The serum put her right to sleep. She slept the entire way home, leaning her head back against the seat with her mouth wide open. She slept when Mom carried her into the house and into her bed. And she slept into the night.
Marcus was disappointed when he rode his bike through the park and didn’t see Liz anywhere. He wasn’t mad, understanding that her parents could have stopped her from sneaking out. He was just disappointed and thought about her a lot as he sped his bike across various trails and off of dirt ramps, finally heading home down a main road.
Liz woke up abruptly in the middle of the night. She was sweating, despite the fact that had kicked the blankets off of the bed hours ago. She looked outside of her bedroom window and saw how dark it was. Her clock said that it was 2:15 in the morning. She knew that she had missed her little play date with Marcus and angrily punched her pillow out of frustration. What did that needle do to me? she asked herself. Liz turned on her bedroom light and rubbed her eyes when the light bothered her. Her eyes were normally a little sensitive first thing in the morning, but this morning, something was different. The light was stronger. Or her eyes were different.
When her vision cleared, Liz noticed that something else that was different. She could see all the way around her body. She could see in almost a 360 degree circle just by staring ahead at the plush unicorn across the room. Such a sharp elevation in her peripheral vision made her dizzy at first. She staggered, only to catch her balance on a bureau. Looking up and into the mirror that was attached to this bureau, Liz was consumed with disbelief when she looked at what had become of her own face. The green tint on her skin. The small round marks that could only be described as scales. And the fact that her eyes were now where her temples used to be, closer to the upper part of the side of her head.
Liz barely had time to wonder what her mother had done to her when her attention diverted towards the sound of chirping crickets in the woods that surrounded her house. They made her hungry, so she opened her bedroom window and climbed onto the ledge. Without thinking, she dropped from the second floor and landed on the ground unharmed. Looking around, licking the air around her with a much bumpier, more whip-like tongue than she had earlier today, Liz could now sense where the best meals were.
And Liz didn’t need target practice. It was as though her eyes contained the world’s most sophisticated radar and her tongue’s natural reflexes were perfectly linked to it. Any juicy insects that had the misfortune of flying within four feet of her head had already signed their own death warrant. And Liz found plenty of them as she effortlessly leapt from tree to tree, feeding herself with her impeccable ninja-like tongue reflexes.
Yet, through the insatiable lust for flies, Liz started thinking about Marcus. He’s good at collecting insects, or at least that’s what he told me, Liz thought, deciding impulsively to ride her bike to his house in the middle of the night.
Marcus was awoken at about 3am by a rapid tapping at his window. Kneeling on his bed and looking out the window, he at first dismissed the green-tinted skin and the odd-placement of Liz’s eyes to the window itself and the way that it was reflecting her image. He quickly opened the window and looked right at her.
Of course, she looked unusual. Her scales felt unusual when Marcus touched the side of her face. She was holding her balance on Marcus’ window sill with a tail that had grown out of her posterior and ripped the back of her jeans on the bike ride over here. That was also unusual. But knowing how much that Liz loved lizards and wanted to be like one, Marcus would have been a complete jerk not to be happy for his friend and her transformation.
“Cool,” he said, making Liz feel relieved by her new friends’ acceptance.
Liz and Marcus spent the rest of the night playing in the woods, climbing trees and swinging from them in a way Liz never could before the increased balance that came from her lizard tail. Marcus was proud to give Liz a guided tour of the woods in his hometown that he had played in every day for as long as he was allowed to.
Marcus even showed her where Ashley lived. Liz peered into Ashley’s bedroom as she was sleeping, hanging upside down with her tail wrapped around their satellite dish. Ashley’s hair was in curlers. She was sound asleep. Liz could see inside of Ashley’s closet from here. All of her clothes looked the same to Liz. Lace and bows. Lace and bows, Liz sneered to herself, scowling with disdain, clenching her now-sharpened teeth. So repetitive. Far too pretty for an ugly girl.
