Taking no chances, he pulled out his switchblade. It sprang open, and he held it in front of him, his arms up and ready. Once again, adrenalin surged through his body. “Hey, are you out there, cat-girl?” he called out. “Are you? I got a present for you. Come and get it!”
No one answered. He felt just the cold breath of wind—and then there was the smell. It was getting stronger, and as the milliseconds passed, his nerves started to get more jangled. “C’mon, what are you waiting for?” he roared.
Still no answer. Finally, after swiveling his head right and left, voice cracking with fear and anger—mainly fear—he screamed, “Where are you?”
“Here,” a woman’s voice said from behind him.
Nick had only time enough to utter two words. “Oh, crap.”
A second later, a hand, furry, powerful, and with sharp claws, sank into his shoulder and spun him around. The pain was so intense that he dropped the knife. A scream clawed its way out of his throat, and as he turned, he looked into the face of the cat-girl he’d seen during the summer. “You,” he blurted out.
The terror almost made him drop his load right then and there. A second later, the dam broke, and a hot stream of pee poured down his leg. He would have felt ashamed, but right then, he was too scared to worry about personal hygiene. “What are you?” he whimpered.
“Something little children dream of when they’re bad,” she answered. “I’m a nightmare, and I’m all yours.”
Frightened as Nick was, he recognized something different about this girl. She was wearing a pair of shorts and something like a sports bra. This was winter. No one would wear that. Other than the attire, she had the same height and build and the same strength as the first cat-girl.
The increase in his own terror coupled with the agony in his shoulder clouded his assessment, and he struggled to figure things out. Just as he was on the verge of getting an answer, she sank her claws in deeper, lifted him off the ground with ease, and tossed him across the alleyway. With a thudding sound, he hit the wall hard and felt two or more of his ribs break. As he fell to the cold concrete, his head banged off the hard stone, his eyes spun, and he wished someone would come and help.
Where was a cop when you needed one? Through fuzzy eyes, he saw her fur, black and shiny, lie smooth and flat upon her body. When she sauntered over, seemingly unconcerned that he was injured, she bent over to lock gazes with him. He flinched and wanted to look away, yet he couldn’t. Her eyes were black, the color of night...the color of death.
She sounded...Russian. How could that be? The other girl had sounded American all the way. A wave of agony went through him, and the cat-girl added to that agony by whipping her claws left and right, shredding his face. Blood poured out and soaked his coat. The loss of blood also meant loss of consciousness. Sensing that the end was near, he whispered, “Last time I saw you...you were gray...you had spots.”
This time, the cat-girl showed her teeth. They were razor sharp, and her smile seemed cruel and calculating. “You’ve never seen me before,” she said, her voice harsh and unyielding, the same as her gaze. “And you’re never going to see anyone again.”
With a swift move, she leapt upon him, biting savagely into his neck. Right now, he felt no pain and wished that he’d been one-step quicker, his moves faster. However, it was not to be. In his last moments of life, Nick wondered why he’d been chosen as some kind of sacrificial lamb, why no one would help him when he needed it most, and why life had to be so unfair...
Chapter One: Working Things Out
Harry Goldman leaned back in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and twisted his neck gently from side to side in order to release the tension. He’d been working from seven in the morning until now, only taking enough time off to use the bathroom and grab something to eat, and then got back to it again.
A sudden cramp in his right trap muscle made him wince. He reached up to massage the offending ache. His fingers were long and slender, which were perfectly suited to typing things up quickly on his computer or deftly mixing chemicals. One knot relieved, another popped up. Once that muscle got the treatment, he turned his attention to the matrix on the computer screen. Staring at it first with puzzlement and then with anger, he wondered where he’d gone wrong. “Something’s missing,” he muttered, pissed off to the nth degree that the answer wasn’t there. “Gotta find out what it is.”
With that, he began typing anew, refining his formula, rearranging the various molecules, and all the while, hoping, and yes, praying for the right result. DNA was the source of all life, what living creatures looked like, their eye color, hair color, body type, intelligence and more. It was a constantly shifting jigsaw puzzle of endless possibilities. He’d been trying to figure out how to crack the code and just couldn’t find the answer, which frustrated him.
The time was eleven at night, the day, January seventeenth, and the place, the FBI branch in downtown Manhattan, New York City. Harry had been living there since the summer. It was a world away from Portland, Oregon, where he’d been raised. He’d been brought to this place under the aegis of the federal authorities in order to do the secret hush-hush lab work that no one in the real world knew about. And he’d done it with only one goal in mind—to help someone he cared for become more normal again.
Still, at times the mental pressure became a little too much. So outside of catching the occasional nap, he’d taken breaks every so often in order to do some pushups, sit-ups, bodyweight squats, and shadow boxing. Perhaps it wasn’t the same as using weights, but it kept his body in some semblance of decent shape.
A full-length mirror stood a few feet away, next to the wall. Looking at his reflection, he saw a teenager with average looks and a mop of brown hair. Critically assessing his physique, he noted its slender frame with just a mere hint of musculature. In a moment of youthful angst and wish-wanting, he thought that if he worked out hard enough, he’d achieve something close to a semi-maybe Olympian ideal.
Rolling up his sleeve—the room was warm and he wore a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of jeans and sneakers—he flexed his arm, and a tiny bump of a bicep appeared. Reality intruded, and it sucked and sucked hard. The answer lay in his genes, and he came from short and slender stock. Sighing, he said aloud, “Probably not.”
With this admission, he got back to work, trying yet another formula for success when the computer told him in no uncertain terms Probability of success—Zero. Smacking the side of his head, he asked the air “What’s wrong?” and of course, the ether didn’t answer.
After exhaling a forceful breath, he wondered if his handlers would terminate the program. He was close, very close. However, the powers that lay in the offices at the top of the building—the movers, the shakers and the fear-makers—had indicated they were getting edgy. Additionally, he was growing quickly impatient with his own lack of results. Results were what mattered most, and even with the most powerful equipment around, the finest computers, the best in DNA analyzers and splicers, he just couldn’t get the right equation.
Or could he? As he wracked his mind, suddenly another combination occurred to him. With a grunt, the most positive grunt he’d given in a long time, he typed in the calculations and let the computer do the work. He’d have the results soon and then...then maybe he could test his theory.
Harry gazed around the room. It was a large square, roughly thirty by thirty. The walls wore the classic clinical white paint of a laboratory. The dearth of furniture made it look even more austere. A musty yet sterile smell filled the air, courtesy of a large air vent on the ceiling piping in the atmosphere of downtown New York. As for those odors, they were neither sterile nor worth thinking about.
His eyes fell upon the jail cell at the far wall, and skipped on over to the three large metal cabinets in the left corner. An unmade cot sat next to the cabinets, and a small fridge beside the bed completed the picture of a researcher who took his meals in the lab, stepped outside only rarely, and lived for his work. This is my life and look what’s happened
, he thought.
Still, hope abounded, and his hope sat safely ensconced in the hard drive of his prize, the desktop computer that nestled on a large metal stand in the center of the room. Outside of the cot and the cabinets, the stand was the only piece of regular furniture around, that and the laptop on it.
What was unusual was the chamber in the far right corner. It stood out, and rightly so, for it was, Harry felt, the key to solving the riddle of the bridge between human and animal. The engineers had nicknamed it the Genesis Chamber for its supposed ability to filter out and subsequently transform an animal into something more human. In Anastasia’s case, it was designed to turn her completely human again.
Anastasia was his girlfriend. She’d been a young Russian woman roughly his age—late teens—but her genes had been infused with those of a cat, an Ussuri cat, to be precise. The Ussuri was a rather rare Russian breed, and she’d been made something less human—and something more.
