I SMELL HUMAN
CHAPTER 1: THE AWAKENING
**Created and Written by Huddon S Lajah**
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They say your life can change in an instant. One moment you're ordinary, the next you're something else entirely. Something wrong. Something broken.
Or maybe—something more.
I learned that six months ago, on a mountain road in the rain, when the world as I knew it shattered like glass.
---
**SIX MONTHS AGO**
The argument started somewhere between mile marker forty-seven and the hairpin turn my father always hated.
"We need to talk about this, Elena." Dad's knuckles were white on the steering wheel, his voice tight in that way that meant he'd been holding back for hours. Maybe days.
Mom stared out the passenger window, her reflection ghostly in the rain-streaked glass. "Not now. Not here."
"Then when? When those people at Scentara—"
"I said NOT now."
I pulled out one earbud, teenage instincts sensing the kind of fight that wouldn't end well. "Everything okay up there?"
Dad's eyes found mine in the rearview mirror, and he forced a smile that didn't reach them. "Fine, mija. Just tired."
I didn't believe him. But I was twenty-eight, not eighteen, and I knew when to let adults handle their own drama. I was about to put my earbud back in when the night exploded with light.
Headlights. Too bright. Too close.
"What the—" Dad's curse was cut short by the impact.
Metal screamed. The world tilted. I remember reaching for something—anything—to hold onto as we spun across wet asphalt. I remember Mom's hand stretching back toward me, our fingers almost touching. I remember her mouth forming my name.
Then the guardrail rushed at us like a living thing, and we were flying.
No—falling.
The car tumbled through darkness and rain, and time went strange. Too slow and too fast all at once. I saw my phone suspended in midair. I saw the spiderweb cracks racing across the windshield. I saw my parents' faces, terror and love mixing into something that would haunt me forever.
Then—impact.
The sound of it. God, the sound. Like the universe crumpling.
And then... silence.
I floated in that silence, suspended in nothing. Darkness wrapped around me like water, and I thought: *This is death. This is what it feels like to stop existing.*
But death doesn't smell.
It came to me gradually, pulling me back from wherever I'd gone. Gasoline. Burnt rubber. Copper—so much copper. And underneath it all, something chemical and wrong, like the air after lightning strikes.
Blood. I was smelling blood.
"Mom?" My voice was small, frightened. A child's voice. "Dad?"
Only silence answered.
Then light—harsh and white and painful—flooded everything.
---
I woke up screaming.
Or at least, I tried to scream. What came out was a choked gasp as I bolted upright in a hospital bed, my senses exploding with information I didn't know how to process.
The *smell*.
Oh God, the smell of everything.
Disinfectant sharp enough to cut. Latex and fear-sweat and medication. The ghost of someone's perfume from three rooms away. Breakfast cooking somewhere in the building—eggs, burnt toast, coffee that had been sitting too long. Underneath it all, the sterile, chemical scent of a place where people came to either get better or stop fighting.
A place where people died.
I clutched my head, trying to make it stop, but there was no off switch for whatever was happening to me.
"Easy, easy!" A nurse rushed in, her voice too loud, her presence too much. She smelled like vanilla body lotion and the cigarette she'd smoked on her break and something beneath that—worry. No, more specific than worry. *Pity.*
And I knew, before she said a word, that my parents were gone.
"No," I whispered. "No, no, no—"
But the smell didn't lie. The formaldehyde scent clinging to her scrubs, the way sadness had its own particular odor—sweet and rotten like flowers left too long in a vase—it all told me the truth my mind wasn't ready to accept.
They were gone.
And I was... different.
---
**SIX MONTHS LATER**
The Pinehaven Police Department smelled like every cop shop I'd ever been in—old coffee, printer toner, and the particular blend of cologne and stress that came from people who dealt with humanity's worst days—but now I could identify each component, track each scent to its source, know things I had no business knowing.
Like the fact that Detective Marcus Hayes had stopped at the coffee shop on Third Street this morning instead of making it at home. Like he'd used the cedar-scented soap I'd given him for Christmas two years ago. Like underneath his professional smile, he was worried about me in a way that smelled warm and sweet, like vanilla and cinnamon.
Like hope mixed with fear of rejection.
