I slowly walked down the street, keeping my head down as I walked. My hat was pulled down fairly low, but not suspiciously so. There was nothing about me worth noting, or at least, I hoped that was the case.

When a patrol car slowly drove past, I tensed up and felt as though my heart was about to skip a beat. However, I carefully avoided looking directly at the car or its drive. I was also careful not to start running or even speed up.

“Nothing suspicious here,” I quietly mused to myself. “Nobody worth paying attention to.”

When the patrol car had finished driving past, not slowing down or showing any indications that they’d seen me, I let out a sigh of relief. It looked like I might be able to make my escape after all.

A couple minutes after this, I reached my destination, an old brownstone that had a condemned sign on it. The truth was, the building was still in decent shape and certainly wasn’t bad enough to be torn down. The reason it was marked as condemned was because someone in city hall wanted the property and they didn’t want to pay any more than they had to for it. Get the property condemned, then only pay pennies on the dollar. It was all being fought in court, and there probably wouldn’t be any resolution for at least six months.

“Perfect,” I said as I slipped inside and went to my chosen apartment. I closed the door behind me and let out a sigh of relief. “Finally…”

The reason that I’d chosen this specific apartment was because it was fully furnished. The previous tenants had been evicted, and they hadn’t been able to bring any of their furniture with them when they left. I’d checked out all of the apartments during a previous visit and this one was the most useful.

I took off my hat, then looked up and caught sight of my reflection in a mirror that hung on the wall. My reflection was that of a man in his late thirties, with thinning blonde hair and a bit more weight around the middle than was strictly necessary. And then there were my eyes. They looked tired, which was appropriate, because I was tired. So damn tired.

“Better double check,” I muttered as I reached into my pocket and pulled out a gun. It was a street weapon, one where the serial numbers had been filed off. It had doubtlessly been used in multiple crimes before I got my hands on it.

With that, I slowly moved through the apartment, checking each room and closet in order to make sure that I really was alone. Once I was done with that, I finally let out a sigh of relief and lowered my guard.

“This should do just fine,” I muttered.

A moment later, I pulled out my wallet, removing the cash but leaving everything else in it. The drivers license and credit cards for Michael Stoat were no longer needed. In fact, I’d have to get rid of them soon.

Next came my badge. I should have gotten rid of that already, but I’d held onto it a little longer than I should have. But no more. I couldn’t afford to have anyone see that thing, especially not now that I was finally making my move.

Once, when I’d first joined the force, I’d wanted to be a good cop, the kind who helped people and put away the bad guys. Unfortunately, things hadn’t worked out that way. The real world had gotten in the way.

At first, it had been desperation to pay a few bills, a simple desire to keep from losing my home. And admittedly, it had also been greed. A thousand bucks to just look the other way? Easy money. Too easy. Then, over the years, they kept asking for more. Leave a door unlocked. Make a certain piece of evidence disappear. Before I knew it, I was in far too deep. Now, my only way out was either prison or the morgue.

“Or,” I mused aloud. “Option three.”

It was with those words that I pulled a small glass vial out of my pocket. This was it, the key to my prison. The cornerstone of my entire escape. IF it worked.

I held the vial up and stared at the liquid inside. It held a high concentration of a virus, Burke’s Biomorphic Virus, also known as ‘the Bug’.

The Bug was a strange virus, one that was unlike any other virus on the planet. It didn’t just make people sick. It changed them. It changed people in completely unpredictable ways.

I’ve had the Bug before. Twice. The first time, I grew two inches taller. The second time, my hair turned from dark brown to blonde. Since baldness and thinning hair didn’t exist anywhere else in my family, I suspected that my second infection was also responsible for my current hairline.

Lately, vials like this had been appearing, concentrated doses of the virus for people who wanted to intentionally infect themselves. It was said that with a virus load this concentrated, that it was almost guaranteed to cause large scale changes, ones that were a bit more extensive than just hair color. This was ideal for people who wanted a complete change of look. People like me.

