Rise of the Transgenics (20 page)

Anastasia growled, shook her head, and tried
to wriggle free, but couldn’t make much progress although she
strained against her bonds. Heaving in deep breaths, she glared
murderously at the leader. “I’m a girl, you moron, just a furry
one.”

In an attempt to shed some light, Harry
answered in a polite tone, “She’s a transgenic, a cross between a
cat and a girl. Someone made her that way. And you have a nice
place here, so if we’re in the way, we’d be happy to leave.”
Abruptly he stopped speaking, aware of how stupid his statement
must have sounded.

The other under-surface dwellers heard the
exchange and let out a laugh in unison. “City boy thinks he’s gonna
leave?” one of them called out.

“He ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said another,
darker voice from below.

More of the members added their input,
basically, saying that there was no point in thinking about
leaving, for where would they go?

Wonderful, Harry thought, they’d already been
chased by one lynch mob, and this group was no better. “You guys
know that the authorities are looking for us.”

The bald leader received the news without
batting an eye and pushed the pipe up an inch higher. “Is that so?
What’d you guys do, rob a pet store?”

His joke caused another round of laughter to
erupt. When it died down, Harry said, feeling the strain in his
neck, “Two others, sort of like her,” he nodded at Anastasia,
“killed some FBI agents and the police think we did it.”

“Did you?”

Sarcasm seemed to be the bald man’s forte,
and Harry bit his tongue in order to keep from spouting off a
smartass answer. It was frustrating, though, but these guys had the
numbers and the weapons, so for now they called the shots. And
right now, his neck was killing him.

“No,” he answered, “we didn’t. But two others
did, and if you’re lucky they won’t show up here. And could you
please take that pipe off me?”

The bald man’s expression didn’t change, but
he did pull the pipe away from Harry’s jaw and rubbed his own jaw
with it, as if figuring out the pros and cons of answering. In the
end, he simply shook his head.

“Well, considerin’ we don’t get out much, I’m
not sure I care. I can see, though,” and he pointed at Anastasia,
“that someone in a zoo might want their pet kitty back.” Another
chuckle came from him, but as before, there was no humor in his
voice.

“Don’t call me that,” she growled.

Her threat didn’t faze the large man at all.
Instead, he stopped his temporary bout of laughter and clobbered
her across the temples with the pipe. More blood spurted out and
her head sagged down. “That’s how you take care of invaders,” he
said.

“You bastard,” Harry ground out. “What was
that for?”

“That’s for her being a freak,” the bald man
said. “She looks like she can take it. Can you?”

No, Harry knew for a fact that he couldn’t. A
shot like that would probably cave his head in. As he looked at his
girlfriend, the wound to her head had already started to heal.
Reluctantly, he shifted his attention to his chief captor, and a
sense of curiosity overtook him. “How did all of you get here?” If
he was going to meet the same fate, at least he’d know the whys of
it all.

The man turned to him, a mean look on his
face. A second later, though, it disappeared, as if he’d decide
there was no imminent threat. Instead, a more introspective look
took its place. When he spoke, it came out in a very matter-of-fact
way, without pity or anger. “How’d we get here? The city, Mr.
Visitor, it left us here. See,” he swept his hand around to
indicate the chamber, “When you’re downsized in a job, you got
nowhere else to go.”

A cough came from deep in his lungs and he
gasped out, “Health care,” and spat out a large wad of phlegm when
uttering those two words, “It’s only good if you got money to begin
with, even a little.”

After taking in a deep breath, he resumed his
story. “We didn’t. So when we didn’t, when the unemployment
benefits ran out, we wandered the streets, same as all the other
homeless.”

“But it’s tougher up there than it is down
here,” another man piped up and walked over to give his input. Of
indeterminate age, he wore stained and filthy sweatpants, an
equally filthy sweatshirt, and had only a few loose teeth flopping
around in swollen gums. “If you’re too old, undereducated, drunk,
drugged up, or whatever else, you got no chance of getting a job in
this economy.”