I gripped my coffee cup tighter and tried not to acknowledge what my abilities were telling me about my partner's feelings. Some truths were too heavy to carry.
"Clara!" Marcus's face lit up when he spotted me across the bullpen, and I felt something twist in my chest. "Welcome back. We weren't expecting you until next week."
I forced a smile that I hoped looked natural. "What, got tired of solving cases without me?"
"Something like that." He approached, and I could smell his hesitation—he wanted to hug me but wasn't sure if I'd welcome it. I kept my distance, making the choice for him, and watched the brief flash of hurt cross his features.
Six months ago, I wouldn't have noticed. Now I could smell the slight souring of his scent, hope curdling into disappointment.
"The Captain wants to see you," he said, recovering quickly. "I'll grab you a real coffee. That cup smells like it's been in your car for two days."
I looked down at the forgotten cup I'd found in my cupholder. "Three days, actually."
His laugh was genuine, and for a moment, things felt almost normal. "Jesus, Clara. Some things never change."
*But I have,* I wanted to say. *I've changed so much you wouldn't believe me if I told you.*
Instead, I just smiled and headed toward Captain Reeves's office.
---
Captain Diane Reeves was a woman who'd climbed the ranks through competence and sheer stubborn will, and her office reflected that—organized chaos, community photos on every wall, a desk that had seen two decades of coffee rings and case files.
And in the bottom drawer, hidden beneath folders: vodka.
I smelled it the moment I walked in, along with the guilt and shame that clung to her like a second skin.
"Six months sober," she said without preamble, watching my face. "Had a slip last night. You gonna report me or let me do my job?"
I froze. I'd gotten better at hiding what I knew, but apparently not good enough. "I... I don't know what—"
"Don't bullshit me, Mendez." She leaned back in her chair, studying me with sharp eyes. "Your psych eval says you've developed 'heightened observational skills' post-trauma. I've seen it before. Detectives who come back from something bad—they notice things."
*If only she knew.*
"I'm not here to judge you, Captain," I said carefully.
"Good. Because I'm not here to judge you either." She slid a file folder across her desk. "Light duty for two weeks. Partner with Hayes on low-level cases. See the department therapist twice a week. Non-negotiable."
I wanted to argue, but the mention of my parents—even unspoken—hung in the air between us, and I knew she was right. On paper, at least, I should still be a mess.
I was a mess. Just not in the ways anyone expected.
"I'd rather work," I said quietly.
"I know." Something softened in her expression. "Your dad was a good man, Clara. Ethical journalist. Pain in my ass sometimes, but good."
The grief hit fresh, the way it always did when someone mentioned him in past tense. "Yeah. He was."
"Report to Hayes. There's a missing person case—teenager, probably a runaway. Should be simple."
*Nothing's ever simple,* I thought. But I just nodded and left.
---
The case wasn't simple.
Lily Chen, sixteen years old, missing for three days. When Marcus and I sat across from her parents in their too-clean living room, I smelled the lies before they even opened their mouths.
Fresh paint covering old stains. Bleach scrubbed into carpet fibers. Fear-sweat on Mr. Chen's collar. And underneath Mrs. Chen's carefully composed expression—the complete absence of scent that came from shock or dissociation.
"What aren't you telling us?" I asked, ignoring Marcus's surprised look.
The question cracked them open like an egg.
The truth spilled out: a fight, broken glass, blood from a minor cut, and Lily running into the night saying she hated them. And something else—a man outside, watching the house.
Always watching.
By the time we left, Marcus was looking at me differently. "How did you know about the carpet?"
"Good eyes."
"From across the room."
"Marcus—"
"Is there something you want to tell me?" The vulnerability in his voice, the hope and fear mixing in his scent—it made me want to scream.
*Yes. I want to tell you everything. I want to tell you that I can smell lies and fear and the fact that you've been in love with me for three years. I want to tell you that I'm terrified of what I'm becoming and you're the only person who makes me feel human anymore.*
But I couldn't. Because the moment I told him, everything would change, and I'd lose the one anchor I had left to my old life.
"No," I lied. "I'm fine."
His disappointment smelled like rain.
---
We found Lily in an abandoned pharmacy on Fifth and Main, huddled in a back room that reeked of chemicals and fear.
