Wonderful, Harry thought. He’d just made his first enemy and he hadn’t been there more than ten minutes.
The guard lingered just long enough to make a quick check that life would continue on, but after he moved away from the cell, the cell occupants moved away from each other.
Harry spoke up again, though it was doubtful anyone would listen. “I’m trying to tell you guys. I didn’t kill anyone. The police just think I did it.”
More laughter followed. These guys were dense with a capital D, but try telling them that. Once the laughter died away, the massive black man rumbled over and pushed Biker Dude Morrison out of the way to ask the obvious question. “So if you didn’t do it, then who did?”
“Monsters did.”
If the truth was supposed to set a person free, then Harry should have been out of jail ten minutes ago. Unfortunately, adages could not be used as a Get-Out-Of-Jail card. As it was, his answer provoked another round of merriment.
Biker Dude Morrison got his anger back and shoved Harry up against the bars. “So where are the monsters at?”
At least he didn’t use his knee, Harry thought as another knife of fear went up and down his spine. Pushing back wasn’t going to help him, not now. He realized that he could die, right here, in this cell, and no one would care. These guys had to be hard cases all the way. They wouldn’t think twice about wasting him, and he was all alone now, all alone...
“Hey, I’m talking to you, punk!”
A slap across the face jarred Harry back to reality. The black man had decided to get his licks in. He had a hand like a ham and a slap as hard as a punch. How hard he could really hit was anyone’s guess. “Huh, you tell me,” the guy demanded and grabbed Harry’s shirt collar, “you tell me where the monsters are...?”
A scream, high, shrill, and full of terror, reverberated from somewhere up top, down to the lower level. Silence hit for a millisecond, and the man’s voice trailed off when another heavier, more earth-shaking sound like a heavy thud split the air. “What in the hell was that?” he whispered and let go of Harry’s shirt.
Now more screams, similar to the first and every bit as terrifying, rent the air, followed by more heavy thuds of bodies hitting the floor and furniture being broken, sounds of shots being fired, hisses and yowls.
Even worse, he heard the sounds of something being ripped. If he didn’t know any better, they sounded like flesh being peeled off bones, and the cries of agony that verged on the hellish made him sure that flesh was indeed being torn off bones. Suddenly, every tough guy in the cell stood as one, training their ears on the source. Biker Dude asked nervously, “What’s going on, man?”
Harry leaned against the bars, resigned to what was going to happen, and answered calmly, “You asked me where the monsters were. They’re here.”
Immediately, every prisoner suddenly turned chicken and rushed the bars, pleading with the guard to let them out. “Man, I don’t wanna die down here,” the black man begged, thrusting his hand through the bars in a vain attempt to draw attention to his plight. “I’ll go to Rikers, I’ll do time, but I don’t wanna be here!”
The other cellmates also pleaded, and Harry, weary from the tension and knowing that there was no escape, said, “You’re here, the same as me, and who’s the punk now?”
Everyone swiveled their heads to stare at him, and then turned back to the policeman, their voices ratcheting up in intensity. “Let us out, let us out!”
“The hell with this!” the guard exclaimed, and drawing his pistol he cautiously walked over to the door. The sounds of destruction and pain intensified, got closer, louder...and he started to shake in fear. False bravado over, he asked, “Who in the hell is out there?”
Not who, Harry thought. This was more like a what. “Bullets aren’t going to stop that thing,” he told the guard, shaking his head. “You’ll need a bazooka.”
“I’ll need a...?”
The guard never finished his question as the door blew inwards so rapidly and with such force that it literally smashed him across the room. He hit the opposite wall with a splat. Like a fly hit with a giant swatter, the guard met death without ever seeing the source of his demise.
After the door fell to the ground with his remains on it, two of the prisoners vomited. The others backed up only to find their way blocked by the bars of the cell on the opposite side, while the Biker Dude stared and mewled out “Oh, holy god.”
