Rise of the Transgenics (10 page)

“Just went to the laundry room. These might
be too big on you, but I threw out my junior high clothes a long
time ago.”

That remark stung. “You really know how to
make someone feel at home,” Harry said, feeling like a little kid
all over again.

Jason chuckled and waved his hand in an
upwards direction. “Your lady is waiting.”

Aware of his own body odor, Harry trotted
upstairs with the fresh clothes, entered the bathroom and stripped
down. As he took a hot shower, the spray washed away some of the
tension. After he shut off the water, he stepped out of the shower
and stared at his reflection in the mirror.

Skinny and wiry, his body showed a hint of
muscle, but not a whole lot else. Sighing, he shook out the
clothes, and though they were too big, keeping warm was a priority.
He got dressed, rolled up the legs on the pants and cinched in the
belt. Before walking into the guest room, he knocked on the door.
“Anastasia, are you decent?”

“Come in.”

She’d found the clothes and now wore a yellow
skirt and T-shirt. “Are you sure that’s going to be warm enough?”
he asked.

Quickly spinning around and posing like a
runway model, she gave him a coy smile. “Like I said, I’m a furry
girl. I’m always sort of warm, higher metabolism and all that.”

While he stood there admiring the view, she
took the opportunity to throw her arms around his neck and whisper
into his ear, “It was cold outside, wasn’t it? I need to rest, and
so do you.”

He never got the chance to answer as she
tossed him on the bed and lay down beside him, pulling the blanket
over top of them. Harry felt the warmth coming from her body, and
she made a deep purring sound that calmed him down. Like a cat, he
thought, just like a cat...but not.

Soon, the purring stopped and the sound of
her quiet breathing wafted through the air. She’d fallen asleep,
and he found himself nodding off as well. Sleep is good, he
thought, sleep is good...

Drifting away, he was awakened by the
movement beside him. Anastasia wasn’t sleeping so peacefully
anymore. Instead, she’d started to violently thrash around,
muttering something in a foreign language...Russian. Her forehead
was damp, and she kept muttering, the sounds getting louder. With a
sudden gasp, she sat up, blinking in the semi-darkened room.

Harry glanced at the clock on the nightstand.
It read three in the afternoon. They hadn’t been sleeping very
long, and he held her close to him. “Are you okay? You were tossing
and turning.”

A series of short, sharp breaths came from
her mouth. “I saw...saw images,” she finally got out, putting her
hand to her head as if to keep the mental pictures from escaping.
“Images of the lab—Nurmelev’s lab—streets...people’s
faces...men...but I don’t know who they are. Everything’s still
blurry upstairs.” She tapped her head for emphasis. “But I saw
them.”

With a start, Harry wondered if the memory
blocks Nurmelev had put into place were beginning to crumble. If
she’d remembered this part of her past life, then maybe she’d
remember her last name. Whether it was good or not for her to know
who she’d been in her past life...it wasn’t his decision, and he
knew it.

A second later, her dreamy state vanished,
and in its place, a hard practicality emerged. “Do you know who I
was?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she prodded him with her
finger. “If you know, if you love me, then tell me, please.”

Surprised by the question, Harry mumbled
something to the effect that he didn’t know much. Anastasia’s eyes
narrowed and this time she placed her hand on his shoulder and
squeezed it—hard. “When we were captured, up at Nurmelev’s place,
did he tell you?” she pressed and her voice became more
insistent.

Well, the truth would have come out sooner or
later, he decided and he looked straight at her
.
“Yeah, he
said you were, uh, not a nice girl in real life.”

A sense of shame swept over him, but not
because he didn’t love Anastasia. He did, although he wasn’t sure
how she’d react to the truth. Still, damn the consequences, she
might remember it one day, so he added in a very small voice, “He
said you were a...prostitute.”

For a second, Anastasia didn’t react, merely
stared at him, but a hint of anger and then sorrow showed in her
eyes. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Some of them stayed
trapped in the fur, and she took her hand away from his shoulder
and brushed them off.