Unfortunately, the process was incomplete, and she’d devolved. Her animal genes had overpowered the human ones, forcing them to lie dormant, and turned her into a common house cat. He knew, though, that she was anything but common.
Observing the machine with a critical eye, Harry made a few adjustments to the mini-computer on top of it that would receive the data from the main computer. He stood back to ponder the possibilities. Seven feet long, three feet in circumference, it was a cigar tube of life—and possibly death. He’d never tested it, because he wanted to make sure—had to make sure—that his calculations were correct. One slip and Anastasia wouldn’t make it.
She lay curled up next to the chamber, her black spots providing a nice picture on her gray fur. Harry, much as he cared for her, knew very little about her background. He knew that she was of Russian descent, but she’d appeared in New York six months earlier, an amnesiac, unable to remember who she was and how she got there. The only thing he knew at first was her name—Anastasia.
“We found out, didn’t we?” he said softly, still staring at her.
He’d not only found out about her, he’d also discovered something more. He’d found love for the first time in his young life. The son of a transgenics researcher, Harry was a walking example of the classic social nerd, a shy young man with no sense of how to talk to the opposite sex without sweating heavily. Everyone out there, he assumed, had someone. In a fit of youthful angst, he had wondered if he was destined to be one of the permanently single people populating the planet.
Upon meeting Anastasia, though, he’d entered a world where nothing was what it seemed. Prior to his fateful meeting with destiny, he’d been sent to jail for illegal transgenic research. He’d only done computer simulations, but the FBI hadn’t taken kindly to it, and the same government group had him taken out of prison to work under their aegis.
He’d first met Anastasia here in this same lab, she as a prisoner and he as a semi-prisoner. She was roughly five-six, slender, and with a decidedly feminine appearance in spite of the fur. They’d gotten to know each other under a bizarre set of circumstances. Along the way, they’d grown to care for each other. The thought of someone actually creating a transgenic was bizarre in and of itself to him. Nature, perverse as it might have seemed, had interfered, turning her into a cat, and now he was hard at work, attempting to bring her back...
A meow broke his train of thought down flashback lane. Anastasia had woken up and was in the process of stretching out, arching her back. With slow and measured movements of her head, she started grooming her body with a delicate pink tongue. Cleanup job finished, she wandered over to his position, jumped up on his lap, and nuzzled his face. “Are you ready?” she asked.
For anyone else, it would have been crazy to think that a cat could talk. He’d thought so himself, but the certain Russian scientist named Nurmelev—now dead—who’d created Anastasia had assured him that she could talk—and she did. Her jaw worked in such a manner to fashion words, and her mind, adult and active, was able to process thought on a human level.
“Almost ready,” he answered, giving her back a few strokes and fondling her ears.
She replied by purring loudly and rubbing her body against his. Had she been human, a person might have thought that the rubbing was of a very personal nature. Now, though, Harry had done it out of simple affection. If he managed to bring her back, though, then that was a different matter. “It might hurt a lot,” he cautioned. It also might kill her, but if she was willing to risk it...
“Then I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer,” she said. With a sudden spring, she jumped down to the ground in a graceful motion, padded her way over to the chamber, and sat on her haunches, looking at it with longing. “I don’t mind the pain,” she said. “I just want to be human again, or as close to it as possible.”
Harry got up and went over to the chamber. The FBI’s research division had prepared everything. All it needed was a subject. “I told you before that I might not be able to filter out the animal DNA,” he said, touching the chamber again while checking out a few switches. “If it works, you might be like you once were. I’ve solved the devolving problem on paper and in computer simulations. I’m not sure it’ll work in real life.”
Anastasia’s first transformation had taken place over the course of months, according to the late Doctor Nurmelev. He’d used a number of drugs along with genetic manipulation, and the results had been nothing short of incredible. The Genesis Chamber—theoretically—could do the same thing in a few minutes. If it worked, if it didn’t mutate a person further, if...if...if...