His voice came out hushed, almost reverent. Harry wondered why anyone would utter the name of a deity who clearly wasn’t listening, much less watching the action. Biker Dude quivered in abject fear, pointed to the entrance, and suddenly the front of his jeans got wet. “The monsters—”
“Are here,” a woman’s voice finished for him, and she stepped into the room, followed by Piotr. The rhino-boar man was bleeding from at least twenty wounds in his torso and legs that made him limp. Wounds or not, he still seemed able to take care of business, which meant killing anything that moved.
Lyudmila also had a number of slashes and holes in her fur, trickles of blood coming from them, but she didn’t seem overly concerned. In fact, she started to groom herself using her tongue and her left hand, like any cat would. “That,” she pointed up, “was a most exciting time for us. It has been a long time since we’ve had so much fun.”
Her concept of fun happened to differ from ninety-nine point nine percent of the rest of the human race, Harry thought, but explaining that to her would have been a waste of time. As he looked on, her wounds soon closed up like time-lapse photography. Examining the vermin in the cell, she turned to her comrade with a smile. “Piotr, take care of these...men,” she said, as if asking someone to take out the garbage, “But leave Goldman alive.”
Harry stood back and tried not to show fear. In stark contrast, his cellmates had no problem in showing fear at all and screamed as Piotr tore the bars apart with a single massive swipe of his paw. Mass panic broke out as the men frantically tried to climb the bars or hide behind another prisoner in a futile attempt to avoid execution.
It didn’t work, as the rhino-boar proceeded to crush, smash, and annihilate everyone in the cell. Once done, fangs dripping with blood, he glanced at his companion, his eyes dull. She was obviously the brains in the outfit, as Piotr, outside of his ability to rip anything apart without effort, didn’t seem to have enough brainpower to walk and chew gum at the same time. “My body still hurt. What we do with him?”
Lyudmila entered the cell of death, daintily stepping between the pools of blood. She sniffed the air and observed Piotr’s handiwork with an air of satisfaction.
Harry stood tall, and decided to meet his end with honor.
“That is an excellent question, my darling,” she said, once more throwing a look of admiration at the rhino creature.
“You could let me go,” Harry suggested. Hey, it often worked in the movies, but this was no movie, and it seemed as though he was the unwilling star of this drama.
She studied him carefully. “Let you go? I think not. After all the trouble we have gone to in order to find you, letting you go is not on our itinerary.”
Lyudmila then turned to the rhino-man who was in the process of trying to paw away the blood and gore dripping from his horn. It didn’t work, so he asked, “Could you do this for me?”
She offered him an indulgent smile. “Of course, my darling, I shall. Please wait.”
Stooping over to rip a piece of un-bloodied cloth from the vest of the now extremely dead Biker Dude, she lovingly wiped the mess from the horn. As Harry watched, the gorge rose in his throat. He tried hard to dispel the image of this killing machine from his mind—and couldn’t. “There, we are all done,” Lyudmila said, tossing away the bloody rag. She turned to Harry. “Now, where were we?”
“We were discussing the possibility of letting me go,” he answered, and then, in an absurd moment, queried, “Is he your boyfriend? Does his IQ go beyond two digits?”
It wasn’t the smartes
t of questions to ask, but since he figured that they would soon turn him into mincemeat, he decided to get in one last joke before the end. His comment caused Lyudmila to smile, but Piotr started at him with pure hatred leaking from his eyes. “You, little man, you are nothing to Piotr.”
He took a step forward, but for the first time he staggered and showed that he could be hurt. His paw went to the back of his head and rubbed a spot on it. When he took it away, it was smeared with blood. “Now my head is in pain,” he said to his female leader. “So what we do with little man?”
Lyudmila chuckled, and coming from her, it was indeed a chilling sound. “Yes, my darling, whatever shall we do in this situation?” she purred...and then lashed out.
Harry never saw the blow coming. What he felt, though, was her paw, hard as a rock, smashing into his jaw. In the books, the heroes always saw stars and flashing lights, but in his case, all he experienced was a tremendous shock of pain, and then the ground came up to hit him in the face.