Facial recognition was way too good these days for me to just fake my death and disappear. I needed something a bit more extreme if I wanted any hope of disappearing and starting over. And this vial, which I’d ‘confiscated’ during a bust, was perfect for that.

Then, with a nervous and even shaking hand, I opened the vial of Bug juice and downed the contents in one gulp. Now, all I could do was wait.

----------

“This sucks,” I groaned.

I was on the couch with a blanket wrapped around me, feeling like crap. The Bug juice had worked. I had the Bug, and had spent the last couple days feeling like shit. It was like the worst case of flu that I’d ever had in my life. And from the way my body was changing, my plan was working. I was getting an extreme change.

Over the last couple days, I’d lost about six inches of height and a lot of weight, both in fat and muscle mass. I was pretty thin at the moment, which freaked me out a bit. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d done this to myself. This was what I’d wanted. I just wished that I had a bit more control over my changes. Getting the Bug was a bit like playing roulette in that you could never be sure where you were going to land. Hopefully, I wasn’t playing the Russian variety.

Just then, my stomach gurgled urgently, so I jumped to my feet and threw off my blanket. I raced to the bathroom, just barely making it before my bowels released themselves, for what had to be the tenth time that day. Even more of my body’s mass disappeared down the toilet, and I was sure that even more of it would follow before long.

When I finished my dump, I stood up and looked myself over, checking out my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I did so. I was so much shorter and scrawnier than normal, that it really threw me off. I felt so…weird.

“This is what I wanted,” I reminded myself yet again.

At this point, my transformation was probably halfway through. And though it wasn’t done, I could see how I’d already changed, and that gave me a pretty good idea of how I was going to end up.

Loss of height and muscle. I looked younger, by at least a decade at this point, and there was a good chance the trend would continue. What was even more notable was the fact that my cock and balls were shrinking away. My balls had pulled up inside my body, leaving an empty pouch behind, while my cock had shrunk to the size of a toddler’s. I probably should have been horrified by that, but instead, I was more…resigned.

“I made my decision,” I reminded myself as I turned away from the mirror. “Now I have to live with it.”

I made a quick circuit of the apartment, pausing to peek out the windows. There were no suspicious cars on the street, as far as I could see, and nobody seemed to be lingering. Good. Now, I just had to make sure that I kept the curtains closed so that nobody saw me.

----------

I took several slow breaths as I lay back in bed. I felt better. Sure, I still felt like crap, but not nearly as bad as before. It had been five days since I drank that vial, and it looked like my infection was done.

My transformation was also over. If there were any more changes to come, they were small ones, ones that wouldn’t really be noticeable. Whether I liked it or not, this was my new body.

With a bit of a grunt, I climbed out of bed and stood up. I stretched out, grimacing a little at the aches in my muscles. However, they didn’t hurt nearly as much as they had for the last few days.

I felt strange. Light. And everything around me looked so much larger than before. Of course, that made sense since I was about a foot shorter than I used to be. I couldn’t be much more than five feet tall now. I was tiny. But oddly enough, in spite of that, and in spite of how crappy I felt from the Bug, I also felt sort of good.

Once I was good and stretched, I made my way to the bathroom and looked myself over in the mirror. I wasn’t at all surprised by my reflection since I’d been keeping track of my changes the entire time. Still, it was pretty freaky to see that face staring back.

A woman… No, a girl stares back at me from the mirror. She was a teenager, probably around fourteen or fifteen years old, with a slender build and small perky tits. She had long blonde hair that kept falling down into my face, and a cute button nose.

“I guess this is me, now,” I said aloud. My voice sounded strange to my ears.

I’d asked for this. I knew that I would change a great deal, and I certainly had. I’d wanted to look as different as possible to my old self, and there was no doubt that I did. Nobody would ever mistake me for being Michael Stoat. Maybe his daughter, but certainly not him.

“I need a new name,” I mused aloud. “Michelle?”

That name made me snort. ‘Michelle’ would have been a convenient name, and one that would have been relatively easy for me to get used to. However, it was also far too close to my old name.