Tugging upwards on Ashley’s bedroom window, Liz found it easy to open, at least for the first few inches. And Liz’s newfound agility, something that she had mastered over the past few hours of lizard tree-hopping, allowed her to slither inside of Ashley’s bedroom in one foul swoop. She tiptoed over to that closet, past a sleeping poodle, letting her fingernails quadruple in size the closer she got to the closet. Letting a disdainful hiss escape from her lips, Liz made sure that every single lacey strip of cloth in this room would be in shreds before Ashley woke up in the morning. Maybe she’ll blame it on the dog, Liz thought before closing the window behind her.
Marcus’ woodland tour ended with a beautiful view of a small pond that both reflected and amplified the breathtaking sunrise. Marcus and Liz watched this view from a thick branch that had fallen off of a tree and embedded itself in the ground. Liz shimmied over to sit a little closer to Marcus, putting her head on his shoulder as she slowly realized that she needed to get home before her mom woke up. “I gotta go!” she whispered in Marcus’ ear.
“There’s another tree stump over there,” Marcus replied before his words were interrupted by the realization that Liz had just kissed him on the cheek.
“Thanks!” Liz said. The rush of excitement that came from her first time kissing a boy caused her to slither into the nearest brush like a frightened snake and vanish from Marcus’ view.
***
Liz was nervous about slithering back up to her room. She wanted to know why her mother had let the doctor do this to her. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that the injection had caused this. She wanted to know why these two respected adults had lied to her. It was almost time for her parents to wake up.
Running through the woods that surrounded her house, Liz could soon see her house from a peak. The sound of early morning bird tweeting surrounded her. She looked up into the branches of a tree and watched a mother bird feeding worms to her young. She effortlessly climbed the trunk of a tree to get a better look. Viewing Liz as a threat, the mother bird stretched out her wings, covering the nest to protect her young. This is what a mother is supposed to do, Liz thought, touched by the gesture by this lovingly suspicious robin. Protect her kids.
But the more that Liz looked at these birds, the more her brain was taken over by the chemicals that she had been injected with yesterday. Like many of the lizards whose DNA made up that orange serum, Liz started viewing these birds the same way she always viewed insects, as tasty little morsels like M&Ms. Her eyes widened, as did her mouth, revealing her new fangs. Dropping from one branch to another, Liz gobbled up those birds voraciously, swallowing many of them whole before the mother bird could even let out an alarming squawk.
More lizard instincts taking over her other brain functions, Liz slid her jeans off of her backside, slipping her whip-like tail out of the hole in the rear and squatting over the now-empty nest. Like one specific species of lizard that lays its eggs in the nests of other animals that it has just eaten, Liz dropped three eggs out of her person that lay neatly in this abandoned bird nest. It felt very similar to taking a poop, so it was a familiar, relieving sensation.
Her improved eyesight spotted other nests in other trees in this woodland, filled with either birds or eggs. Knowing instinctively that she had more eggs to lay, Liz hunted down those morsels as well and marked her territory with this basic biological function of a lizard.
***
Like Liz, her parents were also eating meat and eg
gs for breakfast. Carrie decided to let Liz sleep a little later, per the instructions of the doctor who had given her the unusual injection. Plus, it was Saturday and not a school day.
Enjoying his wife’s cooking as always, Jason told Carrie that he had some fun things planned for himself and Liz today. He was going to take her to the park and out to get some ice cream. “We haven’t done that in so long,” Jason said, smiling like a big kid himself.
“That sounds nice, dear,” Carrie said, wondering if Liz was okay. She didn’t normally sleep this late, even when she was allowed to. “But if Liz isn’t feeling well, can you switch your daddy-daughter day to an inside event? Maybe watch a movie and order pizza?”
Jason shrugged. “I guess. Why? You think she’s sick? She might be just sleeping in.”
