Rise of the Transgenics (8 page)

Piotr...it was a man’s name...a Russian man’s
name. The cat-girl immediately followed up her call by yelling some
other words, which Harry didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter.
He knew what they were.

Then he saw her face as she turned to him,
her grin wide and terrible, and her eyes roved over his body. Why,
he didn’t know, but she stared at him not as someone to be killed,
but as someone to be...
captured.

For its part, the rhino-boar also didn’t seem
to want to kill anyone else. It had already savaged Halsey, but it
kept darting back and forth between the agents. Harry also caught
its gaze. Unlike its female friend, its beady, reddish piggy eyes
seemed to radiate pure malice or pure evil or perhaps both, and the
look was so strong that it fairly melted the snow. He wondered if
it could talk.

It soon answered the question by bellowing
“Lyudmila” followed by other words, which were in the same
language.

Finally, the other girl charged towards
Harry’s position. He picked up a split two-by-four as his weapon of
choice, but Anastasia sped over in a flash and laid out the other
cat-girl with a powerful right hook.

Farrell glanced over at the action, and
before anyone could yell a warning, the rhino-boar sprinted over in
a shocking burst of speed, smashed into Mathers and literally ran
right through him. The impact pulverized Mathers’ torso. His arms
and legs hung in the air for a split second before they dropped
like bloody logs to the snow. He didn’t even have time to cry
out.

A fine mist of blood sprayed in every
direction as the monster continued on and smashed its paw onto
Farrell’s gun hand. A snapping sound echoed sharply in the air, and
Farrell cried out in pain. “Damn it!” he screamed, and fell to one
knee.

The monster continued its assault and
backhanded-pawed Farrell across his face. It grinned, and the look
on the creature’s face could only be described as demonic. “You,”
it said. “You are nothing.” It then glanced over at Harry. “You are
next.”

The grin vanished and it blinked when Harry
belted it across the face with the wooden plank, but more in
surprise than in pain, and it promptly cut a sharp right over to
the position of its fallen comrade. In a quick move, it scooped her
up with one of its massive arms, and bounded into the forest.

Anastasia, swearing quietly now and holding
her arm, walked over to where the two men, one standing and one
fallen, were. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Dropping the board, trembling from the
adrenalin rush, Harry nodded. “Yeah, but I didn’t do anything. You
did it all.”

Examining her, he saw she’d been slashed and
the cuts were deep, but a few seconds later, the cuts healed up and
the marks vanished. One of the bonuses Anastasia had was the power
of regeneration, in addition to her strength and speed. She shook
her arm out and nodded, satisfied.

“Hey, anyone want to get me up?” Farrell said
weakly.

Harry ran over and gently hoisted the agent
to his feet. His right arm hung down at an awkward angle and the
right side of his face had already started to swell. Getting hit by
one of those paws had to be like being hit with a sledgehammer.
However, Farrell said nothing about his condition. “Did you get
those names?” he asked Anastasia.

“Yeah, I did,” she remarked sourly. “They
were speaking in Russian. They’re the same as I am.”

Farrell’s mouth opened, but before he could
utter a word his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed. Since
there was nothing anyone could do about the dead doctor and agent,
Harry and Anastasia lugged Farrell’s semi-conscious form over to
the car, placed him as gently as possible in the back seat, and
Harry took the wheel.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they got
underway.

Gunning the motor, Harry took off down the
mountain road, heedless of the snow and ice, and after fishtailing
his way onto the highway, he pushed the pedal to the metal. “I’m
going to find a hospital first.”

“Take me to...to Mercy General,” Farrell said
weakly from the confines of the back seat. “It’s...one of ours.” He
told them the address and then passed out.

Putting the car in top gear, Harry set his
course and even though the adrenalin rush had started to fade and
lassitude emerged, he kept his mind focused on the job of
driving.

Anastasia remained silent. “Those things
wanted to kill us,” she said.

“No, they didn’t.” Harry shook his head as an
awful thought entered his mind and it didn’t want to leave. “No,
they only wanted to kill the agents. They wanted to capture
me.”

Twenty nerve-wracking minutes later, they arrived at
the hospital. Harry had attempted to keep his speed down, and
frequently checked the rearview mirror to see if they were being
followed. He saw nothing except other cars.

The hospital was a rather small and
unimposing structure set on the edge of a small forest. After
pulling into the Emergency spot and motioning for Anastasia to
crouch down, he said, “Try not to let them see you,” he beeped the
horn twice and got out of the car, but left the motor running.

Farrell woke up long enough to heave his body
painfully from the automobile and stagger out onto the cement. “Ask
for...for Doctor Lindstrom,” he gasped out before collapsing.

A guard appeared at the entrance and Harry
yelled out, “Get Doctor Lindstrom!”

The guard eyed Farrell and disappeared
inside. A few seconds later, two orderlies pushing a gurney rushed
out the door, picked up the fallen man and placed him on the
gurney. One of the orderlies, a large man with cold gray eyes said,
“We’ll take it from here, kid. Wait for someone to come out and
take your statement.” They disappeared inside, leaving Harry
alone.

What was with the statement? “They would
have to call me
kid,”
Harry muttered. Waiting for something
to happen, he scanned the area. An extensive array of bushes
surrounded the hospital, and a forest lay across the street, quiet
and serene and covered in white.

It all
looked
serene, but then again,
the forest up in the Catskills had appeared the same at the outset,
and monsters had been hiding there. He remained tense and jumped
when Anastasia’s voice from behind him called out, “What’s going
on?”

“We have to...” he started to say.

“Put your hands in the air!” someone yelled,
and immediately, he clammed up. Two men in black rushed out, guns
drawn.

“Put your hands in the air!” one of them
repeated. “Turn around, lean over the car, put your hands on it and
spread your legs. Do it now!”

“Hey guys, we’re on the same team,” Harry
protested as he started to backpedal. Obviously, these guys hadn’t
gotten the memo. They continued to advance and he continued to do
the back-step shuffle.

Anastasia poked her head out the window.
“We’re trying to help.”

Her words had some effect, as the agents
stared first at her and then at each other. Taking that as his cue,
Harry ran to the driver’s side of the car, gunned the engine, and
took off. He needn’t have worried, though, as neither agent let off
a shot. They simply stood and stared.

“I guess being a circus sideshow attraction
has its merits,” Anastasia commented wryly from the passenger seat.
She did, however, crouch down to dashboard level.

“You’re not a freak, if that’s what you’re
saying.”

Reactions to the different weren’t unusual,
Harry thought as he drove down the road. Still, his girlfriend
wasn’t a freak, not in his eyes. Anastasia raised her head long
enough to lean over and plant a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks.”

She then slumped down in the seat and focused
her eyes on the blankness of the dashboard. “Will Farrell be
okay?”

Harry answered, “I think so, but we’ve got
other problems. The rest of the agency doesn’t know about us, or
about you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “They were gonna arrest
me, and those two things up there wanted to capture me!”

“I think they were after me,” Anastasia
pointed out and a thoughtful look came over her face. “Still...you
might be right about those two wanting to catch you. They could
have wasted you right away, but only that other cat-girl wanted to
take me on. Her friend didn’t seem like he wanted any of my action.
I wonder why.”

Harry had been wondering the same thing. That
rhino-boar thing—Piotr—seemed pretty much unstoppable. Yet he
hadn’t attacked Anastasia at all. His words, though—
you are
next
—remained fresh in Harry’s mind, and he wondered what their
ultimate plan was.

He stepped on the gas and the car shot
forward, but he kept his speed down to an acceptable level. Getting
pulled over was not on the menu. “Right now we’ve got to keep
searching. I’ll call in later on.”

Driving back to the city, he wondered once
more if the two Russians were somehow trailing them. Anastasia was
obviously thinking the same thing when she asked, “Are we going
back to headquarters?”

It was a good question, one that he couldn’t
answer. After the incident at the hospital, Harry had the feeling
that the agency wasn’t about to welcome him or his girlfriend with
open arms. He drove along, keeping his speed down, and wondered
what to do. The first option meant going back to home base, telling
everyone what they knew, but option B...what was option B?

“How about we listen to some music?”
Anastasia asked and switched on the radio.

“Good idea.”

Music always helped to calm a person down,
but this radio was old and not in the best of condition, and it
filled the car with static at first. As it cleared, the hard,
jangling sounds of a heavy metal song filled the air, and Harry’s
ears tightened painfully. He didn’t care for the genre. Apparently,
his girlfriend didn’t care for it, either, and she quickly changed
the station to something a little slower.

“That’s better,” she murmured.

Soon, the sounds of a soft ballad from a
local station came through, and Harry began to relax, if only a
little. His moment of peace, though, was interrupted by the high,
strident voice of an announcer.

“We interrupt this program to bring you a
special news bulletin. The police have discovered the bodies of two
men in the Catskill Mountains, near Esopus Creek. Dylan Halsey and
Carleton Mathers, both employed by the FBI, were discovered a short
time ago, severely mangled, and the culprits are still at
large...”

Oh crap, Harry thought. How did they know?
“What in the hell...?”

“Quiet!” Anastasia commanded. “We have to
listen to this.”

“Witnesses say that the suspect was a
teenager named Harry Goldman, age eighteen,” the announcer
continued. “He was accompanied by a female accomplice, name and
description unknown. They are believed to be in New York
City...”

The announcer proceeded to give out Harry’s
description, a very accurate one. In a sudden burst of rage,
Anastasia punched the radio, smashing it and cutting off all
sound.

Harry started to sweat, and it wasn’t because
the heater was on. “Well, I guess going back to headquarters is out
of the question, but how did they know it was us?” he began, trying
to think straight. “There weren’t any witnesses—”

“Yeah, there were,” Anastasia interrupted.
“Those two things that attacked us, they were the witnesses. They
want the authorities to bring us in. And we were just seen at the
hospital.”

In that moment, Harry realized he’d been
fooling himself. On the one hand, the rest of the FBI hadn’t been
told of his involvement with the program. In the eyes of the
average agent, he was a fugitive, and God knew what they thought of
Anastasia.

On the other hand, he also knew that they
couldn’t be taken in. If they were caught and taken to a jail, a
local jail with relatively poor security, then that would
automatically make them an easy target. While he wasn’t sure if
they wanted his girlfriend, he was certain that they wanted
him.

Anastasia reached over and touched his hand,
jolting him out of his reverie. “We can’t let them get us. The FBI
knows that we didn’t do it.”

“No...they don’t,” he answered, grimly
thinking about his chances in a regular prison, if it came to that.
Oh, who was he kidding? In a jail cell with a bunch of hard cases,
he had two chances—slim and none.

Still, there was only one way to find out
where he stood. Risk or no risk of being seen, he had to take a
chance. Taking an off-ramp, he drove to a self-service gas station
and spotted a payphone. “Stay down,” he said.

He got out of the car, kept his head down,
and hunched his shoulders as he walked to the phone. He dug a few
quarters out of his pocket, fed them into the slot, and dialed FBI
headquarters. Immediately, a secretary’s voice came on the line, he
gave his name, and she transferred the call to Merton. The Director
sounded concerned. “Where are you?” he asked. “You’ve got to come
in.”

“You set us up!” Harry yelled and then caught
himself. A few people who’d been filling up their cars stared at
him and he turned away, hiding his head with one arm. “You set us
up,” he whispered harshly. “We had to take Farrell to the hospital,
and the agents there wanted to arrest us. What kind of game are you
playing? If you
are
playing one, then I’m not having any
fun.”

“It’s no game,” the answer came. “Outside of
you, me and Farrell, and a couple of others, no one else knows your
involvement with the agency. Apparently, a news station got a call
from a woman with a faint accent.”

Lyudmila, it had to be her, Harry thought.
“Let me guess, she gave a perfect description of me,” he said,
keeping the sarcasm to a minimum.

The answer came instantly, and if the
Director was angry, it didn’t show in his voice. He sounded totally
matter of fact. “She did. And five minutes after we received a call
from the local police and the news station, Farrell contacted us
and told us to call off the agents.”