Menagerie

My face flamed. I wanted to hide, but the best I could do was let my hair swing forward to shield part of my face.

Several feet into my barefoot walk of shame, I saw Brandon sitting in a cracked plastic waiting room chair. I tripped over my own nerves and Deputy Atherton started to catch me, then changed his mind. I saw the moment it happened. He was reaching for me, probably out of instinct, then suddenly recoiled. He flinched—as if I were a snake about to strike, when really I was falling face-first toward the dingy yellow floor tile, unable to catch myself with my hands cuffed at my back.

Brandon stared at his shoes as I staggered, then awkwardly regained my balance on my own. I recognized tension in the cords standing out from his neck, as if he wanted to look, but was fighting the urge.

“Brandon,” I called once I was steady, and my voice cracked on the first syllable. His jaw clenched, but he didn’t look up. My flush deepened. “Brandon.” Raw desperation echoed in my voice and a couple of strangers sneered at the tender bits of my heart and soul I’d exposed.

My boyfriend of four years was the only person in the room not watching me.

“Brandon, please.” My cheeks were scalding and my throat ached. But I couldn’t believe he would abandon me without a word. He knew better than anyone else in the world aside from my mother that I would never hurt someone on purpose.

Deputy Atherton took me by the arm, evidently having gathered the courage to touch me in the face of my humiliation. “Come on, Delilah.”

“No.” I jerked free of his grip, and people all over the room flinched. “Say it, Brandon,” I demanded, and at first he didn’t move. Then my roommate and lover—one of my very best friends—stood and marched toward the exit, as if he wanted to run, but pride wouldn’t let him. “Brandon! Say it, you fucking coward!”

He froze halfway to the door, and my heart stilled along with him. Then slowly, Brandon turned. His eyes were red. His jaw was clenched. He looked at me as if he didn’t even know who I was.

“How could you do this to me?”

“I didn’t—”

“The whole thing was a lie,” he shouted, and I flinched. “You were a lie! I trusted you. I told you everything. I ate with you and slept next to you, and the whole time you were some kind of monster, just using me as part of your human camouflage. There is no Delilah Marlow.”

“No, that’s not true. It was all real! I didn’t know!” I took a step toward him, but Atherton grabbed my arm again, and several other deputies placed hands on the butts of their guns. “You have to believe I didn’t know.”

“I don’t know what to believe.” Tears shone in Brandon’s eyes, but anger glowed in his cheeks. “I was in love with a woman who never even existed. I can’t believe I ever let you—” His sentence ended in an inarticulate sound of disgust, and something deep inside me cracked apart. Some delicate part of me collapsed like a demolished building, leaving only broken shapes and sharp edges.

“Don’t blame yourself, son,” a middle-aged man called out from the waiting area. “We were all fooled in the eighties. I lost my aunt, uncle, and six cousins to those chameleon bastards, may they rot in hell.”

Cheers erupted all around me, and suddenly my ribs felt too tight.

“But I—I’m not one of them! I’m not—”

“Baby killer!” a woman shouted from the waiting area.

“Remember the reaping!” a man in regular steel cuffs shouted, though the cop who shoved him back into his chair didn’t seem to dispute the sentiment.

A cop in his thirties stood from behind his desk and strode toward me, and I thought he was going to take over for Deputy Atherton and get me out of there—until he spit in my face.

I blinked, stunned, as spittle dripped down my cheek.

“Damn it, Bruce!” Atherton hauled me toward another door.

Across the room, Brandon shoved the press-bar on the front exit and when he stepped into the parking lot, he took my last shred of hope with him. If my own boyfriend wouldn’t stand by me, who would?

The front door closed behind Brandon, and I sniffed back tears that stung like utter rejection and humiliation. My hair fell into my face as Wayne led me into another hallway, several strands clinging to the spit on my cheek.

Finally, Atherton closed the door behind us, shielding me from the rest of the world. Or maybe shielding it from me.

In an interrogation room, I followed his instructions without truly hearing them. In my mind, the front door of the sheriff’s station closed over and over, and all I could see was the back of Brandon’s head.

“Delilah,” Atherton said, and I realized he’d already said my name at least twice.