Carrie didn’t respond. She just stared blankly ahead over Jason’s shoulder. Jason got the feeling that something surprising was behind him, so he turned around. There was Liz, standing in the stairwell in her new lizard-hybrid form. Liz clung to the wall with her adhesive fingertips and walked onto the ceiling before dropping into the kitchen chair where she normally sat for breakfast. That was when Jason got a good look at her. Her recognizable features were distorted and mixed with the features of a few different lizard species.
“Liz?” Jason addressed her, holding back what he was thinking. What the hell did your mother do to you?
“I’m a lizard now, daddy,” Liz said with a big smile on her face. She seemed happy about this. Jason patted his daughter on the head compassionately.
“Yes, you are,” Jason replied before turning to stare daggers at his wife.
“I went to see Dr. Blazi like you said,” Carrie said, pulling out her cell phone and taking a picture of her daughter’s new lizard form. She eagerly smiled for the picture. “Not only did he answer a lot of my questions about her condition, but he gave our daughter what she’s always wanted.”
“How did he do this?”
“Well, as he’s mentioned before, he has a lot of contacts in the military. And they’ve done a lot of work with species identity. As it turns out, they developed a bunch of serums. Cross-species genetics, he called it.”
“So, this is something they use on soldiers? For black ops? I’ve never seen any soldiers on the news with altered genes.”
“Well, not yet. The serum is sort of in the experimental stage.”
“And you let him experiment on our daughter without my consent. You thought you would just spring it on me during breakfast and I would be thrilled about it.”
“You know how much she struggles to fit in at school. I thought you would understand what an advantage this is.”
“She’s five years old!” Jason shouted, slamming the table with his fist and startling Liz with his sudden outburst. “She has to be eighteen before she starts altering her body on a whim! Her whim! Not yours! No tattoos! No body piercings! No…whatever this is! God, you’re like those stupid parents who sued the school so their son could use the ladies room! How dare you do something like this without my consent!”
“He said he only needed one parent to sign.”
“I’ll look into that,” Jason grumbled, trying to remember his lawyer’s number off the top of his head. “How could you be so selfish, Carrie?”
“Selfish?”
“Letting some guy that you used to date do this to our daughter!”
“I did this so our little girl could be comfortable in her own skin!”
“You did this for your career! You went to Dr. Blazi’s office to get material for your book…” Jason pointed at Liz. “And you got material for your book! And you even got to transform the one thing that you resented for taking your career as an activist away from you!”
Carrie knew what Jason was implying and she swelled with anger at his words. “Take that back!” she ordered, slamming the table with her own knuckles. He was calling her a bad mother and it was clear from the expression on Jason’s face that he would not take it back. She got up from her chair and grabbed a small round bowl, a bowl they normally used to put spare change in. Throwing it at her husband as hard as she could, he screamed for him to “GET OUT!” Jason ducked as the bowl smashed against the refrigerator behind him. “GET OUT!”
Jason felt bad about arguing with Carrie in front of their daughter, but he felt strongly that, as a member of the family, that Liz should know what’s going on too. She was a smart girl and he tried to keep his temper as reserved as he could. Admittedly, this was an unusual situation and Jason’s sense of justice had flared his temper like a spark near gasoline. After the shards of the smashed bowl trickled to the floor, Jason turned to see Liz’s lizard tail slipping outside through a window that was opened a crack. Hearing her parents fight had upset her, not to mention being referred to by her own father as a “thing” that her mother resented.
“Liz!” Jason called out, snapping Carrie to her senses. Her temper had caused their only daughter and the best money train she ever had to run away from home. Carrie immediately burst into tears. Jason placed his hand on her shoulder and tried to calm his wife. “I’ll find her,” he said with unshakable assurance.
And that is precisely what Jason tried to do for hours, driving up and down the streets of their town and exploring the wooded areas that Liz liked to play in. Carrie called the police and reported their child missing. She gave them the one picture that she had of Liz in her current lizard form. Carrie called Dr. Blazi and told him what happened, hoping to enlist him in the search.
