IMPORTANT: This and chapter 1 are both first drafts. Oooold first drafts. I've posted the first chapter of the third draft, which is the latest, so go read that instead. Unless you really want to compare the differences that badly. Thanks for your time, and all the kind words and helpful input on these first drafts.
Chapter 2: Females
When he opened the door to his room, Nicholas remembered that he hadn’t cleaned it yet, and that was one of the things his mom had asked him to do before she left that morning. If she came home and it was still a mess, he was screwed.
“Nice room.”
Eileen was being polite. There was nothing wrong with the room itself; decent size, with blue walls and blue carpet, and one window behind the desk with a nice view of the street. His bed lay against the right wall, and there was also a bookshelf full of novels, as well as books on philosophy and biology, the latter of which had failed miserably on giving Nicholas any clue on what was up with his blood. Rounding it out was a small little closet for all the nice clothes he didn’t wear. All in all, a very nice bedroom.
The problem was that Nicholas didn’t adhere to the ‘smart clean-freak’ stereotype. Discarded pairs of jeans and shirts lay scattered across the floor, which hadn’t been vacuumed in weeks. His blanket hung from the bed, and his pillows were underneath it. Paper plates, cups, and food crumbs peppered his desk, next to which was a waste bin long overdue for emptying. Well, at least it smelled nice, thanks to the air freshener hanging from the ceiling fan.
Nicholas let Eileen in first and closed the door behind them. Watching her maneuver around the junk on the floor to sit down on the bed, he got to his knees and began to scoop all the clothes into a pile.
“So, what kind of experiments are we doing?” Eileen asked with interest. At least it looked like interest, because her eyes couldn’t possibly get any wider.
“I’ll tell you in a second,” said Nicholas as he stood up with a mound of tangled jeans in his arms, “but first I need to clean this place up.”
Shrugging, she fell back on his bed and lay still. She was probably already asleep, considering how tired she looked. Then again, what if she was wanted for stealing something?
Do I really want to leave a thief alone in my room for even a second? Nicholas wondered. He decided it was safe; he was offering her a place to hide from the police, it was unlikely she would take something and bolt. So, leaving her there, he kicked open his door and made his way downstairs to the laundry room. Luckily it wasn’t his week to actually do the laundry, so he just dropped his clothes in front of the washer and ran back upstairs.
Eileen was gone. He couldn’t believe it at first, and he immediately began searching the room for what she had stolen. At least until he noticed that her miniskirt and tank top were lying there on his bed.
Well great, now she’s running around mostly naked. Mom, Dad, please don’t come home right now.
Across the hall, in the bathroom, he heard the shower start up. Of course, she had been on the run for a few days at least, she needed to get clean. He hadn’t really noticed, but it was probably just because he was too excited about the experiments.
Nicholas spent the next fifteen minutes cleaning and vacuuming his room. It was a pain, having to head back down the stairs to toss every load of trash, but the alternative of having his mom see that it wasn’t done was far worse. He loved his parents and all, but they could be strict as hell when they wanted to be. Which, luckily, wasn’t too often.
For the last five minutes of his cleaning, he noticed that the shower had stopped. He wondered what was taking Eileen so long to get done, but that was when he remembered that she didn’t have any other clothes to change into. Terrific.
“Hey, Eileen!” he shouted, knocking on the bathroom door. “If you need some clothes, I can grab some of my mom’s or something.” She didn’t respond. He knocked again, but still no answer.
Worst case scenario, she had slipped in the shower turning it off and had hit her head, so now she was unconscious or dying in his bathroom. He couldn’t check to see if she was alright either, since the door was, wisely, locked.
A loud thump sounded from his room. Hoping for the best, Nicholas dashed back through his door and looked around. Nothing was out of the ordinary. What the hell was going on?
Maybe I’m the one who needs to get some sleep, he thought.
At that moment, the closet burst open, and something flew across the room and slammed into Nicholas, knocking him down onto his bed. Dazed, he simply lay there for a few moments trying to figure out what had happened, before he sat up and stared in confusion at Eileen.