“What?” I blinked to clear my head and looked down to find myself sitting in a cold plastic chair with my arms looped around the back. A tug against my cuffs rattled chains I had no memory of, which evidently ran between my handcuffs and a metal loop set into the ground. I couldn’t stand or even twist much in my chair without pulling my arms out of their sockets.

Before I could ask if all of the metal was really necessary, a second deputy knelt to slap a set of iron shackles around my ankles and connect them to that same hook in the ground, behind my chair. When he stood, I tried to lean forward, but the pain in my shoulders stopped me. I tried to cross my ankles, but the shackles were in the way. I couldn’t move more than an inch in any direction, and that sudden severe confinement made my throat close. The room had plenty of open space but I couldn’t use any of it. Plenty of air, but I couldn’t seem to breathe any of it.

“Struggling will only make it worse,” Atherton said, and while there was no malice in his voice, there was no willingness to help either. “Just try not to think about it.”

But I couldn’t seem to manage that until the door opened, and Sheriff Pennington stepped in from the hall. He commented on my restraints with an incomprehensible grunt, then sat in the chair across a small folding table from mine.

Pennington folded his fleshy arms on the table and studied my face. “Delilah Marlow?”

I nodded, desperately trying not to squirm. “Am I under arrest?”

He snorted, then swiped at his nose with the back of one hand. “No, and I wouldn’t arrest a dog for bitin’ either. I’d just put the bitch down in the interest of public safety. You won’t be charged, and you won’t be Mirandized, because you no longer have any rights, you devious piece of shit. As long as you’re under my jurisdiction, I can do whatever I want with you, and I can’t imagine your lot would improve if the feds take over.”

His blatant threat bounced around the inside of my skull, and anger overtook my fear for the first time since I’d woken up in a jail cell. “This isn’t right, Sheriff.”

“I deal in law, not morality.” Pennington paused for a moment, evidently to let that little cow chip of irony sink in. “What are you exactly, Delilah Marlow?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. He lifted one skeptical eyebrow, and I shrugged as best I could with my hands tightly bound behind me. “Look, if I knew, I’d tell you just to prove I’m not a surrogate.”

“Unless you are a surrogate.”

“If I were a surrogate, I’d lie. Either way, you’d have an answer. But I don’t know what I am. I didn’t know I wasn’t human until tonight.”

“We don’t know what the surrogates were either, do we?” Pennington pulled a palm-sized notebook from his front pocket. “So that doesn’t really rule anything out for you.”

I tried to find a more comfortable position, but the chains kept relief just out of reach. “Well, we know what they weren’t, and none of those little monsters looked anything like I did tonight.”

“About that...” the sheriff continued, flipping open his notebook to reveal a single page of pencil scrawling. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some possibilities that might keep you out of federal custody, shall we?”

And finally something in his voice clued me in. Sheriff Pennington didn’t want me to be a surrogate either, because that would put me beyond his authority. The Justice Department had claimed jurisdiction over all of those cases before I was even born.

“Here’re the facts, as they were relayed to me. One, your voice changed in depth and—” Pennington glanced at the notebook on the table in front of him “—quality. Says here it was deeper than it shoulda been, and it felt—” another glance at his notes “—large. Whatever that means. Two, your eyes changed color. Not just the irises, but the entirety of your eyeballs.” He made a vague gesture encompassing most of my face, and I shuddered at the thought. “They became white, shot through with dark veins. Does that sound about right?”

I could only give him a painfully wrenching shrug, trying to hide the tide of horror washing over me. “I couldn’t see my own eyes.” And I’d never heard of a cryptid species which fit that description.

“It also says here that the veins in your face became black, like dark spiderwebs beneath your skin. Do you know anything about that?”

“No.” But I could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see. No wonder Shelley was scared. No wonder Brandon could hardly look at me. I’d spent four years studying cryptid species, yet couldn’t even identify my own. If I couldn’t understand what I’d become, how could they?

Pennington glanced at his notebook again.

“What about your hair? Witnesses say your hair took on a life of its own.”

“Sheriff, I’m assuming that if you spoke to my friends, you know that I was a crypto-biology major, with an emphasis in human hybrid species. I should know what I am. But I truly have no clue. Before tonight, I didn’t even know the question needed to be asked. All I know for sure at this point is that I’m no longer a bank teller.” I was no longer a driver, or a tenant, or a girlfriend, or a best friend.