“It’s real,” she replied, and to prove it, she raised her tail and lashed him gently around his knees. Like the punk samurai wannabe, Mr. Polka Dot’s grin vanished abruptly. He got a strange look on his face, suddenly backed off, and Anastasia watched him leave with a smile as the crowd laughed and clapped to show their appreciation. “That’s one way to get rid of them.”
Then a look of fear flickered in her eyes. Harry put his hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”
“We have to go!”
“What is it?” he repeated.
A roar shook the room and drowned out the rumble of the music. The bear-man had entered, and he pushed his way roughly through the crowd. A few security people came over and tried to head him off. He simply seized one of them and crushed his head.
“Holy crap, it’s still alive!” Harry yelled. He’d seen Farrell pump six bullets into it back at FBI headquarters and they had no effect. How could anything have lived through that kind of attack?
No one provided an answer to his question as the music stopped, the screams started, and then all hell broke loose. The crowd made a mad dash for the exits, running over each other and trampling on anyone who got in their way. Harry got knocked down, and the bear-man spotted them and lumbered over quickly. He didn’t speak, just grinned. His fangs were red and stained with something that looked like meat and it was quite obvious he wasn’t into being a vegan…unless he liked eating them.
“Come and get some!” Anastasia yelled and pushed Harry out of harm’s way. She flicked open her claws, and scared or not, jumped right at the beast and slashed his face. He bellowed and kept his head down, protecting his head and neck from further attack, and moved forward as a boxer would, blindly swinging away. His claws were at least two inches longer than hers and they scored deep gashes in her face and torso and shredded her clothes. She yowled in pain, but kept up her attack, hissing and spitting and scratching for all she was worth.
It wasn’t enough. He grabbed her in a bear-hug and started to squeeze. Harry drew back in fear for a moment, and then his affection for Anastasia overcame his dread. He grabbed the nearest chair and belted the creature over the head, but that was like a mosquito trying to annoy an elephant. He hit him again and again, and when the chair broke, Harry used a jagged limb to stab the creature in its side.
This time it had an effect. Blood spurted out and the bear-man dropped his prey. Anastasia fell to the floor gasping for breath and the monster turned on Harry.
Oh hell, I’m toast, Harry thought. The creature grabbed him with one hand and easily lifted him off the floor and held him close to its mouth. A stink of carrion emanated from the open maw. Harry smelled death coming…and then his attacker bellowed again and let him go.
He fell to the floor in a heap and saw Doug savagely biting into the monster’s calf, worrying it like a rat. Blood jetted into the air, and then Anastasia got herself back into the act. She jumped impossibly high, twisted her body in a one hundred-eighty degree turn, and landed on the creature’s back. From her position, she slashed at the back of his head for all she was worth.
“Hey, you, freeze!”
Harry turned around just in time to see three uniformed policemen enter the room with guns drawn. One of the cops yelled out, “You in the raccoon suit! Get away from those freaks!”
He wanted to explain that they weren’t freaks, they were his friends, but the crowd kept rushing by and he got knocked off his feet by the frantic exit-seekers. A few brave souls decided to stop for some phone-pics. “This is going on my social site!” someone called out.
Bad decision, for while the cops urged everyone to get clear, the bear-man had other ideas. It shook Doug off his leg with a quick, economical move that sent the little man flying across the room and then grabbed Anastasia and tossed her into the buffet table twenty feet away. With another roar, it turned its wrath on the picture takers and ripped two of them apart with one swipe of its hand-paw. The victims fell like bowling pins and then the creature decided to charge the police on all fours.
It moved incredibly fast and bore a great resemblance to an enraged mutated grizzly on a search-and-destroy mission. It mowed down guests without a care, tearing right through them like so much tissue paper, and when it slapped down one of the cops it caught the man’s leg in its powerful jaws and started to rip it open. The cop screamed in agony. “Get it the hell off me!”
