Rise of the Transgenics (2 page)

“Fine, I don’t need you!” Nick yelled to the
large man’s back. “I don’t need you or anyone else!”

Or did he? After George left, Nick was
alone. At first, false bravado told him that he was better off this
way. However, after looking at the garbage piled up along with
seeing the rats and mice scavenge for food, he wondered if he’d
been too hasty in his decision. There had to be a better place than
this dump.

Now, early morn had come. It was chilly,
almost icy, but the wind was still. He rubbed his hands together in
order to get the circulation going, and while he did so, he made
plans for tomorrow.

Plans—he really didn’t have any. His life,
such as it was, consisted of living day to day. As for friends, he
didn’t have many, but he did have a few allies he could count on to
help him out when things got rough.

Barney, over at the car wash, let him shower
up from time to time. Marcel, the grocery store owner down the
block, sometimes tossed him a few unneeded pieces of fruit and a
head of lettuce. An old lady who walked by daily and threw in a
quarter—all these people helped him out and gave him the
essentials. He was grateful for that. “Yeah, you gotta be grateful
for the little things,” he murmured to no one in particular and
drew his coat more tightly around him.

In a burst of inspiration, he moved his box
home over to a nearby sewer grate. The smell was awful, but then
again, sewage wasn’t perfume. It didn’t matter if he smelled like a
rose or road apples. Warm air was warm air, and it would keep him
from catching pneumonia. He’d clean up tomorrow.

Closing his eyes, Nick shifted his body
around in order to find a more comfortable position. He’d just
about nodded off when the odor of an unwashed body came through to
him. He smelled tobacco, cheap wine, and body odor. It was another
bum, he thought, and felt a hand slide itself into his coat pocket.
Homeless people never had much if any cash, and they used their
pockets as safes, but nothing was safe on the street.

Immediately, Nick came awake and to a state
of full alertness. With a yell, he lashed out at his attacker. Luck
was on his side as his fist connected with the other man’s jaw and
sent him stumbling backwards.

Getting to his feet, Nick balled up his fists
and moved into a fighting stance. His attacker, a man in his
twenties, did the same. “I just want some money,” he stated in a
tough-guy voice, and rolled his shoulders in the manner of a boxer
ready to go for the knockout. “Then I’ll be gone.”

Nick’s stash ran to a grand total of
thirty-three dollars, and while it was no major amount, to him it
was a fortune. Tough times meant that people had to become tough,
and tough people lasted. Losers didn’t. “Come and get it,” he
urged.

A second later, the other man obliged, and
they met each other in the center of the alley, fists and feet
flying. Right away, Nick knew that the other man was stronger, but
this was
his
alleyway,
his
turf, and nothing and no
one was going to take it away.

Adrenalin coursed through his body, he
punched hard, harder, hardest in a desperate attempt to keep what
was his. After a few minutes of bloody combat, the other man ran
off.

Nick chased after him, but stopped at the
entrance, breathing heavily and scouring the street for cops. Even
at this hour of the morning, patrol cars passed by. With his luck,
some young and eager rookie or some mean-ass veteran would probably
figure him for disturbing the peace and run him in just for the fun
of it. Jail was one place he did not want to go. He’d been there
once in his younger days and did not like it one bit.

Eyes darting right and left, he checked his
surroundings, but all seemed to be peaceful after that brief moment
of violence, and he spotted no one. “Yeah, you run,” he said and
spit on the ground in defiance. “You run, you punk.”

The sound of a window opening made him look
up. A woman, middle-aged with a frumpy hairdo and sagging flesh,
yelled, “What’s going on down there? I’m trying to sleep!”

Quickly, Nick flattened himself against the
wall and did his best to keep out of sight. Great, someone would
have to witness what had just happened. A second later, he heard
the window slam shut. Fortune had decided to favor the bold this
morning.

Weary now, he made his way back to his box
home, sagged down to the ground, and with bloodied hands explored
his face for wounds. Reaching inside a box of his belongings and
rummaging around, he pulled out a broken mirror. “Seven years of
bad luck,” he chortled, and examined his face. The mirror showed a
cut lip, a swollen right eye, and some bruises. He’d had worse.
He’d live.