“So you end up walkin’ the streets,” a man’s
voice called out from below. He sounded quite a bit older than the
others. “And if you don’t freeze to death up top, someone’ll either
knife you or kill you for your clothes. You got a piece of bread
and they’ll take that, too. Down here, everyone leaves us
alone.”

Harry thought back to how the lynch mob up
top had acted. Not like people, no, more like primitives. Fear made
people think in only the simplest, most concrete black and white
terms. Kill the different. Terminate the unknown. And right now, he
took a look at all the denizens of the depths that had come up to
gawk at him and Anastasia—mainly at her.

“We all got stories to tell you, kid,” one of
them, a woman, said in a lazy Southern drawl as she mounted the
steps.

“You tell ‘em, Sally,” the almost toothless
man said.

As she drew closer, she pulled the hood that
had shielded her head to reveal her face. Perhaps in her thirties,
she had a long mane of filth-encrusted hair and features darkened
by soot and grime. The only thing that stood out was her eyes, a
luminous blue.

“Y’all want mine? I ran from some people down
south who wanted to kill me. I came to New York, oh, maybe two
years ago. Couldn’t find work, got kicked out of my apartment, so
when you got nothing, you drop lower and lower. I ended up down
here. It’s not much, but no one comes here and no one bothers
us.”

Right in front of him, he saw decay, smelled
the hopelessness of their lives, and wondered why no one would
bother helping out. Their words hit home—no one cared, and if no
one cared, then what was a person to do? He’d been lucky his whole
life, lucky in the sense that he’d had parents who’d loved him and
done for him. He’d also been born with a first-class mind, and even
though he’d never had many friends, at the very least he hadn’t
ended up alone and homeless. Had his situation been any different,
how would his life have been different?

There were so many variables to think about,
how one person could end up a millionaire and another, a pauper.
Still, the reality of his situation hit home. These people were not
in a philosophical mood to debate the what-ifs in life.

Sizing them up, Harry wondered if they’d gone
the cannibal route. “Um, how do you guys get food? I mean—”

“Y’mean, do we eat each other?” another man
chortled. He seemed to find the prospect more than a little
amusing, as did the rest of the group. They joined in the laughter,
and Harry couldn’t tell if they thought he’d been joking or not. He
did look around for bones or corpses, but couldn’t find any. On the
other hand, in a place like this who would look?

“No, ain’t nobody got time for that,” the
woman said. “We go up topside when the time is right and do that
dumpster-diving thing. We search, we scavenge. That’s what we do
best, and we’ve managed to find places that always got lots of eats
there if you know where to find them.”

“And speaking of finding,” the almost
toothless man said with a throaty laugh which dissolved into a
hacking cough. He pounded his skinny chest and hawked out a wad of
something black and evil. “Sorry about that,” he apologized. “Bad
air and bad lungs and...”

His voice tailed away as his train of thought
temporarily moved in a different direction, that of bad health, but
then his eyes focused and he nodded. “Oh yeah, about us, guess
where you are? This is one of the abandoned subway tunnels the city
built a long time ago. I can’t remember the name, been down here so
long.” He looked at the group members. “Anyone know?”

“No,” the collective answer came.

After giving another slight cough, he nodded.
“They don’t know, and I tell ya, I don’t care, either. These
chambers are all around us, some of them bigger and even deeper.
There are other people livin’ down here, you know? We’ve all heard
stories about them doin’ some real bad things to those people who
come down and snoop around.”

“Hasn’t anyone from the Water Works
Department ever come here?” Harry asked in a desperate attempt to
buy more time.

His question earned him another chuckle from
the group and the dentally challenged man waved off the question
like an elephant shooing a fly away with its tail. “Sometimes
people from the sewer department come down here, so we just douse
the fire and hide. They’re not gonna bother with the likes of us.
They don’t care.” He quickly glanced at the rest of the people
huddled around the fire and for a second, a note of hopelessness
entered his voice. “No one does.”

Harry tried to find a measure of compassion
for these people, and under any other circumstances he would have.
However, with his freedom and life on the line, he really couldn’t
spare any. Finally, he came out with, “Listen, my girlfriend and I
were just trying to get away from the same people you hate up on
the surface.”