The other two policemen started firing and they hit the mark every single time, blowing holes in the bear-man’s torso. He bled, but the bellows continued and unbelievingly ratcheted up a notch in intensity. He let go of his victim, and stood up to take on the other men in blue.
“We gotta go,” Doug urged, wiping the blood from his mouth. Harry had been staring at the scene like a baby watching fire and started when Doug smacked him on the arm to get his attention.
“What the…?”
Harry woke up from his momentary stupor. Like a thunderbolt, truth hit and hit hard. Doug was one of them, too! “Who experimented on you?” he asked.
Doug waved off the question with his paw. “No time for questions, pal. Move your ass!”
He pointed to an exit at the back of the hall and Anastasia joined them, rubbing her head. Harry got bumped around by the panic-stricken crowd, but his girlfriend and Doug easily slipped through the throng of people, took the lead, and guided him to the emergency exit. They ran down three flights of stairs dodging frightened people all the way and out into a back alley. “You got a car?” Doug asked, panting. “We gotta split and I do mean now!”
Harry shook his head and wished he’d asked Jason to stick around. Doug grunted in frustration. “Okay, we do it the hard way.”
They cautiously crept to the entrance and were greeted by the sight of more than twenty police cars which had magically appeared on the scene. “Not this way,” Doug said, and dropped to all fours. It was dark out and no one noticed the dog with human hands moving along the sidewalk.
Anastasia was still bleeding from her wounds, but had strength enough to grab Harry’s arm. She held onto her torn clothes with her other arm and managed a few steps before she started to stagger. He caught her around the waist and urged her forward. “Hang on,” he said. “We’ll make it.”
Doug took point, hurriedly shepherding them away from the carnage. He stayed on all fours and seemed to effortlessly slip through the frantic onlookers that swirled in every direction. People pushed, screamed, cried, and bumped into each other, and everyone was asking questions and no one could give any answers.
Finally, the trio managed to make their way downstairs and out onto the street. It was dark outside, rapidly getting darker, and in the confusion, no one had bothered looking at them directly. Instead, the injured headed over to a few ambulances that had arrived on the scene. Doug stopped in his tracks, pointed at the medical personnel disembarking from the ambulances and shook his head. “We’re not going that route.”
“She’s bleeding,” Harry started to say.
Doug snarled a warning, cutting him off. “Not here and not now. I know she’s hurt, but we can’t ask anyone for help. Follow me.”
Harry had no idea what Doug was up to, but he followed his ally’s lead and they walked as quickly away from the disaster site as possible. On their way, they passed a couple of policemen and Harry nervously asked for directions on how to get to the nearest hospital.
“Are any of you injured?” one of the cops asked. “We’re getting more ambulances in, but it’s gonna take some time. Traffic’s pretty heavy…”
“She got slashed by that thing,” Harry interrupted. He pointed to Anastasia and no, he didn’t have to act scared. He was frightened not only for himself but also for his girlfriend. Her torso was soaked in blood, the elixir of life matting down her hair and staining what was left of her clothes a deep red.
The cop took a quick look at her and pointed south. “We’ve got the next two blocks cordoned off,” he said. “If you cut over to Seventh and take
the back streets, you should find a clinic there.”
“Thank you, officer,” Harry said as calmly as possible. They hurriedly continued on down the block, dodging the injured and the curious. Good thing it was dark as the night hid most of her features.
Doug waited until they were out of earshot and then muttered softly, “Man, there’s a first time for everything. Who said New York cops are rude?”
Chapter Eight
A Brief Stop and We’re on Our Way
Anastasia’s injuries soon took their toll. The crowd continued to move wildly in every direction, people banged into them and impeded their way, and the situation got more violent with the bystanders gawking and the frantic people who’d been at the party trying to escape. A few fistfights broke out, and Harry took his girlfriend’s hand and pulled her close to him. “I can make it,” she gasped out.
“Yeah, I know,” he answered, aware of the clichéd response. “Stay with me.”
