Rise of the Transgenics (15 page)

“We were discussing the possibility of
letting me go,” he answered, and then, in an absurd moment,
queried, “Is he your boyfriend? Does his IQ go beyond two
digits?”

It wasn’t the smartest of questions to ask,
but since he figured that they would soon turn him into mincemeat,
he decided to get in one last joke before the end. His comment
caused Lyudmila to smile, but Piotr started at him with pure hatred
leaking from his eyes. “You, little man, you are nothing to
Piotr.”

He took a step forward, but for the first
time he staggered and showed that he could be hurt. His paw went to
the back of his head and rubbed a spot on it. When he took it away,
it was smeared with blood. “Now my head is in pain,” he said to his
female leader. “So what we do with little man?”

Lyudmila chuckled, and coming from her, it
was indeed a chilling sound. “Yes, my darling, whatever shall we do
in this situation?” she purred...and then lashed out.

Harry never saw the blow coming. What he
felt, though, was her paw, hard as a rock, smashing into his jaw.
In the books, the heroes always saw stars and flashing lights, but
in his case, all he experienced was a tremendous shock of pain, and
then the ground came up to hit him in the face.

Unconsciousness hurt. That thought circulated through
Harry’s subconscious as he lay in the zone between wakefulness and
being totally out of it. In the movies, the hero always fell in
battle, hand to hand, was knocked out cleanly, got up, and did it
over again until he managed to claim victory.

Oddly enough, in all the time he’d been at
school, Harry had been slapped, punched, kicked, thrown against
walls, and tripped. It was only after he’d met Anastasia and after
they’d gone on the run that someone finally laid him out.

A person never knew what it was like to be
knocked unconscious until it actually happened to them. Perhaps for
some of the braver members of society—or some of the more foolish
ones—they thought it was some kind of hard-edged thing, a rite of
passage, something to be fought for and remembered and prized.

Reality painted a different picture. It
wasn’t a special dream world. Instead, it was filled with
sensations of being slung over a person’s shoulder and marched down
a road. The road was rough and uneven and he felt every hole and
depression, and it hurt. Still, it wasn’t as painful as being
tossed onto a hard surface...

“You’ll get some more.”

The voice...belonged to someone he knew in
university. Being homeschooled was one thing, doing research at the
University of Portland campus, another. It was one thing for Harry
to study at home. At home, he felt safe and secure. Spoiled...no,
but cosseted...yes, and he knew it.

Growing up, he’d always been the runt of any
school pack. His earliest memories consisted of going to the doctor
for every little malady his mother thought he had. Colds, fevers,
and the flu—they constituted emergencies, at least in his mother’s
mind. He remembered her loading him into the car from around the
age of four until he was ten, rushing him to the hospital even
though he probably would have gotten better on his own.

As for his school days—he really didn’t like
to think about them. “You’re not going to play?” one of the kids
asked at recess, exasperation showing clearly in his voice. Fifth
grade, recess at ten-thirty, and all the other kids had torn out
the door, yelling that they wanted to be first on the baseball
field or kick around a soccer ball. Harry would have preferred to
carve out his own eyes with a rusty spoon rather than look totally
inept on the playing ground.

“Nah, I want to read,” he answered, clutching
a book on enzymology, something that even a university student
would have found difficult if not impossible to decipher.

“Fine, see ya.”

That was about the extent of his interaction
with the other kids at school. Harry eventually garnered the
reputation as the bookworm, the nerd...the geek. The other kids
treated him like garbage and beat on him because they could.
Getting his butt kicked repeatedly didn’t do a lot for his
confidence. In fact, it made him more gun shy than before.

As for school, not only did he hate the idea
of going just so someone else could use him as a punching bag, he
also hated it as it offered no challenge, no fun, and no happiness
whatsoever, and he couldn’t wait to get home.

Once he did get home, though, his room, with
its simple gray décor, bookshelves that housed his textbooks, notes
and computer discs, became a haven from the world, his own little
ivory tower. Sitting on his bed as a king would sit upon his
throne, he imagined himself to be the master of his domain, the
ruler of his own world, an emperor—a conqueror.