She was sitting down on the floor next to his desk and laughing at him, her hair still wet from the shower. She was wearing some of his clothes, specifically a pair of jeans and a blue t-shirt. Exactly what he was wearing.
“What the hell are you laughing about?” Nicholas demanded. Her eyes flickered open back to that strange stare and she attempted to suppress her amusement.
“I didn’t think you’d be standing right outside the closet when I came out,” she explained. “Sorry I hit you and everything, but it’s still pretty funny.”
Nicholas could not wrap his mind around what she was talking about.
“Why’d you jump out like that? For that matter, what were you doing in there anyway?”
“Uh, dressing myself.” She tugged on the shirt for emphasis. “I looked around real quick, but you don’t have a sister apparently. So I figured your clothes would have to do.”
“So you locked yourself in the closet?”
“Well, yeah. I didn’t want you to see me naked, and it wouldn’t have been fair to lock you out of your own room. I compromised.” Then she smiled, as if that explanation made everything alright.
“Unbelievable,” Nicholas muttered to himself. Eileen tilted her head and grinned, then leapt to her feet and practically jumped onto the bed next to him.
“Sooo…” she said, crouched on his pillow and staring at him, “what’re these experiments?”
Trying his best to ignore her, Nicholas reached underneath the bed and drew out a small blue notebook.
“What’s that?” Eileen asked, as she began to chew on one of her thumbnails.
“Uhh…it’s my notes I’ve taken on past experiments,” Nicholas said, eying her warily. When she didn’t respond, he went on. “See, I have to kind of explain what I can do first.”
“Alright,” she said, rolling her eyes, “what can you do?”
Taking a deep breath in anticipation of being ridiculed, Nicholas cleared his throat and tried to not sound like an idiot.
“My blood,” he said carefully, “can…well, when it gets in other living things…I can make them do what I want. Control them, that is.”
He couldn’t figure out if she was staring at him in confusion or not, since she had been staring for all of the half-hour he’d known her.
“’Kay,” Eileen said after a few seconds. “So like, mind control?”
“More or less. I guess…um…” Nicholas found he was having difficulty going on. Her apparent lack of disbelief was off-putting.
“You guess, um, what?” she said, eager to hear more.
“Um, I guess that it’s like being a puppeteer. When someone or something ingests my blood, or gets it inside them somehow, I get this buzzing in my brain. And then…and then…”
“And then?” she beckoned, leaning forward as far as she could in her crouch.
“And then I can make them do whatever I want. Anything.”
“Anything?”
“Yeah…um…you actually believe me?”
She shrugged, switching to her other thumb to chew on. “I dunno. Is it the truth?”
“It is, but-”
“Well good, then I want to see it!”
She began to tip forward, and Nicholas quickly pushed the notebook up against her legs to prevent her from falling over.
“Just take a look at some of my notes, okay?” he said, letting her snatch them away. She turned and flopped her legs down over the side of the bed so she was sitting normally next to him. Flipping through the pages, she read quietly, but punctuated the silence every few minutes with a short laugh. While she was doing that, Nicholas drew out his razor blade. Her eyes immediately locked onto it.
“You aren’t using that on me are you?” she asked.
“Relax,” Nicholas said as he pricked open his fingertip, “I just need to get some of my own blood to use on you.”
He had expected her to back out of the deal right then and there, but instead she dropped the notebook onto the bed and scooted closer to him, eyeing the drop of red on his finger.
“You don’t have AIDS do you?” she asked.
“No.”
“How do you know?” she asked, not taking her eyes off his finger. “Have you ever gotten tested? I mean, if you’re some kind of man-slut, who knows what you have?”
“I can’t have AIDS, alright? Sex isn’t…” He noticed her eyes became impossibly wider. “…something that I’ve ever really concerned myself with.”
She nodded in understanding, but at least she wasn’t laughing at him. Then, just as Nicholas realized he needed a cup to let his blood drip into, Eileen reached out, pulled his hand to her mouth, and began sucking on his finger.
“…you know, I could have put it in some Kool-Aid or something,” Nicholas offered. Eileen stopped for a second.
