A Silent Voice by ChocolateMilk2

When you talk to the voices, there's a problem. When the voices talk back, that's just something else. For as long as I could remember, there was the voice, the ideas, subtly whispered in my ear. I think it stopped me from going mad. Or maybe that was what made me mad. The voice never told me who or what it was, but it wasn't on my side, and it wasn't the enemy and didn't care, as long as I was alone. As long as I had the will to survive. It was the times like then I wondered if it really mattered. If I should just give in to it. To everything. To the voices and the hunger and the wolves.

But I'd learn to live with it. To accept that my life was like that and there was no changing it. I could always pretend. Pretend that I was normal, a real hybrid, with a real home. Then I wouldn't be living on the streets, and I wouldn't be so cold and hungry. Then I would be at the orphanage, with Pete Bills, and Sam, and I'd be happy. Then we would laugh and tell jokes.

It was too good to be true, I reminded myself. I was gone from there for good. But maybe, just maybe, one day I'd see them again. One day…

'Don't try to twist fate.' The voice chided, 'Or fate will try to twist you…'

I ignored it. It hated that. But maybe I just hated it too. Didn't I have the right to hate it? After all, it was the reason I was sitting in the bin juice of a dumpster, leaning against a rotting bag of garbage. It was the reason I had to fight the urge to gag every third second, or to vomit up inedible food scraps.

'I suppose you'd rather be out there and die, like Tom? Don't blame all your petty problems on me. Besides, the orphanage was infiltrated sometime last fortnight. You would've been found and infested. You don't want to be infested, do you?'

Although I wanted to ask how it knew that, but it would be hopeless. After all, arguing would imply that I wanted to be infested. That I wanted to lose my humanity, to a few DNA cloning devices and a bunch of knives. But I was a fighter. It was my choice to escape the wolves. I was born a person and would die one.

And I knew the cost for that arrogance. All 'hesitant artefacts' would be destroyed. Slaughtered. If you weren't infested and refused to be, then you would be killed for it, and made into the parts that supplied the flesh and bones of the wolves. Or as the people on the streets called them, the Flyboys. Nobody knew where the name came from; after all, what cloned, wolf-like police android could fly?

There were rumours of people who'd rebelled the wolves. Of course the only group to ever be internationally known as a rebellion against was a group lead by an avian hybrid named Angel. But they'd fallen out years before. If you had any information on the group then you'd go to a facility to be 'rewarded'. Basically, they'd extract their information then kill you for knowing too much.

But sometimes, I'd be sitting in the main cafeteria eating lunch, and Pete would lean across and tell me about the raid in Canberra the previous Friday. He was my only friend at the orphanage, and the only one who knew about my condition, or lack of thereof. Most people just assumed there was something wrong that I wouldn't say. There were some creepy infestations out there, and it was generally better not to know. Pete was born a hybrid, and only inherited half of his parent's genes. In a way, this secret was as much to be admonished for as my own.

But then I met Tom, one of these so-called rumoured people. He'd come to the orphanage in handcuffs on request of someone higher up, to say goodbye to his mother, the head there. He'd resisted the procedure the whole way through, even attacking a wolf at one point. When he met his mother, he spat on her boots and cursed at her. For being willingly infested.

Then the headmistress had ordered for him to be killed, in that high, cold voice of hers. As a lesson, she said to the wolves. And in front of all of us, so we could see what would happen to those who aspired against Itex. It was horrible.

One of the wolves tilted Tom's head back, grasping him by the roots of his hair. Another produced a knife and popped his eye out with the tip as I would pop a grape. A thick trail of blood and water ran down his face and clothes Tom screamed the whole way through, falling to his knees.

I was fascinated and disgusted and the same time. When the headmistress looked back, her eyes were filled with tears that she tried to hide. I buried my head in my arms so I wouldn't have to watch anymore. When Tom's screams stopped, I knew it was finally over.

When we were ordered to our beds, Pete whispered to me, "We've got to get out of here, Alex. The wolves are checking on us almost every week. And that display-" He shook his sadly head as if to forget it, "I'm scared."

Me too, I wanted to add. But instead I never gave him a response. The next day I slipped out the window, saying goodbye to Sam the cat, and out of the building. I wasn't stopped by the security, but I noticed how much it had increased since when I'd originally arrived. There was a long, spiked barbed wire fence that I'd managed to cut a whole through, that was out of sight of the camera. I knew, somehow, that the fence wasn't actually to keep us in, but to keep others out.

For the first few weeks, I would've been lost without the voice. It told me all the safe-streets to go and where not. Cafes without wolves patrolling, that didn't pay much attention to whether you had a lizard tongue jutting out of your mouth or not. That wasn't to say I did, but. Although there were a few tight escapes; a police team had almost found me once, in an abandoned hotel, and a shopkeeper had seen me nicking a bunch of fruit, I'd never been caught, or identified.

I tried to tell the voice this, laying in a government dumpster in the middle of some dark, invisible, alley. I even thought something along the lines of respecting the enemy. But it was too late; the voice had already gone.

Fin.

--

This was just a random idea that entered my head a few minutes ago. Like, a, 'what if, instead of hybrids being hunted down by Itex, it was the normal people?' The plot's a little shaky at some points, but I think you get the picture.