***
The disappearance of an unusually formed girl was not the only frightening news that the police in Carrie’s town received that evening. As Liz ran through people’s backyards and up their trees, the police kept getting calls about a strange creature that they had seen running through their yards and leaving claw marks on their trees. Some thought that it was Big Foot while others just assumed it as an escaped animal from a nearby zoo. Liz’s enhanced reflexes served her well as one particularly agitated hillbilly shot at her with his rifle. Liz’s long, fat, whip-like tongue was enough to disarm this white-bearded, barefoot whiskey enthusiast, but by the time that man’s wife ran out of their home, it was a whole different story.
Liz’s jaw had detached from her head, widening her mouth at least tenfold. She was swallowing the man who had shot at her whole. She stretched her mouth muscles to get a little more of the man inside of her throat. The part of his body that was still not swallowed yet twitched violently as Liz’s acidic spit dissolved rest of him into numerous vital nutrients. This would make up for the breakfast that she skipped out on earlier. The woman fainted dead to the ground, awaiting her inevitable fate as Liz’s next meal.
The police matched the reports of the mysterious creature with the picture that Carrie had given them of Liz. A young girl named Ashley had woken up to find that her clothes were shredded during a break-in and the police came to investigate. Claw marks on the wall and the fact that Ashley admitted to bullying Liz in school made Liz the prime suspect for this as well. While three police cars were sent to the areas that these reports were coming from, another police officer was sent to Liz’s house to question Carrie about her daughter’s whereabouts.
As Carrie sat at her kitchen table, drinking coffee with the police officer who she had invited into the house, she started to realize how dangerous Liz was. Her desire to have her old single life back and her desire for fame had gotten out of hand. In front of the officer, Carrie dismissed Liz’s behavior as the kind of scuffle that all bullied kids get into at one time or another, but deep down, she knew she had made a big mistake.
As the officer was finishing his coffee, hoping that Jason would come home soon so that he could be questioned as well, all of the little eggs that Liz had laid into the nests of birds in the surrounding woodland started to hatch. Smaller, scaly, naked, freakish-looking versions of Liz started
to come out of these eggs, stretching their slimy limbs and sniffing the air around them for the nearest scent of food. They caught a scent and immediately started flooding towards Carrie’s house, making high-pitched squeaking noises and flocking in unison like birds avoiding a predator.
Bursting through windows, startling both Carrie and the officer, this swarm of one-foot-tall, human/lizard hybrids attacked voraciously with both teeth and claws bared. The officer stood up quickly, drawing his holstered gun, but he was disarmed when one baby hybrid bit into his hand, drawing blood. Carrie was soon covered from head to toe in these bloodthirsty monsters that were technically her grandchildren. She was ripped to shreds along with the visiting officer by vicious creatures that she herself had unleashed onto the world, intending to become famous for upholding their civil rights.
***
Jason was driving his car home, dead tired after searching high and low for his daughter all evening. He decided to take one final look in the park that Liz always played in. Trudging somewhere between the swing set and the sandbox, Jason was spotted by Liz, who was lurking like a gargoyle in a tall tree nearby, concealed by leaves. She wiped a feather off of her mouth, the last remnants of a live bird that she had just eaten.
“Liz!” Jason called out. Liz immediately dropped from this tree and to her feet. Tears streaming down his face, Jason walked over to his daughter with a big smile on his face. “Honey! Daddy’s sorry.” Jason got down on one knee and touched his daughter’s hair, which he was relieved to discover still felt like human hair. “I’m sorry I yelled at Mommy. Daddy doesn’t think you’re a ‘thing’. Daddy thinks you’re beautiful.”
Liz turned her head from side to side, licking her thin lips with her sticky tongue. Jason could not tell how much of a lizard that Liz had become since last he saw her, so he tried to appeal to the side of her that he knew, hoping that there was some humanity left.