“I told you, don’t call me Miss Kitty.” Harry Goldman, young genius, DNA researcher and still a nerd, is back, and this time he’s working for the law. At the end of Catnip, his girlfriend, Anastasia, devolved into a cat. He manages to bring her back to her half-human form, but no sooner does he do so than a new problem surfaces. Two other transgenics emerge, and they are out for blood. Harry and Anastasia have to face off against Lyudmila, another cat-girl, and Piotr, a half-rhino, half-boar monstrosity that lives to kill. And if that isn’t bad enough, the police, lynch mobs, and underground dwellers are after Harry and his girlfriend as well. With time running out, they embark on a treacherous journey to the Ukraine in order to solve the riddle of Anastasia’s DNA, a journey that could also cost both of them their lives.
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Rise Of The Transgenics
Copyright © 2015 J.S. Frankel
ISBN: 978-1-4874-0275-4
Cover art by Carmen Waters
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
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Smashwords Edition
Rise Of The Transgenics
Catnip Book Two
By
J.S. Frankel
Dedication
To my wife, Akiko, and to my children, Kai and Ray, who make every single day my greatest adventure.
Prologue: The Dumps
January sixteenth, night, an alleyway in Manhattan
Nick Winter shook the snow off his tattered overcoat and zipped his jeans up after taking a leak in the corner of the alley. He shivered as he breathed in the cold January night air. Checking out his environment, the narrow place filled with trash, boxes, discarded bottles and more that served as his home, he saw no one and no shadows. Nothing indicated that any trouble was coming his way.
However, this was New York City—a back alley in downtown Manhattan—so anything could happen, and he needed to stay alert.
Another shiver ran through him, and he cursed the New Year’s weather.
He also cursed the fact that his coat was not nearly thick enough to keep out the icy fingers that threatened to freeze him on the spot. Good thing in a way that it was cold, as it kept him alert, although he figured drinking some wine wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would ward off the night chill.
He looked up at the moon. It had to be around two in the morning, but he had no spare money. Since no one was going to drop in and deposit a bottle of Thunderbird in his lap, he decided to curl up in his box shelter and wait it out until he could forage for something later in the morning. It would be a little warmer then.
Wintertime was a bane to the homeless. He had nowhere to go, as the shelters were often filled to the brim. On top of that, even if you did get a place to flop, they were dangerous places. He figured he was better off staying just where he was. If danger didn’t factor into the equation, there simply weren’t enough places to go around, so what was a homeless person expected to do, ask for a reservation?
Nick knew he stood a good six-two and weighed in the neighborhood of a muscular two-twenty, not bad for being forty-two. However, a person never knew what kind of nutballs would be there. No one except the truly brave or foolhardy would mess with junkies, crack-heads, and all-around losers. They could be carrying knives or brass knuckles. He’d even heard of one guy who carried around a bottle of acid and liked tossing it at his victims. A snort of disgust erupted from his nostrils at that last point. No thanks, he’d take his chances in the open.
Unconsciously, his right hand strayed to his ripped jeans pocket. The heft of his switchblade gave him a measure of comfort. Taking it from his pocket, he depressed the trigger and the blade sprang out. Ka-ching. He’d found it during his trash-bin travels, probably tossed away by someone on the run, and made it his own. Examining the blade in the moonlight, he marveled at its cleanliness, heft, sharpness, and the fact that it could slice through anything.
While he could handle himself well enough hand-to-hand, this was his insurance. It was five inches of lethal steel, all at the touch of his fingertips. If anyone tried something, something bad, they’d get it. A guy had to protect himself these days. It wasn’t a question of being able to fight. He knew how and had fought off anyone and everyone in the past. His turf was his turf and he was prepared to go to war in order to defend it. He had defended it on numerous occasions and always won, too, but these days it paid to be prepared.
Confident in his abilities, he said to himself, “You’re the man. You’ve taken on the best and beat everyone.”
A second later, though, a thought intruded to dash his false sense of invincibility and he muttered, “No, not everyone.”
With another slight shiver at the memory, he folded the knife up and stowed it in his pocket. Hunkered down inside his triple-layered box home, he thought about the night—that night—the night when his perspective on what reality really meant had changed forever. There were tough men and women out there, but this person hadn’t been a person.
She was a cat-girl. Six months back, he’d been in the same alley during the summer, sharing the space with his friend, George. She’d dropped in—literally. That was impossible, as no one could move so silently and quickly. Yet she had, and she’d whacked him around but good. She did the same with his alley mate, and he stood around six-six and weighed two-eighty, so it wasn’t as if it had been an unfair fight.
It had been an unfair fight, though. This girl—cat-girl—moved faster than anything he’d ever seen. She was also very strong, easily twice as strong as he was. While she could have easily sliced both of them up—she did George’s arms, sliced them up like deli meat—in the end, she just knocked the large man out. “I just want to find something to eat,” she’d told him.