The crowd around him edged in closer and a
sense of desperation combined with fear took hold. “The police said
that we killed some federal agents. That means they’re searching
for us, and—”

“And they’re not going to look down here,”
the bald leader cut him off, tapping the edge of the pipe on the
palm of his meaty hand. “I thought we told you that.”

“There are monsters up there!” Harry
exclaimed. “Didn’t any of you go up top and listen to the
radio—”

A smack across his cheek, courtesy of the
leader, cut him off. “Kid, in case you haven’t figured it out, we
don’t got a radio here. No TV, no radio, and no computer, either.
Even if we did, there’s no way to get any reception. We’re deep,
you understand me—deep. All we got is each other, and that’s more
than what most got up there.”

With a massive forefinger, he pointed to the
ceiling. “And if you wanna talk about monsters, little Miss Kitty
tied to that pipe isn’t something that you see every day.”

Oh, you don’t want to call her that, Harry
thought. “Uh, mister, that’s really not a good idea,” he said.

The bald man poked him hard on the shoulder.
“Kid, lemme make this clear to you. You’re in no friggin’ position
to say anything. Get this straight. This is
our
turf.
You
invaded it. No one’s gonna look for you, and if anyone
does, well,” he shrugged his massive shoulders and pointed to the
door. “High tide is coming soon, and unless you’re a good swimmer,
that’s just another body for the city to clean up—or in your case,
two bodies.”

With growing horror, Harry realized that
these people would do anything to maintain their privacy. “You’re
saying that you’d drown us?”

Mr. Bald offered a mean smile. “Accidents
happen.”

This time, the entire group started to guffaw
as if their leader’s statement was the funniest thing they’d ever
heard, and Harry knew they’d stop at nothing in their quest for
privacy. “How about this,” he offered. “You let us go, we just walk
away, and no one knows. We don’t want to be here, and—”

“They’re not listening, Harry,” Anastasia
suddenly said, her voice hoarse and with a tinge of rising anger in
it. She was getting ready to rumble. “They don’t care. I bought
what they were selling a long time ago.”

The almost toothless man stared hard at her
through red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t know what you are, kitty-girl,
but you shouldn’t be talking back to us, especially since you’re
tied up.”

“Don’t call me kitty.” Her eyes, luminous now
in the darkness, narrowed, and a look of impending doom flared in
them. Harry saw the muscles in her shoulders tense and then began
to swell. Her legs also seemed to get larger, her tail coiled
around the pipe, and he knew that what was going to happen soon
would not be pleasant.

Mr. Bald walked over to her and cupped her
chin in one massive paw, squeezing it and jerking her head left and
right. His voice took on a deeper quality, the same as the members
of the topside lynch mob. “Y’know, I never ate a cat before, but
there’s always a first time.”

He leaned in closer and Harry saw the look of
soon-to-be-dished-out violence in his girlfriend’s eyes. The fire
was building, and soon it would consume her and anyone in her way.
“Try it,” she growled, and snapped at his hand.

Mr. Bald jerked it away just in time. “You
little...” he started to say.

“Last chance,” Harry chimed in. “Don’t say I
didn’t warn you.”

“Shut your mouth, kid,” the bald leader
barked out and this time a decisive look came over his face. Taking
a step back, he waved his hand at someone in the circle below. “Get
me a knife,” he called out to the people below. “I need a big one.
Miss Kitty is about to get—”

With a sudden shriek of rage, Anastasia burst
free from her bonds and snapped her legs outward and upward. Her
momentum carried her feet right into the face of the big man,
catching him just under his chin and knocking him backwards.
Performing a mid-air flip, she landed on her feet and balanced
lightly on her toes

He blurted out, “Oh holy god...”

That was as far as he got. Anastasia’s tail
whipped around and across his face, staggering him. “I told you,”
she growled as she seized him by the throat, her sharp claws biting
into his flesh deep enough to hurt but not kill, “don’t ever call
me Miss Kitty.”

“Please...please don’t hurt me,” he
gurgled.

“You look like you can take it,” she
answered.