I shook my head at that, only to end up with a face full of hair. I brushed it out of my face, annoyed that this kept happening. Still, it was nice to have a full head of hair again, even if I did have a little too much of it.

A minute later, I went into the kitchen to get myself something to eat. I was starved. Apparently, all these changes really burned through the calories. Fortunately, I’d stocked the place with plenty of food ahead of time.

Once I finished eating, I staggered back to the bed, feeling another wave of exhaustion hitting. I barely made it before I was out again.

----------

“This is NOT going to work,” I muttered as I held a pair of pants up in front of me.

Those were my old pants, the ones that I’d worn when I came into the apartment. At the time, they’d been a little snug in the waist, but now, they were far too large.

There were other clothes as well, ones that I’d brought to the apartment in preparation for my dose of the Bug juice. I had a variety of different sizes since I hadn’t known how I would come out of it, but none of those were much better. I hadn’t expected to be so small…or to be a girl. I probably should have considered the possibility.

I shook my head, then had to pause and brush my hair out of my face again. I was really going to need to start tying it back or something. But for now…

Once I’d picked out all the smallest clothes, I got dressed. The clothes were still too big for me, but they were better than nothing. At least they’d work well enough to get me to the thrift store so I could find clothes that actually fit.

When I was finally dressed and presentable, I left the apartment for the first time in nearly a week. I went out the back, making sure that nobody saw me leaving the building. The last thing I wanted was to answer questions.

I slowly walked down the sidewalk, acting like everything was normal. I got a couple odd looks because of my clothes, but nobody really bothered me, much to my relief. Nearly everyone else seemed so much bigger than me now, which made me a bit nervous about interacting with any of them.

I waited until I was far enough away from the apartment, then made sure that nobody was watching before I dropped my old badge and wallet down a drain. Once I’d disposed of those, I let out a sigh of relief even as I felt a faint pang in my heart.

My thoughts turned to my old life, or what was left of it. It hadn’t been worth living, not after everything I’d done. I would miss my old apartment though. I’d lived there for years.

By now, the department would have noticed that I was missing. Someone would have gone to my old place to check on me, and they would have found it trashed, as if someone had been searching for something. There also would have been signs of a struggle, with a few drops of my blood on the floor to add authenticity to the scene. Hopefully, the department would think I was the victim of foul play, internal affairs could close the book on another dirty cop, and my former side-employers would no longer need to be concerned about silencing a loose end.

“A win win for everyone,” I whispered to myself. Except of course, I silently added, for the poor bastards who wasted time investigating my disappearance, and everyone who had to fill out all the extra paperwork. But most of those guys were assholes, so screw them anyway.

There was a temptation to head past my old apartment, to see if anyone had gone inside yet. However, I squashed that thought down and pushed it aside. That was the kind of thing that would get me caught. That life was over. Michael was dead and gone, and it was best for everyone if he remained that way.

Now that I’d disposed of the last visible pieces of my old life, it was time to start working on my new one. The first step, besides the actual transformation, would be getting some clothes that actually fit. With that in mind, I went to the nearest thrift store.

I hesitated before walking into the section with all the girl’s clothes, feeling like I was some kind of pervert. At least this wasn’t as awkward as a real clothing store would have been, and especially not a lingerie store. I shuddered at the realization that sooner or later, I would have do to just that. Thrift stores generally didn’t carry underwear.

I had absolutely no idea of what sizes my new body wore, and I certainly wasn’t about to try on a bunch of stuff right there in the store. So, I made do by holding clothes up to me, estimating how well they might fit, and making my decisions that way. When I left the store an hour later, I had a new pair of shoes and two bags of clothes that were a better fit than what I was currently wearing.

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” I muttered.

This was a start. Only a start. I’d prepared the escape from my old life as well as I could, but there was only so much I’d been able to do when I had no idea what I’d look like. With a sigh, I looked down at the bags of new clothes in my hand, wincing slightly as I considered how much brand new clothes were going to cost me. And that was going to be one of the smaller expenses that I’d soon have to deal with.