“Yeah, well, I want to see this mind control stuff now. Besides, how much blood do I need?” With that, she slipped his finger back into her mouth, and Nicholas wondered why he didn’t feel more enthused about it.
“I’m not sure. Since you’re…um…drinking it, that should probably be enough.”
Somehow she didn’t hear him, because she didn’t cease her feast. Nicholas was trying to figure out whether stopping her was a good idea or not, chiefly because it was one thing to have a cute girl running her tongue all over his finger, but it was another when she was doing it under the assumption that his blood was going to take over her mind. More than likely, she thought it was all bullshit and was just sucking on his finger for the hell of it.
She’s either into sucking me, or she wants to be completely under my control…both of these seem like favorable possibilities.
“Okay, done,” she said, breaking away after an uncomfortably long time. “Now what?”
“Um, we wait for the buzzing to start,” Nicholas said, noticing that his finger had already been healed for the past minute or so.
“Oookay…” Eileen returned to gnawing at her fingertips, her eyes darting all around the room.
It took a minute, but soon Nicholas felt the buzz. Now was when things got interesting.
“There,” he said simply. She looked at him warily.
“What?”
“I’ve got it. Right now.”
“But…I don’t feel anything.”
We’ll see about that, Nicholas thought as he stared at her. Get up and go stare out the window.
The caution in her eyes dissolved instantly. Hopping off the bed, Eileen walked over to the window and began to look outside. Nicholas could barely contain himself.
“There, right there!” he said, jumping off the bed and pointing at her. She looked at him like he was crazy.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about…” she said, confused.
“I just thought that you would go look out the window, and you did!”
“Uh, no. I wanted to take a look, that’s all.”
Nicholas felt the triumph in his chest deflate a bit, unable to comprehend what she had just said.
“Well…then it was a coincidence!” he insisted. Looking around the room, he figured he would have to choose something a bit more out of the ordinary. It came to him pretty quickly.
Crawl underneath my bed.
He watched as Eileen immediately dropped to the floor and pulled herself over to the bed. As she quickly slid beneath it and out of his view, he felt his sense of victory returning. The control was working!
“There, how about that?” he said.
“Wow,” said Eileen, her voice muffled from under the bed, “you got a lot of magazines down here. I can’t see what they are though. Hey, do you-”
“Forget those!” Nicholas said, frustrated that she didn’t seem to realize what was going on. “I just made you crawl under my bed! Can you honestly say you just felt like doing that?”
“Well yeah,” she replied, her head popping out from underneath the bed and looking up at him, “I do stuff like this all the time.”
You can’t be serious.
Sighing, Nicholas rubbed his forehead and tried to figure out what was going on. There was always a slight chance that the blood didn’t work on females, but that didn’t make any sense. Female dogs and cats had always responded to the blood the same way males did, why would human females be any different?
Was it really just two coincidences in a row? As odd as Eileen was, Nicholas didn’t buy it. He would have to figure out first something she wouldn’t normally do. And what better way than by asking her?
“Okay Eileen,” Nicholas said, trying to focus despite the fact that he was only talking to her smiling head, “tell me, in complete honesty, something you would never normally do. Ever. Something that, if you did do, would have to be my blood controlling you.”
“Uh, how ‘bout having sex with you?” she responded instantly. Nicholas almost felt a bit of himself die inside.
“Thanks for the self-esteem booster,” he grumbled.
“Don’t take it personally or anything,” she said apologetically. “I just don’t know you very well.”
“Whatever.” Sitting down on the bed, Nicholas realized that he was in trouble. His perfect test subject wasn’t so perfect after all. Almost anything he would make her do, she was spontaneous enough to do on her own. And he wasn’t about to make her have sex with him.
As pleasing as that sounds in theory, he mused, I have no idea where she’s been. Besides, I’d feel like an idiot. Or a rapist. Or both.
Nicholas’ phone rang in his pocket. Sighing, he drew it out and answered.
“Hello?”
“Nicky, that you?” The voice was all too familiar, and besides, only one person called him Nicky.
“It’s my cell Tommy, why wouldn’t it be me?” Nicholas replied. Tommy mumbled something indiscernible on the other end of the line.