Chapter Seven: Captured
Unconsciousness hurt. That thought circulated through Harry’s subconscious as he lay in the zone between wakefulness and being totally out of it. In the movies, the hero always fell in battle, hand to hand, was knocked out cleanly, got up, and did it over again until he managed to claim victory.
Oddly enough, in all the time he’d been at school, Harry had been slapped, punched, kicked, thrown against walls, and tripped. It was only after he’d met Anastasia and after they’d gone on the run that someone finally laid him out.
A person never knew what it was like to be knocked unconscious until it actually happened to them. Perhaps for some of the braver members of society—or some of the more foolish ones—they thought it was some kind of hard-edged thing, a rite of passage, something to be fought for and remembered and prized.
Reality painted a different picture. It wasn’t a special dream world. Instead, it was filled with sensations of being slung over a person’s shoulder and marched down a road. The road was rough and uneven and he felt every hole and depression, and it hurt. Still, it wasn’t as painful as being tossed onto a hard surface...
“You’ll get some more.”
The voice...belonged to someone he knew in university. Being homeschooled was one thing, doing research at the University of Portland campus, another. It was one thing for Harry to study at home. At home, he felt safe and secure. Spoiled...no, but cosseted...yes, and he knew it.
Growing up, he’d always been the runt of any school pack. His earliest memories consisted of going to the doctor for every little malady his mother thought he had. Colds, fevers, and the flu—they constituted emergencies, at least in his mother’s mind. He remembered her loading him into the car from around the age of four until he was ten, rushing him to the hospital even though he probably would have gotten better on his own.
As for his school days—he really didn’t like to think about them. “You’re not going to play?” one of the kids asked at recess, exasperation showing clearly in his voice. Fifth grade, recess at ten-thirty, and all the other kids had torn out the door, yelling that they wanted to be first on the baseball field or kick around a soccer ball. Harry would have preferred to carve out his own eyes with a rusty spoon rather than look totally inept on the playing ground.
“Nah, I want to read,” he answered, clutching a book on enzymology, something that even a university student would have found difficult if not impossible to decipher.
“Fine, see ya.”
That was about the extent of his interaction with the other kids at school. Harry eventually garnered the reputation as the bookworm, the nerd...the geek. The other kids treated him like garbage and beat on him because they could. Getting his butt kicked repeatedly didn’t do a lot for his confidence. In fact, it made him more gun shy than before.
As for school, not only did he hate the idea of going just so someone else could use him as a punching bag, he also hated it as it offered no challenge, no fun, and no happiness whatsoever, and he couldn’t wait to get home.
Once he did get home, though, his room, with its simple gray décor, bookshelves that housed his textbooks, notes and computer discs, became a haven from the world, his own little ivory tower. Sitting on his bed as a king would sit upon his throne, he imagined himself to be the master of his domain, the ruler of his own world, an emperor—a conqueror.
Older now and out in the real world, though, he found that he wasn’t even a footman. Once he got through the junior high and high school homeschooled days, once he’d gotten a special acceptance to Portland University in order to do research, he found out that he was the lowest of the low. He was the skinny sixteen year-old child prodigy who’d never won a fight in his life, and who shied away from sports. He lived only for his books and what he could do to a DNA strand.
While the professors paid him due attention—and their attention approached levels akin to awe—the majority of the university students paid him no attention at all. Only the jocks showed any emotion at all—disdain. They didn’t take kindly to a genius with the brain of three men and the body of an oversized elf.
Cutting through the hallway one day, two of the jocks blocked his way. They were big, either wrestlers or bodybuilders, they wore mean expressions on their oversized heads, and they looked pissed.
As to the reason why, when he asked, “Something wrong, here?” his answer came in the form of one of the jocks picking him up by the collar of his shirt and giving something like a modified power slam.
“That’s for making us look bad in class,” the power slam expert said. “Come back tomorrow and you’ll get some more.”
Which class was this, Harry wondered, but the pain proved to be too great and he passed out. Just before falling into the well of black, he wondered why people had to be such jerks. Then the world went dark and he thought that unconsciousness shouldn’t hurt so much, but it did...
