Rise of the Transgenics (19 page)

Wordlessly, he nodded. He had no computer, no
money save about three dollars in change, and no way to contact
Jason or Farrell. He tried to think of a plan, but nothing came to
mind.

Anastasia took a seat beside him, gracefully
folding her legs up under her and wrinkling her nose, said “This
place smells. I’d love to take a shower.”

He heard the longing in her voice and nodded.
The pain in his shoulder had gone down somewhat, but a great
lassitude filled him. Trying to tell her how he felt, his voice
came out feebly.

She placed a comforting hand on his good
shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Listen, boyfriend,” she
began. “I’m tired, and right now we both need to grab some rest. I
can’t think straight. We’ll make a plan when I come to.”

“Good idea. Wait a second,” Harry said, and
rearranged his body so that he lay flush against the wall. “You can
stick your head on my stomach as a pillow,” he offered.

She flashed a tiny smile. “That’s the best
deal I’ve heard since I came back. I miss you holding me.”

Snuggling together, he attempted to shut out
the smells, couldn’t, but found himself incredibly tired after the
abandoned building ordeal. Soon, he slipped into
unconsciousness.

Awakening minutes or hours later, he felt
somewhat better. The tide hadn’t risen very much, so maybe they’d
be safe for now. Looking down, he saw that Anastasia was still
asleep, but her lips were moving. Bending closer to listen in, the
words sounded...Russian. Dreaming...she had to be dreaming, and
perhaps her mental blocks were breaking down.

No mental block is perfect
,
nor is it complete.
Nurmelev’s words rang in his memory. The
Russian madman-scientist had apprised him of that little fact in
their one and only meeting, and he’d been right. The blocks were
starting to crumble, but Harry didn’t know which word or which
combination of words had done it.

Maybe it hadn’t even been something he’d said
or something anyone else had said. Perhaps it had just been time
doing the work and causing her true memory to surface. As she
stirred ever so slightly, he wondered if she did remember her past
life. If she did, would she still want to be with him? Would she
want to return to Russia and locate her father—if he still lived,
would...

He resolved not to think about it too much.
Whatever happened from now on, it would happen whether he wanted it
to or not. Up ahead lay uncharted territory. A road lay ahead,
unmarked, and there were any number of routes open to driving
on.

“Uh, what is...?”

Anastasia started out of her sleep, blinked
her eyes in confusion, and turned to face him. “I...just had a
dream.”

“I figured.”

She rubbed her face with the back of her hand
and briefly gave her body a quick groom job, picking out clumps of
dirt and running her fingers through her fur. Her nose wrinkled as
she did so, and a look of disgust formed on her face. Licking her
lips, she haltingly explained things. “I saw more images, images of
Siberia. I remember the lettering, the place names.”

Concerned, Harry said, “Um, if this is too,
uh, y’know, painful for you, you don’t have to—”

“No,” she interrupted, her voice sharp. “I
have to tell you. I remember now. My name is...” her face
twisted... “My name is Anastasia Yakusheva. My mother’s name was
Iliana...my father’s name was...”

Her voice trailed off then and she broke down
in tears, her sobs echoing off the walls. She shook off Harry’s
attempt to hold her and wrapped her arms around her body, rocking
back and forth. “I saw those men. I was in high school. My
father...he was an alcoholic. My mother was an alcoholic...and also
a prostitute.”

She choked on her words. When she continued,
it was with a tone of supreme loathing in her voice. “There were
always men in our house, and they came every day, sometimes in the
late afternoon, but usually at night. Our place was in an old part
of the city. It was old and broken, my father was always
drinking...and I was a student. I didn’t know what the men were
doing there...then I heard sounds in my mother and father’s
bedroom. They were moans...groans. My father was downstairs...and
he told me to be quiet while mother...worked.”

Features twisted as if in psychic pain, her
memories, now free, tumbled out in full force. “School was boring,
but it was better than being at home...I thought. One night I came
home late after studying. My mother was asleep on the couch, a
bottle in her hands. Another man—he was big, hairy, and ugly—was
waiting. He pointed at me, and my father told me to go with him. I
was only fifteen...”