Then off she’d gone to forage in a nearby dumpster like any cat would...but she was no cat, and he knew it.
When Nick had attempted to take her on, she whipped out a mean right hook. He never saw it coming, and the impact of her fist meeting his jaw sent him against the wall, knocking him semi-silly. He thought this was the end. She could have killed him. It would have been easy, but maybe, he figured, she wasn’t into killing people. After that, she took off and almost escaped.
The cops had shown up just in time and had taken her down. The memory of the takedown played itself out in his mind. He remembered the hissing and spitting sounds she made, the electronic snap of the Tasers echoing over to where he lay, and the howls of pain from the other patrol officers she slashed before the cops finally subdued her.
Another memory arose, that of her smell. Her fur—musty, damp, and with a slightly gamey odor—indicated cat all the way, but the way she was built screamed girl...just a very furry one. Even the way s
he spoke...just like an American, but when he tried telling the cops what he’d seen, did they listen?
Not a chance, they simply packed him up and shipped him off to Belleview. “Hey man, I saw what I saw!” he kept yelling as they dragged him to the ambulance and stuck a needle in his arm. “It was a cat-girl, okay?”
Mr. Needle contained a powerful sedative, and the next thing he knew, he was in with a bunch of fellow drooling loonies, confined to a cell. The docs also doped him up with a few hundred milligrams of something for his morning breakfast, and he knew—knew—that they’d never believe him.
So Nick got wise. By his reckoning, he spent a good three months in the institution, the first of which passed in a kind of a hazy daze. Eventually they weaned him off the drugs. The shrinks talked to him and said that he hadn’t seen anything, that it had been the booze talking. Although he wanted to tell them that they were wrong, that he’d been sober and clearheaded, he learned to say “Yes sir” and “No sir” and say “I didn’t see any cat-girl. It was a figment of my imagination.”
Being stoned on Thorazine could do that to a person, Nick reflected, bitter now that the cops shut him out. They, along with the psychiatrists, discounted his testimony, and in the end, he figured it was better to lie than to spend the rest of his life in a looney bin. No thanks to that!
The authorities had let him out in September. “Keep your nose, clean, Nick,” one of the doctors said. “You’ve got a clean bill of health, mental and physical, and you’ve got a second chance. Don’t blow it.”
With fifty dollars in his pocket, a gift from one of the orderlies, he set off. He reclaimed his alleyway and went back to foraging for food, clothes and booze during the daytime and sleeping with one eye open during the long nights. He never heard another word about the cat-girl. “And she ain’t there anymore,” he murmured.
Deep in his heart, though, he knew better, and a second later said to the air, “Figment of imagination, my butt. I saw her.”
Saw, but never confirmed. Between raids on trash heaps and scavenging for what he needed, he checked the television broadcasts during the day in some of the shops he passed by. Rumor had it that a bear creature, a dog creature, and the cat-girl were all connected to some kid, and there’d been a battle somewhere up in the Catskill Mountains.
The kid...what was his name? Nick searched his memory...and the name Goldman floated up. A laugh suddenly burst out of him. How would a teenager know about all this, anyway?
Nick truly had no idea. He would have liked to talk the matter over with his friend, but George was no longer around. He’d left town a week before, nervously looking over his shoulder at every sound, crack, creak, hiss, and other odd noise he heard or imagined he heard. “You’re cracking up, man,” Nick had said in an attempt to impart a little reality. “You gotta tough it out, hear me?”
George, soft-spoken in spite of his size, held up his arms. The scars on his forearms, long, red, and deep, stood out. “This ain’t cracking up, Nick. You saw what she did to me, what she did to both of us. I’m not sticking around to find out.”
A harsh laugh forced its way out of Nick’s mouth. He’d spit on the ground as if it would shame his friend into staying. “Are you gonna let a little pussycat scare you?” he’d taunted.
His friend’s expression, open-eyed and scared, didn’t change, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down violently. “You bet your butt I am. That chick carved me up, and you’re lucky she didn’t do the same to you. And we both spent time in the psych ward, didn’t we?”
Forced to confront the truth, Nick reluctantly nodded. George had gone to a different place, but had gotten the same dope-’em-up treatment, and they’d both been let out at more or less the same time. Still, while he’d retained his confidence, most of it anyway, George had lost his. “Where are you going to go?” he’d asked, leaning against the wall and brushing a few snowflakes off his tattered coat.
The other man didn’t answer. He ignored the falling snow and continued to pack his meager belongings, which consisted of two shirts, a pair of oversized jeans and his radio and stuffed them all in a knapsack with one broken strap. Finishing up, he hefted the bundle over one shoulder and started off.
“So where are you going to go?” Nick had repeated.
“Somewhere,” the reply came. “See you.”
“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 grou
nd 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.
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