----------

I leaned back against a streetlight post, watching a bus drive past. This wasn’t one of the local busses but one of the ones that went elsewhere, to other cities and even other states. I imagined being on that bus, on my way to start over somewhere new entirely. Then I let out a sigh, reminding myself that there was a reason I hadn’t skipped town already.

Cars could be tracked down. My former side-employers often kept an eye on bus stations, in case interesting newcomers arrived, or in case ‘assets’ tried to leave. Of course, there were still ways to slip out of town without anyone noticing or following, but it was easier to avoid that kind of attention when I didn’t look like my old self.

“One more stop before I can leave,” I mused.

I could hit the road now, but if I did that, I’d just be one more teenage runaway. There weren’t a lot of good options for me like that, so I needed to stack the deck a little in my favor. That was one of the main reasons that I hadn’t skipped town already.

I needed help, and I’d known that I would. Here, I knew the local players, and I knew exactly which one would be able to help me. That was why I was currently hanging out in this particular grungy neighborhood.

Once I’d spent enough time watching the area and tracking who was around, I moved down the street again, going straight for a small convenience store on the corner. Three men were standing around in front, smoking and talking with each other. They all looked up at me.

“What are you doing here, little girl?” one of the men asked in a patronizing tone. His friends snickered.

“Little girl?” I asked before hearing my own voice and remembering how I now looked. “I’m this many,” I said in a cutesy little girl voice, as I held up a single finger, flipping him the bird. His buddies started laughing at that and even he looked faintly amused.

“You know,” one of the other men said, giving me a predatory look. “She looks like the kind of girl that Ed is always looking for. You know…”

“Runaway,” the last one muttered.

“Do you need some help?” the second one asked me. “Food? A place to stay? A job? I know a guy who can hook you up.”

“I already have a job,” I lied, knowing where this was going and wanting to head it off before things escalated. “And my boss will skin me alive…probably literally…if I don’t deliver his message.”

The men looked back and forth between each other, obviously wondering who my ‘boss’ was, and if he was someone they wanted to piss off. In the end, they apparently decided not to risk it, because none of them made a move as I walked past.

Once I was clear of the men and it was obvious that they weren’t going to bother me anymore, I let out a sigh of relief. I was suddenly very aware of just how small and vulnerable I now was. Girls who looked the way I do now… I shuddered at the thought, resisting the temptation to pat the gun in my pocket for reassurance.

Then I took a deep breath and tried to look calm and confident as I walked into the convenience store. I immediately went to the back, where there was a small sandwich shop with a man at the counter.

“I’m here to pick up an order,” I told the man. “It should be under the name of Shultz.”

“Shultz?” the man asked, staring at me intently.

“First name of Charles,” I added.

The man was thin, balding, and probably in his early sixties. He smelled of cigarettes and beer, though his sharp eyes made it clear that he wasn’t drunk.

“Sure,” the man said with a nod. “You can pick it up in the back.”

I went through the side door that he indicated, then into a room in the back. There were tables full of equipment, but not the kind you usually found in a convenience store or sandwich shop.

The man came into the room and announced, “Your order has already been placed and paid for, so now we just need to put it together. First, I’ll need a couple pictures.” He indicated a professional looking camera that was set up on a tripod, then at the spot where he wanted me to stand.

Once he took my picture, I put on a sweater and then put my hair back into a ponytail. He took a couple more pictures.

The whole room stank, though not nearly as bad as some of the places I’ve been. I remembered a particularly nasty crime scene and nearly gagged at the very memory of that stench. That was just one more reason for me to escape that life. And this man was going to help me with that.

This little photography session was expensive, but it would be worth it. Oh so worth it. New identity. New paperwork. Everything I needed to start over as a new person.

The man, whose name I still didn’t know, was known for being good at his job, which was the first reason I’d come to him. He was also known for being tight-lipped and for not having anything to do with my former employers. Apparently, one of them had screwed him over sometime in the past, and now he refused to have anything to do with them. That was the second reason I’d picked him instead of his cheaper competitor.

“Not like I have anything else worth spending the money on,” I muttered to myself.

