Day 1: Heart
a/n: not my best, spent so long writing because I am hypercritical of my writing and felt like if I didn't get the opening right, no one would read. Steadily getting back into writing vore again so this is not great. But enjoy
The policing world had been unkind to Detective Calder more times than he could count. Within the past year, his own police cruiser was taken for having an “age-affected” mental state — whatever the hell that meant. The man was barely in his forties, but in precinct years, that might as well be a lifetime. His duty as a criminal investigator had been stripped to that of a glorified errand boy, forced to “inspect” lost animal and stolen item reports.
And worse of all his own partner went missing.
Officer T. Brooks had gone silent after a solo investigation — a missing person’s report that turned into personal. A researcher at the local science center had gone missing after coworkers hadn’t seen him leave his lab in a few weeks. Notably, this scientist was known to get really deep into his work so it didn’t surprise them at first. But when they started to hear strange noises coming from the lab, they began to worry.
When Brooks was assigned the case, he had a hunch as to who the missing person could be — his own uncle. The old man was a veteran scientist who loved to get obsessive about his projects, spending days on end buried in research with his assistant on dial to help if needed. Unfortunately, the assistant was on mandatory vacation so they were of no use. So Brooks went at the case alone for once. Calder wanted to go with but Brooks had told him he felt this was a case he could solve himself. Though it never sat right with him, he didn’t oppose Brook’s judgement. But when Brook’s stopped answering his radio, Calder begged to be let out on the case. The captain told him to leave it alone, claiming:
“It’s an internal matter, Calder. Brook’s made it personal so it’s his business on whether or not to let you help. I’m sorry, there’s nothing else you can do.”
But curiosity is a cop’s curse, and guilt’s worse. Calder had already bared enough silence in his career — he wasn’t about to add his partner’s name to the list of thrown out cases.
So, on a rain-slick Thursday night, he found himself outside the now rusted gates of the city research center. It had been abandoned since Brook’s investigation began and no one bothered to return even after Brook’s disappearance. The sign on the center read, “Garbrook Research Facility” in neon lights, some letter’s flicking to stay lit as he grimaced. His mind ran rampant as to what could have happened to his partner. Maybe Brooks got himself trapped somewhere and tried to call for helping help? Maybe a chemical spill occurred and knocked him out in a lab? Or worse, maybe he was turned into a strange experiment himself?
His cigarette going out made him snap back, the soaked hat atop his head had dripped water onto the smoking end. He groaned as the paper in his mouth turned soggy, spitting it out onto the overgrown grass below. The storm above roars as lightning flashed behind the building, startling him. As he pushes the gates, an already unlocked lock falls from around a rail, its keyhole busted wide open and the shackle split in half.
“Maybe Brooks kicked in it. I can see him doing that.” Calder said to himself, moving his hands off the metal to reveal the brownish orange rust staining his hands. He wipes them off on his jacket, leaving handprints on the trench coat.
Inside the center, the corridors were empty, windows caked in dust and floors stained with piled up dirt. A few piles of stray leaves and trash were found in some rooms, windows broken by hooligans looking for ways inside. The air was cold and dry, the smell of ozone and copper filling the air. He turned into a room, seeing petri dishes and beakers smashed onto the floor. He turns on the floor lights, finding them flickering in the hallway and connecting spaces. The place looked half-abandoned, papers scattered wherever and equipment left mid-experiment. Calder guesses the scientists had to leave in a hurry when Brooks began investigation.
Calder ventured deeper into the laboratory, finding a set of large metal doors at the end of the hallway. Marked as “Doctor Vindal’s Workroom”, he pushes them open to reveal a burnt out lab. The room was the only one left in the dark, lights above were burned out from whatever mishap occurred. Charred notes and samples still clung to the walls, some still pinned up by melted thumbtacks. A huge white board on the left side had scribbled over handwriting, when revealed after wiping away the ash, they read:
“My goal: Sustain life beyond organs.”
“Most important?: The heart. Works best for testing.”
“Other organs are great to mess around with, perfect for experimentation.”
“See if independent rhythm out of body can occur.”
“NEED LIVE SUBJECT! Subject found.”
He looked around, wiping off metal tables and counters to reveal organs stashed in containers. Each floating in some colorful convocation of chemicals and liquids that kept them still beating and moving. They made no audible sound, the fluid muffling them as he shook one with a brain inside. He gagged, placing it back down. He stepped over disregarded equipment, some covered in dried blood and dust, one holding an odd green liquid inside. Calder searches a huge desk in the middle of the room, most of whatever was inside burned except for a notebook. Labeled as “Research Work and Analysis”, he opens it to reveal several anatomical sketches and notes written by the doctor. The drawings show various disembodied and dissected organs connected by wires, the same ones he saw in the jars. Each had their own individual pump system with writing telling what fluids and chemicals needed to keep them alive. There were plenty of pictures inside too, many of possibly donated bodies dissected with paper taped toothpicks on the exposed organs, marked as “Replace”, “Rearrange”, or “Remove”.