After putting the mirror away, once more he
squirmed around to find a more comfortable position, and sleep soon
came up to catch him.

Minutes or hours later—he couldn’t be sure—a
noise woke him. Instantly he was on the alert, out of the box, and
up on his feet, ready for action.

What was...? From the sounds this person
made, it sounded like someone walking-but-not-walking, not on two
legs at any rate. Not walking...
padding
along.

Sniffing the air, a familiar smell entered
his nostrils...the smell of a cat, and he thought immediately of
the woman or cat-girl or whatever she was that had attacked him
months before. A shiver of fear ran through him, making his bowels
quake, but if there was ever a time to man up, this was it. Once
the enemy confronted you, you had to win or die trying. No
in-betweens here, it was time to throw down and he intended to
win.

Taking no chances, he pulled out his
switchblade. It sprang open, and he held it in front of him, his
arms up and ready. Once again, adrenalin surged through his body.
“Hey, are you out there, cat-girl?” he called out. “Are you? I got
a present for you. Come and get it!”

No one answered. He felt just the cold breath
of wind—and then there was the smell. It was getting stronger, and
as the milliseconds passed, his nerves started to get more jangled.
“C’mon, what are you waiting for?” he roared.

Still no answer. Finally, after swiveling his
head right and left, voice cracking with fear and anger—mainly
fear—he screamed, “Where are you?”

“Here,” a woman’s voice said from behind
him.

Nick had only time enough to utter two words.
“Oh, crap.”

A second later, a hand, furry, powerful, and
with sharp claws, sank into his shoulder and spun him around. The
pain was so intense that he dropped the knife. A scream clawed its
way out of his throat, and as he turned, he looked into the face of
the cat-girl he’d seen during the summer. “You,” he blurted
out.

The terror almost made him drop his load
right then and there. A second later, the dam broke, and a hot
stream of pee poured down his leg. He would have felt ashamed, but
right then, he was too scared to worry about personal hygiene.
“What are you?” he whimpered.

“Something little children dream of when
they’re bad,” she answered. “I’m a nightmare, and I’m all
yours.”

Frightened as Nick was, he recognized
something different about this girl. She was wearing a pair of
shorts and something like a sports bra. This was winter. No one
would wear that. Other than the attire, she had the same height and
build and the same strength as the first cat-girl.

The increase in his own terror coupled with
the agony in his shoulder clouded his assessment, and he struggled
to figure things out. Just as he was on the verge of getting an
answer, she sank her claws in deeper, lifted him off the ground
with ease, and tossed him across the alleyway. With a thudding
sound, he hit the wall hard and felt two or more of his ribs break.
As he fell to the cold concrete, his head banged off the hard
stone, his eyes spun, and he wished someone would come and
help.

Where was a cop when you needed one? Through
fuzzy eyes, he saw her fur, black and shiny, lie smooth and flat
upon her body. When she sauntered over, seemingly unconcerned that
he was injured, she bent over to lock gazes with him. He flinched
and wanted to look away, yet he couldn’t. Her eyes were black, the
color of night...the color of death.

She sounded...
Russian.
How could that
be? The other girl had sounded American all the way. A wave of
agony went through him, and the cat-girl added to that agony by
whipping her claws left and right, shredding his face. Blood poured
out and soaked his coat. The loss of blood also meant loss of
consciousness. Sensing that the end was near, he whispered, “Last
time I saw you...you were gray...you had spots.”

This time, the cat-girl showed her teeth.
They were razor sharp, and her smile seemed cruel and calculating.
“You’ve never seen me before,” she said, her voice harsh and
unyielding, the same as her gaze. “And you’re never going to see
anyone again.”

With a swift move, she leapt upon him, biting
savagely into his neck. Right now, he felt no pain and wished that
he’d been one-step quicker, his moves faster. However, it was not
to be. In his last moments of life, Nick wondered why he’d been
chosen as some kind of sacrificial lamb, why no one would help him
when he needed it most, and why life had to be so unfair...

