Rise of the Transgenics (7 page)

“I can’t think of anything,” she said softly,
shaking her head. “I try to remember things, remember who I was and
why they captured me. I want to know why they did this to me, but
whenever I do it just hurts.”

Traveling back in his memories to the not so
long ago, Harry recalled the first time he’d met her. At
headquarters, late at night, Farrell had brought in an ex-KGB
doctor who’d defected to the American side, and he’d hypnotized
Anastasia.

Under his spell, she remained as if in a
light sleep and began to speak in flawless Russian. At the time,
Farrell had considered her a spy as she had unimaginably perfect
total recall, able to absorb and remember every single detail of
anything she saw. While it seemed unbelievable, it turned out that
she
was
a spy, although an unwilling one.

As for her past, that of being a prostitute,
Harry had been shocked to the ends of the Earth when Nurmelev told
him. On his end, though, he’d never mentioned it. It would have
been too painful and he didn’t want to hurt her. You didn’t hurt
those you loved, and she’d been hurt enough already.

“Hey!”

Someone shouted out the greeting and Harry
whirled at the sound. Two men emerged from the forest. The first
man was large, looked to be in his thirties, was wearing a parka
over a suit, and had a pair of boots on. Was he an agent? It seemed
so, as he called out, “Agent Farrell, I’m Agent Mathers.”

He carried a plastic bag in one hand and
something in the other. When he lifted it up, it flashed in the
morning sun. It was a badge—an FBI badge. The second man was Doctor
Halsey, also wearing a parka and shivering in the cold, his pale
skin turned red from the weather.

When he saw Anastasia, his eyes grew large
and his face turned as white as the snow. The other man also showed
surprise, and quickly, he tucked his badge away and put his hand
inside his parka.

“Put your hand down, Mathers,” Farrell called
out. “She’s with us.”

Immediately, Mathers did and nodded, although
a wary expression remained on his face. However, if he was wary,
then Halsey was plainly terrified, his mouth quivering along with
his chins. “What...what is she doing here?” he squeaked out.

Questions, questions, there were lots of
questions, chief of which was why Halsey was here in the first
place. Harry thought he’d been put in charge, and now suddenly
number two on the transgenics researching food chain had decided to
put in a guest appearance.

Mathers walked over, proffered the bag, and
Farrell took it. The younger agent scanned the area, his eyes
constantly roving from tree to tree, and spoke softly. “We got here
an hour ago. I’ve searched the perimeter, but couldn’t find
anything. All I found was some bones.”

Through the transparent material, Harry saw
bones, human and otherwise. “What are you doing here?” Farrell
began by asking in a most conversational tone. “Who authorized
this?”

Harry thought that the senior man had to be
internally raging at someone getting here before he did, but if he
was pissed off, he didn’t show it.

Mathers hesitated and waved his hand at
Halsey. “Er, Doctor Halsey said that he was in charge. He had some
notes and said we should search. So—”

“So you came up here without my
authorization, is that it?” Farrell’s voice never rose above a
conversational level, but his words indicated that someone was
going to get their butt metaphorically kicked later on. “Fine,
we’ll settle this when we get back to headquarters. What did you
come up with?”

The other agent swept his hand across the
area. “Hard to find anything in the snow,” Mathers stated, his
breath coming out in puffs of icy air. “We came here before, in the
summer, bagged and tagged everything we could find. If there is
anything else, it’s buried under the wreckage, and we don’t want to
alert the locals. As it is, someone might come by, and if I may,
sir, I’d suggest we don’t stay up here too long.”

Farrell nodded his head. It seemed as though
he considered this trip up here a waste of time as well.

“I’d like to take a look at those bones as
soon as possible,” Halsey interjected, alternately looking cold,
miserable, and scared at the sight of a cat-girl. For her part,
Anastasia ignored him, choosing to stalk around, still testing for
scents with her nose. She then bent over to examine the snow and
waded out into it, sniffing around.

Harry glanced at her for a moment and then
turned his attention back to the plump doctor. This called for the
direct approach. Farrell seemed to want to wait in order to rip the
doctor a new one. Harry didn’t. “You ordered this?” he asked
Halsey. “Did Merton say it was okay?”

