Samaria

I woke up under a dying tree with caustic ash dried to my lips and teeth. The ash was no worse than the dried rubble that I walked through or the leathery feel of my skin. I was dragging my leg at times and finding difficulty managing an upright posture. My clothes have been charred from the fire. Surprisingly, they had held up. I see fires in the distance behind me raging above the sparsely treelined horizon and hear explosions reverberating. There will be no survivors, nor should there be. I have been frozen for years in the deep freeze lockers in the pharma biogenetics deep lab basement. An apparent malfunction of the ancillary power grid changed that, because they had no intention of releasing anything that was fabricated at this particular plant of horrors and human experimentation gone extremely wrong. Experiments no one in their right mind would have done. They locked it down and closed it like a time capsule after selling the most horrendous of these mutated freaks to the most sadistic people inhabiting earth. Had it been for the fact this lab was unmanned I wouldn’t have gotten away. I am sure my exit breach set off the series of explosions. They didn’t expect anything to escape. The trip wires tell me that their intentions were to kill anything coming or going.

I looked at the murky ashen sky as the drones flying overhead were searching to see if there were any survivors. I got out just as the plant was imploding and prior to the armed drones being dispatched. Still foggy after the deep freeze, my recall was coming back in flashes of memories and faces. I wanted to return to the plant to see if I could piece things together, but my strength wasn’t terrific. I was weak, and knew if I didn’t rest, I would be in danger of termination.

Gathering my thoughts, I fell over into a pile of caustic ash and dirt that was heaped up surrounding the tree. I felt the ground start rumbling like an earthquake and rolled back further covering myself with ash and dirt. Large machinery thundered through the open fields towards the plant. “What in the hell are they doing?” All equipment now is remotely run but accompanied by drones. It was scarfing up dirt, roads, foliage, and anything else in its path that led to the plant. “They certainly don’t want visitors, now do they?” I quipped. I watched as they tore up the earth and roads, my head dropping down, and my eyes drooping as I was drifting in and out of sleep. Thinking about what I had gone though all of those years ago.

They harvested my eggs and injected me with plasma and experimental drugs until I woke up and… was no longer me. I was a mutant. That was certain. I had super-human strength, but that was only the start of my mutant capabilities. I had the ability to climb buildings and rocky hillsides with my raptor-like nails and tear flesh right to and off the bones of humans and animals. These razor-sharp claws emerged from under my leathery skin with swipe of my hand in a fraction of a second.

It had been difficult to look at myself with the disfigured, warped discolored facial skin, that appeared in parts like melted wax dripping in the sun compared to who I once was. I was a beautiful woman with long black hair called Samaria. My leathery skin now is almost impenetrable, and I can take hit after hit without injury or incident. I can be shot, stabbed, and burned without being killed. I no longer have genitals or female organs which they felt made mutants weak. Considering all of that, I was a failure in their experimentation because I was not large enough to physically intimidate people and I was set for destruction. What they didn’t realize was they did not change my memories, morals or my identity. My mind was perfectly normal. The soldier that they kidnapped off the streets of that New Mexico town that was more than some small-town soldier. She had skills and intelligence. She was a warrior like her name, Samaria.

I also know exactly who did this. I watched everything that went on in that lab from day to day. I know where this woman lives. I know that she did not want to do this, because I could see it in her eyes every single time, she ran a new batch of the experimental plasma and injected it. And she did it over and over, just like they told her. I think she left me like this on purpose. In addition to that I think that she might be able to fix this whole thing by reversing it somehow. I worry that I’m too late, because I know that they escorted her out one day. Maybe they killed her. Maybe she has died by now. I don’t even know what day or year it is. I do know that the experiments went downhill with her gone. They began integrating the training to kill and the takeover of global governments on a mass level. I’m sure that she feared her work would lead to that one day…

She came to work every day and spoke to no one at work. This lady never socialized. The pharma biogenetics company kidnapped her husband, and I’m sure that it broke her heart, it would have broken mine too. She wore plain A line dresses, the same shoes, the same bag, and the same titanium heart necklace on the same titanium chain. I was sure watching the way that she clutched it that it must have been a gift from her husband. She even packed the same damn lunch every day, so she wouldn’t raise any eyebrows about her routine. But she was kind, that I knew. They did stuff like kill people, like her husband, so that so the rest of us, just took that shit. And…we did.