Older now and out in the real world, though,
he found that he wasn’t even a footman. Once he got through the
junior high and high school homeschooled days, once he’d gotten a
special acceptance to Portland University in order to do research,
he found out that he was the lowest of the low. He was the skinny
sixteen year-old child prodigy who’d never won a fight in his life,
and who shied away from sports. He lived only for his books and
what he could do to a DNA strand.

While the professors paid him due
attention—and their attention approached levels akin to awe—the
majority of the university students paid him no attention at all.
Only the jocks showed any emotion at all—disdain. They didn’t take
kindly to a genius with the brain of three men and the body of an
oversized elf.

Cutting through the hallway one day, two of
the jocks blocked his way. They were big, either wrestlers or
bodybuilders, they wore mean expressions on their oversized heads,
and they looked pissed.

As to the reason why, when he asked,
“Something wrong, here?” his answer came in the form of one of the
jocks picking him up by the collar of his shirt and giving
something like a modified power slam.

“That’s for making us look bad in class,” the
power slam expert said. “Come back tomorrow and you’ll get some
more.”

Which class was this, Harry wondered, but the
pain proved to be too great and he passed out. Just before falling
into the well of black, he wondered why people had to be such
jerks. Then the world went dark and he thought that unconsciousness
shouldn’t hurt so much, but it did...

Unconsciousness soon gave way to
semi-consciousness. That brought a lot of new sensations, mainly a
dull ache in his head and a stronger one in his jaw. His mind did a
quick trot back to the present, laying down the details, one, two,
and three. First, he’d been manhandled by Officer Mean, who was
probably dead, and then Lyudmila decided to use his face as target
practice. Whatever number three was, he didn’t want to find
out.

Swimming painfully into wakefulness also
brought smells. Smells of rotting fruit and vegetables, the squeaks
of a rat foraging for food, and the cold, smog-filled winter air
came through, and he figured that this had to be an alleyway
somewhere. He’d been in alleyways before and didn’t care for them
one bit.

Grunting, he opened one eye and glanced
around. He wasn’t in an alleyway as he’d first thought, but a
building. In the dim light, he made out a number of holes punched
through wooden slats that lined the concrete walls. They hadn’t
been very carefully placed, though, as the light and cold from
outside made their way in.

Feeling around with his hand, he encountered
more concrete and filth, and wiped his hand on his trousers. As his
vision cleared, he made out empty crates, rotten food, dried feces
and other unmentionables.

“You are up?”

Swiveling his head around to catch the voice,
he found his captors staring intently at him. Piotr’s eyes held
hate—as usual—while Lyudmila seemed a little friendlier, if only by
a few degrees.

A wintry smile formed on her face, and she
asked, “You are awake now? That is good,” and leaned over to haul
him into a sitting position, propping him up against the wall.

“Where...where are we?” he asked, struggling
to think clearly.

“In an abandoned factory building,” she said
offhandedly. “We are in the Bowery. This place is condemned, so no
one will follow us here.”

She spoke with a faint Russian accent,
stressing the first parts of her words with slightly more emphasis
than a North American would, and rolling the rs. Had anyone else
listened to her, they would have thought her accent charming. In
person, though, she fell into the chilling category.

“Lyudmila,” Piotr said, his voice thick with
pain. He was on all fours, but then stood up, weaving. “My head
still hurt. I must sleep now.”

She tossed a few words in Russian his way,
and he nodded and wearily wended his way to the far corner of the
room, where he collapsed. Soon, the sounds of snoring filled the
air.

“So what’s your story?” Harry wanted to know.
“If you’re going to kill me, then do it and get it over with.”
False bravado given, he waited, hoping that the cat-girl wouldn’t
kill him.

Another wintry smile emerged, and her sharp
teeth gleamed in the semi-darkened room. “I am not here to kill
you. I am here for...a little talk. Talking is good, yes?”