The sound of a throaty rumble made him look at Anastasia. Her yellow eyes, bright and beautiful, had question marks dancing in them along with worry and perhaps a bit of fear, but he also saw love. Yes, there was love. They’d been together only once, right before she devolved, but he knew in his heart that he’d do anything to bring her back. It was only right that she be given the chance. And as dangerous as this was, he had the feeling that it would work.
“That’s a lot of ifs,” she said, but an all-too-human note of longing broke through when she said, “I’m willing to risk it,” and her feeling sent a rush of emotion cascading through him.
“Let’s hope that it does,” a voice said from behind them.
Harry didn’t have to turn around. He knew the voice belonged to Miles Farrell, the agent who was his handler. A tall, lean man in his fifties with a tough-looking hatchet face and a no-BS attitude, Farrell had acted as his go-between ever since this case had arisen.
In a moment of wonder, Harry flashed back to the day, not so long before, when the agent had found out about Anastasia’s secret, the fact of her being able to speak. He’d been working in the lab as usual, running simulations and going over notes, and his girlfriend had jumped on his lap, whining about being hungry.
“I’m not in the mood for cat chow,” she’d said, sounding grumpy. “Don’t these idiots know that I’m particular about what I eat? I may look like a cat, but that doesn’t mean I think like one.”
Harry chuckled. He’d been making do with stale sandwiches and water with limp day-old veggies. What he wouldn’t have given for a pizza right now! “I’ll ask Fearless Leader if he can get something different for a change.”
“So what do you want, filet mignon or salmon steak?” a voice growled from the doorway.
Harry’s first thought was oh crap, now he knows, but he kept a straight face and replied, “I sort of like steak. Perhaps she wants the same.”
Stupid comment, but what else could he say? Farrell didn’t seem to find it all amusing and strode in, waving his arms in agitation. “How the hell long has this been going on, kid?”
Kid, he calls me kid, Harry thought in the sourest of all mental voices. “First off, you didn’t ask, and I didn’t have to tell you,” he answered, peeved at being thought of as a teenager.
Well, he was a teenager, but he also happened to be one of the foremost transgenic researchers in North America, young years and
all. Genius or nerd, it depended on who you spoke to. He thought of himself as a researcher, nothing more.
Farrell didn’t say another word. Instead, he looked at Anastasia, his expression moving from skepticism to acceptance. It seemed as though he was able to process the impossible faster than most, also to accept it faster than most. “So you can talk?”
“Meow,” she answered, but her lips curled up in the semblance of a smile. Ordinary cats couldn’t smile. It was a well-known fact they couldn’t, as they didn’t possess the necessary jaw structure to do so. Anastasia could, though, and as a breed unto herself, she could do a whole lot more.
This time Farrell’s face turned red and his hand slapped the desk and jarred the computer. “Don’t screw around with me! You could talk all this time and you didn’t say jack to me about it?”
She calmly sat on her haunches, licking her forepaw, then dropped her foreleg to stand up and stare him in the face. “And if I had, what would you have done? Stuck me in a cage, denied me my freedom? We went through all this before. I’m sick of it.”
With that, she jumped off Harry’s lap and strolled unconcernedly to the corner. Farrell watched her go and then demanded, “Well?”
Harry shrugged. “She’s got a point. You captured her once before, remember? And in case you’ve forgotten, you agreed to let me keep her here. You never asked me if she could speak or not. And I need her. You asked me to work for you, and at the beginning, you said that all I had to do was to reverse the process. I think that I can do it, but I need time. If I screw up one little calculation, then she’s history and your program means nothing.”
The agent’s eyes bulged in disbelief. “Kid, you got a real smart mouth on you,” he sputtered. “When you talk about screwing, you have no idea who you’re screwing with. We could still toss you in jail—”
“And there goes your spy program,” Anastasia said from the corner. “I can get out of here any time I want, you’ll never catch me, and you’ll look like a fool. Think about that.”
Rise of the Transgenics Page 2