Calder saw these photos as very methodical, as if the doctor was really etching out the plans and work of “magnum opus”, words ripped straight from the journal. He keeps flipping through the pages, he stumbled across various pictures of Officer Brooks. All shots of him from behind, like whoever took them was concealing themselves from the policeman. They showed him in different parts of a center, looking through desks, filing cabinets, even a refrigerator or two filled with disregarded experiments. The last photo showed him in the very laboratory Calder was in, Brooks facing some metal door in the other corner of the room opening it. The caption under it saying, “I found my subject.”
Calder pockets the notebook, looking for the very door. He pushes some overturned chairs and a fallen shelf to find it, surprisingly untouched by the char. It was cracked open, his flashlight shining through to reveal a spiral staircase that led downward in the dark. He tightened his grip on the flashlight as heard something.
Thump-Thump.
Thump-Thump
The sound echoed up the narrow stairwell like a heartbeat — pulsing, deliberate, alive. Each thump seemed to vibrate the iron railing beneath his hand, the tremor creeping up his arm. By the time he reached the bottom step, Calder could feel the beat in his teeth.
The air had grown heavier the more and more he descended, the bottom thick with humidity and the faint stench of meat. He swept the light across the floor, the checkered tile slick with some black mess atop it. A single bulb swung lazily from a cord in the ceiling, flickering in time with the sound. The room opened into what looked like a subterranean extension of the lab — walls lined with pipes, glass vats, and more of those organ-filled containers. Only now, they were larger. One jar held an entire torso; another contained what looked like a spinal column snaking through thick fluid, twitching on its own.
Calder’s stomach turned, but his feet carried him forward. The thumping grew stronger near the far wall, where a steel door—reinforced, sealed with bolts—rattled like something inside was pushing against it. A low, ragged breathing accompanied the rhythm. He approached slowly, reaching out to brush the surface of the door. It was warm.
“Brooks?” he called. His voice came out hoarse, uncertain. “That you, kid?”
No answer. Just the thump-thump. Then, faintly, a whisper:
“…Calder…”
He froze. The sound came from behind the door.
“Brooks?” he said again, louder. “It’s Calder. I’m getting you out of here.”
He grabbed the door handle tight and twisted. It creaked downward, dust falling off into his palm as the metallic door scraped against the floor, hissing open with a gust of stale air blowing into his face. He leans against it, seeing a wide, circular chamber lined with more tubes and machinery, wires trailing like vines. In the center, on a blood-streaked table, lay what was left of Officer Brooks.
Calder stumbled back at the sight, covering his mouth in shock. Brook was pale and shirtless, his body sprawled out on a metal table with several IV bags filled with a green liquid flowing into him. His abdomen was cut open, ribcage like a book with his still active lunges inside. His body was twice the size of Calder’s, his head visible the size of the detective’s torse and rested on a blocky pillow. The room felt more like a coroner's office than an official lab, Calder even spotting embalming tools on a tray. He noticed that the man’s heart was in a massive container behind him, larger than Calder’s own fist it pumped a dark fluid inside.
“Calder…” he croaked, voice gurgling through a respirator attached to his jaw, his tongue a sickly black shade.
Calder approached catiously.. “Jesus, Brooks — what happened to you? Who did this?”
Brooks tried to lift a trembling hand, but the movement pulled at the tubes embedded in his arm making him wince. His mouth moved, but the respirator muffled his words. Calder leaned closer, catching fragments — “...my…uncle’s experiment... went right... too right...” He croaked, letting out a wheeze. “...you…gotta…get…me…out-” Brooks freezing as he saw something move in the corner of his eyes.
Calder whips around to see a shadow emerge from some walkway behind the wall lined with machinery. A man stepped into his line of sight, his lab coat scorched, clinging to healed overr skin scared with peeling and bubbling marks. His eyes sunken, teeth bared in a twitching grin.
“Detective,” the man rasped. “You’re just in time to see perfection.”
Calder’s heart pounded. “Doctor Vindal?!”
“In healing flesh.” the figure said, chest hitching with something between laughter and a grunt of pain.
“What have you done to Brooks? Why is he..like this?!” Calder says, drawing his gun.
“Detective, science was being conducted. And you ruined the moment.” The doctor began, flipping a switch on the machinery that sped up the liquid flooding into his nephew’s body, Brooks convulsing on the table. “I know you detectives try to understand the motives of men like me, but you won’t. So I have no real urge to proceed in talking.” He says.
“Well try to or I’ll blow your brains away!” The detective yelled, gripping the gun as his finger pushed the safety back.
The doctor sighed, gripping his shoulder in pain. “My project was meant to end death, see how organs can live after their host is gone. At first, cadavers seemed plausible. An already gone person potentially living without their soul. But my first trial turned bad, organs were spoiled. I needed fresh, still beating ones. And Brooks was right for it.” He began. “So I chose to blow up my lab to fake my death. I needed some reason to get him down here and knew it would take something drastic to lure him so going missing was the best option. I found out later that he of couse took up my case and would come searching. It was like a moth to a flame, leading him down here and trapping him for experimentation. And as you can see it was a success.”
