“Come on! Let’s go home, sweetie,” Jason said, putting his hand on her back and guiding her towards his car. Liz sniffed the air around her and when both she and her father turned around, there stood Dr. Blazi, leaning up against the tree that Liz had been perched in. “What the hell are you doing here?” barked Jason, pointing an accusing finger at the doctor.
“Searching for a missing child,” Blazi smugly replied, taking a drag from his cigarette as his trench coat flapped in the breeze.
“Well, she’s been found, so piss off!” Jason barked before looking down and seeing that Liz was no longer standing next to him. She had slithered over to Blazi and up his torso like a garden snake.
“Amazing how certain species of lizards are so loyal to the first person who imprints on them when they are born,” Blazi said, reminding Jason that he was the doctor who had delivered Liz. Blazi gently rubbed his fingers down her scaly nose. Liz responded by rubbing her face onto his index finger. Jason charged forward with his fists clenched, fully prepared to punch his daughter’s pediatrician right in his smug face.
Liz could sense her father’s hostility and immediately whipped her neck around so that her head was facing behind her. She stiffened her body and bared her fangs to Jason, making a frightening hissing sound that rattled the scales on her cheek. She was threatening Jason to stay back. She was protecting Dr. Blazi. “See?” quipped the smug doctor as Jason stepped back, dumbfounded by his daughter’s behavior.
Almost out of nowhere, military men showed up. Their boots hit the ground and they held their guns on Jason, ordering him to back up further. Jason watched in horror as his daughter was placed into a cage by her pediatrician. “Bio-asset contained!” one of the soldiers said into a radio as two other soldiers lifted the cage.
“What do you want with her?” Jason asked. None of this makes any sense! he thought to himself.
Coldly dropping a thick manila folder at Jason’s feet, Blazi deadpanned, “Figure it out!” before all of the soldiers disappeared with the caged trans-species lizard within seconds. In a barrage of purple smoke from gas pellets, it was like they were never there.
Jason got down on one knee, picking up the folder, frightened of what it might contain. He was paralyzed with shock when he opened the folder and saw medical proof from blood samples that he was not Liz’s biological father. After a brief affair with her ex-boyfriend a few years into her marriage, Carrie made Blazi promise to keep Liz’s true parentage a secret. She wanted to pass Liz off of Jason’s daughter, something that Blazi was not happy with. He hoped that Carrie would leave Jason behind and be with him, but since that was not going to happen, he knew it was best that Liz have a stable family. So, he agreed to the deception.
It was not surprising that Liz was autistic, a trait that she got from the genes of the brilliant scientist who suffered from the condition himself. But Blazi had injected Liz with a small amount of his lizard serum during one of her routine check-ups when she was just an infant. This contributed to Liz’s specific obsession and biological connection with lizards, which Carrie passed off as an autism trait, but that later allowed Blazi to convince her mother that she was really a lizard inside. Blazi knew that Carrie was such an overbearing mother that she couldn’t wait until Liz was eighteen to make these kinds of big decisions. She wanted something that she could control, like the career as an activist that she had left behind with motherhood. This allowed Blazi to convince Carrie that Liz should have further ‘species reassignment’ treatment when she was only five. He was able to use Carrie’s obsession with helping the disenfranchised to control the fate of his daughter (and indirectly murder his ex-lover) in a way that he never would have been able to otherwise.
Jason Jacobs drove through the small town that he lived in, thinking deeply about what he should do next. He couldn’t help but worry about Liz. The entire town had been overrun with her hybrid spawns. Everywhere he looked, a miniature version of his beloved daughter was ferociously attacking someone on the street, stretching its mouth to gobble their head. By the time the Army was called in to quell the threat, Jason Jacobs would be long gone.
He started a new dental practice in a nearby town, but used all of his savings to fund an activist movement of his own. Its purpose was to find out what the Army had done to his daughter and why. He contacted some his wife’s friends, looking for more evidence of cross-species genetic experiments in the United States military. He found some, but suspected that more needed to be exposed. Jason didn’t know if Dr. Blazi would allow his daughter to train for combat missions or even if he would even have a choice in the matter. Carrie was the one who had stricken Liz’s birth certificate from U.S. records so she would no longer be considered human. This was another one of Blazi’s ideas, something that would make it even more difficult for Jason to get his daughter back now.
By the time that combat missions involving half-human, half-animal soldiers were commonplace and public in the United States, Jason’s ‘Truth About Liz’ movement would have gained real traction. Through numerous television and online interviews, people all over the world would realize that Jason Jacobs would never do what Carrie did with her own daughter. He would never exploit someone’s weakness to get more publicity for what may or may not be a good cause.
He just wanted to know that she was okay.
For more satirical sci-fi from this author…
…go to www.turtlerocketbooks.com
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends