Before
A long time ago, we used to be happy; everything was peaceful, and there was nothing to worry about. It’s no longer like that for us. If Charles and I weren’t so stupid, none of this would have happened. We don’t know if it’s the dead or the alive. We know it can’t die. Maybe if I never got the job, or maybe if I never even met Charles, our town would still be at peace.
It started with me moving from California to Louisiana. Nothing was big for me. I was single, alone, and depressed. My job sucked, I’m pretty sure my dog hated me, and I had no friends. I decided if I moved somewhere else, I would get a fresh start, like everyone said in the shows. Back at my old job, I was a science teacher, but what I really wanted to be was a scientist.
When I got to Louisiana, I had a crummy apartment, although it was better than what I have now. After a few days of realizing that I needed money to live, I started to look for a job. That’s how I met Charles. He helped me work my way up to being a real scientist. He and I were both interested in the concept of making a human more invincible to troubles that came their way. We decided to try and make things that could make a human stronger.
We did our research on animals. Most of them would die for unknown reasons. Most likely, it was because the dose we gave them was too strong for their bodies. We spent years trying to figure out something. Eventually, after five years, we gave up, but we did have another idea. We wanted to make animals stronger. Not for their sake, but so humans could use them as sources to defend themselves. In 2013, we finally discovered a way.
We didn’t expect this to work at first. We tried this on all sorts of large animals. Then we began to come up with the idea of injecting a baby animal. Not something small, though, something like a rhino or elephant. We thought somehow that if we made a simpler but still strong dose of what we made in a baby animal, they wouldn’t die right away because they were still growing, so they could grow with the strength that we put in them.
We put our idea into action. We bought a baby hippo for about $100,000. I don’t know who named it, but somehow we ended up calling that thing Don. We made a liquid that we started calling Strength Serum into a needle and gave it to the hippo. We expected Don to die right then and there, but she didn’t. Don took it like it was nothing. We weren’t sure if we should have been happy or sad. Nothing happened, which either meant that it didn’t work or that it would develop with time. I thought that we should have just given up. I thought that it didn’t work and that we should’ve just killed her to prevent anything from happening, and I really wish that’s what we did.
Charles convinced me that Don was worth keeping for research. He said that we should give it time to work. It wasn’t impossible to care for a hippo. We did research on her. We knew how to care for her, so that’s exactly what we did. Before I continue on, you should know that me and Charles lived in a small town called Grapevine Grove. This hippo grew up in our laboratory. As time went by, we noticed changes in Don. She got bigger than she should have. Her teeth were sharper than normal. Her eyes were scary to look at. That’s when we knew our serum had worked. We weren’t ready to show her to the world yet. Our idea involved training her to work for humans, but that obviously did not go as planned.
She got meaner and more aggressive as she grew. She became so mean that we decided it was a loss cause and that we should kill her. That’s when we discovered our biggest flaw in the serum. We weren’t sure what the best way to kill her was. We first tried to euthanize her. We were more worried about getting ourselves killed. She wouldn’t let us get near her. I managed to get past her and give her the shot—big mistake. Instead of drifting off to her death, she got angry. I got a huge scar that day. Then we decided to do something a little more crazy. We legally acquired a gun and tried to shoot her. That was probably the worst mistake. She got so mad that she managed to bust out of the lab and make it into town.
My town was not the friendly get-to-know you type. In fact, when I first got there, they almost wouldn’t let me move in because I had only one carrion bag, which I guess was suspicious. When they saw Don, they were not about to let her destroy the town. People grabbed knives from their homes, and some people had guns. They all began to go for Don. A lot of people got injured that day. She ended up escaping to the unknown, aka the dark woods. Don was still growing, which was what scared me and Charles. She hadn’t had enough strength to kill someone, yet she could outlast a bullet. Charles and I knew that if she continued to grow, she would destroy everyone and everything.
We wanted to go search for her, but we were scared, and we were not afraid to admit it. The town’s people shouted at us to go find her. They were angry. We listened to them because they were armed, and frankly, I know they could kill us and make it look like an accident.