The doctor smirked as Calder aimed at him. “So you turned him into some abomination to end death?! Why not use rats instead?”
“Rats?! Do not belittle scientific progress to mutilating rats? Rodents do not have the capacity needed for my chemicals. Brooks is a healthy and strong man who was ripe for experimentation. Besides, he is more man than ever now.”
Calder’s finger tightened on the trigger, knuckles white. The lab hummed with dying electricity; the single bulb above them bursting as the valves pumped to maximum speed. The only light left was the thin beam of his flashlight, bobbing with each shallow breath. Dr. Vindal’s smirk didn’t falter — if anything, it widened as he watched Brooks convulse on the table, the machines around him squealing and coughing like injured birds.
The skin of Brooks’s abdomen puckered and tore as if some elastic membrane had been forced open from within. His ribcage cracked and sharpened bone into jagged teeth, something slick and dark folded outward, and then, horribly, a mouth where there should never have been one. It was a thing both human and other: rows of irregular teeth glinted when the flashlight caught them, lips that had never learned how to be human. The mouth flexed, tasting the air, and Brooks — or the thing that wore Brooks’s face — turned his head. Whatever it was snapped the corpse’s eyes open, wide and pleading they locked onto Calder. Then the head snapped forward and, with terrible speed, lunged at the doctor.
Vindal’s smile collapsed into a scream he didn’t get to finish. The monstrous mouth clamped onto him with a sound of grunted resistance, the scientist’s hands scrabbling at Brooks’s shoulders as to push away the thing he had made. Calder fired, one shot into the floor next to the bent over creature and another into its leg, it growling yet undeterred by hunger. The new mouth extended wider, a wet black tongue unfolding and wrapping around the squirming doctor. It pulled him further into its gaping maw, the rows of jagged teeth scrapping against the doctor’s labcoat, tearing at the cloth and leaving small cuts on his back. Calder watched in shock as the doctor’s legs flailed outside the mouth, scraping against the floor before he turned his head away to not watch any longer. The sound of wet gulping and slurping heard as the creature swallowed, the legs sliding past its midsection’s lips as he panted above. The light of Calder’s flashlight catching only the writhing silhouette and the ragged trail of movement as the creature belched out its middle, ripped parts of the doctor’s coat and shoes discarded on the ground.
When he looked back, it was over: Vindal, now a curled up mass inside Brooks’s middle, writhed around. The cop, or the creature now in its body, sat on his knees with an exhausted expression. Its second mouth panting at its tongue rested back in its jaw, drooling from its meal. Brooks grabs the tubes still embedded in him, ripping them out as his chest seals itself close. The mouth shifted into a smirk as the sealed skin went back into an awful approximation of normal, an indentured line where he had been cut open. Brooks — or whatever remained of him — dissolved into trembling, ragged breaths, smiling to himself before looking back at Calder. The detective appalled, unable to keep his eyes off the officer’s middle, the form of a human just shoved inside the officer like it was nothing.
“Calder…” He grunted, slowly getting up.
“Don’t…you’re not him.” The detective croaked, aiming at the creature wearing his partner’s skin.
Brooks tilted his head, his voice fractured—one half his own, the other something else entirely. “Then who am I?”
The words sent a shiver down his spine, Calder’s finger trembling over the trigger. His flashlight shook as it exposed just how wrong his body still was—the subtle twitch beneath the skin, his middle pulsing with the still writhing form of the detective underneath his second mouth, its tongue sliding out in excitement.
“Stay back,” Calder warned, his heel brushing the blood-slick floor.
Brooks took a step forward. “You wanted to save me, didn’t you?” His tone softened, almost pleading. “You did.”
“Stop.”
Another step. The shadows of the lab swallowed them both until Calder could no longer tell where his partner ended and the thing began. Brooks’s hand rose, trembling, reaching not in threat but in ache. Calder flinched—then the floor gave out beneath them both, slick with fluid and blood. The creature lunged, its torso splitting open again, the mouth shrieking in distorted agony. Calder fell against it, his arms sinking into that heaving, half-human flesh.
He expected teeth. Pain. The end.
Instead, warmth. The mouth, convulsing, folded in on itself like a collapsing lung. The skin sealed shut around him, cradling him against Brooks’s chest, as though the creature itself were shielding him from something unseen.
“Don’t fight it,” came the whisper—familiar, distant, maybe Brooks’s, maybe not.
Calder’s vision blurred. Through the haze, his flashlight illuminates his former partner’s face as the mouth wrapped around his hand, sucking the gun inside. He feels the larger man slump over him, keeping him pressed against a nearby wall. Him dropping the flashlight as he felt his heartbeat quicken, feeling fear coursing through him. As its light flickered, Calder was left in darkness, the sound of breathing accompanying him.
And then silence.