“Holy crap,” Harry whispered, truly shocked
by the fact that someone would pimp out their child. What kind of
people were there in the world? Up until meeting Anastasia, he’d
always been sort of sheltered, and while he knew how bad the world
could be, he couldn’t imagine this.

Anastasia continued to talk in a monotone.
She ran away from home intending to find someone to stay with, but
her friends had no room for a runaway, and the authorities weren’t
interested in helping someone who wouldn’t pay them off.

With little education, no money, and only her
looks, she had no choice, she felt, but to talk to men who said
they found her attractive. One day, when she was sixteen, a man in
his forties bought her coffee. He seemed nice enough, dressed well,
showered her with money and presents, and offered her a place to
stay. Knowing more or less what she was in for, she accepted his
offer, and after that, one thing led to another...

“And then I got sick,” she said, bringing in
the how and why she’d become what she’d become. The weight suddenly
fell off her body and she felt weak all the time. Desperate, alone,
and almost broke, she ended up at a hospital in Kiev, used up and
dying.

“I was nineteen. I had AIDS,” she whispered.
“I never knew who I got it from. It doesn’t matter now. The
hospital ward I was in had thirty people, all with the same
sickness. They were waiting to die...and then Nurmelev came in,
promising me a better life. He had...had a paper for me to sign. I
had nothing to lose.”

A shudder ran through her body. “I woke up
looking like this maybe three months later. I came to New York...I
don’t remember how...and I...I met you.”

Completely spent from her crying binge,
Anastasia hung her head. “I never wanted to do what I did. I never
liked being with someone different every night.”

With a teary-eyed face, she looked at Harry.
“Lyudmila was right. I’m nothing but what she said I was. I’m a
waste of life and you should be with someone else.”

He’d sat there all this time, mute, listening
to her story of loss and sickness and near death. He wasn’t one to
judge and he could not and would not judge her at all. In his
heart, he felt that she’d been the right person for him all along.
The past was the past. “C’mere,” he said, and she nestled her head
into his narrow chest. “Don’t say anything else. It doesn’t matter.
We’re together now.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Tenderly, she stroked his face, and they
kissed each other fondly. While this wasn’t the most romantic
place, love was where one found it and the form of it didn’t
matter. He’d read that in a novel somewhere and it made a lot of
sense. Her whiskers tickled, and he drew back. “Sorry, you’re
tickling me.”

Anastasia chuckled. “I’m not about to shave
for...”

Abruptly, her voice died away. “Did you hear
that?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen!”

He did, and the sounds came again, louder
this time. “Sounds like it’s coming from over there,” Anastasia
whispered again and pointed.

Where she’d pointed to was down the tunnel,
and curious now, they got up and carefully crept over to a set of
steps. The bottom two steps were wet and stained from repeated
exposure to the sewer’s elements, but the stairs above them were
dry as bone. They led about five feet up to an old iron door
partially torn off its hinges. Harry thought that strange, as the
nearest manhole lay well down the walkway. “What is this?” she
asked.

“It looks like it leads to an inner chamber,”
Harry answered, thinking hard and scratching his head. “This might
have been part of an abandoned subway tunnel. The city built lots
of them around a century ago and many of them were abandoned. I
don’t know if anyone’s been down here for a long time.”

“Someone must be here,” she pointed out. “The
door is broken, so maybe some people are living here.” Her eyes
drifted to the surface, as if looking inward, searching for some
information hidden in her mind. “I...remember now. In Moscow, some
of the homeless people lived in the subways, hiding in chambers
from the police. They had nowhere else to go.”

“Right now, we don’t, either.”

Cautiously, he pushed his hand against the
door and it gave slightly. Anastasia then decided to help out, and
under the force of her hand, the door creaked inward. Squeezing
through the narrow entrance, they found themselves standing on a
ledge. Stairs, rickety iron things with no handrails, led to a
subterranean chamber roughly the size of a two-car garage. A musty
smell greeted them, the smell of uncirculated air.