“Maybe it is.”

Lyudmila gracefully dropped into a
cross-legged seated position and sat two feet directly in front of
him. “Then I will talk and you will listen.”

She began to tell him her story, the tale of
a young girl trained to be a soldier in the armed forces of Mother
Russia. A natural athlete from elementary school onward, she showed
a particular aptitude for running as well as gymnastics. She also
happened to be very good at speaking English. “Is my English
perfect?” she asked, and this time her manner seemed almost
girlish.

“It’s pretty decent,” Harry answered, not
wishing to antagonize the homicidal maniac who could rip him apart
with a single blow.

“Thank you,” she said and inclined her head
with an exaggerated air of modesty. “However, English is only part
of who and what I am.”

Her first and only goal was to enlist and
become a first-rate soldier. “My family was poor, I had no mother,
and my father was often ill. So, I felt that it was my duty to
enlist, earn money, and become a good servant of my country and
help her to defend herself. I imagine that your young men and women
feel the same way.”

Harry didn’t really know, but nodded
dutifully, anyway. “Go on.”

Lyudmila’s story sounded like what he’d read
about in the papers and on the Internet, accounts written by
defectors. Entering the army at the age of seventeen, she was
assigned a position as a Corporal due to her physical
accomplishments. However, she soon grew tired of performing her
duties, those being translation and radio monitoring. “It was
boring, but two things happened. One of them was that I met Piotr.
He was in the same unit as me. He was a supply officer, but he also
was not suited for his duties.”

She cast a brief, fond glance in the
direction of the rhino thing. “The second thing concerns who I am
and what I have become. We had heard rumors of secret experiments
being done to improve human life, extend it or change it, and I
asked my superior officer to recommend me for clinical trials.”

A dainty shrug accompanied her last
statement. “I did not know what it involved at first, and Piotr
didn’t, either. He lived only to do his job, but he could not do it
well enough.”

“Too stupid, I take it,” Harry commented and
immediately thought
don’t piss off the woman with the claws. You
need your face.

If his female captor was angry, she didn’t
show it, merely shook her head as if the world was too ignorant to
understand. “Piotr is not a bad person. Really, he is not. It is
true that he is not very intelligent, but he is strong, a marvelous
fighter and killer, and totally loyal to me. That is all that I
desire, and it is also what our creator desires. When I was
accepted into the program, he stressed loyalty and honor. It is a
fine code, yes?”

That last bit sparked Harry’s interest and he
sat up straighter, ignoring the pain his body. “You volunteered for
this? Who’s your, uh, who created you?”

Lyudmila favored him with an indulgent smirk
and leaned closer. Her smell, unwashed fur combined with sweat,
blood, and other unmentionables, made his stomach churn. Didn’t
villains ever think of taking showers?

Obviously, they didn’t, but she didn’t seem
to acknowledge her body odor. The tip of her tail came around to
caress his shoulder. A gleam shone in her eyes and...was she
hitting on him? If so, it left a bad taste in his mouth.

Had Anastasia done that, he would have felt
turned on. Coming from this woman, the very touch of her flesh on
his skin made him want to hurl. Perhaps Lyudmila sensed his
reticence, for she withdrew her tail and curled it around her
body.

“If you are fishing for clues, then I will
tell you, never fear,” she said in a light and absurdly playful
tone. “As I was saying, yes, I volunteered. At first, I didn’t know
what would happen, and the pain was terrible. It took around two
months for the first changes to manifest themselves, and after
that, everything happened very quickly.”

Harry was grossed out by the idea of
experimenting on a human the way her creator had done, but then
remembered that he’d done the same with Anastasia and wondered if
he was any better. “You were conscious all that time?”

“But of course,” she shrugged. “It was
necessary to get my reactions.”

Features composed, she spoke calmly of the
searing pain that accompanied the treatments. “It was like my nerve
endings were constantly on fire. My bones felt as though they would
break, my insides felt as if they were liquefying, and my muscles
felt constantly swollen.