take a step back. The voices aren’t just loud, they’re aggressive. They overlap, talking at ninety miles an hour, a frantic, overlapping babble of languages. I understand every single word. The comprehension is forced into my brain, bypassing my ears completely.

I look at the window. Three figures stand on the fire escape. They aren’t people. They’re gray, semi-translucent, and their edges blur into the smoggy night air. One is missing half its jaw. Another has a rope burn baked into its neck. They’re glaring right at me.

Ghosts. I’m looking at ghosts.

I cover my ears. It does nothing. The volume doesn’t drop a single decibel. The dead don’t care about hands over ears.

“Shut up,” I say. My raspy voice sounds pathetic under their overlapping screams.

They don’t shut up. They get louder. They murmur my guilt, cataloging what I just did, pointing spectral fingers at the body on the floor.

I spin away from the window, my tails whipping nervously behind me. It knocks a dirty ashtray off a side table. It shatters. I ignore it. I need a distraction. I need to focus on something real, something solid.

My eyes lock onto a black leather case sitting open on the small dining table.

It’s a CIA attaché case full of questionable chemicals. I walk over to it, my bipedal gait still feeling awkward, too top-heavy.

The inside is lined with custom-cut foam. Snug inside the cutouts are glass vials, steel syringes, and ampoules of clear liquid.

I look at the labels and my brain instantly catalogs them at a glance.

Sodium barbital. Central nervous system depressant. Fatal dose: two to ten grams.

Scopolamine. Anticholinergic. Good for motion sickness. Better for inducing a twilight state of compliance.

Amobarbital.

I know the molecular weights. I know exactly how many milligrams it takes to stop a human heart, how much to make them talk, how much to make them forget. I know how to synthesize them from base components.

I am a cat. I shouldn’t know the chemical formula for a truth serum.

“Kagakusha.”

The word drifts up from my own memory. Little scientist. That’s what Masaru called me at Unit 731.

I grab the edge of the table. The wood splinters under my grip. I didn’t learn advanced chemistry by napping. Someone taught me. Someone used me.

RIIIIIING.

I flinch. The sound is a physical strike against my sensitive eardrums.

A heavy, black rotary phone sits on a stand next to the door.

RIIIIIING.

The ghosts at the window keep shouting, but the mechanical shrill of the phone cuts through the supernatural noise.

I stare at it. I shouldn’t answer it. It’s a dead drop room. You don’t answer the phone in a burn room.

Whoa. Where did that rule come from? The tradecraft just popped into my head, fully formed.

RIIIIIING.

It doesn’t stop. Ten rings. Fifteen. The person on the other end knows I’m here. They know I’m awake. The sound is drilling into my skull. The phone is an anchor to whatever nightmare I’m living in.

I walk over to the stand. My hand hovers over the heavy black receiver.

RIIIIIING.

I pick it up and press the cold plastic to my human-shaped ear.

“Hello,” I rasp.

The line crackles.

My heart rate instantly redlines at maybe a hundred and eighty beats per minute. A massive dump of epinephrine hits my system. The physiological response is violent and completely involuntary. My pupils dilate so hard the edges of the room blur, and the capillaries in my hands constrict, turning my new fingers ice cold.

“You missed your check in.”

There is no memory attached to the voice. Just a massive, terrifying blank spot in my head. I have no idea who this guy is. I have no idea why he acts like he knows me. I just know that hearing him speak makes every muscle fiber in this bipedal body lock up in absolute terror.

I stare at the dead guy on the floor. His blood is already starting to congeal, the hemoglobin oxidizing a rusty brown where it pools against the baseboards. I stare at the ampoules in the attaché case. I can perfectly visualize the molecular structure of scopolamine down to the covalent bonds, but I can’t remember how I got into this room.

The ghosts at the window are still screeching.

“Muuuuuuschi.”

I gasp in fear. My hand shakes so badly the heavy Bakelite receiver chatters against my jaw. I try to form a word, but my vocal cords refuse to engage.

I open my fingers.

The receiver drops. It hits the floorboards with a hard plastic clack and dangles by its coiled wire, swinging slightly.

The man’s voice leaks out of the tiny speaker, tinny and sharp against the wood.

“Tch. Stay there. I’m coming.”

I back away. As he speaks, a physical pressure builds at the base of my skull. It’s an undeniable, directional pull, like an iron filing snapping toward a lodestone. I can feel a vector. A specific heading.

He’s under five miles away. And he’s already moving.