Harry Goldman leaned back in his chair, cracked his
knuckles, and twisted his neck gently from side to side in order to
release the tension. He’d been working from seven in the morning
until now, only taking enough time off to use the bathroom and grab
something to eat, and then got back to it again.

A sudden cramp in his right trap muscle made
him wince. He reached up to massage the offending ache. His fingers
were long and slender, which were perfectly suited to typing things
up quickly on his computer or deftly mixing chemicals. One knot
relieved, another popped up. Once that muscle got the treatment, he
turned his attention to the matrix on the computer screen. Staring
at it first with puzzlement and then with anger, he wondered where
he’d gone wrong. “Something’s missing,” he muttered, pissed off to
the nth degree that the answer wasn’t there. “Gotta find out what
it is.”

With that, he began typing anew, refining his
formula, rearranging the various molecules, and all the while,
hoping, and yes, praying for the right result. DNA was the source
of all life, what living creatures looked like, their eye color,
hair color, body type, intelligence and more. It was a constantly
shifting jigsaw puzzle of endless possibilities. He’d been trying
to figure out how to crack the code and just couldn’t find the
answer, which frustrated him.

The time was eleven at night, the day,
January seventeenth, and the place, the FBI branch in downtown
Manhattan, New York City. Harry had been living there since the
summer. It was a world away from Portland, Oregon, where he’d been
raised. He’d been brought to this place under the aegis of the
federal authorities in order to do the secret hush-hush lab work
that no one in the real world knew about. And he’d done it with
only one goal in mind—to help someone he cared for become more
normal again.

Still, at times the mental pressure became a
little too much. So outside of catching the occasional nap, he’d
taken breaks every so often in order to do some pushups, sit-ups,
bodyweight squats, and shadow boxing. Perhaps it wasn’t the same as
using weights, but it kept his body in some semblance of decent
shape.

A full-length mirror stood a few feet away,
next to the wall. Looking at his reflection, he saw a teenager with
average looks and a mop of brown hair. Critically assessing his
physique, he noted its slender frame with just a mere hint of
musculature. In a moment of youthful angst and wish-wanting, he
thought that if he worked out hard enough, he’d achieve something
close to a semi-maybe Olympian ideal.

Rolling up his sleeve—the room was warm and
he wore a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of jeans and sneakers—he
flexed his arm, and a tiny bump of a bicep appeared. Reality
intruded, and it sucked and sucked hard. The answer lay in his
genes, and he came from short and slender stock. Sighing, he said
aloud, “Probably not.”

With this admission, he got back to work,
trying yet another formula for success when the computer told him
in no uncertain terms
Probability of
success
—
Zero.
Smacking the side of his head, he
asked the air “What’s wrong?” and of course, the ether didn’t
answer.

After exhaling a forceful breath, he wondered
if his handlers would terminate the program. He was close, very
close. However, the powers that lay in the offices at the top of
the building—the movers, the shakers and the fear-makers—had
indicated they were getting edgy. Additionally, he was growing
quickly impatient with his own lack of results. Results were what
mattered most, and even with the most powerful equipment around,
the finest computers, the best in DNA analyzers and splicers, he
just couldn’t get the right equation.

Or could he? As he wracked his mind, suddenly
another combination occurred to him. With a grunt, the most
positive grunt he’d given in a long time, he typed in the
calculations and let the computer do the work. He’d have the
results soon and then...then maybe he could test his theory.

Harry gazed around the room. It was a large
square, roughly thirty by thirty. The walls wore the classic
clinical white paint of a laboratory. The dearth of furniture made
it look even more austere. A musty yet sterile smell filled the
air, courtesy of a large air vent on the ceiling piping in the
atmosphere of downtown New York. As for those odors, they were
neither sterile nor worth thinking about.

His eyes fell upon the jail cell at the far
wall, and skipped on over to the three large metal cabinets in the
left corner. An unmade cot sat next to the cabinets, and a small
fridge beside the bed completed the picture of a researcher who
took his meals in the lab, stepped outside only rarely, and lived
for his work. This is my life and look what’s happened, he
thought.