Unlike some of the other guys in my position, other cops on the take, I didn’t have any bad habits to blow my money on. I’d never had expensive tastes. I’d never been into drugs, gambling, or loose women. Instead, I’d tucked it all away like a squirrel hoarding nuts. I’d been saving it for a rainy day, and damn if it wasn’t pouring.

The photographer worked fast, having already done most of the work ahead of time. Once the pictures were taken, he just had to attach them to the correct documents. Half an hour later, I walked out with a new birth certificate, high school ID, and a few other things. And since I’d contacted him online and made the payment anonymously, he just thought that I was a normal teenage girl whose ‘sugar daddy’ was setting her up with a new identity. I was disgusted yet relieved at the same time.

----------

I looked around the apartment where I’d been living for the last couple weeks, nodding faintly to myself as I did so. I’d already cleaned up after myself, emptying the trash and removing everything else that I’d brought in. The place was back to the same condition it had been in when I first found it.

“Its not like the previous tenants are coming back for their stuff,” I said as I looked at the abandoned furniture. Still, it was a good idea to clean my tracks anyway.

Once I was satisfied that everything had been taken care of, I grabbed the backpack and rolling suitcase that I’d bought from the thrift store, and which contained everything I now owned. It wasn’t much, mostly clothes and things to take care of myself.

“That should do it,” I announced as I left the apartment and the condemned brownstone it was in.

I slowly made my way down the street, towards the nearby bus station. If anyone saw me, they might think ‘teenage runaway’, but I was trying to project the image that I was off to visit my grandma instead. It was definitely a more innocent explanation, and one that tended to attract fewer predators.

“I grew up on my parents homestead,” I said as I practiced the story I planned to tell. “I was homeschooled there, until the accident… Now, I live with my grandma, and she insists I go to a real school…”

The idea of actually going back to school was ridiculous, but if I really wanted a new life, then that was where I had to start. I had to actually build a life, one which included friends and people who knew me as Emily Majors…which was my new name. I was still trying to get used to it.

“There is a LOT to get used to, Emily,” I told myself, intentionally practicing with the name.

The story seemed a bit hokey, but I figured that it would help to explain my limited school records and any oddities about my behavior. I had no doubt that actually becoming Emily for real was going to be a lot harder than the undercover work I’d done in the past.

I stopped beside a postal box, then hesitated for several seconds. My heartbeat sped up a little as I pulled out a large envelope, one that was addressed to someone in the DA’s office who had the reputation for being clean and honest. This contained some dangerous information, the kind that would have gotten Michael killed if anyone thought he might share it. It had information on my old employers and listed a few places were evidence could be found.

This wouldn’t make everything better. It wouldn’t right the wrongs that I’d been involved in, or really even ease my own guilt. But it was a start. And maybe one day, Emily Majors could actually do something real to make up for it all.

With that, I slipped the envelope into the mail slot and let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. It was done.

A few minutes later, I reached the bus station. I carefully looked around, spotting a few suspicious people and even obvious predators. My eyes stopped on one man in particular, a slender guy who was sitting on a bench, reading a book, and seemingly not paying attention. I knew better.

“Hank,” I muttered under my breath

Hank worked for my former employers, and was one of the people who sometimes delivered my ‘paychecks’ and marching orders. I was careful not to look at him too openly because I didn’t want to get his attention on me.

“Nice and easy, Emily,” I told myself, forcing a smile and some false cheerfulness. “Grandma is waiting for me, and I bet she’ll have my favorite dinner ready too. I bet there will be apple pie…”

Once I made it past Hank and onto the bus, I sat nervously in my seat, glancing out the window and half expecting him to come marching towards me. He never even looked in my direction, much less reached for the phone to tell someone else. I didn’t look like anyone he was keeping an eye out for, so he hadn’t paid me any attention.

Eventually, the bus jerked and then began to roll forward. A minute later, we were actually on the road, heading out of town, and to somewhere else, to somewhere that I’d arranged entry to a local high school. I let out a breath, feeling much of the tension flow out of me along with the air. Then, a real smile formed on my lips. I’d done it. I’d escaped.

The End