In a split second, the doctor’s fraidy-cat
attitude vanished, replace by a smug and smarmy attitude. “He
doesn’t know. You may think you know something about this line of
research, but you’re in over your head. I studied at Vanderbilt,
interned at the Mayo Clinic, and believe me, kid, you know
nothing.”

Once more, he had to come out with a kid
comment, but Harry decided to let it pass. A sense of betrayal ran
through him, but he held his temper and listened to the other man
rattle off his achievements. Halsey only stopped when he ran out of
breath.

What a self-righteous jerk.
Harry
decided to drop the hammer. “If you’re so smart, did you manage to
solve the matrix and turn Anastasia back into what she was when I
first met her?”

Halsey’s superior attitude vanished, as did
his smile. “No.”

“Who did?”

Reluctantly, the chubby man muttered,
“You.”

Farrell then decided to step in. He’d been
listening to the exchange, the expression on his face unreadable,
but now an angry look supplanted the impassive one.

“You know, I was a little peeved before, but
now I’m going to pull rank. You decided to go over my head, go over
the Director’s head, and pull an agent off his regular duties just
to see if you could get in on the action, is that it?”

Halsey started to protest, and the senior
man’s voice continued to rise as he berated the doctor, calling him
incompetent six ways from Sunday.

Harry decided it wasn’t worth getting pissed
over. He’d already owned the doctor, and ownage was sweet. Still,
some things had to be let go, and he walked off to join Anastasia.
She stood at the edge of the forest line, sniffing the air. “Find
anything?” he asked.

Not a word came from her at first, but the
fur on the nape of her neck stood up, and her hackles went up
slightly as well. “Something’s here,” she whispered and bent down
to sniff at the snow. “Wait.”

With a sure hand, she dusted the top cover
off and her search revealed a print—a paw print. Harry’s heart gave
a quick jump. It looked like a cat’s paw print, but larger, as if
it was mixed with a human one. There were toe marks—six of them—and
as for the indentation, it was very shallow, as if the person was
light in bodyweight.

Anastasia continued to check. After she’d
pushed back more of the snow, he saw a few other prints. These ones
were larger, circular, and if he didn’t know any better, they
resembled prints made by something heavy, something large. He’d
seen prints like those before in a textbook he’d read as a kid, and
they reminded him of a rhinoceros’ hoof prints...

“Harry?”

He snapped out of his daze. “What is it?”

Anastasia’s face wore a worried expression,
but abruptly her focus shifted and her eyes narrowed. A note of
fear entered her voice. “We have to go back—
now.
I’m not
sure what it is, but something’s here. Whatever it is, it’s not
human.”

Uncertainty hung in the air. If the something
wasn’t human, then what was it? He didn’t really want to find out,
and she gently tugged on his arm once, and then with greater
urgency. “It’s time to move, boyfriend.”

Slowly, they reversed course. Halfway back
she stopped and crouched down, her nose sniffing the air wildly.
“Yeah, I was right,” she said. “Those prints aren’t human. One of
them looks like me, but the other...”

Her voice had gotten low and hoarse, trailing
off to a whisper. The muscles in her body stood out tautly, ready
for action. “It’s watching...no, wait,
they’re
watching
us.”

Two people, there were two people? Harry
didn’t know whether she was imagining things or not, but at the
same time he
had
seen the foot or paw or whatever-it-was
prints. Listening carefully, he heard nothing, not even the wind,
and he smelled nothing. It was too cold.

However, Anastasia was the expert in smells
and scents, and he trusted her. A second later, she took his hand
and they ran back, struggling through the thick snow to where the
three other men stood.

“We’ve got company,” she announced in a tight
voice and moved off a few steps, her eyes fixed on the forest and
body tensed. In a flash, her claws sprang out, ready for whatever
was lying in wait.

Farrell immediately drew his weapon, as did
Mathers. Taking up shooter’s stances and swinging their pistols up
into the firing position, silenced ruled until the junior man
murmured, “What’ve we got?”

“Something that’s probably my height,”
Anastasia said, “And something a lot bigger. They’re close.”