Unconsciousness soon gave way to semi-consciousness. That brought a lot of new sensations, mainly a dull ache in his head and a stronger one in his jaw. His mind did a quick trot back to the present, laying down the details, one, two, and three. First, he’d been manhandled by Officer Mean, who was probably dead, and then Lyudmila decided to use his face as target practice. Whatever number three was, he didn’t want to find out.
Swimming painfully into wakefulness also brought smells. Smells of rotting fruit and vegetables, the squeaks of a rat foraging for food, and the cold, smog-filled winter air came through, and he figured that this had to be an alleyway somewhere. He’d been in alleyways before and didn’t care for them one bit.
Grunting, he opened one eye and glanced around. He wasn’t in an alleyway as he’d first thought, but a building. In the dim light, he made out a number of holes punched through wooden slats that lined the concrete walls. They hadn’t been very carefully placed, though, as the light and cold from outside made their way in.
Feeling around with his hand, he encountered more concrete and filth, and wiped his hand on his trousers. As his vision cleared, he made out empty crates, rotten food, dried feces and other unmentionables.
“You are up?”
Swiveling his head around to catch the voice, he found his captors staring intently at him. Piotr’s eyes held hate—as usual—while Lyudmila seemed a little friendlier, if only by a few degrees.
A wintry smile formed on her face, and she asked, “You are awake now? That is good,” and leaned over to haul him into a sitting position, propping him up against the wall.
“Where...where are we?” he asked, struggling to think clearly.
“In an abandoned factory building,” she said offhandedly. “We are in the Bowery. This place is condemned, so no one will follow us here.”
She spoke with a faint Russian accent, stressing the first parts of her words with slightly more emphasis than a North American would, and rolling the rs. Had anyone else listened to her, they would have thought her accent charming. In person, though, she fell into the c
hilling category.
“Lyudmila,” Piotr said, his voice thick with pain. He was on all fours, but then stood up, weaving. “My head still hurt. I must sleep now.”
She tossed a few words in Russian his way, and he nodded and wearily wended his way to the far corner of the room, where he collapsed. Soon, the sounds of snoring filled the air.
“So what’s your story?” Harry wanted to know. “If you’re going to kill me, then do it and get it over with.” False bravado given, he waited, hoping that the cat-girl wouldn’t kill him.
Another wintry smile emerged, and her sharp teeth gleamed in the semi-darkened room. “I am not here to kill you. I am here for...a little talk. Talking is good, yes?”
“Maybe it is.”
Lyudmila gracefully dropped into a cross-legged seated position and sat two feet directly in front of him. “Then I will talk and you will listen.”
She began to tell him her story, the tale of a young girl trained to be a soldier in the armed forces of Mother Russia. A natural athlete from elementary school onward, she showed a particular aptitude for running as well as gymnastics. She also happened to be very good at speaking English. “Is my English perfect?” she asked, and this time her manner seemed almost girlish.
“It’s pretty decent,” Harry answered, not wishing to antagonize the homicidal maniac who could rip him apart with a single blow.
“Thank you,” she said and inclined her head with an exaggerated air of modesty. “However, English is only part of who and what I am.”
Her first and only goal was to enlist and become a first-rate soldier. “My family was poor, I had no mother, and my father was often ill. So, I felt that it was my duty to enlist, earn money, and become a good servant of my country and help her to defend herself. I imagine that your young men and women feel the same way.”
Harry didn’t really know, but nodded dutifully, anyway. “Go on.”
Lyudmila’s story sounded like what he’d read about in the papers and on the Internet, accounts written by defectors. Entering the army at the age of seventeen, she was assigned a position as a Corporal due to her physical accomplishments. However, she soon grew tired of performing her duties, those being translation and radio monitoring. “It was boring, but two things happened. One of them was that I met Piotr. He was in the same unit as me. He was a supply officer, but he also was not suited for his duties.”
Rise of the Transgenics Page 11