But it wasn't just fear I smelled.
It was something *chemical*. Something wrong. Lily's scent was distorted, fractured, like someone had taken a normal human signature and twisted it into something unrecognizable.
"Don't let them take me back!" she screamed when she saw me, hands clutching her bleeding ears. "I can hear everything. EVERYTHING. I can't make it stop!"
My blood ran cold.
Enhanced hearing. Just like my enhanced smell.
"What did they give you?" I knelt beside her, gentle, like approaching a wounded animal.
"The man said it would make me special." Tears streamed down her face, mixing with the blood from her nose. "But it hurts. It hurts so much."
Before I could respond, a crash echoed from the main room, followed by Marcus's strained voice: "Clara! Little help!"
I ran toward the sound and found Marcus grappling with a man in dark clothing—average height, forgettable face, impossibly strong.
The man smelled like unscented soap and gunpowder and something underneath that made my skin crawl. The same chemical wrongness that clung to Lily.
He was enhanced. Like us.
When he threw Marcus across the room like he weighed nothing, I understood exactly how dangerous this was.
"You shouldn't be here, Detective," the man said, calm and terrifying. Then he looked at me—really looked—and smiled. "You're different. I can see it."
"On the ground! Now!"
He moved faster than I could track. My gun went off, the shot going wide, and suddenly he was behind me, his breath on my neck.
"They're watching you, Clara," he whispered. "They know what you can do."
Then he was gone, disappearing through a window like smoke.
I stood there, heart pounding, Marcus groaning from where he'd fallen, Lily crying in the back room, and one thought crystallizing in my mind:
*This is bigger than a missing teenager.*
*This is bigger than me.*
---
That night, I found the package on my kitchen counter.
No return address. Just a USB drive and a handwritten note in familiar script:
*"Clara—I'm sorry for everything. You deserve the truth. -Mom"*
My hands shook as I plugged it into my laptop.
The video that loaded showed my mother, younger, in a lab coat I'd seen a thousand times. Behind her, sitting at a table doing homework, was me. Twelve years old. Innocent. Completely unaware I was being filmed.
Being studied.
"Subject C.M., age twelve," my mother's voice said clinically. "Beginning low-dose exposure protocol. Subject is unaware. Consent waived under familial exemption."
The world dropped out from under me.
"I believe repeated exposure during developmental years will result in permanent sensory enhancement," she continued, and I watched my younger self solving math problems, oblivious to the fact that my own mother was experimenting on me. "If successful, C.M. will be the proof we need that this technology can help, not harm."
The camera zoomed slightly on young-me, and my mother's voice dropped to a whisper:
"I'm doing this for her. For all of them. I just hope she'll forgive me someday."
I didn't remember making the decision to scream. I only remembered the laptop crashing to the floor, my coffee table overturning, six months of held-back grief and rage finally exploding into the open.
She'd experimented on me.
My own mother had turned me into this without my knowledge, without my consent, and then died—or pretended to die—before I could even confront her about it.
I collapsed on my floor, surrounded by the ghost-scents of my parents that still clung to every surface, and sobbed until there was nothing left.
---
Later—I don't know how much later—my phone buzzed.
A text from an unknown number: *"You're not alone. Others like us are in danger. Help me find them before Scentara does. -E.T."*
Dr. Elias Thorn. The medical examiner who had no scent. Who'd told me things I didn't want to believe.
Who'd said my mother was still alive.
I stared at the message, then at the files still open on my laptop screen, then at my father's photo on the mantle—the only parent I was sure had actually loved me without conditions.
And I made a decision.
**CLARA (TEXT):** *"I'm in."*
Because if my mother had made me into this—into whatever I was becoming—then I was going to use it.
I was going to finish what my father had started.
I was going to burn Scentara to the ground.
Even if it meant burning myself in the process.
---
**END OF CHAPTER 1**
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**AUTHOR'S NOTE:**
Welcome to I SMELL HUMAN! This story will update weekly with Clara's journey into a world of conspiracies, enhanced abilities, and impossible choices. If you're enjoying it, please vote and comment—I love hearing your theories about what's coming next!
Content warnings for this story: violence, parental experimentation, grief, morally gray characters.