“Oh God,” the chubby doctor uttered, and it
sounded like the pitiful squeak a mouse would make. “What’re we
going to do?” he cried out, and Anastasia smacked him on the cheek.
However, she did retract her claws.

“You’re going to shut your mouth, get down,
and do nothing,” she hissed. “Are we clear on that?”

Halsey didn’t say another word, but he did as
ordered and curled up in the fetal position, whimpering
pitifully.

As they watched and waited, the tension grew.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Farrell muttered, still sweeping the area with his
pistol. Mathers wiped nervous sweat off his forehead, and Halsey
continued to whimper, “This isn’t right, this isn’t right...”

Only Anastasia showed anger, her hair now
standing up and a low, hoarse growl coming from her mouth. Her
claws, razor sharp, glittered in the early morning sun. “C’mon,
c’mon,” she said as if expecting the worst to happen.

As he looked on, mind half out of the action
and half in, Harry tried not to be nervous. Bravery had to be
observed here, but he was short, skinny, weak, and he knew it. He’d
faced down monsters before, but this time two of them were lurking,
and he didn’t know what to do.

His moment of action came a second later when
two figures burst out of the woods, charging in their direction
through the snow. The first was an all-black cat-girl, almost a
carbon copy of Anastasia, and she half-jumped, half-leaped through
the air. Even from a distance, he saw that her feet were more
feline than human, and that accounted for the paw prints.

“Holy God, there’s two of them!” Mathers
yelled.

He didn’t say much else, just pointed his
pistol at the larger adversary and drew a bead on it. Getting a
good look at the monstrosity, Harry immediately thought of the word
nightmare, for it was something that only the word nightmare would
describe. Perhaps six feet in length, it galloped toward them on
all fours, throwing up great chunks of snow as it went.

Built like a mini-rhino coupled with a boar,
it had the head of a boar, but much narrower, and a ridge of bone
ran from the crown straight down to its chin. Its mouth was a
large, gaping maw full of nasty looking long and razor sharp teeth.
A horn, long and thick, protruded from its forehead. Gray all over,
it sported tremendous musculature and moved fast in spite of its
bulk. Steaming snorts of rage spewed from its mouth as it charged
through the snow.

Screaming in terror, Halsey stood up in front
of the charging rhino-boar and the monster tore right through him
like tissue paper. His body literally got blown apart, and blood
sprayed across the snow. The rhino-boar kept moving, and it moved
fast, shaking off Halsey’s innards as it went.

“Shoot them!” Farrell cried and he let loose,
firing quickly at the rhino thing. Mathers shot at the other
cat-girl, but she dropped to all fours and dodged the bullets
effortlessly.

The gap between attackers and prey quickly
narrowed with Farrell still up in firing position. His gun clicked
empty. He quickly ejected the spent clip, shoved in a fresh one,
and continued the assault.

“It’s not working!” Harry yelled.

And it wasn’t. The bullets missed the
cat-girl, and while some of them managed to penetrate the tough
hide of the rhino thing, they didn’t slow him down much, if at
all.

“This isn’t working,” Harry yelled again. He
thought the car wasn’t so far away. Could these creatures outrun a
car? Considering how fast they moved, he’d never make it. “We have
to leave!”

“Not yet,” Anastasia hissed, and leapt out
from her position to take on the other cat-girl.

They clashed in the snow, hisses and yowls
coming from both combatants. At first, it seemed as if they were
evenly matched in strength. The black cat-girl took the offensive
right away, and it seemed as though she’d had martial arts
training, as her moves were precise and sharp.

In contrast, Anastasia fought with a wilder,
more animalistic yet somehow calculated defensive style. Back and
forth they battled, and it looked as though technique would
triumph, but Anastasia seemed to figure out the other cat-girl’s
method of fighting. Flipping impossibly high in the air behind her
opponent, she lashed out with her claws to the back of her opponent
and knocked her ten feet away. “You want some more?” she yelled.
“I’ve got a lot more waiting!”

Slashes received or not, the black cat-girl
didn’t seem to be badly hurt. In a series of back-flips, which
demonstrated her flexibility, she moved a respectable distance
away. She cocked her head to one side as if appraising their
chances, and then whistled a name. “Piotr!”