Shelly instantly began to protest the idea of her going to a hospital, but before any words could exit her mouth, Zoey rolled her eyes and fell to the floor of the chamber.
"NO!" Shelly shouted, thinking Zoey just died. Checking her pulse, it was apparent she was still alive. She had just passed out. Shelly gave a sigh of relief. "Zoey, wake up." She slapped her across the cheeks a few times, but the girl refused to wake up. Shaking her head, Shelly stepped out and looked over the log again. Working backwards, everything seemed to go smoothly, however it wasn't until the start of the process run she saw what happened. Shelly gave a sigh of relief. The process had reloaded the dumped memory, chunked it, and then processed forward. Scratching her head, she searched the system for another dump file. "Okay, so where did the wolf go? You have to had gone somewhere." The dog obviously wasn't in the exit chamber, and Zoey looked completely human. So the data had to go somewhere. However there was no dump file. Even Zoey's file was removed. "Shit," Shelly said. She was too tired to think straight. Taking a breath, she decided to just lock everything down (including Zoey) and come back to it in the morning when she was fresh of mind. "Okay, Zoey," she said, logging off. "I can bring you back to my room for the night. I can probably pass you off as someone who drank to..." As Shelly stood up, she could see the exit chamber was now empty. Her eyes widened. "What the-?" Her eyes darted to the door. It was still closed, but regardless, she swore. Loudly.
_______________________________________________________
Zoey couldn't remember getting to her car. She remembered passing out in the experiment room after the doc said something. But the next thing she remembered was waking up in her car. She was still naked, but after turning her interior lights on, she could see the burns weren't as bad as she feared. Her hair was mostly gone, but it wasn't too bad. The worst part was the smell of burnt hair and flesh, mixed the scent of the bleach detergent she had been using to clean.
Regardless Zoey knew she was hurt, and she probably needed help. She should get help. "God damn it, why am I so tired." The last time she felt this out of it, she had been slipped something by an asshole at a bar. "Last time I answer a job posting on a cork pin-up board," she muttered to herself.
She tried to remember where the nearest E.R. was, but another part of her just wanted to go home and get some sleep. Stopping at a light she looked around for her phone to use the GPS. Only then she realized her phone was probably still with her burned clothes, likely destroyed. "Dammit," she muttered. "I just want to...." She felt really tired, and sleep took her again.
Hours later, Zoey woke up. She recalled fading memories of a dream where she had been living in a cage, being fed by the doctor woman and other people who came in and out of the lab. Weird.
Looking around she was lying on her bed, still naked. It took her only a moment to see her fresh pink skin and remember most of the events of the previous evening. She still couldn't remember going to her car, and she couldn't remember coming home. "What the hell?" she muttered. Her stomach grumbled. "Damn, I'm hungry."
There was a knock at her apartment door. "One minute!" she shouted. Glancing at her clock, it read 8:34. "Ugh." She rushed to get some clothes on. The knocking came again. "I said a minute, dammit!"
"Ma'am. This is the ??PD. Do you own a brown 1996 chevy sedan, license plate S4Y-"
"Yeah!" she shouted loudly unlocking the door while wearing the one robe she had, tied tight in the front. The young officer was dressed in stereotypical cop-man blues, holding onto a tiny notepad like some archaic iPhone. Zoey didn't have a high opinion of the police. "That's mine. Why? The handicap decide to paint their wheelchair under my car's spot last night again?" The guy might had been cute, delicious even. But he was still a cop sticking his nose into everything his bosses told him to.
The brown-haired officer looked her over momentarily. "Ma'am. We tried calling you, but we only kept getting your voice mail. Your vehicle was found running, abandoned, near the intersection of 4th and Cross. Were you aware of this?"
"What?" she blinked. "No. I... No."
"Well, it was there. Keys in the ignition. Running. The doors were also all shut and locked. Did you use it last night?"
"Yeah, but." She swallowed, confused. "I came home." She couldn't remember it, but she had to had gotten home somehow.
"What time?"
"Uh," she tried to remember. She got to the doc's around 9:30pm. She couldn't had been there that long. "I don't remember exactly, but it had to be like 10:00 to 10:30, maybe."
"Okay. It was found up along the sidewalk. One person said they saw it just run idly though the intersection before hitting a telephone pole at low-speed, stopping it. No real damage."
As he was talking, Zoey's eyes trailed over to the side of her apartment door. Specifically, she was looking at her deadbolt.
I unlocked this, she thought to herself. But if my keys were in the car, how did I get in the apartment? The only other set of keys she had were held by her uptight mother seven towns away.
"Ma'am?" the officer asked.
"Sorry, what? Sorry, it's just... I really didn't know it was gone."
"Did you lend your keys to anyone?" the cop asked, slightly in the tone as if he had repeated himself.
"No," she said. "One second. Let me look." Leaving the door, she did a quick search of her apartment and her bedroom. The cop had stepped inside, keeping her in his line of sight. However her keys were definitely not here. "Shit," she muttered. She turned to the cop. "Somebody must had taken them." Her stomach grumbled again.
"Was anybody in your apartment after you came home last night?" he asked.
"No," she said. Then how did you get home, she thought to herself. "At least, not that I recall."
"Ma'am," the officer asked, straight forward, "are you sure you didn't abandon your vehicle last night?"
"I couldn't have," she said. "Look, you said there were a bunch of keys?"
"Yes," he asked.
"Well, you heard my door unlock. I don't have another set to that door. My mother has one. She's nowhere close. So, I was here went this happened."
"Does the manager of the building have a set?" he asked.
Zoey growled a little. "Yes, but... I don't remember seeing him last night. Look, somebody... I don't..." Confused, frustrated, irritable, hungry... she was finding all of this stressful and annoying. "Somebody must had stolen my car," she said.
Did someone? she asked herself, unsure. Her hear started to swim. I need something to eat, a part of her mind told her. This was just too much.
"Ma'am, are you alright?"
"I'm fine!" she barked at him. Something caused the young man to back up a step. To Zoey's surprise and horror, he dropped a hand down onto a gun he had at his side. She backed up a step, "What?"
In a heartbeat, the young man unlatched his gun and drew it on her. "Don't move!" He was breathing heavily, frightened.
She raised her hands up, "What are you doing?"
"I said don't move!"
Then her eyes saw it. As she was raising her hands, she could see her fingernails. They were vastly longer than they should be. The black nail-polish covered only her tips, but somehow those tips were two inches further away from her fingers than they normally were. And they looked sharp. Her body began to feel very warm.
With a look of horror, she turned her gaze towards the meat backing away towards the door. "What is going on!?!" she shouted, her voice sounding a tad more guttural than normal.
Whether it was her voice, or something else, something spooked the cop further. He fired.