In a hushed voice, she began to speak and
trembled as the words came out. “The faces I saw—men, always men,
some young, some older—what kind of person was I to have
done...that?” she whispered and now the tears began once more in
earnest. “What kind of person would sell...?”

With a sudden jerk, she twisted around to
swivel her legs over the side of the bed, then leaned over. Her
voice trailed off as a series of racking sobs shook her body. “All
this time I thought I was someone who’d been kidnapped. I knew I
had a mother and father, but no one ever told me, and now I find
out I slept with...”

Her voice came out harshly as she twisted her
head to spear Harry with a glance. “Did Nurmelev mention my
parents?”

“Just your mother,” he said, once again
fumbling for the proper response. “He said that your mother was an
alcoholic. He didn’t say anything about your father or where
exactly you came from.”

“I probably don’t even have a last name,” she
muttered, still shaking. “I don’t have a history. I don’t remember
where I went to elementary, junior or senior high school—or if I
went. But I can remember doing...what I did. I’m just a prostitute,
a cat...
girl.
”

Those words came out with such loathing that
Harry felt compelled to set her straight and he placed his arms
around her. “No...no,” she sobbed out. “Don’t touch me!”

Ignoring her command, he pulled her more
tightly to him. Her body stiffened, but then just as suddenly
relaxed. “Anastasia,” he murmured, feeling that his heart had been
broken just like hers had, “What happened then, it happened. It
doesn’t matter to me. I love you and always have.”

Her voice came out like lead, but she lifted
her face to his. “Even though I did...what I did...you still care
for—”

Cupping his hand around her cheeks, he
stroked the fine fur and whispered, “I do.”

It wasn’t a huge admission, but then again,
Harry had never been very good with words. It would have to do, and
his girlfriend clung to him, her fingernails digging into his flesh
as she broke down anew. Perhaps in the depths of her sorrow, there
was always the chance of renewal. The past had to stay in the past.
Perhaps one day she’d put her own past behind her.

“Guys, you’d better get down here!”

The call sounded urgent, and Anastasia wiped
her face and drew in a deep shuddering breath. “Let’s go downstairs
and see how much more trouble we’ve caused.”

Running down the steps, Jason pointed
wordlessly at the large screen television in the main room. A live
news broadcast was now being aired and a male reporter, redheaded
and shaking with excitement, pointed to a familiar building—FBI
headquarters. With a sudden, sinking sense that history had
repeated itself, Harry listened intently.

“According to eyewitnesses, no more than
twenty minutes ago, two creatures, a cat-woman and another creature
that defies explanation, smashed through the main door of this law
enforcement agency. There were over a thousand people in the
building at the time...”

The camera cut away to show no less than
twenty ambulances and twice that many police cars speeding away
from the scene, the bodies of the wounded and dead presumably
inside. The voiceover mentioned that the director of the agency,
Andrew Merton, was among the dead. A number of police were busy
pushing back the gawking crowd, and some of the bystanders were
busily taking selfies.

Tragedy occurs and people just have to put it
on a social site, Harry thought as a wave of disgust swept over
him. Breathing out, “Oh crap,” he said nothing more, for there was
nothing he could say.

Anastasia touched him on the arm. “Wait,” she
whispered.

“And we have reports that almost one-third of
them were murdered most savagely,” the reporter continued. He
turned away to listen to something through his earpiece. “Yes, we
have another report coming live from camera crew inside...”

The picture switched to the inside of the
building, the floors awash in blood and body parts. Horrified by
the carnage, Harry wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Jason’s face
had turned pale and only Anastasia remained stolid, growling and
muttering under her breath.

A message had been neatly written on the
lobby wall, a message in blood.
We want the boy. The whore will
die, but the boy will be ours.

Jason glanced at both of them, uncertainty
written all over his face. “What does that mean?”

“It’s for us,” Anastasia ground out, her ears
twitching and the fur standing up on her shoulders. Her body
quivered with barely suppressed rage, but she managed to calm
herself and faced him. “You know I had an impaired memory before,
right?”

“Yeah, I sort of figured.”