However, the situation got more desperate as between the costume, the general heat of the night, and the fact that more and more of New York’s finest had arrived on the scene and started to search everyone including those who’d been wounded by the arrival of the bear-man, Harry wondered if they’d ever make it out of there without someone finding out who they really were.
So much for his plan of sneaking into FBI headquarters, he thought. They’d have the place on lockdown twenty-four-seven. He sighed and scanned the area, but the whole city seemed to have turned into one large trap. And it seemed they were the ones in the cage.
As they made their way along the sidewalk, he also wondered how anything so large had gotten into the FBI headquarters without being spotted first. Where had it come from and how had it stayed hidden? Would it get away this time? He heard shouts in the distance as well as the crack of gunshots and hoped the nightmare would soon be over…
“Over here,” Doug barked. The shout rose over the crowd and interrupted his musings on monsters and mutants.
Harry whipped his head around just in time to see Doug point to an alleyway. “Move it bud, I don’t have all night!”
They hurried inside, and Anastasia collapsed against the wall. Her breathing was shallow and her head lolled. She needed help and she needed it fast. “Gotta rest for a bit,” she said, her voice faint. “I’ll be okay.”
No, she won’t, Harry thought and asked, “Do we have any options?”
“We’re not getting out of the city tonight,” Doug responded. “The cops will be checking everywhere soon and they’re going to do some kind of lockdown in order to catch Ivan.”
“Who’s Ivan?”
Doug blinked. “That’s…the name of the thing that jumped us.” He gave a short, barking laugh. “I just remembered. Yeah, he’s called Ivan.”
The way he pronounced the name, it came out as Ee-Vahn. Another Russian name…Agent Farrell had been right. There was some kind of connection going on. “Do you remember anything else?” he asked.
Doug waved his hand as if dismissing the question. “No, that’s it for now. My memory’s coming back, but just in little pieces here and there. I don’t know when something else is going to surface.” He shook himself all over as if to jog his memory. “Anyway, we’re going to have to stay hidden.”
“Couldn’t you go somewhere, uh, where there are others…?” Harry started to offer.
“You were going to say others like me, like an animal shelter or the dog pound,” Doug finished for him. He snorted and spat something out of his mouth. It was a piece of Ivan’s clothing. “No way would I go to either of those places.”
Actually, Harry had considered the idea, but the look on his ally’s face radiated total distaste and so he dropped the suggestion. “You got something against other dogs?” he asked.
Doug nodded rapidly. “Yeah, I do. Just because I look like one of them doesn’t mean I am one of them. You can’t really talk to a mutt. Some of them bark or whine all night, and finally, a lot of the males are in heat. So are the females. It’s the season.
“And I am not going to the zoo, either. Your girlfriend also isn’t the best candidate for a shelter, so I suggest you think outside the box for a moment. The cops are going to be frisking everyone from now on. If they stop us, you can kiss our furry butts goodbye.”
Anastasia had passed out by this time and lay in a heap on the cement. Her breathing was slow but regular and the bleeding seemed to have stopped, but even so, she’d already lost a lot of blood. Harry started to panic. “So what do we do?”
Doug already had the answer. He went over to a manhole and with a sharp tug, pulled the cover off. He was a lot stronger than he looked. “We go down. The room is waiting and we’re the guests.”
Between the two of them, they managed to get Anastasia’s limp form down the steps, and at the bottom, Harry awkwardly picked her up in his arms. A series of overhead lights gave off a faint yellowish glow which illuminated the rushing sewage water as a fast-moving black mass. He waded across it to the other side and the smell of rotting food, excrement, chemicals, and other odors he didn’t want to think about hit his nose and made him dizzy. He breathed through his mouth in order to avoid passing out and kept going. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he made out ledges on both sides that looked relatively clean.
After making his way over to a ledge, he carefully put his girlfriend’s body down. Doug pulled the manhole cover into place and soon joined them, sniffing the air. “No rats,” he said.
“They have rats down here?”
“Oh, ya think?”
