2
striker
DR. ACKER CALLS us the hounds.
She strokes our faces with her soft fingers, which are always tipped in long fingernails that she paints different colors—usually red, but sometimes glittery or silver—and she croons to us that we are her good boys, her very good boys.
At first, I couldn’t understand her when she said things like that, but one day, I remember that I went into one of the examining rooms and I got a shot and after that, I understood and retained words.
I still can’t… talk, though, not like the betas.
Dr. Acker sometimes talks over us, sometimes while she is stroking our faces or scratching under our chins or patting our heads, and she says that she thinks she could find the right combination of drugs to give us back speech, but that she isn’t sure that’s such a good idea, in the end.
Whoever is in there will be one of the other doctors or maybe one of the lab workers and they’ll usually be surprised that she says something like this, and also surprised when they see us, standing docilely next to Dr. Acker, being petted like an animal, and not reacting in any way to something that should maybe upset us.
But we all know when we are allowed to show anger, and it is never around Dr. Acker.
She punishes us when we get it wrong.
She has ways of punishing, bad ways. Sometimes she uses something she calls a stun gun, but it doesn’t look like a gun. She holds it in one hand and it has metal prongs at the end. She presses it into our bodies when she wants to use it to correct us. It hurts in a way that pushes my whole body into a fresh wave of fear whenever she even says “stun gun.”
So, sure, we might wish we could talk.
But growling at Dr. Acker is never a good idea.
Dr. Acker will continue to talk over us at this point. “Maybe we could give back speech to damaged omegas, too, of course, but what would be the point of that? They still have amnesia, and they still have reduced cognitive function. They’re essentially children, only with massive sexual drives that come out if we don’t suppress them.”
“Sure,” someone else will say, “but there’s the fact that all these side effects happen because of the drugs we give alphas and omegas when they check into Cedar Falls Designation Facility to safely get through their heat or their rut. It’s our drugs that do it to them.”
“Not on purpose,” says Dr. Acker, laughing. Dr. Acker is not a particularly tall woman. She’s petite and athletic, with a muscled physique. Her curves aren’t prominent. She is thin and svelt. She wears her chestnut hair cut at her chin in a blunt bob. Her eyes are blue—light blue, like the early morning sky. She is a very striking woman. “Those are just accidents.”
“Yes, but I thought these projects…” Here, the someone will look at us, look at the hounds, and then look back at Dr. Acker. “I thought they were going to give us the way to fix the accidents.”
“They will,” says Dr. Acker.
“Except you won’t experiment on them. You say you could give them back the ability to speak, and you don’t do it?”
Dr. Acker will laugh then and turn to look into my eyes, if it is me she is touching. She will drag her hand down the front of my chest, over the muscles in my abdomen. “The hounds are doing their jobs just fine,” she will say.
There are seven of us hounds.
Most of us are loners.
The other four hounds, I don’t even know their names, because I can’t bear to be in a room with them and they can’t bear to be in a room with me.
Something about the alpha scents, it’s intolerable.
All I want to do is rip them to shreds.
But with Knight and Arrow, it’s different. They’re mine, and I’ve known it since the moment I scented them.
We three work together. Dr. Acker attempts to interfere with our connection, and I think she’d prefer to sever it, but she can’t deny we work best together. We are a team, a unit, and we’re better than the other four hounds, who all work alone, and only have one body, one nose, one set of instincts to rely on.
Three is better than one. Even Dr. Acker sees that.
Today, Dr. Acker is not talking over me while stroking my face. I am alone when she comes into my room, which is a boring place, and where I spend most of my time doing pull-ups on the chin bar they installed for me. Sometimes I do push-ups or jumping jacks. I don’t know why I do these things.
I think at one point, I was telling myself a little story about how I was going to need my strength to escape.
But I know I’m not escaping. I will be here, at the facility, with Dr. Acker, forever. It is… not home, but all there is.
So, I don’t know why I keep trying to get stronger.
There’s nothing to fight.
When Dr. Acker comes in, I am doing none of these things, however. I am only sitting on my bed. When she comes in, I stand up, eyeing her. Maybe today, we’re getting a job.
The jobs are few and far between, honestly. Dr. Acker claims that we hounds are useful for Cedar Falls, and that we could be hired out to go and find things—or people—or cats or something, I don’t know.
But that doesn’t happen often.
Twice, we’ve been sent out of the facility after omegas. We’ve been trained here, on other omegas, bad omegas, I suppose. Dr. Acker said they were bad.
I don’t know if I truly believed her, but…
Well, this is part of why I’m never going anywhere, I suppose. Something in me is broken now. It wasn’t always, but it is now. Dr. Acker started the breaking, but I finished it. I could have fought it, I think.
No, I know I could have fought it.
But… I didn’t.
How many omegas have I killed?
Five.
Well, not always on my own, admittedly, because Knight and Arrow and I work together, but I count all of the ones we’ve killed together as on my own head. I am sort of the leader, after all. They are alphas, too, but they submit to me.
I don’t know things. I can’t talk. I can’t remember—but I have something like memory, something that tells me that I used to be able—but anyway, I know that killing omegas feels wrong .
It’s funny, though, how easy it is to do wrong things when the alternative is pain and torture, and when… when… part of it does feel right? Part of it feels…
Dr. Acker’s head only comes to the middle of my chest. She is much smaller than me, even if I can see from her muscled form that she’s strong, I know she’s not stronger than me.
Even so, she approaches me with no fear whatsoever, no trepidation. “Good morning, Striker,” she says with a bright smile. “How’s my beautiful alpha boy this morning?” She puts her hand on my chest.
I like it.
I don’t like Dr. Acker. She hurts me a lot, so I’m afraid of her, but she is the only person who ever touches me.
Knight, Arrow, and me, we tried to touch in the beginning, but she wouldn’t let us. She stunned us every time we tried, scolding us, telling us no, that we were bad boys, bad hounds, bad alphas.
“Alphas don’t touch like that,” she would say in a soft, soft voice. “Alphas only hunt and hurt and kill.” And while she was saying that, she would be touching us, running her fingers over our skin, and… and… I don’t know.
I seem to have this memory—this knowledge, I guess, not a memory, because I don’t remember anything before being here, and even less before I got the injection that helped me understand speech. Before that, everything was sort of a haze of sensation and reaction. But I have this knowledge that touch is normal and good and that… that alphas don’t just touch things when they kill things.
But even thinking that, it makes my throat feel tight, as if I might cry.
And another thing that alphas don’t do is cry, at least according to Dr. Acker. If we cry when she stuns us, we only get stunned even worse. We have all learned to control it, to keep it in.
Anyway, I know somehow, deep down, she is using her touch to control me, to keep me starved for her touch, to keep me devoted to her, because some part of me is craving an affection that only she gives me. I know it, and if I didn’t hate myself, I suppose, for killing those omegas, maybe I’d fight her.
But… I guess… I deserve it, maybe.
So.
I don’t fight. I accept all of this here as my punishment.
Dr. Acker rubs my chest and then reaches up to stroke my shoulders and then all the way up to rub her knuckles against my jaw. (They keep us clean-shaven here. At first, we would fight when they tried to shave us, but we are docile now, well trained, like we really are dogs.) “Would you like a job?”
I look down at her, and I let out a little whine of agreement. We can do things, non-verbal forms of agreement, like nodding or shaking our head, or we could probably learn sign language or something, but Dr. Acker likes it if we act like, well, hounds.
“Good boy.” She pats my cheek gently. “Very good boy.”