“Look Nicky, we got a bit of a problem.”
“Is this about your girlfriend again?” Nicholas sighed. Tommy’s new girlfriend, his second, had given him a hand job three weeks ago, which had apparently been Tommy’s first real sexual experience with another person of any kind. Ever since, Nicholas had been getting updates via phone every time Tommy did something new with his girl. These updates had usually been daily, and today’s hadn’t arrived yet. It made Nicholas fully appreciate the amount of sex a person could have without actually having sex.
“No, Chel’s just fine. And in case you’re wondering, I can now say from first-hand experience that 69ing is just as amazing in practice as it is in concept.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that,” Nicholas mumbled. Looking down, he saw that Eileen was smiling up at him from between his feet. He weakly smiled back, hoping that Tommy would get to the point already.
“So, here’s the problem,” Tommy said. “You know Andrea Crantz?”
Andrea Crantz. Fairly popular girl at their school. Good looking, nice to everyone, and female lead of every play and musical put on by the drama club in her three years as a high school student. Hell of a good singing voice, too. One of the rare popular girls who wasn’t a stuck up bitch.
“Yeah, what about Andrea?” Nicholas wondered.
“Well, the problem is that she asked me out.”
Nicholas shifted his phone to his other ear, suddenly understanding the problem.
“Okay, does she know that you’re taken?”
“I don’t think so. Andrea wouldn’t ask me out if she already knew, she’s not like that.”
“Yeah, well, if you’re asking me for advice, you know I think you should stick with Chel.”
“Yeah, I know, I’d thought the answer was obvious too. But then I got to thinking about it…”
Nicholas shifted his legs uncomfortably. Eileen had begun to play with the ends of his socks.
“…I mean, I love Chel, you know that. Not to mention she’ll probably take my virginity and everything in a week or so. But Chel’s parents hate me, and I can’t get them to like me no matter how hard I try. What’s more, Chel’s going to go a college hours south of here, but I found out that Andrea’s applied to the same place I got in. And you know her grades, she’ll get in no problem.”
“So you’d rather be with Andrea because you don’t want to deal with a long distance relationship that isn’t approved by the girl’s parents anyway? Understandable.” Nicholas always pretended to be annoyed when Tommy called him like this, but he was really quite happy giving out advice to his best friend. Tommy was the kind of friend he would take a bullet for, so advising him on his love life wasn’t much trouble. The only problem of course was the fact that Nicholas’ only field experience in that area had been a few girls he had liked, who had ended up liking him back, but somehow never managed to go anywhere with him anyway.
Still, Nicholas had enough common sense and experience talking to his mom to get the basic gist of how girls thought. Not much differently from males, actually.
“I dunno Nicky,” Tommy groaned. “I really don’t know. I mean, if I dumped Chel for those reasons, wouldn’t I be being selfish?”
“Yes, definitely. But considering you’re only seventeen years old, Chel has to realize that your future is more important than her. Just as her future should be more important than you. At your age, being selectively selfish is key to making sure your later life is happy.”
“So what do you suggest I do?” Tommy begged.
“Well,” Nicholas began as Eileen ripped off his socks and threw them across the room with a giggle, “tell Andrea that you’d really like to go out with her, but you’re seeing Chel right now, and that if stuff between you and Chel ever ends, which, let’s face it, it will once you both leave for college, you’ll call her up in a heartbeat.”
“You think that’ll work?” Tommy asked, and Nicholas felt a bit of pride when he heard the hopeful appreciation in his friend’s voice.
“Sure. Andrea’s a good girl, she’ll understand. I’m amazed that she asked you out at all, you know. You kind of fly under the radar during the school year.”
“Uh, actually, I got to know her really well during the musical last year,” Tommy admitted. “I was on the stage crew, but I mostly just goofed off, so I got to talk to her a lot backstage when she wasn’t on. And that was before I met Chel…”
Nicholas sighed, drawing his legs up onto the bed and gently rocking back and forth, his chin on his knees. Eileen had scurried over to where his socks had landed and was trying them on.