Doug’s sarcasm made Harry curse himself for being so naïve. Talk about being a shut-in! “Sorry, I didn’t figure on, well, you know…” His voice trailed off as he searched for a suitable excuse. Nothing came to mind so he clammed up.
Doug gave him a look of indignation. “Yeah, they gotta live somewhere besides the streets. I didn’t have any food for a few days last week, so I ended up coming down here for a snack. They won’t be coming back.”
Harry felt ashamed his newfound friend had been forced to live this way. “Sorry, I didn’t know…”
“Nah, you wouldn’t. Don’t worry about it.” Doug didn’t seem to take offense at the idea of doing what was necessary in order to live. Instead, he scanned the area and then gave a brief nod. “Anyway, we’ll be safe down here.”
Anastasia briefly stirred and lapsed back into unconsciousness. Harry gently stroked her hair and attempted to breathe through his mouth. It didn’t help. “It stinks!”
“It’s a sewer,” Doug explained patiently. “It’s not going to smell like a bunch of flowers.” He glanced at the unconscious form of Anastasia and shifted his gaze to the water rushing by.
Harry figured he had to be grateful for some small miracles. “So what do we do?”
Doug grunted. “What’s your lady’s name?”
“It’s Anastasia.”
“Well, you and Anastasia stay here for now. I’ll go up topside and see what’s happening. We need food and water, and you can’t go anywhere.”
He climbed the ladder and pushed off the manhole cover. Harry heard the sound of the cover being put back into place and hoped his ally would be back soon. He booted up his computer in order to send a quick e-mail to Jason, but couldn’t get through, so clambering up the ladder he shoved the manhole cover off with his shoulder, sent the message, and spent five fitful minutes waiting for a reply. Fortunately, Jason didn’t appear to sleep, and the answer flashed on the screen.
I can’t do too much. FBI came around this morning. The cop who came around yesterday got suspicious about the cat hair and contacted them. Some guy named Farrell talked to me, threatened me with jail if I was hiding any information. They’re watching me. Sorry.
Harry shut down the computer and went down the ladder after tugging the manhole cover back into place. At the bottom, he went through their options and unfortunately, he couldn’t think of what to do. They were on their own. At least Farrell had surviv
ed the attack, but he wouldn’t stop until he managed to make an arrest.
Sighing, Harry turned his attention back to his girlfriend and touched her face, thinking about everything and nothing at the same time. She murmured something in her sleep he couldn’t make out and fell silent.
A few thoughts ran through his mind at light speed. One, how could the bear creature have hidden himself so well? Okay, at the party, yes, everyone was in costume, but how had he managed to infiltrate FBI headquarters so easily the night before without anyone either spotting or taking him down?
Two, where could they go now? He felt tired beyond belief and was clad in a ridiculous costume. His face itched…damn makeup. In a fit of sudden fury, he ripped off his glued-on whiskers and yelled “Crap!” as the pain hit him. He used his sleeve in order to wipe the makeup off. Frustrated and hot, he sat down to think. Every law enforcement official probably had his mug shot handy. There had to be some way of disguising himself other than in this dumb suit.
Three, he was…
A grating sound interrupted his checklist. A second later, Doug entered. He pulled the metal cover back into place and descended the ladder holding a plastic bag in his mouth. “I got food,” he said, and ambled over to them.
Inside the bag Harry saw a number of sandwiches along with two bottles of water. “I am seriously impressed. How’d you do it?” he asked.
Doug gave him a wolfish grin. “I just walked into the nearest convenience store with an empty bag and a note. I use this trick all the time to get freebies. Check this out.”
He pulled the note from his pocket. Harry read, “My owner is blind and homeless. He needs help. Please help.” He looked at Doug. “It’s pretty clever.”
Doug sat on his haunches and begged, just like a canine would. His large brown eyes pleaded for understanding and affection, and then he gave a faint whine and panted. It was the greatest performance Harry had seen in a long time…only it wasn’t that funny. “Okay, you’re an actor,” he said.
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