A noise off in the distance startled me. Looking around I hunkered down. It’s not that I don’t think that I could take another mutant, but I certainly don’t want anyone to know I survived. Being drained from the blast and years of deep freeze are working against me right now. To my surprise comes a young girl and her dog. They appear to be messing with something in the ground, kicking it around, brushing dirt and ash off of it. Then the girl climbs up into a tree and is doing something.

“She’s up in a tree doing something, now at night?” The dog jumps on the trunk of the tree and barks at the girl. “Aren’t they the pair?” They are just living their lives. “Who are these fucking people?” Samaria thought. Shifting around in the dirt, rubble and caustic ash caused soot to waft up and the dog to look in her direction. “Oh, hell no, you little mother fucker. I don’t want no beef with you bitch. You just mind your business.” Samaria directs this at the dog and continues to spy on them.

The dog continued to focus on Samaria’s direction, as the girl jumped down out of the tree, patted the dogs head and straightened her pack. It was just then that the buzz of drones filled the air around them, and red laser lights started swirling around to lock in and kill them. The girl grabbed pistols off both hips taking out multiple armed drones in a matter of seconds. Her eyes in full night vision glowed green now as she moved with such ninja-like precise movement in her execution downing every drone. She ran over and took the ammunition, and immediately pulled homing devices from them to disable their location capabilities, crushing them to pieces. “Done! Now let’s get out before they send more!” the girl said to the dog as they ran towards an enormous rock, and subsequently disappeared.

Dropping down further into the dirt, made me realize that the mutant’s muscles had been clenched and claws were fully extended. Even watching an interaction heightened mutant senses and caused a mutant reaction to the situation which had always given me pause. I often feared that I would hurt someone by accident because of my mutant response coding sequences and inability to control these. Now I knew there was a human here in this area, and that fear was very real, and palpable indeed. But was she human? I certainly had doubts at this point because even if the girl was not a mutant, this girl had mutant attributes that I had seen at the lab with her vision. It was certainly a possibility that she was an earlier version of a mutant mutation or one of the earliest version’s offspring…I couldn’t decide.

The possibilities danced in my head as I determined sleep was still needed and memories of what has become the past continued to plague my mutant mind. I woke up to sun baking more caustic ash to my teeth and face. Same shit, spitting… looking around and smelling the air. The fires were dying down. It was going to be a good night to hit the plant area and delve through things. Right now, I had to eat. Dug up some grubs and ate them but decided on a fat groundhog that looked cancerous. Raw meat used to disgust me but currently, really, had no option, so groundhog it was…energizing, really.

Darkness not always a great cover, when you are digging in hot ash, but, I sifted through the hot embers and splintered wood in a raking motion finding pieces and parts of the last several years of my life. I knew it would take all night, so I set up a grid search to do things orderly. Pulling things away from the wreckage I see a lab refrigerator that still had the door intact and opened it. “Holy shit!” I thought, “What do we have here?” There inside, glowing plasma tubes and in I reached for them... “Hold it right there.” Someone from behind me yelled. “Whaaaat?” I thought, freezing.

Slowly turning the mutant began to take on its full terrifying presence claws protruding hunched over and snarling. Unsure of the threat, the mutant was on high alert and ready. The mutant turned and standing before them was the girl and dog from the day before. Quicker than the mutant could react, the girl swung something from behind her that snapped onto the mutant’s face and head tightly taking her to the ground immobilizing it immediately. The bear trap that now caged its face and head gripping it like a vice was working. The girl walked over and crouched down to look the mutant in the eye. “I saw you yesterday.” That’s when something around the girl’s neck caught the mutant’s eye, and its claws, retracted, the mutant reached up for it, but couldn’t get ahold of the object that was swinging from the girl’s neck. “The titanium heart.” Samaria hoarsely whispered. “I knew the lady that wore the titanium heart. She did this to me.”

The girl looked at the mutant in shock. Gripping the heart necklace. She backed away from the mutant, “My grandmother would never hurt anyone. She didn’t do this.” The girl said pointing, indignantly. “My grandmother is going to save the world. Someone else did that, not her!” The girl kicked the mutant with a hard rib shot.

“Listen, girl, whoever you are. I really don’t think your grandmother wanted to do this. I think your grandmother wanted us to work together. She never infected my brain.” Samaria said, trying to convey good intentions.

“Can a mutant work towards the good of humanity?”…the girl stared. Thought. Grandmother give me a sign…

The heart necklace fell from her neck to the ground in that moment.