“Well,” she shrugged, “I just remembered that
I used to be a prostitute.” Her voice still carried that tone of
self-loathing, and Harry wondered why she was lying about her being
able to recall her previous life. Just as quickly, though, he
realized that she wanted to protect him. While it didn’t matter, he
felt nothing but respect as well as love for her.

For his part, a sympathetic tone entered
Jason’s voice. “Look, uh, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“No, I do,” she interrupted, the passion
coming out clearly as she spoke. “I do. This is my past, this is
what I have to own. I don’t know why I did what I did, but if I’m
ever going to remember who I was, then I also have to remember what
I did, good or bad. I’m going to own this.”

There didn’t seem to be too much to add to
that, and with a slight nod, Jason indicated that all was well.
“Hey, whatever you did before, you did, right? Harry’s cool, so are
you, you’re my guests, and that’s that.”

His honesty, laid out in simple words, made
Harry smile and even Anastasia nodded in appreciation. “Fine, so
now we all know what I did. The message is pretty cut and dried,
though. They want Harry...and they want to kill me. I don’t figure
into their plans.”

“You lost me,” Jason said. “What plans?”

Harry grabbed the remote and shut off the
television. “We’re not sure, either, but we have to start
somewhere. Maybe there’s a link with ASR that we don’t know about.
Maybe there isn’t, but we have to try.”

Jason went back to his computer and started
typing. Like before, he uttered a sound of disgust as the screen
message read
Access Denied.
He then tried a different route
and the screen message read
y
ou are trying to enter a
restricted site.
“That’s it,” he said and spread his hands
wide. “I tried to get in. You don’t understand what’s going on
here. The ASR, the FBI....every federal agency has encrypted their
files.”

“People have hacked into mainframes before,”
Anastasia reminded him. “No system is foolproof or hack-proof.
There must be someone out there.”

As if Fate had been listening in, the phone
suddenly rang and Jason quickly snatched up the receiver. Speaking
in hushed tones, he said, “See you soon,” and hung up.

He went into the kitchen and Harry heard the
sounds of him rummaging around. He returned with a plastic bag in
his hand. After grabbing his jacket from the hallway stand, he
opened the closet, searched through it, and found another jacket
and tossed it to Harry. “Well, this is it. We might have a chance,
but I’m not sure.”

“Who were you speaking to?” Harry asked.

“My contact,” Jason said with a mysterious
smile on his face. “Let’s go. You’ve got a car and my contact
doesn’t live far away.”

Harry slipped on the jacket and went over to
the door, his girlfriend by his side. “Where are we going?”

“We have to see Maze.”

Harry drove carefully, always keeping an eye out for
the police. Aware that he was a suspect, he wondered if the police
had put out an APB on Farrell’s car. They probably had, but it was
too late to try and find another one. Anastasia sat in the back
seat while Jason took the passenger side, giving directions.

Fortunately, between his house and his
contact’s place, there was very little traffic at this time of day.
“Keep the speed down, anyway, man,” Jason whispered. He was
practically shaking in his shoes.

“I don’t see any police cars,” Harry
answered, checking the rearview mirror.

“You probably won’t, not yet.”

Jason took a worried glance out the window.
“But they got neighborhood watch here, and someone’s always spying
on someone else’s house, just in case. My contact, uh, warned me
about that.”

He said nothing for a time. Harry wondered
why people had to be so paranoid, but again, he silently chastised
himself. People were dumb, blind, and often panicky animals. He’d
seen Halsey’s reaction, and Jason hadn’t been much different with
Anastasia the first time around.

Silence continued, and while making a left
turn, Harry glanced at the bag in his friend’s hand. “What’s
inside?” he asked.

“Maze is a serious chocoholic,” Jason said
with a chuckle. “I ask a favor, this is payment. Maze doesn’t take
money for services rendered.”

That was the extent of their conversation for
the moment. Two minutes later, they reached their destination. It
was another nicely appointed house with a neatly swept front walk.
Exiting the car, Harry told Anastasia to stay in the car while he
and Jason ran to the door.