“Just figure out what’s more important to you Tommy. Chel, or your happiness in the future. The near future I might add. And if you decide that Andrea will work better for you in the long run, well…Chel’s a good girl in her own right. She’ll find someone for her at her college no problem.”
“Thanks Nicky. Thanks a lot.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to discipline this naughty girl in my room whose been taking off my clothes and putting them on herself.”
And before Tommy could explode into hyperactive disbelief, Nicholas hung up. Eileen strutted over to him, his socks far too big for her feet, the ends flopping around loosely.
“What do you think?” she asked with a hint of mock snobbery, like some kind of fashion model.
“I think they aren’t your style. But while you’re wearing my clothes, could you please wash whatever you get dirty while you’re staying here?”
“Yeah, sure, no prob.”
Right. Nicholas remembered the buzzing in his head. Sometimes if he didn’t focus on the control, he would stop feeling the buzz until he remembered it. Which also reminded him that he had no idea why the control wasn’t working on Eileen. Unless…
“That’s it!” Nicholas shouted. Grabbing his notes, he quickly flipped to the first blank page, yanked a pen from his pocket, and began to scribble furiously. Eileen walked over to him and tried to see what he was writing.
Please give me my socks back, Eileen.
As Eileen slipped off the socks, got to her knees, and began to slide them back over Nicholas’ feet, he finished scribbling the theory that Eileen herself had just confirmed for him. Smiling with accomplishment, he read the newly inked words aloud so that Eileen could hear him.
“The nature of the control which the blood has over the possessed subject is such that the subject is forced to have an inexplicable want to carry out the desired action. Furthermore, the subject will be totally convinced that the action, no matter how ridiculous or contrary to the normal behavior of the subject, was solely the will of the subject themselves and nothing else. However, it remains to be seen whether or not the subject can realize after the fact that the action was beyond the normal limits of their behavior.”
Glancing over at Eileen, who was busy watching his ceiling fan spin around and around, Nicholas felt compelled to add one more note.
At present time, Human Subject A’s behavior is too unpredictable to form a reliable hypothesis on the nature of a subject’s free will in relation to their actions. I shall attempt to learn more about the subject in hopes of discerning just what would be considered normal behavior for her. From here on out, Human Subject A shall be referred to as Eve.
Eve. A cheesy and cliché codename if there ever was one, but it was the first name that sprung to mind when he thought of the fact that she was the first human female he had experimented on. But giving it some more thought, and realizing how much more appropriate it would be for this particular girl, Nicholas scratched out “Eve” and wrote in the more fitting moniker.
From here on out, Human Subject A shall be referred to as Pandora.
Eileen began to roll around on his carpet, curled into a ball and humming to herself as Nicholas put his notes away under the bed. His phone suddenly began to ring again.
“Yes?” he said into the receiver, hoping Tommy wasn’t going to ask him how to deal with an emotionally hurt girl.
“Is Eileen there?”
Nicholas’ mind began racing. First, he turned on speaker phone and gave Eileen the most serious look he could. Stopping in mid-roll, she looked up at him, and he terminated his control over her, just in case any of his rogue thoughts interfered with her judgment.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” Nicholas said into the phone.
“Is Eileen there?” the voice said again. Male, older. Her father maybe?
Nicholas shot Eileen a look, and her eyes lost any trace of whimsy they had held before, replaced by the same wild fear she had possessed upon falling into his yard. She shook her head furiously, and Nicholas nodded.
“No, I’m sorry, but you must have a wrong number. I don’t know-”
“No, I have the right number. But if she isn’t there, that’s fine. She could have wandered into any of the houses in that neighborhood. But in just in case, if you do happen to see her…” An odd silence followed, and Nicholas could just barely make out a strange sound emanating from the phone. It sounded like sobbing.
A loud, quick explosion burst from the phone, so sudden that Nicholas dropped it onto the bed, and Eileen covered her mouth to prevent herself from crying out. It had sounded like a gun shot. From over the phone, Nicholas heard the sound of the man chuckling in a way that made his skin crawl.
“Make sure you tell her,” the voice said, “that her sister is dead.”
You could re-word it like so:
