Rise of the Transgenics (14 page)

She got up and put her paws around his neck.
“Learn not to be,” she said. “This is for you—and for us,” she
added before giving him a tiny kiss on his mouth. “Think about it,
okay?”

They never discussed the matter again, but
Harry resolved to do what was necessary the next time trouble
happened...if it happened, and he only hoped that it wouldn’t.

Life continued on, and he and Anastasia had
stayed in their semi-ivory tower. He sought counsel only from her
and did for her, because that had become his mission in life, to
restore what had been taken. Love also had a lot to do with it, and
he worked diligently and tirelessly in his quest for knowledge.

At times, though, he spoke to Farrell about
things, but only rarely, as the older man was also a workaholic,
preoccupied with his job, and lived only for his work and not much
else.

“You don’t need to know about me, kid,” the
older man had always answered. “All you need to know is that I work
for this organization. I’ve been with them for over twenty years, I
do my job the best I can, give it my all, and my superiors let me
know on a need to know basis.” He always gave the same stare, cold
and unyielding, and then uttered the familiar refrain. “And you
don’t need to know.”

Awareness or not, Harry eventually found some
details about his handler. Farrell was divorced, had a daughter,
liked playing video games in what free time he had, and lived
alone. Harry knew these details because Anastasia often slipped out
and listened in on conversations between the personnel, and who
would ever suspect that a common house cat would relay this
information?

No one ever did, of course, but Anastasia
wasn’t just any old house cat—she transcended the ordinary.

This situation was also not very common, and
being on the run from creatures that defied belief—not to mention
being arrested twice in the last six months—also transcended the
ordinary. It seemed as though he’d never live a normal kind of
life...

“Hey man, what you in here for?”

A nudge on his shoulder, and then a harder
smack to the same area, brought Harry out of his reverie and into
reality. Blinking, he focused on the voice, and a massive man,
black, with a face full of scars and a pair of cold, dark eyes,
stared at him. “Man, what you in here for?” the man repeated.

“Supposedly for killing two federal agents,”
Harry replied.

The other prisoners overheard the comment and
started to laugh. “Yeah,” one man called out, “Who you trying to
kid, kid?”

Some more comments came Harry’s way, and then
one of the biker dudes he’d seen upstairs, a heavily muscled man in
his thirties with a dirty blond ponytail and even dirtier jeans and
jean jacket, sauntered over to examine Harry more closely. “Hey,
this kid might be sayin’ something. I saw your face once on the
news. Is your name Goldman?”

“Yeah,” Harry answered, still feeling
outsized and totally outnumbered. Glancing quickly around the cell,
he saw that every man there sported tattoos and scars, and outsized
and outweighed him by a lot. The sheer fact that nine on one did
not for good odds make didn’t improve his outlook. “What’s it to
you?”

Biker Guy chuckled as he leaned in closer.
His breath stank of wine and cigarettes, and he poked Harry on the
shoulder with each sentence he uttered. “Yeah, I seen the news on
you. I remember you! You were supposed to have killed a few people
half a year back, right?”

The man turned to face the rest of the
inmates and a gap-toothed grin started to form on his face. “The
news flashes, guys, you remember? Reporters said that he broke into
the headquarters of the FBI and wasted about fifty people. Then I
heard some crap about him doin’ something nasty up in the
Catskills.”

A throaty laugh followed his commentary and
he pivoted around to face Harry again, shoving his face in close,
and every word he uttered was laced with snark. “You ain’t no
killer. You may have robbed a store or stolen some other punk’s
lunch money, but you ain’t a killer. This is my second go-around,
and I’ve hung out with tough dudes in my time. You ain’t no stone
cold killer.”

With that proclamation, the other residents
chimed in, each one claiming they were tougher than shoe leather,
could whip ten Marines with one hand, and knew more about street
brawling than any MMA fighter around.

The list of bragging rights grew, and a
couple of the prisoners started pushing and shoving each other, as
if to prove who the baddest dude was. Their wrath soon extended
over to Harry. Biker Dude seemed to take an especial dislike to
Harry, kneed him in the gut, and he fell to the floor, gasping for
breath.

Right...and where was the law when you needed
it? It was waiting outside with a sardonic smile on its face. A
policeman, large, with a face as round as a melon and as red as a
tomato, watched the abuse happening without saying a word. Only
after Harry received a few more kicks to his ribs did the cop smack
his nightstick against the bars. The clanging sound startled
everyone into silence for a second.

“All right, back off,” he told Biker Dude.
“Cut the chatter! And you, kid, get on your feet! This is a jail
cell, not a friggin’ social club!”

“I never said I was a killer,” Harry replied,
grunting out his answer and holding his stomach.

Biker Dude aimed another knee at his gut, but
this time Harry blocked it and shoved the man away. “Back off,
jerk,” he said.

The other man started in, but a clang on the
bar from the guard’s nightstick stopped further fisticuffs from
happening. “I said knock it off!” he warned. “You hear me,
Morrison?”

So the biker guy had a name. He offered a
false grin at the officer. “I hear you...sir,” he muttered and gave
Harry the evil eye, whispering, “Your butt is
mine,
pal.”

Wonderful
,
Harry thought. He’d just
made his first enemy and he hadn’t been there more than ten
minutes.

The guard lingered just long enough to make a
quick check that life would continue on, but after he moved away
from the cell, the cell occupants moved away from each other.

Harry spoke up again, though it was doubtful
anyone would listen. “I’m trying to tell you guys. I didn’t kill
anyone. The police just think I did it.”

More laughter followed. These guys were dense
with a capital D, but try telling them that. Once the laughter died
away, the massive black man rumbled over and pushed Biker Dude
Morrison out of the way to ask the obvious question. “So if you
didn’t do it, then who did?”

“Monsters did.”

If the truth was supposed to set a person
free, then Harry should have been out of jail ten minutes ago.
Unfortunately, adages could not be used as a Get-Out-Of-Jail card.
As it was, his answer provoked another round of merriment.

Biker Dude Morrison got his anger back and
shoved Harry up against the bars. “So where are the monsters
at?”

At least he didn’t use his knee, Harry
thought as another knife of fear went up and down his spine.
Pushing back wasn’t going to help him, not now. He realized that he
could die, right here, in this cell, and no one would care. These
guys had to be hard cases all the way. They wouldn’t think twice
about wasting him, and he was all alone now, all alone...

“Hey, I’m talking to you, punk!”

A slap across the face jarred Harry back to
reality. The black man had decided to get his licks in. He had a
hand like a ham and a slap as hard as a punch. How hard he could
really hit was anyone’s guess. “Huh, you tell me,” the guy demanded
and grabbed Harry’s shirt collar, “you tell me where the monsters
are...?”

A scream, high, shrill, and full of terror,
reverberated from somewhere up top, down to the lower level.
Silence hit for a millisecond, and the man’s voice trailed off when
another heavier, more earth-shaking sound like a heavy thud split
the air. “What in the hell was that?” he whispered and let go of
Harry’s shirt.

Now more screams, similar to the first and
every bit as terrifying, rent the air, followed by more heavy thuds
of bodies hitting the floor and furniture being broken, sounds of
shots being fired, hisses and yowls.

Even worse, he heard the sounds of something
being ripped. If he didn’t know any better, they sounded like flesh
being peeled off bones, and the cries of agony that verged on the
hellish made him sure that flesh was indeed being torn off bones.
Suddenly, every tough guy in the cell stood as one, training their
ears on the source. Biker Dude asked nervously, “What’s going on,
man?”

Harry leaned against the bars, resigned to
what was going to happen, and answered calmly, “You asked me where
the monsters were. They’re here.”

Immediately, every prisoner suddenly turned
chicken and rushed the bars, pleading with the guard to let them
out. “Man, I don’t wanna die down here,” the black man begged,
thrusting his hand through the bars in a vain attempt to draw
attention to his plight. “I’ll go to Rikers, I’ll do time, but I
don’t wanna be here!”

The other cellmates also pleaded, and Harry,
weary from the tension and knowing that there was no escape, said,
“You’re here, the same as me, and who’s the punk now?”

Everyone swiveled their heads to stare at
him, and then turned back to the policeman, their voices ratcheting
up in intensity. “Let us out, let us out!”

“The hell with this!” the guard exclaimed,
and drawing his pistol he cautiously walked over to the door. The
sounds of destruction and pain intensified, got closer,
louder...and he started to shake in fear. False bravado over, he
asked, “Who in the hell is out there?”

Not who, Harry thought. This was more like a
what.
“Bullets aren’t going to stop that thing,” he told the
guard, shaking his head. “You’ll need a bazooka.”

“I’ll need a...?”

The guard never finished his question as the
door blew inwards so rapidly and with such force that it literally
smashed him across the room. He hit the opposite wall with a splat.
Like a fly hit with a giant swatter, the guard met death without
ever seeing the source of his demise.

After the door fell to the ground with his
remains on it, two of the prisoners vomited. The others backed up
only to find their way blocked by the bars of the cell on the
opposite side, while the Biker Dude stared and mewled out “Oh, holy
god.”

His voice came out hushed, almost reverent.
Harry wondered why anyone would utter the name of a deity who
clearly wasn’t listening, much less watching the action. Biker Dude
quivered in abject fear, pointed to the entrance, and suddenly the
front of his jeans got wet. “The monsters—”

“Are here,” a woman’s voice finished for him,
and she stepped into the room, followed by Piotr. The rhino-boar
man was bleeding from at least twenty wounds in his torso and legs
that made him limp. Wounds or not, he still seemed able to take
care of business, which meant killing anything that moved.

Lyudmila also had a number of slashes and
holes in her fur, trickles of blood coming from them, but she
didn’t seem overly concerned. In fact, she started to groom herself
using her tongue and her left hand, like any cat would. “That,” she
pointed up, “was a most exciting time for us. It has been a long
time since we’ve had so much fun.”

Her concept of fun happened to differ from
ninety-nine point nine percent of the rest of the human race, Harry
thought, but explaining that to her would have been a waste of
time. As he looked on, her wounds soon closed up like time-lapse
photography. Examining the vermin in the cell, she turned to her
comrade with a smile. “Piotr, take care of these...
men,
” she
said, as if asking someone to take out the garbage, “But leave
Goldman alive.”

Harry stood back and tried not to show fear.
In stark contrast, his cellmates had no problem in showing fear at
all and screamed as Piotr tore the bars apart with a single massive
swipe of his paw. Mass panic broke out as the men frantically tried
to climb the bars or hide behind another prisoner in a futile
attempt to avoid execution.

It didn’t work, as the rhino-boar proceeded
to crush, smash, and annihilate everyone in the cell. Once done,
fangs dripping with blood, he glanced at his companion, his eyes
dull. She was obviously the brains in the outfit, as Piotr, outside
of his ability to rip anything apart without effort, didn’t seem to
have enough brainpower to walk and chew gum at the same time. “My
body still hurt. What we do with him?”

Lyudmila entered the cell of death, daintily
stepping between the pools of blood. She sniffed the air and
observed Piotr’s handiwork with an air of satisfaction.

Harry stood tall, and decided to meet his end
with honor.

“That is an excellent question, my darling,”
she said, once more throwing a look of admiration at the rhino
creature.

“You could let me go,” Harry suggested. Hey,
it often worked in the movies, but this was no movie, and it seemed
as though he was the unwilling star of this drama.

She studied him carefully. “Let you go? I
think not. After all the trouble we have gone to in order to find
you, letting you go is not on our itinerary.”

Lyudmila then turned to the rhino-man who was
in the process of trying to paw away the blood and gore dripping
from his horn. It didn’t work, so he asked, “Could you do this for
me?”

She offered him an indulgent smile. “Of
course, my darling, I shall. Please wait.”

Stooping over to rip a piece of un-bloodied
cloth from the vest of the now extremely dead Biker Dude, she
lovingly wiped the mess from the horn. As Harry watched, the gorge
rose in his throat. He tried hard to dispel the image of this
killing machine from his mind—and couldn’t. “There, we are all
done,” Lyudmila said, tossing away the bloody rag. She turned to
Harry. “Now, where were we?”