He had been awoken by the sound of an alarm. No, that wasn’t quite right. He had been disturbed from his nightmare-filled, restless sleep by the smell of blood. Not his blood, for once. Mammal blood- that he could tell at first. The difference between fish blood and mammal blood was something a creature like himself could distinguish, being a sea beast whose typical prey included bony fish and pinnipeds.
But this was no seal or sea lion blood. The stench of death which hung heavily in the air like a dense mist over the morning ocean surface was no flavor of a rotting whale corpse. It was unfamiliar. Alien, almost. In truth, Bruce had never come across dead humans before. Perhaps such was the reason the scent was so foreign.
The Cetus lumbered down the narrow hallways, the screams and shouts of terror fading to white noise in his mind. For the most part, such vocalizations weren’t provoked by his presence but… something else entirely. Some odd entity. Something Bruce couldn’t quite smell, or see, but feel. It gave no heartbeat to be picked up by his electroreceptors dotting his pointed snout. The trail of black smoke left no electrical pulse by which to track. But whatever it was, and whatever Bruce had got sight of had stricken fear into the hearts of whoever was still breathing in the forsaken place.
This place- where was he? His last taste of the open air was severed short by the punctured pain of a tranquilizer dart to his shoulder. When Bruce woke up, his vision had been filled with bright fluorescent lights. His side had felt the ice cold metal of a surgical table. His body had flinched at the skin grafts and needles and wires hooked and sewn and severed to his body like a patchwork quilt. The only remnants of said surgeries were the bloodied taped cloth at the lower end of his hide near his dorsal fin and the flashes and buzzes of surgical utensils in his mind. And the pain of his flesh ripped and sliced by cold, unfeeling human hands, masked by the thin layer of latex gloves. The stench of his own stagnant blood. The overwhelming, overpowering smell of cleaning chemicals following the intense pain.
The sea beast staggered for a moment, catching his breath, the ringing resurfacing in his mind as it traveled from the back of his head to the area between his eyes. Bruce’s webbed claw rose, and he rubbed pitifully at the region assaulted by the offending sound. A beat or so, and the ringing subsided. Don’t think about the Table. Or The Lab. Out. He needed Out. He needed the fresh, wind-kissed air beyond the damp, dusty, stale ventilation of the building.
Out was just a few floor over. A few hallways down. A few doors through. He knew it. He could taste it. Feel it in his electroreceptors. It was not necessarily the same feeling as a struggling seal or fish. But it was some feeling. Better than the numbness to which he had been subjected in the unforgiving, uncaring gazes of the humans staring at him when he was in The Lab. Poking and prodding him like he was a living pin cushion.
The humans on these upper levels were different than the scientists and doctors. They smelled different. Behaved differently. Most cowered away from him. Others disregarded Bruce as if he were merely another hallucination in their minds. A few had thought it wise to throw themselves at him, wielding nothing more than their own fists. Not feeling the necessity to waste any precious energy, Bruce had simply given only swipe of his webbed claw. Usually, it was all it took to launch the offender halfway down the hallway with several noticeable bruises and- hopefully- a lesson learned. That was all he needed to dissuade most of The Others. The Not Doctors.
Level Five. He had overshot the stair landings hadn’t he? So much of the building was already in pitiful disarray, it was difficult to tell which floor connected to which. Even so, Bruce pressed on. Having not seen another Not Doctor in nearly an hour, the Cetus would have usually thought something of it. That is, if his string of thoughts hadn’t been interrupted by the sound of approaching footprints…
