Excerpt: Untitled Max Ride Fanfic

“It’s gonna be all right… Just wake up. Please! Wake up!”

That voice rang through my head as I slowly opened up my eyes. Trying to look around, I notice that I cannot really turn my neck is being held in place by a brace from behind and that I am face down on what I assume to be a chiropractic table. Groaning, I reach behind me and try removing the brace. That is when I notice something is not what it seems. Screaming, I frantically claw at the brace, trying to pull it away from my neck so I can see what happened while I was out cold. I then heard a voice next to me.
“Please sir, don’t struggle, I will release your brace since you seem to have recovered. The genetic transplant seems to have taken hold nicely.” The voice was female, and seemed strangely soothing. I heard a click and I lifted my head to see the face behind the pleasing voice. “Who are you? Where am I? Who am I?” I plead to the face before me, “Me? I am Ms. Rae, head nurse at this genetic institute codenamed “The Cave”. You are in the recovery room there, and your name is Blade. There was no last name on the file.”
“Okay, now I have one more question for you,” I say rubbing my neck and feeling just underneath my shoulders, where I first noticed the protrusions, “What the hell happened to me while I was unconscious?” Looking up from the file, Ms. Rae tells me, “Honey, you were part of a genetic experiment that involved avian DNA. Do not worry though; you were not the only one that got this treatment.” ‘There were others?’ I thought to myself as I kept rubbing the new wing joints, “What’s going to happen now that I’ve recovered?” I then asked. She replied, “You’ll be put through various tests to determine your worth to us. If you meet the requirements, you will be transferred to the military sub-branch of the Cave and shipped out around the world to whoever may need your, and our, services.”
“And if I don’t? What will happen to me then?” I inquire, half expecting the answer I was thinking of at that time, “Well,” Ms. Rae explained, “You will either be eliminated and your extra genetic material recycled into another being, or you can try to run away and get hunted down by our elite retrieval unit. Believe me, you wouldn’t want that to happen, now would you?”