There were other smells as well. Body odor
mixed with smoke, smelly clothes, dried feces, urine, and other
stinks combined to make the sewage outside smell almost fresh.
“There are people here,” Anastasia whispered.

“Let’s take a look,” he suggested.

Carefully venturing down the steps one at a
time, they alit in a filthy area that could only be described as a
pit. Iron pipes, some of which were broken, lined the walls and
hung overhead. Cables, many of them eaten away by time and rust and
rats, lay strewn along the sides of the chamber. Rats, roaches, and
other lower life forms scurried here and there, and he noticed that
the human residents paid them no attention.

It was somewhat warmer in here and dry, and
venturing in further, curious and eager to be away from the cold
and the stink they came upon a group of people, perhaps ten in all,
sitting around a fire.

“Stay back,” Anastasia said as a warning and
put up her hand. The group immediately turned their heads as one,
many of them with wary and even hostile looks on their faces.

She didn’t have to warn him twice. These
people...they probably didn’t take to surface dwellers. Creeping in
closer, Harry saw that they were dressed in incredibly filthy rags,
covered in bedsores, and they were roasting something over the
fire. He wasn’t quite sure what it could be...and hoped that it
wasn’t a person.

“Hey! What are you doin’ here?”

The voice belonged to a very large man with
dirt covering his face. Harry couldn’t tell if the man was black or
white. He just heard the anger echo over the area and said to
Anastasia, “I think this is where we get off.”

Good thing, too, as the group gave a cry of
rage, picked up some sharp sticks and metal pipes, and charged
their position. They didn’t sound quite like animals, but on the
other hand, they didn’t sound quite human, either.

“Run!” Anastasia yelled.

“I hear you!” he gasped out.

Grabbing her hand, he took off as fast as
possible and they hastily beat a retreat up the stairs with the
mob—the second mob—hot on their heels.

Fate or perhaps bad luck decided to play its
hand, as Harry tripped and fell on the stairs, and that cost them
both precious seconds. “Get up,” Anastasia urged.

She pulled him to his feet, and they got as
far as the door when he felt something heavy and hard land on his
head. For the second time in less than a day, he knew he was going
down for the count and out of the corner of his eye, he saw
Anastasia falling as well.

As he came to, slowly, and with a great deal of pain
scorching the back of his skull, Harry’s first thought was that
getting captured twice in the space of a few hours had to be some
sort of record. He didn’t see it as something to be overly proud
of.

As for his second thought, he wondered if
he’d live to see the next sunrise. Thinking it over, he had severe
doubts.

He found himself in a standing position with
his hands lashed to a pipe by thick ropes. The pipe was old, rusty,
and a foul smell came from it, making him long for a bucket of cold
water and a bar of soap.

Pain lanced through his head every time he
blinked, and when he shook it, spatters of blood hit the floor.
Hearing a moan to his left, he twisted his neck around and saw
Anastasia trussed up in the same manner. “Hey, are you awake?” he
asked.

“I am now,” she answered, her voice thick
with anger. “What hit us?”

“This,” someone said in a deep voice and the
owner of the voice stepped out of the gloom holding onto a pipe.
Three feet long, it was covered in blood—theirs.

The speaker had to stand at least six-five
and seemed almost as wide. Wearing only a large trench coat
covering a tattered pair of too-small jeans and ripped up boots,
the man sported a torn cowboy hat on his head. “Don’t move,” he
said, underscoring the obvious.

Maybe in his forties, he had no eyebrows, and
when he took off his hat to wipe his head, Harry noticed he was
bald and that the scalp and face were very pale, as were his hands,
the skin almost translucent. Living down here as he and the others
did had leached out any pigmentation from his body.

“What’s going on here?” Harry asked.

A laugh without any humor behind it greeted
his question. “What’s going on,” the man said, sticking his face
closer and shoving the pipe under Harry’s chin, “is that you and
this cat-chick have invaded our personal space. I’ve seen some
pretty strange things down here, but never nothing like that. What
in the hell is she?”